Well, now, another thing in life, ruined.

Somehow, dirty movies will never be the same.  Now I'll see Ms. Touchstone instead of the action.

What is that chaperone really up to?

If you have hung around here long enough, you know that Cookie loves vintage ads.

This is the one that I find disturbing.  Not the product, or the "yutes".  I do hate punch.  Mostly because most juices burn my mouth and throat - an intolerance, not an out and out allergy, so the doctor says.

No, its that chaperone.   We know she not the mother of one of these "young people" - there is no wedding ring.  But she certainly has mannish hands of great strength.

What the Hell is she up to?   Yeah, she's making punch. But she looks a bit like her mind is telling you "Yes, my plan is working...WORKING!" Muh ha ha ha.

Now, any chaperone at a party with high school or college coeds may be charmed by youngsters and young love, as it was called.

But her face is telling us that a different, darker thing is going on.

"Hey Mom, that new housekeeper is great, but we've been getting calls from the Maryvale Asylum for the criminally insane, but they won't say why they are calling.  Have you checked Lizzie's resume and her recommendations?"

"Why yes, Ethel, but her recommendations seem to be from people who died, many years ago."

"How odd..."

How odd, indeed.

Maybe I have been watching too much TCM, but I just know that Lizzie is up to something. 

A real chaperone would be busy telling the couples to dance four fingers apart.  Or would be admonishing Henry Wilson not to "get that grape juice on Mrs. Applewhite's rug."  Or would be giving Ethel sage advice to Ethel, like "Save yourself for marriage.  You'll be glad you did."*

Instead, I just can't shake the feeling that after the party Lizzie will turn into Mrs. Danver's, and poor Ethel will be invited to the balcony and then the patio in one last step.

So whatever you do, Ethel and friends, don't drink the punch.


* No she won't.  Seven years into that marriage the milkman will bring her milk and a free bottle of whipping cream.  One afternoon of having consensual sex with a man who knows what's he doing and she's ripe for the Chapman Report before Murgatroyd realizes that she wants more than 30 seconds, the second Saturday of every month. 

June is busting out all over, and you could lose an eye

Bonnie logan better be careful.

YOUR recipes await...

It's not my recipe, but it is yours.

Oh, yes it is! 

Says so right there, Missy.

Watered down soup, a few chunks of chick, escarole, and radishes.

Bon appetite!

And what is this?

Well, it says a tomato aspic salad with cucumber salad and red cabbage slaw.

I don't see the red cabbage slaw.  But I see the tomato aspic shaped like the Hippodrome!

If you ask me, it's two thumbs up.

What this has to do with Monterrey is beyond me, unless its the canned tuna, canned a la Steinbeck.

It's never a good thing when your meal has an evil eye on its top.

Remember to clean up after dining!

Doorknobs and Bullshit

Remember this image, you'll need it later.

Cookie wears many hats, one of which is Historic Architecture Preservationist - a field I have forty years of experience in - consultant, head of a statewide preservation organization, etc. and so on. 

During this COVID thing, I have tried to find different ways I can use my knowledge.  Someone suggested joining some of the old house groups on Facebook set up to help people with restoring their period houses. 

For the most part, a lot of people don't have any clue what restoration of a house is, but they love the word Restoration, which has to be the poppers of home remodeling - because it gives them a heart on.   

These are people who think the BS they see on HGTV's Hometown or stripping the plaster to expose the structural walls and chimney's in their houses is restoring something - it is not.  It's remodeling and decorating. 

• When you RESTORE a home, you are taking it back into a point of time when it would have looked a certain way.  Restoring your original wooden windows means that you save the sashes if they are in good repair, clean them, scrape them down, reglazing them, and then putting the whole thing back together. 
• Remodeling is when you don't restore anything, but get rid of the old and then bring in inferior replacements, as in throwing out the original windows and then replacing them with sad ass vinyl windows. Also known as "remuddling".

Get it? Got it? Good.

So I am a member of this group, cringing, at people who think they are doing wonderful things, trying to talk them into not vinyl cladding their homes - LOTS of posts seem to begin with "Looking for opinions, but if you disagree then please don't respond" and the like - when this woman who bought this fire trap in upstate New York chimes in with her latest hair-brained tip.  We'll call her Tonya. 

Tonya has posted all sorts of stupid stuff in the six weeks I have been in the group.  Like the time the roof was caving in but "I got distracted with polishing the light switch plates, and putting them back in the right places."  Or the time the porch caved in and she said "I knew it was unsafe, but I got distracted polishing the stair rail."

Anyway, yesterday, Tonya went a bit too far.

Tonya posted a picture of porcelain doorknobs, one with white knobs, the other with black knobs, and the other with the woodgraining.   These types of doorknobs were fashionable from the early 1800s on into the 1890s.  They were less expensive than true brass knobs, and they were usually fitted to surface latch and lock sets designed to screw into the inside face of a door (new example here).  These too were inexpensive, and they were a quick install - no mortice work on the door itself, just drill two holes through the door and match those holes to the holes in the metal latch and key set, and screw that in.  The latch catches on another plate screwed into the surface of the door frame.  In addition to being weak, they started falling out of favor when doors began to be mass-produced.

Tonya's narrative with the doorknobs went something like this:

"I just learned this and I thought I would share this interesting knowedge!  In Victorian times, white door knobs meant anyone in the household could enter that room in a house.  The black knobs were only on the doors that house servants could enter.  The wooden door knobs were on doors that only white people could use, blah, blah, blah..."

And then Cookie started reading the comments of the people who read this and actually agreed with it: 

• "I think I read that on the internets somewheres (sic)."
• "I know I heard that, but I forget who told me."
• "And those people were so clever.  You'd need that in a mansion."

Reader, let me tell you - Cookie just about had a stroke when he read that racist bullshit. 

So I called "Bullshit" with a capital "B".

I explained that in forty years in historic preservation, in preparing a National Register of Historic Places nomination, in college classes, in graduate school courses, I had never heard anything even remotely like this.  In book after book, nothing like this.  I also pointed out that solid color knobs, white and black were the least expensive, and that the wood tone ones would have been used in public rooms.  White could be used in any room, as could black, as well.  "You could walk into a house that was practical, and the doorknobs could be any color based on what the builder could afford."

I also pointed out that this was particularly insensitive given what the nation is currently undergoing.

And then something magical happened.  Tonya removed the whole post. 

Victory.

But today, she is back at it, asking if she should expose the brick in the kitchen like the house was when servants cooked meals in the fireplace. 

Sweet Smoking Jesus.

This idiot doesn't get that plaster walls were desirable in modern homes going back centuries. 

See.  This is what happens when we don't teach basic history.  You get people who think that the word old was spelled "olde".  Or you get people that olde time western movies were what the west was really about, pilgrim.

But I can only do so much.

My bet is that Tonya will leave the house when it's condemned.  And after seeing the pictures she posted today, I can't imagine it won't be long now until it is. 

When you don't know what to say...

...one thing needs to be understood:

Black Lives Matter. 

But we each need to take a moment and figure out what we can do to fix this and move the world around us back to a point when we work as one for the benefit of the African American communities in this world. 

Brave new world my ass.

Google, a company that cares not a wit about common sense has decided to completely overhaul and reformat the Blogger interface.

In cleaning it up, they have removed words and now only provide symbols.  They have hidden tools and common sense things behind pict-o-graphs.

If Cookie can't find time before the end of June, this could be the end.   Not that I want it to end, but they certainly didn't do this to make it easier to create posts, share videos, etc.

Evidently old fuckers like me who still use desktops aren't Google's priority.

We'll try and make the leap, but it if proves too frustrating, I may be forced to give up the ghost.

It's that day again