A Belgian draft horse named “Radar” – here seen towering over Thumbelina, the world’s smallest horse – is a 2400 lb Texan, a “gentle giant” who consumes 18 pounds of grain and 20 gallons of water a day. He is listed at 19.3 hands, so “Noddy” is still taller.
“Noddy” is a spiffy, purebred shire gelding who stands at an alarming 20.2 hands. He lives in Australia.
The groundbreaking “Huckleberry Hound Show” (the show that put Hanna Barbera on the map, the first half-hour animated show to succeed in the TV market and the first cartoon to ever receive an Emmy), was my favorite show when I was 5 or 6. God I loved that cordial, slow strolling blue dog in the straw hat, who crooned “Oh my darlin’ Clementine” in his syrupy, Southern drawl.
One of three segments on “The Huckleberry Hound Show” was “Pixie and Dixie and Jinks”, featuring a pair of scantily clad, adorably beaming mice. The mice struggled to outmaneuver their nemesis, Mr. Jinks – or “Jinksy”- a lovable, dunder-headed cat with a nebbish/beatnik vibe and an ungrammatical lament “I hate those meeces to pieces!” The local kids’ programming in Philly was a weird and depressing lineup of weirdos and divorced dads; a passive aggressive Lutheran minister named Captain Noah; Gene London’s seedy “Cartoon Corners”; a weirdly boyish yet overtly sexual “Pixanne”; Wee Willy Webber’s Colorful Cartoon Club” (who had excellent taste, introducing a generation to “Astro Boy”, “Speed Racer”, “Kimba The White Lion”, and the seminal “Tobor the 8th Man”); and an abjectly horrifying bit of kid’s fare called “Lorenzo the Clown”  – except that he wasn’t a clown at all, he was a “hobo”, a bum – in tattered clothes and slouch hat and beard stubble. The TV homeless guy had a cartoon show too, “Lorenzo’s Cartoon Festival”. The Looney Tunes confused me with the over-arching violence and World War II references.”Huckleberry Hound” was all new, cute and slanty and modern and even though the animation was unsophisticated, on the 1970’s-standard-issue, scratchy black and white basement Zenith, with rabbit ears and a 10 inch screen slammed into an 80 inch walnut cabinet, who the hell cared.
The designs were adorable, the stories were clever, the voices pure genius. Sure on paper it was your standard-brand, warring cat and mouse (or meeces) in a domestic setting fare, a low budget “Tom and Jerry” without the bells-and-whistles animation and with a low-violence mandate, but “Pixie and Dixie” was really funny. Tom was sinister and sadistic and Jerry was such an douche he was infuriating. The entertainment from “Tom and Jerry” didn’t need to derive from the personality of the characters because all the entertainment burst forth in the effulgent cacophony of the animation. When there was no budget for full animation and the show couldn’t rely on lots of action, it needed great characters.
I really love Jinks because he is a complete original – a hubristic idiot, spewing moronic malapropisms in a quasi beatnik delivery. He is like the idiot hipsters I see at my coffee shop every (workday) morning, mispronouncing “Baudrillard” and – ironically  -“espresso”. The voice behind Jinks is a psychotically prolific actor named Daws Butler who also voices Dixie Mouse and Huckleberry Hound (and, among others: Reddy from “Ruff and Reddy”, Quickdraw McGraw (and Baba Looey and almost every other character from Quickdraw), Snagglepuss, Augie Daddy, Hokey Wolf, Yogi Bear, Chilly Willy, Wally Gator, Elroy Jetson, Hair Bear from “The Hair Bear Bunch”, Lippy the Lion, Peter Potamus, Super Snooper and Blabber Mouse, Wimpy from the “All-New Popeye Hour”, and Capn’ Crunch, you know, from the cereal).
This is reprinted from a piece I wrote for The Huffington Post in December, 2009. Link to original post
How delightful it is to learn, on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, that the Republican Party would lose serious ground in an election held today if it had to face off against an as yet unformed, generic (yet gayly dressed) “Tea Party Party.” Delightful for me, of course, not for the GOP.
This is the GOP’s chickens-home-to-roost moment, and it serves them right. For thirty years and more, the strategists and moneymen of the far right, abetted by their bought-and-paid-for sock-puppets in Congress and their partisans in the slowly emergent right-wing media establishment, have relentlessly poked the far-right bear, rousing it into a wild and angry state, and attempting to co-opt its fury for their own ends. The logical culmination of all this hard work is the Tea Party movement, whose loathing of government is so unhinged and reason-free that it repudiates large swathes of an already half-insane Republican Party (another time-bomb triumph for Dubya!). Sadly, as any zookeeper could have warned the GOP, you can only keep a bear in a riled-up mood for so long before it starts ripping limbs off you one by one. And now, say the pollsters of Rassmussen, the Bear looks set to eat the Elephant alive. And now Boner, McConnell, Kantor et al, try as they might, cannot figure out what is happening to them. The Party of No just became the Party of D’oh!
But for a long time it worked. A politician like Newt Gingrich was able to make a name for himself essentially by acting as if the United State and its Congress were Yugoslavia and he was Slobodan Milosevic (lest you think I jest, compare their shock-n-awful proto-Jim Jarmusch hair-do’s). Slobo’s methods became Newtie’s: act as divisively and as chauvinistically against one half of the citizenry as possible; exploit the rawest and tenderest of national wounds and rouse the most dangerous of its dormant pathologies, then set the political landscape on fire from here to the horizon, hoping one day soon to become ruler of the resultant smoking ash-heap. As Gingrich can tell you though, it only works for so long, especially if you’re a maladjusted crybaby hypocrite leading the charge for impeaching a president for sexual hanky-panky with an intern whilst yourself copping backseat blowjobs from your very own intern! (The greatest political assets you can possess on the right are not honesty, integrity or superpatriotism – they’re shamelessness combined with stupidity and greed, and Gingrich has always had them in spades; likewise most of the knuckle-dragging, government-drowning, Contract-on-America crowd of the 1994 GOP Congressional sweep).
100 years before the Hiltons, the Trumps and the Spellings desecrated America with their gross junk, a Chicago utility czar named Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, gave the most ridiculous dinner party ever recorded.
Billings with his star trotter, Lou Dillon
In 1901, the 40 year old President of the People’s Gas, Light and Coke Company of Chicago retired, pulling up stakes and moving his family to Manhattan to devote much of his time and fortune to promoting the sport of “matinee riding” (like harness racing), and to his own stable of champion “trotters”.
A notable eccentric, Billings made headlines for his outlandish purchases, like the electric race car – a “one of a kind single-cylinder machine capable of four transformations” – he bought off the floor of the Madison Square Garden auto show. He was a crackpot, a big spender and a lavish party host, but he was no Brandon Davis. Billings was a teetotaler, abstemious in an era when gluttony and unabashed inebriation were the norm.
C.K. Billings announced his arrival in the world of Gotham’s plutocrats by acquiring acreage on the largely undeveloped north end of Manhattan, near the newly opened and fashionable Harlem River Speedway (the turn of the century version of the hipster Highline), an exclusive two and a half mile dirt track that ran along the Harlem River between the Polo Grounds at 155th and Swindler Cove at Dyckman Street. Trotting horses, the Testarossas of their time, were the shared passion of New Yorks millionaire sportsmen and the Harlem Speedway was the creme de la creme. [click to continue…]
If you like food like I do, if you like reading about food like I do, if you like talking about food like I do, and if you like reading about wacky, idiotic, fantastic or asinine things people did with food throughout history like I do, then you will enjoy the site called “Restaurant-ing Through History” like I do.
This well curated, entertaining and cleverly composed blog includes the features “Menu Art”, “Taste of a decade: 1870s restaurants” and “Dining in Shadows” which sheds light on the fact that up until the early 20th century, going places with bright light was fashionable, as it it turned restaurants into “stages” on which to be seen and on which to ogle others. It illuminates the fact that dining by candlelight was not thought of as the least bit “romantic”, until electricity became commonplace.
Birmingham, England, November 20: This blue-eyed diva – a Colourpointed British Shorthair – is Parradazy Popstar, basking in her glory at Fancy’s Supreme Cat Show. 1,196 cats were exhibited, delighting and antagonizing some 1,196,000 cat ladies.
- Dear Mr. Andropov,
- My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.
- Sincerely,
- Samantha Smith
- [click to continue…]
