Fred's Book Club: And What About Shrinky Dinks?

It's Hump Day! And that means it's time for our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers! It's the stress of carrying Wednesday on their backs that causes the injury, you know, and.... Oh, skip it. I'm thinking of changing the name of the feature to the U#TIG’Hd836& Writers, which will make about as much sense. 

Today we go back in time, back to our younger days, or even the days before we were born, to ask the musical question... Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?

Freelance journalist Gael Fishingbauer Cooper and PR agent Brian Bellmont created this project, and publisher Perigree turned it into a book in 2011. It's a fabulous collection of things pegged to the 1970-1990 era, especially for things that kids loved. That's an important feature, because most of us are at least a little nostalgic for the world of our childhood, and because nothing goes in and out of fashion faster than kid stuff. 

The book is a series of articles, arranged alphabetically, about the things of the past, and at the end of each there's a summation of its status in the current time (as of 2011), written as its "X-Tinction Rating." Here's one:

TIME FOR TIMER

TV was pretty lecturey in the 1970s and 1980s. Somewhere along the line, someone panicked that kids weren't eating proper snacks and decided the way to solve that was to offer nutritional advice from a yellow blob of fat with spindly legs and a ginormous hat. Thus, the birth of Timer, a disturbing but memorable PSA star whose segments were apparently dashed off by a bored but starving copywriter who had to make deadline before he could hit the drive-thru for a Big Mac.

     Timer's most memorable video has him "hankering for a hunka cheese," but any kid who needed to be shown how to place cheese between two crackers was really too dumb to be allowed to watch TV. In another, Timer takes a tour of the stomach and then apparently just gives up, encouraging kids to eat random leftovers out of the fridge. "Sunshine on a Stick" oversells the result by half, as it's just orange juice frozen in ice-cube trays. Timer also shows up in a segment demonstrating toothbrushing, which is odd when you consider that his teeth are as yellow as the rest of him.

 

X-TINCTION RATING: Gone for good.

REPLACED BY: Nothing. Television networks have since decided that kids can eat random food out of the fridge without frightening cartoon guidance. 

You get the idea. Each little profile is snappily written, with good humor, and appropriate kudos for products and other cultural phenomena that really came through.

Not everything is X-Tinct, either. Take those Shrinky Dinks:

SHRINKY DINKS

Invented in 1973, Shrinky Dinks brought into play the one appliance that Mom never really wanted you to mess with: the oven. In fact, the whole Shrinky Dink process seemed kind of like a joyous, don't-tell-the-parents experiment. Melting plastic on a hot cookie sheet without getting yelled at? Sign us up! 

     Shrinky Dinks never looked like they were going to work. You colored in the shape, be it a Smurf, Mr. T, or a rainbow-maned unicorn, threw it on a cookie sheet, and hoped for the best. Watching through the oven door, you were convinced you'd done it wrong and nothing would ever happen when suddenly it started to curl up like an old sheet of fax paper. It twisted, and then fixed itself, and the end product was tiny, bright and colorful, and thick and strong. As with Homer Simpson and his Flaming Moe drink, fire made it good.

     Few kids really knew what to do with Shrinky Dinks once they were shrunky dunk. One can only have so many zipper pulls, key chains, and napkin rings, after all. But no one ever thought about that when they were watching the plastic writhe in its little kitchen torture chamber. Sometimes the journey is indeed way more fun than the destination.

X-TINCTION RATING: Still going strong.

FUN FACT: In the 1970s, superheroes were the bestselling Shrinky Dinks theme; in the 1980s, it was the Smurfs. 

And indeed, in 2021, Shrinky Dinks are still out there, making kids ask themselves: What shall I create? And why is the oven door so grungy? Can't see nothin'!

As I noted, the book covers all sorts of cultural items, like typing classes, Bicentennial mania, Roosevelt Franklin, Jolt Cola, Halloween costumes "with unbreathable plastic masks," killer animal movies, Judy Blume books, and Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo. If you were alive and aware in the United States in the two decades covered, there's some cultural resonance for you in this book.

The authors have since moved on with their careers. They did a sequel book about the nineties, which looks like fun, but the original Web site for the project has been allowed to turn into a cobweb. I guess my looking back at this book that looks back at the past is like being nostalgic for Happy Days ("Fascination with the 1950s" is an entry in the book as well, by the way). 

And say -- before I close this entry, whatever DID happen to Jell-O Pudding Pops? Well, despite their popularity in the eighties, thanks to pitchman Bill Cosby (whose life went in the toilet after this book was published), the company had trouble making a profit from them. Then, "the Jell-O name was later licensed to Popsicle, which reintroduced the Jell-O Pudding Pops in 2004. Sadly, sharp-eyed eaters say its just not the same." And have since been discontinued. 

Well, sic transit Jell-O Pop mundi, I guess.  

Goo housekeeping.

It's happy homemaker time again, boys and girls! Today we're not going to wash our fine washables; we're going to dust our fine dustables. That is to say, we're going to try a product I got in my Christmas stocking, one designed to pick up dust from all sorts of surfaces... or maybe it's intended to turn into a giant town-eating blob. Could go either way.

ColorCoral, made in China (just like COVID-19!), is billed as a cleaning gel on Amazon, a gel that can be smushed on any surface and removed along with the dust, and used again and again. That's it. The jar comes with no instructions but a drawing of a hand pressing the gel onto a keyboard. Amazon's page has some details, however: 

【Universal Fit】ColorCoral cleaning gel, simple and convenient cleaning kits for PC/laptop keyboard 💻 and other rugged surface, such as the car vent 🚖, camera 📷, printer 📹, telephone 📠, calculator, Instrument 🎺, speaker 🔈, air conditioner, TV 📺 and other appliances.

【Safe Cleaning Gel】This universal dust cleaner is made of biodegradable gel, no sticky to hands, smells sweet with lemon🍋 fragrance, no stimulation to skin👌.

【Easy Dust Cleaning】Make sure your hands are dry and clean, 👉 take a piece of the cleaning gel, 👉knead it into a ball, press the cleaning gel slowly into the keyboard, car vent and rugged surface and then pull out, the dust would be carried away with the cleaning gel.

【Reusable】The keyboard cleaning gel could be used repeatedly till the color turn to dark 🌚 or it become sticky, then you have to replace the gel with a new one 🌝. After cleaning, please stock the cleaning gel in cool place. (📌Don’t wash the gel in water.)

【In the package】1* universal cleaning gel, we provide the cleaning gel with 💯100% money back guarantee, if you find the package broken, the cleaning gel dirty, or any other quality issues, please contact us through message 📩, we promise you a free replacement and a full refund.

Soooo... All right! Let's try it!

Right off, we can see that it is a gel, all right. And it does have a slight lemon scent. But don't eat it! (The jar does warn against that.)

I broke some off and pressed it on and about my dusty keys.

I have to admit it worked -- somewhat. It got the obvious dust, but not the more stuck-on bits of debris. (No, it's not salsa stains or anything like that. Well, maybe coffee.) I think the ColorCoral is okay, but for dusting, I think a can of air will do the trick faster, easier, and more thoroughly. Also more expensively; not sure why cans with nothing but air cost more than $5 and don't last long, when spray cans full of actual stuff cost a lot less. I suppose there's a reason. The ColorCoral gel is $7 but can be reused quite a lot. However, I did not find it to be the miracle cleaner I'd hoped. 

It's back in the jar for you now, ColorCoral! Maybe I'll dust some of my bookshelves with it. Meanwhile, it stays tightly closed. Steve McQueen is not around to defeat it this time. 

The pokey.

So I got it yesterday. The jab, the poke, the stick, the needle, the vax, the Bill Gates chip, the stab, the Warp Speed, the shot in the dark, the shot in the arm. I got #1 on the Pfizer hit parade. I go back for #2 on May 2. Good job, Pfizer!

Or should I say, good jab!

It was actually a bit inconvenient to go on Sunday, but when Governor Corleone started to allow people who are not elderly whom he didn't kill, people who didn't have preexisting relevant medical conditions (a bad back doesn't count), people who aren't healthcare workers, and people who aren't in prison or group houses or schools (six of one...) to get the shot, I signed right up and grabbed the first available date, which was April 11. They were going fast. 

The pokers were giving out the jab at the community college twenty miles from home. The US Army was directing traffic, herding thousands of people through in orderly fashion from one checkpoint to another. It was incredibly efficient, completely contrary to the image of military screwups that pop culture has portrayed over the decades. The military and healthcare personnel were unfailingly polite. The shot didn't even hurt. Afterward I felt a little tired, a little cold-like symptoms, but that was as likely from the cold and rainy walk from the far lot to the college and the miserable drive as from the shot itself. The injection point hurts today like young Foreman gave me a friendly punch on the arm. 

Of course, the clever public health people are still sharing horrible headlines about how COVID-19 variants or anti-vaxxers will keep us in deadly danger forever anyway. I do worry about those who fear the vaccine, but I don't blame them. After all, in 2020 prominent Democrats said they wouldn't trust the vaccines because they didn't want the president to get any credit, but now they expect everyone to get in line. It's a pity no one ever pays a price for such public malfeasance, but here we are. (Google has memory-holed this news story, but it's an easy find through DuckDuckGo.) I do encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, just to stop the madness. 

God knows when things will get back to normal, but I and the rest of the public are more sick of these living conditions than we are of the Chinese Death Virus. We're also pretty goddamn sick of public health weasels (sorry, that's an insult to weasels) and politicians (who are an insult to humanity) making this much more difficult than it needs to be. I am getting vaccinated not because I fear the virus, but just to take myself out of the pool of possible spreaders, and help inch us a little closer to the day that the Communist Chinese's gift to the world is behind us. Put the Wu Flu in the rearview.

Get them swans!

The swans are back at the lake! Can swan-upping season be far behind? 

Swan-upping is not a sport -- perhaps it's better described as an activity or a job -- that one finds here in the States, but it has been going on for centuries on the Thames. I shall let Dr. Wiki explain:

Swan upping is an annual ceremony in England in which mute swans on the River Thames are rounded up, caught, ringed, and then released.

     By prerogative right, the British Crown enjoys ownership of all unmarked mute swans in open water. Rights over swans may, however, be granted to a subject by the Crown (accordingly they may also be claimed by prescription). The ownership of swans in a given body of water was commonly granted to landowners up to the 16th century. The only bodies still to exercise such rights are two livery companies of the City of London. Thus the ownership of swans in the Thames is shared equally among the Crown, the Vintners' Company and the Dyers' Company.

By "ringed," they mean an identifying ring is placed on each swan's leg. In the old days a mark would be carved on each swan's beak, some of them annoying complex -- annoying to the swanherds and, presumably, the swans. The Queen made headlines in July 2009 when she attended the ceremony, the first English monarch to do so in hundreds of years. Of course, it was cancelled last year due to Chinese Death Virus. 

Now, you may be wondering, what do they want with all those swans? Lunch? But no -- while in medieval times one might find a roast swan at a feast, today it's mainly done to check the health of the birds. Like all cool things in England, it has gone squishy. And yet it's still no easy task. Swans are large, larger up close that people might think, and usually ill-tempered and not inclined to be upped. 

The term "upping" seems curious; here is what the Royal Family itself has to say: 

A flotilla of traditional Thames rowing skiffs, manned by Swan Uppers in scarlet rowing shirts and headed by The Queen’s Swan Marker, wearing a hat with a white swan’s feather, row their way steadily up the Thames. ‘All up!’ they cry as a family of swans and cygnets is spotted, and the Swan Uppers carefully position their boats around the swans, lift them from the water and check their health.  The Swan Marker’s iconic five-day journey upriver has been an annual ceremony for hundreds of years, and today it has two clear goals; conservation and education.

Meh -- sounds like a waste of time to me, if you're not going to bother to eat some of them.

If upping you will go, you'll need a good swan hook. These traditionally looked like shepherd's crooks, because you want to get a good grab on the swan but not actually be that close to the damn thing when you do it. You can buy a modern swan hook for a mere $170 at Rescue Technology, and hook all the swans you can reach.

I first got wind of swan-upping via the inimitable Will Cuppy, whose article on the topic -- "Swan Upping, Indeed!" -- had run in The New Yorker in 1935, and was included in his book How to Attract the Wombat. Here's the start of his essay:

I was a fool to give Swan-upping a second thought. I won't say I should have ignored it. You can't ignore a thing that is called Swan-upping. The moment I heard it, I should simply have said, "Swan-upping, eh?" or "Fancy that!" and gone about my business, instead of spending an afternoon in the Public Library reading about Swans.

     Swan-upping sounds like a custom that should have been quietly dropped around the time of, say, Ethelred the Unready. But it has not been dropped -- that's the whole point. Indeed, it flourishes, quite as it did on July 16th, 1308, when Edward II issued a commission of oyer and terminer about some Swans belonging to John de Fitzgerald, who kept his birds on the Waveny, at Mendham, Suffolk.

Maybe I too was a fool to give swan-upping any notice, but he's right; once you've seen it, it makes you think. Sorry about that.

Slick.

Bahb loved to cruise for chicks in his Pachy L-Phant 3000 with the racing stripes.

 

Pots o' dirt.

I have four pots o' dirt on the porch now, each with seeds, trying again to shame Spring into getting things going. I think it's starting to work; yesterday the high was 71!

Two of the pots stand astride the stairs leading to the porch. These contain bell pepper seeds, which turn into big leafy plants all summer. They look great, green and lively and dramatic. And then you get delicious red bell peppers. If they grow at all, that is. If not, those guys who bag the dirt for Scotts Miracle-Gro will hear from me. I haven't forgotten your persecution of an employee for engaging in a legal activity in his own home, Scotts. Fail me and you'll be hearing from my lawyers.

On notice

The third large pot o' dirt contains seeds for grape tomatoes. We got a lot of good tomatoes out of that pot last year, but I made two mistakes -- I started late and I didn't get a tomato cage to tie up the plants. Tying them to the porch railings was a disaster. It lolled all over the place like a drunken green octopus. I got a cage yesterday that can stand in the pot and hold the plants up. Of course, the wind may blow it all over, pot and all, and I won't be able to sue Scotts for that.

The last pot o' dirt is the saddest. When our junior dog Nipper contracted lymphoma this winter, we made an appointment to take him to a vet in the next county that specializes in dog cancer treatment. Two days later we cancelled the appointment -- Nipper was too far gone. They were kind enough to send a condolence card with a little packet of forget-me-not seeds. I planted the flower seeds yesterday in honor of our little one, gone too soon. A good dog is never forgotten. 

Nipper, 2016–2021; forever young.

We're doomed! Again!

Yesterday's cheerful headline in an e-mail from Medscape: 

Tsunami of Death and Disability to Follow Pandemic?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines says "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." According to Wikipedia's article on the Law, "Phrasing headlines as questions is a tactic employed by newspapers that do not 'have the facts required to buttress the nut graph'." So let's see if Medscape's report can support this shocking implication. 

The article itself has a different header: "Post-COVID Wave Ahead of Death, Disability From Chronic Disease". But the first paragraph tells the tale:

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States will likely face a tsunami of death and disability from common chronic diseases that will affect society for decades, Robert Califf, MD, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), writes in an article published today in Circulation.

Oh, bother. What chronic diseases?

Califf says the impending tsunami of chronic health conditions — with cardiometabolic diseases, including heart disease, obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes at the crest — demands swift and comprehensive action.

Califf thinks an "Operation Warp Evidence" (cute, huh?) will be needed for "more real-time, in-depth tracking of chronic health conditions, akin to the rapid data dashboards that were quickly implemented and hugely successful in the tracking of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths." In other words, what will save us is the tracking of our fat, monitoring of our fat, and knowing who is fat. Because all the conditions in the "tsunami" come from sitting around the house and eating, adding to our personal spread while we were trying to stop the spread. 

Here's my favorite part:

The authors of an accompanying commentary note that the healthcare system has risen to the challenge of three simultaneous pandemics — COVID-19, economic disruption, and social injustice — even as many inherent fragilities have been exposed.

The "social injustice" pandemic is a self-serving lie that attempts to cover up the public health profession's complicity in encouraging morons to riot and burn last year. What else did they do for that "challenge" but make excuses for the damage in human suffering and property damage? Are we all social justiced up now, thanks to the healthcare system rising to the challenge?

Clowns like these authors are as packed full of self-regard as a jar is of jam. 

From a New York standpoint I can say they failed on every count, including "rapid data dashboards that were quickly implemented and hugely successful in the tracking of COVID-19 cases," because the information apparently wasn't used. If it had been, Chinese Death Virus patients would have been put on the hospital ship sent by Trump, and the field hospitals set up in Central Park and in the Javits Center, rather than stuffed into nursing homes to infect others. 

All we can gather from this is that nice sinecures will be procured with our money to track how fat and sick we're all getting, so our doctors (if we bother to go) can tell us to eat "veggies" and go for walks, like they always have, while many of us will nod and go back to our freaking Carl's Jr. Super Star with Cheese. Everything becomes kabuki theater after a while, doesn't it?

To their credit, a number of doctors in the comments section took issue with various parts of the report. It makes me think that there is a growing divide between the professional yappers in government medical services and the doctors who actually work with patients. If so, that's good -- because the only thing that will bring these useless tax suckers to heel is if their fellows reject and shame them.