Greetings from the Palermo Catacombs
& more footage from Sicily, including some armchair goats. thinking of y’all, happy clusterflockstocking.
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Headline of the Day
Iceland’s penis museum finally gets human specimen
Named for the shores, not what flows between them.
The Great Rupert (1950) | For Cindy
In which a multi-talented squirrel aids an impoverished family of vaudevillians (headed by Jimmy Durante) by stealing cash their landlord has stashed in a wall.
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Beautiful Clothes (Make Beautiful Girls) [1942]
Featuring Harry Langdon. Directed by Josef Berne.
Furs by Louis Rifkin.
We were talking about visual merchandising. And living mannequins.
Dear Clusterflock
I asked this question to the Straight Dope, and I’m afraid they kind of misunderstood my question – can you help answer or rephrase it?
Does any single cow ever get used for both leather and food? If so, how often, and how does it usually work? They’re such different processes, and I imagine the needs are very different. I find it hard to believe that the guys who are slicing up some perfect steaks are saying “ooh, save that skin, we’re going to send it to Italy to be made into some Gucci loafers,” and that the guys getting a nice long piece of hide out of an animal for Jennifer Convertibles are saying “hey, don’t leave meat that sitting on the floor, those are going to be Omaha Steaks!” And yet, I’m inclined to believe that if there’s a dollar to be made with leftovers, someone’s working on it. Is it just that some cows are destined for burgers, and some are destined for loafers, and the leftovers of both processes just end up as glue or cat food?
You know what I mean, right? They wrote back and said “don’t worry, leather is made from the outside of the cow, steaks from the inside”. I was thinking more along the lines of the idea that cows raised for their supple skin might be treated differently from cows raised for their juicy steaks, because they may have different requirements. My wife thinks this is a ridiculous question, and of course they’re used for both, but I’m not so sure. If I was raising chickens for the purpose of laying eggs, I might want a different kind of chicken (and treat it differently) than if I was raising chickens to make lovely headdresses. What do you all think?
“Bring your monkey back to where it all began.”
An original one-of-a-kind event, the Sock Monkey Madness Festival, will return as a unique celebration of Rockford’s past by highlighting its once thriving knitting industry and boom of the stuffed sock toy made from Rockford Red Heel Socks which continues as a large part of America’s pop culture. The 9th Annual Sock Monkey Madness Festival hours are 11:00 am until 5:00 pm Saturday and Sunday [March 5-6, 2011].
OFFER: Large Stuffed Holiday Turkey/Moose
Posted to Williamson County (Illinois) Freecycle list:
Have large stuffed Christmas Moose and stuffed Thanksgiving Turkey.
Size: Large enough to sit comfortably (together) in a chair. Originally purchased at Cracker Barrel. Like new condition. Tired of storing them every year.
Must be willing to drive to Johnston City, Illinois.
What Cindy said
Having just had our groceries rung up by a weathered, late-fifties, husky-voiced strawberry blonde with heavy eyeliner:
I don’t think Miss Kitty was much of a checker.
A Kind of Wild Justice
Thanks, Daniel?
Believe This or Piss Off
The new Alabama govenor has an interesting take on representative government:
Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister….
The Doll and His Toy
The little imp has arrived. Bearing a toy lion and the ghost of a sock monkey’s smile.
Daryl & Cindy–Christmas Letter
We have been in El Paso all week, and Cindy has been sick the whole time. We meant to send out Christmas cards while there but didn’t plan for the task very well. Here’s this year’s Christmas letter:
Mary Christmas from Randy Taylor and the rest of us,
We went out last night for a Christmas tree and ended up having to shoot some people. That can put a damper on the holidays, but it’s not the end of everything if it happens in Texas. We went to buy it down by the tamale place. The boys had got into their presents early like they do and were in the backseat loading and unloading them. When the police came they were real nice and helped us get the tree into the back of the Tahoe. They felt bad that we had this happen to us in the middle of a family tradition. This fellow pushing a stolen shopping cart full of frozen turkeys he had also stole got a little too close to the car with his friends, and you know how you have to act fast with carjackers. Bobby got one of the frozen turkeys that hadn’t got anything on it, but I made him put it back. That’s not what we believe in. When we got home Paula cooked us some scrambled eggs and that venison sausage I’m having made for us now. It’s been a hard year. First the Pastor getting too handy with Paula, then the internet thing going all venereal about my complaint to the Jimmy Dean sausage factory that the sons of bitches recorded and let out all over the goddam world. Then Mama dead and cremated in January and Rusty finds a bone in the urn, sharpens it, and stabs Daddy with it. And then Bobby nor Donny either one making the football team because of grades. I almost didn’t let them go deer hunting this year, but I think it does no good to punish kids in unchristian ways. And Paula likes to catch up on praying when we’re gone anyway. I don’t know what the deal is with Vanna. She turned twelve and can dress herself now.
Anyway, I got the tree out and up and lighted and the target deer look real good out front of the house since I used spackle and brown shoe polish to cover the holes.
This is all I want to write about now. I hope everybody will think hard about how worse it could be and have a good Christmas. Okay then—bye. RT
I just love to listen to him speak
Cretan Stowaway
We recently found this little guy in the house. He is less than an inch long and very dead. It looks like some kind of Gecko, which we don’t get in England. I can only assume he travelled back from Crete with us and just starved to death, which makes me sad.
the piglet bank
Mary Jeys sent this one over to me.
Designed for anyone who has far too much money and loose change, this is the piggy bank of all piggy banks. Its a real piglet that has been taxidermied and inserted with what all piglets probably dream of as babies, a coin storage unit and a cork plug. Make your plush overpriced apartment complete with this little guy.
The piglet bank will take up to 12 months to produce from the time of order. We expect half the money up front and half when the piglet had been completed. Just so you know that we don’t actually kill the Piglets, they die of natural causes and these are the ones that we use.
Our chameleon was named Jasper,
and sometimes we found money in there with our peanuts.
I remember getting chameleon “brooches” at the State Fair of Texas when I was a kid. The chameleon had a string around its neck, with a safety pin on the other end to anchor to your clothes. Our chameleon was named Jasper, and he lived 3 years.
That’s my Dallas friend Susan Sanders Wansbrough talking. She confirmed my memory of State Fair chameleons and told about Jasper.
I recall girls arriving at school bright and early with limp chameleons pinned to their blouses. The chameleons would grow ever more limp and finally succumb around mid-afternoon. Susan said that her father had agreed to buy her a chameleon only because he assumed it would expire the next day, but “a diet of mealworms kept it going long past the usual lifetime for chameleon brooches.”
We shared more bizarre memories of childhood in Dallas.
Read more
Half in love with easeful death
Over on Facebook, I just glanced at a gallery of photos taken at the fortieth reunion of an LA friend’s Beverly Hills High School class.
One photo was tagged “Front Lawn.” I swear that when I first glanced at the tag, I read “Forest Lawn.”
Dear Clusterflock,
What is this thing?
It’s for sale at The Cure, an East Village thrift store, but nobody seems to know what it is. Suggestions include
- a samovar
- a microwave from ancient Egypt
- a very, very old fashioned water cooler
- the top half of Lady Gaga’s next outfit
- a Dalek incubator
- a charcoal grill
Other notable items from among The Cure’s offerings include Ellen and Arthur’s lovely wedding album, a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanny pack, a drag-queen-sized excellent silver gown, a cool little bookcase, and this, for Cindy.
Erica Il Cane
More from Erica Il Cane here.
Christmas is too damn close!
Talking version available for just $49.95.
For Cindy
Crappy Taxidermy. Dot com.
Updated: from Errol Morris.
Good Kid 3
Back when we took the Dallas Morning News, I sought out a daily feature called “Good Kid,” mostly to see who the kids listed as the two people they would most like to meet.
Today I was happy to discover that the series is available online. Today’s good kid’s picks:
Lady Gaga and Theodore Roosevelt
