This one goes out to the dreamers (a Scientology moment)

NOTE. Posting this video in no way endorses or promotes or says "hey, hey, hey" to the vile practice of Scientology. I just want to show you these guys' new strategy. They've replaced those cheesy rallies and Veg-e-Matic-style announcer with THIS - steamy, dreamy images that don't really mean anything. Nicely shot, however, which is really why I posted it. 

The cut-off text is just crap anyway.

In my merry lobotomobile

Walter Freeman, who championed lobotomy in the US, toured with his “lobotomobile” demonstrating the procedure

Instant Articles
News Jan 14, 2017 Goran Blazeski

Throughout his life, Walter Freeman was obsessed with finding a cure for mental illness and he thought he found it when he became the first to introduce and popularize the prefrontal lobotomy in the United States.

He perfected the procedure by using ice picks hammered into each frontal lobe through the back of each eye socket and performed nearly 3500 lobotomies in his career.

Walter Freeman was born on November 14th, 1895, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. His father was a very successful otolaryngologist and his maternal grandfather was William Williams Keen, a prominent surgeon in the Civil War.

Dr. Walter Freeman left, and Dr. James W. Watts study an X-ray before a psychosurgical operation. 

Psychosurgery is cutting into the brain to form new patterns and rid a patient of delusions, obsessions, nervous tensions, etc.

In his early years, Walter wasn’t interested in medicine but after he received a bachelor’s degree in 1916 from Yale University he studied neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a medical degree in 1920.

In 1935 Freeman learned of a frontal lobe ablation technique when Carlyle Jacobsen tried frontal and prefrontal lobotomies on chimps and came to a conclusion that the chimps became less aggressive and more manageable.

The same year Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurosurgeon devised a leucotome, an instrument for dividing the white matter in the brain, and performed the first procedure known as prefrontal leukotomy.

In 1936 Freeman modified Moniz’s technique and together with his colleague James Watts he performed the first lobotomy operation in the United States on a 63-year-old Kansas housewife suffering from anxiety, insomnia, and depression. He was convinced that the operation was successful and was satisfied with the results so he started to propagandize the procedure heavily recommending it for any type of disorders, from psychosis, depression or neurosis to criminality.

Egas Moniz

Trying to find a more efficient way to perform the procedure he developed the “ice-pick lobotomy”- an operation that didn’t require drilling holes in the skull. Instead, he inserted an ice-pick-like instrument above each eye of the patient by tapping it with a hammer.

Insulin shock therapy administered in Lapinlahti Hospital, Helsinki in the 1950s

Many of his colleagues criticized his method but Freeman was convinced that it was a success and recommended the procedure. Between 1939 and 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and as Freeman claimed, the operation reduced the governmental costs from $35,000 per year for keeping a patient in an asylum to $250 for lobotomizing him.

He popularized the procedure and started traveling around the country in a van he called “the lobotomobile”, performing dozens of ice-pick lobotomies each day. He was able to do a lobotomy in 12 minutes and it is said that he once performed 25 lobotomies in one day. Known as a showman he often used carpenter’s hammers and also liked to insert picks in both eyes simultaneously.

A site of the borehole for the standard pre-frontal lobotomy/leucotomy operation as developed by Freeman and Watts Photo Credit

However, lobotomy’s popularity faded and Freeman performed his last lobotomy in 1967 when his patient Helen Mortensen, died on the operating table. After this incident, he was banned from operating.

Read another story from us: Egas Moniz invented the full frontal lobotomy and won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for it. He was also shot by one of his patients.

In the last 20 years of his life, he continued to tour the country in his “lobotomobile” visiting former patients and documenting their histories. He died on May 31st, 1972.

BLOGSERVATIONS. I don't know what to say about this, but saying something seems to be called for. In another era, I know I would have had my brain ice-picked into submission, no doubt to save those pesky bills from the sanitorium. Humanity has always been terrified of mental illness, and unfortunately remains terrified. There are those (radicals!) who say we've replaced straightjackets with chemical restraints. That instead of warehousing the mentally ill, we dump them out onto the street. And that would be true.

Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK, was lobotomized, not because she was violent or unteachable, but because she liked men a little too much. She was unruly and didn't fit the social mold. LOP, went her brain.

Maybe it would be better to have your brain lopped. What would it be like to walk around inside a lobotomized mind? Would it be as full of holes as Swiss cheese? The brain is nothing but a computer made of meat, and meat can be carved up, sliced, even eaten. 

I was going to call this post Borehole, but I assumed no one would be particularly drawn to read it. In any case, borehole was soon to be replaced with eye socket and ice pick. Though Freeman streamlined the lobotomy and made it readily available to the masses, he didn't win the Nobel Prize for it. That went to that Moniz character, ivory tower type, didn't even DO them like Freeman, just theorized. But theorized countless people to a living death. For that, they give the Nobel Prize.

Frozen moon bubble

Last chance: a bad dream

I had a strange dream about a bookstore. There were two women looking after it, a blonde woman in her 50s and a darker-haired woman, tall and thin, who reminded me of my kindergarten teacher. It was one of those rare private stores, a specialty store of some kind, though I knew not what - the kind of store where you could browse around for hours and no one puts a trap door under your feet or spikes on your chair.

I was leaving my lunch with them in a brown bag for some reason, knowing they had a refrigerator and would keep it cold. I was trying to write my name on the bag, and one of the clerks provided a label. Then the scene changed. I had a precious ticket to a concert, a Beethoven concert in a hall far away, and this was the ticket that was going to change everything. My estranged family of origin was going to be there, and this was my very last chance to connect with them before they cut me off forever. I gave the blonde-haired clerk the ticket and said, "Can you keep this for me?" "Of course," she said very seriously, fully realizing the importance of it, and put it in an envelope for safe-keeping.

Then on the day of the concert, I came in to collect my ticket. The blonde-haired clerk wasn't there, no one knew where she was, in fact no one was even sure she existed, and no one seemed at all concerned about it except me. In fact, they seemed irritated and offended by my concern. "But you don't understand," I kept saying. "I've got to have that ticket. It's my last chance."

It had been hours until my concert, but now time had shifted and it was suddenly only about 45 minutes. . . then half an hour. . . and then I realized I had to walk there if I was to make it at all. I noticed the envelope was still there, and my heart jumped with hope. The clerk refused to open it, knowing the ticket wasn't in there because there wasn't any ticket. Finally she did open it, and it wasn't in there. There were only a bunch of miscellaneous papers and receipts that she barely looked at.

Meanwhile she was becoming more and more offended, then quite angry that I wouldn't accept what she said. She was offended at the very idea that they had "lost" my ticket, as such a thing could never happen. Another clerk came out from nowhere and was very angry at me that I would even THINK that they had "lost" the ticket, and that a ticket likely never existed in the first place. I was only there to make trouble and upset everyone over nothing. They began to abuse me loudly in front of the customers, to make sure everyone knew what a nasty person I was and how I was manipulating them just to make them look bad. 

Finally I knew it was hopeless and began to walk to the hall, realizing it was miles and miles away and I would probably be late. Maybe there would be a cancellation and I could still get a seat? But it would be too late for my family, who would likely think I had forgotten about the concert or didn't care enough to show up. I walked and walked, my dress shoes blistering my feet, then realized I had no idea where the hall was and I would never get there. I looked down and realized that, with my fancy lace concert dress, I had worn knee socks and Mary Janes. And that was the end of the dream.

A thousand baby turtles

I can say nothing about this gorgeous work of art  (so I'll say something): it symbolizes every summer I ever spent at the cottage, sand on my feet, still wrapped in the innocence of pre-puberty, the Jimmy Olsen Annual clutched in my hand, and all my life (such as it was) still ahead of me. Beach sand and lake water and very short, very short holidays, and long periods of wondering what these marvels would look like if we really had them. No one I knew ever sent away for them, perhaps because the addresses were always in the States somewhere. It was just too intimidating.

Were my comic book ads ever this lovely? I doubt it, and I think they left out some of the most important ones:

The "100 Little Dolls". They were little all right, an inch and a half tall, kind of like those plastic soldiers that stood up on a base, but much more slender. I've seen pictures of them, and they remind me of those plastic cocktail skewers that look like things or people. 

These are now a valued collectible on eBay, for much more than $1. These dolls were made "not of paper or rags but of STYRENE plastic and hard synthetic rubber," a wonder-substance in those days. The dolls were described as having a strange quality known as "Lilliputian cuteness", a bizarre expression if ever there was one, and one that no child (and few adults) would understand unless they had read Jonathan Swift.

I think you had to sell something here - photos, this time, which might have been a somewhat easier sell than going door-to-door with salve. I wonder if anyone ever did "win" the chihuahua in a teacup. I feel sorry for a tiny dog, likely sent through the mail, traumatized. They don't even call it a chihuahua, but a "miniature dog".

Here is the text, or as much of it as I can read:

"I'll be happy to send you without you paying a penny, this lovable, young miniature DOG that is so tiny you can carry it in your pocket or hold it in one hand, yet it barks and is a reliable watch dog as well as a pet. You can keep it in a shoe box and enjoy many amusing hours teaching it tricks. . . active, healthy, intelligent and clean. Simply hand out only 20 get-acquainted coupons to friends and relatives to help us get that many new customers as per our premium letter. I enjoy my own lively, tiny dog so much. It is such wonderful company that I'm sure you'll simply love one yourself."

I can't find any accounts from people who actually did get the dog, but there are a couple of horrendous stories about the fabled squirrel monkey, and they are so horrible - the worst animal abuse I can think of - that I won't recount them here. People were actually surprised that their monkey bit them, acted terrified, and pooped on the floor. One of the stories was supposed to be "humorous" and appeared on national public radio. Shame on them - it was a story of abject animal suffering and terror, which - surprise! - is NOT FUNNY.

Another mystery, Grog. I wondered how this would work. Would it be sort of like those Hawaiian ti plants that used to be so popular then? They "grew like mad" too, except I could never get one to grow.

"GROG GROWS OWN TAIL. PLANT TAIL OUTSIDE AND IT GROWS LIKE MAD INTO A  BEAUTIFUL SHADE TREE! Grog, amazing prehistoric monster, comes with half-a-tail. In a few days the tail starts growing. It grows, grows, g-r-o-w-s. Remove the tail from Grog's body and plant it outside and it springs quickly into a flowering, fragrant shade tree. Then Grog grows another tail. Remove the tail again and he grows another, and another. . . endlessly. Only $1 plus 25 cents postage. Satisfaction or money back."

And then there were the baby turtles. I never even hoped for these. They just seemed too good to even dream about:

At first, of course, I thought you'd send away for 1000 baby turtles, which made me wonder where I'd keep them all, how I could hide them from my mother. You could get live baby turtles at the Metropolitan (what used to be called a "dime store", an expression you still hear once in a while), along with a plastic tank with a ramp in it, and a plastic palm tree. I was astonished to find out that you can still get these - they're called turtle lagoons - and that people still keep actual turtles in them. In Canada they're banned, for some reason - perhaps they smuggle contraband under their shells.

 

"Here's one of the most exciting toys you've ever owned. Just think - a baby turtle all your own. What's more, a real growing garden to keep him in, a garden you plant and grow all by yourselef. You can teach him to recognize you when you feed him. Watch him swim - see how he pulls his head and feet into his shell when he's frightened. You can have turtle races - you can make a" (oh, fuck the rest). I don't like the idea of calling a living creature a "toy", but I guess that was the attitude back then. The turtle likely wouldn't survive shipment anyway.

And how cool is this? You could actually grow, harvest and eat the peanuts. Maybe sell them! Except that it would never work in Southwestern Ontario, with our three feet of snow in the winter, and the ground like iron. The text is a little too small/boring to transcribe. 

I confess I didn't see these ads until I found them on Google. Just as well. Why didn't we see how creepy these things were? It's kind of like the way we didn't see the creepiness of clowns. Back then, "rubber wonderskin" was a GOOD thing.  A cowboy ventriloquist's dummy smoking a cigarette was something every boy ought to have.

And these need no explanation.

                       

Ringo was late to the party

Ringo was late to the party - we all know that - but soon found his slot, or slid into it, and thus the Beatles were born. Prior to that, there was somehow a feeling that a piece was missing. Once he was on board, the whole thing exploded.

I loved Ringo first. I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on my tenth birthday - it was their first time on the show, and nobody quite knew what the hell was going on, except that this babyfaced quartet were generating incredible excitement. Elevated on a sort of throne behind the three others was none other than Ringo Starr, the only Beatle with a made-up name, and in some ways the runt of the litter. This guaranteed that all the girls would love him best (pardon the pun!).

 

Ringo was a bit of a mutt, with a big nose and sad blue eyes. He didn't have conventional good looks like Paul, or a slashing wit like John, or spiritual gravitas like George. He was the waif. Three of the four Beatles had abandonment issues around their parents (only George had a more-or-less normal working-class childhood). Ringo's father just walked out, as did John's (and we all know what happened to John's mother). Fatherless boys can go one way or the other. But both ended up lashed onto a comet which is still streaking across the heavens, even with two members gone.

Ringo's still around, and he's hip, he is so incredibly hip! He has waited all his life to be this hip. Paul is looking fragile and has had a little work done on that sweet, slightly overripe face, but Ringo seems twenty years younger than his age. Being a Beatle, being in that world, has been an education, and his joy has survived. 

I was delighted to hear that his eldest son Zak - remember Zak? - has done not-half-badly on his own, serving as drummer for the Who - THE WHO??? Yes. Them. And you don't get those kinds of gigs handed to you because you're a Starkey. Famous Dads can even be the end of your career. You get them because you are brilliant.

Ringo's virtuosity is subtle but irresistible, a savant power that he has always had, and which has evolved. If you doubt me, try to imagine the Beatles' masterpiece, A Day in the Life, without Ringo. This is the backbone of the whole thing.  Listen to it again.

Post blogservations. My Ringo doll! Everyone had a Beatles doll back then, which you smuggled to school and kept in your desk. Mine, of course, was Ringo. I don't still have the thing (how crazy do you think I am? Don't answer that), but of course was easily able to track down a photo of one. Nothing ever goes away on the Internet.

Doesn't look much like him, but no one was prepared for the Beatles back then, for what they would become. I thought that was a hat at first - some sort of fez, or a French foreign legion thing, which wouldn't make sense, would it? But I think it's a tambourine. They couldn't stick a set of drums on him too easily.

If I disagree with you, it's because you are wrong.

I found these two images at about the same time, and I think it's significant, or at least appropriate. In place of "proverbs", you may insert: health advice, political opinions, convictions about race, sexual orientation and gender, denial of various global phenomena, and so on, and so on. 

What galls me is that practically no one prefaces their comments with "I believe that. . . " or "I think. . . " or "It has been my experience that. . . ", followed by a declaration of personal belief. Instead we get opinions hurled like explosive projectiles, and reactions like, "You fxxing moron, get back on your meds!". 

I was thinking today. . . just my opinion, but I was thinking what a disappointment the internet has become. When it was new, there was a sense of excitement, the unprecedented possibility to instantly access information and news, and global communications at light speed that SURELY would bring humanity together at last.

It has hardly come true, and sometimes feels like the opposite. Bland and cliched memes, almost always misspelled, represent practically the only form of benevolently-expressed opinion/sentiment. Read the comments section on just about any web page, and at some point, deeper down, it will devolve into snarling, mudslinging and thuggish name-calling. A lot of pages have started posting warnings to try to screen this shit out.

Let's not get into that left-out feeling, which I am sure only I experience (wink-wink, irony-irony), making me feel like an awkward thirteen-year-old girl. I tried to express some of that in a Facebook post: "friends" (meaning people they've never met who are potentially valuable business contacts) speaking to each other in a kind of impenetrable code that is designed to make others feel left out. 

What I got was two responses (as opposed to the few hundred sympathetic replies an "important" person would get), both from people who occasionally comment on my posts. One sent me a link which purported to tell me how to be more popular on Facebook so that my posts would reach more people. 

This wasn't what I was talking about. At all. I was talking about sensitivity to others, at least an attempt at inclusiveness in a very public medium, and not getting so much obvious pleasure from exclusivity. What she gave me was help for somebody who (she felt) obviously needed it, in order to step into line with the in-crowd. To change myself in order to join the popularity mill, instead of trying to change the system.

The other comment in essence said, "Well, I don't have that problem. I have lots of friends and I don't think anybody ever speaks in code. It never occurred to me to feel left out."

In other words, it's just you. Fine. Her opinion! But that doesn't answer the question: why do you think it's just me?

I'm an uneasy fit with all this social media stuff and would bail, if I didn't want to at least try to stay connected with the literary world. But high school dynamics continue unto death, I guess. My three novels failed, not because they were shitty quality but because they failed to be "popular", which means moving copies. No one talks about this, and if I try to get a discussion going about it, everyone looks away. They're embarrassed for me, somehow, and don't want to get caught up in it. It is the most entrenched, unspoken taboo in the writing field. 

But it's true! To be an author (as opposed to a writer), you have to be read. How else can it be defined? Why is that so unreasonable, so crass? To be read, you have to sell copies, but if you even say this out loud, you're seen as mercenary and an attention whore. But a concert pianist is not expected to play in an empty hall.

I guess this will be seen as a "rant", but at the same time, a blog is supposed to be a place you can express your feelings. Instead, I will go and do something else, entertain myself, have some fun - which I do, and which is the main purpose of keeping this blog going. After all, no one can steal my creativity, which I believe is intact in spite of everything.  I very seldom look at views, because if I get too much into numbers, it will be over. But my days of writing serious novels or even short stories are over. I have retired from the impossible horse race in which I always seem to bring up the rear.

The day everything changed

(From Snopes) In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and New York’s World Trade Center, all sorts of visual media (e.g., films, television programs, print advertisements) were hurriedly scrubbed of depictions of the now-obliterated World Trade Center towers, or of any other images that included (or even suggested) airplanes in close proximity to skyscraper-like buildings. (A prime example of this phenomenon was a 2002 Starbucks advertisement which the company withdrew due to controversy that its imagery of a dragonfly’s buzzing about two large Tazo Citrus drinks, under the slogan “Collapse Into Cool,” was too reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks.) 

As well, visual media were scoured for images antedating the 9/11 attacks which depicted airplanes, explosions, or fires in conjunction with the World Trade Center towers, with the results being described as everything from frighteningly accurate prophecies to merely interesting coincidences (as exemplified in the pre-9/11 designs of a couple of album covers).

Among the latter category of images, perhaps no commercial image was more eerie than the one displayed above, purportedly a French-language print advertisement for Pakistan International Airlines promoting flights between Paris and New York. The ad’s stark black-and-white imagery depicting the large shadow of an approaching airliner spread across the two World Trade Center towers is so suggestive of the terrible events of 11 September that many viewers have assumed it to be a post-9/11 fabrication (especially given the connection that Pakistan was identified as the suspected hiding place of Osama bin Laden).

In fact, PIA had been promoting its New York/Paris and New York/London routes in print media at least as far back as 1972 (as shown in a New York magazine advertisement from that year), and the graphic displayed above is indeed a PIA advertisement which has been verified as appearing in (among other publications) the French periodicals L’Expansion and the 19 March 1979 issue of the Le Point.

BLOGSERVATIONS. Ahhh! Ahk. Oh. This made me feel a bit faint. It was eerie in the extreme, especially when I found out it was real. Just a coincidence, of course - an image that wouldn't mean anything in 1979 except jetsetting and the glamour of international travel. Or - ? That shadowy figure still scares the hell out of me. 

Everyone has their own 9-11 nightmare, and mine is a recurrent vision of what it would be like on one of those planes just before it hit. How much would people know? How much would they see? Berry Berenson, wife of Anthony Perkins, was on one of them. Her last moments must have been terror and confusion. Audio exists of the plane that was wrested away from the terrorists, the one that was supposed to crash into the White House. One can hear them praising Allah in the background as doom approaches. How doomed is the human race, how self-hating, how idiotic! And now a whole culture has grown up to deny the whole thing. Yes, and the walrus was Paul. Or something.

Screech! Screech! Steller's jay in the cedars

Burn your bridges!

Married Love: a consumer's guide

I've written about this amazing little book before, but this time I want to can the smart remarks and just provide a word-for-word transcript. It's a surprise in many ways. These kinds of books don't exist any more, as far as I know, for it's assumed couples will already have adequate sexual experience before marriage not to need one. It's one of the great deceptions of our time. As with most of the crucial skills of life (parenthood, anyone?), we receive no instruction whatsoever about sexual congress and how to make it enjoyable for our partner. The assumption is that when the time comes, we'll know.

Funnily enough, no such thing was assumed "back when". Men were expected to be considerate about their wives and their feelings. They were urged to be patient. I wonder where that one went. My girl friends have long whispered to me that most men are plain lousy at this. They honestly believe the goal of sex is to get themselves off as quickly as possible, no doubt conditioned by porn and a lot of fast and mechanical whacking off. I'm not against whacking off, but it seems to me ironic that way back then, when there were so many inhibitions about the whole thing, people were far more concerned about such matters as pleasure and satisfaction on both sides.

Now there's no such guide. I'm not saying every man thinks only about his own pleasure, but it has to be a great majority. And the belief that women don't need sex and shouldn't even think about it still hangs around. It's something you do for guys, to keep them around.

I read a lot more open and honest magazine articles about female sexuality back in the '80s and '90s. Now, mysteriously, women's sexual needs have disappeared again, while "sex" has devolved into a monstrous tits-and-ass show that bears no relation to reality.

Will Their Dream Come True, or will Sex Ignorance Mar their Happiness

Thousands of marriages end in misery and divorce because so many married people are ignorant of the Art of Love. Is your marriage on the brink of ruin? Do you search for the joy of a perfect union? Now YOU can change despair into heavenly happiness - if you know the secrets of the intimate physical contacts of marriage.

Dr. Marie Stopes, in the preface to her world-famous book, said, "In my own marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex ignorance that I felt that knowledge gained at such a price should be placed at the service of humanity." This volume, "Married Love", courageously fulfills this noble purpose.

Partial Contents

The practice of restraint to please the wife.
Surest way to prepare wife for union.
The marital rights of the husband.
What the wife must do to bring her husband's physical desires
in harmony with her own.
Regulation of physical marital relations.
Sleeplessness from unsatisfied desires.
Nervousness due to unsatisfied desires.
Charts showing periodicity of natural desire in women.
The essential factors for the act of union.
Greatest physical delights in marital union.
How some women drive their husbands to prostitutes.
Natural desire for physical union.
Joys of the honeymoon.
Ignorance of the bride and unwise actions of the groom.
The man who has relations with prostitutes before marriage.
Causes for unhappiness in marriage.
Frequency of marital relations.
Stimulation of physical desires.
The problem of the strong-sexed husband and the
weak-sexed wife.
Positions.
Physical relations during pregnancy.
Problems of childless unions.

With remarkable frankness, and in simple, understandable language, Dr. Stopes explains the intimate and important details of wedded life. Point by point, and just as plainly as she would tell you in private confidence, Dr. Stopes takes up each of the many troublesome factors in marriage. She makes clear just what is to be done to insure contentment and happiness. She writes directly, forcefully, concretely, explaining step by step every procedure in proper sex relations.

1,000,000 COPIES SOLD

I can't read the rest of it, but it refers to a federal judge lifting the "ban"on this book - assuming there was one. We laugh at those times and wonder how people could be so prudish, but how much better is it now? I mean, I don't go around asking everyone, but I happen to know a number of women who find sex distasteful - not because SEX is distasteful, but because their partners simply don't care enough to make it any good for them. Women's desires may be taboo, but porn is bigger than ever and can be googled up in less than two seconds. I believe a lot of men - even the majority - are beginning to prefer it, because there's none of this messy intimacy and skill and other things that might hamper the ultimate goal of getting themselves off.