A recent Bleat was uploaded with missing images and busted links. Let me explain - and I would have posted this Monday, but I knew I'd be pasted flat after Memorial Day, and wanted to have a Bleat in my pocket. This is it.

It was about 10:15 PM on a beautiful spring evening - warm and fragrant, no planes, the hiss of the sprinklers up and down the block.

OH, SCOUT I hear my wife say, and I hear the gate creek.

Annnnd I know what this means. The dog sprouted an opposable thumb and manipulated the latch and got out. Or someone left the gate open; either is plausible, I suppose. Utter an oath, grab the leash and some Milk Bones, tell Daughter to saddle up, and off we go in three directions. It's happened before - never on my watch, but hey we're all fallible. First I walk up to the water tower were the bunnies gambol, because that's what he's all about: chasing bunnies. He's not there. Back home, I get in my car and go to the furthest point he would be, looking for food and prey - the school grounds. Nope. Troll the streets with my high-intensity light playing into yards; check the busy streets in case - gulp - something happened; wait for the text from Daughter saying GOT HIM, because half the time she gets him. Half the time I find him.

But no text.

After an hour we call it quits.

Daughter sits on the side steps under the little lights that hang from the tree branch, silhouetted by the streetlight, waiting for her dog to come home. Breaks my heart.

12:30. Well, he'll be back. The last time he did this, and was out bunny-hunting, he came back after two hours, exhausted, panting, and drank a gallon of water before dropping on the floor and passing out. He'll be back.

1:30. Wife doesn't have to work tomorrow, so she volunteers to stay up.

2:00 I go to bed. Oh - right, website. Drag the htmls over the upload droplets, call it a day. (Hence the busted pictures.) Bed. I think all sorts of horrible things. I may or may not be sleeping. Eventually I am, and I dream that we were turned down for a new dog because we lost the last one. Recall the moment when we went to the pet store to get his name engraved on a metal disk in anticipation of picking him up the next day. Dream: I was driving somewhere with my wife, and there was Scout, sitting on a hill; oh of course, that's where he was supposed to be, leash him up and keep going. Wake; it's dark. No dog. Back to sleep. Dream that he came walking up the steps. Think: it'll be hard to find a dog as easy-going and relaxed. Another summer of training a puppy. No. I don't want a new dog. I want my dog. Am I awake?

I am. Check the clock; sigh; turn over. Sleep. ALARM

It's overcast and dank. I go down the stairs and I smell wet dog, and think: he's back.

He's on the sofa. Looks at me: hey. What?

As my wife would tell me later when she got up, he moseyed home about 4:30. She let him in and went straight to bed and fell instantly asleep. We're standing outside having morning coffee, and then we note:

The front and back gates are closed.

So the dog did have opposable thumbs, and closed them out of basic decency, and perhaps as an apology? No. Did the paperperson do it? No, he wouldn't have done the back door.

"Well," I said, "someone did." Because obviously someone did. We found out later that Daughter woke at 6, saw the gates open, figured he wasn't back, and wandered around the neighborhood in the gathering dawn, looking for him. Sat on the hill by the Water Tower, listening to the world wake up, listening for the clink of his dog tags. But there was nothing, and so she went back home, sat on the sofa in the family room, and wept.

And then she heard the clink of the tags. The thump of a tail on the sofa cushions in the living room. SCOUUUTTTT. She closed the gates and went back to bed.

The whole experience had the quality of a dream - from walking down to the creek at midnight with my flashlight playing on the trees and bushes, the rush of the water below; the innumerable rabbits darting everywhere, the silence, the absence of dog. It's just a horrible thing when there's an absence of dog.

So that's why Friday's site was busted up. So was I.

Then I got up and went to work and put my face in a cake. Because that is my job. It's a thing, on the internet: adults dressing up like children and smashing birthday cake in their faces and posting the pictures. We did a story on it, and someone thought "it would be funny if Lileks did it for our Live Video Facebook page," so yeah, sure: it would give me an opportunity to say how stupid this thing was, and also do video.

"So, five, ten minutes" said Pink when we were setting up in the News Hub.

What? Ten minutes? The act of smashing takes little time. You want me to VAMP FOR TEN MINUTES about smashing my face in a cake. Well. Think; write a script in your head, and then wait - and we're live.

This is my job, and I love it.


 

From 1942, the women of the Miss Subway beauty pageant. This year-end compliation ran in Life to tell everyone around the country what they missed by not sitting in an underground tube looking up at beer ads.

Peggy Healy: pin-up girl where she worked.

 

 
 

This picture was by MUKY, who was a still photographer - for the movies. New York Times:

BARELY DRAWING A BREATH, the diminutive man with the old-world manner and two 35-millimeter cameras around his neck crouched alongside the motion picture camera and took aim, a benevolent sniper trying to get off his shots without giving himself away.

The set could have been a street corner at midnight, a bridge at midday or a worn patch of waterfront at dawn. The director might have been Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn or George Roy Hill. But the place was almost always New York City -- inside in summer, outside in winter, in rain, darkness or sticky heat. And the man with the Hasselblad or the Nikon was, more often than not, Muky: the man who took pictures of the movies.

For 25 years, beginning in the 1950's, Muky (pronounced MOO-kee) -- he has used the single name professionally for more than 60 years -- was perhaps the best known of a handful of still photographers here whose handiwork graced the placards, posters and lobby cards of a thousand movie theaters.

Huh. Never thought that was a job, for some reason.

Meet the intense and serious Cecile Woodley:

 
 

"Her job, and the Navy."

When the last time anyone enthusiastically okayed something?

 

 

 

 

 

I hope that's not a metaphor:

 

A Minneapolis gal - why, she went to the high school a fewblocks from my house, which means she probably went past my house to go down to the creek to watch the boys smoke cigarillos.

She married Lex Baxter in 1951. Eternal love was pledged, no doubt. They divorced in 1952. Then she married Fernando Lamas. Presumably he smoked even more cigarillos.

As for Lex, he rebounded nicely - married Lana Turner after Arlene gave him the breeze. But:

In Detour: A Hollywood Tragedy - My Life With Lana Turner, My Mother (1988), written by Turner's daughter Cheryl Crane, Crane claimed Barker repeatedly molested and raped her from the ages of 10 to 13, and that it was after she informed her mother of this that they divorced. Turner ordered him out of the house at gunpoint the morning after she learned of this.

To take a brief side-journey:

On April 4, 1958, at age 14, Cheryl Crane stabbed her mother's boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death. The killing was ruled a justifiable homicide: Crane was deemed to have been protecting her mother Stompanato was well-known to have been abusive, extremely jealous of Turner and had previously pointed a gun at actor Sean Connery, her co-star in Another Time, Another Place, only to have Connery take the gun from him, beat him and force him from the movie set.

She's a real-estate agent now. I had no idea Bond slapped a gat out of Johnny Stomp's hands and gave him a Scottish thrashing. Those were the days.

Gah, these creepy tongue kids:

Well, that's rather tautological of them. Two out of three items were "French" related, but quite different. Or not: I'd bet the French Fries were as limp as the string beans.

The illustrator is familiar, and his name is on the tip - no, sorry.

Because we're always happy to see store displays - not one of which seems to have survived - here's a happy attempt to get people to consider this stuff an adequate replacement for beverages with actual flavor:

Your Headquarters! Look at all these things we don't have in this display.

 

Just pat with a pad! Applies an impenetrable shield of scented shellac:

Really, five days? There's probably a reason it didn't say "Longshoreman Tested," because it was for women who didn't really perspire at all.

Because they were dainty.

Note the fine print: Save on Cosmetic Taxes. TWENTY PERCENT. There was a TWENTY PERCENT tax on deodorant.

 

This is lovely:

Hey, you say - didn't we just see that, back in the Firestone 1952 feature a few weeks ago? You did. Very good. Now you know what my life is like: hey, I remember those glasses, and seem to remember how the knobs came loose on those lids. Why do I know this? Why do I care? Have I written about this? Reminds me of childhood, and - aw, screw it

 

It's rare I put in a movie ad, because this feature is not about movie ads. But the magazine had thisad. I saw the movielast year, I sweat, but there's nothing about it in the B&W World records. I am mystified.

Hardly your problem. Anyway: Does this seem a bit much to you?

Thirty-one thousand sniper incidents?

 

For your car? That's not where I saw that going.

It's X Boy, a cast-off mascot who's been unemployed for most of a century. A rare genetic disorder made it impossible for him to pull in his tongue, but at least his children found work with Birds Eye.

Finally: I regret to inform you that I only chose one half of this ad, for some reason.

Be worshipped by small natives who make a church out of your right leg!

Oh, er, ahem:

Thus concludes Tuesday. Hey, four-day week! Awesome. See you around.

 

 

 
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