Dancing mania: they laugh! They dance! They scream!

Ye-e-e-e-s, it's that wacky bunch of Pentecostals, the Kenneth Hagin gang! They dance! They laugh! They scream! They roll around on the floor! It's hard to believe that religious people can behave this way, but it sure looks like they do. To me it has a kind of sexual component to it that I can't quite put my finger on. The Shakers, known for their complete abstinence from all sexual activity (which is why the sect died out quite a long time ago) used to whirl around and dance madly when overtaken by the Spirit, but it was not quite like this. Nothing else is quite like this. This is a bunch of adults acting like idiots, behaving more immaturely than toddlers who generally have far better self-control. The idea is that God is filling them with the Holy Ghost to the point that they start to flail around involuntarily, but I don't believe it. Most of it looks faked. There are people who get up and dance around and then go and sit down again, their part of the performance over.

My favourite moment is around the 9:03 mark, where a guy rolls down the stairs, leaving a gun sitting on the step behind him. Obviously it fell out of his pocket as he was holy-rollin' along like that. Personally, I'd be scared of an evangelical who was armed. And wouldn't it be interesting to do a weapons count in this crowd. How many are exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms? All the time, I mean, even in a religious meeting? But maybe they need to be armed here more than anywhere else.

I am at the point in my life now where I don't understand religion at all. And this from someone who was a lay minister and Bible teacher for 15 years. No kidding. But if this is Christianity, then forget it. These are not Christians. They're crazy in the head to begin with, and fork over all their hard-earned money to fuckwits like Hagin. The bizarre thing is that there are tons of "straight" videos of Hagin giving sermons that are, while not exactly my cup of evangelical tea, almost sane. They're in plain English anyway, with no barking or guffawing. He had quite a reputation as a sort of charismatic Billy Graham type, until his ministry took a turn for the supremely silly.

This laughing/flailing idiocy was originally called the Toronto Blessing and took place in a church near an airport. Maybe all the noise drove them to it, who knows. The Hagin videos were made some time in the '90s, and it would be interesting to know where these people are now. How many of them stayed with it. Or if this sort of orgy still goes on, or was it just a fad? I also wonder what happens in the hotel rooms where the participants stay during these big crusade thingammies. I just think it could turn sexual at the drop of someone's pants.

ADDENDA.

Tanganyika laughter epidemic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass hysteria – or mass psychogenic illness (MPI) – rumored to have occurred in or near the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) near the border of Uganda.

The laughter epidemic began on January 30, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha. The laughter started with three girls and spread haphazardly throughout the school, affecting 95 of the 159 pupils, aged 12–18. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to 16 days in those affected. The teaching staff were not affected but reported that students were unable to concentrate on their lessons. The school was forced to close down on March 18, 1962.

After the school was closed and the students were sent home, the epidemic spread to Nshamba, a village that was home to several of the girls.  In April and May, 217 people had laughing attacks in the village, most of them being school children and young adults. The Kashasha school was reopened on May 21, only to be closed again at the end of June. In June, the laughing epidemic spread to Ramashenye girls’ middle school, near Bukoba, affecting 48 girls.

The school from which the epidemic sprang was sued; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off. The following symptoms were reported on an equally massive scale as the reports of the laughter itself: pain, fainting, flatulence, respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crying, and random screaming. In total 14 schools were shut down and 1000 people were affected.

Dancing Mania

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St John's Dance and, historically, St. Vitus' Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children, who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, Germany, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, France.

Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Generally, musicians accompanied dancers, to help ward off the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more to join in. There is no consensus among modern-day scholars as to the cause of dancing mania.

The several theories proposed range from religious cults being behind the processions to people dancing to relieve themselves of stress and put the poverty of the period out of their minds. It is, however, thought to be as a mass psychogenic illness in which the occurrence of similar physical symptoms, with no known physical cause, affect a large group of people as a form of social influence.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

So mild, so pure: TV ads in the '50s

I find that early '50s TV ads make the most intriguing gifs. Advertising style was pretty aggressive then, as nobody quite knew how to marry pictures with sound. Announcers intoned in radio-like voices, with that strange theatrical diction from the 1940s that somehow suggests the formal urgency of wartime.

One of the features of these ads is very (VERY) strange animation, much of it primitive or downright incomprehensible. On very early TV shows, credits were written on some sort of material like canvas and pulled along manually, or cards dropped down with a "flop".  All this is of great fascination to me, as I have vague memories of some of the later-'50s ones, though as a small child (infant!), I had no real comprehension of them. Ads got a lot more sophisticated in the early '60s, and by mid-to-late they were sort of quirky and self-consciously nutty/hippie-ish in a painful effort to be hip.

Here is one of those offputting animations from Birdseye. Frozen food was still kind of a novelty then, and the icebox was a thing of the past. There are even a few ads for frost-free refrigerators, which I didn't have until the 80s! I do remember those pans of hot water and the chisel used to hack out 3"-thick slabs of frosted ice that had been there for years. Once I managed to gouge the inside of the freezer and release freon gas all over the place, necessitating a visit from a repairman. Very nasty.

People don't realize how literally in-your-face TV ads were then. Everything was blasted at you, often spinning around like those newspaper headlines in 1940s gangster movies. This ad talks about "blueing" (I think that's how you spell it), which I am not even familiar with, but I think it was an ingredient added when washing white laundry to keep it from yellowing. Cheer was revolutionary in that it incorporated all that lovely blueing, which is even now endangering species and killing fish in their billions.

One of the big obsessions of the 1950s was nutrition/sturdy health and helping your children build strong bodies - eight ways in this ad, but later on, twelve. This is, of course, an ad for Wonder Bread, a product wildly popular in the post-boom era and later satirized as the epitome of Eisenhower-ish blandness and WASP-y insularity/xenophobia. In this ad, a skinny kid, the equivalent of the guy who gets sand kicked in his face, discovers the nutritional wonders of Wonder Bread and begins to stuff himself with it. Soon he begins to win medals in track and field. I am still searching for that iconic (sorry, but it is) ad where the kid grows in height from toddler to adulthood in about three seconds. Haven't found it yet, but it took me ten years to find "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!", so it's only a matter of time.

Variations on the theme of nutrition. Back then, people actually did pay attention to what was in their food, but it had nothing to do with additives. In fact, the more additives, the better the product. In this case, Billy's animal friends are blasting messages at him about various nutrients, though very strangely, from the pages of a huge book
.

Billy blinking. These animations could be drawn in a single swipe of the pen, and probably were. Disney they weren't, but somehow they got the message across. In fact, I really like this one. Most gifs aren't that smooth and circular.

This is a real gem, with exceptionally primitive animation. Looks like a background being manually dragged across the screen, with cutout heads superimposed. Palmolive shows up a lot in these ad compilations. The name itself makes me feel ickily oily. I don't know if there was olive oil or palm oil in these products or not, but the name is somehow claustrophobic and "close". Suffocating, almost, and definitely oleaginous. It brings to mind Polly Bergen and her revolting "Oil of the Turtle" products, about which I can find practically nothing (though if I check the internet in a few months, there will be seventeen different sites devoted to it).

I like this, because even though nothing happens in it, it has that shakiness and graininess I prize. I'm not sure why everything jerked up and down like this, but it did. Often there was a ten- or even fifteen-second freeze on a picture of the product at the end of these ads.

I'm afraid I lost track of what product this was, but I thought it was delightfully bizarre. It uses the same animation techniques as Francis the Talking Mule and those "I want a Clark Bar" ads. 

One of the things I notice, as I watch these late at night, is how long they are. Most are a full minute, and some are several minutes (especially car commercials, which last an eternity and all seem the same to me, as if the cars are interchangeable). If that doesn't seem very long, try watching a one-minute ad. Just when you think it's winding up, it starts all over again. We are subjected to anywhere from four to ten ads in one minute now, with some of them lasting mere seconds, jamming ten times the information into our already-overburdened brains.

I'm not saying it was "better" then. Children could get polio and black people were barred from hotels and women were expected to stay in the kitchen and defrost their freezers. Life was simpler and slower, for sure. I've always been able to read at light speed, with the result of feeling like everyone/everything else was moving very slowly around me, as in that Star Trek episode where there were two frequencies. I like the internet because it's hyper-fast, and you can get information about pretty much anything in seconds.

But then I find myself watching these ancient ads and giffing them. I gif mainly because sitting through a one-minute commercial seems interminable. So here, I give you only the best parts! A lot of people simply hate gifs because they only see the dreadful, jerky two-second ones that almost everyone makes. And why? Why make such crappy ones? I don't know. I used to go on a site called Gifsforum - but never mind, it's dead and buried now. When I find old Gifsforum gifs I made years ago, they are epics, going forwards and backwards, at three different speeds, with colour turned to sepia or black and white, and on and on. Special effects. My grandkids can do stuff on their ipods that is light-years ahead of this: put themselves in rock videos with stop motion, lip-synching, kaleidoscopic visual effects, and all sorts of stuff, while these poky little twenty-second movies seem unimpressive.

But they save you time. If you want the nugget of something, gif it. That's what I always say. Squawk, squawk, squawk.

POST-BLOG GLOB. I decided to gif an entire one-minute ad here, because of the unusual clarity of it and because it epitomizes food ads from the era, especially products for children like cereal and bread. Remember Grape Nuts? If you don't, you're lucky. They were hard, granular bullets that were about as appetizing as Purina Dog Chow. No doubt they had no more protein (an obsession with these ads, often pronounced "protean" as if it had mythological powers) than a bowl of wood shavings. But this ad also incorporates the fatigued child being dragged off to eat cereal, which solves everything and makes for a hap-hap-happy family!

Were families happier then? I don't know. I look back on that time as golden, and have dreams of Chatham that are almost ecstatic, though at least from age ten I know I was miserable. Before that, who knows? Milk was delivered by horse-and-wagon, and ads looked something like this. We ate Grape Nuts and got our protean, and built strong bodies, either eight or twelve ways. At least the pace was slower, and people could sit still for a whole 60 seconds at a time.

Warm tip: a literal translation

(The following are instructions for cleaning a Pusheen stuffed animal, which I am thinking of ordering from a Third World vendor. One of my literally-translated gems.)

[ warm tip]

Maintenance and cleaning method of plush toys

Plush dirty, not easy to clean after washing and easy to curl. A simple method without water.

To the market to buy a bag of large grain of salt (also known as the sun and salt, about 2 kg), home after looking for a clean plastic bag (to be able to

Hold), then take a small amount of Oshio placed in plastic bags, you're going to get rid of inside, the bag mouth department good, began to make

Strong shaking, about 40 times, out of plush toys, the surface sticky salt particle shaking clean, you will find the salt black hair.

Cashmere toys clean a lot of.

This is because the salt itself with a plus or minus, and dirt will have a positive and negative charge, the friction of the friction, the opposite sex, salt

Will the dirt away, the plush toys clean

Will not be lost hair?

Each one is not lost hair, but because the toy is mostly plush fabric, processing will have a lot of floating hair stuck in the above, we send

Before all the workers took it with a vacuum cleaner to suck, but the daily delivery volume is too big, we do not have a bear to suck on a half

Days, so you receive the above number is still possible to have a bit of the hair, as long as the suction or blowing machine with a vacuum cleaner

, also can be outside a good pat on the no, if it is a hair with hand gently pull will fall, and has been falling,

Is not Yo, the hair is not good treatment, floating hair can be dealt with.

Sure you have a headache

Film leader countdowns

 

What are you, chicken? . . . YES: I AM CHICKEN!

Bob Dylan's auction: give me a buck apiece!

Bob Dylan sells treasure trove of lyrics and poems to university for millions

The Guardian

The 6,000-item collection spans nearly the entire length of his 55-year career, and many items have never been seen before

Bob Dylan has sold his personal archive of notes, draft lyrics, poems, artwork and photographs to the University of Tulsa, where they will be made available to scholars and curated for public exhibitions, the school said on Wednesday.

The 6,000 item collection spans nearly the entire length of Dylan’s 55 year-long career, and many have never been seen before. The collection was acquired by the George Kaiser Foundation and the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

The collection also includes master recording tapes of Dylan’s entire music catalogue, along with hundreds of hours of video.

The foundation and the university did not say how much the Bob Dylan archive cost, but the New York Times, which was given an exclusive preview, said it was sold for $15m to $20m.

Tulsa is also the home of a museum dedicated to folk singer Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s early influences.

“I’m glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie ... To me, it makes a lot of sense and it’s a great honor,” Dylan said in a statement.

Despite being regarded as “the voice of a generation” for his influential songs of the 1960s and 1970s, Dylan, now 74, has mostly kept his items out of the public eye, resulting in high prices when they occasionally come up for auction.

A handwritten copy of the song Like a Rolling Stone sold for a record $2m at a New York auction in 2014, while the electric guitar he played during the 1965 Newport folk festival sold for nearly $1m in 2013.

The archives handed over to the University of Tulsa include two notebooks with lyrics from the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, and Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to his 1964 song Chimes of Freedom scrawled on hotel notepaper dotted with cigarette burns. There is also correspondence between Dylan and the late beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. This report is incomplete. Having made only $20 million on the old papers he had lying around, Bob Dylan decided to clean all the old junk out of his closets and see what he could get for it.

The items were sold at auction at undisclosed prices.


ITEM 476

Bob Dylan's first guitar. Formerly displayed in Smithsonian as First Guitar in Human History. List price, $4,000,000.00

ITEM 14

Bob Dylan's hairpiece, hitherto kept secret from the public. List price, $4.79

ITEM 14A

Bob Dylan's first school assignment, an untidily-written poem called It's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, given a C+ for effort.

ITEM 479

Bob Dylan's first girlfriend Minnie Zota, a resident of Shadylady Nursing Home, Red Hen, Rhode Island.  List price, negotiable.


ITEM 37

Bob Dylan's first set of encyclopedias, sold door-to-door to his neighbor Manny Manheim, borrowed in 1957 and never returned. List price, whatever the list price was in 1957.


ITEM 53

Bob Dylan's horse, Spaghettineck. Taxidermied and mounted on wheels in 1982. List price, pretty high.


ITEM 2

Bob Dylan's dog, Spoons. List price $5,000,000.00. Cupcakes not included.


ITEM - ?

Bob Dylan's second school assignment, also known as "You've Improved!' List price, seven cents or so.

ITEM 1

Unidentifiable artifact. Extremely rare. Speculation suggests an egg slicer which was used as a rack for curing marijuana. May also be the world's only combination banjo/water canteen.

PHOTO GALLERY. These represent rare, historic photos which chart the course of the illustrious Mr. Dylan's life in music and momentous world affairs. For these he will take a buck apiece.

Bob Dylan's class picture. He has just sneezed in the photo and spread a cloud of lethal disease throughout the school, killing many.

Artist's rendition of Bob after each of his first four music lessons. The artist, Hibbie Zimmerman, was quoted as saying, "There will always be a little bit of ape left in Bobby."

Bob's first high school band, the Ramblin' Rockets. Also known as the Jumpin' Jeronimos, the Hibbing Hoot-owls, the Gymbusters, Zimbo and the Zeitgeist, and The Two Tops.

Bob's favourite picture of his sometime girlfriend/goddess/priestess/sponge-off partner/ice-maiden/coat-tail queen, Joan Baez. Shortly after this photo was taken she dedicated a song to him, "Nothing Rhymes with Genius (that's why you treat me so badly)".  Later she complained that the diamond he gave her had turned to rust.

Gerry Mathers in an unsold pilot for a TV series, Leave it to Bob. 

Bob Dylan's second high school band, which Bob admits were "pretty green". Bob never named this group, but they were known around Hibbing Collegiate as "Those Guys Again".

Bob's first copyright infringement notice. (He said a buck apiece. OK?)

MISCELLANY.

Bob Dylan's socks. May contain traces of his DNA.

Bob Dylan's fox. No one knows how to get it down from there.

Bob Dylan's garbage can. Suitable for framing. (Note: monetary accessories not included.)

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Spam I am

https://www.youtube.com/user/MattTheSaiyan

Last night, very late, I got into a Thing, and as usual when I am into a Thing, I don't stop until it feels complete. Which this never will be, because it's one of the big themes/obsessions of this blog.

Old ads. Gifs of old ads, so you won't need to watch all of it. Lots of people say "I hate gifs", and I will tell you why. 90% of the ones I see on "real" sites are about 2 seconds long, a near-violent jerking back-and-forth of figures. I don't even know why those are considered "real" gifs, as it is now easy as hell to make 20- or 30-second ones with utterly simple programs like Makeagif or Giphy:

http://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif

https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker

These.

Some time ago I found a wonderful YouTube channel called MattTheSaiyan, featuring mostly classic ads like the ones I giffed last night. The ones I chose to gif (and I herein present only about half of them) struck some kind of a chord with me, either from familiarity or just plain oddness. It's a weird feeling to see an ad you haven't seen since you watched Queen for a Day when you were seven. Why do we remember these things? As a rule, we were forced to watch them over and over again.

Kind of like these gifs.

One category I particularly like are VERY old ads, probably done live in the middle of a variety show. MattTheSaiyan's ads are edited from reels/videos/DVDs of early television. The "boooop" of an organ is often heard at the beginning of them, indicating live soap operas. An announcer will come on and earnestly present the ad. "Crawls" back then looked like they were mounted on rolls of paper or canvas, and were very likely cranked by hand.

Early advertising was very "in your face", in that someone had finally discovered that TV was not just radio with still pictures. Things MOVED on TV, so suddenly, in the ads, everything was moving. Dove's "1/4 cleansing cream" was so much a part of their ads for so long that I had to include it here along with all the lovely doves. Interestingly enough, Dove now claims that women should think they're beautiful no  matter what they look like. They should, too - as long as they use Dove products.

A lot of the gifs I made last night went to 20 seconds, and really, those are better-quality and more essay-like than these short ones. But they can run a bit weary after a while, if you're not a real afficionado. This is the short version of the Joy ad, the best part really, illustrating that in-your-face, literally explosive quality.

I love this one, and was quite impressed with it when I first saw it. From radiant bathing beauty to radioactivelly CLEAN beauty to. . . bride. It all fits together, doesn't it? If you smell this good, you're going to land a (preferably-rich) husband for sure.

This is a nice one, if a bit vertigo-inducing. Things are literally comin'-atcha. I have a feeling this was a 1950s ad. It's as if they're visually turning up the volume.

I've saved the best 'til last. Who of my generation doesn't remember all these recipes, usually made with Spam or one of its knockoffs (Spork, Klik, Bluggh, etc.) Scraps of pig-snout from the butcher's floor were ground up with plenty of fat as a binding agent. And there you had it: a perfect meat substitute. Spam and eggs! Spam on the barbecue! Spam with pineapple rings (my life is now flashing before my eyes!), and - oh God - Spam with cloves and brown sugar glaze on it, baked in the oven like a ham.

You could do anything to it that you would do to a ham. So says the ad. It was cheep, this Treet. It opened with a key, like a sardine can. And the strange thing is, fried up golden or baked in the oven, it really wasn't too bad. Kind of like really deluxe army rations. Beat the hell out of creamed chipped beef on toast.