The world's first automobile (and Ford had nothing to do with it!)

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen ("patent motorcar"), built in 1885, is widely regarded as the world's first production automobile, that is, a vehicle designed to be propelled by an internal combustion engine. The original cost of the vehicle in 1885 was 600 imperial German marks, approximately 150 US dollars (equivalent to $4,183 in 2018). The vehicle was awarded the German patent number 37435, for which Karl Benz applied on 29 January 1886. Following official procedures, the date of the application became the patent date for the invention once the patent was granted, which occurred in November of that year.

Benz's wife, Bertha, financed the development process. According to modern law, she would have therefore received the patent rights, but married women were not allowed to apply for patents at the time.

Benz unveiled his invention to the public on 3 July 1886, on the Ringstrasse in Mannheim.

About 25 Patent-Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893. (Wikipedia)

And here it is in action! "Action" may be too strong a word here, but at least it moves. My enthusiasm for vintage automobiles is relatively new, but this one goes about as far back as you can without putting a horse in front of it. As they must have, sometimes, when it sputtered to a halt or ran out of the thimblefull of gas it must have taken. Sputter, sputter, sputter! As they used to say, "chitty chitty bang-bang". Only this sounds more like a sewing machine.

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I was delighted to see how many videos there are on YouTube of this glorious clinker of a machine. And they work! It's almost like an electronic wheelchair, or one of those velocipede bicycles with the huge spoked wheels. I have mixed feelings about the internal combustion engine, of course, but my feelings are too complex to get into that now. 

A glorious-looking thing. Almost impossible to believe it ran under its own steam. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

A gorgeous colour shot of the Benz, likely a reconstruction. 

A cat's maternal instincts

Oh my goodness. And they say cats make such good Moms!

Joni Mitchell - The Fiddle and the Drum

The Fiddle and the Drum

Joni Mitchell

And so once again
My dear Johnny my dear friend
And so once again you are fightin' us all
And when I ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall
Oh, my friend
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum

You say I have turned
Like the enemies you've earned
But I can remember
All the good things you are
And so I ask you please
Can I help you find the peace and the star
Oh, my friend
What time is this
To trade the handshake for the fist

And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
Oh, my friend
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum

You say we have turned
Like the enemies you've earned
But we can remember
All the good things you are
And so we ask you please
Can we help you find the peace and the star
Oh my friend
We have all come
To fear the beating of your drum

On Canada Day: we see thee rise

It's not that I have nothing to say. Quite the opposite. I have too much to say, and have learned to censor myself. It's a sad thing, but that's how it is. This blog has devolved into something less meaningful for me, though I still keep it going for my own amusement. Whatever desperately serious thoughts I have, I keep to myself.

There is a reason for this. I remember a wholesale bailing of followers after I posted something that went straight to the core of my fears. It did not go well, and I took it down soon, because I realized I can't do that sort of thing here. I also don't address my mental health issues - much - except peripherally, since, as the old song says, "oops, there goes another rubber tree plant."

Not that I am making fun. Far from it. I know people garner huge followings by revealing their most raw, innermost selves, their secrets. But there is schadenfreude involved, as there is with me, the sense of "well, that's too bad for her, but I'm glad it's not me". Do I insult my potential readers when I say that?

I wept when I played this video, which I found last year and forgot to save. So I had to hunt for it again. The national anthem has never made me weep before. I see desperate daily news items of escalating violence, and wonder how "strong and free" we really are. But I have to say, at one and the same time, I am proud, fiercely proud of this self-deprecating, well-intentioned, blundering, dignified, crazy, brilliant country. We're like the little brother who gets sand kicked in his face. Do we complain? Yes, we do, daily. But ask an immigrant. On every Canada Day, people who have just become Canadian citizens comment to media on what this means to them. And it is everything. It is freedom, freedom to "be". I hate to say "but it's worse everywhere else", but - guess what - it's worse everywhere else.

You're not going to believe this, and I jinx it as I say it, but I have found a kind of happiness, an intense joy and pleasure in the simplest of things: walking around Como Lake with Bill, finding a rare troll doll and having it come in the mail like it's Christmas Day, having a magnificent red-winged blackbird eat out of my hand. And even capturing and posting the wonder of it on YouTube, where I never realized until recently that I have some followers. My enthusiasms have not died, but neither have my fears, and my haunted past has never haunted me more. Everyone keeps telling me it wasn't my fault. I want to speak of these things, in fact I ache for it, but I know it isn't wise.

I also know you can hold two opposing emotions at the same time. Two opposing personalities, more like. I have learned the reality of malignant narcissism in my family of origin, and PTSD in my own core, but for the most part I keep these things to myself. At least there's a name for these things now. In the past, it was just called "life". 

And since some my my small band of readers are from other places, here are the words to Canada's national anthem. MY Canada.

O Canada!

Our home and native land

True patriot love

In all of us command

With glowing hearts

We see thee rise

The True North, strong and free

From far and wide

O Canada

We stand on guard for thee

God keep our land

Glorious and free

O Canada we stand on guard for thee! 

O Canada we stand on guard for thee!

Francaise

O Canada!

Terre de nos aïeux

Ton front est ceint

De fleurons glorieux

Car ton bras

Sait porter l'épée

Il sait porter la croix

Ton histoire

Est une épopée

Des plus brillants exploits

Et ta valeur

De foi trempée

Protégera nos foyers et nos droits

Protégera nos foyers et nos droits

Gumby's little sister: it's MINGA!

A special boy, on a special day

Just listen!

There is something perfectly intoxicating about these early Maxwell House coffee ads. Whoever came up with that coconut-clopping or block-striking or whatever-it-was-that-made-that-perc-ing-sound was a genius, for it's forever associated with coffee that TASTES AS GOOD AS IT SMELLS. Which is funny, because as I recall, "perked" coffee smelled terrible, gaseous and burnt, like the stuff that collects under the burners of an old stove. What it tasted like, I'll never know, because I wasn't drinking coffee then. I wasn't even drinking amniotic fluid then, folks, because I wasn't conceived yet.

What a concept.

This was one of the more magical illusions of my youth. Really, it still is pretty impressive. I made a YouTube video out of this, and millennials gasped over it because they'd never seen it before. How did they do that?? It was nearly as magical as the Hertz Rent-a-Car ad which showed a couple being lowered down into a moving convertible. ("Let Hertz put YOU in the driver's seat. . . TODAY!")

It does seem ironic to me that, though I remember coffee smelling gaseous and burnt, Maxwell House was sold mainly on "aroma", with consumers whiffing it up as if it was some sort of intoxicant. People even smelled the steaming beans, as if they'd ever have the opportunity to whiff massive mounds of coffee beans. Back in my youth, there was a fad of eating the roasted beans (and you can still get them, chocolate-covered for sissies). Though you'd think they would send you into orbit, it seems to me that the brewing process was what brought out the caffeine. But it was a quick pick-me-up if you didn't have time to brew it.

I have no idea of the provenance of this eagle emblem. At first I had an awful feeling it might be Nazi, but I don't think so. Are those stars and stripes on the emblem? It looks a bit like a cheese grater, or one of those old Afro combs. Are those arrows in its talons? Who knows. Handsome cup, but I am not sure what it means.

Special Bonus Gif! Looking at this old ad again, I'm impressed by how good it looks. Apparently they  reversed a shot of the couple being pulled out of the car - but how exactly did they do that? How to attain the precise angle needed, how to keep the background steady while the car moved? There's a magic here, magic that has been lost in this era of CGI and computerized, photoshopped trickery. 

Proudly Canadian! Gold Seal Salmon commercial

A typical cartoon ad from the 1950s, with primitive, highly stylized animation. There's no doubt what the product was, which I believe was Proudly Canadian. My Mum made salmon loaf, creamed salmon on toast, and salmon sandwiches for our school lunch boxes out of Gold Seal. I loved the bones, which looked like vertebrae and were tender and salmon-y. I could never figure out why the company left the vertebrae in the can, along with that gross, fatty black skin. Couldn't they find a way to remove it? Never mind, those bones were great.

Two charming Louis Wain cats

Wobble Girl Dubstep - Swagga Edition

This woman faked ataxia in order to get insurance payments after getting a flu shot. Inside Edition nearly fell for it, until they followed her around for a bit and noticed her walking normally. In this clip she claims to be able to run and walk backwards. This just makes the dubstep funnier. For some reason I kept watching this and laughing every time. What an idiot!

Scenes of daily life in Paris in the 1890s

Old film is a time machine - I think we're agreed on that - but never more so when someone has so lovingly restored a film from the remote past. Color-tinted (which I usually dislike, but which works here as another level of spell-binding), with speed corrected to the frames-per-second discrepancy of early movies, and with convincing sound effects dubbed in, YOU ARE THERE, you are walking these streets, hearing the cloppa-cloppa-cloppa that must have been ubiquitous in those times, smelling the manure which must have been everywhere, speaking rapidly in a French that might not be recognizable today, wearing a heavy, voluminous skirt with layers and layers of petticoats and a constricting corset. . . body-feeling, mind-feeling those times, those left-behind times that were left behind the way we leave behind all times. 

People malign the internet all the time, of course, but look what it unlocks, and in a fraction of a second, right here at home, RIGHT NOW, not having to join some film society somewhere and listen to pretentious people pontificate just to let us all know they know FAR more than we ever will, or even can. I have come to take for granted the click to instant knowledge, and how it has taken over from those endlessly boring, stale plods through the halls of libraries which were already badly out of date. The only boredom left being the comments section.

Elizabeth Holmes: bobblehead

Elizabeth Holmes pretends to agree while one of her critics rips her to shreds. Note the foreward hunch with ankle resting on her knee, one of her more irritating traits.

"Two girls for every boy" and other surfing lunacy

Click on bottom right corner to go full-screen/hear the waves!

"HEY, KIDS!" Wall of comic book prizes

I know I've posted this before, but I still consider it a work of '60s art, every bit as culturally significant and evocative of its era as the kitschy and wildly desirable artwork of Andy Warhol. It evokes those summers at Bondi, my brother and I continually bantering back and forth, reading the Jimmy Olsen Annual and making fun of it, looking with longing at many of these incredible devices, yet knowing somehow we could never even order them. We'd have to send quarters taped to cardboard, Canadian quarters, and somehow that would never do, as we vaguely knew that their money wasn't the same as our money. Superman appeared in an ad and advertised a contest, for which the prize was two all-day passes to Palisades Park, which we had never heard of. It was all very foreign, yet somehow very familiar. 

This is the first time I have attempted to blow it up for detail, though I had to slice-and-dice it and the text is still a challenge. This is a time machine, or as close as I am ever going to get to one. I wonder where they are, those kids who actually DID order these bizarre items, or if any of them are even alive any more.

Heartbreaking! Story of starving cat

BREAKING MEWS! Local cat has never been fed, EVER! Cruelty charges pending

"A chemistry is performed": the lunatic junk science that brought down Theranos

"A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel." - Elizabeth Holmes explains the science behind the Theranos blood testing miracle.

This is the second-most-famous Holmes quote, right next to "First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and all of a sudden you change the world."

Spinning troll animations

Yellow Stripey Things

What's beneath the dress

It strikes me that all these portraits of women (well-to-do women, apparently, who could afford sumptuous gowns and having their portraits painted) have something in common. No matter how different the faces, they all seem to have the same body, with the same erect carriage and impossibly tiny waist. Some of the portraits seem purposely exaggerated, the equivalent of airbrushing or photoshop, as if tightlacing were some sort of Edwardian soft-core porn.

It's hard to believe that even wealthy women went about looking like this all day. Didn't they have - day dresses or something? Afternoon dresses? This is evening attire,  the stuff you pose in, sitting endlessly still, your skirts draped over some velvet divan, perhaps with a decorous little dog at your side.

More than most, these paintings have a static quality, almost "statuesque" (a strange term if ever there was one). Later on, portraits of fine women became sportier (one even depicts a smiling woman with a tennis racket). At this point, however, everyone mostly stood still or sat around. One woman (with the tiniest waist I've ever seen) plays a violin, kind of like the "talent" section of the Miss America pageant. I don't know why I say this, but I think in this case the violin was a prop.

And for reasons unknown, I think of this exquisite poem by my favorite poet, W. B. Yeats, only excerpted here because it's very, very long (but likely to be featured in a future post: I haven't done a literary analysis in ages!):

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

Baby Marlboro

Someone, somewhere, some Mad Man of the 1950s, must have thought this would be a good idea for an ad campaign. And there were at least half a dozen of these ads in the series, so it must have been successful. It's just one of those incredibly dated ideas, like people seeing nothing wrong with mocking gay people and stereotyping people of colour. But why is it that things seem to go forwards and backwards at the same time?

Great moments in advertising

That adorable little Mexican girl in the taco commercial!

The STUPIDEST idea in human history!

(Blogger's note. Yargghh! I see this sort of thing all the time, posted over and over and over again, in the comments section of certain Facebook pages, usually the historical ones for some reason. It's strange, because the one time I accidentally posted a link twice, I was dinged by Facebook for "spamming" and my comments were removed. But if it's THESE guys, I guess it's all right. I repost this complete with unusual grammar and spelling. P. S. I have shortened the name of this outfit wherever possible and disguised a few details to avoid the avalanche of spam I've been getting!)

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