The Glass Character

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

They Cut My Beard and Forced Me to Eat It Remix

Niki Hoeky: get hip to the cogitation, ASSHOLES!

Way down Louisiana

Down in Cajun land

Folks got something goin'

Goes something like

Care folk a-t-tootsie

I wants to t'tie ya puppe'tame me

Dim ya on a scoobydoo

I dig you on'a scuba-die
I oh boo-ga-foo you

You ooh boog-a-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

Golly, squally miss Molly

Everything's copesetic now

Loog-a-boo, look at you

What I'd like to do to you girl

You woka-b-boo-you

You oh boog-a-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee
Mmmmm

Niki, Niki, Niki Hoeky

Pappy's doing time in the pokey

Your sister's on a trip

Your momma got hip

Little girl you're lookin' ok

You ooh boog-a-boo you

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

(musical interlude with humming)

You oh boo-ka-boo you

You oh boo-ka-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

Listen to me now
Niki, Niki, Niki Hoeky

Your pappy's doing time in the pokey

Your sister's on a trip

Your momma got hip

Little girl you're lookin' ok

You oh boog-a-boo you

You oh boog-a-foo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

I talk about you boo-la
(mm-mm-mm)
Come on I talk about you wisssh.
I talk about you boo-la
Talk about you wisssh.

NOTE. I sort of get this. And I'm sort of upset about it. It's the usual thing. When I try to find the lyrics to any popular song, then compare it to the actual (recorded) song, the internet version is always wildly wrong.

Well, no. Lamely wrong. The most unimaginitive reduction of a spicy pun into a plodding non-metaphor, because, gee, we just don't GET what he was trying to say here! It doesn't make sense, see. So this is sort of what he might of/ought to have said.

The weird thing is, these mondegreens (misheard lyrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen) are exactly the same on every lyric site. They do not come from the original, published sheet music. They can't. Someone listens to the song and transcribes it and writes down what they think it might be. If it doesn't make sense to them, they make something up.

This dulls down the brilliance or at least the spark of the original song, irons out any irony and removes all those pesky puns.

How this-all started was with something I saw on Facebook - I barely pay attention on Facebook any more, it's like filing my nails or eating a Popsicle, just something to do. It was a post that was sort of like "do you like new ideas? Do you love baking, walking dogs, picking your nose?" It was supposed to be a satiric take on those old ads to recruit dazzling original thinkers. A line jumped into my head, something I had not thought about since I was thirteen years old:

Get hip to the cogitation.

It came from a song, of course. From way back. But I could only remember bits of it, and not the title.

I followed it backwards by googling just that line, and got nothing at first. Then I added "your father's doing time in the pokey." Slowly it began to resolve into a recognizable song.

I found the lyrics on umpteen lyric sites, in fact, and they all said the same thing.

Niki, niki, niki, hoeky. Pappy's doing time in the pokey. Your mama died hip, your sister's on a trip.

Etc. etc., then the line:

Get hip to the CONSULTATION.

I couldn't believe it was consultation. Had I been wrong all those years? I found the original recording by P. J. Proby on YouTube, and listened for it.

NO, the word was not, never was, never would be, no matter WHO recorded it (and a lot of people did after P. J. Proby), "consultation". Though it was hard to make out, there was no "s" sound anywhere in the word. It was repeated several times. It was "cogitation". It was, and it is.

So why -

Every site you go on will say the same thing. Consultation. These things multiply, they divide, they seethe like gunky slimy pools of frog's eggs. Identical, WRONG tadpoles hatch out and turn into WRONG frogs who then lay the WRONG eggs.

Wrong.

All I can think of is that someone mondegreened the lyrics decades ago, then they somehow got glommed on to everyone's lyric site so that they would all be wrong in exactly the same (obnoxious, insulting, STUPID) way.

But we fixed it, I think. Not that anybody cares! The transcribed lyric for this was just so riddled with mistakes that I had to go over it line by line, playing the recording 8 or 9 times to make "corrections" to some sort of unintelligible patios, and then giving up.

I can't find anything about the provenance of this song. I can't, and I don't want to look at it any more. These could be Cajun-isms, they could, because Cajun is a language unto itself, but if it were Cajun I think I'd see more French mixed in with it. It's not unlike Acadian, the Canadian version, and at one point Cajuns and Acadians were one people. One went north, one went south, one went over the cuckoo's nest.

But I happen to know - I'd stake my very life on it - that no one has ever been hip to the CONSULTATION. That idea is now gasping its last breath while it writhes in the dust.

POST-BLOG COGITATION (NOT consultation), or at least a comparison. I tried to find an "authentic Cajun song", that is, without knocking my brains out, and thought of Doug Kershaw, who really was (is?) Cajun and had a few hits. I don't remember much about those songs, so googled the lyrics for the best-known one, looking for either French or the sort of gibberish that appeared in Niki Niki Hoeky.

Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo
Fell in love at the Fais Do Do
The pop was cold and the coffee chaud
For Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo

Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo
Everyone knows he was her beau
No other girl could ever show
So much love for Diggy Diggy Lo

That's the place they find romance
Where they do the Cajun dance
Steal a kiss with every chance
Show their love with every glance

Ah, yeah, no, I don't see any. The only "Cajunisms" are Fais Do Do (which is literally translated, if I remember my Grade 7 French, as "go to sleep"), "chaud" to rhyme with "do do", and "pop", the Canadian version of "soda". This might have some dim, far-gone Acadian origin, but I doubt it because there was no pop back in 1743.

Not much frazzlin' Cajun spice THERE, is there, boys and girls?

So on to that other one, the one Hank Williams did:

Well, goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me oh my oh
Me gotta go to pole the pirogue down the bayou
My Yvonne, the sweetest one, me oh my oh
I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

Yeah, jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo
'Cause tonight, I'm gonna see my ma cher amio
You pick guitar, you fill fruit jar and be gay-o
'Cause I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

Well, Thibadaux, well, Fontaineaux, the place is buzzin'
And kinfolks come to see Yvonne by the dozen
You dress in style, you go hog wild and be gay-o
'Cause I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

It's a little bit Cajun/Acadian. "Pole the pirogue" sounds like some Polish guy eating perogies, but then I could have my ethnicity wrong. More likely, it refers to a sort of pole barge, like a gondola. Yvonne, yeah, she's French. File gumbo, cher amio, all the other family names - and that's about it, no fancy stuff, no verbal yodelling or Golly, squally, miss Molly. So maybe Niki Hoeky is just a sort of nonsense rhyme, the sort of thing we clapped to in school, the cum-la, cum-la, cum-la feast-a that I was astonished to find on YouTube.

P. S. There are even more versions. I just found out. Burton Cummings pronounces it "condensation", whereas various Motown versions sound more like "conversation", and I've also heard "consolation". But NOBODY says "consultation".

(next day) OH WAIT! There's more.

Another contender for this mystery word is "conflagration", a supposed reference to lighting a joint. So now we've got it down to SIX choices, one of which is definitely wrong:

Cogitation
Condensation
Conversation
Consolation
Conflagration
(and, the ever-wrong) Consultation

Pick one. You might as well do it blindfolded. But when I hear it, I STILL hear "cogitation".

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Wobbly: the Muybridge weenie study

Part of the charm, or frustration, or Muybridge-ness of these stop-motion thingies is how wobbly it all is. Because these were NOT taken with a movie camera, because movie cameras did not even exist back then, perspective would change with each photograph, the grid would move jerkily, framing would tilt around crazily, and it all seemed to take place with an earthquake in the background.

I pasted this guy up merely to show that Muybridge was interested in the male organ. Or in the man with no clothes on, at least. There were not nearly as many weenie sketches, of course, as nubile young women with their breasts bouncing up and down. "That's it! Skip-a-rope, ladies, skip-a-rope!" I can't see him cheering on the weenie guy in quite the same way.

One interesting thing Muybridge did, and I'm not going to make an animation of it even though I love Victorian gowns with corsets, is compare locomotion in fully-dressed women with that of nude women. The corset does not just "make the waist smaller", as people think. It makes the spine ramrod-straight, pushes back the shoulders, forces the breasts upwards and the hips down, while ruthlessly squeezing the middle, reducing it by several (or many) inches. It's impossible to slouch in a corset - in fact, it can't be done - and almost as impossible to bend down to pick something up. That was why they had to have servants back then.

Victorian corsets: my favourite fetish wear

The Muybridge post was just an excuse to introduce some of my favorite Victorian corset photos with their gorgeous gowns. These are wearable art, though they must have weighed 25 pounds and been a misery in hot weather. They dragged the floor, so mice could have run up inside them, and probably did. When you look at the way these women's bodies have been sculpted, you can imagine the price of it, the eternal confining prison carried around all day. Many women even wore their corsets at night to keep their waists from expanding. No one asked their husbands what they thought of this.

This woman in particular has incredible reduction, her full and very molded bosom tapering to an impossibly tiny waist. She has a child, so somehow-or-other her husband must have fought his way through all that armour.

The detail on this gown makes me swoon. And the train! I don't know how women carried it off, but they did. The hair alone must have weighed down the head considerably, and taken forever to pin up.

A nice bit of corset porn, with the extreme reduction clearly visible. With the widespread ignorance of sexual matters during the Victorian era, men must have thought women's bodies really looked like this. Or else they didn't look.

Miss Lettice Fairfax. I'm not sure who she was, or if she was really named for a leafy green vegetable. But I've got a million of these. Every once in a while I have to trot just a few of them out.

And OH how I love corset ads! I have a couple hundred of them squirreled away. They were one of my very first internet image collections. This one delights me because one woman is swooning over another woman's corset. It IS beautiful, isn't it? Torture? Probably.

And look at this! I've had this delightful Ball's Corsets ad (Revolution in Corsets) for over ten years, but it was a grainy little thing and impossible to see the detail. I found this much larger, clearer version just now. The victorious wearer of the Ball's corset has her foot on the puny excuses sold by the competition. Meantime, a herd of women, presumably stripped of said corsets, stampedes away from the sword-and-standard-bearing Corset Warrior Goddess. Her shield assures us our money will be returned if we aren't completely satisfied. This is a gorgeous piece of Victorian artwork. And is that a cross I see in the background? Never saw that before. A detail of the battlefield, I presume. And I can also make out on the banner, "with coiled wire spring elastic section." Ye gods.

And here are a couple of charming artist's renditions.

So, have I tried these things myself? Would you be shocked at the answer if I said yes? I've had - I think - a total of four of them. Two of the four ended up being unwearable due to extreme discomfort, and one was too big. Too big just doesn't work. I have one left, a black one, which is sort of nice, but the problem (!) is, I've lost 30 - 35 pounds in the past year and now it doesn't do a thing for me. These are, by the way, toy corsets bought on Amazon, not the real thing which are custom-made and can cost hundreds of dollars. For the most part, corsets are fetish wear and the wearers go to extremes and wear them all the time, even to sleep in, and "waist train" down to some ridiculous thing like 16".

And no, there are no pictures. Actually, there are, but I don't have access to them and wouldn't post them even if I did. Sorry.

AND A BLOGGER'S P. S.!

This is one I kept coming across, a painting whose provenance was unknown to me. Thanks to Tin Eye Reverse Image, I'm able to feed the program an image (ANY image!) and it will match it to the same image on other sites. The advantage is that it's usually possible to find a larger, clearer and generally superior version. As happened here with a painting that turned out to have an impossibly long file name: John-Singer-Sargent-Mrs.-George-Batten-Mabel-Veronica-Hatch.

Go figure it out! But here she is, and it's about the most orgasmic of all my Victorian collection. And because the original painting was long and narrow (enough that for years I thought it was a cropped-out detail of a much larger painting), I am able to post the image in its original size.

Monday, June 6, 2016

Cheetah: another animation experiment

This animation, NOT based on a Muybridge study, was only six frames and fairly easy to make, but not so fluid as I'd like. For one thing, there was no real baseline or "ground" for the cat to run on. I had to photoshop the six images on to six squares, and it was hard to orientate the cat so that its leaps looked natural. First they were too flat, and then it began to boink up and down like a bunny in these unnatural-looking hops. Obviously, six drawings of a cheetah won't represent the incredible motion of such a cat. But at least it didn't bop all over the map in sudden wild jerks, like the Muybridge studies, in which the camera suddenly moved or the subject appeared to jostle around in the frame. After all, the Muybridge images were just that: still pictures that were meant to represent motion frozen at various stages. It was a kind of elongated stop-motion cartoon, and never meant to be strung together in the diabolical way I'm doing! Muybridge, creepy old pervert that he was, very likely got it on with those tender young maidens he photographed. He had, after all, killed a man in a jealous rage and got away with it, convincing the judge he was insane and then coolly walking away.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Skipping woman

Ding!

DING!

HIT IT!

WHACK IT!

CLICK. . . THE. . . PINK. . . LINK!

That's it. Click on those big pink letters at the top! Because if you DO, you'll be able to hear something I can't describe to anybody. Something I've been trying to find out about since some time in the late 1950s. A . . . ding.

Yes, it's a ding.

That's all it is. But it's a ding I often heard. A ding that happened during those TV station breaks, those top-of-the-hour things between shows, except I don't know what network it was. I don't think it was connected to that weird CBS aperture/eye or the NBC chimes or any of that. ABC? Who knows. A local station, something in Detroit? WJBK, perhaps?

I don't know.

But this is the ding. I recognized it at once and was amazed, because it proved to me I WASN'T crazy after all, though people had been looking at me that way for decades whenever I brought it up (maybe twice in 50 years). When I first stumbled on TV Party many, many moons ago, it was the first video site I ever found and seemed magical. I watched half-minute snippets of old TV shows, things I hadn't seen since I was ten, and wept as if I had found the Holy Grail. That was before YouTube came along and wiped the whole thing off the map.

But! This site, this TV Party which is now known as Classic TV because somebody else (TWO somebody elses, in fact) stole their name, still has this weird, almost eerie "ding" sound when you first go on the page. It's an opening salvo, or a greeting, or something like that. It's an old sound, probably a '50s sound from when I was really little and didn't understand anything, and nobody would explain it to me. So it got stored in the back of my brain along with a thousand other bits of broken information.

BUT.

The ding was never entirely forgotten. Though it lasts about a tenth of a second, somebody was able to find the ding on some tape somewhere and reproduce it, so that each time you go on the Classic TV site, you get the ding. 90% of people, even boomers like me, won't know what the hell they're listening to. I didn't either, until I got that creeping, squicked-out, time machine feeling I get when the 1950s come back to me, and once again I sit in the middle of the living room floor with my fat little legs splayed out in front of me. Three years old, and trying to figure out Ernie Kovacs.

Ding.

An exploration of the paranormal

I pared these down. No, really. There were about fifteen of them originally. I just couldn't stop.

This creepy little ad for Sugar Crisp (now called, I think, Golden Crisp) predates Sugar Bear and his cool, Dean Martinesque "can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" ditty.

There are three bears, of course. And you don't want to know these bears. They come swarming into your living room and cover your TV screen. They look like Ewoks, or, worse, something from the TV-movie version of Communion (remember Christopher Walken's dance?) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

My gifs have been slow and jerky lately. These are shorter ones, so I hope they do better. For some reason the animation in this just begged to be giffed. It's the creepiness of those bears with their jerky puppetry and cold, sociopathic eyes.

The reactions of little Janie and Johnny are almost as squick-inducing as the jerky ministrations of the Sugar Crisp Bears. Note the segue here: girl eats cereal; bear figure with pitcher appears for a nanosection in the right side of the frame, looking - if you pay attention - incredibly artificial; then the bear and the pitcher and Little Janie's bowl are shown in a different shot, so that they never all have to appear together. This saves having to combine live action with animation. The continuity here sucks. It took me a long time to figure out that this is supposed to be the same bowl/bear.

Bear talking. Creepy. Its fur seems to creep and crawl, indicating that it has fleas, or perhaps has been moved around by somebody's greasy fingers as they take each picture and string them together.

It's that jittering, that nervous, diddery thing that makes them so unsettling. They almost seem to be on the wrong speed. That, and the big staring eyes.

"Faster, kids. . . eat FASTER!" That weird sparkly thing is a big chunk of sugar with paranormal powers which bends these children to the bear's evil will. These ads often bragged about how you could (and should) eat Sugar Crisp "like candy". This seems horrible until you realize that Sugar Crisp probably had a fraction of the sugar content of Lucky Charms or Obese-berry or whatever-the-hell they have today.

Like I said. I boiled these down. I could have gone on forever. This is the sort of animation where you can repeat one frame. I don't know if this was stop motion or what, but it's motion that I wish would stop.