Gallery: Night of the Trolls

Baffled: why isn't my novel on the bestseller list?

This article from The Baffler (link at the bottom) is way too long to even quote here, but it has some interesting ideas in it.

To a point.

I was irritated at the way she delivered a long-winded dissertation about how society makes everything our own individual fault and how narcissism/self-absorption is the only defense (paving the way for "remedy-of-the-week" packaged solutions, available online for a price), THEN she abruptly switched directions and wrote in a rather smug way about how practicing yoga/radical self-care has completely revolutionized her life, lifting her neatly out of the quagmire she has just written about.

She seems to be praising, practicing and extolling the very thing she was dissing only a minute ago.

It's the same feeling I get - and how I wish I could just stop reading these things - about articles I see on Facebook that talk about "The Miserable, Lonely, Traumatic Life of a Writer" - only to find out, near the end of the article, that the writer is either J. K. Rowling, Stephen King or a clone thereof. Meaning: yes, it was hell at first, but now I'm in the chips big-time, so I thought I'd throw you dogs a crumb or two of my deathless wisdom so YOU can drool over my unreachable success.

Hey! I was once like you, lonely, unsuccessful, stigmatized, and probably fat. I mean it! Then I joined another species and began to accumulate sales/literary awards like a snowball rolling down a hill.

I always feel the tide turning in these pieces - I know it's coming. It happens at just past the 3/4 mark. They're about to abandon us. Any time. Their compassion for us or whatever-it-is is about to evaporate. A Grand Canyon of exclusivity is about to open up between them and us. So much for their ability to "identify" with us literary peons who, if we finish our novel at all, will never find an agent; or who, if we find an agent, will never find a publisher; or who, if we find a publisher, will never find a publicist; and who, if we never find a publicist, will somehow, and mysteriously, never find ourselves at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.

Aim at 100 rejections, the articles say. Or a thousand! The implication is that if you persevere and persevere, if you never give up, never give up, never give up the ship, and (of course!) never take any of it personally, one day success will inevitably come. It simply has to, after all that perseverence, doesn't it? It's the law of physics or something.

But the awful truth (and I realize this is a totally taboo and unpopular thing to say) is that it might not: in fact, by the law of averages, it likely won't.  With every rejection you receive, the odds of success become slimmer, not fatter. It means more and more and more editors are telling you that they just don't like your stuff, increasing the odds that it is basically unpublishable and you should just go home and do yoga.

Saying this is the ultimate taboo because it makes you a party pooper. But I had a favorite line from a Moxy Fruvous song (until I found out, to my horror, that Jian Ghomeshi was in Moxy Fruvous):

"Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on."

This was long before the ubiquity of self-publishing, not to mention all those talent shows on TV. The only point I am trying to make - and please don't throw rocks at me - is that for every person who performs on America's Got Talent and the like, hundreds or even thousands of people audition and are rejected. Each and every one of those people believe they have what it takes to win, to be a star.

They don't.

Does that mean you shouldn't try? Don't take advice from me, please - Ms. Three Failed Novels! At least I finished my novels, sent them out a billion times, found a publisher, and saw my books (all three of them) on store shelves. This filled me with satisfaction and pride. But that was that. All the other shit didn't happen. No New York Times. No glass slipper.  I did get absolutely glowing reviews for the first one, it was considered worthy of major awards and compared to Alice Munro, but nobody bought it. My fingertips just brushed the brass ring, but I wasn't able to grab the prize.

Why? Hell if I know. And it happened two more times after that.

So am I bitter? Don't know. A realist? Definitely. "It's always so hard to leave Paris," a friend of mine recently wrote on Facebook. Myself, I find it hard not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, I know that collecting 100 rejections is an exercise in self-toughening that might serve you if you were ever in a plane crash in Antarctica. But they might just lead to 101, or 102. There is no guarantee you'll have a sudden, remarkable breakthrough that will cause millions of people to buy your book.

And believe me, if they don't BUY it, you've pretty much failed. Publishers have to go home and buy groceries too, and if they keep taking a bath on your books, they may be a little bit reluctant to take a bath on the next book, and the next. Everyone has to survive. I am not blaming publishers, at all. In fact, I'm not blaming anyone. But unless you are in the tiny fraction of a percentage that makes a go of it, these are the facts as I see them.

As for self-publishing, well. . . I won't get into that, except to say "ditto, and double".

Is this gloomy? Or realistic?

You decide. But you will note that I have not stopped writing.

http://thebaffler.com/blog/laurie-penny-self-care

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Last words and shrieks from the grave: recordings that give me the Christly creeps

I wasn't going to add any text to these - they're largely self-explanatory, but just looking at them, let alone listening to them, is so distressing that I have to say something, in the nature of whistling in the dark.

This first one is a distillation of sound recordings from a site called, I think, planecrashes.com. These are the best, or should I say, the worst of them. I don't know why my mind is so dark, but I must not be the only one or there wouldn't be so many of these things online. I don't know of a person who hasn't at least thought about what it would be like to be in a crash. But to be responsible for all those people. . . The most disturbing aspect, aside from the screams and that sickening crunching noise, is the "whoop, whoop, PULL UP! Whoop, whoop, PULL UP!" alarm that comes on - too late for most of them, as it turns out.

Oh Jesus, God and Mother Macree, whoever she is. These are weird things, an experiment that failed. In 1888 Thomas Edison decided to capitolize on the success of his newly-invented phonograph by implanting a tiny little phonograph in the belly of a horrible doll. And it said horrible things in a horrible voice, but only for a short time - because they all broke. Very quickly. And all the customers wanted their money back. But we still have these hideous recordings, which I assume are original.

I can't really explain or describe the doomsday feeling I get from this recording. It makes no sense - it's just sounds, isn't it? I even know what the original sound was. I remember dial-up (which now seems like the lamest thing ever invented - because it was! You couldn't be on the phone and the computer at the same time.) All these vastly slowed-down recordings are very, very strange. When we think of a recording being slowed down, we think of it getting lower and lower, but it doesn't. It's just endlessly elongated. It takes up more time. And this is like something from Armageddon, the Last Judgement, the trumps of doom. I think it's partly the fact that I do know what the sound is, but it's changed, changed utterly. For some reason I made myself listen to this again last night and had the same queasy, sick dread. It doesn't get better with successive replayings. In fact, it gets worse.

The Volta Labs experimental recordings were another Edison thing. Just a bunch of guys fooling around with very primitive sound equipment. Volta Labs reminds me of mad scientists with frizzy hair, Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, Clyde Crashcup, and that sort of thing, though the comic connection doesn't mitigate the creepiness of the recordings. On one of them, someone appears to say "fuck!", but I didn't include that one. This one is just creepier. It also interests me how much the first recorded discs looked like ugly grey pancakes.

I wonder why it is, when I do not remember World War II, when I do not remember ANY war, that this sound fills me with such primal dread. It is Doom. It is simply the end, and there is nothing you can do. 

And this - this I do not even need to explain. This carved its way into my child psyche during the Cold War, when that awful endless shrill beeeeeeeeeeeep seemed, to me, even worse than the dreaded Bomb.

For a while, the experimental talking clock from 1880 was regarded as "the first recording", but it isn't any more. It was recorded on a cylinder made of lead, incredibly, and it sounds like it. It has its own screechy-whoopy-creepy aspects, and you CAN hear counting in it, though it's hard to make out. Did anyone really listen to this thing? I doubt it ever made the Top 40, and I have no idea where the original resides today. 

Anyone who knows anything about the advent of sound recording knows about the Phonautograph. This French guy who had a name a mile long (de Martinville, I think - unless Martinville was where he lived) just wanted to see what sound waves would look like when traced with a stylus on a moving glass globe. That's all. There was no thought of playing them back. When I first found out that they had found his stylus tracings on some black paper, read them with a laser and actually dragged some "music" out of it, I disbelieved it immediately. It was an obvious hoax.

Back in the mid-'90s, someone tried to pass off a supposed recording of Chopin playing the Minute Waltz which they claimed had been recorded on a similar device. Sadly, it was a fraud. I couldn't even find anything on the internet about this, and still can't, even though I heard the damn thing on the radio. I remember the CBC Radio announcer dismissed it as "a musical Piltdown Man". I'm not sure how I know this, but it turned out to be a CD enclosed with a European classical music magazine which was published on April 1. The catalogue number was something like 425679HAHAHA.

But this ghostly Au Clair de la Lune thing has stood up to scrutiny. At least, no one has stepped forward to admit guilt over it, so it must be real. Some of the air has gone out of it, however.  I note now that when I go on Firstsounds.org, the web site that originally broke the news to the world, it hasn't been updated in a very long time. It just looks like an ugly and very out-of-date web page, even worse than mine in fact. It's sort of a pre-Blogspot thing - whew, what an eyesore!

When all this first came out, there was a great deal of boasting and braggadocio by the researchers, who had been catapulted to fame by a few pieces of sooty black paper. Now I notice a certain nothing. I guess they haven't found anything new. The few seconds of blurby, garbly "singing" isn't so exciting any more, no matter how much they slice and dice it, play it back at different speeds and with different effects, filters, etc. Hey, you can make an armodillo sound like Pavarotti these days. Another tiny sound snippet isn't even a human voice, but a trumpet that sounds like it's underwater. And a lot of it just reminds me of somebody blowing his nose.

Now this is worse. Far worse. I dug this up a very long time ago, when I somehow stumbled upon the idea that ancient clay pots were natural recording devices. If a rotating glass globe with a stylus stuck on it could record vibrations/waves/actual sounds that could be played back in a few hundred years, why then - why couldn't a rapidly-revolving wet clay pot with a sharp thing stuck into it record all sorts of shit as it rotated merrily away? But only if some guy with a laser came along to winkle the sound back out again.

Meanwhile, this is terrifying.

I tried to get hold of the guy who did this a couple of years ago. His "channel" has two things on it: this video, and a six-second "slide show" depicting one still of this pot. So, hoaxy it is. But still terrifying, for some reason I can't determine.

I mean, I KNOW it isn't real.

The Doritos Dilemma: I just can't make my mind up any more!

I just can't make my mind up any more. Who to believe? Who to believe?

What to eat? What not to, that's the thing, isn't it? What to put in our mouths, or NOT to put in our mouths, because really, doesn't that say absolutely everything about us?

Because let's face it, what we eat is what we shit. And in this-old world, you sure gotta have your shit together.

This is a very small excerpt from a radical anti-cancer site (link to article appears below text).

Article Summary

Doritos are statistically listed as the most popular chips worldwide. They may seem like a harmless snack… but their ingredient list says otherwise.

Their main ingredient is corn, which is a highly processed, genetically modified grain. While there are GMO-free snacks on the market, if it doesn’t specifically say “non GMO” on the bag then you’re almost certainly eating genetically modified corn.

The second ingredient is commercially processed vegetable oil. Sunflower oil, canola oil, and soy oil undergo a process by which they become oxidative which leads to free radicals that damage the body and increase the risk of cancer − especially breast cancer.

Maltodextrin is a starchy carbohydrate filler that has little taste but breaks down into sugar very quickly in the body. This seemingly harmless ingredient can wreak havoc in cancer patients and diabetics alike.

Among other ingredients (see article for full list), Doritos contain MSG which is a known neurological excitotoxin. Adverse effects include: endocrine disruption (the part of the body that helps digest and metabolize food for energy), migraine headaches, leaky gut, and the inability to focus.

Some snacks are more wholesome than others, but the processing is the biggest culprit for compromising your health. Remember, snacks (and of course meals) made with real, whole foods are best.

https://thetruthaboutcancer.com/doritos-ingredients-cancer/

BUT MEANWHILE! I saw this in The Beaverton, one of my favorite news sites, which is now popping up a sort of "warning" before people even enter the site. I guess they fear their readers are taking everything exactly literally, and perhaps this is leading to a lawsuit or two.

I never associated the name with litigation, or litiginous (litigacious?) people quivering with indignation over their unfairly-maligned bag of Doritos. Beaverton is a place in central Ontario where my brother Arthur used to go to music camp every summer. I was never sent to music camp because it was felt I had no talent, plus nobody noticed there was another kid in the house.

https://www.thebeaverton.com/health/item/2792-doritos-nutritionists-concerned-canadian-diet-not-zesty-enough

Published in Health

Doritos nutritionists concerned Canadian diet not ‘zesty’ enough

Monday, 11 July 2016 00:00 Written by Eric Turkienicz





VICTORIA – A special report released earlier this week by top Doritos nutritionists has expressed concerns that the average Canadian’s diet is far below the daily recommended zesty-ness threshold.


“It’s really quite shocking – we were not expecting this lack of zesty-ness across the board,” said Dr. Kurt Voortman, Chief Science Officer for Doritos, “Canadians just aren’t experiencing the kind of bold flavours and outrageous taste sensations that they need to lead a healthy, X-Treme life.”

“Not to mention the extremely low level of tangyness in our bodies” Voortman added.

Following the report, the Canada Food Guide announced intentions to revamp the classic food pyramid in order to widen the populaces’ understanding of how important it is to eat more zesty items. Doctors are now encouraged to urge their patients to include at least one “sharp cheddar” item in every meal and add sweet chili heat to things wherever they can.

“But it doesn’t stop with zesty,” Dr. Voortman elaborated, “ask yourself ‘have I had chipotle anything at all today?’, ‘how many flavor crystals does this contain?’, ‘is there a way to make this oatmeal more black pepper jack?’

A mailer providing a chart to assist Canadians in determining whether their ranch is cool enough will be sent out by the end of the year.

MOM!! We're out of toilet paper again (and other cat meditations)

How Bentley thinks

How to Use the Telephone

Horrible, just horrible (with very bad poems!)

You know one of those horrible dreams that you can't get out of, and finally you wake up and you're in a horrible dream that you can't get out of, and finally you wake up and you're in a horrible dream that you can't get out of?

Horrible, horrible man at the door

man at the door

man at the door

Horrible, horrible man at the door

Horrible man at the window.

I am on your hand, but 

I don't understand.

Who you are or

What that thing is on your head,

Why is that thing on your head.

When your face rots like that,

It makes me crazy,

When your face rots like that,

I feel like I have rabies.

The best meat is here, no, the best meat is here,

It's very clear 

to me

That the (very) best meat is here.

I have to smile, oh

I have to smile,

because it makes me

gladsome

Just after a while!

Hoolihan & Big Chuck - Certain Ethnic Six Dollar Man

Probably better than most H & BC sketches, in that it has a broad silent-comedy kind of feel to it - oh hell, ain't it just hilarious when all his body parts fly off? Yes, it IS! You can't show that sort of stuff any more, or if you do, you can't laugh at it. So laugh!

The Earth Dies Screaming 1965 - trailer

When it comes to campy horror flicks from the Cold War era, less is more: meaning, I never watch them. Watching the trailer is enough, and making gifs from the trailer is even better. That way you get to watch the handful of seconds in the 87-minute movie which have any suspense in them at all.

I did watch these, in their entirety, as a kid, when as a rare treat I was allowed to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the den on Friday nights. There would always be some sort of creature feature on Hoolihan and Big Chuck, a local Cleveland horror movie/comedy show that was one part Ernie Kovacs, three parts smoked kielbasa and - the rest of it, I don't know, I guess it was sort of funny.

Count Floyd on SCTV was a sort of rough takeoff on these locally-hosted quasi-scary shows, usually presenting execreble no-budget horror movies. I noted recently that there is still a show on KVOS ("ME TV!") called Svengoolie - forgive me if I spelled that wrong - which tries to do the same thing. Doesn't make it, but it tries. And I vaguely remember another one named Ghoulardi. Sounds vaguely Hungarian to me (but so was Kovacs. Just a coincidence? I. . . don't. . . think. . . so!).

Though we groaned over these (the "we" meaning me and my older brothers, who often crashed my den party, usually drunk or stoned), the scary-badness of them was always the least interesting part of the evening. In fact, Hoolihan (a Cleveland radio announcer named Bob Wells) and Big Chuck (a big chuck) usually didn't even refer to the movie. They did sketches that were mostly lame, such as a Western called The Kielbasa Kid, and some really transparently Kovacs-esque stuff such as Readings by Robert, a clone of Percy Dovetonsils.  At the time I knew nothing about Kovacs except what my brother Walt told me. He worshipped Ernie Kovacs. Almost everyone else had forgotten him. The network wiped all his tapes because they needed them for quiz shows, and because he was so far ahead of his time, his memory fell into a sort of parallel universe sinkhole. (Dying in a gruesome car accident in 1964 didn't help.)

I was astonished to find some Hoolihan and Big Chuck things on YouTube a few years ago, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. Big Chuck went on and on for decades hosting the same kind of local late-night show, though at some point his host changed to somebody named Li'l John, a dwarf (and this was before dwarfs were cool!). Now that I look it up again, there are seemingly HUNDREDS of Hoolihan and Big Chuck videos. YouTube is like those paramecia my brother grew in his bedroom, always multiplying, multiplying. Where anyone gets these things is anybody's guess. Did they work at TV stations in the '60s and pilfer them, smuggle them out under their trench coats, only to blow the dust off them to post them on YouTube? 

I recently found out that old commercials and hygiene films and stuff like that is kept in the Prelinger Archives. So maybe there is a Hoolihan Archives somewhere full of Kielbasa Kid episodes, Parma Place soap opera takeoffs, and, of course, Readings by Robert.

Pasta thoughts. Thoughts from the past(a), I mean. And not "paw-stuh" like Amurricans say, no, the PROPER way, which is PAST-a. Of course. 

I've been trying extremely hard to post a little snippet from Hoolihan and Big Chuck called the Six Dollar Man. Very funny, actually, and I may even have posted it a few years ago. Can't gif it because you've got to see the whole thing. So I will past-a it (post-a it, I mean) in the next past-a. Post-a.

You know what I mean.

Hoolihan and Big Chuck opening.

SCTV opening. Compare and contrast.

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Hey Venus!

The following excerpts come from a several-years-old article in National Geographic (link to article below).

So it MUST be true! Since when did National Geographic ever steer us wrong?

In any case, I almost don't care if Venus is really Venus - really looks like that, I mean. The photos are so breathtaking that the illusion (if it IS an illusion) is almost enough. And in any case, she's obviously an illusion that moves, meaning there's no photoshopping going on.

Meantime, there's a Facebook page called Venus the Two Face Cat, which to me sounds a little ungrammatical, as if someone was loudly chewing gum when they set it up. But it's fairly up to date, unlike a lot of these things that are abandoned after the initial enthusiasm dies down.

My first reaction to seeing a photo of Venus was "no way". Then I looked her up on Snopes, and by God, they said "true"! And would Snopes ever steer us wrong?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/chimeracat.asp

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/120831-venus-two-faced-cat-genetics-animals-science/


Venus the Two-Faced Cat a Mystery

Famous feline may have different DNA on each side of her body.

By Katia Andreassi, National Geographic News
Venus the two-faced cat is currently the most famous feline on the planet.

The three-year-old tortoiseshell has her own Facebook page and a YouTube video that's been viewed over a million times, and appeared on the Today Show last week. (Watch National Geographic cat videos.)

One look at this cat and you can understand why: One half is solid black with a green eye—the other half has typical orange tabby stripes and a blue eye.

How does a cat end up looking like that? Leslie Lyons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the genetics of domestic cats said she's never seen a cat exactly like Venus.

"She is extremely, extremely rare," Lyons said. "But you can explain it and you can understand it."

Many reports about Venus refer to the cat as a "chimera." In mythology, a chimera is a mishmash monster made up of parts of different animals. A feline chimera is a cat whose cells contain two types of DNA, caused when two embryos fuse together.

Among cats, "chimeras are really not all that rare," Lyons said. In fact, most male tortoiseshell cats are chimeras. The distinctively mottled orange and black coat is a sign that the cat has an extra X chromosome.

But female cats, said Lyons, already have two X chromosomes so they can sport that coat without the extra X. That means Venus is not necessarily a chimera.

To find out would require genetic testing, said Lyons. With samples of skin from each side of the cat, "we can do a DNA fingerprint—just like on CSI—and the DNA from one side of the body should be different than the other."

If Venus isn't actually a chimera, then what would explain her amazing face?

"Absolute luck," Lyons said. One theory: perhaps the black coloration was randomly activated in all the cells on one side of her face, while the orange coloration was activated on the other, and the two patches met at the midline of her body as she developed.

Cat fanciers who are transfixed by Venus's split face may be missing the real story: her single blue eye. Cat eyes are typically green or yellow, not blue. (Take a cat quiz.)

A blue-eyed cat is typically a Siamese or else a cat with "a lot of white on them," she explained.

Venus appears to have only a white patch on her chest, which to Lyons is not enough to explain the blue eye.

"She is a bit of a mystery."

Dispose of your ugly ideas here

In spite of its satiric and sometimes humorous tone, this blog occasionally slips into the misanthropic. Meaning, "I hate humanity", or at least the jaw-dropping stupidity inspired or revealed by the internet.

This is an example. This photo, obviously a very old one, is doing the rounds right now. It's the sort of thing that draws hundreds, even THOUSANDS of comments from people, and many of them are indignant. "How could anyone say that about an innocent child?" "All children are beautiful!" "It should be against the law to say such things!" etc. etc. etc.

Somebody said "hey, that lettering looks sort of fake", but no one listened. The person was quickly shouted down. What's the matter with you, anyway? Don't you know how to join in on a massacre? 

Non-lemmings are rare, as are people who say, "Wait a minute." This was a big wait-a-minute moment for ME, which makes me realize why I'm so often shouted down - no, change that to "ignored". 

For it turns out (I had to check this with Snopes, but I was pretty sure of it before I checked) that the photo had indeed been doctored, and poorly at that, the sign photoshopped with lettering that looked far too uniform and modern to be original.

Here is the original photo:

The joke? (For yes, there is a joke/point!) It isn't "I hate children", "children are ugly", "let's put our children in the garbage", "'isn't it horrible that people want to put their children in the garbage", "what's wrong with people anyway?", "call Child Protection Services", "Call 9-1-1","Call the police", "I'd like to take that sweet little girl home with me right now and just love her to pieces" (never mind that the picture was taken in 1931 and she long ago died of old age), etc. etc. etc.

The point is, the JOKE is: see, there is a foolproof way to keep children off the grass! Hahahahahahaha. Or even this: perhaps this is the only way to keep children off the grass.

Oh. 

You mean - ?

But most people won't admit (or even notice) that they've been bamboozled and fell right into it, causing them to rant and rage that NO CHILD is ever ugly (!!), and that even the ugly ones are beautiful in their own way, just like in the song (though I used to wonder how that applied to Hitler). They will have moved on to the next whatever, bluh.

Do I sound misanthropic today? Perhaps I am. Does the internet bring out the worst in people? I sometimes think it brings out the dumbest. The dumbest of the dumb.

One of the things I tried hard to instill in my children was the imperative to think for yourself. Make up your own mind. Evaluate. Strain out the bullshit. I don't mean constant cynicism. I mean discernment, and there isn't a whole hell of a lot of discernment in internet culture. It's all very well to say, "oh well, it was always like that". That still doesn't make it intelligent, moral, right.

Yes, I said "moral".

Morality is a crusty old thing now, and is always (and negatively) associated with sex. It has nothing to do with conscience and one's deepest, most cherished values and beliefs. It's simply out of date. If some world leader displays an act of personal integrity in the face of moral disintegration or indifference, everyone gasps because it's just so gosh-darned different.

Values are something you find at Walmart. 

I can't do much about this, in fact I can't do ANYTHING about this, and if I even write about it I'm accused of being "negative" or a party-pooper. It's just that I'd like to see a little depth, a little substance, without having to go back 100 years or so to find something of value.

But I'm not making this happen, I'm not fixing it, I'm not changing the way things are. So I should shut up! That's the message I get. For God's sake, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all! It scares me to realize how many people actually believe in that.

The prevailing view should prevail. Right? The majority should rule. Right? This is a democracy, so whatever people are saying most often, must make the most sense.  

When Trump gets in, I can predict a certain reaction: a flood of protest at first, and then, once the panic dies down and hopelessness sets in, a certain turning of the tide, an "if we can't beat him, join him" attitude. A "let's make the best of this". And, finally, "hey, maybe the guy's not so bad after all." 

Comparisons of Trump to Hitler are tired and inaccurate, but they're also useful. I believe that the majority of human beings are followers and want to be told what to do. In times of desperation, they'll follow just about anything, the way baby ducks follow a tractor.

Maybe it's just too unbearable to do anything else.

So what does all this have to do with a picture of a little girl in a garbage can? Figure it out yourself, I'm just too tired to explain it.

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