Thursday, July 6, 2017

Someone left the cake out in the rain






Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance




Between the parted pages we were pressed
In love's hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants






MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again, oh noooooo






I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
Birds like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers, by the trees




MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again, oh noooooo




(Short instrumental interlude)




There would be another song for me
For I will sing it
There would be another dream for me
Someone will bring it




I will drink the wine while it is warm
And never let you catch me looking at the sun
And after all the loves of my life
After all the loves of my life, you'll still be the one




I will take my life into my hands and I will use it
I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it




I will have the things that I desire
And my passion flow like rivers through the sky
And after all the loves of my life
Oh, after all the loves of my life
I'll be thinking of you - and wondering why




(VERY long instrumental interlude)

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain






I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh noooooo, o-oh no-ooooo






Vintage peacock windup toy: I WANT ONE





Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Lies, damned lies, and statistics



Dumb things that are posted and reposted until they become true!





THAT VIRAL INFOGRAPHIC ABOUT ‘SURPRISING READING FACTS’ IS TOTAL FICTION

(from Inquisitr.com)

An infographic meme of “surprising reading facts” refuses to die even years after its own author admitted the statistics were bogus, and after polls have shown that reading is 

actually thriving in America.

The infographic, which was created by Robb Brewer in 2011, shares some shocking statistics about how much reading Americans are supposedly doing these days. It claims that 33 percent of high school graduates never read another book in their lives, that 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy a single book last year, and that 70 percent of U.S. adults have not read a book in the past five years, among other figures.






The infographic continues to be shared wildly on Facebook and other social media sites, but there’s only one problem — it’s completely untrue.

Even Brewer, the author of the infographic, publicly admitted in 2012 that he couldn’t back up any of the statistics and asked people to stop sharing it.

“I think it’s safe to say the stats from the original graphic are questionable, and I am therefore recanting any and all connection to them.”

Brewer claims to have used statistics from a survey by an organization called the Jenkins Group, though the group itself says the statistics were incorrectly attributed to them. Brewer has never been able to provide any other source of the numbers he used in the infographic.

The questionable statistics seem to have originally come from a 2011 Mental Floss article, which claimed to have taken them from a Jenkins survey from 2003. Mental Floss has updated the original article saying they have no idea where the statistics came from, either.


http://www.inquisitr.com/3850347/that-viral-infographic-about-surprising-reading-facts-is-total-fiction-debunked/




OK - so I have dealt with this one before and thought I stomped it into the ground, but apparently not. One of the smartest people I know on Facebook just posted this thing with an invisible eye-roll, and all her friends chimed in with their ain't-it-a-shame comments.

NOT ONE PERSON questioned the veracity of these "statistics" or even wondered where they came from. Things that are posted and reposted have a when-you-wish-upon-a-star quality to them: if you say it enough times, then it will be true. Or should I say: if enough intelligent people are willing to swallow it unquestioned, then it will be dangerous.

Or so I believe.

I feel a bit sorry (but not too sorry) for this Brewer character, who says he got his stats from Mental Floss (that towering inferno of intellectual prowess), who in turn got them from The Jenkins Group, who say they've never heard of either one of them and had nothing to do with these highly-questionable "statistics". Now Mental Floss is confessing that the whole thing is a complete sham. It's a made-up chart, people, a thing a guy slapped up because it looked kinda good, kinda shocked a lot of people, and went viral before things were even GOING viral. This thing had to get up on its legs and walk, like a chain letter, but it still fooled millions of people, and what shocks me is that it's still doing so.





Why did the con catch on, and why won't it go away? Because it's telling disgruntled, disgusted people exactly what they want to hear. It's affirming their ain't-it-awful prognostications, their what's-the-world-coming-to lamentations, and their sense that the whole bloody culture is going to hell in a handbasket.

That may be so, but these stats, with their haphazard, grab-a-handful-of figures-and-throw-them quality, must have been invented by someone, somewhere, at some point. Brewer turned out to be less of a donkey than I thought, because he came up with ANOTHER infographic:




Apparently, even these stats aren't entirely accurate or up-to-date. They have done nothing to erase the wild distortions of the original, and in fact, if people find this one, they tend to say, "Hey, look, somebody's ripping off that cool thing about reading! What a pack of lies."

I personally don't believe anything on either infographic. When I first posted about this, about five years ago, when people were already running around like chickens with their heads off over this irrefutable proof of galloping illiteracy, I had the most trouble with that statement at the bottom, which Brewer (now picking the tar and feathers off his clothing) decided to keep. "Reading for one hour per day in your chosen field will make you an international expert in 7 years." Whaaaaaaat?
Is that some kind of joke?

Notice, too, the citations, or whatever they are, at the bottom of this updated infographic. He's actually telling us that these figures COME from somewhere - he didn't just pull them out of his ass. Now that's a refreshing change.



I'm not worried about literacy. Actually I am, terribly, but what worries me even more is that people no longer have that vital piece of equipment Hemingway talked about: a built-in bullshit detector. No, it's all consumed, swallowed whole, lies, truth, info this and graphic that. If it's catchy, if it has bold colours, if it's designed just right, people will not only believe it but keep sending it around to millions of other people, who will accept it without question and immediately hit "share".

About a million years ago I took a communications course which claimed you could "read yourself stupid". I do believe it's true. How does that come about? By being literate as all ding-dong and reading a book every three days, but never THINKING about what you read, never evaluating it, critiquing it or even digesting it. Over time, you will slowly, inexorably lose the ability to think for yourself.

Even worse, you will stop getting out of your chair, stop living and experiencing and writing your own book of life. . . because you will be too busy reading. And if your shit-detector is as eroded and corrupted as most people's have become, you might just be reading yourself into a strange new world of literate  illiteracy.



Awestruck: night sky over PEI








































Scratch me where I itch





Another lovely Nancy Tapley video, two horses scratching where it itches. Horses are herd animals and need each other in multiple ways. One horse is no horse. I wish I had someone to scratch me where I itch.


Umbrella Carries Away Weatherman





Saturday, July 1, 2017

Assorted meaningless nonsense with a Canada 150 logo slapped on it





Assorted meaningless nonsense with a Canada 150 logo slapped on it


— Canada 150 shoe lights


— Canada 150 certified jive power bank


— World’s most inconvenient cutting board








“I love the feeling of grass on my feet, but I live in a parking lot.” The Great Canadian Gift Company



— Canada 150 dog bag dispenser


— Canada 150 anti-slip car mat


— Red-and-white tulips that are actually orange


--- World’s tiniest phone cleaner






— Canada 150 tactical flashlight with multiple features


— Canada 150 novelty grass flip flops


— Terrifying sock monkey


— “Yes, I’m gonna be this guy” air hammock



— And many more!




Goose dance: an animation












































The Canadian Flag: a few rejected designs




These are just a few of the thousands of proposed designs for the Canadian flag. They actually had a contest, folks, and the winner (one of those "why didn't I think of that?" designs) was made official in February of 1965. 

Only in Canada.




"I AM CANADIAN!": Log Driver's Waltz





                      Happy birthday, Canada!


I love my country: Canada turns 150!





Today Canada turns 150, and though I couldn't get into it at all for the longest time, today I suddenly feel myself almost overcome with emotion. I trawled YouTube to find a decent version of O Canada, and unexpectedly (though why was it so unexpected, at this time in our history?) found ZILLIONS of versions, most of them not very good. A very well-known animated one that used to be shown when TV stations signed off for the night seemed like the obvious choice, but it just didn't work for me. There were some very abstract ones that misfired, very sentimental ones, and many that just weren't sentimental enough. When I began to watch this one, I realized I was crying. I wasn't expecting this at all. Something to do with the images that are so bang-on, and the choir that does not sing in words, but only sings "Ahhhhhhhhhh. . ."






Some say the Canadian identity formed as a sort of allergic reaction to the U. S., and there may be some truth in that. It's hard to love our neighbor right now, and I have to say I hate the things that they're doing, which cannot help but affect us. We feel crushed by that great elephant the first Trudeau talked about. But the fact that we're on our second Trudeau seems strange and miraculous to me. I remember when Justin Trudeau was born on Christmas day (which seemed significant for some reason), and everyone in my family went around snidely singing, "For unto us a child is born. . . " from Handel's Messiah. The next line of it, which no one sang, is, "And the government shall be upon his shoulders." It did cross my mind, back then, that some day it might be true.




More weird things are happening now. I compared notes with my husband the other day: "Are you having flashbacks from Expo '67?" To my surprise, he said yes. All sorts of stuff from the Centennial year is coming back to me now, most of it pretty cheesy, even hideous, but we thought it was wonderful then. Man and His World. The Geodesic Dome. The Monorail. The Canadian Pavilion. The Musical Ride.

And La Ronde, with rides that would probably seem pretty tame today. Going down the Flume ride and getting soaked, and going down the Flume ride again and getting more soaked. And again, until the sky opened up in a huge thunderstorm and made "soaked" seem redundant. I remember I was wearing a white cowboy hat that literally melted under the rain.






But it was all so exhilarating. Hell! A world's fair, for US! Canada was an incredible 100 years old, and for once we were going to fling down our usual reserve and CELEBRATE! I cannot post the Bobby Gimby song "Ca-na-da" (one little, two little, three Canadians) because when I listened to it again I felt nauseated, but back then we couldn't get enough of it. It quickly became the theme song of the Centennial.

Then there were all the patriotic songs we sang in school, pulled out of somewhere, then put away and never sung again. (I could not find good versions of Land of the Silver Birch or Something to Sing About, or I would have posted them.) 





It's a junk drawer, like most events you haven't even looked at in, oh, 50 years or so. My brother Arthur is all caught up in it. We were close then, he was 18 and I was 13, and I had no way of knowing he wouldn't live a normal life, or a normal span. He was funny and weird and he didn't last long, sort of like Expo.

There was a song called A Place to Stand which could get to me, all about "Ontari-ari-ario" where I grew up. Mostly it was sung in the usual cheesy way, but sometimes it was used on CBC as a sort of animated filler, and it had no singing, just a couple of violins. It used to knock me right over.





I want to make something, to DO something about the 150th, not just sit here posting videos and rambling. I want to make something move, but not in the ridiculous way that I make a goose or a moose or a ham loaf move. It's really too bad I have no artistic ability, can't draw or paint to save my life, for it might be a comfort to me now that I seem to have reached the end of my creativity.

I was trying to figure out what that horrific Habitat structure reminded me of (and unless I am mistaken, it's still standing and people still live in it in Montreal). It's that godawful UFO pod village in Taiwain:





I had one more thought in this ramble. This isn't done much any more - it's an old-school Canadian kind of thing, to wonder who the "greatest Canadian" is - I mean of all time, and invariably it's some stodgy old white guy with lots of money. Perhaps a Prime Minister from the early 1900s.

I have a candidate, for the simple reason that his influence echoes on in the most potent, living-and-breathing way, and will go on that way for untold generations.




Northern Dancer wins the Queen's Plate by 7 1/2 lengths, 1964.