Signs left over from the era when every gourmet item invited consumers to flatter themselves for their discriminating, demanding tastes:
I’m sure there’s a prosaic bakery-related reason for this, but for GOD’s sake how many layers do you need? Some princess with an exquisitely calibrated palate might discern the individual layers, just as she could detect a pea under 40 mattresses, but I’d actually feel guilty eating something with this many layers, and not detecting the difference. It invites one-upsmanship, too. Somewhere a baker is constructing an 85-layer roll, and his assistants stand in the shadows, trembling: this is madness! It will collapse and kill us all! But he berates them as FOOLS and COWARDS and returns to his work, determined to show those incompetents at the Baking Academy who is the true master. They laughed when I said the 80-layer Biscuit Barrier could be broken. Well, I’ll show them.
The primary accomplishment of the weekend: replacing the broken faucet. Or rather watching my brother-in-law do it. Well, he’d done it before, and you can’t fit two people under a sink. Even if you could you wouldn’t want to. I’d tried to dislodge the faucet, but had been stymied by a step in the process known as “Number one.” As it turns out I was vindicated by the muttered Gallic oaths of my brother-in-law, who declared the old faucet “non-standard,” and wondered how they installed it the first place. But this would not stop him!
The lack of a proper wrench, however, would, so we drove to the hardware store for an adjustable wrench. I had two, but one was just a crazy little millimeter too small, and the other had handles the size of a hedge clipper. Once we had the right tool, we got back to it, and settled on an easy division of labor: he did the work, and I handed tools and expressed encouragement. The obligatory comic amusement came when I remembered my wife had asked me to turn the water back on after I’d turned it off, and I was reminded of that fact by the sound of hissing water, the hollow THONK of a French head banged on the underside of a sink, and a curse that gave one the savory flavor of the lingo heard on the docks of Marseilles. It was so much fun we repeated the entire sequence when he removed the hot-water pipe.
As noted, though, the main faucet was set into the counter in a strange way, and could not be dislodged without removing a screw set high up in the assembly. Imagine trying to tie a shoe with chopsticks in the dark in a tunnel over your head, and you have the idea. Back to the hardware store for a tool that lets you turn screws in difficult places. Huzzah, success. Installed the new one, only to find we were short some tubing – I love these technical terms – that connected the water supply to the faucet. A necessary step, it seemed. It’s always something.
Got the proper tubing the next day, put everything together, turned on the water, got out the mop, dried the floor, tightened the bolts, and tried it again. Works! Now I know how to do it, which will be handy when it breaks in a year or two, as I expect it will. The old Moen may have been non-standard, but it was substantial. The new one, with the lovely name “Price-Pfister” – really, please, is only only lighter, the threading on the spray hose has already begun to fray. Sorry, to phray.
After 45 minutes of use.
Otherwise, a fine enough weekend. Saturday night I watched Pinoccho with Natalie. She said she’d seen it before, and I couldn’t figure out where or when. “But this is Blu-Ray!” Rolled eyes – she does not get the Blu-Ray Difference at all, no matter how many times I stop the picture and lecture her about the lack of artifacting in the blacks. Kids today. It’s a delightful movie, although A) Natalie was right when she said Pinocchio looks a little creepy when it turns into a real boy. (Should have stayed in beta, to repeat a tweet.)
It couldn’t be made the same way today; Gepetto would be slagged for making clocks with inappropriate themes. Such as drinking:
It’s Tipsy McDrinker, the classic pixellated lush with a top-hat and a convenient lamppost from which to swing.
There’s child-beating:
There’s also one that involves GUNS. Gepetto’s wristwatch is pro-beer, too:
I don’t think I’d ever seen the entire movie – perhaps as a kid on TV, but nothing stuck aside from being irritated with Pinocchio. It’s a marvelous film, and full of dark things that come not from some supernatural place but simply from the world of Adults. Well, okay, the whole boy-into-donkey thing is supernatural, but the temptations – fame, cigars, beer, indolence, money – are like snakes that come out from behind the shiny curtain parents put up to keep the seamy world obscured.
The best thing in the movie? Jiminy Cricket, a very American character, all pluck and can-do spirit. I suspect the animators and writers put a lot of Walt into Jiminy – or rather a lot of how Walt saw himself.
Later today: a matchbook, and some other things. Will be doing the second and third NewsBreak segments today – we’re going to a two-anchor format for reasons that will become clear in a few weeks. I get weather and the St. Patrick’s Day preview. See you in a bit.
Pass it along, if you wish
25 Responses to Monday, March 16
Host with the Most
I too replaced a 6 year old Moen with a Price-Pfister about two weeks ago. It is lightweight to say the least. But what a spray! In fact, too much as it soaks everything. I learned from my father in law plumber, and I’ve done it about half a dozen times, so now it’s only like tying your shoes with your eyes closed. Messy, but doable.
So in the past three months, I’ve replaced:
Power Window motor in my 3 year old truck
Garage Door opener
Power window switch in the same truck
Electric Clothes dryer
Kitchen faucet
Another 75 feet of redwood fence – darn dog!
Automatic Transmission in same truck
I’m single-handedly repelling the recession! So I don’t want to any complaining!
I knew ole Tipsy looked familiar….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv6DjMpY04I
Of all the Disney feautres I always thought that Pinocchio was the most perfect… and the scariest. The scene where Lampwick (aka Fred Moore) turns into a donkey is downright disturbing…
Hi, James.
I remember you had read a biography of Walt, and had made a comment about there not being some terribly complex personality deeply hidden beneath the public figure, but rather that Walt was a deeply superficial man. A wonderfully creative, productive one, but superficial nonetheless. What was that biography?
I love Pinocchoi for its visual richness. When Jiminy curls up on the old violin, the rich look of varnished wood is stunning. I could watch it again and again just to look for all the wood-carvings in the shop. Note the cat’s bed, with a cat angel carved in the headboard, and a frieze of scampering mice on the footboard. I love the underwater scenes as well. It’s the absolute best Disney eye candy, and the Blu-Ray treatment didn’t disappoint me.
Items like the spanking clock (Lileks’ link is broken) were actually built as working models for the animators to work from. That one still exists and works:
Link to spanking clock article. Not a good view of the clock, but you will remember it from the movie. I couldn’t find a good image online, but I foud plenty of sites complaining about Pinocchio’s violence and child abuse. According to another book I found, the animators didn’t build working models to animate from, but to impress Disney – it didn’t work. He expected magic.
http://d23.disney.go.com/articles/031009_NF_BL_MeetRobKlein.html
Another great moment is after they have been expelled for the whale, dashed on the rocks and washed up on a beach. The way Gepetto’s body tumbles in the surf looks perfectly natural, and the shot of Pinocchio face-down in a tidal pool was challenging for animation of the time.
Re: broken link, I copied the link from the purported spanking picture (which is appears as a duplicate of the sot-clock picture) and pasted it in a new tab. Since it had the file name “pin1.jpg” I tried changing that to “pin2.jpg” and lo, the momma spanking the bare-bottomed lad with his hand in the jam jar popped right up.
These are just gorgeous frame-grabs by the way, Blu-Ray is awesome.
I remember reading somewhere (may have been this blog a year or two ago, or somewhere else) that a lot of the clocks in Gepetto’s shop were built in real life. I think the main reason was so the animators could understand how a clock really works. IIRC, they bought a couple of cuckoo clocks, and had to take them apart and put them back together in order to learn the mechanics. I think they also consulted a local clockmaker, who taught them how certain clocks could work, based on the design ideas they had, like the drunk, the mother spanking her child, and the two gun-shootin’ hillbillies (perhaps a reference to the Hatfields and McCoys feud), among others.
I agree about the intricate details in the background, with the wood carvings all through the shop, the details on the cat’s bed and the human bed, as well as the candlestick holder, the violin, everything. I think it was meant as a way of indicating that Gepetto took great pride in his work, and never overlooked even the most minute detail. This was reflected in the artwork for the background and the props.
I need to remember to buy the movie before too long. My favorite part was always the Pleasure Island sequence. Looked like the Coney Island part of Hell.
I’m sorry you had a problem with your faucet. We have Price-Pfister bathroom faucets, and they installed with extreme ease and have been very sturdy for years.
Also, their customer service is in the Neiman-Marcus/LLBean stratosphere. I bought the two faucets on eBay (as in, not retail), and while both auctions claimed “new in box!” and both stated that the handles were the Large set, one box was marked Large but the decorative bell part was clearly a Small.
Hubby told me to call Price-Pfister’s toll-free number. I figured there was no way I was getting any help from them, but the slip in the box did say seven days a week. So I called — this was on a Sunday afternoon, mind you — and the phone was answered promptly, by a human, who spoke English! I explained the situation, and she apologized and said she’d send me an entire new Large handle kit. For free. And I didn’t even have to send the Small kit back. I would absolutely buy Price-Pfister products again.
I tried installing a new faucet last year. Owing to a series of Buster Keaton-esque calamities, I ended up destroying two garage door openers and the transformer in my furnace. The new faucet now works fine, though.
Ah, plumbing. It’s been my experience that no plumbing job can be finished without at least two additional (not counting buying the fixture in the first place) trips to Home Depot. It’s always something – a tool, an adapter, a different hose. The number of trips required is directly related to the age of the thing being replaced. Older thing=more trips.
Hubby and friend, both highly paid professionals, installed a new kitchen faucet. Didn’t work. Called the plumber who said it was installed backwards AND upside down. He laughed so hard, he didn’t even charge for the call.
If Jiminy Cricket were drawn today, he’d spend the entire movie telling Pinocchio how he wasn’t responsible for his problems, they were due to Society and Big Business (with Pleasure Island of course being a thinly veiled swipe at Big Tobacco and perhaps a rant against the deforestation caused by creating wooden puppets thrown in) and only the Government could solve them. Pinocchio would not escape Pleasure Island, but instead he would be “rescued” by Federal Regulators.
You can hear Jiminy singing now – “Hold a little protest… hold a little protest” – and singing songs telling Pinocchio to “Let your SOCIAL conscience be your guide.”
re: the boy-into-donkey transmogrification scene. Someone must have been watching a lot of James Cagney movies — particularly the prison freak-out scene in “White Heat.”
72 layers is pretty standard for French pastry. You double over the dough,
roll it, fold the left side and the rightside over the middle, double it again, fold the left side and the rightside over the middle and double it one more time.
2 3 2 3 2 – 72 layers. Sounds a lot more difficult than it is (in pastry, you slather
butter between the layers – yum). I remember seeing a PBS special on this
Japanese artisan who made samurai swords, how they had more that 65,000
layers to them. I’m sure the math challenged reporter thought he’d folded the steel 65,000 times instead of the actual 16 times. BTW, go read the original
Pinnochio story – you will no longer be surprised why Italy went Fascist.
I’d like that pocket watch please.
I think what the above post is referring to is puff pastry. You buy it already made unless you are crazy.
How ’bout that scene where the wolf’s minion pulls P’s shorts away from his butt and looks down into them, and the wolf tells him, “Not now!”
Creepy.
Price Pfister has been around for a long time. My grandfather, who was a plumber from the 50′s through the 90′s, used to refer to them as “Fisher-Price”. Their quality may have improved.
We watched Pinocchio with my three-year-old, who seemed to enjoy it, or at least it didn’t provoke the terrors that the witches in Sleeping Beauty and Snow White did. I was struck as you all were by the beauty and detail in so many scenes, but also wondered about whether the Pleasure Island operation is really economically viable. That’s a lot of infrastructure to support the sale of donkeys.
We already support donkeys AND elephants — we elect them to Congress, where they perform for our displeasure.
Urgh. Price-Pfister. The highest-maintenance item in my house is the Price-Pfister faucet on our kitchen sink. Her wifedness wanted one that matched the decor better, so I took out the extremely reliable one that was there and installed Leaky McLooseHandle.
Ward Kimball was responsible for animating Jiminy Cricket, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he patterned the little bug after Disney. He was always my favorite character, and Pinocchio was one of my favorite Disney films.
“Saturday night I watched Pinoccho with Natalie. She said she’d seen it before, and I couldn’t figure out where or when. ‘But this is Blu-Ray!’ Rolled eyes – she does not get the Blu-Ray Difference at all, no matter how many times I stop the picture and lecture her about the lack of artifacting in the blacks. Kids today.”
On the bright side, she didn’t demand Goofy Golf instead of the movie.
The multi-layered biscuit brought an odd thought to my mind – that of the five-blade razor. The manufacturer attempted to hook me on the new concept by mailing me a free one, just like they did circa 1996 with the TWO-bladed version. It didn’t work. Too much of a good thing. The blades are supported only at the ends, and they give a disconcerting twang – akin to a plucked violin string – as they encounter the whiskers. But the worst part is the afterwards feel – I now know what being flayed with a potato peeler must feel like. The razor gathers dust, after maybe two uses.
I bet the biscuit chef makes great strudel or baklava, though. Now THAT’S a great use of multiple layers, excellent when properly done.
Bill: “If Jiminy Cricket were drawn today, he’d spend the entire movie telling Pinocchio how he wasn’t responsible for his problems, they were due to Society and Big Business (with Pleasure Island of course being a thinly veiled swipe at Big Tobacco and perhaps a rant against the deforestation caused by creating wooden puppets thrown in) and only the Government could solve them. Pinocchio would not escape Pleasure Island, but instead he would be “rescued” by Federal Regulators.”
I always thought it was the beer that turned them into donkeys. Pleasure Island could be seen as both a shot at Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol.
I love baklava. My mom used to make it when she was in the SCA back in the early to mid-90s.
I still think it’s hilarious that Disney called its grown-up zone “Pleasure Island.” But no smoking!
Re: the 80 layer barrier:
FOOLS!
I WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
(ask me how!)
http://www.offworlddesigns.com/p-291-fools-i-will-destroy-you-t-shirt.aspx
If you ever have a few days to totally waste in a most enjoyable manner, the girl genius comic is for you.