Walking for the cure: a family affair

As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday we took part in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation annual walk for the cure. This has become an event we look forward to, and this year we noticed that Erica and Lauren seemed to be getting a lot of attention from photographers for the local papers.  They were snapped several times in the course of the day.

Oh, those papparazzi! Perhaps it's something about golden curls and blue eyes (or elaborate face-paint with ladybugs entwined in it) that attracted all that attention.

Then this morning, we saw this in the Abbotsford News!  We never expected all of us to show up in a photo.

At the front of the procession pulling the wagon is my daughter-in-law Crystal. Erica (7) rides in the wagon, while Lauren (4) pushes it (go figure).  At the far left in jeans and shades is my son Jeff. But get this, Nanny and Papa ended up in there somewhere (blessedly semi-hidden by the crowd). Dead-centre you'll see a man in a Tilley hat (Bill), then another guy to the left, then Nanny in a green striped top.  Glad it wasn't taken from the rear.

Stay tuned for more. . .

And now, for something completely different

Yesterday's rant stirred up some mixed feelings in me. It was one of those posts I usually delete because it comes from so far out in left field. But I decided to leave it up.  Please take it as irony of the most iron kind.

And in case you're wondering, my own marriage is nothing like that! Even as I write, I hear the vacuum cleaner running downstairs, and it ain't the cleaning lady. Later on he will put a meat loaf in the oven. Oh yes.

To provide some counterweight, I hope, I hereby display the rest of the stuffies I knitted for Lauren and Erica's joint birthday party on Saturday. I'm proud of these. They were fun to make, but also a lot of work. They are, top to bottom, the Ugly Ducking all grown up, plus his girl friend (and later, wife) Melinda Mallard;

A grizzly bear, unnamed (yes, I know there isn't a grizzly bear in The Ugly Duckling, but there was in my version; this one was so hard to make he was in and out of the garbage pail several times);

A penguin, definitely NOT in the story (one of the hits of the evening, though it was the easiest to make);

A dolphin, likewise, who looks like a girl dolphin (dolphinette?) to me;

And some ladybugs. Lauren loves them, and it's the name of her team for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure, which convened on Sunday, Grandma and Grandpa included. The five-kilometer walk was a bit of a stretch for us old people, but hey, it was for the best cause ever!

The good wife: legs open, mouth shut

After all these years, I think I've figured it out: a “good” wife keeps her legs open and her mouth shut. She is placid, obedient, trots around willingly and cheerfully doing all the little tasks around the house, is grateful for her “position” and to have a roof over her head, and ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS defers to “her man”, grateful that he’ll even have her, put up with her annoying little habits like getting a cold and having her period and talking to her mother on the phone.  But since her position is fragile and she could be turfed out at any whim, she tiptoes a lot, constantly walks on eggshells and placates, placates, placates. If she has feelings of her own, they are so deeply buried that she can’t even find them any more.

The ideal woman. The ideal woman doesn't have much to say because she's too busy serving. Serving up meals, serving up sex, serving up herself. The direction is all outward, except for that little inward thing she needs to do now and then to keep everything running placidly forward.

Some of it she plain does not like, but has learned to do it mechanically, not thinking, then washing her mouth out with Listerine afterwards, hoping no one can guess what her breath smells of.


Like an old-time vaudeville act, she is adept at spinning a lot of plates at one time. She isn't perfect at this, but she tries. Though she quietly but diligently takes care of little things like paying the mortgage on time because he always seems to forget, he really would like a woman who defers to him in every matter, including paying the mortgage, though the very suggestion that he would prefer her to be like this flips him into a rage, or at least a sense of indignation that she thinks he could be such a louse. But she knows he IS such a louse, and doesn't want to be reminded of it.

 

She knows a lot of things, secrets. Masses of them, but she never tells, because it is her only power. She knows who slept with him last year and knows she showed up at their twins' birthday party with her kid who has no Dad. She knows he has no Dad because the kid told her. But why doesn't she say anything?

When she came back from that little trip to Vegas, that one fling with her friends that resulted in exactly nothing except weight gain and money loss, she came home a little early. As she walked in the door, she heard voices.

 

His voice, then hers. Hers? Who was this? Then she recognized it. They were in the bedroom, probably in a state of undress. He laughed in a slightly drunken way.

She backed out the door, called a cab and went to stay in a hotel, pretending not to be home for a few more days.

So nothing happened, nothing was disturbed. She did catch hell from her friend, the one who thought maybe she should say something once in a while. But her friend was divorced. That was what came of "saying something". Her friend said, "For God's sake, that's YOUR bedroom in YOUR home! Why did YOU have to go stay in a hotel? You should've thrown the bastard out, along with that cheap slut he's sleeping with!"

"Maybe he's bored," she said. And it was true, she wondered if this placid bit was getting just a little bit boring for him. So maybe she should just make allowances and look the other way.

It was like an army drill, really, and if you practiced it often enough you got good at it, or at least didn't object to it any more, or (for that matter) notice it was happening at all. Legs open, mouth shut. And on command: reverse! For a woman should always be ready, willing and able to swallow whatever a man has to offer.

Golden girls

Sisters, sisters. . . one seven, one not quite five. . .


. . . and being with them is golden time, proving Tom Robbins was so right when he wrote:


It's never too late to have a happy childhood.



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OK, boys and girls. . . compare and contrast!

This is your homework assignment for Friday: compare this recording of Eva Taylor singing Chloe (also charmingly nicknamed Song of the Swamp) to the Spike Jones parody. Damn, it's close, except for all the cowbells, interjections ("where are you, you old bat?") and starting pistols going off. Jones had a sort of perfection about him - everything was perfectly timed, perfectly insane, and beautifully played because he had a hell of a band.

I was hard-pressed to find a favorite (very nearly chose Laura for the fact that fully half of it is played straight, and beautifully) and of course the tracks brought back floods of memories which I didn't particularly want to experience, but there you are.

As a confused child, I often thought parody was straight - I was, like, four years old, right? - and tried to take Spike Jones and Songs of the Pogo literally. It was my fault that I couldn't understand it, because it was obvious that the adults did or they wouldn't have kept on listening to it. My sister was thirteen years older than me, but I figured I should be able to keep up.


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Spike Jones' Chloe: Through the black of night. . .

Things to do with a dead cat

Angoraphobia!

Just watch this. If you haven't seen it before, you'll have to put your jaw back on. If you HAVE seen it before, you'll have to put your jaw back on.

It's called Glen or Glenda (or: I Changed My Sex, or:  I Made an Unbelievably Bad Movie), and purports to explain to the audience why some men just can't help borrowing from their girl friends' wardrobes. Especially pink angora sweaters (the climactic moment at 54:25).

Though there are lots of other memorable moments. For reasons no one understands, director Ed Wood (the subject of a biopic called Ed Wood, starring. . . no, not Ed Wood, who died of alcoholism in the '70s, but the far-dishier Johnny Depp) liked to insert several elements into his films:

- stock footage (there are at least 15 minutes of shots of busy streets, hospitals, war zones, munitions factories and stuff like that);

-  long, pointless monologues by washed-up actors like Bela Lugosi (who, inexplicably, gives a running commentary from a haunted house);

-  and, the thing he did best, soft-core sleaze.

It definitely isn't porn, not even Dairy Queen soft-serve-style porn. There aren't even any bare titties or anything like that, just women wearing tight or filmy clothing writhing around on sofas.  At a few points (42:15, 43:00 - not that I'm counting) there is some even-more-inexplicable, mild S+M  (i. e. a woman ties another woman to a large stick) that leads nowhere.

This has nothing to do with the main topic of transvestites and transsexuals, here conflated into the same thing, though they insist Glen is NOT a homosexual: dear God, who would want to be one of THOSE? The film can't decide if it's fer it or agin it: i.e. tolerant of men who like to cross-dress, or harshly judgemental. Glen (played by Wood, whose own florid cross-dressing habit went back to wearing lacy red panties under his Air Force uniform during World War II) seems to be going through the tortures of the damned, all caused by being teased as a boy for being a "sissy". Bela keeps drivelling on and on about "puppy dog tails and BIG FAT SNAILS" (not that I dislike snails: see my post of May 16/12).

Fifty Shades of Snails

But it's all so confusing.

This is I guess what this thing is all about, gender confusion and how it can drive a poor soul to suicide. Ed Wood is much better-known for Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is worth seeing just for Maila Nurmi lurching along with a waist the size of a drainpipe. I think Glen or Glenda was his first, however, made on a shoestring budget in a couple of weeks and featuring friends who'd appear on-screen if he bought them a couple of drinks.

Bela Lugosi was such a wreck by then that he'd take any work to feed his drug habit, and died during the filming of Plan 9, to be replaced by Ed Wood's chiropractor covering his face with a cape.

Oh, that's enough now, just watch it already, or at least the good parts I've told you about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Wood

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Dancing Queens

They may look a bit like they've been in a production of The Mikado, but guess again - these little girls, Gunnings of my Gunnings, have just performed in a dance extravaganza in which each of them had two numbers in different genres.

Erica does not need those eyelashes. Already she creates a breeze when she blinks, but it was all part of the costume.

Grandma is proud!

OK, it may look like Lauren is about to swat her sister with her congratulatory flowers. But she behaved herself, and took her bows gracefully. Both girls did exceptionally well, excelling (of course!) at tap, acro (believe me, you couldn't do this) and ballet.

Try to imagine a four-year-old girl tap-dancing to Jailhouse Rock and you'll get the idea. The "awwwwwwwww" factor was very high throughout. This isn't high school gym stuff, but a real dance school that performs in a real theatre. Missed steps and the odd slip are all part of the path to professionalism, and a lesson in one of life's most crucial skills: getting back up again and carrying on.

Mummy is proud. Mummy is also tired, having supervised much of the performing, organizing the delightful chaos of little bunheads in tutus darting all over the place backstage.

Unfortunately I was not able to get shots of the girls in their various costumes because cameras aren't allowed in the theatre. (Can you imagine what the performance would be like with hordes of parents and grandparents holding up their phones and clicking away so nobody could see anything?) In spite of the attempt to keep the view clear, many an elderly person was heard to say, "Is that her? Is that her? No? Which one is her, then?"

Eventually we'll get to see the whole show on a professional video and experience the "awwwwwwww" all over again.

Mummy is proud, Daddy is proud, two little girls have danced their hearts out. My heart has wings!



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Scratch me a lover, pass me a drink

Be My Robert Benchley

 (Dedicated to Dorothy Parker and the members of the Algonquin Round Table. . . with a nod to the Barenaked Ladies' Be My Yoko Ono)

If there’s someone you can drink without,

Then do so.

And if there’s someone you can waste your time with,

Do so.

You can be my Robert Benchley

You can follow me wherever I go

Be my, be my,

Be my Robert Benchley

Well there was this little lady in old New York

Her quips couldn’t get much darker

She soon became the toast of the Algonquin

Miss Dorothy Parker

If you were smart, or thought you were

If you dared to do it and were able

You got yourself to that hotel, and sat down at

That big Round Table

 

(Be my, be my, be my Robert Benchley

Be my, be my, be my Robert Benchley)

There was this fat guy sitting there

By the name of Woollcott

He and ate and drank and partied and insulted folks

Yes, quite a lot

And look, there’s George S. Kaufman

High hair and skinny as a rail

Though he wins no beauty contests,

His plays just never fail

(you can be my Robert Benchley)

Back in 1921

bootleg liquor there was plenty

You either had a bag of bills

Or you just didn’t have any

Though movies had no soundtrack

With Lloyd, Gilbert and Garbo

Round Tablers were all talkies:

Like George, Heywood and Harpo

(be my, be my, be my Robert Benchley)

While Dottie loved her Benchley,

They all said it was platonic

To think they’d ever hit the sheets

Was really quite moronic

When Benchley married Gertrude

Dottie nearly had conniptions

She was a girl without a brain

It just defied description

One day Dot and Benchley

Decided to incorporate

They had to call the company

A name that sounded great

They tried on this and tried on that

In English, Dutch and quasi-French

Till Alexander Woollocott said

“Why not call it Parkbench”

(You can be my Robert Benchley

You can follow me wherever I go)

Though Dottie loved her Benchley

His wit and clever thinkin’

There’s no doubt she corrupted him

And started him on drinkin’

He started chasing chorus girls

It saddens me to say it

But that’s the game that Benchley chose

And so he had to play it

Oh no, here we go – life is just one big pun,

Oh no, here we go – It’s Benchley on the run!

It’s sad to say this fairy tale

Doesn’t end in blazing glory

Benchley made short subjects

And Miss Parker wrote short stories

His liver conked at fifty,

And that’s not very groovy,

And his shorts are only fillers now

On Turner Classic Movies

Dorothy went on living

Smoking, drinking, taking lovers

But her heart belonged to Benchley

In her mind she had no other

Though her talent was unquestioned,

Her stories now are history

A product of her times, I guess

To me it’s just a mystery

You can be my Robert Benchley

You can follow me wherever I go

Be my, be my,

Be my Robert Benchley

 

Yes, thinking she is obsolete

Strikes me as quite absurd.

So let’s let Dorothy Parker

Have the final word:

Ballade Of A Great Weariness

There's little to have but the things I had,
There's little to bear but the things I bore.
There's nothing to carry and naught to add,
And glory to Heaven, I paid the score.

There's little to do but I did before,
There's little to learn but the things I know;
And this is the sum of a lasting lore:
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

And couldn't it be I was young and mad
If ever my heart on my sleeve I wore?
There's many to claw at a heart unclad,
And little the wonder it ripped and tore.
There's one that'll join in their push and roar,
With stories to jabber, and stones to throw;
He'll fetch you a lesson that costs you sore:
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

So little I'll offer to you, my lad;
It's little in loving I set my store.
There's many a maid would be flushed and glad,
And better you'll knock at a kindlier door.
I'll dig at my lettuce, and sweep my floor,
Forever, forever I'm done with woe.
And happen I'll whistle about my chore,
"Scratch a lover, and find a foe."

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Silent screams in space

"Am I going to crash?": a lonely death in space

(From YouTube notes about Lost Cosmonaut video, posted above):

This is a supposed recording of a Soviet space flight in 1961. In it, a Russian woman can be heard complaining about the increasing temperature inside the craft before it is destroyed attempting re-entry.

This was recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1961. It is reportedly one of many transmissions intercepted by the two brothers that prove the existence of the lost cosmonauts.

For more info, please visit http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/default.htm

The following is a translation of what the woman is saying:

five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five...
come in... come in... come in...
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN!
COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?...
FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?...
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING...
BREATHING... OXYGEN...
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS)
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS?
WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I
TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES...
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT...
I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT...
... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?...
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A
FLAME!...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO...
THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!...
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER...
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...

OK, gentle readers. So what's my take on all this? I found this eerie recording on a Top 10 List of Eerie Recordings (from a site called Top 10 Lists of. . .), and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I couldn't even get to sleep last night, it creeped me out so much.

Way leads on to way, and I found much more information about these notorious Judica Brothers, along with a million mostly-amateurish-and-absurd conspiracy-theory videos claiming the moon landing of 1969 was a complete hoax. The best of these is a clever satire (taken seriously by many, which was the whole point: to show how naive and idiotic these theories are) called Dark Side of the Moon. Watch it if you are at all interested in this subject, as it will show you how "convincing" these arguments can be (until they collapse in a heap of incoherence, or perhaps sardonic laughter).

So how valid is this claim that two young Italian guys, obviously smart and innovative, were able to pull down signals and even voices from remote space using cobbled-together, Heathkit-like amateur equipment? The documentary I watched, Space Hackers, makes a convincing case. There is no doubt that these guys were brilliant, and since two heads are better than one, they joined forces in an odd sort of fused-together, codependent manner. Suffice it to say they didn't get out much, and would have fit in nicely on The Big Bang Theory.

All this started with the commonly-heard beeps of Sputnik, the first Soviet satellite launched in 1957 (which I remember, though I was only 3 years old at the time: my brother Walt, a science junkie, dragged us all up on the roof of my father's store with a powerful telescope to try to see Sputnkik, which we didn't. Then we all went out and had a Spudnut, so that I forever confused the satellite with a doughnut hurtling through space.)

OK. . . confusing stuff, but some of it is compelling. Sputnik was just a start: the Judica brothers then supposedly picked up the heartbeat of Laika, the doomed dog the Russians shot into space. Then morse code SOS signals that read like howls of agony in the inferno. Mumblings from cosmonauts, full of suppressed panic, most of them in hopeless peril. The gasps, rapid heartbeat and what sounded like the death-rattle of another cosmonaut. And on it goes.

It's all Caught On Tape, folks, and last night, recovering from the worst migraine I've had in years, I was in an Oliver Sacks-ish state that can only be described as altered consciousness, my neural wiring sticking out all over my head and audibly sizzling.  (As a means of enlightenment, I don't recommend this, because it hurts like hell and makes you throw up). So I watched all kinds of things, including something that totally debunked the Judica brothers' recordings - or most of them - as fakes.

It's true that the female cosmonaut in the video I posted doesn't sound like she's speaking in the terse, formal military language of space - but was it in place back in 1961? And was it common to send women into space back then? Well, they sent a dog. The Americans sent a chimpanzee. Maybe she was the next logical step before they risked sending a man. (The photos, by the way, depict the official "first woman in space", Valentina Tereshkova, launched a few years later after they had got the major bugs out of the system: i.e. re-entry without hurtling back to earth in a blob of molten metal.)

The Judicas had an enigmatic, playful quality about them (but then, doesn't Howard Wolowitz with his dickies and his brisket and his Billie-Burke-ish girl friend also strike you as a bit dippy?). Nevertheless, as the brothers' notoriety grew in the Italian press, NASA invited them for a "friendly" visit to headquarters so that they could pose a few "friendly" questions.

Their answers are nowhere on the record, nor do we know of any attempts to harness their amateur brilliance in the service of spying on the Soviets.  It could be they were dismissed as chippers with a vivid imagination and a love of publicity. Maybe they were just attempting to score some chicks.

But if these guys really did even a fraction of what they claimed, it's astonishing.  At one point they were supposedly able to compress a long series of secret signals broadcast from Russia - a code no one could crack - and found that it was, in fact, a few phrases of music taken from the opera Boris Gudenov. (No relation to Boris Badenov of Rocky and His Friends. Come to think of it, that IS a weird coincidence.) Another time they were able (supposedly) to crack a band of frequency by calculating the exact length of an antenna they saw in a photograph.

Or. . . are they having us on, after all?

There are those who believe we went to the moon. There are those who believe we went there, but didn't land and come back because it was technically impossible. There are those who believe we had to fill that visual gap somehow (with footage shot by Stanley Kubrick?). There are those who debunk, and those who debunk the debunkers. It becomes very convoluted, to the point that an obvious satire like Dark Side of the Moon (a sendup of the "I want to believe" earnestness of those conspiracy nuts) is taken at face value.

In some cases, it just makes people angry. "Those people (the filmmakers) were lying to us! Henry Kissinger did NOT say those things!"  This speaks volumes about the IQ level of the average citizen. Like Brontosaurus, maybe their brains are in their butts.

So what do I think? Oh, I don't know. I watched the "moon shot" from a cottage on Lake of Bays, at Bondi Resort, a heavenly sort of place that nevertheless didn't have TVs, so we had to borrow one from somewhere. We had a wine-and-cheese party to celebrate the event, and suffice it to say I didn't pay much attention to the cheese.

My parents had allowed me to have wine with dinner since age 13, and after a gruelling Oxfam walk my Dad brought a glass up to my room containing a couple of ounces of Scotch mixed with orange juice.  But this time I was drunk, really drunk, though I was only 15 years old. My parents kept filling up my wine glass over and over again, and when they cut me off, my much-older siblings kept right on pouring until I was stupefied. They must have thought that seeing me drunk was kind of cute, like watching a monkey that had got hold of a bottle of beer.  After all that one-small-step-for-man business by Neil Armstrong (which should have been "a man," not that anyone cared), I remember lying on a hillside staring up at white-hot stars, disturbingly close, that wheeled and whirled like something out of Van Gogh.

Back then we all took this moon shot stuff at face value, of course. But one reason all these theories (most of them loony) are popping up now is that we're starting to realize how incredibly primitive the equipment was that launched these guys, got them to the moon and (even more incredibly) brought them back. The average SmartPhone has a thousand times more computer juice, a quantum leap (if you'll pardon the expression) beyond that dinosaur technology with its hair-raising risks.

Really, shouldn't all of them have blown up? Weird, isn't it. Just a coincidence? Sheer luck? Why did two Challenger missions end in flaming disaster, when the only Gemini/Apollo fatalities took place on the ground? (And just what did Gus Grissom have to hide? Jesus, I've got to get off this subject.)

Think of it now. What if those men had landed, made their historic moon walk and dramatic pronouncements, then couldn't get back? (My husband the science wiz, who seems to have inside information about some of this stuff, tells me that each astronaut was given a cyanide capsule before they launched.) I think even Walter Cronkite would have been at a loss for words.

The deeper you delve into all this shit, the crazier you feel. I am certain that NASA, not to mention the Soviets, did some spin on this stuff, maybe hid some things, minimized them or downplayed them. It's more likely the Soviets did coverups, just because of the nature of the Iron Curtain culture (which, by the way, I thought was a literal iron curtain, kind of like the Great Wall of China. Well, I was five.) There are those people who seem to think everything to do with government and/or the military is a conspiracy: it fills the endless hours while they wait for a girl friend (someone ditzy enough to tolerate all this shit). Oh, bring back the X Files, please.

Meanwhile we have this haunting, almost pleading voice, repetitious, so blurry it could mean almost anything. We hear what we want to hear. My own brother had Heathkits and telescopes and bunsen burners (which we used to melt lead, I am not kidding, I did it at age eight). It was trendy then to be an amateur scientist, a space geek. I married one, after all.

The documentary I saw was very strange because the brothers, now old men, still have all their dusty, creaking old equipment with the dials and chugging reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The men seem like relics who haven't kept up, their one encapsulated moment of fame now stowed in a museum of obsolescence.

And yet, and yet. At one point there was some film footage of their "antenna", or at least one of them. I expected a rod with a little bulb on it. You know, an antenna. But this was a massive structure that spread out to cover half the roof of their little lab. It looked like a space station up there. How had they figured that out? You couldn't get that shit from a hardware store, could you?

To hear these old men speak, which they did in Italian with subtitles, was sheer poetry. They described how the American press dismissively thought of them as "just pizza and mandolins". Einstein (whose theory of relativity was obviously a load of conspiracy-driven bullshit) would have appreciated this. Enigmatic, rumpled, otherworldly as E.T., he had that same dreamy, subversive quality, the uncanny power of men who have stared into space, reached out in childish curiosity and pulled down the stars.

(Note. This is a summer repeat of one of my, well, don't I have the right to think so?, best pieces. It isn't really summer, but this sure is a repeat. But it's my birthday, and I can do anything I want. And if *I* didn't remember it, YOU sure as shit won't.)

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