Fierce and Frozen

Taxidermy.

It’s yet another of a quadrillion things I’ve known about all my life without ever giving it a second thought. Matter of fact, when I hear the word, all I hear is Bugs Bunny saying, “Hmmmm...tax-ee-doy-mee”.

It’s so naturally embedded in my subconscious that I don’t even think of what a strange practice it is. Remove its innards, replace them with some type of filler, insert glass eyes, and then display. I imagine it’s an art form like any other, but it just strikes me as…ghoulish, I guess. Deer, bears, wolves, birds, etc., stuffed and posed to look like they were somehow frozen in mid leap or midair. Wow, that Bengal tiger really died standing upright, swiping at you? Just what part of the thorax do you aim for to freeze that pose?

Stuffing game to pose as trophies is bizarre. Even more bizarre than that is when people actually do it to their pets. I’m not talking about that business with mummification which doesn’t even seem like it could be a real thing (but oh it is). I mean taking your beloved and recently deceased cat or dog to a taxidermist and having it stuffed and mounted in a “natural” pose. What do you do then? Put it on a rolling cart and move it around the room?

Christ. I’ll just take the pictures and keep the memories, thanks. How creeped out would you be to walk into your living room where your cat would normally be balled up in a sunbeam, but now it’s on all fours, frozen, and staring at you through glass eyes (wow, they really do follow you around the room!)?

*shudder*

And you just know that the day will come when you start draping coats over it. “It’s okay…she used to love to sleep on the coats, so it’s like she’s really here!”

No. No it isn’t. Not at all. You have a shell of an animal with glass eyes, clay eyelids, and a fake nose. Go ahead and snuggle up to it if it’s such a convincing facsimile. No really, go ahead.

Subliminal Message in a Bottle

Spin the spinner and call the shots
Twister can tie you worse than a knot
One foot here, one foot there
The spinner says what but you decide where
You reach, you stretch, you balance, you twist
Try it once you get the gist
No two twists come out the same
Twister is a Milton-Bradley game!

I can recite that game's jingle with disturbingly clear recollection because it was drilled into my head as a wee lad. Ditto with Perfection.

My older brother and I lived with my grandparents for a spell when I was age four to about six years old. This was by no means a bad thing as my grandparents owned an Italian restaurant in Lodi New Jersey from about 1950 through 1980, and attached to the restaurant was their house. The name of their restaurant was Casa Cosimo, and it became a household name, landmark, and an institution to the town of Lodi.

As I’ve gotten older, I have found out more and more cool things about that restaurant, and my aunt has become the archival expert on the place. She still has the original menus, advertisements, articles, reviews, and too many printed accolades to count. And of course, my favorite part of the archive collection: the excellent black and white photos.

So, Aunt Lilu, we may joke about your alleged fanatacism when it comes to record-keeping, but we all owe you a great deal for keeping the legacy alive.

My grandfather was what one would typically refer to as “right off the boat”, and it would be neither an insensitive nor inaccurate description. The man really was right off the boat. How he came to be a well-known and respected chef in a small town in New Jersey is a good eighty journal entries alone (suffice it to say that the man was completely fearless). There are a lot of missing parts in the timeline, so I’ll refrain from trying to lay it out here for fear of inaccuracy. I have often wondered what it must be like to be related to a celebrity or public figure, and I always assumed it would be great--unless your last name ends in ush, itler, ennon, or ennedy. I don’t know why it took so long to dawn on me (most things do), but I actually am the relative of a celebrity. And I was right; it’s great.

Running the restaurant were my grandparents; my grandfather essentially chained to the stove, and my nana doing everything else. There would be the occasional waitstaff who would drift in and out of the picture, but my grandparents for the most part were the core and a completely self-contained machine. Needless to say, they didn’t have much time to look after my brother and I during the day. I should note that my brother and I were never in any danger, whereas today DSS would probably haul us away. In actuality, being left to our own devices for hours on end was actually great and I recommend it highly. We were forced to be creative with our time, whether it was drawing, inventing games with names that will forever be an inside family joke, listen to the radio, or just play with whatever we could find. We got to use our *GASP* imaginations instead of having everything spelled out for us.

Unfortunately, sometimes television also played a pretty significant role in that stage of childhood. This is why I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of television shows and commercials from 1974-1976. I watched a LOT of television back then, and it’s a pretty safe bet that I watched enough to last a lifetime. Hogan’s Heroes and F Troop I never understood, Love American Style had a gajillion jokes in it that I never got, Hee Haw might as well have been filmed on Mars, and no matter what they say, Sid and Marty Krofft must have done blotter acid at some point.

It was in between all these shows that commercials would get their hooks in me with their insidious jingles. I wanted Spirograph, an Evel Knievel Stunt Bike, Stretch Armstrong, and Pulsar, and wouldn’t even know why. Evidently, Baby Alive was soft and sweet and Easy Bake ovens produced bakery-quality cakes, one light bulb watt at a time. Commercials for games were especially brainwashing. Observe:

When you’re into Perfection
Here’s how it goes
You gotta be quick
So keep on your toes
Put the plunger down and set the timer
Put the pieces in place, but don’t be slow
With Perfection, you’ve got to move ‘em fast, move ‘em fast
Or the pieces will pop up before you put in the last
And that’s Perfection!

Man, what incredible anxiety that commercial produced, let alone the actual game. Still remember the damned thing thirty years later though, don’t I? Behold the Power of Advertising.

Lite Brite, making things with li-hi-hight!
What a sight, making things with Lite Brite!
Lite Brite! Make people, animals, things!
With refills like Bugs Bunny or Bozo the Clown!

All right, all right. That’s enough. The restaurant probably sold itself, but the picture you see is a billboard for it right off what I presume was route 46.

The Electric Football Kid

Yup, yet another post about spring. What I can I say? It’s a big deal for me. There are signs of new life everywhere, people are actually walking outside by choice, it’s warming up (albeit verrrrry slowly), and again, peepers(!). And now that it’s Easter, the smell of vinegar, chocolate/jelly beans/peeps and fresh-cut grass makes the mind reel.

But first, a non sequitur:

One of my favorite games at my grandparents’ house in Connecticut was electric football. To the uninitiated, electric football is this bizarre thing that’s a metal board with a football field painted on it, and underneath the metal was something that vibrated. You’d line up the plastic players in the usual formations like you would with live, non-plastic players, and one of them would have a little foam football under his arm that looked curiously like a tiny gypsy moth cocoon. After you’ve gotten all the players where they need to be, you turn on the board and watch them go. The vibrations would move the players across the board (hopefully), and maybe after about three hours or so the one carrying the ball might actually make it to the correct end zone.

There was usually a great amount of strategizing with this game, and it was always in vain. The reality was that as soon as you turned it on, the players would be off-sides, out of bounds, and often getting their arms interlocked, doing some crazy electrified do-si-do. It was still fun to watch, and I imagine it also wowed many an acid freak.

Back to spring. I just went out for a walk, and I’d say it’s probably about sixty degrees out. It’s just warm enough for things to smell different; water hits the road and now it smells very earthy; an occasional floral scent will waft past me; the outdoors just smell sweeter overall. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: PIZZA. I unwittingly walked past a Dominos, which next to Pizza Hut is probably some of the most sub-par pizza ever produced. This pizza smelled like the craptastic Elio's sort that you used to get in elementary through high school. What bowled me over about the scent was that it immediately transported me back to a balmy school cafeteria. The room would be full of kids throwing pizza down their necks as quickly as possible so they could get outside and finally have recess without a jacket and go back to class sweaty for the first time in seven months.

I would hate to be a teacher this time of year trying to hold the attention of a classroom full of kids bursting at the seams who just got their first taste of actual warm and sunny weather, their appetites whetted for the school year to be over already.

As for me, concentration just wasn’t an option and I always felt like one of the little plastic electric football players in the middle of a play. No tiny cocoon required.

Ahem.

My humblest of apologies once again for the lack of updates. There hasn’t been anything I’ve deemed particularly postworthy as of late, and I didn’t want to throw just any old thing on here (at least with the comics I could elicit a chuckle or two).

In other news: SPRING! I heard peepers when I got home from band practice last night (AM, actually), and man, do I EVER love that sound. Now I eagerly await the popping of new green from all the hibernating plant life.

I’ve finished reading the Chuck Klosterman books. More accurately, I finished one-and-a-half of his books. Frankly, the guy got kinda tiresome. I think he may use or refer to the word “ironic” once every three sentences, and that’s just too much for anybody regardless of how good the irony actually is. And interestingly, for a rock critic, he had some pretty egregious inaccuracies as well. Whaddya know; he’s human after all. In fact, he's a human who looks like a blond Corey Feldman.