'Hogs

Today is Groundhog day. I can always remember what day groundhog day is on because of the 1979 Rankin Bass TV Special "Jack Frost." Which is a pretty ok movie, I guess.



Specifically the song that starts at 6:30. I would actually recommend skipping right to that. After all, the movie is just pretty ok.

Plot: Jack Frost turns human, then turns back to a spirit, saves the day. The end. OOPS SORRY I FORGOT A SPOILER ALERT!

After this creepily mild winter, I wouldn't be surprised if the groundhog gave us spring today. The most popular 'hog, Punxsutawney Phil, predicted it would be early spring last year, and we all remember how that turned out though.The snow didn't melt till April!

His record is a lot more varied than I realized. There's a nice chart going back the 1800's on the wiki. As a kid it always seemed like we were getting 6 more weeks of winter- but there was a fair amount of hopeful spring in there too.

NO POWER NO PEACE

Or not. I dunno. Today commences the 5th day I am without electricity. I am hopeful it will be back on tonight, but we'll see.

Because of the dangerous nature of the storm and all the downed power lines, we've been keeping kitty inside for safety. This has made her go insane! Her new habits include: Gnawing on the edge of the table, jumping onto the highest places possible, running around like crazy and hissing at nothing, climbing inside the sofa, etc. She's a little wild!

One of the things I've missed is my netflix shows. Considering that some helpful utility worker severed our cable line and threw it across our yard (WHAT.), it will probably be awhile before we have internet at home again. The show I'm jonesin' for the most is Baccano!

It's an awesome 16 episode story with some really wonderful characters and a fun mythology. It tells the story of 18th century alchemists living immortal in gangland NYC. The story weaves together plots from a few different time lines, making for a rich and complex story.

My favorite characters are probably Isaac and Miria, the shows comic relief. They're a pair of over-acting criminals who get away with their crimes by virtue of their silliness.

I also have a soft spot for Jacuzzi Splot, the bootlegger with a tattooed face and big anxiety problems. He's got to have a good cry before he can do anything heroic!

Please South Hadley Electric! I wanna find out what happens  next! Also, getting sick of going to bed at 8. Thanks!

Somebody Come and Play - 1970

This song is simultaneously bouncily cheerful and doggedly sad. It's one of Sesame Street's more complex treasures. It really does capture the co-existing optimism and loneliness of being a kid on the hunt for a playmate.

This video is of the original appearance of the song on the show, and features a very bummed baby orangutan with nobody his age in his pen. Later incarnations of this song used significantly prettier and cheerier scenarios. But I think the original bleak setting was a really interesting choice - it makes the song seem sadder, and more pressing. Somebody get that monkey a playmate already, I can't stand it! Poor guy.

Photoverkill

There's nothing like a little mini vacation to rejuvenate! Paul and I were lucky enough to get to spend a gorgeous day in Boston yesterday, and stay over last night at a company expensed hotel. We were in town because Paul was doing a photo shoot for an article CODE magazine was doing on his work. It was a good taste of what his new modeling career will entail, glamorous wardrobe changes (they had him model in a $1000 coat!) and hotel living. (Pics to come!)

While we were in town, we decided to spend a few hours at the New England Aquarium. It was a lot of fun! It did make me discover my newest first world problem pet peeve. People were taking way - way- way too many pictures. I know that now that everybody (except me) has an android, it's really easy to take some photos. But do you really need to seize the opportunity and take pictures of every single thing you see?

Really, when you look back on your vacation pictures, are you going to be all that excited to show your friends the 100 pictures of fish you took? Especially given that there are probably pictures of these fish that exist already, many probably better quality than yours, that you can access any time?

It also seems totally impossible to actually be appreciating and enjoying the exhibits when your primary concern is flashing pictures of every single fish in the aquarium. Give it a rest!

RANT OVER

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

Seeing how wonderfully simple it is to make goat cheese on Serious Eats has totally rekindled my desire to adopt a milking goat for the yard. In addition to getting sooo much delicious cheese, it would make it so poor Paul would never have to mow the lawn again! I would say that that is a pretty solid win-win. Plus, we would get great fertilizer for the garden out of the deal? Are there any downsides? Maybe a few, like this being a lot of work, and having to mate them to get the milk...... but I am ignoring that right now!

This could be me!

Society Dog Show - 1939

Mickey Mouse is such a incorrigible optimist! Look at him here, trying to fit in with the upper crust at a fancy pure bred dog show. Can't he see that Pluto can't compete with these privileged pooches?



The story takes a Romeo and Juliet turn, as Pluto falls in love with a sassy little terrier who can see through the class lines.

The whole tale of class warfare comes to a head when vanity takes down the whole event in a fiery blaze of hubris!

Moral of the story: Blue collared folks are more likely to be heroic, so you better be nice to them and stuff!

Do your ears hang low?

Wearing animal ears in public. I will not deny that I have mocked people for doing this in the past- specifically gals who maraud as cats on a daily basis. Specifically those on the Umass campus.

However, I have since realized that fuzzy costume ears are appropriate and fun on special occasions. Last summer, I wore my awesome bunny ears at the Gathering of the Vibes music festival, and got many complements. Also some sweaty hugs from stranger-hippies.

It can be fun to be in costume in public, you do get a lot of attention. Maybe that's the cat-girls angle.

Alas, at that same aforementioned event, I sat on said ears and broke them. I thought I'd have the energy to repair them, but I still haven't done it.

I stumbled upon Fuzzhats.com today, and now I'm contemplating purchasing a new attention getting headdress. 

This last one, the yeti, is a big front runner!

Bongo - 1947

This is my favorite Disney short of all. It's a fish-out-of-water tale of a circus bear who escapes his cruel captors for the instinctual glory of nature. I have really distinct memories of so many parts of this, I must of watched about 500 times as a kid.

It's got good songs, and I like that there's a female narrator, cuz it was made in war-time.





I was talking to Paul too about how this cartoon distinctly informed my young romantic sensibilities. F Alpha males, the smart Beta is where it's at!

Knowing is half the battle...

I recently bought this shirt during Threadless' epic March Madness $10 t-shirt sale:

Without realizing/knowing that it was an homage to this:



Good thing I found out before somebody started talking to me about The White Stripes! I don't want to seem like a poser. I just bought it because I like elephants.... :-/

Rough Rider

111 Years ago, Teddy Roosevelt climbed on the back of a majestic moose and rode it through the wilderness. A year later in 1901, he was elected president. Are you shocked? Me neither. Nobody is. This is excruciatingly manly my friends.

This Roosevelt was also the first president to be seen riding in an automobile in public. He's like the master of novel transportation.

More like Tom Crook...amirite?

For some reason, 2011 has ushered in an era of playing 10-year-old GameCube games at our house. Our most obsessively played diskette? Animal Crossing!



Every day when we come home from work, Paul and I take turns diligently working towards paying off our house by finding dinosaur bones, fishing, and doing chores for our neighbors.

Games like this are so weird, because they're predicated on you laboring more than you would at your real life job. But it's strangely, strongly addictive.

The most fun part of the game is buying/earning items to decorate your house. I'm trying to collect all the items in the Cabin Series, which will make my house look roughly like the interior of "The Great Northern" from Twin Peaks.

 

Addictive!

Pluto's Christmas Tree - 1952

 This Christmas themed Disney cartoon features Chip and Dale in their feral, pre-Rescue Ranger days. Poor Pluto gets a Wiley Coyote-esque raw deal as he attempts to evict the chipmunks from his beautiful tree.

This one reminds me of a story my dad (a Nursery Manager) told about a customer he had at work, who would always vigorously shake his trees before buying them. Why? One time he bought a tree that turned out to have "monkeys" in it, and the monkeys came out and bit him. The perils of buying live flora!



@2:20 - This has forever fueled my desire to be able to walk around inside a giant Christmas tree

And for the heck of it, here's our Christmas Tree:

Almost as nice as Mickey Mouse's.

Bark Bark Bark

Growing up at my house, it was practically a tradition to play this song for the family pooch around the holidays. Its a fairly certain method to make your dog go nuts. Particularly in years where we had a new puppy, playing this song was a pretty fun game. Most dogs become delightfully confused and frantic at the disembodied sound of their wassailing kin.



I guess the barking dog jingle bells isn't everybody's cup of tea though. This song (a 1950's Danish recording) was recently found to be "America's least loved Christmas Song," as it came in last place in a survey of 579 recordings. However, the focus group used to create the ranking consisted of "200 women aged 30 to 49, recruited via e-mail, who said that they either liked or loved Christmas music," and that sounds like a cat-lady hot bed to me. I think perhaps there was an anti-pooch prejudice afoot!



I bet if this was in the mix it would have been found to be THE NUMBER ONE XMAS SONG OF ALL TIME!!!

Fish are Friends, not Food.

On our first day in Baltimore, we went to the national aquarium. It really is a world-class museum. The exhibits went beyond being just informative, they were visually stunning and some were just plain innovative. They had a few that were like walking into a giant terrarium, incorporating native plants, animals and birds into the habitat. They even adjusted the climate of these exhibits, to make you feel totally immersed in the environment.

It was a fun way to spend the day. My favorites were the lion fish, the dolphin tank, and the seahorses. I had least favorites too....

3 Scariest Creatures at the National Aquarium

1. Southern Stingrays, 6 feet long. Totally thought the people swimming in the tank were going to get Irwined.



2. Blind Tetras. Little fish that are born with eyes but lose them weeks into life.


3. Mud-skippers, evolution's most indecisive freak.

If you are ever in Baltimore, I would say that this is the best thing to see. We spent the whole day there and enjoyed it greatly.

That night, we drove out to the Broadway Diner for dinner - featured on "Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives"



We got an unbelievable amount of delicious food for cheap. The portions are huge, and it made me sad we didn't have a fridge in our hotel room. It's a neat place, an intersection of fine dining and greasy diner in a surprisingly complimentary way.

Flipp(er)in' Out!

So, last night I was watching "Flipper" (1964). It was a show that I remember watching a fair bit of as a kid. I think I enjoyed it because I thought a dolphin would make a cool pet, and the hero-family's life at sea seemed really fun and fancy-free.

What I didn't remember about the show was how surprisingly boring it was for a show that was all about adventure. In theory, the things that were acted out were action-packed: helicopters rushing to the rescue, flipper fighting a shark, etc. But because they chose to use virtually no music (at least in the episode I saw), all the action just seemed drawn out and flat. I think maybe this is just a by-product of my over stimulated 21st century mind. But it is also a fact that shows/movies from the 50's and 60's spent entirely too much time focusing on trivial parts of the story, like vehicles getting from point A to point B without a time lapse.

What really surprised me about this particular episode of the show was seeing Lucille Bluth featured as the young, foxy love interest. Jessica Walter used to be pretty hot....


Keep an eye out for loose seals, Gangy.

Scoundrels!

Methinks the neighborhood chipmunks have been taking liberties with my pumpkin! Cads!
This has never happened to me before...I guess I just picked a particularly delicious looking pumpkin, because Paul's is untouched.

South Hadley's got some houligan rodent gangs!

Caturday XXIII- Wave if the Future

So apparently, exercise wheels aren't just for hamsters and mice anymore. The Cat Wheel Company has made sure the futility of running in place very quickly can be appreciated by your kitty too!



Next step, harnessing the energy to power your house. I'm gonna buy 100 kitties and go off the grid!

Time for Pooches!

So, I guess I appear a little preferential to cats here on this blog, what with the "cat" category and all the Caturday posts. But I love dogs too! I was raised in a family of Dog people, and never even interacted with a cat that much until I lived with Rabi. I think it's time that the dogs got their day (eh...). So:

Caroline's 6 Favorite Dog GIFs

6.

5.


4.


3.

2.


1.

Dumbo - 1941

Dumbo was a movie I watched somewhat regularly as a little kid. On the surface, it seems like a nice story about an underdog flying elephant who overcomes his tormentors and becomes a star. With it's bright colors and circus setting, it initially seems like a lighthearted tale. But there's a lot of darkness here. I think Disney does a good job of subtly suggesting at the harsh realities of circus life. The cruelty to animals, the backbreaking labor, and the discrepancy between the public face of the show and actuality of the inner workings.

One of the songs I remember liking best from this movie was the "Song of the Roustabout". I think it was the driving rhythm and the spooky minor key that appealed to me. Also, I thought it was really neat to see how circus tents were built, and I liked that the animals helped.



This is one of the songs that people often point to as proof that Dumbo/Disney is racist. The idea of this scene is not inherently racist. It shows the intense, thankless labor that black people were resigned to. However, some lyrics (specifically "when we get our pay, we throw our pay away") are pretty prejudiced seeming. Basically, this song has nothing on the Crows singing "When I see an Elephant Fly."

The weirdest scene in the movie is when Dumbo and Timothy the Mouse get WASTED.



It's got a trippiness to it that was way ahead of it's time. The part that starts at 1:50 is my favorite, I know all those lyrics by heart. And at 2:08, we get a sweet elephant Voltron, neat!

On wing

Birds I saw today:

-Robin
-Red Winged Blackbird
- American Goldfinch, female
-Common Grackle
- Tufted Titmouse
-Black-capped chickadee
-White-Breasted Nuthatch, my favorite
- Mourning Dove

Also, a baby bunny.