I've been goosed!

I don't know why I've had this rather inane nursery rhyme repeating in my head lately. I don't know how it got started. I'm aware that most of these childish things have dark or even sinister origins, buried in antiquity somewhere.

I wondered if this one wasn't just a piece of nonsense, incongruous, like the wacky poems of Edward Lear or even Lewis Carroll. But no. The merest probing into Wikipedia brought up this:

Most historians believe that this rhyme refers to priest holes—hiding places for itinerant Catholic priests during the persecutions under King Henry VIII and later under Oliver Cromwell. Once discovered the priest would be forcibly taken from the house ('thrown down the stairs') and treated badly. Amateur historian Chris Roberts suggests further that the rhyme is linked to the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII.

Other interpretations exist. Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey note in Birds Britannica that the greylag goose has for millennia been associated with fertility, that "goose" still has a sexual meaning in British culture, and that the nursery rhyme preserves these sexual overtones ("In my lady's chamber").

Priest holes! Sexual connotations! It doesn't quite hang together for me, but these things can evolve over time, or exist in layers. The original version didn't even have the throwing-down-the-stairs bit:

Goose-a goose-a gander,
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs and down stairs,
In my lady's chamber;
There you'll find a cup of sack
And a race of ginger.

We won't even ask what a "race of ginger" is. It's just one of these obscure things. Some older versions include these even-sillier lines:

The stairs went crack,
He nearly broke his back.
And all the little ducks went,
'Quack, quack, quack'.

All that strange left-leg stuff ("so I took him by his left leg and threw him down the stairs") didn't seem to add up for me, until I suddenly remembered hearing the expression, "He kicks with his left foot." Just recalling that phrase jarred awake a synapse that hadn't fired since I was six and listening to my Grandmother quietly, politely eviscerate every Catholic in the neighborhood. The left foot is like the left leg or the left hand - sinister, half a bubble off plumb, "not the thing". In other words, to an observant Protestant - Catholic.

You have to ask yourself, however, why anyone would invent a children's rhyme about priest holes and the persecution of Catholics, those nasty old left-foot-kickers. Why would anyone throw in references to geese (ladies of the night) and ladies' chambers (implying high-status quarters not normally open to the goose trade)? There is Mother Goose, of course, just to complicate things. But if you really look at the structure of the rhyme, which absolutely no one does, you see that it can be interpreted entirely another way.

The narrator, the "I" who is reciting the rhyme, is actually addressing it to the goose character - asking it, in essence, "where should I go? It's kind of like "hey, you over there - yes, I mean YOU, Goosey Goosey Gander - what's a-happenin'?" But it's definitely not "Here I am, Goosey Goosey Gander, Esquire, and let me tell you all about my lady's chamber." This is in spite of the fact that every illustration I've ever seen for this thing includes a big, nasty goose, usually throwing a man down the stairs.

 In fact, "Goosey Goosey Gander" might just be a collection of nonsense syllables, a blithery-blathery-tra-la-lee sort of thing.

If you take the goose right out of the equation (and that's no fun, because I love these depictions of savage geese throwing terrified men down the stairs), then you have something like this:

Dinder, dander, donder
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs, downstairs,
In my lady's chamber.

When you look at it this way, it can and does have erotic possibilities. Hmmm, let's see, where am I going to wander? (wandering being a sort of aimless idling, or even a poking-around-in-none-of-your-business thing). Maybe up here, maybe down there (whew - now that has some sexual meaning behind it!), or maybe in my lady's chamber, where I certainly do NOT belong. It has a sort of subtext of invaded intimacy.

The old man who wouldn't say his prayers kind of reminds me of the old rhyme about "I met a man who wasn't there". In any case, is it really the goose who does the "throwing down the stairs" bit? Of course not; it's the narrator of the poem. So maybe it's really by that notorious old Catholic-hater, Henry VIII. Who knows, he wrote a lot of songs, such as Greensleeves. Or maybe Anne Boleyn wrote it for something to do in the Tower before she got chopped.

Horse watching goat dancing

Harold Lloyd on the clock: here's how he did it

"I tawt I taw a Bentley cat!"

It might be food: Director's Cut

Why Toto is the star of The Wizard of Oz

White peacock dancing

Hey, Xenu! Scientology and you

The hardest thing you will ever have to do

Breathtaking: fireworks over the Eiffel Tower

The best cat, I mean, the BEST

Here kitty, here kitty

Here little kitty, here little kitty

Here kitty, here kitty 

Here little kitty cat

Look at the little kitty cat

A-walkin' down the street

I bet he's got no place to go, 

or nothin' good to eat

Look at the little kitty cat

With tiny tired feet

He ought to have a place to go, 

'Cause he's so very sweet!

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty, here little kitty

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty cat

I’m gonna ask my mama 

if she’ll let me take him home

Where I can hold him close to me 

so he won’t have to roam

He oughta have a lot of milk, 

and lots of fish and meat

Instead of finding what he can 

in the alley and the street

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty, here little kitty

Here kitty, here kitty,

Here little kitty cat

Now look at the little kitty cat

A-sleepin' in his bed

He’s got a place to rest his feet 

and lay his weary head

I’m going to see that he will stay

as happy as can be

And now when he goes walking 

he’ll go walking next to me

Oh, kitty, 

Oh, kitty,

Oh how I love my sweet little kitty!

Oh kitty, oh kitty,

Sweet little kitty cat!

Cat lover's note. This song, beloved in my childhood, is somewhat biographical. Bentley came to us from the SPCA, designated as a "stray". These were once called "alley cats", though the term "stray" was floating around to describe missing dogs. I knew very little about Bentley's history. Nobody did. He was about a year old, brought in by someone who found him badly injured, likely mauled by a dog or coyote. We had to piece together his story after the fact: perhaps he had wandered off from somewhere, gone on a little adventure, and become lost. There was nothing remotely feral about him, though - his gentleness and sweetness was immediately apparent, even from his picture.

When I first saw him in his little SPCA cubicle by himself, he jumped down from his high place and ran up to me, looking up at me expectantly. I picked him up, he relaxed in my arms, and it was instant love. When I opened the door to the cat-carrier, he went in there like a shot.

I had my cat. He didn't have any fur on his shoulders, but I could see the healed puncture-marks where he had been so badly bitten. My daughter-in-law looked at him and said, "That's where his wings broke off."

The thing is, we had not even planned to have a cat. At all. The "cat-riarch", Murphy, had lived to be 17, and at that point we said "no more cats". I was into birds then, kept one for eleven years, and when Jasper died I got a new lovebird named Paco, a gorgeous, sweet little lavender-colored thing that I immediately became deeply attached to. The grandkids loved her immensely. When she was only about eight weeks old, I found her dead on the floor of the cage. I never found out what went wrong.

Why a cat? It was unlikely. My daughter had just gotten a new kitten, adorable. She kept saying, oh, c'mon you guys, you're pensioners, you need a cat. One day when I was feeling particularly ripped up about Paco, I said to Bill, "Jesus, we might as well just get a bloody cat."

Bill said, "We could get a cat." He said it hopefully. He said it with a sense of possibility. Perhaps we needed to revisit that "no more cats" decision of years ago.

It didn't take long. The fund of adoptable kittens was small, but Bentley was a year old and home-ready. His manners were impeccable, and my feeling is that he had a good home, but they didn't neuter him, and one day he followed the siren call. A bad thing, or a good thing? It was good for us. 

Here is his SPCA mug shot. At this point he was named Theo, so he has had at least three names in his lifetime:

He has been the best cat, I mean, the best. Gentlemanly, self-possessed, even classy, like his name. Yet just as off-kilter and unpredictable as any feline. He is the master of the soft-paw stealth attack. Though the fur grew back on his shoulders where he had been picked up and thrashed, when he leans forward I can see little gaps underneath where the skin was too damaged. I call these his "duelling scars". 

Why is Bentley on this blog so much? Hell, I'm getting views for the first time in seven years! But it's more than that. He changed my life. I never expected that, at all. 

It takes a cat like Bentley to do that.

Salt frenzy: there IS a solution

Due to a couple of weeks of unseasonably cold weather, Vancouverites are scrambling around in their usual panic. White stuff is coming down out of the sky, and nobody knows what it is. This happens once every ten years or so. When it does, panic ensues. No one knows how to drive. No one knows how to WALK. There's this slippery stuff down there. The city offered citizens some free road salt, assuming everyone would be polite about it and take the allowed bucketful. That didn't happen.

The top story on CTV News (for several days running) had Tamara Taggert and Mike Killeen solemnly intoning about the Salt Frenzy resulting from Vancouver's "ice-pocalypse". To me, the whole thing looks fairly orderly, but who knows? If these people had been armed. . . (it would have been the United States). At least they didn't hit each other with their shovels.

I have the solution. Or at least, these people do. A handful of salt every few steps, with three adults and a child walking carefully in the salt-sprinkler's footsteps.

It works. But it wouldn't play very well on-air. Not enough frenzy, I guess.

Sea turtle magic

Bentley's tum-tum

Bentley Paws

Bentley destroys the Christmas tree

You can never go home any more

My kind of town
my hometown was

My kind of town

a church made of bricks and boards
bannister slivers and varnish
old hallway, stained glass
school from the 1800s
squeaky floors
a purple runner on a communion table
horse pulling wagon with milk bottles rattling
a house made of glass and cedar
and the paste-white face of Milky the Clown

we sang the Elmer the Elephant anthem
here's what Elmer has to say 
on the street you never play
pilgrims of safety 
and obedience
an ivy-smothered brick partition
standing around the convent
old school        an old school
TV on all the time always the TV 
Captain Jolly and Poopdeck Paul
showing up late for choir the gown that got dirty
oh come and join the happy fair
if wonders you would see
all down the front I shouldn't be eating in it
"my teacher's name is Mr. Service"
riding on my brother's back
a cat named Timothy
who crawled behind the stove

we sat in rows, I couldn't see anything
the seats folded up on our desks the sides wrought iron
you had to have a milk ticket don't forget your milk ticket
I sang in rows it was junior choir
a song came on the radio
Maple City Maple City
"it's the store with the heart in the heart of town"
and then we went to the Spudnut Shop

Jesus Saves it said on the church on the corner
that no one ever goes into
or maybe I just don't see them
brown people 
kept separate
horses I remember riding horses
and the communion table
and all that stuff on TV hi-yo Silver 
horse chestnuts all brown and shining
a dog named Skippy skipping 
skipping double-Dutch
and growing up           changing
not wanting the changes very much

I see my town in amber and it's old and it's brown
it's my town
it's my kind of town

Animated cats!

Monty Python it ain't, but these crude animations of mine, my very first attempt, are perhaps inspired by the Edwardian cutouts of Terry Gilliam. A dear friend of mine gave me a book called A Catland Companion, years and years ago, and it sat on the shelf for ages. THEN came the power blackout on New Years Day that killed our internet connection for over a week (which, by the way, is the sole reason I haven't been posting).

So.

No TV.

No internet.

No nothing.

I started looking for something to do, and rediscovered Catland. Hmmmm.

Could I - maybe - make something out of this?

I've been using a gif program to make little slide shows to post here (maybe you've noticed) - and I noticed they kept using the word "animated". Animated!  Animation is what I've wanted to do all my life! But having absolutely no talent in visual art - drawing or painting or anything else - I was sort of stuck.

But not TOO stuck, because I rediscovered Catland and its oddball denizens. I discovered they could be moved around and photoshopped in all sorts of interesting ways. I could not put them through the gif program, of course, so I was going on faith that they would look like anything. But these cats just jump off the page, don't they? And I hardly had to do anything with this little row of dancers, just bounce them up and down and reverse the image. In fact, it's the best one I did, and I did practically nothing.

Is it the Gilliam effect, I wonder, that caused me to make these cats do such violence to each other? Cartoon violence, of course, with no bloodshed, just a few mashed heads. These guys kind of jump around a lot. I was experimenting here, and ended up with considerable jerkiness. Gilliam's stuff doesn't move smoothly at all (does it?), yet he makes it work. Damn.

These two adorable kittens started out so promising, but ended up looking so strange, as if they're weightless or something. To compensate for the floatiness, I made the animation go a bit too fast, so they jump around each other. I wanted a hopping effect - almost a leapfrogging, and got two highly caffeinated kittens. I think this was the first serious one I did. I learned from this that I cannot do the required 24 frames per second that Disney required when animating Snow White. The main technical problem with these is that when I was making the frames, I had no way at all of knowing whether the animation was working or would look right or convey motion without jarring jerkiness. 

I did try.

This is a Louis Wain cat, and it shows. I suppose he'd turn over in his grave if he knew about this, but if people can animate Hieronymus Bosch, then I can make a Wain cat leer like a fiend from hell. It's a short step. Actually, this is one of my favorites, along with the kick-line of kittens. I may play with this one some more and make more expressions, repetitions or whatever. It seems too short.

I held out the most hope for this one, and was partially successful. It took me the longest. The original drawing looked like this, and it was all I had to work with:

This is a nice example of anthro - anthropo - whatever, making the cat look human, but not TOO human. Those ain't ballerina legs and feet, folks - they're animal, but in a weirdly human position. So what can I do here? I had to detach arms and legs and twist them around and try to get them back on again. It was hard. It was also necessary to remove the shadows on the floor so I wouldn't have to keep reproducing them consistently. I just don't have the equipment to do that. But it sort of came out all right. I kept tweaking the frames, and I guess I could tweak them some more.

But I'm waiting for the next blackout.

The art of the horse

This is just a small sampling of the magnificent "horse art" of Wesley Dennis, who illustrated all of Marguerite Henry's most famous books. He had a sense of the horse that transcended mere likeness and transformed Henry's books from ripping good stories into something magical and unforgettable. I still have my old, yellowed copy of Misty of Chincoteague, and my King of the Wind with the cover long gone. Some of the black-and-white illustrations have been coloured in with pencil crayons - surely not by me! I had three older siblings who all had their way with these books until they were handed down to me. This merely added layers of magic.

Santa's last day of smoking

William Shatner Speaks!

Bentley has no legs!

Dream horse

"I'm mentally ill, guys!" Why Carrie Fisher kicked ass

Neither of the videos I did on this subject were wholly satisfying to me, as I kept leaving out important stuff. I have no capacity to edit, and it's unscripted, so it goes down the way it goes down.

A lot of the stuff Carrie Fisher talked about was my stuff, too. I found aspects of her life history alarming, but she got through it all and would have kept on going, if she could. And she would have done a lot more good with her honesty and no-holds-barred approach. The thing is - and I have even said this to a psychiatrist - as far as mental health issues are concerned, we have not even had our Stonewall yet. We're in about 1970 now and have a lot of catching up to do. There are signs of it just starting, but I still get irritated at the way it is unfolding. No one has any imagination about this at all. Everyone still thinks in straight lines and stereotypes.

I try to hope. I saw a PBS documentary on Stonewall. An archival interview with the head of the Mattachine Society was most revealing. He defended gay rights, but insisted he wasn't gay himself: "no, I tried it once, but it's not my cup of tea." He also said, "society shouldn't feel threatened. Homosexuals will never want to marry or attempt to adopt children." He said it as if the very idea was preposterous. Which, I guess, it was.

I've written of all this before, and now I am tired of it because of the energy it takes to write, and the way it has to be "good", damn it, I mean not a mess. So now I make videos, and those aren't perfect either, but I know they come closer to expressing how I really feel. It's important that I do that, because Carrie Fisher proved to us all that life is a lot shorter than we think.

Hey, Santa! What's your New Years resolution?

I LOVE HAROLD LLOYD!

Why I felt like I knew Carrie Fisher

I started off to make a video of personal reflections triggered by Carrie Fisher's death. Ended up making two. Neither one of them really said it, so I am probably going to post both of them eventually. I don't script these things at all, so sometimes I leave out the most important thing. But I don't treat Carrie Fisher's idea as a joke. 

People tend to cringe when they think of "crazy" people, casually writing them off as whack jobs, nutbars, etc. (Sorry, but this is what I hear every day of my life.) This conveniently makes them less than human, which reminds me of another human practice that used to be OK and even "good business": back when one human being could own another, and force their will upon their property.

A great many people were incredulous that anything could be wrong with that. It was simply an aspect of mainstream society. If you were kind to your slaves, after all. . . But even after their chattel were set free, they were vilified by nasty, denigrating names and physical segregation.

That doesn't happen any more. Does it? Can you think of another (large) group of people being referred to as things, such as "jobs", with no one objecting because the injustice is so invisible?

What? You mean there's a problem? Aren't those people sort of oblivious to what goes on anyway, so does it really matter what we say?

We all need a good cleansing, perhaps an enema, and then we need to begin again. The thought of "pride" in a crazy person seems pretty much unthinkable, but pride in a gay person used to be an aberration, and perhaps a sign of mental illness. We have come a long way, and yet, not far enough.

P. S. I use some language here, one word in particular, that might shock people. It's not used lightly. In fact, it is meant to demonstrate just how devastating it is for a human being to be casually vilified, verbally punished and denigrated. It's not meant to hurt anyone, that's not why I'm doing it. It's a parallel, an example. This is what it feels like. I want to shake people up with it. Wake them up. Because as it stands, it's not OK to call gay people by nasty names - it never should have been - but "whack job" slips casually out of people's mouths, and no one turns a hair.

Bentley meets Darth Vader!

What is this fat, macho tabby doing in the back yard?

Why does he look so much like Bentley?

Has our Jedi Master met his (fat, macho) father at last?

Does this mean that Princess Meow-a, the nice fluffy tortie who comes in through the hole in the fence, is really his sister? Probably not, but it's a nice story. 

I had to voice the part of Darth Vader in this scenario, as the cat was too far away to be heard. Bentley does NOT like me using weird-sounding voices, nor does he like me whistling. He comes up to me, looking anxious. The whites of his eyes show, always a bad sign. 

Humans are supposed to behave in a certain way, and I repeatedly break those rules. And yet, he still loves me. At least, I think he loves me: here he looks merely alarmed.

Separated at birth: Rudolph Valentino and William Shatner

AFTERNOTES. I was going to run this with no text at all, but now I feel moved to Say Something. Anyone who follows this blog (me, maybe?) knows that I am nuts about The Shatman. To be 85 years old and have that kind of energy and passion is phenomenal. (And the horses, don't get me started!) But I am also finding out more about Shatner's roots. I found a very poignant story about his professional beginnings in Stratford, Ontario (a place I've been to many times) as a Shakespearean actor. I have seen clips on YouTube from Hamlet and Julius Caesar, and this so-called-over-the-top actor gives, if anything, restrained performances. The article - God, where did it go? I should've bookmarked it - talks about how insecure he was as a young man, and how much of a loner he was. Loner? Insecure? None of these match with the energetic dynamo-of-85, the Shatner of a thousand interests and enterprises (ch-ch-ch-ch - dry ironic chuckle). And yet, and yet.

I'm also finding all these things he did when he was much younger. The segment on the boxer was breathtaking, for he has the body of an Adonis. He is ripped. This powerful, grounded physicality is the foundation for his phenomenal longevity and vitality in his 80s: if you wreck your body when you're young, you're toast by age 60 (sorry, Carrie, I'm afraid it's true). 

As for Rudolph Valentino, he was perhaps my first movie star crush. As a kid, I saw pictures of him in a book we had lying around, a big coffee table book called The Movies. (I thought I imagined it, until I was able to buy a used copy from Amazon.) When I was ten years old I wrote short stories about him, set in the 1920s. Maybe these foreshadowed my completely obscure, mostly-unread novel about Harold Lloyd. Who knows. But I was fascinated with him. 

I am not saying these two are "alike", but is there not something - an elusive something, perhaps, in the exoticism of their eyes, the sensuous bow-shaped lips, the incredible facial structure with cheekbones to die for - is there not something almost Mongolian about Shatner's slightly slanted eyes, something Moroccan about Valentino's inscrutable gaze? 
He was, of course, a Latino from Spain, but Shatner is not the waspy, white-bread leading man people assume he is. He is a Jewish boy from Montreal, and no doubt carried that label and responsibility with a degree of pain.

The pain you can see in those incredible, unfathomable brown eyes.