Three Men in a Boat (and a tin of Pine-apple)

 For some reason, this very silly story popped into my head today. It's a small excerpt from a wacky, daffy book called Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I remember "taking" this story in school, maybe in Grade 5, and thinking it was ridiculous and wonderful. I also remember listening to a CBC Radio series based on Three Men, with the theme song being a very lame polka (which I can't find, though Lord knows I've tried). The  things you remember!

To return to our present trip: nothing exciting happened, and we tugged steadily on to a little below Monkey Island, where we drew up and lunched.  We tackled the cold beef for lunch, and then we found that we had forgotten to bring any mustard.  I don’t think I ever in my life, before or since, felt I wanted mustard as badly as I felt I wanted it then.  I don’t care for mustard as a rule, and it is very seldom that I take it at all, but I would have given worlds for it then.

I don’t know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who had brought me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have had them all.  I grow reckless like that when I want a thing and can’t get it.

Harris said he would have given worlds for mustard too.  It would have been a good thing for anybody who had come up to that spot with a can of mustard, then: he would have been set up in worlds for the rest of his life.

But there!  I daresay both Harris and I would have tried to back out of the bargain after we had got the mustard.  One makes these extravagant offers in moments of excitement, but, of course, when one comes to think of it, one sees how absurdly out of proportion they are with the value of the required article.  I heard a man, going up a mountain in Switzerland, once say he would give worlds for a glass of beer, and, when he came to a little shanty where they kept it, he kicked up a most fearful row because they charged him five francs for a bottle of Bass.  He said it was a scandalous imposition, and he wrote to the Times about it.

It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard.  We ate our beef in silence.  Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting.  We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed.  We brightened up a bit, however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine-apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us.  We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice.  We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with.  We turned out everything in the hamper.  We turned out the bags.  We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat.  We took everything out on to the bank and shook it.  There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out.  While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day.  He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry—but we could not make a hole in it.  Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast.  Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.

 

Trump School Bus ad: the Stable Genius goes off-road (and how!)

This is the best thing I've ever seen. And it isn't even exaggerated! They could quote him verbatim to the same effect. I've been watching the meltdown, but I do not trust that he will NOT get in. I think he may well be President again. 

The Little Ash Girl: Cinderella Undressed

 

I remember this recorded version of Cinderella much more vividly than the Disney movie. For one thing, it's strung together by the music from Prokofiev's ballet, one of my favorite orchestral pieces. It's weird, because the music must have made an impression on me in my childhood - as much as the story, at least - but it sort of faded out of my mind until a couple of decades ago, when I stumbled on the ballet music again and felt my scalp prickle from the stirring of memory.

This record, or records (two 78 rpms) gracefully incorporated the quirkily gorgeous Prokofiev ballet score. The narrator might as well have shut up and let the music tell the story. Listening to it as an adult, there is a certain edge, a pleasing tartness in the music that cuts the sweetness, and a real sense of irony, of tongue-in-cheek. Cinderella is almost - not quite, but almost - a madcap figure, a sort of puppet acting out her fate because "that's how the story goes". Then there are those stepsisters, nasty spinsters spinning their nasty webs. In a TV version of the ballet, one of the stepsisters was around 180 pounds, twice the size of the standard ballerina, and took her pratfalls with good humor (though it was obvious she was a very good dancer). In contrast, the other stepsister was a menacing rack of bones.

Once you start digging into the deeper layers of fairy tales, you find yourself gasping and floundering. There is just too damn much "meaning", too many layers, and some versions are wildly conflicting. The earliest Cinderella story was some Sumerian thing from the Fourth Dynasty (or whatever), and the story involved fish. It took place on boats and in tombs. How could the two be linked? I was also surprised to find that the Grimm brothers, known for telling stories too gory and disturbing for children, were known to sanitize these primal folk tales to make them more palatable (and sell more books). But even their cleaned-up versions are so shocking they are almost in poor taste, at least for children.

With Cinderella, the Grimms were somehow connecting us to a stranger, older and darker story (and much longer - each of these fairy tales would fill a  book) than the stereotypical and sugary version we have today. A fairy godmother? Not a chance. That would make it too easy. Here is how Aschenputtel (Cinderella in German, which literally translates as the nasty nickname The Ash Fool) gets her gold-and-silver ball gown:

As no one was now at home, Cinderella went to her mother's grave beneath the hazel-tree, and cried,

"Shiver and quiver, little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me."

Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She put on the dress with all speed, and went to the wedding. Her step-sisters and the step-mother however did not know her, and thought she must be a foreign princess, for she looked so beautiful in the golden dress. They never once thought of Cinderella, and believed that she was sitting at home in the dirt, picking lentils out of the ashes. The prince approached her, took her by the hand and danced with her. He would dance with no other maiden, and never let loose of her hand, and if any one else came to invite her, he said, "This is my partner."

Right away, I think of My Fair Lady, and how no one recognized the "draggletailed guttersnipe" Eliza Doolittle because Henry Higgins passed her off as a Hungarian princess. It's such a direct hit that it makes me shiver. G. B. Shaw was no fool, knew his fairy tales, and knew how to hit a nerve.

So is the Ash Girl's ball gown a disguise, or something else? Perhaps her grimy sackcloth was some kind of veil, and the shimmering gown she took from her mother's grave a reflection of her deeper self. It literally turns her into someone else, or back into the person she was meant to be - someone even her family doesn't recognize. The storyteller plays with identity here in a way which is downright spooky.

There's no stroke-of-midnight in the story, but Aschenputtel must beat a hasty retreat after the ball. She hides in a pigeon-house or something - what an odd place to hide! In this strange version there is more than one ball - one version claims, "the Prince had three balls", which I thought was pretty funny. So she must return to the graveyard for a new dress each night.

Cinderella's dead mother figures large in this story, as do those enigmatic white birds. Where Disney got all those mice is anyone's guess. I could find no pumpkins here either. There is a controversy around the slippers, whether they were made of glass or not (the Grimms seemed to think not), and some versions even suggest they were made from fur. It's hard for us to picture our heroine clomping around in comfy bedroom slippers at the ball. But let's press on.

Next morning, he went with it to the father, and said to him, no one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits. Then were the two sisters glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut the toe off, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. Then he took her on his his horse as his bride and rode away with her. They were obliged, however, to pass the grave, and there, on the hazel-tree, sat the two pigeons and cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."

Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut a bit off your heel, when you are queen you will have no more need to go on foot." The maiden cut a bit off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the king's son. He took her on his horse as his bride, and rode away with her, but when they passed by the hazel-tree, the two pigeons sat on it and cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
there's blood within the shoe,
the shoe it is too small for her,
the true bride waits for you."

The repetition of rhymes, incantations and spells is an indispensible part of this kind of storytelling, usually in threes (the "turn and peep" shows up three times). Characters come and go as if through a revolving door, in and out of reality. The mystical significance of birds can't be overemphasized in this version, particularly the two white pigeons, who play a more active role than many of the humans. 

All sorts of analysts have tried to figure out the slippers. Some say they are representative of female genitalia, which I don't really get (though they do get bloody in a way which suggests the female fertility cycle). Shoes allow one to walk in public, be mobile, go forth. Dance. In contrast to the slippers (whatever they're made of), there are also big heavy wooden clogs, low-status peasant shoes,  made for those who toil in the dirt.

Walk a mile in my shoes. The old woman who lived in a shoe. If the shoe fits. . .

He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. "This also is not the right one," said he, "have you no other daughter." "No," said the man, "there is still a little stunted kitchen-wench which my late wife left behind her, but she cannot possibly be the bride." The king's son said he was to send her up to him, but the mother answered, oh, no, she is much too dirty, she cannot show herself. But he absolutely insisted on it, and Cinderella had to be called.

I can't help but feel this is a reference to virginity, an absolute must for marriage, particularly to nobility. To marry, and particularly to "marry up", one absolutely had to be pure. The mother seems to be saying in so many words that her daughter is too "dirty" to be considered. And her own father is calling her a "little stunted kitchen-wench", a mere leftover from his first marriage - "wench" being a term for a "loose woman". Is this why white doves swirl and flutter around the story as proof of Aschenputtel's unassailable virginity?

She first washed her hands and face clean, and then went and bowed down before the king's son, who gave her the golden shoe. Then she seated herself on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe, and put it into the slipper, which fitted like a glove. And when she rose up and the king's son looked at her face he recognized the beautiful maiden who had danced with him and cried, "That is the true bride." The step-mother and the two sisters were horrified and became pale with rage, he, however, took Cinderella on his horse and rode away with her. As they passed by the hazel-tree, the two white doves cried,

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
no blood is in the shoe,
the shoe is not too small for her,
the true bride rides with you."

There's so much here that I can't begin to get into it!  Bloody shoes, false brides, hazel trees and white pigeons which have somehow, mysteriously, become doves. And dead mothers, and a maiden's tears having the magical power of  healing and summoning. Sliding her foot into that slipper does have a sexual feel to it - the perfect fit - casting off virginity and stepping across the threshhold into womanhood. Of course this version is a translation from the more stolid German, so some expressions may have been extensively reworked. The magic incantations were probably quite altered, as they had to rhyme, scan and make sense. But all those bleeding, chopped-up feet - . Isn't this a desperation to escape one's station in life, to move on up or social-climb, even at the cost of being able to walk? Only Aschenputtel has the grace to hold off and allow the Prince to recognize her face. Yes, her face - not her foot.

I skipped the part where the Prince sets a trap for the Little Ash Girl by spreading pitch on the stairs of the ballroom (so at least one of her furry slippers will get stuck). I skipped the nastiness of the stepmother throwing lentils into the ashes on the floor, each grain of which Aschenputtel must pluck out by hand (probably digging into the skin on her knees). And when did ashes become cinders? Cinders are almost like live coals, not quite burned out, and quite dangerous. Don't get a cinder in your eye.

I also stumbled on a version in which the stepsisters were actually beautiful, but deadly. In other words, they were beautiful to look at but had nasty personalities. I've always had a lot of trouble telling little girls that "ugly" characters in fairy tales are "bad", and "beautiful" ones are "good". Just what does that mean? How much effect does it have on the average impressionable girl?

At any rate, my beloved 78 rpm version has no amputated toes, nor does Prokofiev's. But the ending of the Grimm version is a killer. The magical doves have alerted the Prince to Aschenputtel's true identity:

"Turn and peep, turn and peep,
no blood is in the shoe,
the shoe is not too small for her,
the true bride rides with you."

And when they had cried that, the two came flying down and placed themselves on Cinderella's shoulders, one on the right, the other on the left, and remained sitting there. When the wedding with the king's son was to be celebrated, the two false sisters came and wanted to get into favor with Cinderella and share her good fortune. When the betrothed couple went to church, the elder was at the right side and the younger at the left, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards as they came back the elder was at the left, and the younger at the right, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.

Yoicks! Blindness all their days! This isn't very merciful, is it? Very forgiving? But it interests me that the Little Ash Girl doesn't have to do any of the dirtywork - the white doves are her unlikely agents of revenge. Even a symbol of peace is full of hidden menace.

Though we often hear that these stories are too ancient to trace down to their roots, somebody must have thought of them, started them at some point in antiquity. Versions swirled around and were added to and (obviously) sanitized, but then it all sort of hardened, like the glass slipper. So even this relatively-modern Grimm tale of blindness and bleeding feet is about as far away from the Disney version as it gets.

FOOTNOTE! More on the glass/fur controversy:

The illustrated Antique Fairy Tales book sums up the argument in a footnote:

“There is no doubt that in the medieval versions of this ancient tale Cinderella was given pantoufles de vair – i.e. [slippers of] fur … probably [from] a grey squirrel. Long before the seventeenth century, the word vair had passed out of use… Thus the pantoufles de vair of the fairy tale became, in the oral tradition, the homonymous pantoufles de verre, or glass slippers.”

Am I guilty of the worst sin on social media? (Where is free speech in 2024?)

I have run into the most miserable, baffling, unfair problem I have ever had on YouTube, one which could easily cause my channel to be terminated. For the third time in several months, I have had a notice pop up telling me my comments have been taken down due to "hate speech". 

I have no idea what those comments actually SAID, because they weren't there anymore, but I knew damn well I was NOT guilty of any such thing. With the Meghan Markle thing, I happen to know she has minions and a legal team who carefully watch YouTube and other social media, and clamp  down on transgressors whether they've actually done anything or not. I know of several creators who lost their channels that way.

I figured out that the first one I got was likely a Markle thing, but the second one really baffled me. The only thing I could think of was the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case, in which she and her minions also watch comments and videos and bring people down if they don't like what they say. I have to guess because it  disappeared, but my comment may have alluded to the fact that Gypsy Rose's nickname as a child was "Possum". This was actually stated in one of the many dramas, documentaries, reality shows, etc. that have sprung up around her. I believe I called her something like Possum Girl, and  this was deemed hate speech because I cited her childhood name. 

If it wasn't that, it was something equally stupid. But I'm guessing here. In truth, I have no idea why any of this is happening to me. I don't see how I broke the rules, but how do I know that if they don't tell me what the rules are?  I stopped watching or commenting on Gypsy's videos weeks ago, but yet another warning popped up yesterday, this time restricting me from commenting for 24 hours. So the noose is tightening even as we speak. 

It was even more frustrating and painful  to realize I can no  longer reach a human being at YouTube - it's all Google now, so your cry for help is engulfed by a corporate monster. I do remember live-messaging a support person years ago to resolve a problem, but he did not speak English very well and didn't understand what I was saying. I even found an email address and tried that, but nothing happened, there was no answer. 

But now I don't even have that. They have made themselves unreachable, 

I sent the following letter to an obscure snail-mail address I found at the bottom of the Google junk drawer, but I think it's more or less a joke, meant for seniors like me who they assume don't know one end of a computer from another. Will I hear anything back? Will this make it all worse? Will they insist I AM guilty of hate speech and just didn't know it, and take my channel away from me forever? Corporations, like individuals, don't  like to admit they've been wrong. It's a pride thing, and they'll hang on to their delusions to the bitter end.

Google LLC, D/B/A YouTube
901 Cherry Ave.
San Bruno, CA 94066
USA

August 11/2024

Several times in the past six months, I have received a warning from YouTube about comments I made that contained “hate speech”. I was completely shocked at this, as I don’t believe I have ever posted anything that would qualify as hate speech. Nor have I ever been accused of it in the past. I have been threatened with losing my channel if I did not stop.

I am very careful in my comments not to use language that is racist, sexist or homophobic, and not one word of it is threatening or bullying in any way. In fact, I believe my comments are carefully considered and worded respectfully,unlike many other comments I see in the same section. Some are meant to be satiric or ironic, so perhaps the algorithm doesn’t understand humour? Surely we have not lost the right to express criticisms, particularly of public figures, if they are fairly-worded.

I have been a YouTuber since 2013 (channel name/handle ferociousgumby), have 20,600+ subscribers and almost 3,000 videos, and my channel means the world to a chronically-ill, isolated senior who has very few social connections. I post birdwatching and doll-collecting videos, which I cannot see as controversial in any way. Nor can I find anything in my comments to object to. Perhaps it is my collection of troll dolls (this is not a joke!) which the algorithm doesn’t like? In any case, I believe I am being watched, and it makes no sense. My views have also dwindled dramatically for no apparent reason.

I cannot fathom why this keeps on happening to me. My channel’s existence is in danger for no good reason. Something in the system must be doing this, perhaps the algorithm which I know very little about, or else someone is reporting me for a problem which I believe does not exist, or is taking something literally which was meant to be humour.

I did attempt to send feedback through YouTube more than once, and got no reply. I have tried the help forum and got nowhere. I have also sent this letter to snail mail, but I have to assume it’s very unlikely there will be a response. So this is the last thing I can think of doing. If in fact you have determined that I am guilty of “hate speech”, PLEASE give me a list of the offending words so I can stop using them! Nothing would make me happier than to abide by the rules, but first I have to know what they are. I need your help.

😀BUBBLE WRAP FRENZY! (Poppin' Good!)😄

Erica and Lauren find some unique ways to pop bubble wrap. From our double-birthday BBQ dinner.

The Troll Doll Channel: FUN Family Unboxing of TWO exotic trolls!

We did another fun family unboxing of two trolls, including one that turned out to be from ICELAND (though I originally thought Lithuania). So my international collection includes trolls from Ireland, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, West Germany and Iceland. There are very likely a few more, but when you order them you don't see where they're from, and I don't always look closely at the box for the return address. Several more are from that Crystal Creations one which says Ireland, but I though I saw a US address. At any rate, I've just ordered another one, in hopes we'll have them over again for another hilarious time. 

World's creepiest sound recordings: talking dolls, sirens and screams

 

I wasn't going to add any text to these - they're largely self-explanatory, but just looking at them, let alone listening to them, is so distressing that I have to say something, in the nature of whistling in the dark.

This first one is a distillation of sound recordings from a site called, I think, planecrashes.com. These are the best, or should I say, the worst of them. I don't know why my mind is so dark, but I must not be the only one or there wouldn't be so many of these things online. I don't know of a person who hasn't at least thought about what it would be like to be in a crash. But to be responsible for all those people. . . The most disturbing aspect, aside from the screams and that sickening crunching noise, is the "whoop, whoop, PULL UP! Whoop, whoop, PULL UP!" alarm that comes on - too late for most of them, as it turns out.

These are weird things, an experiment that failed. In 1888 Thomas Edison decided to capitolize on the success of his newly-invented phonograph by implanting a tiny little phonograph in the belly of a horrible doll. And it said horrible things in a horrible voice, but only for a short time - because they all broke. Very quickly. And all the customers wanted their money back. But we still have these hideous recordings, which I assume are original.

I can't really explain or describe the doomsday feeling I get from this recording. It makes no sense - it's just sounds, isn't it? I even know what the original sound was. I remember dial-up (which now seems like the lamest thing ever invented - because it was! You couldn't be on the phone and the computer at the same time.) All these vastly slowed-down recordings are very, very strange. When we think of a recording being slowed down, we think of it getting lower and lower, but it doesn't. It's just endlessly elongated. It takes up more time. And this is like something from Armageddon, the Last Judgement, the trumps of doom. I think it's partly the fact that I do know what the sound is, but it's changed, changed utterly. For some reason I made myself listen to this again last night and had the same queasy, sick dread. It doesn't get better with successive replayings. In fact, it gets worse.

The Volta Labs experimental recordings were another Edison thing. Just a bunch of guys fooling around with very primitive sound equipment. Volta Labs reminds me of mad scientists with frizzy hair, Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, Clyde Crashcup, and that sort of thing, though the comic connection doesn't mitigate the creepiness of the recordings. On one of them, someone appears to say "fuck!", but I didn't include that one. This one is just creepier. It also interests me how much the first recorded discs looked like ugly grey pancakes.

I wonder why it is, when I do not remember World War II, when I do not remember ANY war, that this sound fills me with such primal dread. It is Doom. It is simply the end, and there is nothing you can do. 

And this - this I do not even need to explain. This carved its way into my child psyche during the Cold War, when that awful endless shrill beeeeeeeeeeeep seemed, to me, even worse than the dreaded Bomb.

Anyone who knows anything about the advent of sound recording knows about the Phonautograph. This French guy who had a name a mile long (de Martinville, I think - unless Martinville was where he lived) just wanted to see what sound waves would look like when traced with a stylus on a moving glass globe. That's all. There was no thought of playing them back. When I first found out that they had found his stylus tracings on some black paper, read them with a laser and actually dragged some "music" out of it, I disbelieved it immediately. It was an obvious hoax.

Back in the mid-'90s, someone tried to pass off a supposed recording of Chopin playing the Minute Waltz which they claimed had been recorded on a similar device. Sadly, it was a fraud. I couldn't even find anything on the internet about this, and still can't, even though I heard the damn thing on the radio. I remember the CBC Radio announcer dismissed it as "a musical Piltdown Man". I'm not sure how I know this, but it turned out to be a CD enclosed with a European classical music magazine which was published on April 1. The catalogue number was something like 425679HAHAHA.

But this ghostly Au Clair de la Lune thing has stood up to scrutiny. At least, no one has stepped forward to admit guilt over it, so it must be real. Some of the air has gone out of it, however.  I note now that when I go on Firstsounds.org, the web site that originally broke the news to the world, it hasn't been updated in a very long time. It just looks like an ugly and very out-of-date web page, even worse than mine in fact. It's sort of a pre-Blogspot thing - whew, what an eyesore!

When all this first came out, there was a great deal of boasting and braggadocio by the researchers, who had been catapulted to fame by a few pieces of sooty black paper. Now I notice a certain nothing. I guess they haven't found anything new. The few seconds of blurby, garbly "singing" isn't so exciting any more, no matter how much they slice and dice it, play it back at different speeds and with different effects, filters, etc. Hey, you can make an armadillo sound like Pavarotti these days. Another tiny sound snippet isn't even a human voice, but a trumpet that sounds like it's underwater. And a lot of it just reminds me of somebody blowing his nose.

Now this is worse. Far worse. I dug this up a very long time ago, when I somehow stumbled upon the idea that ancient clay pots were natural recording devices. If a rotating glass globe with a stylus stuck on it could record vibrations/waves/actual sounds that could be played back in a few hundred years, why then - why couldn't a rapidly-revolving wet clay pot with a sharp thing stuck into it record all sorts of shit as it rotated merrily away? But only if some guy with a laser came along to winkle the sound back out again.

Meanwhile, this is terrifying.

I tried to get hold of the guy who did this a couple of years ago. His "channel" has two things on it: this video, and a six-second "slide show" depicting one still of this pot. So, hoaxy it is. But still terrifying, for some reason I can't determine.

I mean, I KNOW it isn't real.

(NOTE: This is the one and only article I have ever found about the infamous phony Chopin "Piltdown Man" recording.)

"The recording of Chopin performing the "Minute Waltz" is a now world-famous musical hoax that was exquisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD's about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1.

Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!

The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.

The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transfered by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.

Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?

The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)

The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"

Anthony Perkins: The PEOPLE Magazine Interview that "outed" him

 

Well, okay. . . I have a lot to say about all this, but I don't know where to start. Around the time Psycho II came out, and for no reason that I could comprehend, I began to be obsessed with Anthony Perkins. I had not even seen his masterful turn in the original Psycho - that came years later, and with it the realization that Psycho II was just a pale imitation, which Perkins seemed to be phoning in to help him pay the bills.

But from that point forward, I was seeking out Perkins' repertoire of movies on late night TV and in the VHS tapes (no, make that Beta!) that I could rent from the corner store. I became fascinated by this fairy-tale (excuse the pun) story of a man terrified of women, who admittedly DID have sex with men which he claimed felt "unreal", and who suddenly met this earth-mother paragon who completely set him free from the shackles of his (unreal-feeling) homoerotic impulses.

Well, that's pretty much it, isn't it? That's the myth, and it fit in well with the times and with the wild popularity of Mildred Newman. Her sappy self-help screed How to Be your Own Best Friend (which I dealt with in my last post) demonstrated that even someone as intelligent as Perkins could fall for an utter sham, since all his gay friends seemed to be doing the same thing. 

I didn't catch up with all this until - probably - Perkins' death from AIDS in the early 1990s. It all began to make sense to me then, and since then I have read two biographies: one sanitized and respectful, the other incredibly detailed and full of rather nasty gossip and hearsay. I had to average the two and guess at the rest. What the People article didn't say was that Perkins had had several long-term, committed relationships with men, most notably Tab Hunter and the dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom he lived for years. (Sadly, Dale too fell for Mildred Newman's poisonous indoctrination.) 

It's too bad his close relationships with men, which obviously went far beyond casual pickups, were completely negated in this article. But what horrified his family and close friends was the way he "outed" himself as a man who for years and years had had sex with other men. His claim that his mother sexually abused him as a child (clearly, the reason he was so terrified of women) was also met with shock. Was he throwing in all these lurid details mainly to sell tickets? If so, it worked very well. 

Andy Warhol wryly observed in his infamous diary that he guessed Psycho II would make a lot of money, and that he found the People article hilarious because Perkins claimed his gay life was "all in the past". Somehow, I think Warhol and his whole erotic subculture knew him better than that. 

So how far have we come? It's been said that there are STILL no leading men in Hollywood who are openly gay. Only a straight actor can play a gay character. This was true when Tom Hanks played a man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, but it seems equally true today. You just don't see gay playing gay. Too unbelievable, I guess.  Tom Cruise and his longtime companion John Travolta are still in the closet (with, presumably, that Scientology guy David Miscavige). 

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I ordered an extra copy of the Perkins issue from People, and kept it for years. The scan you see above, which I had to chop up and blow up to make it readable, came from a website. This thing is still around, along with the attitudes that still drive men and women to stay in the closet and live a secret life, or no life at all in which they can be truly themselves.

When Gay was NOT Okay: Anthony Perkins' Dilemma

 

The brilliant actor Anthony Perkins died of AIDS in 1990, after a long battle with his true nature. Back in the 1970s, unhappy in his career (mainly with being typecast as Norman Bates in Psycho) and feeling lonely and frustrated in his relationships, he took the advice of all his celebrity friends and began to see the avant-garde therapist of the day in hopes of curing his malaise.

According to Tony’s therapist Mildred Newman and her husband Bernard Berkowitz (authors of the wildly popular self-help bestseller How to Be your Own Best Friend),‘Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.’

Their incredibly insightful advice on how to find the road to happiness and self-acceptance:

‘When you do something that makes you feel bad inside, ask yourself if that’s the way you  want to feel. If not, stop doing what makes you feel that way. Instead, do the things that make you feel good about yourself. Love is an affirmation of the living, growing being in all of us.’ These sappy fridge-magnet platitudes damaged innumerable people who were looking for a way out of conflict with their sexual orientation.

Perkin’s friend Dodson Rader (also an unhappy client of Newman's for years) remembered a farcical occasion when Newman and her husband gave a party in their large duplex Manhattan apartment for all the gay men they believed to have cured.

‘The place was filled with about thirty couples, some of them very famous. Every one of them had a wife or girlfriend and they were all trying to prove to their shrink how happy they were in their new straight roles. About an hour and a half into the party, in walked the handsome young actor Barry Bostwick, who was starring in Grease, which had just opened on Broadway. Everybody stopped talking and stared at the door. It was astonishing. As the kid walked around the apartment, I noticed one guy after another would go over to him and slip him their phone numbers. Their sense of self-delusion was laughable’.

The programming (or de-programming) must have worked, for Perkins married socialite Berry Berenson in the late '70s and fathered two sons. But his secret double life never ended - it just went underground. When he tested positive for HIV/AIDS in the late1980s, his wife claimed she had no idea how he had contracted it. The disconnect in his life was profound, and it contributed to his early death. 

I'm sad to say that such forceful attempts to wrench around someone’s natural orientation haven’t ended. The religious right still persecutes anyone who does not match the one-man-one-woman-exclusively-forever ideal. They use Bible verses as projectile weapons to puncture any hope a gay person may have of attaining true self-acceptance. Conservative Christians still see repentance as the only cure, but isn’t the whole thing rather complicated, just like human beings themselves?

BUT NO, Mildred Newman says we can CHOOSE how we feel about everything! Feel bad about drinking alcohol? Don’t drink alcohol, drink Kool-Aid instead! (Or Flavor Ade, which worked well for Jim Jones and the People’s Temple.) The choice is yours. In any case, who needs detox or rehab? Doing something that makes you feel guilty or “bad” about yourself? Just stop doing it, and do something “nice” instead. So if you’re gay, just act straight for the rest of your life and you’ll be happy forever.

But in a significant way, Perkins won. After his death (and his funeral was attended by literally hundreds of his friends and supporters), he issued this statement to clarify the circumstances of his death: 

"I chose not to go public because, to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' There are so many who believe that this disease is God's vengeance, but I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness, and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

It's a bit of a trite statement to say "love wins", but sometimes, against the odds, and in the most unlikely of circumstances, it triumphs in the end. 

My BEST Birdwatching Day: The Glorious PINTAIL

Burnaby Lake is my happy place. I have an almost mystical connection to the birds here, which swim right up to the edge of the dock so you can photograph them up-close. I have never seen pintails in any of the other places I birdwatch. I also see sandhill cranes, dowitchers (sandpipers with longer legs), wood ducks, escaped white domestic ducks and doves who use the lake as a kind of sanctuary, and even the elusive Mandarin duck, which is so rare it made the local news.

It can all make me forget, for a while, the things I'm dealing with right now, including intractible physical pain which I can't talk to my doctor about. I have been dismissed, ignored and told to run along, go home and behave myself, so many times over the years that I have pretty much given up trying. This is how people become addicted to bootleg pain meds cut with fentanyl, but I hope I never get to that point. It's too bad when the "cure" is potentially worse than the disease. 

But until I go crazy with the pain and find a way to end it for good, I have my birds. 

WHEN ROBOTS ATTACK! Best Scene in Disney's THE BLACK HOLE

Tony Perkins playing Norman Bates as a scientist who thinks he can defend himself against a killer robot with a file folder.

Two Minutes of Genius! Incredible Film Montage from Humoresque

So what can I say about this, one of my all-time favorite noirish 1940s melodramas? It even has Joan Crawford with giant shoulder-pads playing a wealthy alcoholic cougar pursuing the very dishy John Garfield, who fakes his violin-playing quite effectively. The incomparable Oscar Levant is actually playing here, and many claimed he was at the same technical and interpretive level as Vladimir Horowitz (and the two were, by the way, buddies). This montage thrills and delights me every time, as it says so much about Garfield's tough-guy character and his bewilderment at landing in the Big City to pursue his music career. There are some echoes of An American in Paris here, as Garfield begins to feel more and more like a gigolo who can't escape Joan's desperate clutches. It ends in her walking into the surf a la A Star is Born. In spite of all this borrowing and unabashed melodrama, Garfield keeps it from sinking into sappyness and gives it an effective edge. I play violin myself - not like this, of course, but I do play, and even though it took a team of people to convincingly show him playing, I think it worked very well. As he was a minimalist, he didn't ham it up or overdo it facially, which makes it especially effective. Garfield died of a heart attack depressingly young, so we don't get to see him very often. But in the film Three Daughters, he plays a sardonic pianist whom he admitted was based on Oscar Levant. 

My description of the clip on YouTube is as follows:

A brilliant bit of filmmaking, one of the highlights of this noir-ish 1940s melodrama. John Garfield plays Paul Boray, an ambitious young concert violinist pursued by wealthy cougar Joan Crawford. Here he arrives in the hustle and bustle of New York City. So could tough guy Garfield really play the violin? Of course not, but he was saved by some Hollywood magic. For close-ups, Garfield’s arms were pinned down, the violin was attached to his neck, and two professional violinists would crouch down beside the actor, out of camera range, one doing the fingering and the other bowing. The actual soundtrack heard by the audience was played by Isaac Stern, with Oscar Levant accompanying him on the piano. After a couple of takes working in this strenuously awkward manner, Levant called out, “Why don’t the five of us do a concert tour?”

😳Is this DUCKLING in DANGER?😳

Last year, this enormous brown duck (an escapee from a meat farm) hatched out an incredible NINE babies, all different colors from bright yellow to mottled brown. She must have mated with a wild mallard, but sadly, I only saw the babies twice, then they disappeared, likely picked off by crows and gulls. This year I was surprised to find her with ONE duckling, bright yellow, which means it's an easy target. Nature can be so sad. We've followed ducks like Bosley and Belinda, escapees from barnyards, but they always seem to die due to predators. Domestic ducks don't have the wild instincts of mallards, and don't move fast enough. This may be my only chance to see this little fluffball.

Is she REAL, or is she. . . ?

YouTube still plays tricks on me. Last night I could not even get on my home page, then today it began to play the ads which are normally blocked by AdBlocker. I posted this, then realized I had to be careful NOT to use the term "AI", though it is everywhere now and I am supposed to indicate if anything I publish uses it. I am not even sure of this thing, it may only be an animation. But nobody looked at it, as usual, so I had to weasel-word it back to neutral terms, and wait for YT to slam me AGAIN. Why am I such a threat to them?