THE STORY OF THE COOKIE STORY

A few years ago my mom started telling the cookie story. It is a story of a slightly humorous minor misunderstanding.  After the fourth or fifth time I asked her to stop telling it, because for one thing she remembered it differently from the way I did and every time I heard it I had to decide whether I ought to tell my side of it or just let it go, and for another thing a funny thing I did when I was a kid is kind of embarrassing for a greybearded old coot to have to keep having stuck in his face forty years later.  I record here for digital posterity the story of the cookie story as I remember it, which is probably considerably different from the way it really happened.  What we really need to do is have my mom and sister write up their versions and do a whole Rashomon thing on it.  So here goes:


My mom found a cookie recipe she wanted to try out and they turned out pretty well.  We liked them quite a bit.  The recipe makes a huge batch, about eight dozen cookies, and that can last a family of three a pretty long time.  We liked them enough that when we finished them, Mom made them again right away.  They are good cookies, really good, but weeks and weeks of the same cookie gets kind of wearing on a kid.  I thought once this batch was finished I could get her to make something different.  The problem was getting those cookies eaten up, so when my friend Robert would come over I would give him a whole lot of them, as many as he could carry in both hands, and soon they were gone.  Problem solved.  Except I came home that fine summer afternoon to find Mom had just finished baking another gigantic batch of those same cookies.  "They disappeared so quickly that I knew you really like them so I made you some more," is what I imagine her saying.  That is really all there is to that story except for my shocking confession.  


I made a version of those cookies today and they are really good.  I made minor substitutions, but here is the recipe as I got it from my mom:



Pioneer Home Cookies 
1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup margarine (cubes not tub) (1/2 pound)

1 cup salad oil

1 egg

pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon sour milk or cream

1 teaspoon cream of tarter

3-1/2 cups flour

1 cup oatmeal

1 cup cornflakes

1 cup coconut

1/2 cup chopped nuts

Drop by teaspoon on greased cookie sheet then press flat with glass dipped in sugar.
Bake 350 degrees for 10 minutes until light brown.

I made a half recipe, using butter instead of margarine, and baking powder instead of the soda/tartar - it's the same thing. I added another tablespoon of flour to make up for the wetness of a whole egg in a half recipe.  I keep rolled whole barley, rye and oats in the house rather than oatmeal and used more of that instead of the coconut.  I crunched up some Rice Chex in place of the corn flakes, but you could use more oatmeal for that too if you like.  Using both oil and butter makes them very light and crisp, but it also stays in your mouth a bit, which may be why I got tired of them.  It says drop by teaspoon, and that is not a measuring teaspoon but a regular spoon. They are very soft when first out of the oven but they harden up after about a minute and they don't clamp onto the pan, so you can let them sit for a minute before taking them off.  When you try a new recipe for the first time always do one test cookie first just so you can see what they are going to do.  I use a little metal pie pan for that. Here is what four dozen Pioneer Home Cookies look like:

There is the story and there are the cookies.  Now my story is ended.

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Daisy Bufford

Meet Daisy Bufford.  She was in 28 movies from 1927 to 1944, including Gone With the Wind and Cabin in the Sky, and played eleven maids.  Here she is in Naughty But Nice (1939), with Ann Sheridan. 

 

 Her main function in the story is to bring heavily spiked drinks to Dick Powell, and express astonishment when he sucks them down like lemonade, which is what he thinks they are.

Extreme astonishment.  To be fair, she is not the only person in the film who displays, through facial expression, extreme astonishment at that character's drinking habits.

Here she is in a non-maid role in Nobody's Baby (1937) a B comedy starring Patsy Kelly.  She is informing Robert Armstrong that she is not the woman in a taxicab that he is looking for.  The fact that she is black was meant to add comic effect to the mistaken identity.

MOVIES

I am probably the only person you know who even knows who Wheeler and Woolsey are.  I never let an opportunity to watch a Wheeler and Woolsey movie escape me.  They just crack me up.  Peach-O-Reno (1931) is as good as any of them.  Their usual girl foil, squeaky cute jazz-baby Dorothy Lee, is joined by Zelma O'Neal who can be seen at the end of the I Want to be Bad clip from Follow Thru, posted below.  Peach-O-Reno is a divorce farce, a popular subject for many years, until the code clamped down, and Bert Wheeler has an extended sequence, including a musical number, in drag.  Looks pretty good too.  That's all, I just like to post these drag shots when I get a chance.

OLD GARDEN CART

Goodbye to the old garden cart.  I got this for five dollars when I was just starting to work in the garden.  It had been patched, repaired and rebuilt.  It was extremely heavy, and when fully loaded with compost it was topheavy too.  The old plywood addition finally started rotting away and it had been a couple of years since I had used it.  Then I saw a simple cart design that inspired me to finally tear it apart.  I had to break a couple of bolts with a cold chisel, and saw through a couple of things, but mostly it was pretty easy.  I'm going to see what I can put together using only the lumber I have on hand, mostly scrap and leftovers, re-using the old wheels to make a long narrow cart with solid bottom and sides that I can shovel stuff into and tip it out of.

So that is what I did this morning, took apart the old cart.  And made cookies.  Not very good ones though, kind of bland, dry and cakey from a 1940s recipe.

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Libby Taylor

For decades if there was a woman of color in a Hollywood movie, there was only one, and she was the maid.  It was a common and necessary role but often required the actresses to play dumb, and be confused or frightened, for comic effect.  The actresses who played maids rarely had a chance at a decent role, and I think they deserve a bit more recognition for what little they were allowed to contribute.

Meet Elizabeth A. "Libby" Taylor. Libby Taylor appeared in 60 movies, features and shorts, from 1932 to 1953. She played 35 maids, and was rarely credited onscreen. Here she is in Hollywood Hotel (1937).

Conspiring with Allyn Joslyn.

Her function in the story is mainly to take a couple of telephone calls.

"He can't come up here, we ain't home!"

Here she is with Bette Davis in the closing scenes of  Satan Met A Lady (1936), uncredited even in the Internet Movie Database, although she has a couple of lines.

HATE VIRUS

TITANIC SECRET ORIGINS

This is a shot of a hallway set from Forbidden World (1982), Roger Corman's Alien ripoff.  Note that the walls are lined with takeout boxes below, and bulk egg cartons above.  According to Beverly Gray's biography of Corman this technique was developed by the art director for the 1980 Star Wars ripoff Battle Beyond the Stars (still one of my favorite SF movies - I used to watch it once a year).  "He had everyone collecting styrofoam containers from McDonald's hamburgers - when spraypainted silver, these looked impressive lining the walls of a spacecraft.  ...if the actor should turn around quickly and slam into the wall, the whole thing would crumble.  Then you had to go back and get more boxes."  That art director was 26 year old James Cameron, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people are watching his movie Titanic at the moment I am writing this.  That's how he got his start, gluing McDonald's boxes to the wall of a spaceship set.  Or so the story goes.

HISTORY'S GREATEST SECRET REVEALED!!

I was very happy to find a fascinating page on The Discovery and Demonstration of the Minoan Calendar, describing the work of Drs. Dempsey and Herberger in bringing the ancient Minoan Calendrical system to light.  You can enjoy it in detail on your own time but I have another, bigger secret to reveal here.  The Drs. were so struck by the "visual problems and broken patterns" in the decorative borders of a wall-painting that they settled down to crack the code contained therein and at last discovered the Minoan Calender.  It's pretty impressive how well concealed it is and how much analysis and diagramming must be done to pry that secret out of ancient dead hands.  So I printed out a copy of their work and got in my time machine and went back to Knossos when they were just finishing up the painting and showed it to them and they were like this:

I do not mean any disrespect toward Drs. Dempsey and Herberger or their work. But just look at the calendar on your own wall for a second and THINK ABOUT IT. They are what I have come to call Overanalysts, and I have been enjoying the work of Overanalysts for many years. There is a guy who carefully measured and diagrammed all the standing stone rings and lines he could find in Celtic Britain and Europe, and found that they were meticulously laid out in a highly complicated secret geometry.  There is an offshoot of the Holy Blood Holy Grail myth which shows that the seemingly decorative carvings in an obscure chapel in Britain conceal secret knowledge encoded in waveforms revealed by vibrations in metal plates of specific size and thickness - I swear this is true, they really did seem to find this evidence.  The interior structures of The Great Pyramid were found to precisely diagram the prophecies of the biblical Book of Revelations, up to World War One or so, and then it all had to be revised or forgotten.  Another scholar found that the temple sculptures of  the Roman Mithraic cult symbolize the interrelations between the constellations of the stellar sphere as viewed from the outside.

It's true that there are artists and craftsmen who are initiates into Ancient Brotherhoods and devote their skills to encoding the Secret Knowledge in complex diagrams, and they do Great Work.  Those people are very few and rare.  The work of Overanalysts starts at the opposite end of that process, with a picture or a series of carvings; it measures and compares, analyzes and ponders with a dozen books on the table, astrological and qabalistic diagrams on the wall and a three foot tall brass orrery showing the positions of all the planets except Pluto at any point in time.  If they didn't find a remarkable hidden secret with all their dedication and resources that would be a real shame and they would have wasted years of work. The thing is, these people are looking at art through the eyes of science, informed by scholarship and research.  They are not thinking with an artist's mind.  I have an artist's mind, and I also know quite a bit about science, scholarship and research, and human nature to boot.  That is why I am uniquely able to reveal to you History's Greatest Secret, regarding the encoded mysteries concealed in the works of craftsmen throughout history.

SOMETIMES WE JUST EYEBALL IT.

Sometimes we just start at one end and go to the other end and when we get there we stop.  If it looks okay then we do another part.  We stick the bull in the middle and arrange the two figures so the composition is balanced and try to get it done before time to knock off work and go home.  Sometimes we just stand the stones up in what looks like a pretty good circle or a fairly straight line and not worry too much about it.  We  carve what looks like a pretty even pattern and figure nobody is really going to be looking too closely.  We put three leaves on one side of a plant and five leaves on the other side because it looks better that way, not because there is a secret message we want to convey.  

So, I congratulate the Overanalysts of the world on their discoveries, and I like to think of the craftsmen and laborers who did the work, and what their ideas and lives and concerns were, and it is fun to think about.

YOU WANT IT WHEN +1

Back in olden times I think it was a law that you could not operate a print shop without a copy of You Want It When? somewhere on the premises.  It may have been optional for auto repair shops but it was mandatory for print shops. Nobody ever saw an original copy of  it, just re-copied and re-drawn, messed up and cleaned up versions with inexplicable features like the vanishing left arm of the third from left guy, merging into the side of his head.  A friend of mine researched and collected variants of this, but I can't remember if it was Kip or Dave.  Maybe they will tell me.

Anyhow on Google+ today I encountered this little oddity.  I thought it was one of the YWIW guys out of context but soon found it was not.  I tentatively attribute it to the Master of YWIW.  Note however the distinct difference in mood, joviality rather than hilarity, created by the lack of tongue.  

What does it mean? I don't know.  It's just a thing.  Make note of it for future use.  Just remember that somewhere out there may still live some old guy who one day created this proto-meme, waiting for a half-assed unnecessary documentary to be made about him.

INSTANT UPDATE!! This guy Mike Lynch posts information on a disputed claim to the origins of YWIW.   I am willing to credit Henry Syverson as the source of the single figure below, and the inspiration for the amateur artist who created YWIW.

SHOCKING REVISIONIST COVERUP!!!

When we first moved into our house I fulfilled a life-long dream.  Not the one about riding the bus naked, the one of  having my own copies of the Zallinger murals, an artistic inspiration from my youth.  I acquired multiple copies of the Time-Life World We Live In books and assembled the murals, gluing them up in our kitchen where they remain to this day.  The murals were brought to my attention again today, when I was sharing a link to the Peabody Museum where the originals stand.  I found to my astonishment that all the online references to the Age of Mammals mural seem to feature a dynamic auburn mammoth with huge curling tusks.  This one:

Here is the same section of the mural, or A mural of some kind, as it exists on my wall:

Similar, but different.  What the hell is the deal here?  I don't know.

RUN IT THROUGH THE HOLLYWOODIZER

Last night I enjoyed the absurd, and entertainingly brief, 1932 film inspired by Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue.  It inspired me, in turn, to re-read (after some forty years) the story to see just how wildly the movie varies from the source.  Poe's locked-room murder mystery (with notably grotesque details and circumstances) is enhanced by the addition of a romance and a madman.  Bela Lugosi is introduced as a bizarre charlatan devoted to proving evolution by injecting women with gorilla blood, from which they naturally die.  Here is Lugosi berating one of his victims:

Your blood is rotten!  Black as your sins!  Your beauty was a LIE!

Here is that victim, lovely Arlene Francis, years later, quizzing a mystery guest on the television game show What's My Line:

One of the first things one realizes upon reading Poe's story is that there is no morgue in it.  It's the name of a street in Paris. There might be a morgue in that street but there is not one in the story.  I can hear in my mind the gravelly voice of a cigar chomping studio dictocrat, "Where's the morgue?  If there is a morgue in the title people want to see a morgue."  So there is a morgue, and a carnival, and a romance, and a gorilla carrying an unconscious negligee-clad woman across the rooftops of Paris, and Poe's amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin is renamed Pierre, probably because Auguste doesn't sound French enough.  "What's a French name?  Pierre.  Change it to Pierre."

I enjoyed reading the story again, mainly because it is so refreshing, after what passes for writing nowadays, to read page after page without a single grammatical atrocity, to see the correct use of  "farther," to encounter quondam and pasquinade in the same paragraph.  I admit that I have never really gotten Poe; though I have read all his works it was more out of a sense of duty than affection.  He wrote clearly and succinctly, compared to the turgid style of many of his contemporaries.  His observations show a certain acuity and I especially liked his statement on the common error of mistaking complexity for profundity.

I also enjoyed seeing the movie - I can't remember if I ever saw it before, and it is not a real standout in any event.  Despite the good production  values and exotic details it is ultimately a bit flat in its effect.  It doesn't seem to horrify or thrill as it was intended.  I attribute some of its weakness to the abandoning or softening of some of the  most grotesque conceptions of the original - little is made of the bizarre circumstance of a corpse brutally thrust up a chimney, and the disturbing idea of an ape running amok with a razor (used with full intention by Dario Argento in his film Phenomena) was discarded.  At best it is a harmless hour of the bizarre which is unlikely to provoke in the average viewer as much thought as you have seen here today.