One Of My Favorites

Two favorites, actually - the video and Mr. Whittle:



I rewatch this to calm down when the news of the day makes me want to bite someone.

Oh, and check this comparison of Palin's pre-order book sales vs. those of David Frum (one of those GOP "elitists" that Whittle speaks of) at Doug Ross:

Memo to David Frum, re: Sarah Palin

Heh. Keep going rogue, Sarah.

I Stole This

from my sister's blog (also from James Thurber). A real fave of my mom's & mine when I was a kid. Pretty much the story of my life, as well.

*sigh* Jeez, I miss my mom and dad.


LATER:

I'll just throw this in here, as no one will ever see it in the comments (not that vast multitudes will see it here):

The Little Girl and the Wolf

by James Thurber

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.


(Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.)

(LOLkitty courtesy of Cheezburger)

Gian Carlo

For those like me who have and love Siamese cats (or fans of cats in general), here is a lovely story.

From the website:

"Gian Carlo" was originally published by Valkyrie Press in 1975. A historian tells the fictional story of a Siamese cat whom he named Gian Carlo after a certain saintly Italian youth, long since deceased. Gian Carlo the cat was a creature with a bigger-than-life personality, flamboyant and spectacular, elite and swash-buckling in every way. His friendship with his master's daughter and with the Machiavellian crow, Prince Rupert, give rise to some of the most moving episodes in all cat literature.

Enigmatically he appeared to the world in a small hill-town in Italy and--just as enigmatically--he disappeared into the deserts of New Mexico. Perhaps indeed he is still alive. Certainly he was deified by the Indians of Taos.

Written with superb technique and craftsmanship, this is a book no reader could possibly put down. The book was illustrated by one of our fine American artists, Robert Hodgell.

The book has been out of print for some time, but is reproduced (with illustrations) on the website.

Discovered via The Conservative Cat - Thanks, Ferdy!

Goody, Goody!

I am not a vindictive person. Sometimes I even try to whip up a good retaliatory fever against someone who richly deserves it, but it's just not in me. I'd rather just hope the fates catch up with them and forget the whole thing. Vengeance is Divine, not mine.

Still, I just love this song. Of course, it's too jaunty to be very wrathful, too cute to be truly spiteful.

GOODY GOODY

Johnny Mercer and Matt Malneck
1935

You told me that there wasn't a lesson in lovin'
You hadn't learned - Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?

You told me that you keep playing with fire
Without getting burned - Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?

So you met someone who set you back on your heels -
Goody, goody!
So you met someone and now you know how it feels -
Goody, goody!
So you gave him your heart too, just as I gave mine to you,
And he broke it in little pieces, now how do you do?

So you lie awake just singin' the blues all night -
Goody, goody!
So you think that love's a barrel of dynamite.
Hooray and hallelujah, you had it coming to ya.
Goody, goody for him - Goody, goody for me -
And I hope you're satisfied, you rascal you!

Sound files:

Benny Goodman, Helen Ward vocal (1936)

Ella Fitzgerald (date unknown)

Video:

A fifteen-year-old Frankie Lymon, sans Teenagers, in a live TV performance in 1957. He muffs the lyrics toward the end, but his great smile and stylish delivery carry him through.

The Secret Life Of James Thurber

This was the first book I ever read. It was at the beginning of first grade, and I brought it to school with me because I was crazy about it. My teacher saw it and asked me about, and then I couldn't understand why she kept saying to all the other teachers, "Did you see this? She says she's read it." And they all looked at me ... strangely. Rather like some of the odd looks on the characters in James Thurber's drawings.

Both of my parents loved it, too, and were constantly quoting bits to each other, so I got lots of exposure to it in varied context. I can't say I understood every aspect of it at that tender age, but I was fascinated by his drawings - the fierce women, the shy and frazzled men, the many dogs, strange rabbits, unicorns and "wire-haired fox terrier lawn dogs" that populated the Thurber world; simple drawings with enigmatic titles.

The stories were even more offbeat; some memoir of Thurber's life, some pure fantasy. The man who saw "The Unicorn In The Garden. "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty." "If Grant Had Been Drinking At Appomattox."

Here's an excerpt from "The Car We Had To Push":

But to get back to the automobile. One of my happiest memories of it was when, in its eighth year, my brother Roy got together a great many articles from the kitchen, placed them in a square of canvas, and swung this under the car with a string attached to it so that, at a twitch, the canvas would give way and the steel and tin things would clatter to the street. This was a scheme of Roy's to frighten father, who had always expected the car might explode. It worked perfectly. That was twenty-five years ago, but it is one of the few things in my life I would like to live over again if I could. I don't suppose that I can, now. Roy twitched the string in the middle of a lovely afternoon, on Bryden Road near Eighteenth Street. Father had closed his eyes and, with his hat off, was enjoying a cool breeze. The clatter on the asphalt was tremendously effective: knives, forks, can-openers, pie pans, pot lids, biscuit-cutters, ladles, egg-beaters fell, beautifully together, in a lingering, clamant crash. "Stop the car!" shouted father. "I can't." Roy said. "The engine fell out." "God Almighty!" said father, who knew what that meant, or knew what it sounded as if it might mean.

It ended unhappily, of course, because we finally had to drive back and pick up the stuff and even father knew the difference between the works of an automobile and the equipment of a pantry. My mother wouldn't have known, however, nor her mother. My mother, for instance, thought - or, rather, knew - that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. "Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!" she would say to us when we started off. Gasoline, oil and water were much the same to her, a fact that made her life both confusing and perilous. Her greatest dread, however, was the Victrola - we had a very early one, back in the "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" days. She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity. She could only suppose that it was propelled by some newfangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison's dangerous experiments. The telephone she was comparatively at peace with, except, of course, during storms, when for some reason or other she always took the receiver off the hook and let it hang. She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets of the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.

We can only imagine with what horror the Thurber grand-mère would have viewed today's wired and wireless world.

His stories were always so vivid to me, even as a kid. I reread them frequently, always with the same delight I had that first time. And I can still hear my parents quoting him.

Links:

Brief Thurber bio
Thurber's World (And Welcome To It)!
Thurber House
Thurber Stories, Links & Quotations
"The Dog That Bit People" (complete story)