Is it real, or is it . . . Meredith?

Oh all right then, the last one was posted by a "fan". But I think it makes a point. With the exception of an extremely blurry profile picture (below), these are all the photos currently posted on Meredith McIver's Facebook page. I mean, all of them! At first the page didn't exist (she doesn't seem to have a footprint anywhere on the internet), then an empty Facebook page sat there for several days. Then, this! Many people are taking this very, very seriously and saying, "You see, folks? She DOES exist. You were being really stupid believing all those dumb conspiracy theories." From the comments, I'd say at least 3/4 of readers believe this is her real page. People don't really look at photos, and if they do, they believe what they see without questioning. Oh, there she is with Trump. . . with Michelle Obama . . . with  - Whatsisname. . . 

But I still don't buy it. She's a cardboard cutout, as convincing as the photojob you can see in these pictures. And yet, if we express any doubt of her existence, we're quickly clapped down for being one of those survivalists with guns and dried rations in his basement. 

The "proof" I'm hearing is stuff like: she co-wrote several books with Donald Trump in the 2000s. Look! It says so right on the book covers! And if it's in print, it MUST be true. My grandma used to say that (or was it my great-grandma?). She's 65 years old (though she looks more like 40 in the pictures). She went to ballet school, or someone named Meredith McIver went to ballet school, somewhere. She was born in New York and raised in New Jersey, or something like that, and that matches up with "a" Meredith McIver, so she must be real!

I still believe that her name/identity were either wholly invented so that someone could take the fall for Melania Trump's disastrous plagiarized speech, or perhaps they just pulled the name of a real person out of the files - someone now so disconnected from Trump that she's likely to keep her mouth shut (perhaps for a price).

To me, "proof" would be seeing an interview with her on network TV, or perhaps on the news. Anything at all would do, but it has to have her face on it, and it has to have her wearing something besides that dreadful polka-dot jacket. The excuse for her remaining out of sight is that she needs to keep a "low profile" to play down the embarrassment of the theft of Michelle Obama's speech (which was, of course, entirely her fault).

Someone is having us on here, of course. Michael Moore? Who knows. He's too busy predicting the end of the world as we know it (and he might just be right). There's no way in the world this is a valid Facebook page, but where IS her valid Facebook page? Why is it enough for some people to say "she co-wrote a book with Trump, therefore she must be real"? It might be a pseudonym. Such things have been known to happen. I just don't see anything that holds up. And the panicky/contemptuous tone of the articles debunking the "conspiracy theory" is suspicious to me, too. "Stupid idiots! How can you doubt Trump's integrity? He would never do a thing like this. That's as stupid as believing in Bigfoot."

As a matter of fact, I like the Sasquatch photo best, and it's just as skilfully photoshopped as all the rest of them. Her profile picture is so blurry that you really can't tell who it is, which makes me wonder. Maybe she really IS blurry, though - her identity certainly is.

https://www.facebook.com/Meredith-McIver-578466218980877/

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Sorry. . . this is an awful game

Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, Clue. Some board games are classics and have been staples of family fun time for decades. Then there are those odd games where you simply crack open a bunch of nuts, or slowly murder a large mammal with gravity. We dug through some old Sears catalogs from the 1960s to remember the forgotten board games of the decade.

Did you play any of these?





LOVE

Twister is game already full of flirtation and suggestion, so it is suprising that a younger spin on the game blantantly called LOVE existed in the midcentury. "Use your hands and feet to spell L-O-V-E," the ad proclaimed. Our parents would have put the kibosh on this scenario immediately.





FEELEY MEELEY

Here is "the game that gives you a funny feeling." Players put their hands inside a box and fondle and plastic toy, trying to guess what it is. Once you've become familiar with the 23 little objects, the game was pretty much pointless. Of course, you could also just cut a hole in a shoebox and make your own.





GREEN GHOST

This glow-in-the-dark game looks pretty fun, with its little plastic snakes, bats, keys and spooky trees. Oh, and feathers! That being said, with all the tiny parts, there's no way kids weren't losing some pieces.

GRAB A LOOP

You wear a belt with rings attached to it. You run around. Your friends try to rip off the rings. Hours of fun!





BUCKET OF FUN

Bucket of Fun combines all the fun of cleaning up your toys with… well, that's it. Plastic balls erupt out of a plastic bucket. You gather them up. This is like selling a deck of cards just to play "52-card pick up."





BEE BOPPER

For a mind-numbingly simple game — you swat a bee — the description is rather long-winded: "Spin bee on spinning card. Watch closely where he stops. Spinner has 4 colors that correspond to Bee Launchers. If spinner stops on your color act quickly to get your bee up before he's caught on the launcher. If bee is caught before launch, catcher gets 2 points… after launch 1 point. Winner is the one with most points."




THE LAST STRAW

Hey, kids! Want to rupture the spine of an ungulate? Just overburden this poor Bactrian camel with wood and watch his back snap in two! Ha! Just because "the straw that broke the camel's back" is a common idiom, that doesn't mean it makes for a good game.





MR. SPIN-HEAD

Feed a clown marbles.





OH, NUTS!

Pick open a bunch of plastic walnuts, looking for marbles. At least with real nuts, you can eat them.





DON'T SPILL THE BEANS

More proof that all you needed to make a game in the 1960s was some plastic food and an idiom. Though, technically, isn't the goal of the game — dumping beans into a pot — "spilling the beans"?





SCARNEY

What more could children want than a cold, ultilitarian, multi-purpose game from "gambling expert" John Scarne. Okay, maybe on second thought we'll play with that plastic camel.





NBC-TV NEWS GAME WITH CHET HUNTLEY

Another thing kids love: the tragedy and politics of the evening news!





TALK TO CECIL

"Cecil is a hand puppet that really talks… He directs the game." Obey the dragon!

http://www.metv.com/lists/13-wacky-forgotten-board-games-from-the-1960s

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Hell! Who needs this new Star Trek movie?

"I'm talkin' 'bout you! I'm talkin' 'bout me!" The strangest thing about this Star Trek episode is how Spock "gets" (understands, groks) these bizarre people. It's as weird as Wesley Crusher in The Next Generation, a gee-whiz, clueless Leave it to Beaver kid who seemed to "get" everything in the universe.

But the jam sessions are, well. . . One garish-looking chick plays a bicycle wheel, and Spock grooves on a thing that seems to be a combination organ, bass and electric guitar, with harpstrings thrown in for good measure.

The costumes for this particularly awful Trek are pure Desilu, made up of bits and pieces of whatever was left over in the costume department. Those musical instruments look like weapons to me. I particularly  like the way Zargon (or whatever his name is - NOT Herbert) keeps - apparently - "tuning" his axe, or at least he's doing something to it.

Maybe the writers were beginning to think Spock was just a little too straightlaced (straitlaced?) to be interesting. God knows they went outside the boundaries of his character a lot, having him fall in love with a woman in a cave (Mariette Hartley - no wonder!), cry for his mother, and half-kill his captain in the name of Love.

The whole episode reminds me of the Hitler audition in The Producers, the Dick Shawn character, complete with boots (or whatever they are - leggings? Stay-ups?) that go over his knees. A sort of Sonny Bono look.

SO. . . I just had to gif these! So in case you miss those cartoons you watched when you were a kid - here are your Saturday morning gifs.

It never ceases to amaze me what turns up in Wikipedia: individual episodes of Star Trek "TOS"! Makes me wonder if they're all there, but I am not about to find out. Maybe just the "clinkers"? To my mind, comparing this one to Spock's Brain is an injustice. That one was somewhere in my Top Ten (which I'd have to think about, since I've forgotten most of them). In this case, though, I think the analysts have missed the boat. It's the gorgeously cheesy, agonizingly kitschy atmosphere in this thing that "makes" it - makes it memorable, anyway. Particularly that big half-naked guy, whatever his name is (do you really think I am going to find that out?).

Reception

The episode has generally been seen as one of the weakest in the show's history, but its portrayal of characters representing the counter-culture of the late 1960s has produced widespread comment. Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a 'C-' rating, describing the "space hippie" characters as "too strange and irritating for me to view them sympathetically" and finding fault with the singing, which he described as "the worst kind of padding". Handlen noted as a positive aspect that the episode did allow for the voice of dissent against the "utopia" portrayed by Star Trek. In their compendium of Star Trek reviews, Trek Navigator, Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross both viewed the episode negatively, describing it as having aged badly because of the hippie characters and also noting the poor musical parts of the episode. Grace Lee Whitney, who had played Janice Rand in early episodes of the show, described the episode as a "clinker" on a par with another slated third season episode "Spock's Brain".

Several writers have discussed the way the episode represents the "space hippies". Aniko Bodroghkozy touched on the topic in her book Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion. In it, Bodroghkozy noted a negative and positive portrayal; on one hand Sevrin's followers have been duped and must return to "civilization, apparently contrite, chastened children". On the other, they challenged the supposed benefits and superiority of the Federation, which Bodroghkozy described as a "reading of the counterculture." Timothy Brown argue that Dr. Sevrin is "a clear stand in for Timothy Leary." Like the acolytes of Leary and other counter-culture leaders, Sevrin's followers are "under the spell of charismatic but dangerously unhinged leaders" and "stand for a sixties generation in the thrall of misled idealism."

POST-BLAH. OK. I made one. I made one of those Star Trek Top Ten thingies, and a bottom twelve because the more I thought about it, the more shitty ones I thought of. Funny, because at first all that came to me were the good ones, or at least the ones I liked/like. Many don't hold up, of course. And some, I love only because I was going through puberty and all sorts of emotions and sensations were surging through my body and mind. Star Trek will forever be associated with puberty for me. I'll try to give a brief description of each episode, unless I get bored with it.

Top Ten (you've seen these? They're good ones, so you'll remember them.)

10 The Naked Time (everyone reverts to their "true self" - Spock cries).

9  Trouble with Tribbles

8  City on the Edge of Forever

7  Assignment: Earth (Terri Garr and the black cat and Gary Seven! Way cool, even now.)

6  Journey to Babel (Spock's Mom and Dad. Also Lassie's Mom.)

5  Amok Time (Spock gets it on, or wants to.)

4  Space Seed ("KHAAAAAAAN!" Actually, Kirk doesn't say that 'til The Wrath of Khan, but there couldn't BE a Wrath of Khan without the Maxwell House Man, Ricardo Montalban.)

3  Shore Leave (Whatever you imagine becomes real. Bones dies,comes back to life with two women with fun fur stuck to their breasts.)

2  This Side of Paradise (Jill Ireland. I confess I still weep when I watch this one. At the end, she is truly heartwrenching and really crying.)

1  Miri (Kim Darby, Michael J. Pollard. . . the episode is absurd, because these kids are supposed to be entering puberty, and the boys have these deep man's voices. But it still gets to me because when I first watched it I was alone in the den, and I think that is the exact moment I reached puberty. Note: particularly memorable for its quintessentially Shatnerian line, "No blah-blah-blah!")

What interests me about this, and I am already losing interest because I haven't eaten anything yet and it's twelve to 1:00, is that quite a few of my "bests" ended up on other people's worsts. For some reason, Spock's Brain, which I thought was pretty good but didn't make the cut, is rated low. Apollo ended up in the top twenty, as did the gangster/OK Corral one! 

Bottom Twelve (no order to these, though some are worse than others.)

The Savage Curtain (Lincoln appears out of nowhere and calls Uhura a "handsome Negress").

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Frank Gorshin is painted half black and half white. Jesus.)

Who Mourns for Adonais? (Who, indeed? He looks like an indignant Jolly Green Giant. A member of the landing party falls in love with him, then must spurn him for the sake of duty! "Really, Apollo, You didn't think I was some simple shepherdess you can awe." Only one word for this episode: appalling.)

A Piece of the Action (Gangsters - Spock in a porkpie - just fucked).

Patterns of Force (Nazis - Spock in a Nazi uniform. Actually, he makes a pretty convincing Nazi.)

The Squire of Gothos (Beyond obnoxious, ends up being a little kid whining to Mommy and Daddy, but he has been whining for the past hour, so what else is new?)

Spectre of the Gun (Western)

Journey to Eden (which see)

Arena (Gorn - only memorable for Kirk's famous drop-kick).

The Paradise Syndrome (Mirimani - synthetic Indians, Kirk knocks one up while he has amnesia)

A Private Little War (Mugatu, guy in a white fun-fur gorilla suit with spikes down the back).

The Omega Glory ("We! The! People!!!"). Actually, I keep thinking Americans might like this one.

But the only problem is, he left out "the right to bear phasers".

What's most ironic about all this is that William Shatner is a Canadian.

"I feel like a fool for buying this"

So this is the subject of this post, but this bland yellow cotton skein of yarn doesn't begin to convey what the problem is.

I recently went into Michaels during a yarn sale and began to grab handfuls of this stuff, all different colours, because it was on for $1.50. Small as they were, that's still a good price.

Bought them. Then they were crammed into a plastic bag and sat there for a week. Then last night, when I opened the bag - 

It was a "what the - ?" moment. There was this - stink. It seemed to be clinging to the bag, permeating it. I thought of those horrible scent cards in magazines, the kind that make my eyes immediately start burning.

Only this was far worse. It was Cat House No. 5, a French perfume you'd buy at the dollar store by the gallon, something you'd use to disinfect the cat box if you really hated your cat.

At first I didn't know what the hell was going on. I began to paw through the balls of yarn. The smell was getting stronger and stronger, until I found the yellow, and - 

I came pretty close to gagging. I noticed that on the label, there was a tiny little symbol that said "scents", printed on a nearly-illegible red circle. It would not be obvious to a consumer at all, and if you were in a hurry like I was, you'd just grab it as if it were any other skein of yarn. I'm sorry, but it doesn't occur to me to pick up and smell the yarn before I buy it. It's like checking it for fleas - just does not make sense.

Even as I write this, a phantom headache threatens. I can't describe it. The smell has taken up residence in the lining of my nostrils, as only very acrid and overwhelming scents do.  It's Aunt Dorothy's cheap perfume, applied layer by layer because she didn't bathe very much. It's that headspinningly stinky Febreze furniture deodorizer shoved up your nose with a shovel. It's one of those reeking pieces of cardboard you hang up in the car to hide the smell of Junior's last heave. It's  - 

One day on the bus, I sat next to a very Goth-looking woman who obviously worked in a meth lab. The chemicals coming off her literally burned their way into my sinuses, which had to heal over the next few days. This isn't quite that bad, but why can't I get rid of the smell?  I haven't touched the yarn in hours! The rest of it, the stuff that was in the bag along with the "scents", have caught the contagion and now reek almost as badly. They just absorbed it like a sponge. I threw them all in the clothes drier and they've been in there for an hour, but -  

I don't think so.

I may well have to return the whole lot. But the problem is, Michaels is obviously cramming this "scents" yarn in the same bins as the regular stuff. By now, it'll all be pretty much permeated. 

Scented yarn. OK.  I'll try to wrap my head around the concept! If you, say, knitted a sweater or even a scarf with this stuff, your body heat would fully release its gagging, wafting ponk. It would follow you around all day and set off everybody's allergies, not just your own. You would move in a cloud of stink that blares "cheap! Cheap! Cheap!" all day long. And I doubt if something this obnoxious could be washed out.

Maybe it's like pizza crust, constantly being reinvented: stuff it, put hot dogs in it, chop it up into rippable bits, dunk it in some sort of sauce that probably won't improve the experience. But for God's sake, don't just leave it alone! Keep "improving" the product with bizarre innovations that fall down in the execution.

This yarn is booby-trapped. I'm not the only one who has bought it without realizing just how evil it is. Maybe they should put steel bolts into the skeins that shoot through your hands, nailing you to your chair as if you're Christ on the cross. 

I know I am within my rights to return all the yarn, but what new stink might I find in the bins? There are three or four of these "scents", including - gag - lavender. The one I mistakenly bought is supposed to be some sort of migraine-inspiring vanilla, but if you added a little Chanel No. 5 to skunk spray, you'd just about have it.

I find it gratifying, having dug up the few reviews of this product that exist on the internet, the degree to which other customers are on the same page with me. I feel vindicated and a little less shitty about the whole thing. I hereby quote a few of them anonymously:

I just bought this yarn not knowing it was scented. I like the colour but the scent was giving me a headache! My fingers even smelt after. I had to wash my hands when I was done knitting. I really hope the smell comes out in the wash. I will not be purchasing anymore scented yarn. Frankly, I don't understand the purpose of adding perfume to yarn.

No,

I do not recommend this product.
smelly

Bought this in creme white not realizing it was scented cotton. It is cheap, not a nice scent and I put it in the trash.

No,

I do not recommend this product.
Nice color, not so nice scent.

Purple is my favorite color and one of the reasons I purchased this item. I like the soft lavender color but I do not like the scent.

To me the scent smells like cheap soap. Luckily it's not too overwhelming (although it is strong), so it's bearable even though I don't care for the scent.

Awful

I ordered 3 different yarns and they all smell exactly the same and nothing like the description for any of them. The scent is AWFUL. I don't even know how to describe it; it's just an annoying smell that is really strong and almost burns your nose and throat. I would not purchase this again, and unfortunately I have to finish my project so I don't have time to return it. I am just working a little at a time and taking breaks from the horrible smell.

Would recommend to a friend? No

smell horrible

Could not get by the smell. There is no words for it. Just no good. I thought that there would be much more little bundle of yarn. Just no good. Brought it back to the store. Waste of time and money

The skeins were a whole lot smaller than what I had purchased prior from another source. I thought they would be all the same size.

Top positive review

One person found this helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not quite vanilla, but not bad.

I bought it for the color & it is a good cotton yarn. The scent is not unpleasant, but it's not exactly vanilla - it is more reminiscent of a laundry detergent scent.

Top critical review

One person found this helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars  I feel like a fool for ordering this

Well, I feel like a fool for ordering this. It is a teeny, tiny skein. I kept looking in the shipping box for the rest of it. And it does not smell like lavender. at all. It rather...stinks. There goes $9 wasted. I expected more from Bernat. A teeny, tiny smelly bundle. lol. Not my usual joy in opening a package of new yarn !

Smelled harsh and chemical-y. Had to return.

i ordered this yarn and recieved this color yarn but it was not as described it was bernat handicrafter not scented at all

It's ok, very skimpy .not much of a scent wouldn't buy this again....

NEXT DAY'S REFLECTIONS. Second verse, same as the first! I found yet another review that resonated with me. And how.

Does not smell like vanilla

This yarn does not smell like vanilla. It is VERY perfumey. Bought it for a child hat but it smells like grandma's perfume gone bad. Additionally some of my skeins were stained with what appears to be coffee.

No, I do not recommend this product.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Mystery Drake

 

Shake a feather

Mystery of the Magpie Duck: still unsolved?

After the revelations in yesterday's email from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, we went to visit our newly-recognized magpie duck in Como Lake. There he was, fat and feathered and practically eating out of a man's hand as he threw seeds to the flock, which was waddling around on the lake shore.

But then I noticed something.

I noticed something I had sort-of noticed before. Our duck's plumage didn't exactly match the photos of magpie ducks, though they had the same general configuration of light and dark.

But our duck is brown.

Our duck has a brown breast and sides which pretty closely match the rich variegated plumage on the mallards (particularly the females) all around him. Magpie ducks are closer to solid black and white.

Then I realized I probably didn't fully understand what the Cornell Laboratory guy said: "It is a hybrid  of mallard origin" likely referred to OUR duck alone, not the whole species as I had assumed. I guess I thought his entire race had a mallard origin, like Thoroughbreds being spawned from ancient Arabians, or Bengal cats from wildcats, but probably not. Our guy is unique.

Though we can't know for sure because he likely won't submit to a DNA test, this is likely a mixed-race duck, a genetic puzzle, which is partly what makes him so special. That means either his Mummy or his Daddy was a magpie duck which mated with a mallard: a strange love affair, which might even have rendered him sterile, like the mule which results from a donkey mating with a horse.

Or not?

And why is he so big? He's nearly the size of a goose, for God's sake! It's hard to believe he was crossed with anything, let alone a duck so relatively small. We noticed his feet were at least an inch longer, as was his bill. But I tend to trust what the Cornell Lab guys say.

Today, when I was particularly eager to get a good look at him, he practically posed for me, his whole body out of the water, even turning to let me get a look at the other side.

Though the mystery has been solved, it hasn't been solved fully. The scenario is now more complicated: a magpie duck and a mallard producing offspring which has features of each, but is mostly magpie in size and configuration.  And what of "the other one", the second magpie duck which we thought we saw once? Did that mating produce more than one offspring which decided to stay in the safety of the lake rather than become someone's dinner? Or is this Bigfoot all over again, seeing what you want to see?

I wonder, too, why he posed for us on dry land like that. We've been glimpsing that duck for several years, in an "oh, look, there he is!" "Where?" "Oh, he's gone now" sense. Never has he stood there three feet away from us, preening and quacking into the camera.

The magpie is a most illustrious bird

Dwells in a diamond tree

One brings sorrow and one brings joy

Sorrow and joy for me

The magpie is a most royal bird

Black and blue as night

I would that I had feathers three

Black and blue and white

I saw the gentle magpie bird

In dusky yester-eve

One brought sorrow and one brought joy

And sooner than soon did leave

The magpie is a most illustrious bird

Dwells in a diamond tree

One brings sorrow and one brings joy

Sorrow and joy for me

Sorrow and joy for me

Sorrow and joy for me