Alien Report!

"The Isolator is a bizarre helmet invented in 1925 that was used to help increase focus and concentration by rendering the wearer deaf, piping them full of oxygen, and limiting their vision to a tiny horizontal slit. The Isolator was invented by Hugo Gernsback, editor of Science and Invention magazine, member of “The American Physical Society,” and one of the pioneers of science fiction."

This post started out as a sort of "whuzzat?" feature, with all sorts of bizarre semi-recognizable images in it. Then I became bored. I've posted stuff on The Isolator before, and decided that since it was the only thing that interested me, I'd isolate my search.

When I first encountered this headgear from the Land of Strange, there was all of one photo of it, the black and white one at the top. This time, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with results, but this nice color one popped up on a magazine cover. (Do you get a sort of Ripley's Believe It or Not feeling from this? Was it dreamed, or nightmared, or did it actually exist? I find it hard to believe that this had been a "thing", that someone took the time to build one and actually wear it.)

It looks like "a thing", but maybe this is just a prototype. I can't quite believe there's a human being in there. The "tube" looks like old-style electrical cord, in which case you'd do more than inhale and exhale. You'd probably be electrocuted.

Weirdness like this does something to your perspective. I have heard that there are levels of time and reality that exist parallel to each other, but that once in a while two streams bisect, or there is a shift, so that one is suddenly aware of another level. And it's not the same, not the same, not the same thing at all. One feels a sort of vertigo, a blurring-together of the known with the unknown. And you can't even tell anyone what you've experienced, because all you can do is exclaim to yourself and to the aching reaches of the Universe: 

This gets weirder. The Isolator, which to me looks like nothing more than a portable padded cell, is surprisingly similar to Kevin, the tall two-eyed minion from Despicable Me.

      

       

See the resemblance? But it's missing something. The Isolator doesn't look like hard plastic or metal or wood. I don't know what sort of material the guy used, but it looks like felt or something. It's sort of soft and felty, almost - squishy. Almost like. . . 

YES! 

Call it The Twinkilator. 

Twinkies are not to be messed with. They can be as forbidding and intergalactic-looking as that old head-widdly thing. As witness:

Twinkie the Kid!

And tell me honestly, doesn't this look like a Twinkie writing up a scientific report? Either that, or a slightly overdone corn dog.

I am not sure I want to elaborate further, for I have already reached a terrible conclusion. The Isolator isn't like a minion or a Twinkie or even a corn dog, because it ISN'T REAL: it doesn't exist, and maybe never existed! It's just some useless mad-scientist, drawing-board thing done on commission for that scientific magazine, which looks about as scientific as a Marvel Comic.

      .                                                                                                                                                                        

But then I found. . . this.

This looks real as fuck. It does. It just looks like a modern photograph of somebody WEARING one of those head-thingammies. It reminds me of some detective show, or Science Fiction Monster Theatre or something like that.

But as usual, I cannot find one scrap of information on this photo.      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
And this! I mean, these are either cocktail napkins (?!) or invitations to some intergalactic social event, the Wedding of the Century.  I just do not get it.

It also looks a little bit like those Irish hats that leprechauns wear, except leprechaun hats don't have this big bloody wire hanging out of them or big holes that look like they're staring out of the depths of hell.

Could this be photoshopped? What else COULD it be? Are two time zones of reality overlapping again? Damn, I was hoping it had stopped.

There is so much information on the internet. There is so much misinformation on the internet. There is so much NO information on the internet, and it insults me, as if I'm "just supposed to know". I got that "just supposed to know" feeling when I tried to research this whole non-topic, finding stuff that got more incomprehensible (see above) by the minute. I'd write about how this has dogged and tortured me all my life, but I just don't want to go to the trouble to bring myself down for no reason.

This happens incessantly on Facebook, which I have nearly stopped using except to go on individual pages for videos and images. (Just the pictures, folks.) People "in-talk" all the time, chatting back and forth, NOT messaging as they are supposed to, at all, but gabbing on and on intimately in a language outsiders (their "friends") don't understand, full of obscure references. "Should I do it?" can be a whole post. The in-group soon answers, in droves, but very obscurely, already knowing what the question means but couching their answers in arcane language to increase the agony of the ostracized. No one is allowed to ask what it's about or you'll be looked at as if you are an embarrassment, like dog shit on the bottom of someone's shoe. The whole comfy little thrill of it comes from the ruthlessness of shutting out your friends, so that they cannot be a part of your thrilling little world.

                                       
BREAKTHROUGH, BREAKTHROUGH! I just couldn't leave it alone, that modern-looking photo, I had to find out where it came from. So I did a reverse-image search on it - which sometimes gives me the provenance of a photo, though usually not.

And here it is! It's from a TV show called Elementary, which is, I would imagine, about Sherlock Holmes, who is depicted in modern terms as a high-functioning autistic. I think that's a load of high-functioning horseshit, myself, but here's the gif anyway: it turned out kind of neat.
   

                             

I don't see this as looking quite like the fuzzy Twinkie of Hugo Gernsback's vision. It looks more like an industrial vacuum cleaner, or a garbage pail with holes in it. It must have been fun for the prop department to rig this up, though not much fun to have it on your head.

FatBoyGetDown!

A whiter shade of meow

 

You talkin' to ME?

Heaven and hell

Wanted man (and woman)

Wanted man in California, wanted man in Buffalo
Wanted man in Kansas City, wanted man in Ohio
Wanted man in Mississippi, wanted man in old Cheyenne
Wherever you might look tonight, you might see this wanted man


I might be in Colorado or Georgia by the sea
Working for some man who may not know at all who I might be
If you ever see me comin’ and if you know who I am
Don’t you breathe it to nobody ’cause you know I’m on the lam


Wanted man by Lucy Watson, wanted man by Jeannie Brown
Wanted man by Nellie Johnson, wanted man in this Tex town
But I’ve had all that I’ve wanted of a lot of things I had
And a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad

I got sidetracked in El Paso, stopped to get myself a map
Went the wrong way into Juarez with Juanita on my lap
Then I went to sleep in Shreveport, woke up in Abilene
Wonderin’ why the hell I’m wanted at some town halfway between


Wanted man in Albuquerque, wanted man in Syracuse
Wanted man in Tallahassee, wanted man in Baton Rouge
There’s somebody set to grab me anywhere that I might be
And wherever you might look tonight, you might get a glimpse of me


Wanted man in California, wanted man in Buffalo
Wanted man in Kansas City, wanted man in Ohio
Wanted man in Mississippi, wanted man in old Cheyenne
Wherever you might look tonight, you might see this wanted man

How to do it

This cat eats weird things

Zap-a-kitty!

Pull till it hurts!

Take these broken wings

The first time a blackbird flew down to eat out of my hand at Burnaby Lake, my hair stood on end (figuratively speaking). From the time I was a little girl, I longed to have a bird light on my hand, and  I even used to stalk them, wondering why they always flew away.  A mean neighbor kid said I could catch a bird if I put salt on its tail, and I literally went tromping around with a salt shaker in my hand for the longest time. I also took home baby birds I found on the ground, which I now realize was a mistake: in many cases the parent birds are still feeding them. I've seen nearly-full-grown crows screaming after their parents, still wanting a handout. The birds I took home nearly always died, or were so close to being adults that they just flew away on their own.

But birds.

I lost my beloved Paco a couple of years ago, and it still hurts. How it hurts. The bond between bird and human isn't understood unless you have it. Most people say it's "only a bird". Now that we know more about the intelligence of ravens and crows, attitudes are changing. Paco was a sweetheart, a violet-blue lovebird who at only a few weeks old was highly sociable and smart. Then, only a few weeks in, I found her dead in her cage.

Losing Paco led indirectly to gaining Bentley, but our attachment to Bentley was amplified, I am sure, by the loss of Paco. Bentley, too, came from a difficult background. No one quite knows the extent of the trauma, but I am sure he would have died had someone not rescued him in time. Covered with dog bites and nearly emaciated, he was found wandering around Surrey, the toughest neighborhood in the lower mainland. He had no tattoo, no chip, nothing to identify him, but he clearly wasn't feral. Once he recovered he turned out to be a wonderful pet. His loyalty and protectiveness towards us is a palpable thing. He is simply dear.

But these, my wild birds, I still have. It was a delight when the first bird of spring descended. Over the winter we kept hearing the delightful ker-squeege of their song high in the bushes, but no birds ever came down. The ones I saw up there looked immature. Even now they are still a little shy of full adulthood, their feathers a bit mottled with juvenile camouflage. The big, lusty males of last summer must be off nesting somewhere.

These are a comfort to me, because to be honest, I have lost so much over the past several years that I can't begin to count the blows. I am sort of afraid of totting it all up. Some of it was stuff or people I had to walk away from, because it or they had become suffocating. Some was simply taken from me. Life is about loss, no matter what our shallow, striving, materialistic culture might think (if you can attribute thinking to it at all).

You don't try to get it back, and there are no compensations. Not really. You just keep going, and going, into the unknown.

Dessert hell

I get obsessed with certain things, and it's wrong of people to say being "obsessed" is an unhappy thing. My obsessions make me happy as shit. But they do get tiresome. I got looking at those magazine pictures of desserts, you know, the really gross or extreme. flourescent-looking/baroque ones from the 1950s. The Betty Crocker stuff. And at once, I began to make a collection. I can put this on my blog! I told myself. But it began to seem too, too much like something I had done before. So I began to combine obsessions: my bizarre attempts to animate, and my usual ho-hum slide-showy-giffy stuff. I could regulate the speed, of course, and repeat and alternate frames any way I wanted to. Really, that was about the extent of it, and the result is enough to give you a migraine.

BUT.

There was one I left out. I had already made the gif, and damn if I was going to go back and do it all over again, since I'd already chucked the first three or four attempts (as usual). But the one I left out. . . it was magnificent. It was just the epitome of everything tacky, tasteless, overelaborate and basically unappetizing about these things.

This thing looks Satanic, a hell of yellow goo, the dark sinkhole in the middle a prison you will never escape from.  It is stuck all over with gumdrops that look like pustules, and those little silver balls we used to put on Christmas cookies, the ones that had real silver in them. Every once in a while you'd be chewing, and there would be this crunch, and a taste of metal. Maybe a broken tooth. And the Softasilk Cake Flour, I'd never heard of that before. 

I don't know if Coronation Cake had anything to do with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II some time in the early '50s (and NO, I don't remember it!). Some time in my rifling around to find good photos for this project, I found an actual picture of one of these cakes that someone had made. It got deleted along with a lot of godawful other stuff. My recycle bin doesn't even work any more. It keeps shutting down. It hates what I am feeding it. 

But I dredged it back up with my indispensible Tin Eye feature, which can find nearly anything:

So somebody must have actually made this cake. There are whole web sites, blogs and YouTube channels devoted to testing out those awful-looking post-war recipes. This one looks like some bizarre hat, or a merry-go-round without the horses (more likely, an ugly-go-round). But I have to hand it to Tammy Tingles (the only name I could find for this creation). With that hole in the middle, it must be angel food, and I do not know how an angel food cake could support all those devil-horns of frosting and inedible-looking gumdrops without collapsing.

The original is far uglier and more menacing, reminding me of nothing more than one of those creepy abandoned carnival rides that should have been junked a century ago. I had to do something with it! I had thought of making the cake jump around, or the gumdrops fall off it or something. Then I had this demonic idea, but it didn't work. It ended up like this:

Originally I had Betty Crocker morphing into some sort of figure from The Exorcist, and at one point she had a mouth like The Joker from Batman. Then I thought, to hell with it, it's lame. Just having her pop up like this took a lot of work. I think I'm getting better at actually having my figures move, however. They don't just jerk to and fro. Varying the speed is key. No matter how much I work on this it doesn't quite satisfy me, so at this point I will say to hell with Betty and her Satanic cake.

Hoot! It's a coot!

My nature photogaphy has improved.  A lot. At first it was nothing but a shaky blur. (Mind you, I constantly see YouTube videos with a million and a half views which are dark, shaky, and totally incoherent.) It's easier with closeups, of course, though I am not particularly close to these birds. The ones I really want to capture are on Lafarge Lake. We once saw THREE types of mergansers in one day (common, red-breasted and hooded), but I got no more than two or three seconds of focused footage surrounded by shaky, blurry, tilty, finger-covered crap. Since I haven't figured out how to edit these (and it was not long ago I had never even held a camera, so one step at a time), I can't post those. The mergansers hang out in the middle of the lake, so focusing on them is murder. You have to smoothly pan the camera ahead of the bird so that it continually swims into the frame. Otherwise you'll lose it. Mergansers swim like crazy, but they are so breathtaking that I will keep on trying.

Doll fight!

 

 

This is so beautiful I want to SCREAM

This type of organ is sometimes called an orchestrion, because it mimics the sound of orchestral (or band) instruments. This had a tag on it of Hal Roach, so I think it's likely a medley of tunes used in the Little Rascals/Our Gang comedies. Thus the tunes have a familiar ring that you can't quite place. There are hundreds of YouTube videos of antique instruments like this one, some of which play WAY out of tune. None of them are this beautiful. 

I can see this being pulled by horses in a sort of gypsy caravan. Antique carnival music. This was the closest thing people had to "recorded" music back then. Though you can hear the great head of steam building at the beginning (because the organ, after all, is a wind instrument, contrasting with the fact that the piano is percussion), the instrument in truth is like a player piano, its tunes "programmed" on rolls of paper with holes in them. (And by the way - are you old? I mean REALLY old, like me? If you are, you might remember computer "punch cards" with holes in them. Must have been the same principle. Our light bills and water bills came in this form, and on the outside of the envelope it would say, "Don't bend, fold, mutilate or spindle". I never did figure out what "spindle" meant. Impaling it, maybe, on a fork or knife. At any rate, this gorgeous thing just thrills me.)

Some more. There are lots.