Nick: you make me sick

This is an actual transcript, word-for-word, of a horrific bucket of swill that just appeared in my inbox. I'm still trying to believe it happened, and decided to address it right away before my fury abated. My comments follow Nick's nice intimate little message.

Hi Margaret,

You know better than most that putting your writing "out there" takes a tremendous amount of courage; readers will find and comment on even the simplest mistakes. At Grammarly we know the feeling - and we've made it our mission to improve writers' confidence. Putting our money where our mouth is, we'd be honored to sponsor your next blog post with a $20 Amazon gift card.

In case you haven’t heard of us, Grammarly is an automated online proofreader that finds and explains those pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes that are bound to find their way into your first draft. Think of us as a second pair of digital eyes that can spare you the cost of hiring a proofreader. If you'd like to join our 3 million users and try the premium version of our proofreader for free, let me know and I'll make it happen!

Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate blog post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time.

Cheers,
Nick

P.S. Let me know if you ever find yourself in foggy San Francisco; I’d love to grab some coffee. :)

I have no idea what-the-fuck this is, or even if it's on the level. It may well be a hoax perpetrated by that old Gandalfian wag, Matt Paust. But I have a queasy feeling that it's real. 

I don't even know where to begin! "Hi Margaret" is a good start: who ARE these people, and why do they feel so completely confident to address me as if I'm an old friend? But it gets worse. That first sentence offends me in the way that only patronizing, ignorant bullshit can offend me. "You know better than most" is meant to massage my brilliant writer's ego: oh, we know you've been there, you've taken your lumps. "Putting your writing 'out there' takes a tremendous amount of courage." No it doesn't. I have no courage whatsoever, and I've been "putting it out there" since I was eight and hand-wrote ten copies of my first novel for my friends and relatives. It's a little like saying to a woman, "You know, it takes a tremendous amount of courage to wear that dress."

"Readers will find and comment on even the simplest mistakes"? What universe does this asshole live in? My blog receives relatively few comments (except the 43 I got for the "I See Dead People" post that garnered over 73,000 views), and since Matt makes most of them, he knows better than to pick at my  "pesky" grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes, not that I make any. (Or hardly any.) But it seems their mandate is to "improve writers' confidence" by helping them spray toxic chemicals on those squirmy little errors and wipe them out. 

This Grammarly thingamabob, whatever it is, is supposed to save me "the cost of hiring a proofreader". I have published two novels which received almost universally positive, even glowing reviews, so do you think I need a fucking PROOFREADER? This sort of invasive, mind-polluting trash is just what makes the internet such a dismal swamp, when it could be so much more. But Mr. or Ms. Patronizing Asshole saves the "best" till last. "Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate blog post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time." 

OK, Nick or whoever-the-hell-you-really-are, THIS is my "next appropriate blog post" and I hope you see it! And I would LOVE to see what would happen if I tried to hunt you down in San Francisco so we could "grab some coffee :) " My personal theory is that you don't exist, that you are in fact a corporate mirage, an evil and impersonal force out to squeeze the impoverished blogger dry of his or her last few dollars. 

From the first fake, cheery "Hi, Margaret!" to that last noisome verbal oilslick about "grabbing a coffee", this thing sucks like a vampire with 100 insatiable mouths. It has the fixed, sociopathic grin of a Great White shark moving in for the kill.

But hey, Nick baby, if you'd send me that gift card for $20, maybe I could afford a few ropes, whips and chains and a box of condoms for my next trip to San Francisco. 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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Blueberry Butt!

Charge of the Light Brigade: Take 2

De Jarge of de Light Brigade

by William F. Kirk ("The Norsk Nightingale")

(NOTE: William F. Kirk , The Norsk Nightingale, was a 19th-century dialect poet world-famous for his "lumberyack" poetry, best represented by Sonnet on Stewed Prunes ("By yiminy! Dey ban gude"). One of his oevres was satirizing famous poetry, including the "half a league, half a league" refrain of Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade. At least I think it was Tennyson. . . I always used to call him Alfred Lord Tennis Ball. Anyway, try reading this aloud in the home furnishings section of Ikea, and see what happens!)

Yoyfully, yoyfully, Yoyfully onvard,

In dis har walley of death Rode the sax hundred!

It ban a cinch, ay tenk, 

 Some geezer blundered.

 "Hustle, yu Light Brigade! Yump!" Maester Olson said;

 Den in the walley of death

 Go the sax hundred. 

Cannon on right of dem, 

Cannon on left of dem, 

Cannon on top of dem, 

 Wolleyed and t'undered; 

Smashed vith dis shot and shal, 

Dey ant do wery val; 

Most of dem ketching hal,— 

 Nearly sax hundred! 

Yes, all dem sabres bare 

Flash purty gude in air; 

Each faller feel his hair Standing. No vonder! 

Yudas! It ant ban yob 

For any coward slob, 

Fighting dis Russian mob. 

Ay tenk ay vudn't stand Yeneral's blunder.

 

Cannon on right of dem, 

Cannon on top of dem, 

Cannon behind dem, tu, 

 Wolleyed and t'undered. 

Finally say Captain Brenk, 

"Ve got enuff, ay tenk,

 Let's go and getting drenk."

 'Bout tventy-sax com back 

 Out of sax hundred.

Ven skol deir glory fade?

 It ban gude charge dey made, 

 Every von vondered. 

Every von feeling blue, 

'Cause dey ban brave old crew, 

Yolly gude fallers, tu, 

 Dis har sax hundred!

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Full prively he caught her by the queint: torn from the pages of Facebook

High, dizzy and brand new!

Welcome to the New Look. Well, sort of. I was just tired of the old title which most people didn't understand, as it was meant as a sort of satire of Barbie's House of Dreams (and all the other kittenish, puppyish, glittery-type-things I SOOOO often see on the internet). They thought I was merely lame and took shots at me. One even called my blog "embarrassing". Oh dear.

So today, on a whim, I changed it up, changed the title too, and am mixed up as hell because older posts still seem to want to come out in a House of Dreamy sort of way. But hopefully I'll soon get the bugs out.

I'm sticking to this simple template now because there is nothing I LOATHE more than a web site I can't navigate, with "things" popping up all over the place and rolls of photos dizzily sliding along when you don't want them to. I don't like tricks. I want accessible. As it is, I wasn't able to get all the text just where I wanted it to be, but this will do for now.

I do get tired of that "iconic" picture of Harold 'angin' about on the clock, and felt that this one had a little more scope. It is one of the VERY few high-res pictures I can find of Lloyd - most are small and smudgy. I also like Mildred Davis' somewhat submissive posture. I believe this came from an early Lloyd pic called High and Dizzy.

And the title, well, it's the same title as my forthcoming novel. Almost everyone else referred to Lloyd's screen persona as the "glasses character", but for reasons that were never clear, Lloyd himself always talked about his "glass character" and even "glass pictures", which I think is indescribably poetic. For that I thank him, for it's a great title and much nicer than The Glasses Character.

Will this blog be about Lloyd and nothing else? You know it won't. It will probably have the same freaky, uneven history of 23 views for one post, and 73, 496 for another (no kidding, look it up, it's called I See Dead People: Victorian Post-Mortem Photography, and it got more exposure than I've probably had in my entire writer's life). Since I can't seem to please anyone, and since freakish events like that one are rare, I'll continue to please myself.

I thought it was a good idea to stick my name on the title of my blog for publicity, and now it feels a little lame and never got me anywhere, anyway. So I'll use the title of my novel instead. Coming soon. To a bookshelf/Kindle near you.

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Weinerdance: Anthony Weiner gets down!

It's late, and I want to go to bed, but that's when the gif-monster strikes. A two-minute YouTube clip of Anthony Weiner, who may just be the most repulsive human being I have ever seen, yielded so many rich gif moments that I had to pick and choose. In this one he demonstrates some strange new dance step, the Sexting Shuffle, perhaps.

One of the Weenie-man's favorite gestures - pointing fingers! Remember, Tony. When you point a finger at someone, four fingers point back at you. Or whatever. 

That's tellin' em', Tony! That's righteous moral indignation! That's exposing hypocrisy, corruption and lies! That's taking a stand for truth, honesty and the American Way!

No! I WON'T clean up my room! I WON'T eat my spinach! I WON'T stop sexting, I WON'T!

Eat, pray, LOVE that Tony Weiner.

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Harold Lloyd: it's cartoon time!

This is a Mickey Mouse cartoon about a polo match, with a ragtag assortment of celebrity caricatures cavorting around. Unfortunately we only get to see Harold in the stands (bottom left), but he's right there beside W. C. Fields and (presumably) Greta Garbo. In the back row, Charles Laughton as Henry VIII, and Eddie Cantor, known on radio as Banjo Eyes.

Was the original in colour? I doubt it. They didn't make them back then. Someone must have colorized it somewhere along the line. BTW, I don't think Harold ever wore a red bow tie. Interesting that he wears gloves: a horrific hand injury forced him to wear a prosthetic glove on camera.

Here he's singing in a chorus in Mickey's Gala Premiere, which features dozens of "stars" doing all sorts of wacky things. Looks like Clark Gable on the right, with Edward G. Robinson and - ? - Adolphe Menjou? - in the front row. Help me here.

A funny little thing I found on YouTube, an animated trailer for Harold's last silent picture, Speedy. Wish I could see more of him, but isn't that always the case?

Congratulations, Mickey!

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Peotry Korner: Paradise Lost

(Taken from an actual review on Amazon.com.)

Paradise Lost: Boring Peotry.

Planes, trains and rollercoasters: how Harold gets around

Sonnet on Stewed Prunes (by the Norsk Nightingale)

Sonnet On Stewed Prunes

By William F. Kirk


Ay ant lak pie-plant pie so wery vell;

Ven ay skol eat ice-cream, my yaws du ache;

Ay ant much stuck on dis har yohnnie-cake

Or crackers yust so dry sum peanut shell.

And ven ay eat dried apples, ay skol svell

Until ay tenk my belt skol nearly break;

And dis har breakfast food, ay tenk, ban fake:

Yim Dumps ban boosting it, so it skol sell.

But ay tal yu, ef yu vant someteng fine,

Someteng so sveet lak wery sveetest honey,

Vith yuice dat taste about lak nice port vine,

Only it ant cost hardly any money, - 

Ef yu vant someteng yust lak anyel fude,

Yu try stewed prunes. By yiminy! dey ban gude.

Turbo Snails and Mochi-knitting

There's some kind-of-a movie coming out about snails. Damned if I know anything about it, but I know my granddaughters, sweet little blue-eyed blondies with bouncy hair, LOVE snails and will probably go see it.

They love slithery, antennae-y, slime-trail-leaving snails, which they keep outside in the backyard in a sort of plastic box which serves as a snail ranch. Every so often Daddy shakes it out over the garden, and the snail-collecting starts all over again.

Snails this size are surprisingly easy to knit, though I had to refresh myself on the Magic Loop method which essentially knits a tube that doesn't require seaming. I could never knit on four needles to save my life.

The hardest part, of course, were the antennae, which had to be knitted as i-cords. It was only recently that I discovered this stands for "idiot cord". It's a way of getting around the four needles, I guess. There is snobbery and elitism in knitting as in everything else, and the four-needle, double-pointed crowd often looks down on those poor sods who only use two. Never mind, I just wanted to get the job done.

This is the original mega-snail I knitted for Erica, who must be 9 or 10 inches long. The pattern is out of a book of knitted amigurumi, but this one is atypical. Amigurumi are usually tiny, crocheted, and represent imaginary creatures. This one was honkin' huge and nearly impossible to knit. Surprisingly, the shell was relatively easy because it involved relentless decreases that pulled the tube into a curled ram's-horn shape.

The body, however. . . the instructions were woefully inadequate, only two pages, with NO illustrations. The patterns I frequently order on the net often run to twenty pages, with instructional photos on every page. So it's a wonder I completed this project at all. Having done the shell, however, I knew I couldn't stop, so I made up my own body which was more of a beanbag, stuffing it with plastic shot to give it stability. The plastic shot slowly leaked out of tiny holes in the body, however, necessitating a major repair job.


http://mochimochiland.com/2008/03/free-pattern-snails-and-slugs/

This is a link to the pattern on a charming site called Mochimochi Land. I approve, except I altered the pattern a bit (as I usually do), making the end of the snail shell a bit narrower (they're hard to curl under) and correcting a problem with the eyes.

Snails' eyes aren't placed the way they are here. They're on the ends of their icky, probing, viscous antennae.
The way the antennae look here, they're more like bunny ears. I made mine longer, with a bit of a blob on the ends so I could embroider on eyes.

The kids would never forgive me if these things were inaccurate.

(This doesn't look much like a real snail either. The movie I was talking about is called Turbo and it's about some sort of snail race. Actually, for their size, snails aren't slow. We've had the experience of looking at a snail in the back yard, going away for a few minutes, and coming back only to find it several feet away. All that determined slime-gliding must pay off.)

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My God. . . what's that in your pocket?

No, it's not the cute little green Geico Gecko with his Australian accent and ironic humour. It isn't the Aflac Duck, who seems to have broken a wing lately or something (but he only had one line anyway).

This is some sort of nightmarish mechanical squirrel that hands out pills.

Pink pills, Pepto-Dismal pills (as we used to call it). If they taste as sickish and paintlike as the original sickish pink liquid, then they'll make you throw up, which is one way I guess of relieving your stomach problems.

I heard once that during the war (and to my generation, The War meant only one thing) people used Pepto-Bismal as paint in a pinch, when nothing else was available. This tells me several things. One, that there must have been buckets of it lying around (why would it cost less than paint, or be more available?) Two, that there must have been a lot of sickish pink walls during the war. Three, that I think I'm going to be sick now.

And hey, waitaminute: the Pepto part I get, but Bismol? Does this stuff have bismuth in it? What the hell IS bismuth - isn't it radiactive, like Strontium 90? What's Strontium 90? Is that why it's pink?

(below. . . I hate to do this. . . I found out some facts about the bismuth, but could only post these few because I can't think about this any more.  I'm surprised this stuff hasn't been hauled off the market by the FDA.)

Dissolved Pills Mike Walker

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Most modern medicines are carefully synthesized organic molecules so potent that each pill contains only a few milligrams of the active ingredient. Pepto-Bismol is a fascinating exception, both because its active ingredient is bismuth, a heavy metal commonly used in shotgun pellets, and because there is a lot of it in each dose. So much, in fact, that I was able to extract a slug of bismuth metal from a pile of pink pills.

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Jesus was homeless. . . wasn't he?

'Survival' of United Church not a priority

(Blogger's note. I was a longtime, active member of the United Church until a sense of alienation drove me away a few years ago. The National Post article below (describing churches scrambling frantically to survive financial hardship) scored a direct hit. During my 15 years as a committed member, I saw churches trying to maintain cavernous old buildings, in dire debt because they couldn't make their mortgage payments. I saw them grabbing people practically as they walked in the door to join committees, shaming people if they couldn't or wouldn't tithe (often actively questioning their commitment if they felt their money was better spent giving directly to charities), and even driving away people who were contributing in a way that was outside the box. Such interlopers made everyone uneasy, as they seemed to be saying: look, guys, the old ways aren't working any more. What can we do that's new? 

So today I found this article online which was written SIX YEARS AGO. I wonder what has changed. Probably not much. Members are still probably sitting through endless annual meetings in which the main subject is financial doom and the reprehensible lack of members' commitment which has brought it about. I remember the gloomy, depressed feeling hanging over us as we left these meetings, shamed into believing we were letting our church down and even letting the United Church die because we didn't care.

Though everything in our culture has changed  so radically that it is practically unrecognizable, the United Church expects to go on operating in the same way it did in the 1950s. Why doesn't it work any more? Can you guess? But shame isn't the answer, nor is panic, scrambling to get the old ways back, or bitterness and gloom.

Ask yourself: how many churches did Jesus build? Only one, and it has no walls.)

By National Post October 13, 2007 

The leader of the United Church of Canada says his Church is too "preoccupied" with protecting its buildings, counting its money and recruiting members, and should instead devote its energies to helping the poor, the hungry and the sick beyond its walls.

Reverend David Giuliano, the Moderator, or spiritual head, of one of Canada's largest Protestant churches, has sent a letter to United Church congregations across the country, urging them to worry less about "buildings and budgets" and become more concerned about the "suffering of the world around us."

"Our hope is not for our survival or even growth," Rev. Giuliano writes. "I am praying that our preoccupation with getting people into church is transformed by a passion for getting the church out into the world.

"I am praying that we welcome strangers with a radical hospitality that sees in them the face of Christ -- not an 'identifiable giver' or a 'potential committee member.' "

Rev. Giuliano's plea comes in the midst of a difficult period for the Church and its roughly 600,000 members. Along with other mainstream Christian denominations, the United Church of Canada is experiencing a long decline in national membership; its congregational lists fell 39% between 1961 and 2001.

In July, the Church announced program cuts and layoffs at its national headquarters in Toronto due to financial pressures -- including the closure of its audiovisual production office and the cancellation of its award-winning current affairs television pro-gram Spirit Connection, which will air for the last time on Vision TV on Dec. 30.

In an interview this week Rev. Giuliano acknowledged, "There's a lot of anxiety in the Church about our institution --about money and numbers."

He said the Church, which once boasted more than a million active adherents, was for many generations a source of cultural and social authority in Protestant Canada.

"Many of us are reluctant to give up [that authority]--even if it doesn't really exist today --but I see the change as liberating, because we don't have to hold on to that any more."

"Jesus's followers were not a huge group of people, and they were not prosperous," he said.

"The measurement of a faithful community cannot be in its numbers."

Rev. Giuliano said that as one example of the Church's preoccupation with survival, too much money is spent maintaining Church buildings that serve little purpose other than to shelter a declining group of worshippers once a week.

"I think we have too much property," he said. "We have places where we have three United Churches within three blocks of each other."

He applauded one of the country's oldest congregations, First United Church in Ottawa, which sold its old building last year and now leases meeting and programming space from a nearby Anglican Church.

Rev. Giuliano likened the Church institution to a treasured car that a proud owner might keep in their driveway.

"The Church is a vehicle intended to get us somewhere. If you keep it fixed and washed and waxed but you don't ever take it anywhere, it doesn't have much purpose," he said.

"If what we do is ask the question, 'How do we get big or even survive,' I think we've lost our way," he said. "For me, the real question is, 'What does it mean to be faithful?' "

© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.

(Post-blog. I can hear the protests now. But it won't work. It won't work. Whether we like it or not, the world runs on money and it can't be any other way. End of discussion.

Show me ONE organization that has survived for more than a couple of years without significant financial support from its membership?

I have one, and it has many branches and exists in many forms. It was started in the 1930s because a doctor and a stockbroker couldn't stay sober. But together, with mutual insight and support, they found that they could. No one told them that survival without money was impossible, so they survived. They did more than survive: their tiny church of two became the most successful worldwide self-help organization in human history. And all this with no dues or fees, so that NO ONE would be excluded.

Maybe just a little bit closer to what Jesus had in mind.)

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