Rickety Uncle

There's something I do, and I guess I had better talk about it now. When I am sitting there vegetating in front of the TV, craving something sweet, sometimes I Make Something.

It isn't even a "thing", just a mixture. You know how cookie dough tastes about one thousand times better than the actual cookies? I try to make something that approximates cookie dough, or brownie batter, or whatever, but on a small scale. It never works. Butter, sugar, cocoa, etc. - blecccch, but I usually eat it anyway.

I love the topping for apple crisp, and have tried to make something like it. Just the topping. It never works, because you can't cook it. But raw oats and Crisco and stuff -  how could it fail?

So yesterday I see a bizarre recipe on a Facebook page called Vintage Recipes. Here is what the original looked like:

It made no sense. Seemed to be some sort of square, but it had no flour in it, no eggs, just butter and more butter. But it only had four ingredients, which I liked.

The name, though - what the hell - ?? WHOSE uncle, and why is he so rickety? For some reason I kept thinking of Ricky Ricardo (dough - see? D'oh).

I did some research on this odd-sounding thing, and to my amazement found only ONE YouTube video on it, with a completely different recipe. Normally anything edible has literally thousands of versions, including a very smug, perfect version by Nigella Lawson. Remember the sponge toffee/honeycomb/hokey-pokey/yellowman, etc., that never turned out and, because the syrup was volcano-like on the stove, could actually be hazardous to your health?

I also found two handwritten "vintage" versions of this recipe - hey, we used to throw all these things out once we got computers! There would be no more cookbooks, remember, and you could throw out that old box with your handwritten recipe cards in it, too. That included the ones passed down from your mother, your grandmother and your great-grandmother, who were obviously hopelessly low-tech. We no longer needed those embarrassing brown cards with the tatty edges, so old and spilled-upon that you could hardly read them. From now on we'd cook directly off the computer screen.

Oops.

Now those tatty old brown cards are precious beyond measure, and people are making gazillions of dollars posting them on their cooking blogs. 

So did I make this drunk-uncle stuff? Of course. When I mixed it up, with my hands of course, it was, well, sort of like the topping for apple crisp, but without any flour. And it was sticky and very greasy from all that butter. I didn't take any cute photos or a YouTube video of me making this, partly because I miss making videos with Caitlin so much that I want to howl sometimes (but just getting her to speak to me is a major triumph, now that Grandma has become obsolete).

But it all comes out the same, I think, kind of like this:

I tasted one, and butter gushed out of it and oozed onto the kitchen floor and made a dangerous slick. I had to put up a traffic cone. Nobody warns you about these things. As with all those hokey-pokey recipes, food bloggers always claim it's "easy to make, fun and delicious". 

I don't think I have ever had an internet recipe turn out. The "magical three-layer cake" was a flat grey custard that I threw out after two days. Nobody wanted to eat it. You already know about the sponge toffee, the seven tries. Mug cake! Back when the grandkids acknowledged me, our various attempts at it were hilarious.

This might be OK after a couple of days. Maybe it needs to mellow, like shortbread. Who knows.

RICKETY POSTSCRIPT. They didn't get better with age. Not really. I kept eating them, hoping the next one would be better. After four of them, I began to feel sick and to think, "I'm going to gain two or three pounds just from eating these things, and they're disgusting." So they went into the garbage.

But I did not totally give up on this recipe. I love butter and brown sugar mixed together, and while making the original batch I kept tasting the raw dough or sludge or whatever-it-was, and it had a delightful buttery, sugary flavor. Tonight I decided to scale the recipe way down: 4 tablespoons rolled oats, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, one tablespoon butter (melted). Mixed it together with my hands, and began to eat it with a spoon.

Not. . . bad! It had a salty-sweet taste from the sugar and butter, and the oats were kind of like horse fodder, substantial to chew. I would make this again, to eat on the spot, but now I'm trying to find a way to add chocolate to it.

Drunk on the divine

I love to watch people go wacko under the power of the Holy Spirit, but this is really extreme. I have no idea what's going on here, because all the other videos I found of this woman were relatively "straight" - IF this Pentecostal shit can be said to be straight! I have no idea why drunken delusion, howling, flailing around, rolling on the floor, babbling in nonsense syllables, walking people around on leashes, etc. is assumed to be Godly. To me it's spiritual masturbation. 

Why not go help someone in need? But that has nothing to do with what is happening here. It's no better than actual drunkenness, which never helped anybody. I think a large part of this is the kind of herd mentality that caused Jim Jones' nearly one thousand followers to drink the Koolaid, even forcing their children and babies to drink it. This Heidi character is a performer, as far as I am concerned, putting on a show to convince the yokels in the audience to pony up for the sake of her "mission". It will work. I know this, because it always does. 

 
 

                                                                                                                                                             

  

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BIG CHOCOLATE!

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Wet dreams in the jungle

There are days, and this is one of them, when I am totally fed up with the internet. What started off as a potentially invaluable source of information has become a vast juggernaut, with useful stuff increasingly buried by the crap that is posted every day (and hardly anything is ever taken down). The more this stuff accumulates, the harder it is to find anything, which is ironic but is never mentioned. I won't get into the racism, the ranting, the hiding in the bluff behind cover of anonymity, so you can say any damn hateful thing you want. 

But once in a while, you find the end of a thread, and you think, hmm, maybe it's not so freaking useless after all. The old magic returns, if only for a moment.

For years, a thought would come into my head, I'd rack my brains fruitlessly for a while, then give up and let the thought slide back into oblivion. It had to do with Tarzan. More specifically, Tarzan movies. More specifically than that, the Tarzan movies that used to come on TV on Saturday afternoons.

It was some sort of a Tarzan series, and I am sure the movies were badly butchered, but we didn't care because we had nothing to compare them to. Certainly we didn't get to see the erotic swimming sequence (did anyone? I find it hard to believe it wasn't cut from theatrical versions) from Tarzan and his Mate. They probably even censored the crocodile-wrasslin' scenes with their sped-up film and elaborate editing (to make it look as if an actual crocodile were involved) because they were too violent for the kiddies in the 1960s.

The series had some sort of title card with palm trees and birds and stuff on it, and there was this music. It was the weirdest stuff, because it seemed to have animal sounds in the background. Bird calls and stuff. There was very little actual music involved, just atmosphere. A piano was playing, and someone was rhythmically scraping something. You only got to hear a snippet of it while The Tarzan Show title card came on, but they'd also play a bit of it after commercial breaks (and there were a lot of them).

So was this, as they say, "a thing"? Did it still exist, could I find it?  How do you find something like this when the clues are so vague? I just started googling terms like "music with birds in background" and "bandleader who uses bird sounds" (for in retrospect, it's obvious this was some sort of lounge music). I was astounded at how quickly I scored a hit. Soon I was playing a video with this cheesy, lounge-y, '50s-style music, about as exotic as Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, which I had not heard in - um - four, or - seven, or - a lot of years. 

What made me laugh is the realization that those aren't even bird sounds - they're band members squeeee-ing and hooting and rattling to sound like birds. Could have fooled me. I have no plans to cultivate a taste for the genre, which is called exotica (and here I always thought that had something to do with sex!). But at least now I know what it is. The internet still has the power to inform.

I don't know if Martin Denny got any royalties for The Tarzan Show, but probably not - they likely just stuck the record on and hoped for the best. As is almost always the case, I can't find any information on the actual video, which I think is quite lovely. Who knows how many times it has been pirated and passed around. But isn't that what the internet is all about?

Handmade movie

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Fall of the house of Horse

There's something just a little bit sad, and a little bit mad, about the way I collect horse pictures on the internet.

When I was a kid, I didn't have too many options. I had my horse books, such as King of the Wind (with Wesley Dennis' glorious illustrations of the sun-colored Godolphin Arabian) and the odd rerun of My Friend Flicka or Fury. For a short time I had a horse of my own - and I am sure I did not appreciate it at the time. These are among the sweetest memories I have, so it seems incredible to me that after a while, I lost interest. How stupid we are, or can be, in hindsight.

But the internet opened up whole new vistas of horse porn. When I started collecting photos about five years ago, they were mostly teeny and of poor quality. All that has changed. I mean, look at this thing! It's breathtaking, almost beyond horse.

But I've also noticed some things about horses.

They have changed.

This 1960 painting of an Arabian horse by Wesley Dennis is the standard for the breed. . . or at least, it used to be. I pictured the "Arab" (as little girls called them, thinking of them as the epitome of horsedom) as having a fine, sculpted head sitting on a swanlike but muscular neck. Large dark eyes and flaring nostrils were traits of this ancient desert breed, as were small, pricked ears.

This horse (the cinematic knockout Cass Ole), shown in silhouette in The Black Stallion, reveals ideal Arabian conformation in every sense. Especially that beautifully symmetrical head with its elegant profile.

Even as a horsy little girl, having read every horse book in existence, I knew there was a trait prized by Bedouin horsemen: it was called jibbah, and it referred to the slightly concave, tapering forehead and muzzle of the desert horse. SLIGHTLY, I said, as in the lovely Arabian mare above.

SO. . . WHAT HAPPENED???

This happened.

And this happened.

And THIS happened! AAAAACK!!! 

Somewhere along the line, in the past few decades, the standard of beauty and ideal conformation for the Arabian horse has gone to hell in a shit-basket.

The glorious and dignified desert steed has come to resemble something more like My Little Pony.

We now have a horse with a pig-snout: a muzzle that looks squeezed, with very large nostrils that have almost formed a mono-nostril (because there's simply no room for them at the end of that tiny nose), and black eyes that look something like an alien's. The show ring is behind a lot of this mutation/mutilation, with handlers applying eyeliner or even tattooing the horse's eyelids to give them that dark and sultry look.

But most of it is breeding. Bad breeding, to exaggerate traits that someone must have decided are quintessentially Arabian. The result is creatures which look disturbingly alike, like the Hapsburgs when their genetic house of cards finally collapsed. No one seems to see this ugliness any more, and horsy Facebook pages draw oooohs and ahhhhs in the comments section for the most horribly distorted photos of Arabians, their heads flung up unnaturally high and their eyes flashing because their handler just jerked the hell out of the lead.

BUT!!!

That's not why I'm writing this.

I'm writing this because the other day I came across this photo:

Hell-llo, I thought. In fact, I think I said it out loud.

It looked strange. It looked like the puzzle piece that might fit together with the grotesque Arabian "dished" face.

It wasn't just the exaggerated Roman nose, but the eyes, which had an exotic almond shape that gave the horse a "knowing" look. Unless we're talking about locating the feed bucket, most horses aren't particularly knowing.

It was eerie. What sort of horse was this?

It definitely wasn't a draft horse. It just didn't have the look of one. A Clydesdale or Percheron has the same sort of nose, but it belongs on a massive head and neck. This just looked strange.

When I looked it up, I was even more puzzled.

It's one of these.

An Andalusian  (and oh God, how I love that name! Say it again: Andalusian). It's a very ancient breed of Spanish horse, but a horse of a very different shape and size. You can instantly see that the neck is thicker, the body longer and more muscular than the Arabian's. The legs are more like a thoroughbred's. And the head is noble, with a curious convex curve that is the opposite of jibbah: what shall we call it - habbij? 

The Lusitano (another fall-over-backwards-gorgeous name) originated in Portugal, and a horse person would kill me for saying this, but they're pretty similar. So you have horses like this, magnificent steeds which resemble all those old paintings and sculptures of war horses. They're so different from Arabians - or even Morgans or Quarter horses or Saddlebreds or ANY of the breeds which originated from Arabian stock - that it's hard to know what to make of them. How did a saddle horse get a head like that?

But here's where we start to get in trouble. Something about this horse's head isn't quite right. He looks inbred to me - though, of course, a lot of highly-bred horses are. It comes with the territory. But that convex head is as weird-looking as the Hapsburg lip. The eyes are almost squinty. Could it be that the breed's more distinctive traits are being deliberately exaggerated, for the sake of the show ring and the auction block?

Is this what makes a Lusitano a Lusitano?

I hate to see it, because at their finest these are such beautiful horses. But this is not beautiful. This is deformity, not unlike the toy-like Arabians which have lost all their dignity through human manipulation. 

No more horse lies! "From the horse's mouth" means telling the truth. And these poor creatures, through no fault of their own, are paying through the nose.

Blogger's afterthought. It's sad, some of the things you see. There are zillions of YouTube videos of horses, including Arabians bucking and prancing around. They are beautiful to watch. Here's a tiny clip:

The resemblance to Cass Ole is just astounding, even in the way he moves. It's just possible the two are related. But what dismayed me were the comments:

"That's not an Arabian."

"No way, don't try to fool us."

"You trying pass this off as a Arab?"

"Look at the head, it's Quarter horse or a Morgan."

"Arab have deer head, not? This horse has no."

Yes. The "deer head" with the tiny squashed nose has now become the standard, so that a magnificent horse like this one is somehow "wrong".

My hope is that not all Arabians look like this. But the fact that ANY of them do dismays me, particularly since this sort of extreme breeding seems to be done to please the public.

I would be pleased by this. And thank you.

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