The mystery of Alan Gershwin: SOLVED?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/obituaries/alan-gershwin-who-claimed-a-famous-father-is-dead-at-91.html

I was amazed but not surprised to see this fascinating obituary in the New York Times about the extraordinary life of Alan Gershwin, who was either an uncrowned prince cheated of his musical and financial heritage, or a complete fraud.

It surprises me that I still get comments on the blog post I did in 2015 about AG and GG (link below) and the complicated relationship they had, whether face-to-face or only in Alan's imagination.  There is just no simple version of this story, and I think it has the makings of a movie. I have heard that William Shatner has a phantom son who keeps threatening him with exposure. So far he’s ignoring him.

I have had a bit of a problem with his “uncanny” resemblance to GG. People see what they want or need to see. GG was so cruelly yanked out of the world, with so much unfinished business, that maybe a lookalike son was an emotional need for some people. Some make their living “being” other people at parties, etc. – professional lookalikes, and AG didn’t look any more like George than a convincing lookalike. But then, I didn’t know him. 

Some of the commenters on my blog piece are kind of upset or even angry that I don’t just accept the reality of AG being who he says he is. Others kind of dismiss him or talk about how terrible his music was. Yet he’d show up at music festivals and no one would question him. Maybe Alan Gershwin was the unlived life, the continuation in very watered-down form of George once he prematurely dropped away. 

In my unofficial research on GG, I kept coming across stories where people would “see” him in his old haunts after he died. He’d just appear for a moment. Elvis sighting stuff? Could be, or just more of that desire to see someone who left too soon. I read that Ira Gershwin whispered on his deathbed that he “saw” his brother after his death – he waved at him cheerily from the sofa in his workroom. IG was terrified to tell anyone lest they think he was crazy. Another time he appeared at a player piano for a second in front of a crowd, and several people “saw” him. But people see what they want or need to see, which is why AG went so far. Maybe.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2015/04/lost-and-found-mystery-of-alan-gershwin.html

I've been blocked! The dark side of Facebook

What? you may ask me. A dark side? How can that be? Easy. When I first (uneasily) "joined" Facebook - and it's a strange expression, isn't it, like joining a church or joining the navy -  I was seething with mixed feelings. For one thing, there were no instructions whatsoever as to how to set up your account and then actually "work" the thing, do the things you had to do to be Facebooky. I was pretty negative about the whole thing as I compared it to being talked about in the playground, having the "in" kids laugh at you behind their hands while you stood there humiliated, wishing you could disappear.

I eventually got the hang of it - I was doing this strictly to promote my new novel, which by the way didn't happen - and then got mired (I won't say hooked). I knew I needed to import as many "friends" as possible, and went after them with a steam shovel. I thought that was how you did it! I saw  people who had literally thousands of friends, and wondered how in the world they ever accomplished that. Did it just happen by itself? Why wasn't it happening to ME by itself? Was I the wrong blood type or what?

Then I started getting these notices from Facebook. Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!  They looked officious and I was meant to be terrified by them. Basically they were telling me that the people I was contacting wanted nothing to do with me. Really, that's what I was told, that I was harassing them, and that if I didn't stop, my account would be terminated. It was completely baffling. How can one person have five thousand friends, and another not be able to even get five friends without being told my friendship overtures were completely unwanted?

Because I didn't know what I was doing, I just blundered along. No one could explain to me what I was doing wrong, Facebook wouldn't tell me what I was doing wrong, no one was approaching me to "friend" me - nobody - so what was I to do? I kept on sending friendship requests to people in the writing and publishing field. That's why I was doing this. To connect. After a while I did get a good number of acceptances. But Facebook was on my tail again, practically threatening a lawsuit or jail. 

Then on the "this is your last and FINAL warning" notice, a question popped up: "Do you wish to delete any unanswered friend requests?"

Delete. . . say what? Delete unanswered. . . how do you do that?

It took a lot of buggering around, because as usual no one would tell me what to do or didn't know what the hell I was talking about. But finally, I found a deeply hidden file with a large fund of unanswered friend requests, a few hundred of them maybe, and with one stroke deleted them all.

Presto! Problem solved. I never heard from Facebook again. It seems the problem was . . .  too many unanswered friend requests! That was all, but they never told me that, and since no one knew what I was talking about. . . 

I'm not a natural on Facebook, but I am learning there's a way to use it. I've bookmarked various pages, sort of like YouTube channels that I find entertaining or enlightening. The news feed refreshes every 67 hours, so I don't get much out of that. It's just slow as hell. Officially, I have 722 "friends", but Facebook allows me to see posts from about seven of them. Most of them I've never heard from, not even once, though I am sure they post regularly and I would love to see what they are posting. 

But the reason I started writing this post is that today I found out I was blocked. Blocked is forever, basically. I know, because I've had to do it myself from time to time. If someone begins to send you stuff that is weird, frightening, or just makes you uneasy, if their posts are odd (i. e. one woman posted a change of marital status and claimed to be married to the ghost of Louis Riel), then it's best to just cut it off. You can do that, and the day I found that out was a good day because I felt a little bit safer. 

Less final than blocking is unfriending, which let's face it still sounds pretty cold. If I walked up to someone I used to like and said, "Hi! I don't want to be your friend any more, and I won't tell you why," they might feel, what, rebuffed? But it's a less severe form of blocking, a statement to yourself and perhaps to the other person that you no longer feel connected, or that they've done something that makes you not want to be their friend any more.

I realize I don't have to say any of this. You know already. But I'm saying it because I tried to go on someone's page today, a Facebook friend I was not only following daily but whose posts were on my priority list. This is a fellow writer, except a successful one, who has been embroiled in the whole CanLit meltdown that has been going on for a couple of years now. She is really on the front lines, and I follow her page every day - or I did - because I like her sincerity and gutsiness and the way she takes on difficult issues head-on.

And - it looks like she has blocked me. Either that, or her page has completely vanished, and I don't think that's how it happens.

I did post a few comments on her page in the last couple of days, but I can't see that they were incendiary remarks.They expressed frustration at feeling like a failure because none of my novels sold. It was weird, because HER post seemed more incendiary than mine. The whole reason I follow her page is that she is such a champion of free speech. She believes everyone has the right to be heard. I can see having my comments deleted, I can see being unfollowed or unfriended or even being messaged and told to can the remarks before I did any more damage. But this??

Then I checked the page of another Facebook friend, a very brave and gutsy lady in the CanLit field who has been publishing some blazing articles about the current literary debacle. She has unfriended me, apparently. We are no longer friends, and I don't know why.

Just like that. It's over.

I know there's such a thing as Facebook envy and social media stress. Young people are especially prone to it. This is not the right environment for a person like me who hates impression-management and frantic accumulation of likes, who hates to feel like she's the only one on the playground who can't speak Ish-kabibble. Yet I haven't closed my account yet, and I still check it daily. And I am not sure why.

Yesterday I joined a group - hey, ME joining a group! - of troll fanciers. Yes, a group of people like me who collect trolls, because they remind me of my childhood, of being ten and watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and playing trolls with my girl friends. Right now it is the only good thing I can see about Facebook. I've been blocked by one friend - someone I really admire - and I don't know why. I've been unfriended by someone I really don't know, but who used to be my friend, and I don't know why.

It feels like my fate to get lousy results, whether from my three novels (awful sales, all of them, in spite of very good reviews), or my Facebook page or my YouTube videos (some of which get no views at all, ever). If I used these things to define my worth, I would be in so much trouble I might not get up tomorrow morning. I might not be breathing. So I don't.

And yet, for all that, I feel bruised. I feel bruised that someone I don't even know personally has blocked me, doesn't want me even seeing her page, and does not want to see my page ever again. I just don't get it. Others have quietly bailed on me, I am sure, as I have quietly bailed on others. But this is a little different. 

I can't play the game, obviously, I've had so much proof it should be blatantly obvious. But part of me wanted this, wanted to be accepted as a writer, as someone who could make a contribution. It didn't happen. But it gets worse when someone who DID make a contribution doesn't want to see me any more, and I don't even understand why.

"Who you calling a shrimp?": The deadly mantis punch

I stayed up 'til all hours making this animation/slideshow, or whatever it is - variable-speed gif? It's easy-peasy to find eye-aching photos of mantis shrimp, since for a while they were the darling of the internet. Animals can be "in" or  "out", and for a while it was the tardigrade, or water bear (which bears no relation to bears, believe me - they're ugly little suckers, even though indestructible). Mantis shrimp aren't merely gorgeous and gaudy, but they have these things like red boxing gloves that spring out at light speed and knock their prey out cold. Maybe THAT'S why they became so popular, especially in the United States (where boxing is king).

This is an excerpt from one of those NatGeo for Kids things that I find helpful because it gives me just the facts I need:

"Found in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the peacock mantis shrimp is arguably one of the most captivating creatures in the sea. Its hard-shelled body is bursting with color—hues of bright red, green, orange and blue, and its forearms are covered in spots. At the top of its head rests a set of protruding eyes, and they aren’t just for show.

These crustaceans have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom, containing millions of light-sensitive cells. With 16 color-receptive cones (compared to humans, who have just three), the peacock mantis shrimp can detect ten times more color than a human, including ultraviolet light. It can move each eye independently and uses this exceptional eyesight to avoid predators and track down prey.

The peacock mantis shrimp lives in the crevices of coral and rocks on the ocean floor. A territorial creature, it has been known to exhibit aggressive behavior toward intruders. This ferocious shrimp has club-like appendages that fold beneath its body, resembling a praying mantis.

With a spring-like motion, it uses these appendages to attack prey—and a mantis shrimp’s punch is no joke. With the ability to strike at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet (50 times faster than the blink of an eye), a blow from a mantis shrimp can easily break through the shell of a crab or mollusk."

Being incredibly lazy, I dredged up these mantis shrimp gifs  (which I made myself, so no stealing) from a previous post - but can you blame me? The weebly-wobbly eyes alone are gif-worthy, I think. When I first saw even a still photo of a mantis shrimp, I doubted my eyes, thinking it was a Facebook hoax. Looking it up, I saw all sorts of gosh-gee-golly blog posts about the New Cool Animal. Which they are, I fully admit (if not new any more).

I don't think every mantis shrimp is this gaudy. Some of the more pedestrian ones I saw just looked like brown lobsters with no claws. But the peacock variety is fascinating enough that photographers must look at them for hours to get just the right shot of its tarantula-like legs and alarming swivelling eyes with those awful little holes.

Everything this creature does is creepy, even if it's just going about its business. It's all those skittery little appendages, with things sticking out all over its body.

And this one, oh God. It is very slowly swallowing a fish, dissolving it on the way in.

But this is the crowning glory of the mantis shrimp: its incredible punch. I have read that they can actually break aquarium glass, so that lab technicians have turned on the lights in the morning to find an inch of water and shattered glass all over the floor.

That sounded like a social media myth to me.. But it's a fascinating species. I had a few questions, which of course the internet was kindly enough to answer: yes, you can eat them. Yes, you can buy them as pets (for around $90.00 - $130.00). Full-grown, they range from 2" to 7". And it's not a myth that they can shatter glass: that punch is the equivalent to a bullet fired at close range. 

This thing, though - it just sort of happened. When I have a lot of short gifs, I sometimes try to put them together into a compilation. Sometimes it works. This time, I came up with something infinitely more interesting. The gif animator just didn't like the gifs, or there were too many frames, or something, because they came out all patchy, but the effect is very cool because there's no background to these. I don't know how it happened, and I doubt if I could make it happen again. Normally if I try to feed in too much, the app just refuses to make the gif (and my, aren't I cool with the terminology today!). So this scary gif, made by accident, turns out to be the best of the whole set.

The Irish boogaloo

Who knows if these are true? Some of them seem buanchumadh/beal onna/fainne/boogaloo. And they left out "smithereens".

The house I grew up in

 

 

Captain Kirk and the Mugatu: a love story

An animation I made in homage to Captain Kirk's intense, if sometimes painful relationship with that loveable, horned albino space gorilla, the Mugatu.

And some outtakes. . . 

Special Action Figure version

Moonspinner

SLUG DISASTER: caught in a Venus fly trap!

Glob thingum

FAST! FAST! FAST Relief!

Who knows where that first gif comes from, or what it means - it's a "found" gif, like so many of them - but it reminded me of that old Anacin commercial where the hammers are pounding inside the guy's head. This was before the classic "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!" ad, which is (at last!) now available on YouTube.

Anacin goes on and on about having three ingredients, and one has to wonder what they are. Some pain relievers still add caffeine (though I don't know why - as a "pick-me-up"?), but back then it was not at all unheard-of for over-the-counter drugs to include codeine, which is now recognized as a narcotic. Which is perhaps why I used to love to take big slugs of Benylin cough syrup straight from the bottle. It went down warm, and made all my little troubles go  away.

Abandoned Edsels

I love old cars, but I hate Edsels, boxy, low-riding, with that hideous triangular toilet seat glommed on to the front. But seeing them abandoned and rusting away like this is somehow comforting. Collectors cherish these things because of their rarity, and the taint forever associated with it: from then on, anything which bombed badly after a huge buildup was called an "Edsel". The fact it was named after Henry Ford's son made the failure particularly excruciating. Wikipedia explains it like this:

Edsel and its failures

Historians have advanced several theories in an effort to explain the Edsel's failure. Popular culture often faults the car’s styling. Consumer Reports has alleged that poor workmanship was the Edsel's chief problem. Marketing experts hold the Edsel up as a supreme example of the corporate culture’s failure to understand American consumers. Business analysts cite the weak internal support for the product inside Ford’s executive offices. According to author and Edsel scholar* Jan Deutsch, the Edsel was "the wrong car at the wrong time."

"The aim was right, but the target moved"

The Edsel is most notorious for being a marketing disaster. The name "Edsel" became synonymous with the real-life commercial failure of the predicted "perfect" product or product idea. Similar ill-fated products have often been colloquially referred to as "Edsels". Ford's own Sierra model, which launched almost 25 years later, is often compared to the Edsel owing to initial buyer antipathy to its perceived radical styling, even though, unlike the Edsel, it ultimately became a sales success. 

Since the Edsel program was such a debacle, it gave marketers a vivid illustration of how not to market a product. The principal reason the Edsel's failure is so infamous is that Ford had absolutely no idea that the failure was going to happen until after the vehicles had been designed and built, the dealerships established and $400 million invested in the product's development and launch. Incredibly, Ford had presumed to invest $400 million (well over $4.0 billion in the 21st century) in developing a new product line without attempting to determine whether such an investment would be wise or prudent.

The prerelease advertising campaign promoted the car as having "more YOU ideas", and the teaser advertisements in magazines only revealed glimpses of the car through a highly blurred lens or wrapped in paper or under tarps. In fact, Ford had never test-marketed the vehicle or its unique styling concepts with potential buyers prior to either the vehicle’s initial development decision or the vehicle’s shipments to its new dealerships. Edsels were shipped to the dealerships undercover and remained wrapped on the dealer lots.

*My only question is: what's an Edsel scholar? Imagine doing THAT all day.

Come ride in my teal automobile

Though any color would do,

I would much prefer a green-blue.

Giant Ball of Matches: WATCH IT BURN!