British slang for "christmas present"
I'm only getting one bloody crimbo pressie this year!
Monday, January 5, 2015
Dupes, dopes, Doyle, and a leprechaun in Alabama
You know how one thing leads to another? No? Neither do I, it's only January 5. I haven't started ANY of the things I've resolved to do. Whatever they are. Meantime, I was watching this thing, y'know, this thing on TV called Mysteries at the Museum. . . quasi-educational, sort of, but it talked about these little girls who took photos of "fairies" about 100 years ago, photos so fake they would be laughable even then, and - somebody fell for them, making you wonder what sort of IQs these literary types really have. I don't want to paraphrase this cuz I'm lazy, so here is a chunk of an article about it. I haven't shown this to my husband yet, who worships Sherlock Holmes and everything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. I don't want to disillusion him and reveal to him the fact that his hero was just another blithering Englishman with the intelligence of a katydid.
Doyle was a credulous dupe for various kinds of nonsense. He not only believed in spiritualism and all of the phenomena of the seance room, but he also believed in fairies.
In 1917, two teenage girls in Yorkshire produced photographs they had taken of fairies in their garden. Elsie Wright (age 16) and her cousin Frances Griffiths (age 10) used a simple camera and were said to be lacking any knowledge of photography or photographic trickery.
Frances and the Fairies, July 1917, taken by Elsie. Midg Quarter camera at 4 feet, 1/50 sec., sunny day.
Photo No. 1, above, taken in July, showed Frances in the garden with a waterfall in the backround and a bush in the foreground. Four fairies are dancing upon the bush. Three have wings and one is playing a long flute-like instrument. Frances is not looking at the fairies just in front of her, but seems to be posing for the camera. Though the waterfall is blurred, indicating a slow shutter speed, the fairies, are not blurred, even though leaping in the air.
Here's a more detailed look at this picture.
Photo No. 2, taken in September, showed Elsie sitting on the lawn reaching out her hand to a friendly gnome (about a foot high, with wings) who is stepping forward onto the hem of her wide skirt.
Photographic experts who were consulted declared that none of the negatives had been tampered with, there was no evidence of double exposures, and that a slight blurring of one of the fairies in photo number one indicated that the fairy was moving during the exposure of 1/50 or 1/100 second. They seemed not to even entertain the simpler explanation that the fairies were simple paper cut-outs fastened on the bush, jiggling slightly in the breeze.
Doyle and other believers were also not troubled by the fact that the fairy's wings never showed blurred movement, even in the picture of the fairy calmly posed suspended in mid-air. Apparently fairy wings don't work like hummingbird's wings.
Hardly anyone can look at these photos today and accept them as anything but fakes. The lighting on the fairies does not match that of the girls. The fairy figures have a flat, cut-out appearance. But spiritualists, and others who prefer a world of magic and fantasy accepted the photos as genuine evidence for fairies.
Three years later, the girls produced three more photos.
Photo No. 3 "Francis and the Leaping Fairy" showed a slightly blurred profile of Frances with the winged fairy suspended in mid-air just in front of her nose. The background and the fairy are not blurred.
Photo No. 5 "Fairies and their Sunbath" is the only one that looks as if it could have been an accidental or deliberate double exposure.
The girls said they could not photograph the fairies when anyone else was watching. No one else could photograph the fairies. There was only one independent witness, Geoffrey L. Hodson, a Theosophist writer, who claimed to see the fairies, and confirmed the girls' observations "in all details".
 |
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. |
|---|
Arthur Conon Doyle not only accepted these photos as genuine, he even wrote two pamphlets and a book attesting the genuineness of these photos, and including much additional fairy lore. His book, The Coming of the Fairies, is still in print, and some people still believe the photos are authentic. Doyle's books make very interesting reading even today. Doyle's belief in spiritualism, convinced many people that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was not as bright as his fictional creation.
Illustration for Alfred Noyes' poem "A Spell for a Fairy" in Princess Mary's Gift Book by Claude Shepperson. (Hodder and Stoughton, no date, c. 1914, p. 101ff). Compare the poses of these figures with those of three of the fairies in Photo No. 1. The figures have been rearranged and details of dress have been altered, but the origin of the poses is unmistakable.
A curious fact is that in this book, a compilation of short stories and poems for children by various authors, there's a story, "Bimbashi Joyce" by Arthur Conan Doyle! Surely he received a copy from the publisher. If Doyle had noticed this picture, and if he had the sort of perceptiveness he attributed to Sherlock Holmes, he might have concluded that the Cottingley photographs were fakes. But, maybe not. Believers are good at seeing what they believe, and not seing things that challenge their beliefs. Or perhaps the close match of drawing and photos is a supernatural psychic coincidence.
On the matter of Conan Doyle's gullibility, Gilbert Chesterton said
...it has long seemed to me that Sir Arthur's mentality is much more that of Watson than it is of Holmes.
It is worth noting that Doyle was said to have an intimate relationship with Lucky, the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, later made infamous by an interminable series of cartoon ads for cereal which was nothing more than dye and a torrent of sugar. When he found pink hearts, yellow moons and green clovers floating around in his cereal bowl one morning, Doyle believed he had found irrefutable scientific proof for his beliefs and published a series of seventeen volumes entitled How I Got Lucky. In honor of his remarkable literary achievement, Doyle was granted an earlhood and crowned Lord Snuffleburg the Stupid. Lucky the Leprechaun was played in the movie version by Sir Basil Rathbone.
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Thought for the day, if not the century
Robert Louis Stevenson
Happy Thought
From Child's Garden of VersesThe world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Saturday, January 3, 2015
All the ads, pick one, buy book
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Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
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It took me years to write, will you take a look
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Smoking fish
It's the Humphrey Bogart of the fish plaque world. And whatever did happen to all the fish plaques? You know, those singing fish. I still have a singing lobster, but it may be the only one left. It's a non-smoker.
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Thursday, January 1, 2015
IT'S COLORFORMS!
Happy freakin' New Year. I'm sitting here right now listening to what sounds like a war zone outside my window, while I sit dolefully at my computer thinking, jeez, I should be in bed by now. But it's 2015, it must be, or my computer wouldn't be telling me so.
This is one of those big muddy messy compilations of old TV toy ads. I wouldn't even throw this at you - and for God's sake, don't watch all of it, it's a whole hour of your time that you'll never get back! No, start at about 5:30 and go to about 16:00. Almost all the ads in this segment are for Colorforms, which for the uninitiated were little pieces of vinyl that stuck to each other with a static charge. Started off as dolls with clothes that clung to them, and went from there. A few of these ads are just headspinningly bizarre, including one where a roomful of people drunkenly laugh at nothing. In another spot, someone makes ludicrous "breeeeeep!" noises while abstract shapes move all over the place, seemingly by themselves. But my favorite is the Popeye one, in which some adult putting on a kid's voice tries to sound convincingly natural. The Dad sounds equally brain-damaged, and the Popeye Colorforms are so poor I could cut out better shapes freehand with dull left-handed scissors.
It was a different world then, vastly different. Better, worse? I'm not too fond of the one I'm in, but it's the one I'm in. Happy 2015. Or at least, I hope it will be.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
The Unborn: full body silicone baby boy
It's getting late, I'm feeling sick, but had to share this with my Beloved Readers. I have been doing a serious study of the squickfest that is the Reborn Doll, but this all-silicone version, quivery, rubbery and virtually transparent, takes the freaking cake. It's called the Full Body Silicone Baby Doll, and it's unlike anything you will ever want to see again.
One might almost be convinced this is a real baby, until she starts bending his arms backwards at a 90-degree angle.
Let's diaper the sweet little son-of-a-gun, so his teeny rubber wee-wee won't keep quivering like that.
Quick! Call Child Protection Services! Silicone baby in trouble!
Hey, lady, listen to me. That baby ain't breathin'.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Bonus link! More pictures of full-body silicone baby dolls. Warning! Don't go alone.
http://www.anhuangbabies.com/full-body-silicone-babies
Post-blog thoughts. Like the Grinch, I just had an awful idea. There could only be one way these babies could be manufactured with such eerie, even grotesque realism. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? A cast? A mold? And how would a cast be made? Let's not consider the possibilities. We look at Victorian post-mortem photography with repugnance, and yet it looks like someone is taking a dead baby and making a cast from it, then squirting in a bunch of pink silicone. Often these dolls are "recommended" to bereaved parents as a substitute, but then the possibilities grow even more macabre. Cloning pets is a new industry that is booming, but is that much more extreme than casting babies? The next step will leap across the gap: cloning a dead baby so that the parents receive an exact duplicate of the one that has died.
This idea is much creepier than those tired old stories about dolls coming to life. Even this quivering little homunculus doesn't come anywhere near the horror of a cloned baby.
I feel a short story coming on.
Post-post-blog thoughts: The internet is both great for me and awful for me, for it takes only seconds to find a treasure trove of pictures of my latest obsession. There are people who make a fat living from creating these things. Often it's carefully rationalized: well, men get obsessed with model trains, don't they? Yes, but model trains don't look so lifelike they seem to be ready to cry at any minute.
Come to think of it, there are distinct advantages over a real human being. You have complete control here. This baby does what you want. Period. It never changes. It can become a focal point for all your expectations, all your love. I have already read about marriages breaking up over this, when love for an inanimate mold of silicone supercedes love of a messy, ageing, cranky, needy, "real" human being. Though reborns seem needy, they are not. They can be put aside for years if you want, or taken into the bath with you.
And they never die. This is a real bonus for women who have lost babies. They never die because they were never born, in spite of their weird-sounding name.
I won't get into the weird "extras" some of these have. And I don't want to think about why they are there.
And as a kicker. . .
Monday, December 29, 2014
Stella and Ella: Public Access Gold!
As you are well aware - OK, then, you aren't because you never read this - I am always on the lookout for good public access kitsch. This is some of the finest I've ever seen: Stella and Ella, identical twins in their 70s with oddly unlined, expressionless faces, doing a "panno-mahn" to Bing Crosby groaning Silent Night. As we find out in the introduction, one of them is dead, which explains a lot (though they may be mistaken about that: to me, it looks as if BOTH of them are). They wear white choir gowns and do a lot of outstretched-arm stuff. There is this "local radar" weather warning thing which I at first thought was some new YouTube feature. It never goes away and lends a bizarre stained-glass effect, along with the orange fibreglass curtains.
These things aren't parody, which is what makes them so fascinating. They are sincere efforts at worship. Of what, I am not sure. No doubt both ladies are dead now, wearing their white crimplene gowns permanently in that great Public Access Station in the Sky.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
The Interview: the day the lights went out
Power Outage During Final Moments of 'The Interview' Startles Audience
Dec 26, 2014, 3:55 PM ET
By MEGHAN KENEALLY
MEGHAN KENEALLY More From Meghan »
Digital Reporter
Allwood Cinemas 6 in Clifton, New Jersey appears in this screen grab from Google Maps.
Google Maps
Everyone knew what was coming -- the controversial death scene in the movie about a fictitious assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un -- but then the lights cut out.
One packed movie theater was left bewildered when a sudden power outage struck 1,300 customers in Clifton, New Jersey, including Allwood Cinemas at a critical moment towards the final moments during a screening of "The Interview."
Barry Cohen, who attended the 1:30 p.m. screening with his wife and grown son, said they "had no idea" what was going on.
'The Interview' Opens to Singing, Sold-Out Crowds as Sony CEO Explains His Decision to Show Film
What People Think After Seeing 'The Interview'
"When it lasted more than five seconds, we though that maybe it was part of the movie and then we realized that it wasn't," Cohen told ABC News.
Even though a power outage would have caused confusion in any circumstance, the threat issued by a hacking group that it would attack theaters screening "The Interview" led to understandably hyped tensions, moviegoers said.
"Some people ran out of the theater," Cohen said. "There was another couple near us, the woman turned to her husband and said, 'Let's get out of here!' She didn't even wait for a refund or anything."
Allwood Cinemas did not immediately respond today to a request by ABC News for comment, but a spokesperson for the power company, Public Service Electric and Gas Co., confirmed that there was an outage in Clifton on Thursday afternoon.
"At 4:01 p.m. on Thursday, December 25, a downed wire on Market St. caused approximately 1,300 customers to lose power in Clifton. PSE&G crews arrived on the scene and restored power to all customers at around 4:15 p.m.," PSE&G spokesperson Lindsey Puliti said in a statement.
Cohen said that after realizing that the blackout was not part of the movie, he went out into the lobby -- where the lights were still on -- and asked for a refund once it was clear that the theater was not going to be able to rewind the scene to fill in the gap.
He and his family got refunds, went home, and downloaded the movie on Google Play so that they could see the final 15 minutes, Cohen said.
"Anything Seth Rogen does is going to have gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex scenes, gratuitous baseless humor at times," Cohen said. "I give it an A-minus."
BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. This was a strange one, but no stranger than anything else I've heard about this situation. I'm just glad I wasn't there. It all screams of Halloween prank, fun-house effects designed to thrill and chill and gather attention from the media. And apparently, it worked.
The audience should just play along. Be good sports. After all, they knew there was still some shred of danger from going to this thing, so the laugh's on them, right? I'm not too sure about that.
This whole thing is just getting too creepy for me. It wasn't a good concept from the start. Who thought it was a good idea to make a gross, frat-house-style comedy about a dictator with dangerous power? Did anyone actually think this through?
Then the whole "Sony hack" thing, which Sony will eventually have to admit was either an inside job or the work of some 19-year-old high school dropout with an IQ of 276.
But it was still a lousy idea. Incendiary. Maybe this is how far you have to go to get people's asses in seats. There has to be a trumped-up element of scandal (someone insulting Angelina Jolie's eyebrows, or something equally horrendous), a sense of lurking danger. But danger may lurk nonetheless.
Wouldn't that be ironic - if the world ended, not by climate change, the gathering storms and surging floods washing away the Biblical weight of human sin - but repercussions from a bad comedy.
But on second thought: isn't life itself a bad comedy, one that even lacks a plausible ending? Few lives wind up neatly. As a matter of fact, in most cases, the same thing happens as in Allwood Cinemas 6 in Clifton, New Jersey. Everything just goes black.
P. S. I just noticed something when I read the piece again. When customers dashed out of the dark theatre and into the lobby, THE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON. Emergency lights, maybe? I don't get it. Why would there be emergency lights in a movie theatre?
Friday, December 26, 2014
Creepiest doll EVER?? You decide
This time, no gifs. This time, every precaution must be taken to keep the windows from blowing out and the ceiling caving in. The dead shall live, the corpses shall rise from the cemetery, and the world will listen, as Baby Saucy begins to speak! Talk about twisting someone's arm to get them to do something - to get any sort of facial expression out of this thing, you practically have to wrench its arm off. Some of the videos make such hideous sounds that - oh well, here's another one for you.
I post these only because it's a little bit difficult to describe just what is going on here. Technically, I can't begin to explain what's happening. There must be some sort of awful mechanism grinding around behind the skin of her Stepford Baby face, pulling it this way and that. The crunching, cracking, popping noises suggest cartilage being twisted, limbs pulled out of their sockets and bones snapped in two.
I can imagine some little girl getting one of these on Christmas morning. No, I can't.
(I lied about the gifs.)
Are you in Crimbo Limbo?
- bitchy resting face
- poopsock
- control shift n
- thot
- swag
- cenosillicaphobia
- selfie
- morning hitler
- troweling
- lunk
- crimacious
- crimaliens
- Crimanity
- crimansqua
- Crimany
- Crimany-A
- crimate
- Crimax
- crimbalba
- Crimbaloid
- Crimble
- crimbles
- Crimbo
- Crimbo Limbo
- crimbo pressie
- crimbo (short for Crimbabwe) also kno...
- crimbot
- Crimbus
- Crimcheck
- Crimdalf
- 1. crimbo pressie
Thursday, December 25, 2014
When is a blackbird white?
As I prepared to adopt another bird (more later!), an old song about a bird kept playing in my head. A French Canadian song. A song I had heard only once. A song I thought was attached to a piece of animation. The animation being done by the legendary Canadian film innovator Norman McLaren. But do you think I could find it?
I had no idea of the title. All I had was "French Canadian folk song about a bird" - specifically, a bird whose body parts drop off, then multiply. Strange?
But not if it's Norman McLaren, the mystic pioneer of animation who was known to draw images and even a sound track directly onto film stock.
Where did I see this? On TV? In school? It might have been at Bondi, the mystical vacation spot of my youth, where on Friday nights we saw films, not on a TV but projected on a screen. This was up in the "rec room", a woody-smelling place meant for rainy days (which was seldom used). All I remember is a ping-pong table, some old 78 rpm records (including the complete score for South Pacific), and a wheezy old organ you pumped with your feet.
But ah, those Friday nights! Often the movies were from the National Film Board, a Canadian institution which spewed out educational films, movies that were Good For Us (and taught us something, too!). But there was also this wacky aspect of the NFB, the animation. (Canadian animated shorts still win a disproportionately high number of Oscars.). McLaren's work was known for being surreal to the point of dadaism.
With this one, I remembered the sorrowful Gallic minor-key tune and even the French lyrics vividly, and the poor bird made of white chalk lines with its body parts flying all over the place. But what was the song called, what was the name of the film, and (more to the point) could I dig it up on YouTube and see it again?
The internet never ceases to fill me with wonder. It didn't take long, after all: I tracked it down on (naturally) an NFB web site/film archive. I knew it as soon as I saw the title. It's called La Merle (The Blackbird), even though, ironically (though not for McLaren), it's white.
Post-bird reflections. I thought of one more Bondi special, called Glooscap Country. Found it easily, as this was something every Canadian schoolchild was required to see. I remembered the narrator, and beautiful scenes, and just one line: "Amethyst. The eye of Glooscap." And by God, not only did I find the movie - I found the line. So one more bit of seemingly-irrelevant information rattling around in my head has clunked into place.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
WTF did I just see???
The creepiness of dolls is a topic I return to again and again, just because I haven't squeezed all the squick out of it yet. Not by a long shot.
This all started with a '60s ad for Baby Echo, which took me to Baby Secret, which then landed me squarely in the Oz of Doll-land, that place where women (and men? Who knows, maybe they're out there but still in the closet) conspire to treat the inanimate as not only animate, but precious and irreplaceable.
Wikipedia talks about reborn dolls in a way which is obviously years out of date. There is no mention of the newer all-silicone, rubbery pink dolls that can be plunked into the bath water (as opposed to the older models with stuffed cloth bodies that have to be wiped down). It refers to the reborn phenomenon as being the province of bereaved, pathetic, disturbed older women. My research contradicts that. It's even more disturbing to me how young most of these "mothers" are: in their twenties or even their teens. Is this the "new parenthood", I wonder - no mess, no fuss, no pesky stages of maturation, just an endless, powerless babyhood? For unlike a kid, a reborn baby will never answer you back. Or answer you - at all.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of YouTube videos of women with their "reborn" dolls, taking them for walks, bathing them, buying clothes for them, etc. Some of them would class themselves as collectors, though this is often a mask for a fetish. "Dollers" insist there's nothing harmful about any of this. Isn't it normal and natural to treat a quivering pink blob of silicone like an infant?
As with not being able to look away from a train wreck, I've sat through lots of these. Mostly they're really long, maybe fifteen minutes of giving Little Presley her bath, or outlining Baby Grayson's morning routine: "Grayson! What do you want for breakfast this morning?" (Grayson is the one who gets sick and has to go to the doctor. What doctor would be willing to play along with this - a plastic surgeon who implants silicone breasts?). Many feature the grand opening of the box from eBay that the doll comes in.
But the Birth of Ellie Mae video takes the proverbial birthday cake, and the candles too. It's a youngish woman actually going into labour and giving birth to her blob of silicone, depicted in excruciating detail. I thought most of us gave up this sort of "role-playing" when we were ten years old. But apparently not. Apparently there is a whole class of adults who never grow up, who continue to "play" like Peter Pan, to play at babies, bondage, and a whole lot of other stuff I know nothing about. Last time I checked, relying on that kind of extreme behaviour to cope with life meant you weren't coping very well, if at all. But now - am I sounding old here? (yes) - it seems that anything goes. Nothing is a perversion any more. The line is blurring.
I couldn't watch all of this, and I don't advise YOU to watch all of this - just skip through it for the high- or low-lights. I have a million questions. . . Do her "friends" watch this sort of thing? Are they into it too, or is this solitary? Is it a sort of sex tape for silicones, made mainly for the participant's pleasure? Do these women already have children, do they want children, do they LIKE children, or have they lost a child and are looking for a substitute?
Why does it vex me so much to see a video of a woman opening her reborn dolls' Christmas presents, fingering the new outfits as if trying to see if they'll still fit in six months? Why does it chill me to hear middle-aged women go on and on about "hanging out all day long" with their "babies", or taking them to the Walmart to see what sort of reaction they'll get (knowing they'll shock the shit out of people, a form of sadism which most would probably vehemently deny)? I have even heard stories of women leaving their reborns in cars for long periods of time, as a weird kind of "bait". It's an unhealthy, even creepy attention-getting device which is one of the less-discussed aspects of the subject, mostly because people don't know how the fuck to respond to all this bizarre shit.
I always object to people who refer to their gerbils or Golden Retrievers as their "babies", but on second thought, I think they should call them whatever they want to. At least they are alive and sensate. They have a pulse. Shouldn't that be a minimum requirement for a baby?
Post-blog revelations. I'm writing this later, in the new year. I notice the original YouTube video has been taken down, for reasons unknown. Was there too much flak from those who are creeped out by the silicone baby phenomenon? Did the user realize it was just too over-the-top to film a "role-playing" video about giving birth to a gelatinous, inanimate blob? I'm not sure. Most of the comments for these kinds of videos are positive, believe it or not - breathless ooohs and aaaahs over how beautiful Little Kaylee is, and how they want one exactly like it. Which can no doubt be had.
You'll have to take my word for it how strange this was. Believe me! I saw it with my own eyes.
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