Ghost birds of Maui

We remember these graceful birds (which at first we thought were herons) from other trips to Maui. They're cattle egrets, semi-tame birds which hang around condo developments waiting for the maintenance person to trim hedges and stir up the best-tasting bugs. I was sad to hear that islanders dislike these birds, which were imported to eat some sort of specific pest, with the usual results (eating all the wrong things: nobody handed them the menu when they arrived). But I think they're lovely, graceful ghosts. They can come and eat in my back yard any time.

Dr. Phil's spazz attack

Black snowflakes

How to describe a toothache

The only time in my life I ever had a severe toothache, the pain was so bad I wanted to die and was already planning my suicide. This was an unrelenting agony which was ruthlessly, relentlessly eating all the nerves in my face. Day and night it continued. I barely slept, and those rare times I did, awakening brought the pitiless, demonic force roaring back. My dentist was "away", with no date for coming back, so I had to have an emergency root canal (at a time when I barely knew what a root canal WAS), all done in one very long session with a dentist I didn't know. When you're in that kind of pain, your deliverer becomes a shining figure, and I think I fell in love as the novocaine took effect. During this very long session, I had to pee so badly I thought I was going to burst, but my mouth was so frozen and full of rubber dams and clamps and cold metal implements that I could only gesticulate wildly: FIRST LETTER! P???

I survived it, but I remember that only several belts of whiskey would even take the edge off it. I no longer indulge in whiskey, and I hated it even then. But it made me realize why dentists in the Westerns used to give cowboys a bottle for anaesthesia. The followup to this was almost as awful as the toothache, for I developed facial neuralgia from having my jaw cranked wide open for five hours. 

The following are just a few words I found to describe dental pain. Click on each word for a definition:

severe, bad, violent, terrible, acute, painful, dull,excruciating, dreadful, slight, chronic, awful, neuralgic,sudden, nagging, worst, maxillary, rheumatic, constant,mild, spontaneous, real, persistent, horrible, intense,simple, ordinary, agonizing, unbearable, unconscious,nervous, frightful, sharp, non, perpetual, mental,intermittent, prolonged, eternal, grievous, horrid, frequent,inflammatory, hunger, occasional, neuritic, mandibular,spiritual, comic, continuous, incessant, agonising, fearful,permanent, irish, beastly, intolerable, miserable, incipient,genuine, appalling, terrific, impromptu, menstrual,diplomatic, giant, royal, odontogenous, continual,continued, nasty, unprovoked, wretched, mysterious,called, unendurable, incurable, unremitting, inveterate

How W. C. Fields got away with this scene in his infamous short The Dentist is anyone's guess. In fact, the Hays office vetoed its release, but like a stag reel it still did the rounds and survives to this day. The myth is that Fields didn't do sexual comedy, but it's plain that he did. His morals weren't exactly pure. He had Carlotta Monti stashed away, for God's sake, and refused to marry her even after fifteen years of service, and when he died she was completely left out of his will. Didn't get a penny. It was sort of like she didn't exist. That's not funny, but it was common behaviour back then to pretend there was no mistress. I even saw her briefly a few nights ago in a Fields movie called Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Was she paid for this cameo, a tiny taste of an acting career she longed for and never had? Well, what do you think?

"Why I Hate My Pillow" (Amazon review)

(Below is one of the best reviews I've ever seen, of any product, in any medium. I just had to dedicate a whole post to it. My Pillow ads are the most irritating things on the face of the planet, especially that inane little jingle that sounds like it should have been on the Jack Benny radio program in 1940. Even more surprising is the fact that nobody seems to like My Pillow. But this negative review was the best negative review I have ever seen, so I quote it here in its entirety.)


As Seen on TV My Pillow Maximum comfort and support (2)
by As Seen On TV

Price:$119.99+ Free shipping

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1.0 out of 5 stars Hated this pillow.
By Kindle Customer on December 15, 2017
Verified Purchase

REVIEW. Hated this pillow. Just like all loose filled pillows, I woke up with a large dent and my head on the actress.

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CONSUMER REPORT.  I was somewhat taken aback, especially in light of the fact that the ads for this thing run about fifty times a day on KVOS (the oldies TV station), to learn from my hero James White (the Freakin' Review guy) that My Pillow, the corporation, found itself in serious legal hot water last year. 

Though this seems standard with As Seen on TV products, they made all sorts of outlandish claims that this pillow could do everything but cure cancer. These fell under the heading of "unsubstantiated claims". They also perpetrated some minor fraud on the public by not making good on their two-for-one deals. I found an alarming number of one-star reviews on Amazon, mostly of the "this-is-a-terrible-pillow" variety, but this one was one of the most delicious things I've ever read. This might actually HELP a product's sales if it actually happened. 

My gecko encounter on Maui

This might just be my favorite of the hundred or so videos I took on Maui in December. This gecko was so majestic, and so huge, that he might not even have been a gecko. He might have been an anole, a similar-looking creature which grows to twice the size. I'm trying to figure out if this one had sticky pads on its toes. What do you think? It might be an anole, after all, but he looked like velvet, and regarded me with what seemed like intelligent eyes. OK, I know that's fanciful, but he was just adorable, and stayed for a long time (again, most un-gecko-like: most of them are seen only for a split-second as they dart back into a crack in the wall). The creature had a tail so long it wouldn't even fit in the frame, and was always partially hidden behind something. I'm still trying to figure out the size of it - at least a foot long nose-to-tail, perhaps longer. Geckos run four, six inches or so. As a kid I loved loved LOVED reptiles and amphibians, had a chameleon (actually, an anole), a fire newt, and a whole collection of frogs, toads and turtles, not to mention a snake or two. I longed for a salamander, but never found one. This gecko would have sent me into rhapsodies of joy. I just had to wait for it, I guess, though waiting more than 50 years for something can be tiring.

When my cat is sad

Enchanted Doll Fantasy

Do your ears hang low?

Or does any other part of your body? There's an infomercial for that. I've had a run of them lately - and they're great material for gifs, such as these (below) demonstrating what happens when you use these fabulous whatever-they-ares - earring lifters or whatever. MagicBax! They're just a special backing for pierced earrings that holds the earring more firmly in place, but as far as I'm concerned, such products already exist, and you can get them at Dollarama or Dollar Tree for a buck or so.

These look very uncomfortable to me, as they're a sort of bulky metal thing. But oh, the women using them look ecstatic! One of the major existential problems of their lives (how to hold their earrings on) has been solved forever.

I'm reminded, for some reason, of the old Playtex bra commercials, demonstrating the power of the bra "to lift and separate". Digging a little deeper into this strange topic, I find dozens or maybe even hundreds of videos of "how to wear pierced earrings without piercing your ears". The one I just looked at, just too absurd to re-post, had an attractive-looking young woman literally wrapping flesh-colored adhesive tape around her earlobes - like those thick fabric bandages you used to see - and sticking the earring through it. It was - I can't speak. She said, "Oh, girls, this is FABULOUS! If you brush your hair over it, it's even better!" My God.

The injured look was never my thing, but maybe it would be OK if seen from far away, like on the catwalk or competing in a pageant or something. Not likely to happen to me any time soon.

I have a ton of earrings collected and given to me over decades, and the rare time I try to wear them, I can't find my left earlobe at all - it seems to have shrunk, for some reason - and the hole in it is even harder to locate. If I do manage to get a backing over the post, it won't come off. Once my husband had to take pliers and wire cutters to remove one that had somehow got bent out of shape.

Someone once told me the sure-fire way to remove an earring backing from a stubborn wire was to coat the post in lube.

I could make a joke here, but I guess I won't.

Maui: from day to dusk

Night falls incredibly fast in the tropics. No way could I capture it, but I tried! Once I had brought all my videos home for editing, I realized I had in fact filmed through a keyhole, resulting in a postage stamp. 

But for all that, the videos stir some memories of a heavenly-sweet time. It's likely to be our last "big" trip for a while, perhaps forever. I did not realize until I got home that the sassy black birds I kept seeing and hearing were mynah birds. Every time I saw one it was singing a different song, with its uncanny ability to mimic everyone and everything around it. It was even more surprising to find out that this was yet another non-native species brought in to control pests, resulting in even worse problems (levelling fields of crops, plastering the roofs of condos with guano). Still, I loved the guys, screeching, strutting around and owning the place.

I could watch these all day

Watch them, not make them.

Gershwin: by George, by Bling!

By George, by jing, by God-almighty, I found these Blingees in a George Gershwin file and decided they were too hokily cute not to post. 

I went through a Gershwin phase two or three years ago, and I can't  say it's over, since it changed me. In most of them, you see The Great Man, the Gershwin who struck a pose, whether he was (supposedly) at the piano or (supposedly) talking to his girl friend. And even: See George. See George at the beach. These are ALL posed, the products of publicity, and the early ones bespeak an androgyny that I never knew existed.

Some say Gershwin was gay, others don't care (me!), others see his flexibility in who he wanted to spend time with. Kay Swift, a brilliant composer on her own, was one of his longest and closest relationships, and he dedicated the musical Oh, Kay! to her. In fact, I've always seen that title not as whimsy but as a cry from the heart. 

Gershwin eventually ended up sad and frustrated by the public's unwillingness to embrace his full genius (the lamentably misunderstood Porgy and Bess). They seemed to want to push him back to Tin Pan Alley. They were simply more comfortable with the old George. He served their needs, while his true genius seethed inside him. 

Meantime, a horrendous, horrible thing was slowly growing in his head: a monstrous tumour which eventually claimed him, while his doctors insisted his escalating agony and shocking disability was "psychological". So psychological that when he was in the bathroom, he fell down dead, or so close to it that helping him was impossible. I see him leaving his body, hovering around the ceiling somewhere, looking down while the impotent, idiot doctors cracked his skull open like a walnut, finding a grapefruit-sized tumour that had probably been growing there for years. A sad end for a man still in his 30s, the Mozart of his time. We still have the music, but as prodigious as his output was, it was only a tiny fragment of what he kept in his idea file, his treasure box. A box that, tragically, would not be opened until it was too late.