Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Monday, March 20, 2017
WATCH THIS! Incredible life hacks that will hack your life.
These incredible life hacks hacked my life, and they'll hack your life, too.
Cats who Forgot How to Cat
My cat "cats", and he does a lot of these things too, so I guess he must be. . . a cat.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Horse yoga!
This was part of my HORSE FAIL post, but it was too good not to repeat. It's one of my infamous animations (with four or five frames, so it ain't Disney). Apparently this is a "thing", something they do down Argentina way to rehabilitate stallions:
From the Daily Mail:
The exercise of horse yoga is practiced at the Doma India School in San Luis, Argentina with the aim of taming and relaxing wild, traumatised and nervous horses.
The school was founded by father and son Oscar and Cristobal Scarpati and they live on a farm in the South American country.
If I were a stallion, this wouldn't relax me, but that's just me.
Gang life: Andy and the animals
It was only in the past week or so that I discovered the shame and disgrace that is Andy's Gang. This was a sort of grotesque Howdy Doody clone with a similar gallery of obnoxious kids, a creepy charmless host, and loud, bizarre characters running around pointlessly. That would be OK - sort of - except the drippy, creepy host is Andy Devine, the most irritating, smarmy actor ever to walk the face of the earth. He had this voice that was both whiny and abrasive, and a vacuous, my-brain-shrank-in-the-wash smile.
But the show would have been tolerable - maybe - without the animal segments. In this case the creatures were literally wired to tiny musical instruments and made to "play" them to a seemingly endless tune. In this video the song is unrecognizable, but it involves a chicken, a chihuahua, a hamster, a rabbit, and - the only one who retains his dignity through the whole thing - Midnight the Cat.
I like Midnight. Though he is probably as glazed as the rest of them from the effects of sedation, he at least keeps his eyes open. His paws are literally controlled by wires that are quite visible at times, jerking his legs up and down, and in one case as he "plays" the banjo, one front paw is rapidly yanked back and forth with wrenching force.
This is abuse, of course, and I don't offer it here as anything else. But it is SO bizarre that I had to share it. One of the many facts I didn't want to know about Andy's Gang is that there was, in fact, no studio audience, just an endlessly repeated stock-footage clip of kids stomping and screaming. (This kind of takes the piss out of the theme song: "I got a gang, you got a gang, everybody's gotta have a gang" - Gang? There's nobody here!). Andy Devine taped all the season's episodes in the space of a couple of weeks, then went off to do his real work, usually on Westerns where he played a whiny, fatuous, gravel-voiced sidekick.
When I found the clips, I was shocked and horrified at what they were doing to these creatures. This is like something out of the Twilight Zone, an animal nightmare. This sort of thing would, I hope, be outlawed today, though I'm not sure in the third world. I thank God now for shelters, the SPCA, the Humane Society, and for people willing to adopt kitties and puppies who have already been through the mill.
(Do you like my Midnight animation? I found two photos that are slightly different. And that is all it takes.)
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Friday, March 17, 2017
Thursday, March 16, 2017
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
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.
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.
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