A Darksome, Moonless Night

It’s a darksome, moonless night - the kind of dark that obscures the stars and swallows up light.  A fitful wind bestirs the dry leaves and they rustle and whisper as they flit across the lawn until ensnared by the clutching grasp of a hawthorn hedge.  A tall and foreboding house stands next to a copse of walnut trees.  Their barren limbs cower and sway, scratching with sylvan talons against the house’s cladding. 

You pull your cloak tighter around your shoulders as you peer at the dark-windowed house.  Its blackness is outlined against the dark sky - shadow on shadow.  The lane is long with naught to light the way but a jack-o-lantern who glows with a ghoulish grin from his perch atop a wooden stool set next to the front door.

You slowly make your way toward the door, your footsteps crunching on the gravel drive.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Closer to the front door; closer to the ghoulish grin.  Closer and closer.  A wicked wind lifts your hair and reaches it's icy fingers down the back of your neck.  Suddenly, you hear a spine-chilling scream!  Then a long and mournful moan!  A wolf howls with anguished longing!            

You stop dead in your tracks, frozen with fear.  Should you go on?  Has your bravery failed you?  You take one hesitant step towards the door, testing your courage.  Then another.  And yet another.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Crunch.

Soon you’re at the wooden porch steps.   Almost there.  You look up at the jack-o-lantern glowing from the triangular slashes in his orange flesh, daring you on with his menacing grin.  You climb the wooded steps and walk to the door.  Raising your trembling hand, you give three timid knocks.  It is enough.  A light comes on inside the house.  You hear slow heavy footsteps approaching.  With a sigh and a creak the door swings open.  Filled with fear, you want to flee.  You want to run back down the laneway and keep running and running until you’ve run all the way home.  But you hold your ground. You look up, hold out your hand, and with newly found courage exclaim,

“Trick or Treat!”  

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Grizelda the Ghastly Gourmet

Yes, my pretties!  The parade of Halloween paraphernalia persists (as well as more artfully authored alliterations)!   Today, I want to share with you a clip from an old Canadian children's show that has become a cult classic - The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.  I loved loved loved this show when I was a child - which maybe explains quite a lot.  Anyway...I want to share with you a clip of my favourite character, Grizelda the Ghastly Gourmet.   Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/AcvofD-4rto

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The Witches Spell

Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I

By William Shakespeare

A dark cave.  In the middle, a caldron boiling.  Thunder.  Enter the three witches.

1 Witch:  Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.

2 Witch:  Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin’d.

3 Witch:  Harpier cries:-‘tis time!  ‘Tis time!

1 Witch:  Round about the caldron go;

                In the poison’d entrails throw.-

                Toad, that under cold stone,

                Days and nights has thirty-one;

                Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

                Boil thou first I’ the charmed pot!

All:         Double, double toil and trouble;

                Fire burn and caldron bubble.

2 Witch:   Fillet of a fenny snake,

                In the caldron boil and bake;

                Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

                Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

                Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,

                Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,-

                For a charm of powerful trouble,

                Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

All:         Double, double toil and trouble;

                Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

3 Witch:   Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;

                Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf

                Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;

                Root of hemlock digg’d I the dark;

                Liver of blaspheming Jew;

                Gall of goat, and slips of yew

                Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse;

                Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;

                Finger of birth-strangled babe

                Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,-

                Make the gruel thick and slab:

                Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

                For the ingredients of our caldron.

All:         Double, double toil and trouble;

                Fire burn and caldron bubble.

2 Witch:   Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

                Then the charm is firm and good.

Ghosts At Large

When a friend asked, "You got any plans for Halloween?" we were instantly bewitched.

"A Halloween party?!  We'd love to come!"

Dan and I haven't been to a Halloween party in ages.  And I love Halloween.  I mean...I really love Halloween.  I love the colours - pumpkin orange with an inky black sky.  I love it's smell of autumn leaves, and apple cider, and Tootsie Rolls.  I love the witches, the vampires, the zombies and the ghosts.  And I especially love greeting the children at the door as they come trick or treating.  You know the neighbourhood crazy lady who always dresses up in a costume to hand out candy and whose breath smells suspiciously like boozy apple cider?  That would be me.

So when we got an invitation to a Halloween party, I quickly went out and found the most deliciously creepy costumes.  I purchased these olden-day outfits, all white and raggedy and bought make-up to make our faces look dead and ghastly.

Is this not cool, or what?!

Something like this - only spookier!  

source:  https://www.798makeupandhair.com

But our friends had to cancel.  There will be no party.  Talk about being all dressed up with no place to go!     So, if you know of any place that could use a little haunting, please let me know.

SNL Skit - Tell Him with Kristen Wiig

I used to spend my Saturday nights with Jane (you ignorant slut) Curtin and Dan (you pompous ass) Aykroyd, along with the hilarious Gilda Radner, John Belushi and the rest of the original cast of Saturday Night Live.  All in all, it wasn't  bad company for a 14-year-old babysitter.

I've been a fan of SNL's ever since, and although nothing can hold a candle to the early days and original cast, every now and then the show still comes up with a real spark of genius.  Here's a little gem from last weekend that I want to share with you.  Enjoy!

   

The Outdated Gadget Quiz Answers (and Leisure Suit Larry)

I'm sure you have all been sitting on pins and needles, anxiously awaiting today's post.  So without further ado, here are the answers to The Outdated Gadget Quiz!

Photo #1 - An adding machine.  Accountants would get a workout pulling the lever while totalling up amounts. 

Photo #2 - Typewriter ribbon.  This one is fancy smancy with both black AND red ink!

Photo #3 - A wringer washer.  Wet, soggy clothes were fed into one side of the wringer, and something resembling Wile E. Coyote after an encounter with a steam roller came out the other side.

Photo #4 - A computer punch card.  Judging by your comments on the quiz, many of you have very fond memories of these things.

Photo #5 - Kudos to my clever cousin, Bradi  who guessed this one correctly.  It is indeed a vacuum tube or as it's formally called - a pneumatic transport system capsule.  Compressed air or vacuums caused the capsule to shoot along tubes within a building, transporting money or mail.  Cool, huh?

  

Photo #6 - Popular with Cold War Era spies and librarians, these microfiche cards hold teeny tiny photographs of information.  The cards are placed in a projector which enlarges the data so it can be read.  

Photo #7 - Everyone know this one, right?  But does anyone know what it is called?  I'll call it a 45 record centre hole thingy (and yes, that's how we Canadians spell center).

Photo #8 - A floppy disk.  My very first computer game was on these things - Leisure Suit Larry.  The goal of the game was to get Larry laid.  I spent hours at it!

Photo #9 - A phone cord - great fun for fidgeters (that really should be a word!)

Photo #10 -  a hair dryer.  In decades past when everyone seemed to have more time, woman would relax under these things with a magazine.  The down side was you couldn't hear the beauty shop gossip.

Photo #11 - A credit card imprint machine.  Cha Ching!

And now that I've come to the end of my quiz and we're all feeling older than dirt, let's all have a laugh with Leisure Suit Larry!

The Outdated Gadget Quiz

Last weekend, as our family gathered together for our Thanksgiving Day feast, my brother-in-law introduced the topic of Changing Technologies with this joke - 

(and they didn't) which led me regale the younger generations with a Back-In-My-Day speech as we all know nothing delights the younger generation more than a Back-In-My-Day speech.  

With mouths agape and eyes wide with amazement (or maybe it was with yawning mouths and glazed eyes - I'm not really sure) they listened to my pitiable story of how I would actually record my favourite songs off a portable radio onto a separate cassette tape recorder by placing a tiny plastic microphone in front of the speaker!  Can you imagine!   I went on to explain how I would sit with my finger on the Stop button, poised and ready as I anxiously waited for the exact moment to press it down - that precise nanosecond between one song ending and the next song starting - only to have my mother burst into my room to announce that dinner was ready.  The younger generation were surely astounded, astonished, and aghast at the barbaric technology I was forced to endure.  Surely.

Which brings me in my typical round-about way to the subject of today's post - a quiz about outdated gadgets.  I call it the Name the Outdated Gadget quiz.  Now, those of us of a certain age are going to find this easy, so to the younger generation I'd like to offer this bit of advice - "Suck it up!"

Are you ready?   Let's begin.

      

Photo #1

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Photo #11

Canadian Thanksgiving and a Recipe for Apple Crisp

This weekend is the Canadian Thanksgiving.   Yes, you read that right - Canada does indeed have a Thanksgiving  Day and it is exactly like the American holiday - minus the Pilgrims.  (FYI - Canada was a French colony back in the early days and although we did have Jesuit Priests, we did not have zealous Puritans.)  In fact, the early French settlers and fur traders with their native wives ( for some reason, French women weren't flocking to live in the mosquito-plagued wilderness of New France) celebrated a yearly harvest feast in the European tradition decades before the pilgrims arrived in Plymouth.

For centuries, the celebration has been held around the end of October or early November depending on the harvest.  In 1879 it was declared a National Holiday, and in 1957 it was pinned down to it's current date of the second Monday in October which means, in practical terms - bales of straw, scarecrows and pumpkins are permitted for the first two weeks of October, then you can add the ghosts, witches and all other spooky Halloween decorations for the last two weeks.  Then it's straight into Christmas decorations, but that's a whole other post.

So... (getting back to the subject at hand) except for the buckled shoes and funny hats, Canada's Thanksgiving is the same as the American holiday and I'm sure my American friends will agree that Thanksgiving has a very defined menu that has to be strictly adhered to lest you cause an uprising amongst the clan.  This is the Canadian menu:  a roasted turkey stuffed with a bread dressing and served with a cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, fall crops such as squash/sweet potatoes/apples in some form or other, and of course, pumpkin pie.  There MUST be pumpkin pie.

Now, because I like you all very much, I am going to share with you my family's absolute requirement for each Thanksgiving dinner, a cherished family recipe for The Very Best Apple Crisp ever.

4 cups/1000 ml sliced apples
1 cup/250 ml white sugar
1 cup/250 ml water
3/4 cup/175 ml all-purpose flour
1/2 cup/124 ml butter
1 teaspoon cinnamon

1.  Place apples in a greased 8"x8"/2 litre baking dish and sprinkle them with cinnamon and pour the water over top.
2.  In a bowl, cream together sugar and butter.  Stir in flour.  Sprinkle over apples.
3.  Bake for 30 - 40 minutes at 350 Fahrenheit or 180 Celsius.
4.  Serve hot with vanilla ice cream.



So tell me, is the Canadian menu much different from the American menu?  Are there any Thanksgiving dishes that are essential for your dinner?
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