I Don't Love Lucy

 

I had some fun tonight.  I don't know how many of you saw the article online which was petitioning the town Lucille Ball grew up in to have a "likeness" of her removed.  It is a bronze sculpture of the beloved "I Love Lucy" star who seems to be holding what looks to be a fifth of gin and a spoon to ladle it down with.  While that line is [sort of] from "My Fair Lady"...the statue certainly is not a fair lady by any means.

I realize it probably is Lucy from one of her iconic episodes in which she shows up at Ricky's show after she schemes her way into the good graces of the station manager in order to do a live, on-air commercial for "Vitameatavegamin" - a tonic which will "pep you up" - but is mostly alcohol.  It's quite a riotous display of her comedic tongue-twisting ability.  Ability is something which this sculptor, Dave Poulin, seems highly lacking.

Please don't get me wrong...I can't even draw a proper stick figure and all my "saw-blade" Christmas trees I'd been forced to make out of construction paper, paste, and glitter each year in grade school for my parents could never look the same on both sides.  I am not, and never will be...artistic.  But...I can tell crap when I see it.  I saw a lot of it just a few minutes ago.

Out of sheer curiosity, I looked up this guy...as the article did say the man responsible for starting the brouhaha over the statue, stated he "didn't want to disparage the artist's entire body of work, saying Poulin has other works that are quite good, but this one needs to go."  So, I Google'd.  I figured there must be some mistake...like maybe the bronze mold blew a gasket or something...or, more than likely, someone made up an April Fool's Day thing and it took a couple days to get going.

It wasn't.

Click after click on his "Dave Poulin Sculptor" website -- I was more mortified than the last.  I decided I would start naming each one - and while I was copy/pasting each photo to my Facebook account, I titled each one.  One of my friends asked me to make a blog with all of them in one fell swoop, and I am duly obliging.  I honestly was laughing at some of my titles...which is rare for me to do.  I don't sit around maniacally laughing at my own stuff as some people probably think I do.  I do it rarely.  I laughed a few times with these...and, with any luck, you will, too.  (I hope Mr. Poulin has a sense of humour.)

I'm just going to copy/paste my stuff over from my Facebook page without cleaning it up or editing it...so you can see the spontaneity.  I was churning thee out like a madman...or madwoman, as the case may be.  (Please click on each image to view it larger and in all its glory...cough, cough.)

I call this one "Boo!" Scary monster child frightens woman to death. This is done by the same guy who did that horrid Lucille Ball sculpture that her town is trying to get removed.

 I call this one "Attack of the Zombie Soldier"...

I call this one "Zombie Guy":

I call this one..."Help! My head's on backwards!"

 I call this one..."Stretch Armstrong" (you have to be old like me to remember the toy)...

 The side of the one above - which I now call "Terror in Central Park"...

 I call this one..."Shoulda drowned"...

I call this one "Your Number's Up". Hopefully this "artist's" number is up, too. Seriously - these are horrible.

  
ROFL - I thought that was her foot without a shoe for a minute there. Whew! I think it's just leaves. So I shall call this one, "In the book it says...206 bones in the human body and the sculptor didn't give me one of them"...

Geez - they keep on coming - I swear to God - they don't end. This guy must not sleep!

This one I call "Don't Ask, Don't Tell Where the Hell You Saw It...'Cause I Ain't Going There To See It!"

(My friend said this - I swear I was having a dialogue with another human being - I just don't talk to myself randomly on Facebook -- you know, not that much.  She said:  Well if you make a post please tag me in it! I've got to drag myself to bed but I will share as soon as I get up lol)

Calling this one: "Thank God I don't See the Front of This"...

I call this one..."Is that a goat-dog hybrid? Seriously...WTF IS that he's dragging?"

I call this one, "Shit...I looked at the Solar Eclipse!"

This one? "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Horror Park -- A Tale Too Frightening for Mark Twain to Ever Write"...

This one I call..."Dude...Get Back...I Think I Just Shit a Turtle!"...

 This one...I call..."Whoa...a Magic Bong!"

(I showed this to my son after this exchange and he said I labeled too many as "zombies" -- but I'm thinking this guy could sell a lot of  these things in a niche market looking for zombie statuary.  Seriously...people buy a lot of zombie stuff.)

This one is..."Zombie With Shovel"...

This one looks quite good...I call it "Got Someone Else To Sculpt It For Me"...

Last one. I call this one: "Village of the Damned" (If you saw the film you will understand.)...

Well, there you have it.  That was my "Facebook Entertainment" for tonite.

Sorry about the formatting...for some odd reason it kept disappearing things when I reformatted and went back to centering and spacing issues and all sorts of things.  Due to the high number of photos I copied/pasted and all the Facebook stuff I copy/pasted, I'm not going to risk it.  I'll try to clean it up in a new blog...but I'll have to go into the source HTML code and sometimes that's just really a pain.  I might just center everything and call it a day.  (I had wine and haven't slept yet - so, technically this is still my nite.)


Here's a link to the original story:  I Love Lucy Statue

Day 10: Zombies

"Zombies" is the prompt today, Day 10 of "30 Minus 2 Days of Writing" at "We Work for Cheese" -- do check out some of the other writers who are participating.  But first...read (and listen to) this:

I'm watching the Olympics...so, I'm going to spare you all with a made up zombie story.  Please know that had I done one, it would have been awesome.  

I'll just post a song up by Philadelphia band, "The Hooters".  Yes, their name pre-dates the restaurant chain "Hooters" - in case you were thinking they called their band that just to get more notoriety.  They didn't.  They did, however, probably name it after a euphemism for "boobies" -- because who doesn't like boobies?   But I don't know this for certain and I'm not gonna Google.

 

Below is their song, "All You Zombies" which I remember from time to time (not to be confused with "Time After Time" - see below) and it always brings back happy memories of my youth. They were a fantastic group and I loved them.  Philadelphia radio station, WMMR, also loved them, and would play their stuff all the time back in the '80s (along with Peter Gabriel, whom I love the best, who disc jokey, Pierre Robert, nicknamed "The Patron Saint of Rock & Roll").  Yeah, I loved this radio station growing up. 

"The Hooters" were even the opening act in Philadelphia for the US portion of the "Live Aid" concert...which was a rather big event in 1985...and I still have my T-shirt to prove it (yes, I just dug through all my stuff and threw it on for this photo, again sans make-up).  This, by the way, is as close to a "hooters" shot as I'll ever have on the Internet (I hope).

 

But why "The Hooters" never got more famous than they did is beyond me.  Group member Rob Hyman also won a Grammy for co-writing "Time After Time" with Cyndi Lauper, whose version of that song is probably best remembered.

Here they are singing "All You Zombies".  I hope you enjoy it...and let me know if you ever heard of them (as I'm curious); they had quite a few songs which MTV would play "back in the day".

 

Anyway...back to watching the Olympics for me...until my Ambien kicks in and then I really turn into a zombie. 

 

The Dead Sea Monkeys

(That fuzzy brownish-green stuff growing on the bottom and the green floating stuff growing on top...um...aren't stalagmites and stalactites; and I highly doubt either is supposed to be there.)

Well, it was destined to happen, but considering I got them last April, it probably wasn't the shortest longevity record ever set, but nonetheless, it was pretty devastating...

...my last Sea Monkey died the other day.

Now, I don't know if you kept up with my Sea Monkey blogs I did a few months back - if you didn't, you could always go here...then here...and finally here if you're interested.

I also don't know exactly what went wrong, but I'm willing to take a few half-educated guesses, and, as usual, I'm willing to share them with you.

First off, let me tell everyone that I didn't buy any of the gimmicky things they had for sale, like water purifiers, pumps and "executive-sized desk aquariums", so perhaps, by my frugalness, they were doomed from the get-go.

I did do some things, however, which might have, oh, speeded up their demise a tad slower than just chucking them down the toilet.

First off, the Sea Monkey people don't give you any instructions on how to scoop out the "dead Sea Monkey sludge" from off the bottom of the Sea Monkey container. Now, granted, it might have been addressed in the "Deluxe Sea Monkey Booklet" I could have paid extra for, but I didn't because I thought I'd be able to accomplish this menial task without spending $3.99 and another $3.00 for postage (or whatever it cost...I'm too distraught to actually check).

Sad to say, I couldn't.

I figured the easiest way might be to pour off the alive Monkeys into another container, but since the Sea Monkey container itself doesn't have the pointed/angled pouring spout like a Pyrex measuring cup...I probably spilled about 329 Sea Monkeys all over my counter before I figured out it wasn't going to work. They just dribbled out over the side of their home and, I, filled with horror at the thought of them being maimed in some way if I tried to slide them off the countertop and back into their happy habitat, decided "death by paper towel" would be much more humane.

It was, however, a noble try.

A less nobler try was the "suck them up with a straw" procedure.

Let me elaborate a little.

It seemed like, in theory, this would work. You get a straw, insert it down to the bottom of the container...which, by the way, has the plastic terrain equivalent of the Mariana Trench, i.e., it's not smooth and suck-uppable...and then put your finger on the top of the straw, and then draw their remains out, siphon-style.

Yeah, right. Again, this works ONLY in theory.

In reality, what happens is that you only manage to stir up the debris on the bottom and each time you try to pull the straw up out of the water, most of the water just manages to dribble back out of the straw. Then you are left with the agonizing decision of what to do with the mucky "yuk" you just removed and put into that Pyrex measuring cup (hey, give me some points for thinking ahead here). Do you then wait two hours for the sediment to settle to ascertain which specks are alive and which are dead...or do you just toss it down your sink...or do you do the moral thing and just pour it all back into the original container?

Yep...my morals won out and I ended up pouring it all back into the original container, thereby stirring up more dead bodies which probably really freaked out all the live Monkeys. In fact, this agitation action of the water alone probably killed another 128 of them.

But I tried. Oh, and remember the forethought of the Pyrex cup, too.

The last way to do it proved as futile as the other two...

...I found out that you cannot logically scoop out enough water, one tablespoon at a time, to catch all the live ones...what you can do is scoop out about 1/8th of a cup of Sea Monkey-laden water before you say "Screw this, it's going to take an eternity". I then tried my utmost best to at least separate the old water from the Sea Monkeys and, in that process, lost at least another 72 of them doing this.

At that point I'd pretty much determined it was best to just give up thinking of new and innovative ways to kill my Monkeys by trying to save them. I would just let nature take its course.

Well, at least tell us, Mariann, what exactly happens to Sea Monkey water that's been virtually left to evaporate over the course of four months?

The answer to that is: It gets very cloudy and the bottom of the aquarium, which has now become a Sea Monkey burial ground, starts to resemble some primordial Chia Pet.

Now, I'm not terrible, I was adding more water to keep it at the optimum Sea Monkey level and all...but after a while, it just seemed like all I was doing was probably creating a super-concentrated inevitable death lab of sorts, where, had I managed to keep them alive for a month or two more, might have had the chance to see some Frankensteinian/Re-animator thing happening.

As it just so happened, it didn't happen, and the last Monkey is now among the "rotting dead".

I'm not getting any ideas they will start hatching out of eggs again...but just in case there ARE such things as Sea Monkey Zombies...I think I'll let the water sit around for another month...or two.


You know...just in case.