A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

Besides winter being about a week long with highs in the 60s, the best thing about living down here is the lizard population constantly underfoot. As common as insects during the summer up north, little anoles scamper across your path and up every wall and tree pretty much everywhere you go. They climb and cling to screens like flies; I spent some time working out on the patio the past couple of weeks and during the day they run around constantly, chasing bugs and hiding from birds. I like to think I’m living in a bad science fiction story from the fifties where the best image of an alien world the author could conjure was replacing bugs and squirrels with reptiles. All I need is a clunky robot manservant and a jet-pack and I’m a Kelly Freas painting on the cover of Amazing Stories.

Later, during the wet season, these little frogs will be all over, the babies like this no bigger than a dime. They’re much more secretive than the lizards, and I don’t know where the tadpoles grow or where they all go the rest of the year. Dead ones show up occasionally, usually flattened in a parking lot or under a pot on the patio. They dry up good and mummy-like– I nearly had my father-in-law eating one as beef jerky on the golf course one day. If they were clean they might not be bad.

Prototype #1 of my most recent secret project…

Gary & The Hornets predated the boy-band craze by a couple of decades, at least, and the three brothers may have pioneered the 1960s/early ’70s “family musical group” trend that included The Osmonds, The Jackson 5, and The Cowsills (apparently the inspiration for The Partridge Family).
All of their hits were covers, which you could get away with back then, but they had enough success to get this Oscar Mayer gig and at least one appearance on The Tonight Show:

You’ve got to admire that they’re not just some polished, choreographed dance troupe ala contemporaries like The Osmonds, or over-produced synthesized corporate product like whatever the kids have today, what, The Jonahs Brothers? These kids look and act like little kids putting on a show, especially in this, the earliest clip I could find:

I like a couple of their covers more than the more famous versions, even if they seem inappropriate for a 12-year-old to be singing in 1966. Hi Hi Hazel sounds almost like an ode to child molestation when The Trogs do it; with a pre-adolescent singing, it’s just quaint and weird.
Of course, the real appeal is the old Oscar Mayer ad itself. Between this and the famous B-O-L-O-G-N-A tune they have probably the two most recognizable jingles in television history. The ad is short and sweet– here’s somebody famous, they sing the jingle, the kid says “Groovy!” and the same announcer who must’ve done every commercial voice-over through the ’60s and ’70s names the product as it spins into view. And notice that the package of hot dogs looks just about like a package you’d buy today? A can of Pepsi or a box of Tide from that period is virtually unrecognizable to a kid today. With the jingles, the Wienermobile, and that dedication to brand recognition, Oscar Mayer must have one of the most successful marketing departments ever.
Through the magic of youtube, here are a couple of animated spots they did in the ’50s and ’60s:

I remember that second one, and siding with the kid who didn’t want to march off to the death camp with the other kids to become “all-meat wieners.” Even if it’s as catchy as all get-out, the lyrics to that jingle are a little creepy, especially when the kid adds his own “…there’d be nothing left of me” line at the end. Still, it’s a really cute Peanuts-inspired little spot. The first one has such masterful design– how do they get those geometric characters to be so expressive? And the voice work is so great. What do we have now? A wiseacre badly-CGIed talking baby hawking insurance or something? Sigh…

The whole “distressed” t-shirt thing is puzzling enough– why buy a shirt that already looks old? So you can claim you’ve had it for years, and fool your friends who’ve never seen the giant display of them at Kohl’s? Even more alarming, perhaps, is that they sell them in sizes for 2-year-olds now. Do they expect that my kid will be at the playground taunting the poseur toddlers with her distressed Charlie Brown shirt, claiming “Hey, I was into Peanuts before you were even born!"? We bought it because we never see t-shirts in her size with anything much besides Dora the Explorer on them, and it was on the clearance rack at Target, but I’d rather it just looked new.
The 2-year-old just turned 3 recently, celebrated with a Dora cake that didn’t turn out too badly, but it was like painting with toothpaste to get the frosting to cover the faint outline from the cake pan.

We went to a Build-a-Bear place on her birthday, where she built a puppy she unhesitatingly named ‘Hearty.’ They place a satin heart inside the yet-unstitched animal in an anointing ceremony that’s like a strange cross between Voodoo and Catholicism. It turns out those ritualized things really stick with little kids, which must be how the Pope ropes ‘em in at a young age.
It’s funny how she coins words and names. It’s hard to say how she decided that adding -Y to anything made a descriptive name, like Hearty, or Planty and Orchidy who’ve eaten dinner with her. I remember being fascinated that at barely one she called money “bank” without ever hearing slang from 1970s cop TV shows. I imagine our chimp-like ancestors running around giving everything a name in the same way as soon as they invented language.

She also got this tortoise, another of her favorite animals (actually it’s sea turtles, but we only have one bathtub). They’re a pretty common pet down here, and this kind grows to a couple hundred pounds and people keep them in their yards. Wild gopher tortoises live around here too; we just saw a pretty big one next to the road yesterday. Presumably she’ll be able to ride this one someday, depending whose growth ouraces the other’s.

Scrabble players came up with what they call anamonics, phrases that remind you which letters will go with particular 6 or 7 letter combinations to make a bingo. I know the 25 or so most common 6 letter “stems” and their phrases, and only a few of the 7 letter phrases. So when I have TONERS and a K on my rack, the above phrase lets me know there’s a bingo to look for, and I should know it. Of course, when it comes time to use my useless knowledge I blow it far too often, and couldn’t find the word this weekend when I needed it. I bingoed the next turn, but then convinced myself that DENIGRATE should be DENEGRATE* (Scrabble nerds always asterisk non-legal words) and passed up another bingo to lose a game that was handed to me on a platter and kept me out of a chance at 2nd or 3rd place.

We had a good time though– one of my club mates just missed first place in the top division, and the venue was in a new community development south of Ft. Lauderdale that was nice, if a little snooty. The guy who won my division (the 2nd of 5) choked up as he donated his check back to the breast cancer foundation that the tournament was a fundraiser for, “For my mom,” he said, so I might’ve felt guilty if I won anyway.

I’m headed back to Wisconsin for a week– I may do a post before we go, but there won’t be anything else until I get back…

Most days I wake up thinking about Brolly Hut, just like everybody else, I imagine. But lately with all the Scrabble tournaments in the area, and the fact that most of the people I “socialize” with aren’t interested in much else, I wake up trying to find an anagram of NOTICED (there are 2!) or wondering how I could’ve stopped some guy from playing the X for so many points the night before.
I’ve given up playing on the internet to try to ease my brain a little, and also because it’s still the internet and not even Scrabble is immune from the anonymous nutball syndrome. I’d expect crazies in World of Warcraft and all that, but even obscure foreign bootleg servers are filled with people (apparently the same people you’d meet in a store or a park any day of the week) who will swear at you, call you a cheater, log off, or just make you run out their 15 minute timer in order to try to avoid losing a game. It’s not too uncommon that they’ll rant something that comes across like Jack Nicholson in The Shining– “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scrolling down the screen as fast as they can paste-and-hit-enter. I just open another window and do something else until it’s over, but I always wonder if they think I’m paying attention to them. I guess they must.
Anyway, my obsessing payed off at the club this week when I scored 610 points against one of the top players (there’s a new guy who everybody scores 500+ against; 600 wouldn’t be so impressive) including 212 for REQUITES. I’d like a lucky game like that at a tournament; they always have side prizes for high game and high word. I never get the set-up when it counts.
There’s a breast cancer fund raiser tourney this weekend, then we’re off for a while. When I get my head back, it’ll be more Brolly Hut and the usual stuff on the blog. I have some better pictures of Brolly Hut, btw, in books that are packed away, and surprisingly the one above is all I could find on the webs. It was quite a sight in the heyday of Googie architecture, and the sign, the logo, and the name that rolls off the tongue like nonsense from a dream you can’t remember are just perfect. I don’t have the Oxford English Dictionary here, but it seems odd that they ever tried to market burgers with what I assume was an British colloquialism. Did people in Southern California ever say “brolly?” Maybe they sold Fish & Chips and had an English theme to capitalize on the British Invasion, but I don’t know if they pre-dated the Beatles or not. Either way, what America needs right now are more buildings shaped like umbrellas, that’s what I say.