The Troll Doll Channel: FUN Family Unboxing of TWO exotic trolls!

We did another fun family unboxing of two trolls, including one that turned out to be from ICELAND (though I originally thought Lithuania). So my international collection includes trolls from Ireland, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, West Germany and Iceland. There are very likely a few more, but when you order them you don't see where they're from, and I don't always look closely at the box for the return address. Several more are from that Crystal Creations one which says Ireland, but I though I saw a US address. At any rate, I've just ordered another one, in hopes we'll have them over again for another hilarious time. 

World's creepiest sound recordings: talking dolls, sirens and screams

 

I wasn't going to add any text to these - they're largely self-explanatory, but just looking at them, let alone listening to them, is so distressing that I have to say something, in the nature of whistling in the dark.

This first one is a distillation of sound recordings from a site called, I think, planecrashes.com. These are the best, or should I say, the worst of them. I don't know why my mind is so dark, but I must not be the only one or there wouldn't be so many of these things online. I don't know of a person who hasn't at least thought about what it would be like to be in a crash. But to be responsible for all those people. . . The most disturbing aspect, aside from the screams and that sickening crunching noise, is the "whoop, whoop, PULL UP! Whoop, whoop, PULL UP!" alarm that comes on - too late for most of them, as it turns out.

These are weird things, an experiment that failed. In 1888 Thomas Edison decided to capitolize on the success of his newly-invented phonograph by implanting a tiny little phonograph in the belly of a horrible doll. And it said horrible things in a horrible voice, but only for a short time - because they all broke. Very quickly. And all the customers wanted their money back. But we still have these hideous recordings, which I assume are original.

I can't really explain or describe the doomsday feeling I get from this recording. It makes no sense - it's just sounds, isn't it? I even know what the original sound was. I remember dial-up (which now seems like the lamest thing ever invented - because it was! You couldn't be on the phone and the computer at the same time.) All these vastly slowed-down recordings are very, very strange. When we think of a recording being slowed down, we think of it getting lower and lower, but it doesn't. It's just endlessly elongated. It takes up more time. And this is like something from Armageddon, the Last Judgement, the trumps of doom. I think it's partly the fact that I do know what the sound is, but it's changed, changed utterly. For some reason I made myself listen to this again last night and had the same queasy, sick dread. It doesn't get better with successive replayings. In fact, it gets worse.

The Volta Labs experimental recordings were another Edison thing. Just a bunch of guys fooling around with very primitive sound equipment. Volta Labs reminds me of mad scientists with frizzy hair, Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, Clyde Crashcup, and that sort of thing, though the comic connection doesn't mitigate the creepiness of the recordings. On one of them, someone appears to say "fuck!", but I didn't include that one. This one is just creepier. It also interests me how much the first recorded discs looked like ugly grey pancakes.

I wonder why it is, when I do not remember World War II, when I do not remember ANY war, that this sound fills me with such primal dread. It is Doom. It is simply the end, and there is nothing you can do. 

And this - this I do not even need to explain. This carved its way into my child psyche during the Cold War, when that awful endless shrill beeeeeeeeeeeep seemed, to me, even worse than the dreaded Bomb.

Anyone who knows anything about the advent of sound recording knows about the Phonautograph. This French guy who had a name a mile long (de Martinville, I think - unless Martinville was where he lived) just wanted to see what sound waves would look like when traced with a stylus on a moving glass globe. That's all. There was no thought of playing them back. When I first found out that they had found his stylus tracings on some black paper, read them with a laser and actually dragged some "music" out of it, I disbelieved it immediately. It was an obvious hoax.

Back in the mid-'90s, someone tried to pass off a supposed recording of Chopin playing the Minute Waltz which they claimed had been recorded on a similar device. Sadly, it was a fraud. I couldn't even find anything on the internet about this, and still can't, even though I heard the damn thing on the radio. I remember the CBC Radio announcer dismissed it as "a musical Piltdown Man". I'm not sure how I know this, but it turned out to be a CD enclosed with a European classical music magazine which was published on April 1. The catalogue number was something like 425679HAHAHA.

But this ghostly Au Clair de la Lune thing has stood up to scrutiny. At least, no one has stepped forward to admit guilt over it, so it must be real. Some of the air has gone out of it, however.  I note now that when I go on Firstsounds.org, the web site that originally broke the news to the world, it hasn't been updated in a very long time. It just looks like an ugly and very out-of-date web page, even worse than mine in fact. It's sort of a pre-Blogspot thing - whew, what an eyesore!

When all this first came out, there was a great deal of boasting and braggadocio by the researchers, who had been catapulted to fame by a few pieces of sooty black paper. Now I notice a certain nothing. I guess they haven't found anything new. The few seconds of blurby, garbly "singing" isn't so exciting any more, no matter how much they slice and dice it, play it back at different speeds and with different effects, filters, etc. Hey, you can make an armadillo sound like Pavarotti these days. Another tiny sound snippet isn't even a human voice, but a trumpet that sounds like it's underwater. And a lot of it just reminds me of somebody blowing his nose.

Now this is worse. Far worse. I dug this up a very long time ago, when I somehow stumbled upon the idea that ancient clay pots were natural recording devices. If a rotating glass globe with a stylus stuck on it could record vibrations/waves/actual sounds that could be played back in a few hundred years, why then - why couldn't a rapidly-revolving wet clay pot with a sharp thing stuck into it record all sorts of shit as it rotated merrily away? But only if some guy with a laser came along to winkle the sound back out again.

Meanwhile, this is terrifying.

I tried to get hold of the guy who did this a couple of years ago. His "channel" has two things on it: this video, and a six-second "slide show" depicting one still of this pot. So, hoaxy it is. But still terrifying, for some reason I can't determine.

I mean, I KNOW it isn't real.

(NOTE: This is the one and only article I have ever found about the infamous phony Chopin "Piltdown Man" recording.)

"The recording of Chopin performing the "Minute Waltz" is a now world-famous musical hoax that was exquisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD's about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1.

Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!

The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.

The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transfered by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.

Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?

The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)

The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"

Anthony Perkins: The PEOPLE Magazine Interview that "outed" him

 

Well, okay. . . I have a lot to say about all this, but I don't know where to start. Around the time Psycho II came out, and for no reason that I could comprehend, I began to be obsessed with Anthony Perkins. I had not even seen his masterful turn in the original Psycho - that came years later, and with it the realization that Psycho II was just a pale imitation, which Perkins seemed to be phoning in to help him pay the bills.

But from that point forward, I was seeking out Perkins' repertoire of movies on late night TV and in the VHS tapes (no, make that Beta!) that I could rent from the corner store. I became fascinated by this fairy-tale (excuse the pun) story of a man terrified of women, who admittedly DID have sex with men which he claimed felt "unreal", and who suddenly met this earth-mother paragon who completely set him free from the shackles of his (unreal-feeling) homoerotic impulses.

Well, that's pretty much it, isn't it? That's the myth, and it fit in well with the times and with the wild popularity of Mildred Newman. Her sappy self-help screed How to Be your Own Best Friend (which I dealt with in my last post) demonstrated that even someone as intelligent as Perkins could fall for an utter sham, since all his gay friends seemed to be doing the same thing. 

I didn't catch up with all this until - probably - Perkins' death from AIDS in the early 1990s. It all began to make sense to me then, and since then I have read two biographies: one sanitized and respectful, the other incredibly detailed and full of rather nasty gossip and hearsay. I had to average the two and guess at the rest. What the People article didn't say was that Perkins had had several long-term, committed relationships with men, most notably Tab Hunter and the dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom he lived for years. (Sadly, Dale too fell for Mildred Newman's poisonous indoctrination.) 

It's too bad his close relationships with men, which obviously went far beyond casual pickups, were completely negated in this article. But what horrified his family and close friends was the way he "outed" himself as a man who for years and years had had sex with other men. His claim that his mother sexually abused him as a child (clearly, the reason he was so terrified of women) was also met with shock. Was he throwing in all these lurid details mainly to sell tickets? If so, it worked very well. 

Andy Warhol wryly observed in his infamous diary that he guessed Psycho II would make a lot of money, and that he found the People article hilarious because Perkins claimed his gay life was "all in the past". Somehow, I think Warhol and his whole erotic subculture knew him better than that. 

So how far have we come? It's been said that there are STILL no leading men in Hollywood who are openly gay. Only a straight actor can play a gay character. This was true when Tom Hanks played a man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, but it seems equally true today. You just don't see gay playing gay. Too unbelievable, I guess.  Tom Cruise and his longtime companion John Travolta are still in the closet (with, presumably, that Scientology guy David Miscavige). 

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I ordered an extra copy of the Perkins issue from People, and kept it for years. The scan you see above, which I had to chop up and blow up to make it readable, came from a website. This thing is still around, along with the attitudes that still drive men and women to stay in the closet and live a secret life, or no life at all in which they can be truly themselves.

When Gay was NOT Okay: Anthony Perkins' Dilemma

 

The brilliant actor Anthony Perkins died of AIDS in 1990, after a long battle with his true nature. Back in the 1970s, unhappy in his career (mainly with being typecast as Norman Bates in Psycho) and feeling lonely and frustrated in his relationships, he took the advice of all his celebrity friends and began to see the avant-garde therapist of the day in hopes of curing his malaise.

According to Tony’s therapist Mildred Newman and her husband Bernard Berkowitz (authors of the wildly popular self-help bestseller How to Be your Own Best Friend),‘Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.’

Their incredibly insightful advice on how to find the road to happiness and self-acceptance:

‘When you do something that makes you feel bad inside, ask yourself if that’s the way you  want to feel. If not, stop doing what makes you feel that way. Instead, do the things that make you feel good about yourself. Love is an affirmation of the living, growing being in all of us.’ These sappy fridge-magnet platitudes damaged innumerable people who were looking for a way out of conflict with their sexual orientation.

Perkin’s friend Dodson Rader (also an unhappy client of Newman's for years) remembered a farcical occasion when Newman and her husband gave a party in their large duplex Manhattan apartment for all the gay men they believed to have cured.

‘The place was filled with about thirty couples, some of them very famous. Every one of them had a wife or girlfriend and they were all trying to prove to their shrink how happy they were in their new straight roles. About an hour and a half into the party, in walked the handsome young actor Barry Bostwick, who was starring in Grease, which had just opened on Broadway. Everybody stopped talking and stared at the door. It was astonishing. As the kid walked around the apartment, I noticed one guy after another would go over to him and slip him their phone numbers. Their sense of self-delusion was laughable’.

The programming (or de-programming) must have worked, for Perkins married socialite Berry Berenson in the late '70s and fathered two sons. But his secret double life never ended - it just went underground. When he tested positive for HIV/AIDS in the late1980s, his wife claimed she had no idea how he had contracted it. The disconnect in his life was profound, and it contributed to his early death. 

I'm sad to say that such forceful attempts to wrench around someone’s natural orientation haven’t ended. The religious right still persecutes anyone who does not match the one-man-one-woman-exclusively-forever ideal. They use Bible verses as projectile weapons to puncture any hope a gay person may have of attaining true self-acceptance. Conservative Christians still see repentance as the only cure, but isn’t the whole thing rather complicated, just like human beings themselves?

BUT NO, Mildred Newman says we can CHOOSE how we feel about everything! Feel bad about drinking alcohol? Don’t drink alcohol, drink Kool-Aid instead! (Or Flavor Ade, which worked well for Jim Jones and the People’s Temple.) The choice is yours. In any case, who needs detox or rehab? Doing something that makes you feel guilty or “bad” about yourself? Just stop doing it, and do something “nice” instead. So if you’re gay, just act straight for the rest of your life and you’ll be happy forever.

But in a significant way, Perkins won. After his death (and his funeral was attended by literally hundreds of his friends and supporters), he issued this statement to clarify the circumstances of his death: 

"I chose not to go public because, to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' There are so many who believe that this disease is God's vengeance, but I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness, and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

It's a bit of a trite statement to say "love wins", but sometimes, against the odds, and in the most unlikely of circumstances, it triumphs in the end. 

My BEST Birdwatching Day: The Glorious PINTAIL

Burnaby Lake is my happy place. I have an almost mystical connection to the birds here, which swim right up to the edge of the dock so you can photograph them up-close. I have never seen pintails in any of the other places I birdwatch. I also see sandhill cranes, dowitchers (sandpipers with longer legs), wood ducks, escaped white domestic ducks and doves who use the lake as a kind of sanctuary, and even the elusive Mandarin duck, which is so rare it made the local news.

It can all make me forget, for a while, the things I'm dealing with right now, including intractible physical pain which I can't talk to my doctor about. I have been dismissed, ignored and told to run along, go home and behave myself, so many times over the years that I have pretty much given up trying. This is how people become addicted to bootleg pain meds cut with fentanyl, but I hope I never get to that point. It's too bad when the "cure" is potentially worse than the disease. 

But until I go crazy with the pain and find a way to end it for good, I have my birds. 

WHEN ROBOTS ATTACK! Best Scene in Disney's THE BLACK HOLE

Tony Perkins playing Norman Bates as a scientist who thinks he can defend himself against a killer robot with a file folder.

Two Minutes of Genius! Incredible Film Montage from Humoresque

So what can I say about this, one of my all-time favorite noirish 1940s melodramas? It even has Joan Crawford with giant shoulder-pads playing a wealthy alcoholic cougar pursuing the very dishy John Garfield, who fakes his violin-playing quite effectively. The incomparable Oscar Levant is actually playing here, and many claimed he was at the same technical and interpretive level as Vladimir Horowitz (and the two were, by the way, buddies). This montage thrills and delights me every time, as it says so much about Garfield's tough-guy character and his bewilderment at landing in the Big City to pursue his music career. There are some echoes of An American in Paris here, as Garfield begins to feel more and more like a gigolo who can't escape Joan's desperate clutches. It ends in her walking into the surf a la A Star is Born. In spite of all this borrowing and unabashed melodrama, Garfield keeps it from sinking into sappyness and gives it an effective edge. I play violin myself - not like this, of course, but I do play, and even though it took a team of people to convincingly show him playing, I think it worked very well. As he was a minimalist, he didn't ham it up or overdo it facially, which makes it especially effective. Garfield died of a heart attack depressingly young, so we don't get to see him very often. But in the film Three Daughters, he plays a sardonic pianist whom he admitted was based on Oscar Levant. 

My description of the clip on YouTube is as follows:

A brilliant bit of filmmaking, one of the highlights of this noir-ish 1940s melodrama. John Garfield plays Paul Boray, an ambitious young concert violinist pursued by wealthy cougar Joan Crawford. Here he arrives in the hustle and bustle of New York City. So could tough guy Garfield really play the violin? Of course not, but he was saved by some Hollywood magic. For close-ups, Garfield’s arms were pinned down, the violin was attached to his neck, and two professional violinists would crouch down beside the actor, out of camera range, one doing the fingering and the other bowing. The actual soundtrack heard by the audience was played by Isaac Stern, with Oscar Levant accompanying him on the piano. After a couple of takes working in this strenuously awkward manner, Levant called out, “Why don’t the five of us do a concert tour?”

😳Is this DUCKLING in DANGER?😳

Last year, this enormous brown duck (an escapee from a meat farm) hatched out an incredible NINE babies, all different colors from bright yellow to mottled brown. She must have mated with a wild mallard, but sadly, I only saw the babies twice, then they disappeared, likely picked off by crows and gulls. This year I was surprised to find her with ONE duckling, bright yellow, which means it's an easy target. Nature can be so sad. We've followed ducks like Bosley and Belinda, escapees from barnyards, but they always seem to die due to predators. Domestic ducks don't have the wild instincts of mallards, and don't move fast enough. This may be my only chance to see this little fluffball.

Is she REAL, or is she. . . ?

YouTube still plays tricks on me. Last night I could not even get on my home page, then today it began to play the ads which are normally blocked by AdBlocker. I posted this, then realized I had to be careful NOT to use the term "AI", though it is everywhere now and I am supposed to indicate if anything I publish uses it. I am not even sure of this thing, it may only be an animation. But nobody looked at it, as usual, so I had to weasel-word it back to neutral terms, and wait for YT to slam me AGAIN. Why am I such a threat to them?

 

Am I a sitting duck?

I have come to the conclusion that it is business as usual with my channel, which is why I am back to the fluffy ducks and trying NOT to look at views. For one thing, I HAD to get off the Gypsy Rose thing, which was turning pretty sickening anyway. Once more I was having comments taken down with threats that my channel would be terminated. So I went back and deleted all my comments (or at least I tried - who knows if they actually deleted) going back to February, when I first started commenting on the story. I deleted my watch history a couple of times and then re-built it to deliberately throw off the YouTube vultures. So, onward, no matter what I get or don't.

I am convinced certain people (Meghan Markle and Gypsy being the worst) have  a form of special protection that renders them pretty much untouchable. In MM's case it is the fact that Harry is a blood prince forever, no matter how dastardly his actions (as witness the way Prince Andrew is still performing his royal duties as if nothing has happened). Thus MM falls under the same corrupt umbrella. 

With GRB it's a little more complicated. She got a very sweet plea deal based on her "abuse story", most of which turned out to be bogus. But it was a political thing. No one will vote for a man who dares misbelieve the harrowing tale of a fragile little girl forced to endure unnecessary medical treatments while bound in a wheelchair (though that "fragile little girl" turned out to be 23 years old and completely able-bodied, and somehow strong enough to hack her mother's body to death with a fishing knife.) 

But due to her elaborate web of  lies and how the media  ate it up for so many years, it's set, it's fixed, and due to double jeopardy there is no turning back. She has "paid her debt", serving 8 years in what amounted to a college dorm while her autistic accomplice rots in a Rikers Island-style prison for the rest of his life. 

So in what way might commenting on this story hurt ME? I can see it now. It's that aura of protection which sets up a network of minions to watch ALL the comments on ALL the videos, filing multiple complaints against one creator which can quite easily bring about the end of the channel. It happened to a frightening degree with MM, and with GRB the stakes are much higher due to the fact she's famous  for hacking her mother's body to pieces with a knife used to clean and gut fish. Those seventeen stabs were mostly her doing.

The MM debacle caused some completely innocent people to be banned from YouTube for life, just for telling the truth. With GRB, the stakes are enormously higher because there is a murder involved, and now the scummy little rat who committed it is pregnant and swanning around in triumph while the world fawns at her feet.

Well, no, not really. But this is the ONLY place it is safe for me to write about  this story, as even Facebook  puts me at risk. And it is the last time I am going to say anything about it.

 

😳Am I Too Old for YouTube?🤔

Well, what do you think? Meantime, here's more information that I attempted to send to YouTube, which turned out to be a Google address and completely generic. 

I sent a version of this message yesterday, but since then I realized I left out some crucial points. I have a serious problem which I need to address. I hope YouTube will listen, because this is extremely important to me.

My account is called ferociousgumby, and I have been a creator since 2011, with 20,600+ subscribers and almost 3,000 videos. I received a notice yesterday which I did not understand. It said  my comment had been removed because it "may violate community guidelines re: hate speech policies." I was told that if I made any more comments like that, I could lose the ability to comment or even have my channel terminated.

I do not believe I am guilty of hate speech in any of my comments. I am a senior citizen who uses her channel for her hobbies (birdwatching, doll collecting, cat videos, etc.) I am hardly a threat to anyone! I always strive to be respectful towards others, even if I disagree with their views. Since the offending comment was already removed, I have no idea what it actually said or in what way it may have violated YouTube's community guidelines. Since I am basically operating in an informational void, I have no idea what you are referring to, so how can I avoid such offenses in the future? 

I do have strong opinions, as do most of my YouTube friends and cohorts, but I always agree to disagree with people and do NOT issue attacks or insults of any kind. That said, I believe I have the right to criticize public figures, because such people have assigned themselves that role, thus opening themselves up to public criticism as a matter of course.   

I am baffled as to why I am being threatened with losing my "grandma channel", which is all about my hobbies and interests and intends no harm to anyone. To lose it would be heartbreaking and would badly affect my mental health, since I am bipolar and  have to be very careful about stress. I have also had to face a number of very serious family health issues, including my husband's surgery. 

I was unable to tick the box asking for email feedback, but I would be most grateful if you would enlighten me on these points so that I may stay within community guidelines in the future. But if I don't know what I'm doing wrong, how can I put it right? Please give me more information about this issue, citing the SPECIFIC comment and the SPECIFIC community guidelines I may have violated. Otherwise, I will have missed an opportunity to learn. Thank you for hearing me out.

With respect,

Margaret Gunning (ferociousgumby)

email  magunning@telus.net 

The Troll Doll Channel: Who knew TROLLS could FLY? (Carousel Waltz)

Who knew trolls could fly? This is my tiniest custom troll, an exquisite thing with a teeny-tiny crocheted outfit and replacement hair made from Tibetan mohair.  Sad to me that no one seems to be watching my videos anymore, but I've come to pour so much of myself into them that it's hard to stop. I won't stop, so must rearrange my attitude somehow. So long as my views don't go to zero, I guess I'm OK.

The Starlight Night: Hopkins Strikes Again!

 

The Starlight Night

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! 

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! 

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! 

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows. 

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! 

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house 

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse 

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

So what does the poem mean?

What means this bizarre double-jointed curvature, this sharp hairpin turn from fireworks "ooooooohs" and "ahhhhhhhhs" into the kind of heavy and even suffocating religiosity that leaves me completely kerflummoxed?

I don't know much about Gerard Manley Hopkins except to say that when he became a Jesuit, he burned every poem he had ever written. Thus perhaps some of his best works were relegated to the ashcan.

He's the one who wrote about depression, that Carrion Comfort one that I find so harrowing, to the point that I think he must have been a true sufferer. But why must everything in Hopkins be Christified?

The poem starts off very much like an innocent Robert Louis Stevenson verse for children, a "how would you like to go up in a swing" sort of thing. But there is a sort of urgency to it, as if we'd better look now or we'll be too late. It seems to tug and poke at us, hey, take a look up there, look at Casseopeia (which I can NEVER see - I am the poorest of visual discerners and can't tell one bloody constellation from another). Then comes a flood of almost-precious elven description right out of Lord of the Rings. Cockle-shells and dingle-bells. Except that, because it's Hopkins, he can get away with it. It's a surprising, even shocking quality, the art of verbal daring.

Fire-folk sitting in the air, why yes, that's a line any poet would kill for. Quickgold: that's perfect, isn't it - why didn't anyone think of that before? The air swirls with magic, you can see your breath, you're shivering yet too warm, your companion's hand is like ice in yours. Yes, you're there, transported, borne up like a downy feather (take THAT, Gerard!) as the constellations wheel drunkenly over your head.

Where I go off-course is in the line, "Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize." What can he be getting at? Taken literally, it makes no sense at all. Purchase what? Prize what? Does he mean we have to earn the right to get into heaven, so to speak - heaven represented by the rapturous star-filled night? Is immortality a kind of lottery, a spiritual 6-49?

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

I don't know if he's talking about "buying your way in", trying to bribe God (good luck!), or the cheapness and crassness of reality compared to the gasping celestial vision. It's one of those weirdball Hopkins-ian things that makes you want to toss the book across the room.

But then he gets back to the "look, look" stuff, which by now is getting a little old (can't help but think it!) in spite of the "Maymess" (a word I really thought *I* had invented) and the "mealed-with-yellow sallows".

But then come the strangest lines of all.

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

I don't know, this grounds the poem with a thud, steals all its magic. Hopkins must have had some sort of a thing for Christ, and it's weird. When I first read this startling thing, my reaction was "what"? These are indeed the - barn? And what are "the shocks"? Kindly explain yourself, poet.

I can only guess - and I am really guessing here, because this is an odd thing that doesn't make much sense even after a lot of analysis - that he thinks of the heavens/nature and all that jazz as "housing" Jesus and Mary and all those holy folk who to him represent God. Or does he glimpse the holy/eternal in and through, are those starfolk sitting in the air little glints of God, God's little birthday candles maybe?

Is the universe just God's skin?

I might be reading more into this than I should. Hey, maybe I'm smarter than he was, or at least less obscure. But there are things I don't like here, words that may or may not be used for jarring effect: "barn" (barn? Haven't we just travelled to the farthest reaches of the universe? Why use the image of an outbuilding that is basically full of shit?); "shuts" (an awful word, implying "shut-in" and even "shut up!); "spouse", a sort of creaky word referring to one's life partner - oh, that's creepy! Oh, that's creepy! Is he married to Jesus, or his mother? I guess "espouse" can mean just believing in something. Or something.

Or surrendering to it? Oh God. I was never one for surrender, though in certain circles (does the term 12 Step Program mean anything to you?) it's considered the highest achievement.

And that word "hallows" is not one I am comfortable with either - all hallows eve, hallowed be thy name (which for some reason always reminded me of the inside of a pumpkin, that punky smell). So he throws in some language which could not be more at odds with the dazzling fluidity of those first few lines. What of buying, selling, bidding - what's he on about? Maybe it would be better to stop at Line 7. Can the Sunday school lesson; just dazzle us.

😸My Cat Gets EVERYTHING he Wants (especially treats!)😸

Onward! In the face of 15-view videos rather than 15 million, I must carry on.

Have I had enough? Yes - of THIS!

Ironically, this is a comment about comments that never got posted on YouTube. I've had considerable discouragement over my channel lately. Over 13 years, I've built it up to 20,500+ subscribers and over 3,000 videos - but my views are absolutely in the toilet now, without any change in the quality or the work that goes into them. People have even been calling me out on "commenting too much" on other people's videos, which makes no sense as I think my comments are much more well-thought-out than the average and don't attack anyone. Maybe that's why?

So I had no real place to post this, and decided to plop it down here. It's my thoughts on what has happened to social media and the uncharitable, sometimes ruthless Wild West that is the internet.

This evolved into an essay, so skip it if it’s too long! But I have a few things to say about the internet in general, and YouTube in particular, as I’ve experienced it since I started my channel as a hobby in 2011. I have had a number of people reply to my comments about Gypsy Rose Blanchard, claiming I comment too much, I’m in every comments section, and (as a result) I have no life, I should get a job, and should just stop all this because I have nothing to add to the conversation. (I got this one, nearly verbatim, just a few hours ago.) Surprisingly, these are NOT all from the pro-Gypsy camp, which really does shock me. I generally do not promote myself (though it seems like everyone else does, relentlessly, perhaps just to survive the sharks in the water), but to be told I have no life based on my writing hits every nerve in my psyche.

As for an explanation as to why I “write too much”, I am a professional writer, have published hundreds of newspaper columns, book reviews and magazine articles, poetry and short stories, and published three novels (with publishers, NOT self-published). I established my channel in 2011 and have posted more than 3,000 videos, and have 20,500+ subscribers. I don’t mention any of this, ever, because it makes me very uncomfortable to self-promote, though I see it everywhere and all the time, and it is beginning to wear me down. It really does seem to me that this is what YouTube is all about now: subs, views, links, numbers, numbers, numbers! I can appreciate the fact that people need to make a living, but there is such relentless hustling going on that I am beginning to wonder if it is about people anymore.

I do have a lot to say, and maybe some people don’t like it, but I try never to be disrespectful to anyone and believe my comments are well-thought-out. People can skip them if they want. When I hear creators say over and over again “I’d love to hear what you guys think”, and  when I think I DO have something to say, I tend to want to SAY it without being clapped down by people I thought were on my side. It has just happened too many times for me to ignore.

 Writing is what I do. Next to my family, it is my life. When yet another person tells me to shut up because I don’t know what I am talking about, it hurts. I am beginning to think I may end up having to wind up my YouTube experience because it is just not the deal I signed on for. At all. Sad, because it used to be so fun and enjoyable, and it was a way to share all my hobbies, particularly during lockdown. But those days appear to be over. I don’t know this place anymore.

I don't often say these things. . . (but today I will)

I don't often put a lot of personal stuff on this blog, because no one reads my posts anyway except random people from New Zealand who leave comments 12 years after I posted them. I am exhausted and frazzled and worn out after a second bout of having to wait on my husband hand and foot (literally, feed him and take his shoes off for him) after relatively minor surgery, and he will be having another round of it soon. 

What is hurtful is the lack of acknowledgement of what I am doing. I quite literally have to take his temperature, help him to the bathroom, badger him to take his meds, get past his crankiness when he needs to eat, etc. etc. I went through all this during his first hospitalization, when the whole family hopped to and saw that his every need was met. It simply amazed me how everyone came together to serve him, which was far from the case when I used to be hospitalized. 

Then I was left completely on my own, no visitors (and as usual, sending a card or flowers to acknowledge the misery I was going through made as much sense to everyone as sending me a dead carp. It just wasn't done - everyone knew that!) Even discussing it was off the table and not to be spoken of. Had it been ME on that operating table, the family response would not have been the same at all. This I know for a fact. But my illnesses weren't counted as real anyway, as I just should have pulled up my socks and carried on. Which I did, with little or no help to crawl out of a black pit of annihilating depression. And for reasons that I will never understand, I nearly lost the right to visit my  grandchildren because of the nature of my illness. 

So here is what I, the schmuck who has always been blown off by practically everyone, but especially my nearest and dearest, wrote to hand to him. Haven't done it yet, but I'm on the verge. If everything I do for him is neither needed nor wanted, what on earth has my life been all about? 51 years together should amount to more than that.

If you don't eat, even when you are NOT hungry, you will not get better. If I prepare a plate for you of nutritious food that you might like, which takes time and energy, you can at least keep it beside you for later and not wave me off with a look of dismissal. Please try to be a little bit grateful, even if you don't like or want what I am offering.

I am doing everything I can to help you get better, but I am getting near the end of it. It's all very well to tell me "just stop", but that's not what I signed on for. It's not in my nature NOT to want to look after you. You should know by now that I am a nurturer, and I do not feel it would be fair to you to just stop. But it is wearing me down when I see the lack of appreciation.

I walked a long time in heat and discomfort and pain today, BECAUSE I wanted to get things you might like, things that are easy to eat while lying down, and some things to make an actual meal which we have not had since Monday. And then you said there had been no need for me to go to the store anyway. Which meant, "You shouldn't have bothered." So what I did was completely devalued and blown off as unnecessary and unwanted. 

I do these things because I CARE, but I believe I have given far more to this family than they have ever given me, and it is beginning to catch up with me. I think that you should get your own food as far as you can, and I will make an evening meal of real food and you can eat it or not. Please, if I do go the extra mile for you, which I have always done, don't just tell me you didn't need or want it. You did need it, you continue to need it, and I will try to do what I can to maintain my sanity until you are better. 

😄SMOKIN' HOT SHOWGIRLS do the Crowd Wave with their LEGS!😄

So this, which I worked on for hours, got TEN views. I'd give up, but somehow after 13 years and 20,500+ subs, I find that hard to do.

WHY is this happening? Why are my subs rising by 300+ per month, but no one is watching? Ten views, when the Motormouth thing, which I threw together in ten minutes, has 14 MILLION.

Really, I give up, except I can't. I just had to keep trudging forward, but it does seem like everything I've built up since 2011 (over 3 THOUSAND videos) is just going down the toilet due to people's indifference. 

Is there a way ahead? I guess I will find out, yes or no. But it galls me that so many channels with 3000 subs or less are getting tens of thousands of views, while my stuff just falls into the gutter.

Can't Live: the Tragedy of Harry Nilsson

This is something I'd have to file under "it seemed like a good idea at the time".

When I finally found the song 1941 by Harry Nilsson, it (of course) sent the detective in me on a search for more about Nilsson's life and work. I began to realize how many amazing songs he'd written, and how incredible his voice was, with its pure 3 1/2-octave range vibrating like glass in the heavens. So as I trudged through the archeological dig that is YouTube, I turned up a documentary called Who is Harry Nilsson (and why is everybody talking about him?) The title was based on the song Everybody's Talking from Midnight Cowboy, one of my favorite songs from one of my all-time-favorite movies (which I saw again recently, and which once again knocked me out of my chair with its soul-shattering depiction of life's desperate fringe-dwellers).

I instantly saw the biographical connection with the song 1941 - the only difference being "the circus" meant, presumably, the music industry, money and fame. That last line "but what will happen to the boy when the circus comes to town?" is one of those one-liners that packs a tremendous punch. And it all happened. He was born in 1941, and his father walked right out the door three years later, leaving a scar on his soul that never seems to have healed.

I was hooked immediately because as the doc unfolded, it became apparent that  his destiny and fortunes were intertwined with those of the Beatles, in particular John Lennon who was every bit as adept at monstrous self-destruction as Harry himself. He even famously got drunk and rowdy with Ringo Starr (who seems to have pulled himself out of the fire just in time). Most of the people who contributed to this thing were industry types, who were in accord with the general feeling that Harry Nilsson was hell-bent on destroying himself for reasons that only made sense to him. Though he was described by friends and loved ones as sweet and gentle and lovely and all the rest of it, that is not the way he acted and not the way he treated people who deserved infinitely better than his sometimes monstrous abuse.

It was getting depressing, and I knew how it ended, but I trudged on. When John Lennon was shot, Nilsson became obsessed with gun control laws, though all his crusading appears to have come to naught. After that his career fragmented as he careened from cocaine highs to alcoholic lows, generating enough nicotine fumes to poison a whole community. Before John died, they had a screaming contest which resulted in Nilsson rupturing a vocal cord. His voice never recovered. But he seems to have inexplicably chosen to destroy his instrument in a way that horrified me more than all the rest of it put together.

So when he was 54, his life walked out the door. He ruined his body, and collapsed and died from all his extremes. But I had to ask myself if the San Andreas fault in his personality stemmed from that early parental abandonment.

It must have.

Nothing else could crack a soul clean through, could it? Unless there was some kind of abuse we don't know about, but maybe this was enough. By the time I got to the end of the documentary I had a heavy feeling, but I also felt the familiar anger I experience when I hear of someone pissing away the kind of golden opportunities that less fortunate people would give their right arm for.

Does fame do this? Why do so many famous people self-destruct, usually from drugs and alcohol and the disastrous situations that inevitably result? Was I spared, do you think? I guess I wanted it, but I also didn't. When I get a comment on a YouTube video I posted six years ago, when I receive an email comment on a blog post I did in 2012, it reminds me of something important.  It makes me realize (once again) that the rewards of the creative life are not what you think.

The rewards of the creative life are NOT helling around in bars, snorting cocaine until you hit the ceiling, abandoning a wife and son (yes, folks, he DID abandon a wife and son, just like in the song, before siring another five children with another woman, whom he soon left a widow). The rewards of the creative life are - simply - the creating itself. Or maybe touching just ONE person and hearing about it many years later. And realizing there may have been many others who just never told you about it.

I stepped out of addiction just in time, and like Ringo (and Paul), I'm still here and savoring my life to a degree I never thought possible. I keep it simple now (though it's never easy), and if I think about drinking, I think about where it took me, and I can never go back there again. But when I think of Harry Nilsson, I just get angry. There's something so perverse about the whole thing. He got drunk "at" people, that much is plain, and maybe even "at" himself. But why not use a few particles of that genius brain to figure out just what you have to do to live a peaceful and fulfilling life (and to treat the people you love the way they deserve to be treated?)

It takes no great genius to fuck up, to destroy, to obliterate. No talent at all. And I'm sick of hearing about tortured geniuses and listening to people make endless excuses for them. This song, though - it's just eerie, because the raw need in it, the sense of catastrophic damage, is disturbing to me. Do people need to be so irreparably broken to communicate such grief? What a horrible deal. 

So what's the conclusion? If you're a legendary creator and performer, or just someone who needs to write and perform, and want to live a half-decent life, be careful who you choose as a role model. Shoot for Ringo or Paul, who are still here and still creating - not poor, beleaguered, self-annihilating Harry.