Monday, May 24, 2021
💗Bob Dylan is EIGHTY YEARS OLD Today💗
Bob Dylan: 80 things you may not know about him on his 80th birthday
By Paul Glynn
"I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now."
Bob Dylan sang those wise words at the tender age of 23, on his track My Back Pages.
As he reaches his 80th birthday on Monday, we've decided to ignore the advice of the famous Dylan documentary Don't Look Back and celebrate the life and career of the US singer-songwriter.
Be warned though before we get started, this list is about as long and exhaustive as some of the verses on his last album...
1. Bob Dylan is not his given birth name. But you already knew that, right? So here are 79 more facts about the artist formerly known as Robert Allen Zimmerman.
2. He has sold more than 125 million albums around the world.
3. Despite his success and cultural impact, Dylan has never had a number one single in the UK or US. For context, Mr Blobby, Crazy Frog and Las Ketchup have all topped the charts.
4. A poll of musicians, writers and academics, conducted on Dylan's 70th birthday, found his best song to be 1965's Like a Rolling Stone, which the singer once said was his most honest and direct work. "After that I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play," he said. "I knew I wanted to write songs because it was just a whole new category."
5. Bruce Springsteen said the track, with its opening snare kick, sounded like "somebody kicked open the door to your mind". While another high-profile fan, U2's Bono, called it "a black eye of a pop song".
6. When asked what his songs were about, in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan quipped: "Some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve."
7. Surprisingly to many, the counterculture icon did not play at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Dylan was a Woodstock resident at the time (the festival was actually about 40 miles away) but he got a better offer - £35,000 to headline the Isle of Wight festival instead, with members of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles watching on.
8. Speaking of The Fab Four... Dylan was the first man to introduce the band to marijuana, Sir Paul McCartney recently revealed to Uncut. 'We all ran into the backroom going, 'Give us a bit!'" said Sir Macca. "So that was the very first evening we ever got stoned!"
9. Many of his songs are more familiar to mainstream audiences as cover versions. For example Adele's version of Make You Feel My Love, The Byrds' Mr Tambourine Man and All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. "He played [my songs] the way I would have done them if I was him," he said of the late guitarist. Dylan himself has recorded covers of Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon tunes.
10. Malibu resident Dylan has 17 houses around the world according to biographer Howard Sounes. One of them is reportedly in the Scottish Highlands.
11. The troubadour has won 10 Grammy awards, including three for his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, which many critics considered to be a return to form after a long artistic slump.
12. He was born into a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, before moving upstate to Hibbing.
13. Country singer Hank Williams, and bluesmen Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were among his musical heroes growing up, along with the king of rock 'n' roll Elvis Presley. The Rebel Without a Cause James Dean was his celluloid hero.
14. Dylan saw Buddy Holly play live locally just a few days before he died in a plane crash.
15. As a youngster he played piano and guitar in several summer camp/high school bands. Their names included The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, The Golden Chords and (our personal favourite) The Rock Boppers.
16. He wrote in his high school year book that it was his ambition "to join Little Richard".
17. Working as busboy in a Fargo restaurant, after finishing high school, remains the only normal job Dylan has ever done. But in another life he'd like to have been a soldier. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles he wrote he'd always pictured himself "dying in some heroic battle rather than a bed".
18. After moving to Minneapolis to study he turned his attention to folk music, swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic, which he played in cafes around the city's bohemian Dinkytown area.
19. He became totally enchanted by US folk singers like Odetta and Woody Guthrie, who he would later visit in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey and play his own songs to him.
20. His first original composition of any note was called Song for Woody, and he even began to sing and talk like the Oklahoma singer.
21. Guthrie offered Dylan his stash of unused lyrics but his young son Arlo was unable to find them when Dylan came knocking. Almost 40 years later, the lyrics were put to music by Essex folksinger Billy Bragg and Chicago band Wilco.
22. In his book, Dylan revealed that aside from Guthrie and Irish folk group The Clancy Brothers, the biggest influences on his songwriting were blues legend Robert Johnson and Pirate Jenny - a song from the Brecht/Weill play The Threepenny Opera.
23. Having briefly operated under the name Elston Gunn, including while playing in Bobby Vee's band, Dylan then settled on his now famous moniker - a nod to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
24. Dylan was a university drop-out. He never did finish his Liberal Arts degree at the University of Minnesota.
25. He read works by French symbolist poets like Arthur Rimbaud and American beat writers like Jack Kerouac. The On the Road writer's spontaneous style "blew a hole in my head", Dylan once remarked.
26. He moved to New York in 1961, to chase his dream of becoming a big music star.
27. He would regularly perform at venues in Greenwich Village such as Cafe Wha? and The Gaslight Cafe, where performers would pass around a basket at the end of each set and hope to be paid. Dylan once said he would get a dollar and a cheeseburger to play his harmonica all afternoon alongside another singer in the village.
28. After nine months in The Big Apple he secured a deal with Colombia Records, feeding the company's PR executives "pure hokum", as he later put it.
29. His first trip abroad involved an eight-week stay in a freezing cold London in the winter of 1962/63, where he learned traditional English folk songs like Scarborough Fair, and (for contractual reasons) cut an LP under the pseudonym Billy Boy Grunt.
30. Early on in his career, he would make up tales about his background, telling journalists and radio presenters that he was an orphan, from New Mexico and that he used to travel with a carnival.
31. His self-titled debut album consisted largely of covers of traditional folk and blues numbers, such as The House of the Rising Sun.
32. His breakthrough follow-up, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, carried a picture of him and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, on the cover. A performance of the song Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is believed to have signalled end of the couple's relationship.
33. Blowin' in the Wind, the opening track on the album, was the song that made Dylan famous - initially thanks to the Peter, Paul and Mary version - and it also forever aligned with him the civil rights movement and anti-war protests.
34. The song has a similar melody to that of the African American spiritual song No More Auction Block. It came about as musician Agnes 'Sis' Cunningham urged artists like Dylan to put contemporary activist lyrics to old tunes which she then published in her Broadside magazine.
35. Dylan performed the number near to Dr Martin Luther King Jr at a march on Washington DC in 1963, becoming the voice of a generation in the process - a label he always rejected.
36. He said that Dr King's famous I Have a Dream speech that day affected him "in a profound way".
37. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan shocked fans and the music world by plugging in and rocking out, backed by a band that had been hastily-arranged the night before.
38. For the next year or so on tour around the world, Dylan and his band The Hawks were regularly booed when they went electric - including at London's Royal Albert Hall. He was famously even called "Judas" by one gig-goer at Manchester Free Trade Hall. "I don't believe you," replied Dylan. "You're lying".
39. The period that followed - with his trilogy of more abstract and surrealist bluesy folk rock albums, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde - saw Dylan turn pop music into an art form, according to Sean Latham, director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa.
Speaking on Radio 4's documentary series, It Ain't Me You're Looking For Babe: Bob Dylan at 80, Mr Latham said: "The closest parallels we can draw in fact are not to other pop stars but to say Picasso or James Joyce."
40. Dylan married Sara Lownds, who had worked as a model, in secret in 1965, and they had four children together. He also adopted her daughter from a prior marriage.
41. For a short while they lived at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York.
42. One of their sons, Jakob, became known as the frontman of the 1990s band The Wallflowers.
43. Dylan did a screen test at Andy Warhol's studio, aka The Factory, and walked away with a print of an Elvis portrait.
44. He was injured in a mysterious motorbike accident in July 1966.
45. The singer then stopped touring and became a bit of a recluse for most of the rest of the 60s, living in a remote artists' colony in Woodstock, upstate New York. "Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race," he wrote in Chronicles. "Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on."
46. During this period he learned to paint, read the bible and would jam with his with 1966 touring bandmates - who would become affectionately known as The Band. The collection of historical ballads and traditional songs they recorded were released many years later under the name The Basement Tapes.
47. The Band's star-studded final gig, which featured Dylan, was later the subject of a Martin Scorsese documentary entitled The Last Waltz.
48. Fans broke into Dylan's property (and bed), and he eventually moved back to Greenwich Village, where he was similarly hounded by Dylanologists.
49. The star rarely read the contracts he signed early on, and as a result he and his long-trusted manager Albert Grossman ended up suing each other in the 1980s.
50. Re-inventing himself again as a country singer, he wrote Wanted Man with Johnny Cash, who debuted the track live at San Quentin prison in 1969. Dylan made a rare appearance on his famous friend's new TV show.
51. His 1975 album Blood on the Tracks tackled the topic of his separation from Sara.
52. Its opening track Tangled Up in Blue saw him experiment with timeless painting-style techniques in the muddled narrative of the song. The singer said it took "ten years to live and two years to write".
53. Dylan returned to the live circuit in 1974, playing arenas with The Band - one of the first major tours of its kind.
54. The following year he gathered a collection of entertainers - including beat poet Allen Ginsberg, singers Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and violinist Scarlet Rivera - for a travelling circus-esque US tour called the The Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan even drove a motor home for the circuit of small town venues, which was mythologised in a Scorsese Netflix film.
The finale of the first leg of the tour constituted a benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Ruben Carter - the subject of Dylan's recent song The Hurricane - and featured a cameo from fighting champion and activist Muhammad Ali.
55. At times during the unique tour, Dylan painted his face white and wore a mask, while former girlfriend Baez dressed up as him.
56. Baez has stated that the lyrics to her song Diamonds and Rust relate to her relationship with her fellow singer.
57. He started to re-imagine his songs at this time, reworking the tempos and styles so they were almost unrecognisable. A decade later, after sustaining a debilitating hand injury, Dylan said a jazz singer inspired him to play and sing his songs using a totally different technique.
58. In 1978, Dylan released a cubist-inspired film he had written and directed during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, called Renaldo and Clara. The almost four-hour long feature starred his (by-then ex) wife Sara and Baez, as The Woman in White, and it was an expensive flop at the box office.
59. Dylan had a period of Christian revelation in the late 1970s, following his divorce, after a fan threw a small silver cross on stage. He got baptised and released several albums containing contemporary gospel songs like Gotta Serve Somebody.
Speaking about his faith in 1997, however, the musician told Newsweek: "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music, I don't find it anywhere else. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists all of that, I've learned more from the songs than I have from any of this entity."
60. Sporting a dangly earring, Dylan played a rather ragged rendition of Blowin' In the Wind at the global charity event Live Aid in 1985, backed by Rolling Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium.
61. His song Blind Willie McTell, a tribute to the late bluesman, was released in 1991, oddly eight years after it was recorded.
62. Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis in 1986 and they had a daughter together, before divorcing in 1992. This second marriage remained a secret until Howard Sounes' book, Down the Highway, was first published in 2001.
63. He formed a supergroup called The Traveling Wilburys in 1988, with his famous friends George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. They each had band nicknames and Dylan was known as Lucky. Lucky Wilbury.
64. He was inducted into the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that year too.
65. His album Love and Theft was released on 11 September 2001 - the same day as the plane attacks on New York City.
66. Dylan won an Oscar and a Golden Globe award earlier that year for his hard-grooving track Things Have Changed, which featured in the Michael Douglas movie Wonder Boys.
67. He had his own weekly one-hour satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, from 2006 to 2009.
68. Dylan's name appears on the wall of Blackpool's Opera House, alongside other acts to have performed there, such as comedians Little and Large and Roy Chubby Brown.
69. He's a hip-hop fan. Dylan raved about Ice-T, Public Enemy, NWA and Run-DMC: "They were all poets and knew what was going on," he wrote. Some consider his own 1965 track Subterranean Homesick Blues to be one of the first popular modern rap songs. 70. He's also allegedly a master thief. Chronicles: Volume One (to give it its full title) was a New York times best-seller, however critics claimed its author, Dylan, had cribbed certain passages from Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Time magazine and even a guide to New Orleans.
71. The 2007 Dylan-inspired film I'm Not There became Heath Ledger's last movie to be released during the actor's lifetime.
72. A 160ft wide Dylan mural by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra (pictured below) was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis in 2015.
73. Dylan was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 2012 by then-Present Barack Obama; before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later, for having "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". He became the first songwriter to win the prestigious award, but it was collected on his behalf by another - the priestess of punk Patti Smith, who nervously sang A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.
74. He eventually delivered a Nobel lecture in the form of a spoken word piece with added piano tinkling and references to the plays of William Shakespeare and Homer's hero, Odysseus. "My songs are alive in the land of the living, but songs are unlike literature, they are meant to be sung and not read," he explained.
75. The last British gig of Dylan's so-called Never Ending Tour, which kicked off in 1988, saw him and Neil Young co-headline a UK show for the first time, at London's Hyde Park in 2019. He's played roughly 100 gigs a year for the last 20 years.
76. His first new song in eight years, Murder Most Foul, was released last year and it comprised of a 17-minute rumination on the 1960s and the assassination of JFK. It made Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, his 11 minute-plus epic from 1966, seem pretty poppy by comparison.
77. In December, he sold the rights to his entire song catalogue to Universal Music Group (UMG) for an undisclosed fee. The New York Times claimed the deal could be worth more than $300m (£225m).
78. Dylan has been a keen painter and visual artist for decades and his work is currently on display and up for sale at the Halcyon Gallery in London and the Castle Fine Art gallery in Manchester.
79. Last week, it emerged Dylan had agreed to become an honorary patron of the The Bob Willis Fund - a new charity in memory of the late England cricketer. "Bob Willis was a great sportsman who left too soon," Dylan noted. "I'm happy to help keep his flame and cause alive."
Willis once told the BBC's John Wilson that he had changed his middle name to Dylan as a young man, in honour of his favourite musician.
80. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma - a museum dedicated to artefacts from his huge archive - will open to the public in May next year.
So if you made it to the end of this list and are still craving more, now you know where to go for more Dylan facts.
Saturday, May 22, 2021
"Stuffed" Girl's Heads! only $2.98
Friday, May 21, 2021
WILLIAM SHATNER: 💗PRE-KIRK COOL💗
It's William F**king Shatner, who is still cool at 90 years old. But here - there ought to be a law!
Thursday, May 20, 2021
Mama duck vs heron: GO, MAMA, GO!
This is one of the great nature videos of all time. Herons are notorious for picking off baby ducklings as a sort of mid-day snack, and at first this bird predator seems to have all the advantages as it slowly advances. But the heron underestimated the fierce protectiveness of the mother duck, who risks her own life to chase this marauder off (squawking in terror!). Honestly, I love watching mama ducks with their young; they are so attentive, so protective, allowing them free rein to explore and swim far out into the water - before bringing them all back home again by some secret signal. I find myself longing for a mother who was that caring, that protective, and that devoted to my safety. It's a strange model to use, I admit, but if I could've been raised by a duck, I would have saved myself decades of grief and despair.
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Monday, May 17, 2021
Let's Bring back the MUNSINGWEAR MEN!
Ah, the drama, the camaraderie, the warm human interaction, the - oh what the hell. It's strange how something that seems so blatantly gay now wasn't really seen as gay then. Or at least, I don't think so. But I've never seen a bunch of straight men in a locker room joshing each other about their underwear. Some of these guys are, I confess, pretty cute and easy on the eyes. Hey, I like men too, like the smell of them, their voices, their. . . excuse me. It is an appreciation that most definitely does NOT wane with the years. But the union suit idea doesn't make it for me. And the "stretchy seat" thing kind of kills whatever attraction might ensue. Not to mention those "slumberalls" that I don't think you'd even see at a co-ed pajama party.
NOTE: My blog program is vastly improved now, so that I can blow this up immensely and you might even be able to read most of the text (which is really the best part). Which is why this gif is running sooooooooo slowly! The original ads were long and skinny (like some of these guys) and fit down the sides of the text in magazines, which makes for an awkward size - and having to scroll down to get all the text, if you're that dedicated. If not, here is a sort of edited version with only the best parts:
NOTE: My blog program is vastly improved now, so that I can blow this up immensely and you might even be able to read most of the text (which is really the best part). Which is why this gif is running sooooooooo slowly! The original ads were long and skinny (like some of these guys) and fit down the sides of the text in magazines, which makes for an awkward size - and having to scroll down to get all the text, if you're that dedicated. If not, here is a sort of edited version with only the best parts:
Sunday, May 16, 2021
💙💙💙The Troll Doll Channel: HEAVY METAL trolls!🤎🤎🤎
These two just didn't get enough play. I put an incredible amount of work into them, and though I am pleased with the result, it's too bad this video got a couple dozen views, whereas some of my most lame, inane things get over 15,000 (including one of an old 1961 computer singing "Daisy"). I will never understand it, but I keep working on these because it's an enjoyable hobby and keeps me from thinking too much.
Saturday, May 15, 2021
CAPYBARA CONFIDENTIAL!
When I found out there is an entire YouTube channel devoted to capybaras, my life was complete. Fifteen years ago Caitlin was obsessed with capybaras, and do you think we could find anything about them? Hardly anything. Certainly not videos like these. This means I can vary my viewing pleasure and watch something besides cute kittens and baby goats.
Friday, May 14, 2021
💚I LOVE TURTLES!💚
One of my all-time-favorite nature videos. Not exactly action-packed, but very turtle-licious.
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
PANDEMIC HAIR: stages of grief
IN THE BEGINNING. Unable to see stylist. Taking matters into my own hands, began to trim the ends off with a razor comb. Colored it with something called hair mascara. Did photo shoot with cat for Facebook page.
Quite a few months in. (Already lost track of time.) Not happy about my attempts to keep it short. Natural colour showing through (grey or blonde or what??). Keep thinking about making an appointment, and not making an appointment.
PANDEMIC PONYTAIL. More than a year in. No more razor combs, no more hair mascara. This is what it looks like. First, I haven’t worn a ponytail since I was eight. I haven’t seen my natural colour (whatever you call this - I will call it blonde, but in natural light it looks grey) in over 30 years. It is a totally different texture, the annoyingly tickly cornsilk of my childhood. I wore the same side part and barrette when I was five years old. I think my stylist would scream if she saw what has become of me, but if the entire world changes, so does your identity.
Acceptance?? I look ten years older than I did a year ago, but then, a lot has happened, and NOT happened, and my hair is the least of it.
I am back to my five-year-old hair. But at least I look happier now.
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
SMOKESCREEN: a treat instead of a treatment
One of the reasons I spend so much time on YouTube (OK, the COVID apocalypse is right now the main reason) is to scan the comments, particularly regarding a video which has been up for several years. Sometimes I even see one of my own comments from, say, eight years ago, and it gives me a funny time-machine feeling. The following was a comment on a three-hour documentary (the kind A & E used to produce before their content slid into the sewer) recounting the history of Big Tobacco and their successful coverup of the lethal nature of nicotene addiction.
This had to be one of the strangest comments I've ever seen on ANY topic, and I want to pick it apart here because it rang a lot of bells for me - not as a smoker, which I've never been, but as a sober alcoholic who nearly drowned in her addiction to alcohol. In other words, I know the dynamics of addiction pretty well, I've lived it through my own heart and liver and brain, and I see all the earmarks of an addict in these strangely defensive, yet rhapsodic remarks about the now socially-taboo habit of smoking.
"I've been a smoker for about a year and a half, smoking about three cigarettes a week with additive free rolling tobacco and its probably one of the most enjoyable habits I've ever taken up in my life. Here are 5 Thoughts on Why I Smoke Cigarettes:
OK, so let me analyze these baffling comments one at a time.
I've been a smoker for about a year and a half, smoking about three cigarettes a week with additive free rolling tobacco and its probably one of the most enjoyable habits I've ever taken up in my life. Here are 5 Thoughts on Why I Smoke Cigarettes:
This guy hits the ground running in what I would call the art of minimizing/rationalizing. "About three cigarettes a week" is kind of like saying you pee three times a week. As far as I know from talking to hundreds of smokers in AA, it just doesn't happen. Even if he's correct in telling us how moderate his habit is, his description of "additive free rolling tobacco" somehow makes it all sound a lot more wholesome, organic, and just plain safer than smoking those awful tubes with the filters in them. "Taken up" gives a sense of starting a new hobby, or a new religion perhaps, and certainly embracing the habit of his own free will.
1. If you are not willing to even give me the time of day because I have a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers, and that's your only reason to not talk to me, then thank you for removing yourself from the equation and not wasting my time.
WHOA! Settle down, fella! Nobody's out to get you here, so why the sudden cobra-strike before anyone has even said anything? I saw no direct criticisms of anything he had said in the comments. But that wasn't the issue. He was defensive, surly, even hostile before the conversation even started. It was: hello, I love smoking, and go to hell, you're wasting my time. Anyone who disagrees with him is dismissed with contempt before they even get to make their point. If these are five "thoughts", I'd like to see what he calls "insults". The description of an innocuous "pinch of dried leaves" is probably the most extreme example of minimizing I've ever seen. Hell, I used to drink a clear liquid that might have looked like an ordinary glass of water, except that it said Smirnoff on the label.
2. There is something zen and meditative about sitting down with a bag of tobacco and rolling your own cigarettes. The mechanical muscle memory of making something relieves you of having to focus on other things.
This is one of the most far-fetched (if poetic) defenses of smoking I've ever seen. I doubt very much that someone HAS to resort to rolling their own cigarettes to attain a meditative state. If it's muscle memory and the comfort of repetitive actions that provides so much comfort, peeling carrots might do the same thing. If you have the desire to "make something", take up carpentry or cooking or painting or sculpture. It's a lot more constructive way to use your hands, and you won't end up with rotting lungs or a stopped heart. I also wonder exactly what those "other things" are - never spelled out as either positive or negative, but definitely things he would rather not focus on.
3. Almost everything seems better with a cigarette. Long drives in the car. Pulling an all-nighter. Coffee. Sex. Taking a poop. The only thing I can think of that it makes worse is a stuffy nose and a sore throat from a cold, and god dammit if I just don't soldier through that.
Let me get this straight. You smoke "about three cigarettes A WEEK". So you tell me. Then suddenly everything you do seems to require a cigarette: driving, staying up late, drinking coffee, having sex, even taking a shit! This sounds like the classic smoker's pattern: get up in the morning, have a cigarette. Drink some coffee, have a cigarette. Drive to work, have a. . . or walk the dog, or pee, or whatever-the-hell-it-is you happen to be doing. Smoking doesn't "make it better" either. It's just a reflex based on addictive craving. ANY excuse will do. One of the reasons it's so hard to quit is that you associate every single activity of your day with lighting up. If you truly smoke only three cigarettes a week, you must take very few long drives in the car (and a long drive - hey, wouldn't that maybe require MORE THAN ONE cigarette?). The George S. Patton-type stoicism about sore throats and colds is just a way to flaunt his immunity to such mortal weakness.
4. There's something beautiful about the way that smoke curls through the air, interacts with sunlight, and vanishes like it never existed. It really makes me want to capture it in a photograph or draw it on a pad of paper.
5. As far as addictions go, smoking cigarettes is probably the least harmful one that I have. Friendships will come and go. Relationships will start and end. People are born and then we die. But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes.
Here is an admission in plain type that this guy DOES have an addiction to smoking. He calls it "the least harmful one that I have", making me wonder just how many addictions he DOES have. In a sense, all addictions are the same - it's what goes on in the brain that is such a disaster, the dopamine rush and surge of artificial wellbeing - and the substance, such as "that a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers", is just the delivery device.
But it's what he says after that which truly horrifies me. Friendships will come and go, relationships will start and end. . . This echoes very closely the MANY statements made in the original documentary by long-term smokers (many of them in the terminal stages) who actually cherished their habit, saw cigarettes as their "friend", and even saw mere human relationships as comparatively disposable. The tone of his "you live, you die" comments is harsh and feels dismissive of life itself, but then comes the topper: "But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes."
Go to a gas station? Buy a new pack. . . But wait. Whatever happened to your little drawstring bag, the wholesome loose tobacco with no harmful additives, the three hand-rolled cigarettes a week? There's nothing very meditative about stopping at a Shell station and furtively purchasing a pack of Marlboros along with your Snickers bar and a bag of Cheetos. It's sad, because it's pretty plain to me that he is basically lying, and posting the elaborate comment publicly out of some need to defend something that he knows is clearly harmful to him. This guy is very likely a full-on smoker, someone who takes denial to the level of an art form, with one of the most elaborate smokescreens I have ever encountered. He deserves the Old Gold "Treat Instead of a Treatment" Addiction Denial Award of the Week.
Monday, May 10, 2021
Creepy 1961 Computer Sings DAISY (HAL'S song from 2001)!
I don't have a lot to add to this, except to say it's getting thousands of views on my YouTube channel - and I finally figured out why. There's a TikTok craze going around now with various people, machines, computers, celebrities, etc. etc. singing this version of DAISY. I had no idea this was going on and just stumbled on the recording, then found the bizarre gizmo that supposedly recreates human speech. I put the two together just because they seemed to belong.
Saturday, May 8, 2021
UPDATE: No, THIS is the weirdest thing I’ve seen for sale on eBay.
Vintage Anatomically Correct Boy Doll Toy
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Friday, May 7, 2021
Thursday, May 6, 2021
OK, Piers, now tell us how you REALLY feel.
PIERS
MORGAN: How the hell can Meghan 'I hate royalty but call me Duchess' Markle
preach about father-child relationships when she's disowned her own Dad, and
wrecked her husband's relationship with his?
What would make the current shortlist for the title of World's Most Ludicrously Inappropriate Book?
Donald Trump's Guide to Diplomacy?
The Art of Protecting One's Privacy by the Kardashian Sisters?
Why Marriage is for Keeps by Bill and Melinda Gates?
These would all be good contenders were it not for the announcement this afternoon that Meghan Markle has written a book called 'The Bench' about the very special bond between father and child.
Sorry, WHAT?
Notwithstanding Ms Markle's seemingly unlimited thirst for committing attention-seeking acts of gargantuan hypocrisy, this seemed beyond parody.
But it was real.
I laughed out loud when the news broke via her ecstatic publishers, and even louder when I read the accompanying gush-laden statements.
Ms Markle proudly informed us that her debut literary tome captures 'the warmth, joy and comfort of the relationship between fathers and sons from all walks of life.'
She added: 'This representation was particularly important to me ... and I worked closely to depict this special bond through an inclusive lens. My hope is that The Bench resonates with every family, no matter the make-up, as much as it does with mine.'
Hmmmm.
Meghan Markle has written a book called 'The Bench' about the very special bond between father and child. Sorry, WHAT? I laughed out loud when the news broke via her ecstatic publishers, and even louder when I read the accompanying gush-laden statements
Ms Markle proudly informed us that her debut literary tome captures 'the warmth, joy and comfort of the relationship between fathers and sons from all walks of life'
She added: 'This representation was particularly important to me ... and I worked closely to depict this special bond through an inclusive lens. My hope is that The Bench resonates with every family, no matter the make-up, as much as it does with mine'
I wonder how much these touching sentiments will resonate with her own family, or her husband's?
Lest we forget, Ms Markle has ruthlessly disowned her father Thomas and refuses to have anything to do with him despite the fact they now live just 70 miles from each other.
She is also reported to have disowned every other Markle, none of whom were invited to her wedding.
This doesn't seem like someone overly keen to operate 'an inclusive lens' to me.
In fact, it seems a singularly EX-clusive lens.
She also spray-gunned Thomas in her lie-packed Oprah whine-a-thon in a manner that was more 'ice, rage and irritation' than 'warmth, joy and comfort'.
As for Harry, he trashed his father Prince Charles in the same interview, moaning about how Daddy had stopped taking his calls or giving him cash, sounding like some needy spoiled brat teenager rather than a 36-year-old multi-millionaire doormat who ditched his family, country and duty because his chillingly controlling and ambitious wife wanted him to.
And unforgivably, he did this as Charles was desperately worried about HIS father, Prince Philip, who was lying seriously ill in hospital and later died.
Very, very uneasily, I would suggest.
The pair of them also branded Harry's royal family a bunch of heartless racists, though no evidence has yet emerged to support any of their outrageously hurtful and damaging claims.
And they repeatedly attacked the institution of the Monarchy and everything it stands for.
Yet when it comes to flogging her book, what author name does Meghan Markle use?
Ah, of course: 'Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.'
Yes, she continues to cynically exploit her royal titles because she knows that's the only reason anyone is paying her vast sums of money to spew her uniquely unctuous brand of pious hectoring gibberish in Netflix documentaries, Spotify podcasts or children's books.
Of course, her equally cynical publishers don't give a damn about any of this shocking double standard.
She cooed that the illustrator's art 'beautifully matches the tender emotion of Meghan's words, and every spread is infused with a vibrant sense of joy and love. The Bench is timeless—it feels destined to become one of those books that people will be reading for generations to come.'
And unforgivably, Harry gave the Oprah interview as Charles was desperately worried about HIS father, Prince Philip, who was lying seriously ill in hospital and later die
The pair of them also branded Harry's royal family a bunch of heartless racists, though no evidence has yet emerged to support any of their outrageously hurtful and damaging claims. And they repeatedly attacked the institution of the Monarchy and everything it stands for. Pictured: Prince Charles leads the procession of male royals, including Harry, at his father's funeral
Hmmm, I don't wish to rain on the comically sycophantic parade - but I suspect this book will become an instant historical classic for all the wrong reasons.
The whole notion of Meghan Markle dishing out advice to anyone about the relationship between fathers and children is absolutely ridiculous given the appalling relationships she and her husband have with their own fathers.
Yet her brazen decision to do it anyway is so sadly typical of a woman whose tendency for staggering hypocrisy is only matched by her extraordinary tone-deafness.
I'd honestly rather hear parenting tips from Britney Spears's god-awful father because at least they still talk to each other.
In the press release, Ms Markle is described as 'a mother, wife, feminist, and activist' who 'currently resides in her home state of California with her family, two dogs, and a growing flock of rescue chickens.'
What it didn't clarify is that she resides with a lot more animals than family members.
In fact, the only three members of her entire family she seems to have any relationship with at all now are Harry, Archie and her mother.
The rest have been discarded along with her ex-husband, and almost every old friend and colleague.
'What Meghan wants, Meghan gets,' was Harry's famous refrain in the build-up to their wedding.
And so far, she's got exactly what she wanted: the handsome British Prince, the Californian mansion, the millionaire celebrity lifestyle she always craved, and since Oprah's unquestioning softball PR stunt, the coveted and ferociously-contested status of America's No1 oppressed victim – a poor innocent waif cruelly mistreated by the beastly racist British royals until she managed to grab her confiscated passport and escape back home.
The fact none of this ugly incendiary narrative is
true is irrelevant to the people who matter to her – the
But what Ms Markle really needs now is some old-fashioned home truth.
THE truth, that is, not HER truth that usually turns out to be of the Princess Pinocchio veracity.
And THE truth is that she's a cynical disingenuous manipulator intent on wrecking the Royal Family's image around the world with her shameless, shameful, money-grabbing victim-playing antics, and dragging her hapless husband along for the ride.
This new book about father-children relationships is just another example of Meghan Markle's never-ending penchant for preaching what she never practices.
And if she really cared about father-child relationships, she would never have trashed Harry's family on global TV in the horrible way that she did, causing yet more damage, possibly irreparably, to Harry's relationship with his father.
But then as we've seen from her gruesomely self-interested behavior during a pandemic that's caused so much devastation and pain to billions around the world, Meghan Markle doesn't really care about anyone but herself.
Wednesday, May 5, 2021
Domenic Troiano - The Wear & The Tear On My Mind
I swear to God, a couple of years ago this phrase kept repeating in my mind: "But it's the wear and the tear on my mind. It's the wear and the tear on my mind. . . " I thought, OK, I'll google it and the song will come up. NOTHING. I mean nothing. I tried searching YouTube. Nothing there either. I tried every permutation of the line, wear, tear, mind, blind. . . not a thing. It was as if I'd imagined the whole thing. Then - just now, just a minute ago, as Bob Dylan says in his song - voila - it pops out at me, and it has been there on YouTube for a couple of years now. It's by a Canadian named Domenic Troiano, and it's one of those names buried at the back of my brain since about age 16, which is, let me tell you, a very long time. But here it is, and yes, it's exactly the way I remember it! But it's the wear and the tear on my mind. The wear and the tear on my mind. Oh yes!
To get my fortune told
She said, I don't see much in the future for you
You won't be gettin' old
That got me worried
So I went to see my doctor
He said, son, you're gonna die
Ain't nothin' I can do, ain't nothin' I can say
All that's left for you to do is cry
Lord, it's the wear and the tear on my mind
It's the wear and the tear on my mind, on my mind
Why is this world so unkind?
So I went out to see a lawyer
I asked him to write my will
He looked at me with a real straight face
And said, to whom do I send the bill?
I couldn't believe that, so I called up my old lady
And said, mama don't you start to cry
It seems I've been here too long now
And it's time for me to say goodbye
Lord it's the wear and the tear on my mind
It's the wear and the tear on my mind, on my mind
Why is this world so unkind?
It's the wear and the tear on my mind (on my mind)
It's the wear and the tear on my mind (on my mind)
Why is this world so unkind?
Why is this world so unkind?
Wear and the tear on my mind (on my mind)
Wear and the tear on my mind (help me out Lord)
Wear and the tear on my mind
Wear and the tear on my mi-mi-mi-mind
Wear and the tear on my mind (on my mind Lord)
Wear and the tear on my mind
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. Domenic Troiano died of prostate cancer at the age of 59.
Monday, May 3, 2021
Hey, that's my girl! Shannon Paterson covers the vaccine beat
My illustrious daughter Shannon covers the vaccine beat for CTV News Vancouver. We never get over the thrill of seeing her on TV!
Thursday, April 29, 2021
💗Sexy Betty Boop: SHAKE THAT THING!💗
Confession time: I have a "thing" for Betty Boop. It's bizarre enough to love a cartoon character "in that way", but last time I checked I was hetero, so. . . but never mind. Some corner of me that refuses to conform crushes on Betty, or at least the magnificent pre-Code Betty who could really shake that thing.
She wore practically nothing, and even what she did wear kept falling off or being pulled off her, or blown off by the wind, or suggestively tugged on by her little doggie, or whatever. She ran around practically nude, and in more than one cartoon danced the hula WITH NO TOP ON. I am not kidding, all she had on was a diminutive Hawaiian lei which shifted back and forth as she shimmied. In this guise she (nonsensically) introduced Popeye in his very first cartoon appearance by DANCING THE HULA with him. Make sense? Never mind, the piggybacking worked, and in the next Popeye cartoon he didn't have to hula at all.
It was dismaying to see what happened to her after 1934, the threshhold for "the Code" that killed everything. Her hemline plunged to her knees, she suddenly had long sleeves and a high neckline, the winsome garter no longer existed, all her clothes (and very dowdy clothes they were) stayed on her body, and all she had left of her old teasing sexy self was the "boop-boop-be-doop" and the spit curls. Thus a '20s icon was destroyed, tamed, and turned into a domestic drudge, winsomely doing housework and selling war bonds.
But we still have pre-Code Betty, a character which I am SURE was not ever meant for kids! Who WAS she meant for, then? Guys who were turned on by a line-drawing of a bizarrelly-proportioned female with next to nothing on? Must have been - or people like me, who just see her as exotic, sweetly rebellious, and totally adorable.
POSTSCRIPT. I forgot to mention that the little video-ette I made (in slow motion, and with tango music added) was taken from an old Boop cartoon called HA! HA! HA!, and it featured all the characters and a number of inanimate objects getting STONED on laughing gas (thus the vapor shimmering in the air as she dizzily shakes her booty, then literally falls down at the end). The drug connection caused this cartoon to be banned, but it does seem like shutting the barn door after the fact. Why not ban the whole thing? She's about as subversive as a cartoon character gets.
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Creepy comfort: when dolls talk back to you
I just have to dust this one off again.
Maybe it goes all the way back to voodoo and burning your enemies in effigy, but humanity has always had a very strange relationship with dolls. They're both cuddly and creepy, calling forth a weird mixture of maternal tenderness and hair-raising shock. We don't expect them to talk, and most especially they weren't supposed to talk in Edison's time, which is what made this doll so - unique. The fact that the mechanism inside them (which was actually a teeny-tiny phonograph that played a miniature disc) broke after one or two uses meant that their popularity soon faded. Most of the dolls were returned. A few must have survived more or less intact. It was decades later that Chatty Cathy took over as the most "possessed" doll (meaning, of course, that more little girls owned them) in history.
I had no interest whatsoever in dolls when I was a child. I was more interested in frogs, toads, newts, snakes, polliwogs, mud puppies, millipedes, salamanders, and anything else that crawled (or barked or whinnied or meowed). I have no idea what has happened to me in the past few years, but my doll collection (if you count the trolls) has boomed, so much so that I don't know how many I have now, and don't want to count.
I can't account for this, except to say that the reborn doll craze has given rise to dolls that are much more realistic and less creepy (some would say MORE creepy due to the uncanny valley effect) than the staring-eyed, round-headed, stiff-limbed hunks of plastic we used to play with. I've knitted clothes for my dolls, made tons of videos about them, bought more and more of them - and, of course, during the pandemic, have relied on them as a source of comfort. They say we return to the enthusiasms of childhood as old age approaches - but in this case, I seem to have aged backwards, and am catching up on what never appealed to me in childhood.
I still like crawly things, and LOVE birds, which have become a serious interest in the past few years. Sometimes the only thing that pulls my spirits out of a bog of sludge is feeding the red-winged blackbirds at Burnaby Lake. The glossy, sassy males tilt their heads this way and that, their brilliant red and yellow wing patches flaming in the sun. The females, much more practical and industrious, are no-nonsense creatures who get right down to the business of eating, without any flirtation needed.
I can't see ahead right now - can anyone? Are we out of this woods yet? It seems to me it grows darker with every step. Each day HAS to be sufficient unto itself, because I can't plan. We try to focus on how much better our situation is than someone else's - but don't I also bleed for them, my fellow suffering humans?
For some reason - this is terribly disjointed, sorry - a song jumps back into my head, one that gave me great comfort during another time when I couldn't see ahead. I'd be walking through the woods with this song playing in my ear and try to find some sense in what was happening to me. Mostly I was just trying to stay out of the hospital, and when I was unable to find the light, I had to try to develop a taste for the dark. I don't know how I survived that time, why those soul-destroying times kept returning, and why I am not in that state now when I suppose I have every reason to be. Maybe the message was finally delivered.
No one is alone
No one here to guide you
Now you're on your own
Only me beside you
Still you're not alone
No one is alone, truly
No one is alone
Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood
Others may deceive you
You decide what's good
You decide alone
But no one is alone
People make mistakes
Fathers, mothers
People make mistakes
Holding to their own
Thinking they're alone
Honour their mistakes
Everybody makes
One another's
Terrible mistakes
Witches can be right
Giants can be good
You decide what's right
You decide what's good
Just remember
Someone is on your side
Someone else is not
While we're seeing our side
Maybe we forgot
They are not alone
No one is alone
Hard to see the light now
Just don't let it go
Things will come out right now
That's the best I know
Someone is on your side
No one is alone
Stephen Sondheim
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