Sometimes, your gamble in the candy aisle of a Chinese market pays off… sometimes it doesn’t. Not everybody loves haw flakes, but I’m a fan.
Mmmm… haw
Contains haw, sugar,
water and red dye.
But mostly haw.
What are haw flakes, you ask? Why, they’re flakes. Made out of haw. Just like it says on the package. They may look like firecrackers, but they’re a delightful candy treat. Each roll has a couple dozen super-thin wafers of hawiness. They look like monochrome Necco wafers, and taste and feel somewhat like a desiccated Fruit Roll-Up. I think they are delicious, but a few people have said they “taste like ass.” Most people seem to like them, though. Even if you don’t go for the taste, the packaging is so colorful and fun, they’re hard to resist. Unless you’re just really disappointed that they aren’t really firecrackers.
Haw flakes, in the buff
They are dirt cheap — possibly literally. I used to work for a dirt company, and dirt can get pretty pricey. As I said, each roll comes with a couple dozen wafers, and ten of those rolls come in a pack. I bought a bag of about a half-dozen packs for just a couple bucks. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400 flakes. I don’t understand how that is possible, what with all the elaborate packaging involved, and the shipping halfway across the globe. I would love to see pictures of a haw flake factory, they’re probably lots of fun to watch in action.
I brought some with me to Forbidden Island last week (that’s our favorite bar, we tend to be there on Wednesdays), and they were a big hit. I might try crumbling some up into some Schnapps of some sort, and call it Hawschläger.
I really don’t need to say anything. The cover says plenty. Go on, I know you just want to look at it for a bit. I’ll be right here when you’re done.
I Love This World posted about the cover to Mastermind, and made my day. Has any game ever had better packaging? I think not. Hanford said it all, when he looked over my shoulder as I was preparing that photo to post — “Ooh, Mastermind! That was a very adult game.” Yes, yes it was. It was a game that demanded the most refined demeanor your seven-year-old self could muster (which mostly involved one raised eyebrow and a lot of “hmmm… interesting”s and soft, knowing chuckles under one’s breath). I loved this game, but even to this day, I cannot tell if it was really the game I loved, or if it was the cover. Mastermind was mental dress-up in a box.
I mean, look at it! Clearly, those two are plotting world domination, and are taking a break from their evil schemes to play a little mind game with you. They will win. It is a foregone conclusion. But you’re happy to be their little plaything, because they are so urbane and suave, and maybe if you play along with them they’ll be nice to you after they take over the world, and MY GOD THEIR TABLE IS SO SHINY.
And that woman — is she just along for the ride? Is she playing him, and biding her time until she can cast him aside? Or has he warped her to his purposes? Hm, maybe you should try to save her. But you can hear her laughs mocking you even now, at the thought that she might need saving. Yes, we will play this game as a distraction, while you suss out what’s really going on here.
If you’d like the mystery broken (and by broken, I mean shattered into a thousand little pieces, never to be reconstructed), move along past the jump, and learn the story of the making of the Mastermind cover, and see a recreation of the photo with this same couple, 30 years on. (Hint: They didn’t succeed in taking over the world.)
This book is from 1973, and it isn’t nearly as cool as my 1959 booklet of Cut-Up Cakes, from a design point of view — but it has more cakes in it, including this great, full body Easter Bunny cake. Marie was asking for this — I hope it does the trick!
Another Bunny Cut-Up Cake
Here’s another, simpler Easter Bunny, from the same book.
Escapees from the bathroom, we are entering the world on a journey filled with new adventures. Maybe we can stay with you for a while?
Pee&Poo tattoos
Decades of forward-thinking Scandinavian design have finally reached their pinnacle in this: Pee&Poo. Called Kiss&Bajs in their native Swedish, these lil’ darlins of the toilet world are the creation of Emma Megitt. There’s a whole line of products, including plush toys, keychains, underpants, socks (?) and t-shirts, for both kids and adults. Strangely, no potty training books — I guess this is just Pee&Poo for pee & poo’s sake, which I can kind of understand.
The strangest product has to be this set of traditional sailor-style Pee&Poo Tattoos, with skulls and crossbones (in the shape of a deceased Pee and Poo), anchors, and toilet paper banners. My favorite thing about Pee&Poo, though, is their Pee&Poo rainbow. I want one painted on the wall of my bathroom, with the end landing right on the terlet.
I can’t imagine a better thing to be occupying the domain name peeandpoo.com.
Wendy McClure found a collection of Weight Watchers recipe cards in her parents’ basement a few years back — no one in the family would admit to having purchased them, and she got to keep them. Photos of midcentury food are always a spectacle, but it’s her addition of MST3K-like commentary that really makes it something else. Not that the recipe cards need much help being ridiculous, with names like Snappy Mackerel Casserole, Fluffy Mackerel Pudding, and the relatively straight-forward Mackerelly. Weight Watchers was really pushing the mackerel.
I first saw these when they were posted on Tiki Central a few years ago; Tiki Wahine brought the thread up again the other day with a new link (the old one had died). Now Wendy McClure has a book out of these culinary masterpieces, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. I actually kind of want to make the Frankfurter Spectacular.
Just when you think that the Internet holds all the answers, it fails you. My search for information about Boomerang, a ’70s kids’ TV show from my native Seattle, has turned up nearly bupkes.
I did learn something very interesting… I had no idea that Marni, the host of Boomerang, was none other than Marni Nixon.
Nixon is the reason Julie Andrews won her Oscar for Mary Poppins. Well, that’s not fair — that was a well-earned Oscar. (Those who already know this story can skip ahead a couple of paragraphs.) Julie Andrews had starred on Broadway in the hit musical My Fair Lady, and won a Tony award. But when My Fair Lady was turned into a Hollywood film, Julie Andrews was not yet a name movie-goers would recognize, and Warner Brothers cast Audrey Hepburn in what really should have been Julie Andrews’ role. Walt Disney knew better, and cast Andrews that same year in Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins, and Julie Andrews, became a smash sensation.
When the press started to dig a bit, and learned that Audrey Hepburn didn’t actually sing her parts — that the beautiful voice behind “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” was actually Marni Nixon… well, Jack Warner started to look like a fool for having ditched Julie Andrews. In Julie Andrews’ Oscar acceptance speech for Mary Poppins, she thanked “the man who made this all possible… Jack Warner,” which makes me love Julie Andrews even more.
Marni actually has a brief role in Mary Poppins, as one of the animated geese, but didn’t meet Andrews while working on that film. When Nixon and Andrews later worked together on The Sound of Music (Nixon played one of the nuns), Andrews introduced herself with a hearty handshake, and exclaimed “I really love your work!,” probably with a cheeky look in her eye. Marni also was the singing voice for Maria in West Side Story, and she did some vocal work for a Mr. Magoo album, “Magoo in Hi-Fi” and provided “ethereal voice effects” for some Esquivel albums. She was a very, very successful session singer in Hollywood.
I’m still having trouble reconciling the host of Boomerang with this Hollywood figure, but it comes together a bit when I hear the Boomerang theme song again — the song’s not exactly a winner, but it sure brings back memories, and that voice is loverly:
Click play to hear the Boomerang theme song
This still leaves plenty of holes about Boomerang the show, though. I can fill in a little bit more from my own memories: It aired on channel 4, KOMO, which was Seattle’s ABC affiliate. It was filmed during the late ’70s into the early ’80s, and continued on in reruns for a while. Marni’s co-star was a yellow puppet boy, who looked like a cross between Bert from Sesame Street and Terrence from South Park. I can’t remember his name, and I couldn’t find it online. His name was Norbert. (Thanks melberoo!) There’s one episode in particular that I remember, where Marni was hired to do a commercial for some silver polish, but she tries the polish and it doesn’t work very well, and she decides to not do the commercial. It was a lesson about not whoring oneself out, and whenever I’m faced with similar scenarios, I always think of Marni’s frustration with the silver polish. Overall, the show was on the schmaltzy side, and if we’d had the variety of cable back then, I probably would never have watched it.
So anywhere, there you go. That’s all I could find about the Seattle show Boomerang. Maybe someday something more will show up.
1971, Cindy und Bert sing “Der Hund von Baskerville”
German singing sensation duo Cindy und Bert sing a song about the Shelock Holmes story “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in German, to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” German youth dance, morosely. An utterly un-houndlike dog yawns. Cindy und Bert sing with all the fiery passion that might go into ordering a bowl of potato soup. The camera tries, valiantly but unsuccesfully, to perk the scene up with some violent zooms in and out of the “Hits-a-Go-Go” logo.
I’d never heard of Cindy und Bert, but apparently they were all the rage in Germany and the Netherlands in the ’70s. Just so you don’t think they were all doom & gloom, here’s a much perkier Cindy und Bert, in 1973.
Today, I would like to discuss one of the true classics of the Disney live action canon: Monkeys, Go Home! This 1967 film has it all… monkeys* — four of them, and they’re <dramatic echo>SPACE MONKEYS</dramatic echo> … Dean Jones … ’60s protests … Love, Frenchy Style … and as if that weren’t enough (no, stop! no, really!) … Maurice! Chevalier! And! The! Title! Ends! In! An! Exclamation! Point! Can you feel the hilarity?! So zany!!!
*phew* … I’ll take it down a notch or two now, before someone reaches through the screen to throttle me.
Dean Jones puts his chimps to work, in Disney’s "Monkeys Go Home!"
Alright now, where was I? Oh yes. Monkeys, Go Home. I mean, Monkeys, Go Home!. In this delightful, fun for the whole family maybe some of the family film, Dean Jones plays Henry Dussard, an American who has just inherited an olive farm he has never seen, in the south of France. Ooh la la! Being an American, he’s got some nutty ideas about how to turn this olive farm into a profitable venture — by hiring chimps instead of people to work the farm. Luckily, he previously was a chimp trainer for NASA, so he’s got a team of recently-retired space chimps at his disposal. So wacky!
In the ’60s, even the chimps were protesting
The little French town doesn’t like the idea of having to compete against a chimp-run farm, and they mount an underground resistance against Dussard. The chimps strike back by mounting a protest of their own, fighting for their right to work just as humans do. At the same time, a boozy French broad shows up claiming to be Dussard’s long-lost cousin (and she is truly fabulous, played by Yvonne Constant), staking claim to half of Dussard’s farm, and threatening Dussard’s budding relationship with a barely-legal French tartlet, played by Yvette Mimieux.
Maurice Chevalier, with the French corner of It’s a Small World
And just for good measure, Maurice Chevalier plays the town priest, who shows up now and then to impart some heavily-accented wisdom, and sing a song or two.
This is quite possibly the slapstickiest, monkeyest, wacknuttiest of all the Disney films. The hilarity, it ensues. This film… well, it’s sort of the Disney version of the Star Wars Holiday Special. I can’t help but wonder why they’ve released it on DVD, but I’m so glad they did. I kind of love it.
Oh! The music! The music is the best part, and I’m not kidding around here — I would sincerely buy Robert F. Brunner’s soundtrack/score. It’s great ’60s light-quirk-funk-pop stuff.
* Technically, chimps aren’t monkeys, but for the sake of simplicity, today we’ll say they are. It’s Topsy-Turvy day! Shrimp are fish! Tomatoes are vegetables! Mama’s Family was funny!
This lovely little confection looks sweet as can be… but it’s MEAT! That’s not cake, it’s meatloaf, and that’s not frosting, it’s mashed potatoes. Genius! The meat cake pictured here is by David Seah, but the originator of the meat cake craze is Black Widow Bakery. David’s has a stuffing filling (it’s a turkey meatloaf, made for Thanksgiving), and Black Widow’s has gravy filling and a rendering of a T-bone steak in ketchup on top. Both sites have helpful step-by-step instructions on how to make your very own meat cake. The Black Widow site has a whole gallery of other people’s meat cakes. Thanks to Tiki Avengers for the heads-up!
So, the other day, I became temporarily obsessed with these little plastic nuggets:
Just one word. Plastics.
I have fond childhood memories of filling up little metal frames with these plastic bits and melting them in the oven to make stained-glass suncatchers. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what the heck they were called. A lot of Googling time only brought up a company that makes Jewish-themed ones, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t making stained-glass dreidels and menorahs when I was a kid. It was more like mushrooms and butterflies and frogs — y’know, good ’70s stuff. Just when I was ready to give up, I found ‘em — they’re Makit & Bakits. And they’re still making them!
Kindergarten-level glazier
Well, that meant a jaunt to my friendly neighborhood craft store was in order. Sure enough, there was a very small selection of kits. They even make glow-in-the-dark ones now. I had to buy one. I picked out this little flower one, just because the colors were more interesting than the ones in the other sets. It rang up at $1.35 (!). It was definitely at least $2, maybe even $3, worth of fun. That’s value, my friends.
I cheated and mixed the colors on the petals, because I like it when the nuggets blend together like that. I’m happy enough with how it turned out, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with it; it will probably live a prostrate and nomadic life, moving about the house from one flat surface to another along with random scraps of papers and other doodads, until I throw it out.
So, now what? Here’s what — I’ve got a whole mess of those little plastic nuggets left. They seem to have designed these kits to come with enough pellets to recover from a spill onto the particle abyss that was a ’70s shag carpet. I think I might actually somehow have more of these plastic bits than I started with. It’s the melting of the plastic bits that’s the most fun with these — the frames are kind of ass — so I can’t just throw these out, I’ve got to melt them. But how? In what shape?
My current thinking is that I want to lay them out in a disc shape and melt them, and then, while they’re still warm, shape them into a little bowl. Kind of like they do on television cooking shows with grated parmesan. But I can’t help but think that this is worth pondering a little bit more.
