PANDEMIC HAIR UPDATE: two years and counting!

I cannot believe that it has been nearly TWO YEARS since I had a professional hair cut. I was cutting it myself for a while, with a razor comb, and for a WHILE it looked OK. . .then when it stopped looking OK, I was surprised to find there were things I liked about it (along with things I DIDN'T like about it). This is as close to blonde as I've ever been since early childhood. I have more than two months to wait to get it cut, and by then I should be wearing it in braids.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE! YEAH! I got it cut! NOT radically, as I went to a brand-new stylist, which I haven't done in 20+ years. But I figured I must have been a very low priority to my former stylist to put me off for ten weeks or so. You'd think there would be a tad more loyalty displayed to a 20-year customer. I told the lady who books appointments for her, "I only need a cut", thinking that would get me in sooner - but it was the opposite. She has filled up her schedule with ornate "dos", perhaps in anticipation of Christmas, and a mere cut doesn't bring in much revenue. So it seems I went to the bottom of the heap.

Meantime - I walked into Superstore, no appointment, went to the salon which is part of the store, and ten minutes later was having an expert cut and hearing about how GORGEOUS my hair is (I'm only quoting!), and how I shouldn't get it coloured or cut too short (which I didn't!). "You have grey hair with highlights? Is this natural? I've never seen that before. No, I mean it. It doesn't even look grey, it looks blonde, with lighter-blonde streaks." She did say it, readers, that's verbatim. 

I haven't felt this good about my hair in - ever, I guess. THEN came the ultimate compliment: we went over to my son's house for dinner, and my VERY style-conscious 16-year-old (blonde) granddaughter Erica looked closely at me and said, "I like your hair." She has never said anything like that before! Though the stylist took maybe 1/2" to 1" off, it now has some shape to it, and some of the heavy, dense "flop" at the back is lighter - meaning the natural curl has sprung back to life. And yeah, I DO have natural curl - but who knew?

Sorry if this sounds narcissistic, but wow! This is just a parable of how the worst thing ("oh my God, I haven't had a haircut in a year and a half and it looks DREADFUL") can come out better than you hoped. And this is as blonde as I've ever been in my life. For 30+ years, I covered it up because stylists INSISTED that grey was the enemy, grey was ugly, grey made you look "older" (the WORST thing that can happen to a woman!), and I had to pony up and have them cut it and colour the daylights out of it. Now I see how much of this was and is economically-driven. 

Dye jobs cost. Perms cost, Straightening costs. So does curling. Taking the curl OUT, putting the curl IN. This lady said, "Oh, you have such nice hair!", then neatened up the back and tapered the ends and made it into a hair style. It cost me $30.00, including a 20% tip. Lesson learned? 

This whole thing reminds me of renovating an old house that has had nothing done to it for decades, then ripping up the rotten old "wall-to-wall" carpet that used to cover up the "ugly"  flooring - and discovering gorgeous, glossy, nearly-new-looking hardwood underneath. But in my day, a million years ago, hardwood meant you were "poor" and couldn't afford to look luxurious. It was as if hardwood was just compacted dirt. Now we see things kind of differently.

🌺The Troll Doll Channel: THE CAROUSEL WALTZ!🌷

Some of my more gorgeous trolls go for a spin. 

Stereoscopic images shimmer into life. . .

 

 

I have had these on file for YEARS and have just made them into a YouTube video, but I kind of like them the way they are. Call them the VERY FIRST motion pictures (consisting of two frames!

Oh God, this is the BEST video ever.

No, I mean it. On a relatively crappy day, this was just what I needed.

😲DAISY: "ONE MORE TIME!"😲

Oh God. This "Daisy" thing - it started out with another video, a creepy thing featuring the FIRST EVER computer to be programmed to "sing" (IBM something-or-other - I don't retain numbers very well). This was in 1961, so ANYTHING a computer"sang" sounded miraculous. The weird, robotic recording reminded me of Stephen Hawking, and I just had to use it for something - so I put it together with a visual from another bizarre talking-robot video, completely unrelated. They just looked cool together, though they were never meant to be synchronized.

Though I did not realize it at the time, the 1961 audio of "Daisy" had blown up on TikTok. I was/am barely aware of TikTok except as a rude presence on YouTube, or something my grandgirls giggle over. At this point, apparently due to the TikTok phenomenon, my own video has had well over 3,500,000 views - yes, I mean THREE AND A HALF MILLION, and my subscriber count has jumped from about 300 to well over 8,000. All because of "Daisy", and a TikTok video I knew nothing about.

BUT, then I started thinking about another version of "Daisy" - the one many of us recognize from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (and I have to spell the title out so people won't think I'm referring to 9-11). In the most memorable scene in the whole movie, Dave is shutting down the evil computer HAL, and as his mind becomes increasingly childish, he begins to sing. . . "Daisy", getting slower and slower as he runs out of juice, or whatever it is that makes computers "go". 

A LOT of people became confused because my first video talked about the "2001" version. So I found it and glommed it on to Motormouth again, this time in slow motion. Which version is creepier? I think the HAL one, because as he slowly loses all his intellectual powers, it creates the macabre impression that a computer is "dying". 

It's obvious to me now that HAL's song was a sly reference to the 1961 IBM version, but only hard-core techno-geeks would have gotten the joke. And think about it: the movie came out in 1968, only seven years later. 

😳ROBORAMA! Robot imitates human speech: AGAIN!😳

I Contain Multitudes: the songs seem to know themselves

 

Bob Dylan   

On writing "I Contain Multitudes"

I didn’t really have to grapple much. It’s the kind of thing where you pile up stream-of-consciousness verses and then leave it alone and come pull things out. In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line. It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state. Most of my recent songs are like that. The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors. The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.

Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells

The Bells  

Edgar Allan Poe

 I.

        Hear the sledges with the bells—
                 Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
        How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
           In the icy air of night!
        While the stars that oversprinkle
        All the heavens, seem to twinkle
           With a crystalline delight;
         Keeping time, time, time,
         In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
       From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II.

        Hear the mellow wedding bells,
                 Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
        Through the balmy air of night
        How they ring out their delight!
           From the molten-golden notes,
               And all in tune,
           What a liquid ditty floats
    To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
               On the moon!
         Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
               How it swells!
               How it dwells
           On the Future! how it tells
           Of the rapture that impels
         To the swinging and the ringing
           Of the bells, bells, bells,
         Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells—
  To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III.

         Hear the loud alarum bells—
                 Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
       In the startled ear of night
       How they scream out their affright!
         Too much horrified to speak,
         They can only shriek, shriek,
                  Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
            Leaping higher, higher, higher,
            With a desperate desire,
         And a resolute endeavor
         Now—now to sit or never,
       By the side of the pale-faced moon.
            Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
            What a tale their terror tells
                  Of Despair!
       How they clang, and clash, and roar!
       What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
       Yet the ear it fully knows,
            By the twanging,
            And the clanging,
         How the danger ebbs and flows;
       Yet the ear distinctly tells,
            In the jangling,
            And the wrangling.
       How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
             Of the bells—
     Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
            Bells, bells, bells—
 In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV.

          Hear the tolling of the bells—
                 Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
        In the silence of the night,
        How we shiver with affright
  At the melancholy menace of their tone!
        For every sound that floats
        From the rust within their throats
                 Is a groan.
        And the people—ah, the people—
       They that dwell up in the steeple,
                 All alone,
        And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
          In that muffled monotone,
         Feel a glory in so rolling
          On the human heart a stone—
     They are neither man nor woman—
     They are neither brute nor human—
              They are Ghouls:
        And their king it is who tolls;
        And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
                    Rolls
             A pæan from the bells!
          And his merry bosom swells
             With the pæan of the bells!
          And he dances, and he yells;
          Keeping time, time, time,
          In a sort of Runic rhyme,
             To the pæan of the bells—
               Of the bells:
          Keeping time, time, time,
          In a sort of Runic rhyme,
            To the throbbing of the bells—
          Of the bells, bells, bells—
            To the sobbing of the bells;
          Keeping time, time, time,
            As he knells, knells, knells,
          In a happy Runic rhyme,
            To the rolling of the bells—
          Of the bells, bells, bells—
            To the tolling of the bells,
      Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—
              Bells, bells, bells—
  To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. 

The Gorgon in her Lair

I do not soon forget. In fact - never.

 

🤡PRINCE HARRY JUGGLES HIS BALLS!🤡

Ghost Elephants

Elephant Eternity

Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees
Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees
Elephants elephants walking like time

Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river
Fountaining their children in the mothery river
Elephants elephants bathing like happiness

Strong and gentle elephants
Standing on the earth
Strong and gentle elephants
Like peace

Time is walking under elephant trees
Happiness is bathing in the elephant river
Strong gentle peace is shining
All over the elephant earth

Adrian Mitchell

Ghost Elephants

In the elephant field tall green ghost elephants with your cargo of summer leaves at night I heard you breathing at the window Don't you ever think I'm not crying since you're away from me Don't ever think I went free At first the goodbye had a lilt to it— maybe just a couple of months— but it was a beheading. Ghost elephant, reach down, cross me over Jean Valentine    The Elephant is slow to mate The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate; he finds a female, they show no haste they wait for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd, and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word. So slowly the great hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast. They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood. D. H. Lawrence

Lost, found. . . and found again: The Elephant Song

THE ELEPHANT SONG

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong, a-tong!
That is thc rhythm of the elephant song,
As the big grey elephants shuffle along.
To the sing, song, singing of tho old brass bell,
To the shrill, harsh stridence of the mahoot's yell,
To the shuff-shuff-shuffle of the great round feet,
The elephants are swinging down the village street.

A priest peers out from his while-washed cell,
As he hears the ringing of the elephant bell.
A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse,
A baby peers from the arms of its nurse,
A cobra dances to a charmer's tune,
The incense wavers in the shrine of the moon,
The street dogs scamper, the children scurry,
A woman hum-hums as she fixes curry,
While the bells keep ringing, like a. distant gong,
Tong, tong, tong-a-tong. a-tong,
The swing-along rhythm of the elephant song.



This is one of those things with a long story attached to it. I remember this poem from about Grade 3/4 (which I took in one year, with Miss Wray, one of those spinster teachers that used to be so common back then). I remember her reading this out loud, and loving it: the swinging rhythm of it, the vivid imagery.

A couple of lines stayed with me: "The elephants are swinging down the village street," and "A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse". Typical of the times, nothing was explained to us, so we had no idea what a "fakir" was (our teacher pronounced it "faker"), and none of us asked.

Then the poem simply disappeared.



Over the years, I've done searches, tried to scare it up. A few years would pass, and I would try again. I was beating the bushes and not finding it. I googled the lines I could remember. (For some reason, in my head I heard the poem rhythmically chanted by a choir of people: perhaps a reflection of a 78 rpm Babar recording in which there was a Greek chorus in the background).

I decided it was dead and unreachable, somehow deemed no longer important. I didn't wonder if I had imagined it, because I remembered more than one line. I knew it was real. But I had no idea of the author's name.



I still don't. I finally found it, incredibly, in a newspaper archive from 1946. It had won the Weekly Poetry Prize in The Advocate, a newspaper that appeared to be Australian (I couldn't read the original at all: it was just a distorted jumble of flyspeck type that made no sense no matter how much it was blown up). The headlines mentioned sheepdog contests called "cooees". Strange.

But beside the yellowed archive was a transcript of the poem - or at least I thought it was the poem - though every line had 5 or 6 errors in it, in syntax, spelling. . . so I had to piece it together from the faulty fragments, using my memory and imagination.

I think this is the poem. There are two names after it, all garbled up: Dan Mantlin and Audrey Cullen, but it's not clear if either of them wrote it.

Is it the stereotypical portrayal of India (where I assume it is set)? Surely there are far more racist poems out there that haven't dropped so far out of sight. Personally, I love the imagery, the rhythm, the pounding of the great round feet and the hypnotic tinkling of those bells. It would never be taught to children now, and it's a little too childish for adults to be exposed to. It belongs to another time, which is maybe what I love about it the most.

💥💎Diamonds on the Water💎💥

A dazzling moment on Como Lake.

💐🌹🌼ADORABLE! Victorian Ballerina Cats🌼🌹💐 (animation)

Hey, it looks like I'm "back" (not that I was ever away). After a brief moment of panic, YouTube is once again allowing me to post videos without going in circular gyrations that take forever and may not even yield results. This is one of my earliest animations, likely made for Facebook or perhaps for this blog, which I have transformed into YouTube videos. I came to rhe realization that I had THOUSANDS of gifs - I can't even count how many - that I spent a tremendous amount of time on, posed once, then filed away. Some of them are good enough to work on some more, adding sound/music and being given a second life. Sounds like a theme!

It's the end of an era

 

We-e-e-e-ellll, it's the end of an era for me. YouTube is no longer posting videos directly from the site, and since THAT is where I got them, I'm having to take the long way around. A pain, but that's "progress". Blogger is now a very old and kind of outdated app, and even though I DID update the look of it fairly recently - I don't even know if the saved ones will work now. This is a pain mainly because long entries are kind of sparse now - pandemic has changed everything, including how much time I have to actually write something coherent. The thumbnail at least SEEMS to be correct here - YT has been casually taking them off and putting up random screen-grabs, when I generally put more into my thumbnails than into the videos. So I don't even know if THIS will work any more, and if it doesn't, this blog will have to revert back to still photos and text (as it began!). I guess Blogger is no longer considered "hip" enough, and I am DONE with Facebook, and this time I reeeeally mean it! I am surprised to see at least a fragment of the custom thumbnail here, when it's not showing up anywhere else. YT is "adding" features, meaning it is subtracting others. And all on a November Monday. 

UPDATE. As I look at this, it really looks OK - I just have to take the extra step of copying and pasting the address up top. Actually, it looks a hell of a lot better so far, and I can make it any size, and you can also watch it on YouTube easily. But how I wish they'd warn us about changes, rather than just pulling the rug out from under. They "roll out" changes as if it's some kind of bloody red carpet. Anyway, I seem to be able to watch this, so hope you can too.

Massive alligator takes casual stroll through South Carolina golf course

Something for a Monday.

Stayin' alive. . . stayin' alive. . .

Here's what you have to do to "stay alive" in North Korea.

🎃MANGA-BANGA POP-EYED PUMPKIN!🎃

It's Halloween. The lamp is lit.

Around the fire we children sit

And telling ghost-tales bit by bit,

'Til sister Jane says "HUSH!"

Who's that creeping on the kitchen floor?

Who's that sneaking round the bedroom door?

Who's that squeaking like his throat is sore?

IT'S A GOBLIN!!

Why I remember this tattered bit of song from my school days - maybe grade 3 or 4 (and I took 3 and 4 in one year, which was then called "skipping" but which meant the curriculum was combined so that I could go into a "special" Grade 5) is a mystery to me, but it's one of those things that flies out of the junkyard of all my past lives and hits me on the head like flying shrapnel.

I say grade 3 or 4, rather than 5 or 6, because I seem to remember, vaguely, the music teacher from McKeough School in Chatham vigorously leading the choir, which was made up of "canaries" and "bluebirds", or something like that (i. e, the kids who couldn't sing were literally in their own little stigmatized group, not allowed to mix with the better singers). McKeough School was an old horror of a building which was turned into a heritage site in the '80s, but which may well have been converted into retail space by now - like that OTHER horror, Park Street Untied Church (about which I still get an inquiry once in a while when somebody takes a bit of interest in Rev. Russell Horsburgh, whom I have written about in several posts, years and years ago. I don't recommend you read them.)

I can't and won't go into other Hallowe'en memories (and we DID spell it with the apostrophe, a contraction of "evening" - I guess - and when I saw it spelled in that archaic way recently, I was puzzled. Do they still do that in Britain? Do they even HAVE Hallowe'en in the UK?), because I don't have too many. One time, though - my mother actually sewed my outfit, a black velvet cat costume which caused one guy in a car to yell out, "What's new, pussycat?" to a startled eight-year-old, trick-or-treating me.

I have to get on with my day now. I made this goofy little video out of PicMix gifs, and post it here cuz I want my videos to have a second life somewhere. It surprises me how many views I get on YouTube for these little things, primitive as they are. But there is pushback now because, among other things, YT has become (as they used to say in the '60s) "plastic" - too slick, too manufactured, too uniform, too DULL like a loud TV commercial, all monetized and out to grab your cash. And why is it that so many YTers KEEP ON SAYING, "Like, subscribe, hit the notification bell. . ." at the end of every single video, when everyone who has ever watched even ONE YT video knows all about that stuff? Just as actors shouldn't insult their audience and authors should not insult their readers, YT should not be insulting people who have actually SEEN the little symbols for like, subscribe, and notification at the bottom of EACH AND EVERY video.

But I digress.

💥"Guten tag, Pokey!" GUMBY SPEAKS GERMAN!💥

This is just so weird that I HAD to post it. Yes, there really was a German dub of the Gumby Movie (which I THINK was called The Gumby Movie) that flopped so badly in the '90s that it went direct to video. If you look closely at this, the animation is pretty terrible, nothing like the bizarre but somehow believable work of Gumby creator Art Clokey. There are continuity problems, problems with synchronizing sound and dialog, and even remnants of props showing which are used to keep the clay figure in place while each frame is photographed individually ("claymation", which is also known as stop motion animation). The thing I notice the most is that the characters' HAIR moves all over the place, a weird side effect of bad animation which makes the whole thing look amateurish. As for the plot of this thing. . . never mind, but hearing Gumby and his pals speak German makes this excerpt worth watching for its sheer bizarre-itude.

😾😲KITTEN WITH SUPERPOWERS: Don't Mess With PUFF!😲😾

One of my more primitive, but still favorite, animations, originally made for this blog - I think?? Or maybe Facebook. But here it is in a more fully-realized form. It amazes me that I get views for these, but people seem to like the fact it's handmade, deliberately primitive, and the farthest thing from CGI possible.

BLANK SCREEN: a beautiful sight!

💗Whatever this is, I love it!💗

I have no idea what this is or where it came from. Must be YouTube.

😳JENNIFER GREY in EMBARRASSING '80s Computer Dating Video!😳

I will admit to stealing this video from a magnificent YouTube channel called Pics and Portraits. Why it's called that, I do not know, because a soporific-sounding announcer keeps coming on and saying things like, "You're watching Sleepcore. Pleasant dreams."  So was the channel originally called Sleepcore? Did someone else steal the name, or - . Or did it get shut down, the way I have also been nearly shut down for no particular reason except benevolent plagiarism? 

But the art of stealing reached the level of the sublime when I saw a comment under one of the Sleepcore videos. A guy was complaining about some aspect of the content, I think the format of it, because it made it harder for HIM to upload everything onto HIS channel. In other words, he was openly admitting to stealing ALL of this guy's content, whole and unedited. The Sleepcore guy just told him he had nothing to complain about, which was true.

As if that were not weird enough. . . the YouTuber behind Pics and Portraits admits to using "repurposed" material. A nice way of saying "stolen". Which means I am either not really stealing it,  or stealing pre-stolen material. Kind of like "distressed" jeans, which I would never want to wear because, let's face it, most days, I am distressed enough already.

This little gem is just one of a genre called "retrofuturistic computer horror stories", in which we're all told we will soon be swamped in a sea of ignorance about computers unless we scramble to find out EVERYTHING about them. Long strings of incomprehensible techno-babble soon follow, just to make sure we feel properly terrified and thrown off-balance. This stuff must have been produced by sadists. Suffice it to say that none of it ever came true.

I know nothing about computers after all these years, and still use them fairly competently, at least to the point of maintaining a blog and a YouTube channel. So that was a bunch of bunk. Some of these retro-mini-dramas tried to put a more positive spin on the oncoming horror. Jennifer Grey is excruciatingly cute in this little snippet, which extols the virtue of a magical system which allows a teenaged couple to draw pictures together without actually being in the same room. Both are supposed to be nerdy, unpopular kids who can't meet anyone in the usual way (whatever THAT is), but the whole thing just fizzles because Jennifer Grey is charismatic and sweet, and the guy is - well, he's  a doll, and I wouldn't have minded at all having him for a boy friend in 1972. But this was long before the prototype of the nerd as pop culture hero. 

I think the real truth of all this, besides the fact that both of them are well into their 20s, is that Jennifer Grey needed the work (this was a couple of years before Dirty Dancing), and the really cute guy was the only one who auditioned. 

😳WHAT DOES IT MEAN??😲

This is a really, truly, scary thing that happened to me a couple of years ago when I was on a Facebook page. I don't even know how or why it popped up. So what do they mean by "kill" the page? How do you do that, and why would anyone want to? I thought the term was "delete". I still haven't figured it out, but it made a cool animation which started life as a gif, but is now posted on YouTube.

💔OFFICE ROMANCE: when it all goes wrong (animation)💔

"When you just give love

And never get love,

You'd better let love 

Depaaaaaart. . . "

HIERONYMUS BOB (Bob Dylan animation)!

Time for yet another Bob Dylan animation! Made by me. Cuz I loves that Bob.

Capybaras Romeo and Tuff'n Go Shopping

Some days, we really need to see some cute capybara videos.

I love you, Piers Morgan!

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I know damn well I am not supposed to be doing this. I have no permission from anyone to copy and paste an article from the Daily Mail. But posting a link is useless, no one will click on it anyway, and anyone remotely interested in "these two" HAS to read this! It's the most scathingly brilliant summation of this infuriatingly self-important, pompously narcissistic duo I've ever seen (with the possible exception of his LAST scathingly brilliant diatribe in the Daily Mail). Piers Morgan resigned from his job on morning TV when his views on Meghan Markle and her histrionics were censored, then was vindicated when the bigwigs decided he had every right to practice freedom of speech and say that he wouldn't believe a weather report from that empty-headed, self-absorbed, pretentious faux-royal piece of baggage. 

PIERS MORGAN: We need an urgent vaccine to save us from the Duke and Duchess of Polluting Hypocrisy and their cynical campaign to set up a rival money-grabbing renegade Royal Family

By Piers Morgan for MailOnline

There’s a new advisory on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s website Archewell, the one named after the son they were determined to keep private so he wouldn’t be used as a media tool.

‘We love having you here,’ the message reads, ‘but we’re mindful of screen time. Why not take a break? We’ll still be here.’

This disingenuous virtue-signaling guff was presumably crafted by one of the couple’s partners, the Centre for Humane Technology, which counsels how to remove toxicity from one’s life.

I’d certainly welcome a break from the world’s most toxic royals whose laughable mission statement is to put ‘compassion into action’ but who never miss a chance to spew unsubstantiated abuse about their own families that they persistently trash and disown.

As with everything in Meghan and Harry’s ludicrous world, they love to preach one thing and do the exact opposite.

They’ve just finished a four-day trip to New York which even by their two-faced standards set a new low bar for hypocrisy.

Ostensibly designed for them to lecture the world’s ‘ultra-rich’ pharmaceutical firms on ‘equality’, something the privileged, pampered prima donnas know all about from the palatial comfort of their Californian mansion, the trip was in fact a ruthlessly cynical attempt to establish their new alternative Royal Family.

And it made me puke.

Let’s remind ourselves that the Sussexes quit Britain and royal duty because they supposedly wanted privacy.

Yet ever since they landed in the United States, they’ve been engaged in a shameless, relentless orgy of self-publicizing, money-grabbing duplicity.

The duplicity comes from their pretense to loathe everything the Royal Family and Monarchy stands for, but at the same time gleefully milking their royal titles with the obscene greed of a sounder of swine, the term for a group of feral hogs that destroys everything in its path.

Meghan and Harry have their noses permanently rammed in the regal trough, and it’s obvious that they now intend to keep them there until they’ve made themselves repulsively rich and famous.

In this regard, they’re the royal version of the Kardashians – people with no discernible talent other than for pimping themselves out to the highest bidders and a craven desire to air their dirty family linen in public for financial gain.

But at least the Kardashians’ mission to be billionaire TMI merchants is founded on a basic honesty: they don’t pretend to be talented or saving the planet.

By contrast, at the heart of the Sussexes’ stated campaign to ‘uplift and unite’ us all with their searing compassion – unless you’re related to them, then you can go **** yourself - lies outrageous two-faced deceit.

For a prime example, the self-styled eco-warriors never stop lecturing the world about the environment.

Only last month, Harry warned us that climate change is one of the ‘most pressing issues we are facing.’

And one of the purposes of the Global Citizen Live concert they attended on Saturday night was to demand tough new eco laws halving US emissions by 2030.

So, you might assume they lead by example in deliberately reducing their own carbon footprint?

Don’t be silly!

In fact, they deliberately do the complete opposite.

On Saturday, the Sussexes flew back into Santa Barbara from New York in a private plane, a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet. It will have produced around 17 tons of carbon emissions for the flight.

It’s the same mode of transport they have repeatedly used – often as guests of celebrity pals like Elton John and George Clooney - despite being criticized for obvious double standards.

Now, I’ve nothing against private jets, and have used them myself, but I’m not constantly lecturing the world on the urgent need to reduce its carbon footprint.

The hypocrisy is breath-taking.

Their mode of road travel follows a similar theme.

Waiting for them on the tarmac in Santa Barbara was a large gas-guzzling 4x4.

In New York, the Prince and Princess of Pollution sped around Manhattan in a luxury convoy of at least three Range Rovers and SUVs.

To quote from their own speech on Saturday, this willful disregard for their own eco-hectoring is ‘like throwing away life vests, when those around you are drowning.’

And what were they doing there anyway?

Ostensibly, the Sussexes were in the Big Apple to harangue pharmaceutical firms for not doing enough for ‘equality’ when it comes to dispensing vaccines to poorer countries.

As with everything else these two harp on about, the real issues surrounding vaccines and patents are far more complicated than they suggest, and the companies they’re attacking have already saved tens of millions of lives with their brilliant work in this pandemic.

But one of Global Citizen’s main objectives is also to ‘defeat poverty.’

Well, I’m sure we can all agree that nothing screams defeating poverty more than Meghan Markle sporting $100,000 worth of designer clothes – though whoever paid her to wear that unflattering bulky winter wardrobe on warm sunny days probably deserves a refund - and lavishly expensive jewelry as she trotted around impoverished parts of Harlem where she read schoolkids extracts from her own book, The Bench.

We were told this cringe-making display of self-aggrandizement was to ‘promote early literacy’ but as reviewers of this god-awful pile of bilge have attested, The Bench is to literacy what Madonna is to growing old gracefully.

It takes a special kind of brazen shamelessness to use children who can barely read to fire up your book’s flagging sales.

Just as it does to film yourself doing so, as Meghan and Harry reportedly did throughout their trip, to fulfil your massive multi-million-dollar contracts with paymasters like Netflix.

It also takes a special kind of brazen shamelessness to attack big pharma for being ‘ultra-rich’ and not doing enough to promote equality, when you are making yourselves ultra-rich by preaching about equality from your private jets and nine-bedroom, 16-bathroom mansion.

But my biggest concern about this New York trip though is not about the Sussexes’ shocking hypocrisy which happens with such regularity now that it’s lost all ability to surprise.

No, what worries me far more is the ongoing damage they are doing to the Royal Family and Monarchy with their very transparent attempt to establish an American-based renegade royal entity.

One that’s not based on the kind of quiet, admirable, stoic, modest, duty-led majesty of the Queen, but on a cheap, tacky, noisy, toxic, Kardashian-style 24/7 invasion of our senses that’s specifically intended to fleece royal status for maximum personal commercial benefit.

Meghan Markle’s incendiary but still-unproven claims of racism and callousness against the royals during her Oprah whineathon back in March have already caused very real harm to the Monarchy, especially in parts of the Commonwealth.

Now she and her hostage victim husband are striving to be a rival Royal Family that bestrides the globe like a woke colossus, and they’re being enabled in this delusion by the likes of New York mayor Bill de Blasio and the United Nations who treated them like world leaders in the past week.

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio hasn’t found time to pay an important long overdue trip to Rikers prison but did find time to suck up to the Sussexes.

Governor Kathy Hochul took time out from her presumably busy schedule to join de Blasio for a photo PR op with the Sussexes at One World where they also met the UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed.

And the US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield was so thrilled by rubbing shoulders with the royal couple that she excitedly posted pictures of them all on social media.

All of them were treating Meghan and Harry like world leaders.

But they’re not.

They’re a retired actress and a retired Prince pretending to be world leaders so they can fill their royal boots with as much filthy lucre as possible before the penny finally drops to their gullible acolytes about what their real game is.

I see right through these ridiculous little chancers.

We need an urgent vaccine to protect us from these right royal hypocrites.