The Lost Harold Lloyd

I am always wildly excited to find "new" photos from the lost Harold Lloyd movie, Professor Beware. I call it lost because it's. . . lost. Nobody knows where it is. I have even consulted with people who knew Harold personally, and they don't know either, and don't want to talk about it. Is something going on here?

I've found a lot of promotional stills, "lobby cards" and posters for Professor Beware, but nobody knows if it still exists anywhere. There is a rumour that it was shown - once - on American Movie Channel, or perhaps Turner Classics. But what happened to it after that?

There are big handsome movie posters like this one, and such-like, but no MOVIE. This is odd. It is said Harold didn't like the movie very much, having done not-so-well with his first couple of talkies. Did he decide to withdraw it, to destroy the negative? But Harold was the kind of person who kept everything.

This is a scene where he gets very wet, and we get to see, at last, how curly his hair really was. It was always slicked back, like men's hair was back then. He looks so painfully cute here, I honestly can't bear it.

I like his pained, bewildered, baffled expression here. Though I know almost nothing about this movie, the stills seem to portray him as slapping himself on the forehead with dismay. Dismay was always one of his better modes of existence.

I mean, how provocative can it get: "Egyptologist in Strip Tease". An unlikely headline. Here Harold looks uncannily like Clark Kent, which is funny because Clark Kent was originally modelled on Harold Lloyd.

This is what I mean about the forehead-slapping. God! he is adorable.

Another underwear shot.

Don't ask me to explain these! Perhaps we are meant just to look upon them, like the Burning Bush, and not ask questions about them.

Note the right hand, which isn't really a hand. It's a prosthetic glove, fashioned after Harold lost his thumb and forefinger in an explosion. This one looks much more lifelike than the primitive ones he first wore in 1919.

But unless someone finds a copy moldering away in some Paramount vault, I'll never get to see this movie. Its very rarity, scarcity, impossibility, is what makes it so utterly irresistible.

Scary little Christmas: The Snowman

Now this one is truly terrifying. This snowman morphs into something bordering on the Satanic. The accompanying text has a warning: "This ain't Frosty." It's not for kids under the age of twelve.

Vacation from hell: can you top this?

(Please note: I lay no claim to this, except to say it's freakin' great. I include a link to the original piece at the end. Maybe this is not the way to do it. Probably not. But it's not going viral, folks, I'm lucky to get 18 views some days, and 16 of them are mine, so I hope I can "quote" this without getting into trouble. Anyway, it kicks ass.)

Greetings from Hell (A.K.A. Maui)

Grant Lawrence — Westender

  

Maui in December: Sounds awesome, right? But if it’s your friend / co-worker / neighbour / frienemy who’s taking the holiday, and boasting nonstop about it on social media while you shiver here in Vancouver, it can be more than a little annoying.

Well, here’s the flipside, for those of you with a taste for some sweet schadenfreude. Imagine, if you will, saving up for a Maui vacation for two years, booking the trip back in January, and making it extra special by taking three generations of family.

Now imagine being woken up by your jetlagged kids at 5:20am Hawaii time, then pulling back the curtains on the lanai to groggily stare out at palm trees bending in hurricane-force winds against a charcoal sky as sheets of rain pelt the windows. Then pretend you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when it happens the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that.

If you can conjure such a thing, you’ll have a pretty good feel for our recent family vacation. Go ahead and revel in our bank-breaking sogginess, but you have to admit: There’s something downright cruel about Vancouverites spending thousands of dollars to fly 4,356 kilometres to escape the rain, only to arrive to much more of it.

Hey, we made the best of it. What choice did we have? Stay in the hotel room all day? I did that on a vacation in the Dominican Republic when, again, it rained the whole time. I ended up watching a five-day-marathon of Little House on the Prairie in Spanish.

The hot tub at our hotel was still fun in the rain. We even met someone in the tub who voted for Trump. She was very anti-Obama, saying, “Who is Obama, anyway? I mean, where does he even come from?” My wife responded, “Um… Hawaii, actually,” which was followed by the Trump supporter’s stunned silence.

Just as the weather was finally starting to clear up, a middle-aged couple from Minnesota arrived in the suite above us. Oddly, they kept their curtains drawn tight all day, emerging only at night. They were loud talkers, but we didn’t think much of it – that is, until the man, who resembled cartoonist Robert Crumb, got absolutely and repeatedly wasted. Drunk as a skunk, he’d slur abusive remarks at his wife at the top of his lungs, then beg for sex and “a baby,” all the while flicking his Marlboro butts down onto our lanai (in a non-smoking resort). His lunatic ravings and smashing and banging went on all night long, which thoroughly freaked us out: I barricaded the doors and my 11-year-old nephew cried. It was like a cross between National Lampoon’s Vacation and Cape Fear. When the couple finally checked out a few days later (after repeated run-ins with security), we were shocked to learn they were on their honeymoon.

My sister finally had enough of it, treating her family to a one-night stay in a big, fancy resort a little further south, in what is typically the sunnier part of Maui. Except it poured there, too, and the hotel’s deluxe pool was closed due to a Code Brown (that’s resort-speak for a kid taking a dump in the pool.) But their room had a lovely view of a gigantic construction site.

We did eventually manage to capture the “Aloha spirit” of the islands, and it was the time spent with each other that mattered most: snorkeling with my 15-year-old nephew, a sunset dinner with Mom, watching the cousins play in the sand, and hearing my 11-month-old daughter say “Mama” for the first time. All that, and listening to my three-year-old yelling, “It’s raining AGAIN?”

http://www.westender.com/news-issues/vancouver-shakedown/greetings-from-hell-a-k-a-maui-1.4327072

CODA. Do YOU have a vacation-from-hell story you'd like to see on this very blog? Didn't think so. I mean, if you have one, please send it to me, but somehow it doesn't seem likely. I don't get much response to this blog, though I am grateful for every scrap I get. No, I mean it!

My own vacation from hell came after the worst bout of flu I had ever experienced. I woke up in the night with such a high fever that I was afraid I would die. I had to crawl to the bathroom on my hands and knees to get the thermometer. My temperature was just under 105 degrees. The thermometer felt hot, like it had been dipped in boiling water. I kept thinking, bizarrely, of those cartoons where the mercury climbs and climbs until it bursts out the end.

I crawled into a tub full of cold water, afraid I would have convulsions. My husband was out of town and couldn't help me. I was just barely recovered - still felt shaky and had lost ten pounds - when it was time to go on our deluxe dream vacation to Hawaii - yes, Hawaii!, but everyone said, don't worry, you'll be fine once you get there.

I was not fine once I got there. At all. I was in agonizing pain all night, every night, for reasons I could not fathom, and barely slept. My legs felt like they were stuck in a fire. When someone describes a pain as "searing", I know just what that means. They jerked and twitched incessantly, and hurt insanely no matter what I did: heat, cold, moving, not moving, drugs, not drugs. All we had was Tylenol, and it didn't even put a dent in the pain.

Desperate for relief and sleep, I went to clinic after clinic, and they said helpful things like, "Just stretch your legs out like this. No?"  My husband went out in the middle of the night, lied in an Emergency room and said he needed codeine for his old football injury. They gave it to him. (This was a long time ago.)

The codeine also didn't put a dent in the pain. Towards dawn, the agony would fade to jelly-kneed weakness, but I still couldn't sleep. At all. I couldn't nap. I could barely walk. I was fried.

That was my holiday. I vaguely remember listening to Hawaiian public radio while lying in a codeine stupor. Finally we found a real doctor who said, "This isn't flu. I don't know what it is. You picked up a virus somewhere, a bad one. Maybe on the plane. Your immune system was wiped out, so it got its hooks in you." Or words to that effect.

By then it was time to go home, and I did not see how I would survive the flight, cope with the airport, or any of it. The real doctor gave me some drugs, something like oxycodone, and I took half a tablet and went into a coma. My husband had to push me in a wheelchair at the airport, and help me on to the plane like an invalid.

But I remember that the weather was nice.

Coda to the coda. I did go to my doctor after the trip to try to find out what the fuck happened to me. She said she didn't know what it was either. Ah, medicine! How is it that I keep hearing about all these modern miracles, such as head transplants (which are now a reality: so please, PLEASE can I have a new head now?), when doctors seem to do nothing except frown and say, "Uhmmmm -"

But something very weird happened. I was supposed to give a urine sample, a useless thing they do to keep patients busy and make it seem as if something is happening, and I was utterly shocked. My pee sample was dark brown. It looked like sludge. I asked my doctor about it and she said it was "normal". But what sort of tests did they do? This wasn't excess creatinine, folks, it was some sort of curse-of-the-volcano thing. It was a question left hanging. I never had anything like that happen to me again.

The many Matts

Even if he did call my novel "forgotten" (which it IS, damn it) in one of his columns. Oh well. I don't know if I could've gotten that novel written without his support.

Do you think I'm on a kick here with these giffy-slide-show-type-things? Could be. Takes up less room, anyway.

Bentley's Christmas

Bentley is a Christmas kind of guy. Just tonight I caught him skulking around under the Christmas tree. When I tried to take a picture of him, he lunged at me, but it was a friendly lunge.

The gangsta look suits Bentley just fine. 

Scary Christmas!

Bentley roasting by an open fire.

Is. . .is there a cat in there somewhere?

A Christmas cuddle.

Bentley has brought me so much joy!

Why Ryan is such an awesome kid!

For one thing, he plays a trombone that's bigger than he is. He could've played clarinet in band - even a trumpet - saxophone, those are cool - but no. It had to be trombone.

Playing an instrument like this is hazardous. Musicians are vulnerable to certain kinds of injuries, and this one was particularly painful. While putting his instrument together, his hand was literally pinched in the slide, necessitating a trip to Emergency. There was just one problem. . . his Taekwondo red belt test was in a couple of days. Obviously he'd have to cancel. This is a very big deal because the whole class takes the test together, and it's a rite of passage for them.

But let's not forget, this is Ryan, the Taekwondo Kid! Here he is ace-ing his test, a private test as it turned out, making it much more dramatic (and filmable - you usually can't pick them out of the herd). It has a sort of Karate Kid/Pat Morita/wax-on-wax-off vibe to it.

Breaking the board. And overcoming considerable adversity at the same time. So bow to the new red belt champion. Way to go, Ry!

And here he is getting ready to play his trombone at the school Christmas concert. 

Special bonus gif: Ryan singing in the choir.

AWESOME images of Christmas!

Boy did it take me a long time to make this! I had to assemble some of my favorite Christmas images, but then the gif program didn't want to accept them, or even acknowledge them. They seemed to have disappeared in a puff of smoke. I kept working at it, found a better gif site (they are everywhere now), and lo! Here they are. These are things that remind me of the comfort, coziness and awe of the season. The Christmas squirrel is especially meaningful, reminding me of the squirrel in my favorite Christmas movie, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Enjoy! (You know as well as I do that the "awesome" is clickbait.)

Taekwondo Master: Ryan earns his red belt!

Ryan aces it, nails it, bam! He's the Taekwondo Kid, earning his red belt with moves that are well-practiced and confident. He had to miss his group test due to an injury, but the advantage is this unobstructed video that reminds me of the Karate Kid working out with that guy, you know, Pat Morita? Oh well. It's cool! Way to go, Ryan.

Wax on, wax off.

Taekwondo Master: Ryan breaks that board!

The final step in Ryan's red belt test for Taekwondo. This little guy really takes it seriously, and as you can see, he aces it. He was unable to take part in the group test due to a hand injury, but there was an advantage in the delay: Mom was able to take this awesome video (and I never use the term unless it is absolutely warranted!)

I was delighted to get a comment from a reader in Tanzania telling me they couldn't view the original video (which was in the wrong format - I YouTubed it to make it easier to post). I don't always know who my readers are, or where they are. I try not to be too obsessive about this, afraid I'll lose the purpose of the blog (the satisfaction of writing and putting it out there). I've had a lot more views lately, inexplicably, and I'm happy about it, but I will keep going even if I don't. I recently passed three thousand posts, and though I was going to celebrate it, I decided not to. Just a signpost along the way.

Yaaaay, Ryan!

Scary Santas

Some of these Santas aren't even human. I am not sure what they are. Many should not still be at large. And why is it we ask our children to go sit on the lap of a man they don't even know, a big obnoxious man covered in fur who keeps going "ho, ho, ho"? The rest of the time we tell them not to even TALK to strangers. No wonder so many of the little kids in these pictures are screaming with terror.

A scary litttle Christmas

W'all, w'all, w'all (Jimmy Stewart festive stammer), usually this time of year I make gifs of weird, creepy or disturbing Christmas videos. Just the good bits. But not everyone likes gifs, and they don't always even run smoothly. They're being replaced by mp3 videos which are infinitely more sophisticated. But from the format of this blog, I think you can gather that I hate infinitely more sophisticated.

This year I'm posting whole videos. There's always the risk my zillions of readers won't bother to watch them (and with gifs, they don't have much choice: there they are, repeating, and repeating, and repeating). But some of these things cry out for context.

This is a harmless enough stop-motion video from the 1950s, and it used to run every year on public television. Kids looked forward to seeing it. The elves are cute enough, though Hardrock seems oddly named. Is there a cafe named after him, I wonder, or is he a hard rock musician, or what? The mystery is never solved.

But the reason I'm posting it under this Festival of Creepy Christmas Videos is that the Santa in this thing WON the First Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown in 2014 (which included gifs from all sorts of bizarre old cartoons and puppet shows from the '50s). That is, he won it in the first year. In the second year (link below), I found a whole bunch of new shit. I might re-run the whole post, which I don't like to do, but Lord-oh-Lord did it take a long time to make all those gifs!

(I just went back and looked at the actual post. He won in the second year, too.)

You're not going to believe or even comprehend the Santa in this thing. Why were so many children's programs so creepy back then, or were they maybe not creepy at all and our standards have changed?

You decide.
 

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

(Read at your own risk.)

Mother cat and kitten: furry love

Lazy cats

A Margaret Atwood Christmas

Atwood is a great subject for my PicMix art because every one of her images on Google is a posed, professional author photo. That means lots of blank space in behind - either that, or walls of books, and both of them gif up really nicely. As it turned out, there was a minimum of silliness in these (a little disappointing, really, but these aren't meant to be mockery). At the same time, the greatest weakness of these photos is that they are posed, professional author photos, meaning they are virtually interchangeable.

You have to try on all sorts of background effects for these things. One of them had her entire library in flames, and her in it. I didn't use it. This has some sort of vibrating Santa in the background, but that part doesn't show. The feverish, shifting stars are a nice touch. The animation is so bad in these that it's a kind of poetry.

Atwood as Santa was just too tempting to resist. 

In this one she looks uncannily like Barbra Streisand. I think the background of exploding roses is, if anything, restrained, so I had to use puppies and kittens to balance it.

This will cause seasickness if viewed for longer than ten seconds.

Jinglebell rock.