Punch & Judy

punch & judy

CAST OF CHARACTERS
                                                                              
1. mr punch                               

2.  judy (his wyfe)                                                                     

3. ye baby

4. toby (a dog)

5. ye devil

6. ye crocodile

7. a constable

8. a skeleton

9. ye hangman

10. joey the clown
(from london town)


Punch & Judy is a mini-drama performed with hand puppets, & always by a single person who does all the voices, plays the music and/ or operates the phonograph, and does everything necessary to the
 performance of these one-act, set pieces.

In addition, this "professor of punchology" carves the heads of the puppets, makes their bodies and their clothing, and even makes his own prosceneum arch and theatre booth. I can't think 
of any other dramatic mode in which  cooperative endeavor is not just frowned upon, but absolute anathema.

The emphasis on the lone puppet master makes the quality of these performances almost too easy to judge.

The best professor of the craft today is an old gentleman named Glynn Edwards, who is unfortunately nearly totally retired. What makes him the best is his mastery of the fundamentals; he moves from one voice to another seemingly without effort, and since one of the two conversationalists is always Punch, whose voice requires speaking thru a contraption called a swazzle, it can't be as easy as it sounds. The movements of Edwards's puppets are also graceful and natural, and I especially enjoy the little dog who introduces the show, and moves in a most expressive and joyful way.

I also immensely enjoy the work of Professors John Thursby and Rod Burnett, who, like Edwards, have mastered the elements of "the script," such as it is, so thoroughly that they can easily improvise to fit the requirements of any audience. I should mention here that to some extent, if you've seen one Punch & Judy show, you've seen 'em all. The scripted a elements follow each other not precisely in a strict order, but in a series of predictable vignettes which increase in violence as the show winds out its roughly 20-minute duration.

It's this violence, and the coarse and aggressive nature of Mr. Punch which has caused this show, performed steadily in England for over 350 years, to fall into disrepute amongst the PC university crowd. I'll say more about political correctness vs Mr Punch tomorrow, plus a bunch of disorganized (at this point) thoughts about this topic and others relating to the primitive but strangely engaging Punch & Judy shows.

However I've borrowed your eyes too long already today, and I need to go cook dinner.

ye last road trip (again)

We arrived home on Monday at ye end of what I REALLY hope was ye last rode trip. Now I know you’ve heard it B4 — I think the first “last road trip” was in 2005. .

 

At that time I wrote," Once upon a time, when gas was cheap and motel rooms were reasonably priced, I took to the road whenever the impulse struck, often just for the hell of it. Cruising along some remote two-lane blacktop (I never liked traveling the interstates) conferred a sense of freedom and independence. It fostered an illusion of power -- omnipotence, almost -- best expressed as, "I can go wherever I want, and do whatever I want, whenever I want."
"Sure. Until the money runs out. Or more importantly, until you're out of gas. And we are.

"Among the innumerable casualties of hurricane Katrina was our notion that gasoline is an infinite resource.

"But now we've breached the three-dollar barrier, the point at which many Americans find their formerly unlimited mobility curtailed.

"It's now extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a family of four with modest means to gas up the old Ford Explorer and go tooling off to visit Aunt Mary in Lubbock."

But now we see expense is only one facet of the "petroleum problem;"there will be times when the environmental problem is that gas is too cheap and too available. We are in a radically different scenario now, what Jim Kunstler called "the bumpy plateau" in "The Long Emergency." and it's not easy 4 me, confined to a wheel chair and carrying an oxygen tank, to deal with those bumps.


As things have turned out, gas is so cheap right now that traffic is THE problem in nearly every city & town, as people for whom recreational driving had not been an option for quite a few years suddenly take it up again with a vengeance; we were in a two-hour jam on the run into Portland on our way to Seattle, & a four-hour jam leaving Tacoma for Boise & points south on a couple days later.

Some recreation. If the folks up in Washington, in Portland, OR & LA & Frisco want to have fun in their own way, that's OK I spoze (or it would be if it wasn't demolishing what's left of our optimal 80% nitrogen & 20% oxygen atmosphere). But I can tell you it makes the wheechair life look a lot better. 

That final day took a lot out of us, and a lot out of the cat (she travels with us everywhere we go); unable to drink for over 8 hrs, she was a ghost of herself the day after her return, but has since reverted to normal behavior.

j'ai un trou dans ma tete

Woozenweezer K. Trumpf

I had heard about this dude for  a number of yrns,m.  d took no more  pleasure in than I would if I was floatin down wb troubkllese

ie treek wih a 5-inch blade in my neck.

monkey & a rangatang

Monkey & a rangatang a-settin in the grass;
one say "no" and t'uther'n say "yass."

She knows a .38 slug, Beedle-e-bom,                
He knows a .38 slug, Beedle-e-bom,           
                             
                       
                                               Howler Monkeys howling "No."           

Well, cain't nobody use it;
Mama got a .38 slug.                       

                             

untitled

Elizabeth the Great.

I don't know ye, but how important is' t? with Twitter you don't really have to know any body.

Easy Rider Yellow Dog

Since the Miss, Susan lost her jockey Lee
Was more than excitement.
You, she Moanin 'night you can hear the morning
"Wonder where is my easy rider is lost."
Cablegrams is out of sympathy
Telegraph moves inquiries.
Alabam character 'comes from
Anywhere that Uncle Sam has
Delivery to rural areas as well.
Phone rings all day
But it was not for me.
The final good news
Please fill our hearts with joy.
This message comes from Tennessee.

Dear Sue your Easy Rider hit the fortress today
South Saidodoa puruman rattler car.
I saw him, he was a pig.
Easy Rider is now away
So he had to repair it, hiking is not far.
He has just gone over the South Yellow Dog.


I know this area like the back of a Yellow Dog
I know the route took the riders.
All tie, the Bayou, Burg and quagmire.
This is down south-way cross the dog.
Please do not exactly grow money trees.
Cotton is grown on the stem easily.
No horses, horseracing is not grandstanding
Old Beck is shot like a land
Down here in the south, cross the dog.

000! the yellow dog the yellow dog, Ridin Z. back of a yello dog,
Don't yu know I'm on Z. hog when I ride on Z. back of a yello dog  x
>^<
 x x
   .4.
L^^^L

who is she?

Can anyone out there identify this little waif? She's famous today; not so much then.

I know who it is but I'm not sayin until someone out there gets it right.

You can reply to this blog, or to 8103 E Southern in Mesa, AZ (85209).

Answer: even after 3 days on Facebook, there is no correct answer. (so, trumpet blatt, drum role) IT'S KELLY RIPA.  

friday cat blogging

It's a common enough topic heading this week, with a singular subject.

"Most everyone's mad here," said the cat.  "You may have noticed that I'm not all there myself."

nightmares & hallucinations

The Duchess's Kitchen, by John Tenniel.

I've been here in the kitchen for 9 yrs now. Except for the normal-looking little girl entering at right, the cast of characters is perpetual. 

The Duchess holds a baby who is writhing in pain and rage, as she makes ineffectual attempts to comfort it. She looks like Broderick Crawford in dire need of a fifth and a pack of Luckies, partly because the baby screams incessantly, and partly because she's been carrying the burden of monumental ugliness all her life.    

To her right, in front of the stove is the stoic-looking cook, holding a phallic-shaped pepper shaker and filling the air with that abrasive substance. Try sitting in such an atmosphere, with your nose burning, your eyes running, your ears assailed by howls and  enormous thumps, and I believe you too will conclude that imprisonment in such a place as the Duchess's kitchen, every day for 8 or 10 years constitutes torture.

It does get better at times. At night the fire dies down, and everyone goes to sleep -- the only relief. I'm certain that's why I've learned to sleep 13-14 hrs a day.

Did I leave anyone out? Yes -- barely noticeable under the cook's feet is the house cat -- a Cheshire Cat to be exact. Cats and dogs pictured in domestic scenes confer the status of households on them. A smiling cat is an evil image, and the Cheshire Cat designates the Duchess's kitchen as an evil place. If you want to see what it's like, stop by any time -- I'm always here.

more of d same

I guess I'm too old to be disappointed by presidential elections any more, but I'm still angry as hell.

We've learned to expect the Republicans to be a bunch of nut cases, rageaholics, warmongers, religious fanatics, and apologists for capitalist pirates and blue-blooded aristocrats. That's never a surprise, and it's just the same old big, big deal.

But the naive and gullible American public is fooled one election after another, and continually disappointed to discover that the Democrats they thought were so wonderful are just a bunch of bimbos. Our wide-eyed innocence is perpetually taken advantage of by candidates who run campaigns exactly like the current one -- an exercise in feel-goodism, in which cynical establishment operatives manipulate us with pollyanna platitudes and glittering generalizations.

Things did change a little this year, and one candidate appeared willing to talk about the fact that since 1980 the United States has become a society composed of a tiny enclave of haves sitting atop, and on the backs of, a population of debtors. [The numbers prove it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit … §ion=4), so don't even bother telling me it ain't so.] He's losing, by the way.

No candidate is willing to bring up the fact that this country is dying under the weight of an empire and a military establishment more massive than anything the world has ever seen, capable of both casual violence and murderous, rage-driven wars of acquistion in which we drop cluster bombs on little kids. Economically, this war machine is bleeding us dry, but on this subject our vaunted "liberal" Democrats remain as silent as a row of cathedrals.

Instead of honest assessments of these and other life-threatening issues, the Democrats give us silly personality spats and feel-good, mealy-mouthed nonsense about "change" and "hope." To hell with them.

I'm appalled by the ease with which many of my fellow posters are taken in by this cynical twaddle. You're good, loving, well-meaning people, and I love the hell out of you, but most of the liberals I see here have a few things to learn about what actually drives the political process in this country. And here's a clue: it's not idealism.

z word of z day...

...from z greatest pundit, Mr Atrios, at his blog Eschaton.

It's Really Happening

Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. There's going to be a convention. I might actually watch it.

oooh,that musta been a bed-bug... (lemon jefferson)

Public records show that Sen Sanders was paid in excess of $1,800.00 in 2015 by two private organizations. He must make  the contents of those speeches public, or otherwise surrender credibility in his ongoing feud with Mrs. Clinton, in which he insists she must divulge the contents of speeches she made to Goldman-Sachs and elsewhere on Wall Street. 

What happens in Phoenix gets spread all over the map. Sort of like Marinera sauce, but not near as tasty. I'm Joe Friday;  it's that day again.

OK, you're saying that what Bernie Sanders did is equivalent to what Mrs. Clinton did when she harvested millions from Wall Street Firms for speeches. And even though we know how much she got 4 each speech  the content of all of them is a closely-guarded secret (like the nuclear codes) -- no transcript, no synopsis for any of em.

I moseyed on over & decided to stick around & have a look-see. When I got over there it was ø but a rehooligan mob, so I thought I oughta "Stick Around" & have a hear-listen also 2.

PROFESSOR BRICE STICKS AROUND ON POOR HAPLESS MR. GREENJEANS. Engafgesin the dreaded spying technque, "hear-listen!"

The greatest carrier of "hear-listen" campaign microphones is Z bed bug, a pest for reasons other than this vermin's copious eagerness to be trained as spies, which augments and competes with his natural tendency and bloody enjoyment of painfully biting humans. 

I'm sure you know what I mean, and puhleeze do me the kindness not to evah ask me to explain it 2 U. 

friday cat blogging

Sammy' last haircut,on April 8 of this yr, was very x-citing, but it now must be repeated, as we've entered on the hottest days & weeks of the yr, & not even 90 days is gone since de last 1. 

I spoze if she had 2 have 3 haircuts this summer it wouldn't B Z end of Z world.

a gnu post

Horrorshow.  I made it back without letting a whole month go by.

About halfway thru our "Southwest Wanderslust" trip I decided I should get a *device*  of some kind  so I could write on the blog. Got me a Samsung tablet which turned or 2 b a bad mis-take, as the ANDROID™ operating system concerns itself only with creating a platform for advertising. It does so with amazing efficiency, and makes a simple action like signing into facebook impossible, unless you're already registered and inspected on that computadore.

 I'll return it 2 where I got it from this morning. 

smells like dead things

I'm glad to report that Jim Kunstler has returned to us, and wrote a great column this week.

Not that he's gone anywhere. It's just that his wonderfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation, has been uncharacteristically horrible lately. Last week he reached a new low when he chose the transgender bathroom controversy as his topic. I found the result unreadable, and nothing from April or May is up to his usual standard.

Kunstler does his best work when his topic is free ranging and improvisational riffing on the Great American Meltdown. That's what he returned to this morning, and it's an approach that produces paragraphs like this:

Things go eerily quiet and still before the California primaries. At this stage, the two major parties have discredited themselves so thoroughly that a necrotic stink wafts around the election of ’16. Who put that road-kill possum in Hillary’s podium? Why does Donald look every week more and more like a lurching Golem? The parties are rudderless. Their leaders range the decks like wailing revenants. It’s as if the mortal remains of Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan have come from the grave to eat the brains of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Reince Priebus. The rectified essence of every zombie fantasy churned out of Hollywood seeps through the capillaries of the dying political establishment, as it stews and ferments and waits to be loaded on the garbage barge of history.

The questions posed therein are purely rhetorical, and answer themselves. Hillary herself is the dead possum, and Trump looks like a "lurching golem" 'cause that's eggs ackley what he is.

It's great to see you back, Jim. Your country needs you, more than it could ever know.

weekend cat blog

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_) º(signed)º S@MM¥

Looks t'me like Sam's RR.

(olyeuse kids know what RR is an abbreviation 4, amirite?)

ЛСД

I thought I'd provide little more 2day about LSD generally and Hofman's "bad trip" specifically. I was especially interested in the art work I put up yesterday. and no more than began researching it before I found out it's got a history.

Wikipedia recounts "The celebration of Bicycle Day originated in De Kalb, Illinois, in 1985,[9] when Thomas B. Roberts, then a Professor at Northern Illinois University, invented the name "Bicycle Day" when he founded the first Bicycle Day celebration at his home. Several years later, he sent an announcement made by one of his students to friends and Internet lists, thus propagating the idea and the celebration."

As you can see, both these versions of the original Bicycle Day artwork were used to decorate 25 hits of blotter paper LSD.

The problem I have  with this image is it conveys none of the fear or paranoia Hofman experienced that day, and chooses instead to picture only the idealistic qualities of LSD.

Over the years  many artists have taken a stab at updating the original, & this one does convey just a hint of the menace Hofman felt that day. But my favourite is still the LSD monster (see yesterday's Catboxx), for the way he told it, Hofman's bike ride home was truly terrifying, with the ideal part of the trip coming later that day.

woo hoo woo hoo hoo

"He turned on, he tuned in, and he has finally dropped out: Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who invented LSD, and experienced the first “bad trip,” in 1943, has died at the age of 102. That’s 873 in freak-out years." (Item from Whatever it is I'm Against It blog)

A little over a year prior to my birth in 1944, an an unknown Swiss chemist experienced history's first bad acid trip. As with most such trips, he had no idea what was happening to him, or why. 

On Monday, April 19, 1943, Hofman deliberately took .25 mg (250 micrograms) of the drug after experiencing minor effects the previous Friday when working with LSD, probably resulting from tiny amounts of it entering his body through the pores.

"What happened on April 19 became known to the psychedelic counterculture as Bicycle Day: Hofmann's wild, two and a half mile cycle ride home - no car being available because it was wartime."

"I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. I asked my laboratory assistant to escort me home. On the way, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly.



As he rode home, the pioneer tripper assumed, as have generations that followed, that everything would be OK once he got there, but alas, it was not 2 B. "My surroundings had now transformed themselves in more terrifying ways. Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms. They were in continuous motion, animated, as if driven by an inner restlessness."

His wife and kids were away on vacation, but a neighbor stopped by and brought Hofman some milk. He quickly gulped down more than  2 liters.

"...the neighbour was no longer 'Mrs R,' but a malevolent, insidious witch with a coloured mask...Even worse than these demonic transformations of the outer world, were the alterations I perceived in myself, in my inner being. Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be wasted effort.

"A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa. The substance, with which I had wanted to experiment, had vanquished me. It was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will."

A few hours later of course, everything was hunky-dory, the demon invasions were over, and life very curiously returned to what passed for normal during the 20th century and WWII. This is something subsequent generations of trippers have known: If you drop a tab and your home is invaded by  raptors which tear you to pieces then eat you, don't worry; ain't no big ting brudda. It's all in your mind, so just give it a couple hours.

References

The 4th para is in quotes because it is taken in its entirety from this article in the Guardian (UK)

The quoted material following para #4 is from Hofman's autobio, LSD: My Problem 
Child.

A note on the artwork. This piece was originally executed as the cover for a 12" LP. 
LSDemon – 666% Under Voice Records and Monstruo.ink Crew presents 666% the debut release by LSDemon (Freak AKA Alejandro Aguilar), a darkpsy producer and graphic artist from Costa Rica. The sound on this release is dark, mischievous, and powerful, featuring music created in the last two years. Establishing a theme, the front cover was done by the artist to introduce us to the psychedelic trip we are about to embark upon.

shrillery hillary

Below you'll find a 2008 essay by the great researcher, writer, and blogger, the shadowy WIIIAI. I find this even more pertinent today than it was 8 years ago, and wonder whether Mrs. Clinton has filled the gaps in her knowledge during that time.
(For the link to the original article, click on the title below.)

Hillary and Jeanette

Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton was campaigning in Montana and made an ill-informed mention of Jeanette Rankin, who Montana elected as the first woman member of Congress in 1916. Hillary said it just goes to show that men really will vote for a woman, since women didn’t have the vote in 1916. Except that women had in fact won the vote in Montana in a referendum (of male voters, natch) two years before. This is not just a minor gaffe about Montanan history but a gap in Clinton’s knowledge which illuminates a few things about her.

First, Clinton is a female senator, and an aspirant to be the first female president, who evidently in all these years has never been curious enough about the first woman in Congress to learn more than a tiny bit about her. Hillary doesn’t really consider herself part of a feminist history, doesn’t recognize that she stands on the shoulders of those who came before. She thinks she got where she is entirely by her own efforts.

Clinton evidently thinks, wrongly, that women in the US received the vote in one fell swoop with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. In the same way as she remarked that while the civil rights movement may have organized and agitated, the real victories for African-Americans only came when Lyndon Johnson decided to push for them, so the decades of hard struggle by women to achieve political rights, including state-by-state (and territory by territory) suffrage campaigns like the one that Rankin helped lead to victory in Montana but many more which did not succeed, are completely disregarded and unacknowledged by Hillary, if she even knows about them. She does not understand how much organized, grass-roots effort over many many years it really takes to effect any sort of change in this hide-bound country; the only lesson she really learned from the failure of her health-care plan in the 1990s was that she, Hillary Clinton, did not have enough power. Her comments last week (this week?) denigrating party activists suggest that, like Bush, who remarked that “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” she too has an impoverished view of the day-to-day role of the citizenry in democratic governance. Not that Obama is much better in this regard: when he leads chants of YES WE CAN, he does not mean to empower his supporters to do anything beyond getting him into the White House and then dispersing to their respective homes to quietly await the flow of manna and all things good from his capable hands.

Considering that Rankin is also known for her principled pacifism, having cast one of the few votes against American entry into World War I – which was also her first vote in Congress, and therefore the first vote cast by a woman in Congress – and the only vote against war with Japan in 1941 (she only served two terms in Congress: she was not re-elected in 1918, though mostly for reasons other than her position on the war, and not elected again until 1940; crappy timing, really), had Hillary known more about her, she might never have brought up her name in the first place.

american Гласность

First rule of tellin the truth is, you got to know what it is B 4 U can say it out loud.

So what is the truth about Vietnam and Campuchea (Cambodia at that time), about Nicaragua and El Salvador, About Iraq, Iran, & Afghanistan?

Ask the question of yourself honestly, and if you give an honest answer as well, you'll know what we must do.

Revolution now.