Nobody can resist the woman with the Hormel Flavor-Sealed Ham.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Life on Repeat
The Broken Computer Keyboards
I recently noticed that the "plus" key on my new computer keyboard didn't work. Apple promptly sent me another keyboard...which has a mostly unresponsive "right arrow" key.
A third keyboard is now in the mail. You'll know it's arrived when different letters start disappearing from my blog posts.
The Persistent Junk Mail
After three weeks of receiving "The Record Save and Sell," an enormous package of weekly junkmail, I finally had enough. The thing is too big for my mailbox, but the carrier just stuffs it in anyway and leaves the lid open. Therefore my legitimate mail gets crushed and rained on.
I called the company and was "taken off the list," but I received it again the following week. I called back and was reassured that I REALLY wouldn't get it any more...but of course I did. I finally managed to track down the MANAGER, who absolutely, positively promised that I would never receive the Save and Sell again.
It was in my mailbox on Friday.
The Squatter Squirrels
Several months ago my landlords finally admitted that there are squirrels in my attic, and they patched up the roof and laid out traps to remove the critters once and for all.
This weekend they gnawed a hole into the opposite end of the building. They're back again, and this time I imagine they're singing a song:
We're happy little squirrels and we're back to bother you,
with our squealing and our humping and our chew and chew and chew.
We spurn all laws, we have big claws, we're muscular and furry, oh,
don't try so hard to lose us 'cause we'll get back in a hurry!
If you sit all day and wonder what we're doing to your ceiling,
you cannot understand...your little attic's so appealing!
We live in peace, we'll sign no lease, we'll send no rent your way, 'cause
we're happy chewing squirrels and we've moved in here to stay!
I recently noticed that the "plus" key on my new computer keyboard didn't work. Apple promptly sent me another keyboard...which has a mostly unresponsive "right arrow" key.
A third keyboard is now in the mail. You'll know it's arrived when different letters start disappearing from my blog posts.
The Persistent Junk Mail
After three weeks of receiving "The Record Save and Sell," an enormous package of weekly junkmail, I finally had enough. The thing is too big for my mailbox, but the carrier just stuffs it in anyway and leaves the lid open. Therefore my legitimate mail gets crushed and rained on.
I called the company and was "taken off the list," but I received it again the following week. I called back and was reassured that I REALLY wouldn't get it any more...but of course I did. I finally managed to track down the MANAGER, who absolutely, positively promised that I would never receive the Save and Sell again.
It was in my mailbox on Friday.
The Squatter Squirrels
Several months ago my landlords finally admitted that there are squirrels in my attic, and they patched up the roof and laid out traps to remove the critters once and for all.
This weekend they gnawed a hole into the opposite end of the building. They're back again, and this time I imagine they're singing a song:
We're happy little squirrels and we're back to bother you,
with our squealing and our humping and our chew and chew and chew.
We spurn all laws, we have big claws, we're muscular and furry, oh,
don't try so hard to lose us 'cause we'll get back in a hurry!
If you sit all day and wonder what we're doing to your ceiling,
you cannot understand...your little attic's so appealing!
We live in peace, we'll sign no lease, we'll send no rent your way, 'cause
we're happy chewing squirrels and we've moved in here to stay!
Catching Up on the 1920s Vernacular
Georgette fabric was a bouncy and crinkly derivative of silk. Women in the '20s who wanted to be fashionable but couldn't afford expensive dresses would settle for georgette. You can still buy it today.
A comptometer was a very early adding machine which allowed numbers to be entered by holding down several keys at the same time. For this reason they were actually faster than modern calculators, but I somehow doubt they still offer training courses for them.
It would seem that the "motor robe" I posted about last week had a close cousin in the "steamer rug," as mentioned in the Feburary 23, 1929 New Yorker.
In the '20s you could actually create colour home movies using the Kodacolor technique, which used lenticular trickery similar to those posters and billboards that change their image as you walk around them. It was apparently pretty good, but awkward.
A comptometer was a very early adding machine which allowed numbers to be entered by holding down several keys at the same time. For this reason they were actually faster than modern calculators, but I somehow doubt they still offer training courses for them.
It would seem that the "motor robe" I posted about last week had a close cousin in the "steamer rug," as mentioned in the Feburary 23, 1929 New Yorker.
Those warm plaid steamer rugs that zip up, either in a long version to extend to your waist or in a short knee length, ideal for chilly motoring or for steamer crossings, are to be found here.Our anonymous commenter was right...those cars really WERE cold!
In the '20s you could actually create colour home movies using the Kodacolor technique, which used lenticular trickery similar to those posters and billboards that change their image as you walk around them. It was apparently pretty good, but awkward.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Maid of the Mist
I have just received the pictures from our Niagara Falls photoshoot, and holy cow they're fun. I really do need to learn to stop kvetching about my "dewy shine" and just let loose.
I can't reveal the really stellar money shots until the Daily Muffy episode actually begins -- about a month from now -- but here's a candid teaser with the sucky American falls in the background:
As for me being upstaged by the majestic Canadian falls...hold your horses!
I can't reveal the really stellar money shots until the Daily Muffy episode actually begins -- about a month from now -- but here's a candid teaser with the sucky American falls in the background:
As for me being upstaged by the majestic Canadian falls...hold your horses!
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The Little House in the Wilderness
I love the little house in the wilderness, the one tiny house which has withstood all efforts of the Big Insurance Company to buy it. The B.I.C. owns everything else on that block, with the hopes of someday building another tower or a parking lot there...but that plucky little house has stood its ground and -- if Ian has anything to do with it -- it will be there for a long time.
Ian owns the house. Today he caught me snooping around and we started talking. I'd assumed that the house was deserted -- most of its windows are painted over and its wall of two-storey bushes form an impenetrable shell around it -- but no, Ian still lives there. He's an imposing middle-aged guy in green mechanic's coveralls, his face is huge, he is enthusiastically anti-establishment. I found him yanking out the four-foot high thistles, part of the foliage that he correctly calls his "naturalization." It would seem, however, that the B.I.C. doesn't like those thistles.
The 1861 farmhouse has been in Ian's family for a long time, and he says that if anything happens to him it will be inherited by his equally imposing cousin. Ian is friendly and gregarious, a brilliant talker. He calls the B.I.C. tower "Big Brother" and the rising loft tower on the other side is "Big Sister." He shares my amusement that a newly-constructed apartment complex can be called a "loft." As a child in that house he remembers seeing the factory which used to be there belch huge clots of fabric out of its smokestacks.
Ian says, referring to the B.I.C., "They hate my entire G.I. tract."
We talked until the big storm came down and hammered us, when Ian gathered up his electric clippers and disappeared back into his tiny patch of wilderness. It thrills me that he lives in there, happily isolated, a pain in the ass.
Ian owns the house. Today he caught me snooping around and we started talking. I'd assumed that the house was deserted -- most of its windows are painted over and its wall of two-storey bushes form an impenetrable shell around it -- but no, Ian still lives there. He's an imposing middle-aged guy in green mechanic's coveralls, his face is huge, he is enthusiastically anti-establishment. I found him yanking out the four-foot high thistles, part of the foliage that he correctly calls his "naturalization." It would seem, however, that the B.I.C. doesn't like those thistles.
The 1861 farmhouse has been in Ian's family for a long time, and he says that if anything happens to him it will be inherited by his equally imposing cousin. Ian is friendly and gregarious, a brilliant talker. He calls the B.I.C. tower "Big Brother" and the rising loft tower on the other side is "Big Sister." He shares my amusement that a newly-constructed apartment complex can be called a "loft." As a child in that house he remembers seeing the factory which used to be there belch huge clots of fabric out of its smokestacks.
Ian says, referring to the B.I.C., "They hate my entire G.I. tract."
We talked until the big storm came down and hammered us, when Ian gathered up his electric clippers and disappeared back into his tiny patch of wilderness. It thrills me that he lives in there, happily isolated, a pain in the ass.
Because It's Saturday: "Xanadu" by Hank and Lily
If you live in central Canada, be happy! Hank and Lily are starting their next tour, and here's their new video, "Xanadu."
I am thrilled beyond belief that they're coming to Waterloo in August. You should go and see them!
I am thrilled beyond belief that they're coming to Waterloo in August. You should go and see them!
In Praise of Morley Callaghan
I first heard about Morley Callaghan while reading Carolyn Strange's mostly-dire "Toronto's Girl Problem." She presented Callaghan's book "Strange Fugitive" (about bootleggers and gangsters in Toronto during 1928) as a deliberate attempt to counter Toronto's self-proclaimed squeaky-clean image.
Before reading "Strange Fugitive," however, I ran across Callaghan's short story "Escapade" in The New Yorker. I fell in love, and found myself wondering how I'd missed reading his work for so many years.
Callaghan's fiction has been mostly overshadowed by his colourful life; his brief stay in Paris and his friendship with Ernest Hemmingway, who he famously K.O.'d in a boxing match. He has also been dismissed by some as a hack who hammered out short stories and novels which rarely deviated from his established style (or, as some have interpreted it, a complete LACK of style).
But his style is so GOOD. I have never read Hemmingway's work but Callaghan's straight-forward, undecorated prose is often compared to his. He uses no excess words, no colourful adjectives, no metaphor. His stores are written in an almost journalistic style along the lines of "These are the people and this is what happened to them."
I just finished the first volume of Callaghan's four-volume "Complete Stories" and I've noticed that his REAL genius was the limited nature of his omniscient narrator: he tells us what his characters are thinking but never delves into their motivations or tries to interpret their thoughts, let alone judge them. Since most of us -- like Callaghan's "everyday Joe" sort of characters -- fool ourselves constantly with rationalizations and repression, each story is a slow peeling-away of motivation, until you're left with the bare and unambiguous working of the protagonist's soul.
This is what makes Callaghan's fiction so spectacular. He captures what it really feels like to exist and to think in the limited way that us people do. Using the simplest language he conveys human complexity without every appearing DELIBERATE about it. As always, "These are the people and this is what happened."
He can get a bit tedious, I admit. By avoiding flowery language Callaghan tends to frequently use the same adjectives ("plump") and you get a BIT tired of every story opening the same way. But that's what he did, and it's what he did best. If you have never read a Morley Callaghan book then you really, really should.
Before reading "Strange Fugitive," however, I ran across Callaghan's short story "Escapade" in The New Yorker. I fell in love, and found myself wondering how I'd missed reading his work for so many years.
Callaghan's fiction has been mostly overshadowed by his colourful life; his brief stay in Paris and his friendship with Ernest Hemmingway, who he famously K.O.'d in a boxing match. He has also been dismissed by some as a hack who hammered out short stories and novels which rarely deviated from his established style (or, as some have interpreted it, a complete LACK of style).
But his style is so GOOD. I have never read Hemmingway's work but Callaghan's straight-forward, undecorated prose is often compared to his. He uses no excess words, no colourful adjectives, no metaphor. His stores are written in an almost journalistic style along the lines of "These are the people and this is what happened to them."
I just finished the first volume of Callaghan's four-volume "Complete Stories" and I've noticed that his REAL genius was the limited nature of his omniscient narrator: he tells us what his characters are thinking but never delves into their motivations or tries to interpret their thoughts, let alone judge them. Since most of us -- like Callaghan's "everyday Joe" sort of characters -- fool ourselves constantly with rationalizations and repression, each story is a slow peeling-away of motivation, until you're left with the bare and unambiguous working of the protagonist's soul.
This is what makes Callaghan's fiction so spectacular. He captures what it really feels like to exist and to think in the limited way that us people do. Using the simplest language he conveys human complexity without every appearing DELIBERATE about it. As always, "These are the people and this is what happened."
He can get a bit tedious, I admit. By avoiding flowery language Callaghan tends to frequently use the same adjectives ("plump") and you get a BIT tired of every story opening the same way. But that's what he did, and it's what he did best. If you have never read a Morley Callaghan book then you really, really should.
Friday, July 25, 2008
"Stride of Man" by Thames Williamson
I admit it: I have a fascination for things which are under appreciated or outright forgotten. Maybe someday I'll figure out what such things appeal to me, but for now I'll just revel in it.
While going through old New Yorker magazines, I read tantalizing book reviews about authors who you never hear about now; some of them were up-and-coming stars who never realized their potential, others were one-book-wonders, and a few wrote well-regarded fiction of a sort which just doesn't resonate nowadays. In the latter category I put Thames Williamson.
If you can find substantial information about Thames Williamson on the internet then you're savvier than I am. Myself, I read a review of "Stride of Man" in a 1929 issue of The New Yorker, and it sounded strangely intriguing. One trip to abebooks later and I had a second edition copy in my hands, complete with ratty page trimming and a gorgeous art nouveau cover.
Then I read it, and...well, they just don't write books like this anymore.
It's an "epic," tracing the life of fictional Daniel Patterson -- distant relative of Daniel Boone -- from his humble beginnings to the height of his career as an automobile king. That element is straight-forward enough, but the book is really an allegory for American migration, invention, and ambition.
Patterson begins as a pre-teen orphan, living off the land west of the Rocky Mountains during the beginning of the civil war. As he moves east he learns about steamboats, he hunts buffalo, he falls in love, he boards his first train, he tinkers with bicycles...then he migrates to the prairies and tries to eke out a living, before travelling further east to Chicago where he labours in a factory. He deals with unions, he dreams his dreams, and then -- finally -- he starts work on the invention that will make him rich: the automobile.
Through all this he matures as a sort of Ayn Rand hero: serious, fair, able to juggle his workers with his down-to-earth reasoning skills, born of wildness and never tamed by the city or by the demands of high scoiety. It all comes across as terribly contrived...because it IS, and it's meant to be. It's a totally unsubtle pastiche of American-innovator stereotypes, meant to encapsulate the stages that the United States went through in order to become an industrial giant.
Fortunately Thames Williamson is pretty level-headed through most of the book, presenting both the pros and cons of every stage of Patterson's (and America's) development. At the end, however, he introduces a "practical art and culture" character in the form of Patterson's son Brand, who -- after going through the first world war -- decides that it's time for America to leverage its infrastructure toward creating...well, art, or culture, or something.
Through most of the book Patterson argues against anarchists and artists, chastising them for being all "idea" with no "plan." But somehow Brand's arguments eventually sink in, and since Williamson's writing is so non-judgemental, it's hard to know what point he's making. Is he telling us that Brand's ideas are correct, and that in 1929 it's really time for America to plot out a Grand Cultural Roadmap? Or is he saying that Brand has somehow distracted his father, perhaps implying that American businesspeople are likewise being co-oped and distracted by the younger generation?
I don't know, and that's the frustrating thing about "Stride of Man." After 300 pages of lean, quick prose, it descends into pseudo-intellectual babble about destiny and maturation, the kind of talk that the Patterson character had been mocking since the beginning of the book.
Anyway, I DID enjoy the book, and it's certainly like taking an undiluted sniff of Pure '20s Optimism. But if Williamson's other novels are like this I can see why he's been totally forgotten.
PS: The back sleeve of the book advertises MacKinlay Kantor's "Diversey," that damn book that I scorned but which continues to haunt my life. I WILL TRY TO READ IT AGAIN, if just to stop it from tormenting me in the future.
While going through old New Yorker magazines, I read tantalizing book reviews about authors who you never hear about now; some of them were up-and-coming stars who never realized their potential, others were one-book-wonders, and a few wrote well-regarded fiction of a sort which just doesn't resonate nowadays. In the latter category I put Thames Williamson.
If you can find substantial information about Thames Williamson on the internet then you're savvier than I am. Myself, I read a review of "Stride of Man" in a 1929 issue of The New Yorker, and it sounded strangely intriguing. One trip to abebooks later and I had a second edition copy in my hands, complete with ratty page trimming and a gorgeous art nouveau cover.
Then I read it, and...well, they just don't write books like this anymore.
It's an "epic," tracing the life of fictional Daniel Patterson -- distant relative of Daniel Boone -- from his humble beginnings to the height of his career as an automobile king. That element is straight-forward enough, but the book is really an allegory for American migration, invention, and ambition.
Patterson begins as a pre-teen orphan, living off the land west of the Rocky Mountains during the beginning of the civil war. As he moves east he learns about steamboats, he hunts buffalo, he falls in love, he boards his first train, he tinkers with bicycles...then he migrates to the prairies and tries to eke out a living, before travelling further east to Chicago where he labours in a factory. He deals with unions, he dreams his dreams, and then -- finally -- he starts work on the invention that will make him rich: the automobile.
Through all this he matures as a sort of Ayn Rand hero: serious, fair, able to juggle his workers with his down-to-earth reasoning skills, born of wildness and never tamed by the city or by the demands of high scoiety. It all comes across as terribly contrived...because it IS, and it's meant to be. It's a totally unsubtle pastiche of American-innovator stereotypes, meant to encapsulate the stages that the United States went through in order to become an industrial giant.
Fortunately Thames Williamson is pretty level-headed through most of the book, presenting both the pros and cons of every stage of Patterson's (and America's) development. At the end, however, he introduces a "practical art and culture" character in the form of Patterson's son Brand, who -- after going through the first world war -- decides that it's time for America to leverage its infrastructure toward creating...well, art, or culture, or something.
Through most of the book Patterson argues against anarchists and artists, chastising them for being all "idea" with no "plan." But somehow Brand's arguments eventually sink in, and since Williamson's writing is so non-judgemental, it's hard to know what point he's making. Is he telling us that Brand's ideas are correct, and that in 1929 it's really time for America to plot out a Grand Cultural Roadmap? Or is he saying that Brand has somehow distracted his father, perhaps implying that American businesspeople are likewise being co-oped and distracted by the younger generation?
I don't know, and that's the frustrating thing about "Stride of Man." After 300 pages of lean, quick prose, it descends into pseudo-intellectual babble about destiny and maturation, the kind of talk that the Patterson character had been mocking since the beginning of the book.
Anyway, I DID enjoy the book, and it's certainly like taking an undiluted sniff of Pure '20s Optimism. But if Williamson's other novels are like this I can see why he's been totally forgotten.
PS: The back sleeve of the book advertises MacKinlay Kantor's "Diversey," that damn book that I scorned but which continues to haunt my life. I WILL TRY TO READ IT AGAIN, if just to stop it from tormenting me in the future.
1960s Techno?
We've always thought that "techno" emerged during the mid-80s...but would you believe it if I told you that the first techno song was recorded in the '60s? If I clarified that Delia Derbyshire was the perpetrator, though, you'd probably realize that if anybody was going to invent and then dismiss a new electronic artform, it would be her.
It would seem that Derbyshire kept stacks of old reel-to-reel experiments in her attic, and after her death the BBC started going through and cataloging them. They found some truly amazing things, as described in this NoiseAddicts post.
Most interesting was a very capable techno song, recorded during the '60s and therefore without sequencers, keyboards, samplers, or even multi-track technology...I assume it was created using the traditional Radiophonic method: a bunch of reel-to-reel recorders all in a row, each playing a meticulously-constructed tape loop.
You can hear the mindblowing results here, including a brief dismissive prologue by Derbyshire herself.
It would seem that Derbyshire kept stacks of old reel-to-reel experiments in her attic, and after her death the BBC started going through and cataloging them. They found some truly amazing things, as described in this NoiseAddicts post.
Most interesting was a very capable techno song, recorded during the '60s and therefore without sequencers, keyboards, samplers, or even multi-track technology...I assume it was created using the traditional Radiophonic method: a bunch of reel-to-reel recorders all in a row, each playing a meticulously-constructed tape loop.
You can hear the mindblowing results here, including a brief dismissive prologue by Derbyshire herself.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Dr. Seuss and Flit: The Awkward Edition
If you've been following these "Dr. Seuss and Flit" advertisements, it won't surprise you to see a creepy African caricature amongst all the rest. I do, however, enjoy the queerly long-legged cat.
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