The Glass Character

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Woman Struck by lightning speaks!

The most bizarre video I have ever seen (no, I mean it)

God save me from this video (one of the worst I've ever seen). It's from a ghastly, creepy kids' show of the 1950s called Andy's Gang. I'm going to be posting more about this show - if I can stand it (must. . . write. . . post. . . ). It involves a truly shameful form of animal abuse which people found quite amusing back then. Those who have carefully analyzed this few minutes of film (and I've studied it as minutely as if it were the Zapruder footage) believe that the hamster actually dies at the 1:05 point.

Sweet surprises!

Some of my favorite Lucky Charms commercials from the 1960s. I especially like the fact that the "rainbow" colours all come out in shades of grey. This reminds me of Dorothy stepping into Oz. None of us knew that the picture turned to colour at this point, because none of us had SEEN it in colour. So he has to describe the colours to us.

Lucky Charms has steadily escalated the number of marshmallow bits over the years, until the "cereal" is now nothing but a bowl of chemicals. North Americans are puzzled, with big question marks appearing above their stupid heads, as to "why" their children are so obese. How can they become obese from a cereal that's "magically delicious"? In recent years the leprechaun has become insufferable, speaking in an obviously phony Irish accent (I mean, even more phony than this one) while he rolls out the "new" marshmallow shape/flavour. The last one was in the shape of a silver Porsche.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

We could have been friends

Demon Possessed Singing Trout

Demon possessed singing trout.

BAD KITTY!

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

One of the weirdest things I've ever seen

.

Ice shove - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_shove

An ice shove, ice surge, ice heave, ivu, or shoreline ice pileup is a surge of ice from an ocean or large lake onto the shore. Ice shoves are caused by ocean currents, strong winds, or temperature differences pushing ice onto the shore, creating piles up to 12 metres (40 feet) high.

"Ivu" sounds like some legendary creature like the Yeti or Abominable Snowman. Abominable Ice Shove?

Anyway, I've never seen anything quite like this. It was reassuring - somewhat - that this is actually a "thing" and not some freakish nightmare driven by climate change. As per usual, this video (a couple of years old now) was passed around without any explanation. The tinkling crystal-chandelier sound has an undertone of relentless chugging, like an awful ice train. That part of it I don't understand, at all. It still looks like some supernatural event to me, like a glacier somehow sped up about a million times.

Blogger's annoyed post-script. I can't find a thing on "ivu" except in that Wikipedia piece. Wikipedia defines it very strangely:

Ivu

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ivu or IVU may refer to:

Ice shove (Inupiat terminology is Ivu), a surge of ice from large bodies of water onto the shore
Impuesto sobre Ventas y Uso, the Puerto Rican sales and use tax
International Vegetarian Union, a non-profit organisation promoting vegetarianism
Intravenous urogram, a procedure to examine the urinary system
Ivu or Eve, a character from the manga Black Cat

It isn't even a REAL black cat, but a person, and nowhere is she called Ivu. I give up.

You ARE in the chair.

Broken hurricane siren: the sound of doom

Growing up, I had a constant sense of doom. Maybe it was from being a Cold War kid and having nothing explained to me. In this doomy era of Trump, many of those feelings are back.

I swear to God, it must have been 20 years ago, I was sitting at home minding my own business when I heard the end-of-the-world sound of an air-raid siren. I couldn't even take it in. Nobody could explain it to me - in fact, nobody else had even heard it. It was the story of my life.

Later I asked a friend about it, and he said, "Maybe they were just testing it out."

For what? I never found out.

Chew your little troubles away

TIPS to Housewives!

Latest Flavor-Hit in Soup

Made with Peanut Butter - nourishing, economical, easy to do

1/2 c peanut butter
2 c. milk
1 c. boiling water
1/2 tsp. onion juice
1 tsp. salt, dash pepper, paprika

Heat peanut butter in top of double boiler and gradually stir in boiling water, mixing thoroughly. Add milk and seasoning. Cook over water for 15 min. . . . For thicker soup add 1 to 2 tbs. flour first made into smooth paste with 2 tbs. cold water and stir into soup; stir and cook 10 min. more. Serves 4. Top with whipped cream, peanuts or chopped bacon, or serve it plain.

Blogger's note. At first I had the horrible thought that this peanut butter soup had Wrigley's Spearmint Gum in it. It's bad enough as it is. Peanut butter IS sometimes used as an ingredient in cooking, but here it's just - wrong. I mean, two cups of milk and one cup of boiling water? That's THREE cups of liquid added to a mere half-cup of peanut butter. It's just not going to work. Fifteen minutes of cooking isn't going to make this into soup, and even adding flour paste (the kind we used to stick paper together) won't make it thick enough to resemble soup. The whipped cream garnish strikes me as pretty bizarre, and the bacon - it's just a waste of bacon.

Is this a wartime/rationing recipe, do you think? There used to be a kind of "soup" in England during the war called Brown Windsor, made of gravy powder and water. Let us give thanks that, at least in this small details, things have gotten better.

Another Blogger's Note. I did find a number of recipes using peanut butter. I won't give the full recipe for this one (African Peanut Chicken Stew) because the page has asked me not to, but I could certainly go for it:

2-3 pounds chicken legs, thighs and/or wings
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 large yellow or white onion, sliced
A 3-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
6-8 garlic cloves, chopped roughly
2-3 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 15-ounce can of crushed tomatoes
1 quart chicken stock
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup roasted peanuts
1 Tbsp ground coriander
1 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste
Salt and black pepper
1/4 to 1/2 cup of chopped cilantro

No flour paste here.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Bentley the space alien

Bentley is in such a state of bliss in this video, cuddled up in the cat bed I knitted for him. There really is a resemblance to a space alien here. A very cute, sweet one. With fur.

They just didn't love you enough

A harrowing scene from one of my favorite movies. Bette Davis is scary in this thing - at the height of her genius. Has anyone ever captured alcoholic self-pity better than this?

Kitty in the cupboard

Oh my goodness! While preparing to shoot a DIY video, I heard a knocking sound in the cupboard. There was Bentley, standing on top of the dishes! Somehow or other - well, I guess I must have left the cupboard open and he slipped in. Getting him to "slip out" again was another matter, as he weighs at least 14 lbs. (we think, closer to 15 now) and didn't want to come out. Bentley loves to be a part of anything I'm doing, so he often shows up in my videos. And he's always the best part.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

How much shock can you take?

Trust no one!

This is one of the weirdest things I've ever heard, and inspired a flurry of paranoid gifs, and even an animation (featuring paranoid stills). I think "politone" is meant to be "polytone", because the only definition of "politone" I can find is:

Politone

Politone may be available in the countries listed below.

Ingredient matches for Politone
Pioglitazone

Pioglitazone hydrochloride (a derivative of Pioglitazone) is reported as an ingredient of Politone in the following countries:
Taiwan

← International Drug Name Search

To me it sounds like shoe polish, but never mind.

(These do play, by the way. I just like the look of them stuck together. Try playing them all at once.) Anyway, this group, this ENIGMA2000, is very X-Files, very paranoid, very into the mysterious numbers-sequence broadcasts that were covered so well on William Shatner's Weird or What? (and GOD how I miss that show, it was tons of fun. Remember that little chihuahua, and the way he came riding up on a horse?)

I randomly came across this politone stuff and it scared the living shit out of me, so I just had to know more. Pretty soon I didn't want to know more. This is some sort of weird espionage thing, spy versus spy, even though it goes by an innocuous name. Some think it even has a paranormal aspect. There are lots of examples on YouTube of numbers being read out loud, random tones, even bits of music, coming from all over the world. Nobody quite knows why. I keep thinking it's a bizarre sort of Emergency Broadcasting System, a frequency left open in case the world ends and the political bigwigs of the world want to say goodbye.

According to Wikipedia: "A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. Most identified stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers, although digital modes, such as Phase-shift keying and Frequency-shift keying as well as Morse code transmissions are not uncommon. Most stations have set time schedules, or schedule patterns; however, other stations appear to broadcast at random times. Stations may or may not have set frequencies in the HF band."

It goes on, but we know enough already, don't we? These number sequences would appear to mean absolutely nothing, but they MUST have meaning or they wouldn't still be broadcast after something like 90 years. The Politone guys (for I can't even imagine a chick doing this - these fellows remind me of the Lone Gunmen on the aforementioned X Files) have their own newsletter, so dated-looking that it's even worse than mine for obsolete-looking formatting. None of it makes a damn bit of sense, so it's obvious these guys don't get out much. The photos are about an inch square, and the '90s-font text goes all the way across the screen, so that your neck is out of joint after reading a paragraph.

Anyway. I've written before about how I "hear things" in my neighborhood, particularly at night. It's disturbing. Right now things are quiet, but I have no illusions they will stay that way. It's aircraft, obviously, but WHY? and what, even? Must be the RCMP, but what would they be doing buzzing around in helicopters over my sleepy little town? And if it's the military, God help us all.

I had a thought today - something from Apocalypse Now! flashed into my head, and suddenly I realized there has to be more than one helicopter. Maybe that's why it's so loud? There's a resonant frequency between all of them which threatens to make my skull explode.

I just had to express my paranoia in an animation (below) which I call Cold War One. It is, mercifully, silent.

Saturday, March 11, 2017

There's no place like . . . Izmir

Turkish adaptations of classic movies are always particularly bizarre. Well, bizarre to US maybe, though not to the average Turk.

As with most of these things, there are no subtitles, but we can kind of guess at the action. I mean, if you haven't seen The Wizard of Oz five thousand times - But I guarantee you, you've never seen it quite like this.

Instead of Over the Rainbow, the movie opens with this:

Let it never be said that corners were cut in this production, but the entire storm sequence is done in animation. Calling it animation is stretching a point, as very little moves in it. The figure of Dorothy is dragged across the screen while the credits roll (or blink on and off).

The actual storm scene is a bit incomprehensible. It collapses 20 minutes or so of film into half a minute of cheap cartoon.

From what I am able to make out, Mama doesn't make much effort to get Dorothy into the storm cellar, which is located INSIDE the house.

Like the original, this is a musical. Sort of. Sometimes the characters just get up and spontaneously dance. The music is so strange, however. Some of it is traditional Turkish stuff, I guess; some sounds like Little House on the Prairie, but then this thing breaks in: