Wrath of Nature

If you look closely, you can see a second rainbow forming just above the white tower on top of Rockhill

Giannialissimo Alla Gitarra

 

Make Way For Noddy

Make way for Noddy. Everyone does in his neighborhood, as he drives down Main street in Toyland Village in his delivery car, targeting the terrified citizens with his drug deals, accompanied by a scowling, unshaven Big Ears for backup muscle.

Watch as Jerky Clockwork Clown shoots up in an alleyway with HIV-positive Jimmy Giraffe, scanning the horizon nervously for Mr. Stumps, to whom he owes $36.

Then get ready for Tinky-Winky, the abused-as-a-child gang leader, as he extorts the villagers of Teletubbyland in various schemes, usually accompanied by his thuggish coterie, Dipsy, Laa-laa “Nails” Ianuzzi, and Po.

These are the twisted fantasies of a first-time parent, as I am forced to watch, along with my toddler, the inventions of an army of children’s programmers, day in, day out, ad infinukem.

I am hoping that the theme-song writer for Noddy sleeps well, because at three o’clock in the morning as I toss and turn, the words to “Make Way for Noddy” sear their way through my dendrites and axons, always punctuated with the sharp “Prrp-prrp-prrp” of the car horn and the tuneless bark of “Noddy!” that crops up every second line while my toddler always mindlessly chimes in with a parrot-fashion, semidemiquaver late “Noddy!” in response.

In this Sisyphian world of children’s daytime programming I am forced to inhabit a twilight existence, continually pushing a boulder up a hill to the strains of the Barney Song, eternally suffering the wrath of Hades as I stumble and we all roll back to the bottom and do it all again.

Couldn’t these people have thought things through a little better? Just piping the Thomas The Tank Engine song repeatedly through a circular array of Bose DeepSound speakers to the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay would elicit scores of confessions within a smattering of hours, with many possibly offering personal jihad within minutes.

When one is forced to actually sit and watch every excruciating moment of “Between The Lions”, one’s nearness to God becomes much, much closer. Because if there happened to be a shotgun nearby, I would be Tinky-Winkying out of existence before even one bar of the theme song was over.

Even Bugs Bunny’s “Kill the Wabbit” would be sheer gold to the ears compared to some of the stuff churned out by contemporary kids’ show composers. One knows that the absolute bottom is reached when one hears some innocuous “educational” program’s theme song burst spontaneously into Rap, with that faux hip-hop charade that’s become all too familiar these days in promotions to packaging, minus of course the downward devil’s horn hand gestures and brutish mugging for the camera. Oh, and flying bullets.

It’s bad enough that we, as parents, should be forced to sit through this stuff. When I was a kid, waaay before that goddamn Sesame Street green frog burst like a blossoming Kudzu Triffid onto the world scene, I thrilled to the Donna Reed Show and Leave it To Beaver. Hell, Cerberus aside, that sly Leave it To Beaver theme song was positively life-affirming. I can summon it today again in a wink without a shred of horror.

If I were a kids’ show composer, I would try to mirror the reality of the world in which we now live. Say, for instance, instead of upbeat major chords and perky lyrics such as “I love you/You love me/We’re a great big family” of the Barney song, we would have “What is wrong with existence/When I and my son/Are forced to sit through/This crap every day”.

One can even find the hijacked original lyrics to the Barney “song” on the Internet: “This Old Man/number one/He played knick-knack on my thumb.” This simple line is several orders of magnitude more original than the hack ripoff “With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you/Won’t you say you love me to!” (sic)

If one bothers to extrapolate (as I often do, given the enormous blocks of time spent trying to concentrate on work while Barney jabbers in the background) one finds it extraordinary that a large, stuffed purple mannequin vaguely resembling a bowling pin can spew so much invective as he sweeps through Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, scything neighbors’ houses clean with rocket-propelled grenades and cluster bombs, also targeting . . . whoops, lost track for a moment.

“That’s Mr. Rogers!” I say, hopefully, to the toddler on my knee. “Taking off his sweater is totally normal, with no sexual undertones—really!”

Meanwhile, in my tired brain, the Sesame Street set is a scene of chaos, with Elmo senselessly stabbed in the groin by a jealous Count as Big Bird, Bert and Ernie look on in mute horror, and Mother Skittle frantically dials 911 only to get a busy signal.

Make way for Noddy.

The iPad Toast Wood Nightmare

I think that is the best head for an article I've ever written.

But every word is true! About three years ago, or whenever the iPad Mini came out, I ordered a real-wood cover/protector for the back of the iPad, because I like wood.

I put it on the iPad just after I took it out of the box it came from Apple in, so there shouldn't even be a thumbprint on it, let alone a scratch!

But I never anticipated taking the cover off—I do remember thinking "Hmm, this is gonna be a bitch to remove," as I applied the wood to the iPad.

I had done a brilliant job with  applying the wood guard, so it looked really, really good—not fake veneer, but actual wood.

But unlike the nice little video they put up on how to remove your cover, the hair dryer trick did nothing to help remove the cover.

The iPad with the cover on looked something like this (I forgot to take a photo of it before I started to remove the cover; this is a random image from the Internet, but it looks very like mine):

I tried the hair dryer trick, but it didn't help anything. I had to use my thumbnails—and completely fucked them in the process. It's hard to even type, my fingers hurt so much.  As you can see from the next photo, the wood skin did not peel easily. I had to  pull up little pieces  and they kept breaking off in my fingers.

I did not want to use anything metal to help me peel the skin up, but I found a stiff plastic rectangle made to remove bubbles from screen guards, and it worked well—better than my ragged fingernails—and didn't scratch the iPad. But look at this mess, about half an hour in:

It got worse. This as about half an hour after the last photo. I was dripping sweat by this time; I kid you not (the little plastic rectangle at bottom right):

It took at least another hour to get to the stage in the next photo. I know that is hard to believe, but it's true. I really had to be careful not to scratch the iPad in any way. It was difficult, but with patient peeling and scraping, I was finally able to remove most of the skin:

But look at all the adhesive residue. It was a bitch to remove—that alone took half an hour and a lot of bicep power:

The Strike of the Undead: Cemetery Lockout 2007-08

 In which the meadow in the cemetery went un-mowed for two years. Here, Tai-chan flies a kite.

A little boy, the birds and the bees.

The undead had a blast.

Oratory Sunset, June 2016

Right-click on image to "Open Link In New Window" (not "Open Image In New Window")

If you look closely, you can see a second rainbow forming just above the white tower on top of the apartment building

Last Blast—NDN Cemetery, March 24, 2016

Right-click to open in new window for higher resolution.

The fractality of it all is astonishing. Does not this remind you of a squall on the North Atlantic? . . . envision it and the hallucination becomes real.