Happy half century, you anorexic slag!
Monday was Barbie’s 50th birthday (counting from her introduction at the American International Toy Fair). I had a burger today at our favorite greasy spoon, Salmonella-on-Sea, and I didn’t grab a newspaper quick enough so I got stuck with the women’s rag. That’s where I read this.
Barbie was based on the postwar German doll Bild Lilli, who was a doll of easy virtue marketed to adults. Today, one Barbie is sold every three seconds. Or maybe it’s three Barbies a second. Shoot, I don’t know. I didn’t steal the magazine.
You know who loves her some Barbie? Me, that’s who. Not the doll — they stopped giving me dolls when I wouldn’t stop dissecting them — the playscale.
Playscale is the universal 1:6 toy scale that means GI Joe can wear Barbie’s panties and Midge can drive the tank. Oh. My. God. All those fabulous tiny Coke bottles and naugahyde cowboy boots and plastic fried eggs. I just love ickle things.
My best friend had every damn playscale playset in the world, because her parents actually loved her. The whole West family (remember them?), with horses. The whole Barbie family. The camping set. The dream home. Man. Poor people sure buy their kids lots of great stuff, don’t they?
Speaking of Barbie/Joe mashups, I remember this story from when it was reported. I never learned if it’s true, but I sure hope it is. I’d give a lot for a Barbie who yells, “eat lead, Cobra Commander!” Or, alternatively, a GI Joe who coos, “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”
Fun Barbie facts:
Barbie’s real name is Barbie Millicent Roberts
Barbie is from Willows, Wisconsin and went to Willows High School
Barbie has four sisters: Skipper (1964), Stacie (1992), Kelly (1995) and Krissy (1995)
Barbie’s first pet was a horse named Dancer
The first Barbie sold for $3.00 in 1959
Barbie’s signature color is PMS219 (that’s Pantone [color] Matching System, smartass)
Ken debuted two years after Barbie in 1961
Ken and Barbie broke up on Valentine’s Day, 2004
Okay, those facts weren’t really all that fun.
March 12, 2009 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 17
Pencils!
The Sanford Corporation (a Newell Rubbermaid Company) is the world’s largest manufacturer of writing instruments, mostly by way of corporate om-nom-nomination of familiar brands: uni-ball, Sharpie, PaperMate, Waterman, Parker, Prismacolor, Eberhard faber, Turquoise, Col-erase, Empire-Berol and more…more than you ever dreamed.
Doug of the Pencil Pages toured the Sanford pencil factory in Lewisburg, Tennessee in 2004 — in June, when a young man’s fancy turn to thoughts of pencil — and brought back this excellent photo essay.
Because having nothing to say for myself doesn’t even slow me down.
January 1, 2009 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 12
Loot! Plunder! Swag!
This? A British Airways place setting…from the Concorde. This is just the sort of brilliant, clever gift-giving Uncle B excels at and I…do not. I made him circle shit he wanted in a gardening catalogue. I’m pretty darned sure this is the first time in my life I’ve ever bought anyone vermiculite for Christmas.
We’ve just polished off the champagne…the turkey is in the oven…it has been an good Christmas. Hope yours was, too!
See you on Boxing Day! (Don’t ask).
December 25, 2008 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 36
Set Weasel on KILL!
Margaret Calvert is still alive, but only because I haven’t found her yet. When I heard her interviewed on Radio 4, it’s the first I learned her name, but I had been looking for her for years. By her works I knew her.
Margaret and her boss, Jock Kinneir, undertook a much-needed redesign of British road signage in the middle 1950s and introduced thereunto previously unknown levels of suck and stink.
Weasel exaggerates? You decide. Let’s start with this here. The previous ‘school crossing’ sign was a charming little boy in a cap with a satchel leading a littler girl. As Margaret describes it, “It was quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton, and very grammar-schooly. I wanted to make it more inclusive, because comprehensives were starting up, and I didn’t want it to have a social class feel.”
So she smashed it to bits. Class warfare, feminism AND it looks like ass! Trifecta! Margaret later confessed that the little girl was based on a photograph of herself as a child. Yup. She had a model for this glommy piece of shit. Boggles the mind, don’t it?
She’s a Kiwi South African. Did I mention that? She emigrated all the way from far-flung colonies to screw over the mother country’s signage. Speaking on behalf of resident aliens everywhere: naughty, NAUGHTY immigrant!
But I don’t hate her for the School Crossing sign. I hate her for a sign I’m not even positive she designed. IT IS THIS ONE. Can you spot why this sign makes Weasel shiver and foam at the mouth? WELL, CAN YOU?! (Hint: say yes, or I’ll fucking come over there and hurt you).
Yes. Yes, that’s right. In order for a skidding car to make these tracks, the left front tire would have to detach itself, cross over and land on the right rear while the right front tire correspondingly travels diagonally over and does the other thing.
COULD. NOT. HAPPEN. This is suck writ huge. A graphical “ain’t got no” — times the tens of thousands of them jammed by the side of the roadall over Britain. How many people signed off on this abomination? How many bovine visual illiterates drive past it every day without a second glance?
I have one of my ‘funny spells’ whenever we pass one. It hurtssss ussssss. And oh…OH!!! There’s one at the end of the driveway!! MY DRIVEWAY!!!! I took one look and I thought, “Right! That’s how it’s going to be?”
So you can understand, when the vicar came at me waving a page of Miz Calvert’s best work and asking me to choose which three best typified my future life, I was like, “ZOMG! Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker’s father!!!!!” and hid under the sofa.
Two more sessions to go!
December 18, 2008 — 6:10 pm
Comments: 32
Meet my leetle freen’ Johanna
Many activities which appeal to stupid people for stupid reasons appeal to me for good reasons. Really good reasons. Really. It is my curse.
I mean hippies. And recycling (also patchouli, but that doesn’t really figure here). Human beings don’t make enough garbage to spoil the view, let alone wreck the planet (except maybe in China, which is full of diabolically clever and hard-working little people). Upscale Western suburbanites sorting their garbage into colorful plastic bins to be picked up by a fleet of giant belching diesel trucks to Save the Earth is an idea so pointless, loony and mathematically-challenged that even I can work out the formula.
It goes like this: if it is more expensive to recycle a thing than make it from scratch THAT MUST MEAN it requires more energy to do so (in some cases, a lot more energy) and that makes Gaia cry.
Yes. Yes, my hippies. There is recycling that is bad for the planet. Perhaps most of it, as it is practiced today.
And yet…waste is a terrible thing. Maybe because I am sometimes poor…maybe because I was raised by a pack of wild hippies. Whatever. Wasting a thing that can easily be reused offends me right down into my bones. It is an aesthetic judgment, not a scientific one — but I’m an aesthetic sort of a weasel, so bite me.
And zo…meet my new compost bin. Not any compost bin. Oh, no. This is a Green Johanna — a Swedish design that will devour tea bags, coffee grounds, banana peels, meat and fish (including bones!), garden clippings and all that goddamned fruit and veg you buy but don’t eat before it goes off — oh, yes. I’ve seen you do it — and transform them into lovely, glossy black soil. Which, using the magic of whatever the hell it is he does in that greenhouse, Uncle B will transform back into delicious food (if things carry on getting worse, he says, we’re going to grub up the front lawn and plant potatoes).
I love Johanna. I love her better’n that pig we had in the ’70s
And the sweet thing is, the local Council is so chock full of stupid hippies, they’re giving us a Johanna for £19.95, not the £114 list. Hooray for stupid hippies!
December 2, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 24
Exotica of the Day
Prawn crackers.
No, no…not pr0n, crackers. Calm down there, you crackers at the back. Prawn crackers are a staple of East Asia. Ninety percent air, 10 percent rice, and I think their collective grandmother might have seen a prawn at the circus once.
A bag of them is usually included with an order of Chinese takeaway (aka takeout) in the UK. At least, that’s my experience. Uncle B says it isn’t always; depends the size of the order. Well. There are no small Chinese takeaway orders in the Badger household, so that’s my experience.
December 1, 2008 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 32
Today’s Fun British Fact
It is illegal to mail horror comics to the UK.
For reals. I tried to find an online citation for that, but I couldn’t. It’s true, though. The lady at the Post Office showed me the regulation sheet.
I wasn’t trying to do that. I was trying to mail Uncle B an air pistol. A BB gun. PO Lady wouldn’t let me, on account of it’s “a weapon.” And I say, “a reproduction weapon.” And she says, “well you could hurt somebody with it.” And I say, “I could hurt you with this Customs Declaration form if I tried hard enough.”
I lost. Of course I did. Nobody ever argues the regulations and wins.
My real guns are going in the shop (most of them, anyway). But I have a couple of CO2 pistols I’d like to keep. They’re perfectly legal in the UK, but one looks exactly like a Glock and the other looks like a Walther PPK. I figured I didn’t want to pack them in with my household stuff, on the off-chance they turn up on an x-ray or something and get everything confiscated. So I decided to mail them on ahead.
I’m sure the comic regulation is some fusty old thing left over from the pre-Code comics era. Like the comic I stole this header graphic from. Which is in my horror comic collection.
Which is packed with my stuff.
Oh, piffle.
October 30, 2008 — 2:41 pm
Comments: 39
Fishing for tarts
Lots and lots of things have been fished out of the Seine. This was one of them. Maybe. If you want the long version, ask Google and spend an afternoon at it. Or go with the short version:
No-one knows who she was, really. She is called l’Inconnue de la Seine. The usual story is that she was drawn from the river in the late 1880s and the morgue attendant was so taken with her beauty and poignant expression that he called for a mask to be made.
I’m going to call bullshit on that bit, anyhow. No way this is the face of a dead woman. In fact, it would be difficult to take a cast of a living woman and catch a smile. Plaster is heavy and the dead seriously lack muscle tone. If this thing started life as the mask of a woman, it was heavily recarved afterwards (which is not at all uncommon with casts).
Anyhow, the story continues, she was put on display (in the 1880s, unclaimed bodies — up to fourteen at a time — were put in a chilled room at the morgue, fronted by plate glass. It was the most popular shop window in Paris). No-one claimed her.
Then somehow the mask escaped into the population. It was a sensation. Factories were contracted to churn out copies (in fact, one story I find plausible is that l’Inconnue was actually an entrepreneurial mask-maker’s daughter, alive and well at the time). No salon or filthy bohemian garret was complete without one. She appeared in poems, novels, baudy limericks (I’m just guessing on that last one). She was an icon of feminine beauty for decades, well into the 20th Century.
And then she really got popular. In 1958, emergency docs Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal chose l’Inconnue for the face of the original Resusci Annie (Snopes says oui to this story). Making her, officially, the most kissed woman of all time.
Thought a little creepy story might not go amiss today, this being Hallowe’en week and everybody being utterly sick to death of poltics and all.
October 29, 2008 — 2:11 pm
Comments: 37
My groat. Let me show you it.
This is my groat. There are many groats like it, but this one is mine.
My groat came up in conversation here last week, so I figured I’d give you a peep at it. This is my groat. Specifically, it is a Maundy groat of Charles II. The obverse says CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA and the reverse says MAG BR FRA ET HIB REX. Which means “Hix Nix Stix Pix.” Heh heh. Jes’ kidding. The real translation is: “HEY CROMWELL, how does my ass taste?”
A groat is a little silver coin worth four English pennies, also called a fourpence. The first was minted in the 13th Century and the last (for actual circulation — more on that in a moment) in 1888. The date on this one is 1679, but it wasn’t necessarily made in that year. They weren’t all that fastidious about minting coins every year, or changing the dies when they did. Early in Charles II’s reign, they were still producing most coins by hammering, but they switched to milling in his lifetime. This is a milled coin.
The Maundy ceremony, confusingly, happens on Thursday. Specifically, the Thursday before Easter. “Maundy” is a corruption of Mandatum Nuvum — the ‘new commandment’ to love one another and, umm…wash feet. British monarchs have observed some sort of Maundy ritual since 600AD — which sometimes included foot washing, but nearly always involved giving silver coins to the poor. The coins were known as Maundy money.
Regular old coins were used at first, but beginning with Charles II, special coins were minted, in sets of four: 1p, 2p, 3p and 4p. And still are. Despite decimalization (in 1971, Britain utterly fucked its wonderful but brain-hurty old currency scheme and lost many a beautiful coin) Maundy money is still legal tender.
Today, the Queen gives out Maundy money to worthy old persons, as many old coots as she is years old. The foot-washin’ part was quietly dropped centuries ago, until the current Archbishop of Canterbury — a very strange man — revived the custom in 2003.
Because it is a Maundy coin, Charles II his own self may have handled this groat. But probably not. And now you can tell all your friends, “I have seen Weasel’s groat.”
October 27, 2008 — 10:13 am
Comments: 104
The paper towels, they tell me things. Unspeakable things.
I don’t know how Rembrandt did it without paper towels. They’re the perfect studio companion — a mix of tough, absorbant and inexpensive. They daub excellent textures into wet paint, leach just the right amount of excess medium off an overladen brush, protect delicate surfaces from greasy human fingers and they’re totally the quicker picker upper. You can quote me on that.
When I have used a paper towel, if it isn’t thoroughly gefukt, I carefully fold it into a square and set it aside — a habit I picked up from an old art school friend (though I think she picked it up in her years of food service jobs). There’s always a big, tottery pile of gently used paper towel squares next to my left hand. When it’s panic stations, I’m on it. I’m a blottin’ fool.
I buy the best quality paper towels I can find, with a “good” randomized texture and always — always — in plain white. So how a roll of these vapid, preachy fuckers got in my cart, I will never know. I must’ve been in a hurry.
The paper towels picked a bad time to mock me. I was thinking blearily about the whole mortgage and financial meltdown while I made coffee and paper-toweled things this morning. Generally speaking, Washington is no more than a peripheral malignancy; a sort of slow sapping around the edges of the national vitality. But at this moment, those strutting retards are directly responsible for what’s wrong with my life. Their greed and incompetence is the only reason I am sitting at a desk today facing another eight hours of PowerPoint instead of bustling about the kitchen in my English country house making pickles.
Yes I’m going to make pickles. I’m going to make the hell out of pickles. I’ll probably wear an apron while I make them, too.
But right now, I have PowerPointin’ to do…
September 18, 2008 — 8:29 am
Comments: 50