We’ll be off to try to see the eclipse today, because the weather report yesterday (and this morning!) said it would be sunny and warm.
For the occasion, I made a cereal box eclipse viewer just for fun. We’ll see if it works. I sacrificed a box of Raisin Bran for it. Sena wondered where her cereal box viewer was. We had only one box of cereal in the pantry.
And we’ve got some eclipse glasses. Good luck out there!
The University of Iowa Dept of Physics and Astronomy and the Sciences Library invites the public to view the partial solar eclipse on April 8, 2024 between 12:30 PM-3:00 PM at the Pentacrest and the Sciences Library courtyard. Solar eclipse glasses free while they last.
The solar eclipse is just around the corner! We’re hoping for decent weather. We’re also hoping that everyone views the event with safety in mind.
University of Iowa Health Care ophthalmologist Dr. Ian Han has great tips on how to observe the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. He pointed out that eclipse glasses that pass muster for safe viewing of what will be a partial eclipse in Iowa are typically on a list of approved eyewear and often have an ISO (that stands for International Organization for Standardization) number stamped on them. Our glasses have the right stuff!
However, animals sometimes get confused by solar eclipses, including cicadas (see my other post about cicada weirdness posted today). Cicadas might stop singing or maybe their gonads drop off a little sooner than usual, I don’t know exactly. But the zombie cicada gonad apocalypse timing probably makes that a non-issue. I did say “probably.” But how could we protect them if necessary?
There might be a scientific way to custom fit the cicadas with solar eclipse glasses using groundbreaking technology first used in the 1989 documentary film, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” which I have not personally watched but which could be featured on Svengoolie. We’d have to scale up production for possibly trillions of bugs. And I guess we can’t protect their gonads.
But we can all protect our eyes.
Update: I found a very good web site which tells you how to check if your solar eclipse glasses are genuine and protective. In addition to the information above, you can test the eclipse glasses indoors by putting them on. You shouldn’t be able to see anything but the brightest light bulbs and those just barely. You can test them outside as well. On a sunny day, look around at any reflective surface. You shouldn’t be able to see much at all. I tested ours and they passed with flying colors.
I’m sure you’ve heard the zombie cicada horror movie-like story in the news which sounds like it would make a great episode for the Svengoolie TV show. “Attack of the hallucinating zombie cicadas without gonads” would make a good title. One possible torrid scene suggestion would open in the “living” room (although zombies are not really alive), female (Alice) and male (Fred) cicadas seated on the sofa, lava lamp on the coffee table:
Fred: Alice baby, what’s your sign?
Alice: Your gonads are off, hon.
Fred: Oops. Did I leave them at the racquetball court?
Alice: Hmmm. Have you had your…shots?
Fred: What do you mean?
Alice: You’re not carrying any sexually transmitted diseases, are you?
Fred: I hardly see how that’s possible, since my gonads fell off somewhere. Have another drink of my psychedelic fungus urine, which I am able to shoot out stronger and faster than an elephant!
Alice: Not erotic enough in my book. I’m leaving, Fred.
Fred: Wait a minute, Alice. I’m sure my gonads are around here somewhere; let me check between the sofa cushions!
Cicadas are those bugs which make extremely loud buzzing noises every 13 or every 17 years or whatever, when they dig their way out of the ground to climb trees, molt, and find mates. Sex is the main event for them and possibly trillions of them will be looking to get lucky in the biggest invasion in over 200 years, at least in the southeastern United States.
On the other hand, there is something seriously wrong with some of them. A parasitic fungus with an LSD-like or amphetamine-like substance takes over the males and their sexual equipment just falls right off, replaced by fungus gobs which stick on to other males or females, infecting them and turning them into sex-crazed zombies which kill each other off faster than Woody Harrelson can slaughter the walking dead in Zombieland (a movie I never saw).
This reminds me of a couple of X-Files episodes, as I’m sure it reminds you. One of them is Firewalker in which a silicon-based fungus infects a crew of scientists and kills them off by making them zombie-like spreaders of it, complete with a long, strangely phallic-like sprout which explodes out of their necks, after the victims gradually become psychotic.
The other X-Files episode is Field Trip in which Mulder and Scully get trapped underground covered in a giant gooey fungus which makes them hallucinate their brains out. At the same time, it’s digesting them. Yum.
I don’t think the X-Files producers got the idea for the episodes from the cicada zombies.
Here’s yet another take on the Svengoolie TV show fan insanity. Maybe we’ll get over it someday, but for now I doubt it.
Sena gets in on the act this time as she throws the chicken at me after I tell cheesy jokes Svengoolie style before I juggle the Shrilling Chicken along with a couple of glow balls while wearing my brand new Svengoolie glow in the dark T-shirt. It’s a total fart—I mean gas.
I’m wearing gloves for a couple of reasons. Number one, the first time I tried to juggle the chicken, it dropped awkwardly on my right hand and made my index finger swell up. I had to let that heal up for a few days and I don’t want to reinjure myself. Number two—they just look cool.
Juggling items of different shapes, sizes, and weights is much harder than I thought. I never knew which way that chicken was going to fly. Catching it was total luck.
Doing stand up was a new thing for us. I never knew how hard it is to get your lines right. We had to do several takes to get the joke routines down. Muffing my lines was almost as funny as getting the jokes right.
But those jokes are so lame they’re great! The rim shot sound effect was a free download on pixabay.
Just another plug for Svengoolie. It’s a MeTV channel cheesy horror flick fan favorite. The show airs every Saturday evening at 7:00 PM. Svengoolie has been hosting it for decades and he introduces the movie and shares interesting background about the films and actors. He also tells these really groaner-style jokes which triggers the audience to throw chickens at him.
Tomorrow night’s movie is The Time Travelers.
Sena bought a couple of new brands of mayo, or new to us anyway. They were Bama Mayonnaise and McCormick Mayonesa. Sena didn’t much care for Bama Mayonnaise. And that is just her personal opinion; don’t send any nasty letters, please!
On the other hand, we both really liked McCormick Mayonesa. It has lime and sugar in it. It reminds me of Miracle Whip, which as you know, is my favorite (no offense, out there!). Sena really prefers Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise. But I still love her.
Here’s the thing about my sensitivity about nasty comments. I want to emphasize here that we are not rating any of these mayos we’ve tried. OK, I’ve written a few blog posts about them, but you will not find any numerical ratings about them (I’m pretty sure, though I haven’t checked). I found a web site article by Sean of the South. The title is “Mayo Wars.” He rated the mayos. Big mistake. He got a lot of flak. There are a lot of folks out there who worship their favorite mayos.
Sean tried 73 brands of mayonnaise. I didn’t know there was anywhere near that many brands of mayo! I gather Sean’s ratings made some people stride briskly to their refrigerators, pack their favorite brands lovingly, and ship them to Sean with letters expressing deep devotion to their mayos while advising Sean to watch his step or suffer the consequences.
Anyway, we’re not rating mayos. In fact, we believe that all mayos are created equal. Only, we think you should give the McCormick Mayonesa a try. We think it’s pretty good in potato salad and as a sauce for fish.
Remember that Shrilling Chicken I tried to juggle a few days ago? Well, I got my revenge for the sore finger it gave me. This is the message to chickens who peck me.
Chicken, meet your juggler!
This time, I put on gloves along with my usual safety goggles to prevent further injuries from the satanic cluck-meister.
I guess I taught that bird a lesson.
Recently, we saw a rabbit in our back yard on one occasion and a feral tabby cat on another day doing what they do best.
The cat was hunting and the rabbit was on the lookout for hunters. The hunted and the hunter are both alike in many ways except for the most obvious—one gets to eat the other.
Otherwise, in action they are both like coiled springs: alert, jumpy, and ready to do what they do best, flee or pounce.
Whether you are predator or prey, you do this every day.
Both Sena and I stayed up to see the cheesy 1972 horror flick The Gargoyles last Saturday night. No kidding, Sena stayed up for the whole thing! The show runs from 7-9:30 PM but the actual movie is only a little over an hour long. It’s about a clan of gargoyles that every 500 years hatch from eggs and wage war on humans to take over the planet. They never get the job done, probably because humans have all the guns and all the gargoyles have are claws and flimsy wings which you don’t see used until the very last scene. Like all of the Svengoolie movies, all of the jokes are so bad they’re good.
You can ask a fair question, which would be what else is on in addition to the movie? There’s a lot of commercials, of course, as well as the corny jokes and skits. But the other features last Saturday were excerpts from the Flashback Weekend Chicago Horror Con, in August 2023. I think it’s an annual historical horror convention that takes place in Rosemont, Illinois.
One of the attractions was a panel presentation about the history of the 90th anniversary of the drive-in theater hosted by Svengoolie and Joe Bob Briggs. It was arguably better than the feature flick. I have heard the history elsewhere about how the drive-in theatre began (I think it was on the travel or history channel).
The most interesting part of the history is how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the recent history of the drive-in theaters. The point was that, when the pandemic hit the country, all indoor theaters closed, leaving the drive-ins the only place to watch movies for several weeks. They did pretty good business.
Moreover, horror movies and drive-ins go together like cheese and crackers (see what I did there, cheese as in cheesy movies?). OK, fine.
Anyway, horror films were mainly linked to low budget projects that big stars and big directors avoided like the plague. Mainly, those movies were played at the drive-ins—which is how they got a tarnished reputation. That led to cherished stories by older people who used to sneak their friends into the drive-ins by stowing them in the trunks of their cars. That probably did happen, even in the old Mason City Drive-In Theater in Iowa where Sena and I grew up. It was demolished in 1997.
As far as The Gargoyle movie goes, the one thing I couldn’t find out was exactly why Bernie Casey, who played the head gargoyle, didn’t voice his own lines. The web references I found just mentioned briefly that it was because his natural speaking voice didn’t fit the character. They were dubbed in by Vic Perrin who did the voice-over for the introduction to The Outer Limits.
Maybe the funniest scene was when the head gargoyle placated and playfully slapped the fanny of the female head breeder gargoyle after she noticed he was flirting with the human woman he kidnapped. The breeder was obviously really jealous. Maybe this means that the battle between gargoyles and humans will always come to a stalemate because we’re too much alike.
Remember that rubber chicken Sena ordered as a joke for what looks like my transformation into a Svengoolie fan? Svengoolie is the longstanding host on the MeTV channel which shows old, cheesy TV horror movies every Saturday.
Svengoolie always gets a lot of rubber chickens tossed at him after he tells a few jokes. Well, the rubber chicken arrived. Actually, I think it’s plastic, about which I’ll have a lot more to say. It’s called Shrilling Chicken. Sena ordered it from Wal-Mart. We’re still waiting for the Svengoolie glow-in-the-dark T-shirt, which she ordered through the Svengoolie web site.
The chicken is about a foot long and squeals when you squeeze it. It’s sold as a dog toy. It’s red and yellow and the first thing I did was to try to juggle with it along with two juggling balls. I thought it would be cool to get a YouTube video of it, especially while wearing the Svengoolie T-shirt.
I was trying to get the hang of juggling a linear chicken with juggling balls and was just getting to where I could do 3 or 4 throws while also squeezing it to make it squeal. And then it happened: the demonic chicken bit me (or is “pecked me” a better way to put it?)! That’s pretty spooky given the connection to Svengoolie, the horror show host.
OK, so it didn’t actually peck me in a satanic manner, but I caught it awkwardly in my right hand. My right index finger swelled up and it got a little sore. It’s healing quickly although it did leave a faint bruise.
Then I looked up Shrilling Chicken on the web. What a rabbit hole! I found warnings seemingly all over the web against getting within 100 yards of the thing because of allegations it contains toxic chemicals. In fact, pretty much all the warnings came from a group called Ecowaste Coalition, with the chief spokesperson being someone named Thony Dizon, Chemical Safety Campaigner.
Thony’s main message is that Shrilling Chicken contains unacceptable levels of “toxic plastic additives.” He cites a long list of European countries that have banned Shrilling Chicken, despite the labels on the package, one of which is “CE” which means that it meets European Union standards.
The warnings go on to say that children should not be allowed to even touch it, although there are dozens of ads on the web showing where you can buy it for kids, with one image of a child hugging a Shrilling Chicken as tall as he is. I didn’t know they made them that big.
Thony also goes on to cite an “FDA Advisory No. 2020-042” which clearly is opposed to Shrilling Chicken being on this planet. I spent quite a while looking for that FDA Advisory in the U.S. FDA website. I couldn’t find it.
If you don’t look closely, you’ll miss the part at the bottom of the page indicating that the “FDA” referred to is the one in the Philippines.
The Shrilling Chicken label also indicates that the toy is approved for kids 6 years and older. It also has the Green Dot symbol on it. Wikipedia says it’s “…to indicate to consumers who see the logo that the manufacturer of the product contributes to the cost of recovery and recycling.” The Shrilling Chicken is made in China.
On the whole, I would say Shrilling Chicken is less than demonic in any sense of the word. However, given what happened to me, I probably would not toss it at Svengoolie.
Also, I would suggest you not try to juggle with it. I had to lay off juggling practice briefly so I can heal up.
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