A Break in the Routine

Today (by which of course I mean yesterday; my days run from afternoon to the following early morning) hasn't exactly been filled with "adventure, excitement and really wild things;" but it has been a bit of a rutbreaker. Just for starters, I was interviewed today by a reporter for the Tucson Citizen. It would be nice if the interview were about my wild success instead of dismal failure, but that's how it is. The reporter was looking for a story on how the recession was affecting people who recently became unemployed here in Tucson, so I emailed and told him. It seems to me that my particular story is kind of noteworthy, not because of me but because of the way it illustrates the larger problem. Every "permanent" job I've had in the past 15 years was with a company that has now gone bankrupt, closed its doors or both. I went back to school to get a degree in a high-paying, high-demand field, and it's currently doing me no discernible good. And I didn't even mention the whole health insurance issue. The article is supposed to run on Friday. I'll link to it when it comes out.


The other thing I did today, besides the dog park and watching Doctor Who, was follow through on the second email from AOL about AOL Pictures shutting down. As with AOL Journals, American Online has made arrangements for a simple conversion process to another service. This one is called PhotoWorks, and it's free. Well, sort of. I read part of the new member FAQ, and there's a catch. The site is run by American Greetings, and they want you to buy something, at least once a year - prints, calendars, custom greeting cards, something. If you don't, your free storage goes away. After that, you would presumably see the image on the left instead of your lovely pictures. I got this result tonight one one of my entries, and I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I had accidentally deleted a couple of images, and copying them back into that album didn't restore the link.

I had already saved everything stored in AOL Hometown (which is also gone now), but had not grabbed this stuff. Fortunately it was extremely simple and quick, at least for the relative handful of pictures I had on YGP/AOL Pictures. I logged in from my Mavarin screen name, which isn't even my main email account, although I treat it as such. It didn't matter. It grabbed everything I had stored from any screen name, including the images that used to grace my earliest entries from my old AOL Journal Musings from Mâvarin. I had already gone through the Blogger versions of most of those entries and relinked to the same images as stored on mavarin.com, but it was still good to grab what was there.

For one thing, I rediscovered some 2004 Tuffy pictures that I didn't seem to have on my hard drive. They were taken with the old Mavica, an early, bulky digital camera with such low-res photos that we used to get twenty of them on each floppy disk, which is what the camera used for storage. Unsurprisingly, they're not great pictures, but I'm fond of them. I still remember the day I took some of them. One thing I did tonight was save them back to my hard drive and clean them up with PhotoStudio. It helped a lot.

My PhotoWorks albums were kind of an odd lot. There was an entire album of someone else's fall foliage shots, and another one of somebody's messes from a discussion I had with other journalers back in 2004. I also had a "scratchpad" album with one photo, a "shoebox" album with 51 photos, a few albums I put together on purpose for various incarnations of AOL profiles and AIM pages, and a bunch of albums named after individual Musings entries. Most of the latter had one or two photos each. Surprisingly, there were also a number of journal-based albums with zero photos each! I'm not quite sure what happened there, but nothing seems to be missing. I deleted the empty albums and consolidated the onesies. From here they could be re-linked to the relevant entries on the Blogger version of the old journal, but as I say, I'd already relinked to most of the same images as stored elsewhere. Just as well, really.

The most annoying part of the process was dealing with a few old Woohoo slideshows. These were the cool AOL Pictures slideshows that had various effects available for the transition from one image to the next. My favorite by far was the "Ken Burns" style, named for the documentary director's technique of panning across still photos while zooming in and out on them. I had one of those set up for a slide show of a 2004 trip to Las Vegas, and another one was on the main page of the St. Michael's website. With the transfer to PhotoWorks, those Woohoos were gone. I had to fuss with the St Michael's page for a while to get the more boring Picasa version of the slide show in place, realign the table it was in, and fix some text that the site's host service, GoDaddy, kept resizing as tiny.

While I was at it, I also put in a bit of time tagging a bunch of the Musings entries. There are over 600 entries, so it's way too tedious a job to do all at once. Another problem with some of the old entries is that spaces between words went missing in a number of places. This used to be an ongoing glitch in the early days of AOL Journals, and the transfer to Blogger seems to have exacerbated the problem.

You may have noticed that I've been fussing with the sidebar for the Outpost in recent days. Blogger recently introduced much better sidebar widgets, now called gadgets. My favorite is the blogroll-style linking lists, one which you can display the most recent entry of each blog and the first image in that entry. I found that very handy last weekend in keeping track of who has posted their Round Robin entries. It's also a very fast way to see what interesting things people are up to generally.

Anyway, I've set up a more exclusive "Recent Robins" list in place of the old static one, listing only the people who played last weekend. If you play along with the next one, "On My Table,", your blog will be added to the list. A second sidebar gadget section, titled "Weekenders," will similarly link to everyone who does one or more Weekend Assignments. Everyone else whose blog I visit with any frequency (or feel that I should) is on one or more of the other sidebar lists. If you're a regular reader and I'm not linking to your blog, let me know and I'll probably add it. I purged quite a few inactive or defunct blogs with my recent update.

Karen

Half a Park, Half an Order, and Half-Expected News

Okay, I have several things to talk about tonight, all unrelated to each other save for the rhetorical flourish above. See what I did just there?

1. Half a Dog Park is Better Than None

Cayenne and Pepper and I went to Miko's Corner Playground as usual today, only to discover that a fence had been erected across the middle of it, blocking access to the southern half of the medium-to-large-dog enclosure. An elderly couple told me that this is an annual event; they close off half of the dog park, re-sod it, give it time to get established, and then open up that end while closing off the other end for the same process. I can't complain one bit about this. To be honest, the grass has been looking almost like a scattering of hay on bare dirt in recent weeks.

It does present me with a small problem. My usual routine is to walk around the (presumed) 440 yard track several times while the dogs sort of follow me around, dashing off frequently to chase other dogs, meet people, squat on the grass or smell interesting smells. With no sidewalk or track at the temporary fence, it's become difficult to do anything like that, especially since many of the owners congregate there, making navigation difficult. Ah, well, it will all be worth it in the end.

I did try sitting on one of the four still-accessible benches, but the dogs didn't know what to do if I wasn't moving. Eventually I stood around having a nice conversation about the dog park, dogs, cancer and the economy with a retired physicist and his wife. The dogs managed to amuse themselves with other dogs until it started to get dark. I'll have to start taking them out there earlier than 5 PM.

2. Half an Order Is Better Than None.

Doctor Who: The Complete Fourth Series arrived today from Amazon. I had pre-ordered it using my unemployment money debit card, and I don't regret or apologize for it one bit. This is going to be our leanest Christmas ever - John will probably count this as my only Christmas present - but I wasn't going to wait or do without. There are lots of other things I can't have right now - several Scalzi books, lunches out, new clothes and so on, and that's fair enough. After all, I am unemployed. I'm not pulling my financial weight. But Doctor Who is a lifeline for me, a joyous escape from my worries. I devoured most of the DVD extras tonight, all those deleted scenes and video diaries and so on, and they were great. If you don't happen to be a Doctor Who fan, mentally put yourself in my situation and then imagine the arrival of a box set of DVDs from your favorite TV show ever, packed with bits and pieces of stuff you've never seen before. It's fabulous.

There was also a Doctor Who-related book in my Amazon order, another bargain-priced pre-order which was originally scheduled to arrive tomorrow. It's essentially a series of emails between the show's head writer/executive producer and his journalist friend, fascinating stuff by all accounts. It hasn't shipped yet, and Amazon wants to know what I want to do about it. This book has been out for about two months in the UK, and what I ordered is the UK edition. So what I want to know is this: if I canceled the US order and ordered it from Amazon UK for approximately $2 more, would I get it any sooner? Who knows? I'm feeling a little guilty that I ordered it at all, but I had to do it. I just had to. I need to economize somewhere else now, somehow, to make up for it. By the way, friends, there will be no Amazon gift certificates from me this year. I'm sure you understand. Even John's Christmas stocking won't necessarily be full, for the first time ever. Nor mine, I imagine.


3. Half-Expected News Arrives About My Former Employer.

That's it. Either I'm a jinx or I'm very unlucky in the jobs I get, when I get one at all. First the travel agency business starts to go the way of the buggy whip (my longtime employer Worldwide Travel closed up shop this past summer), and then the mortgage industry crashes and burns (I was suddenly jobless when First Magnus went bankrupt in August 2007), and now this:

Beaudry RV files for bankruptcy protection

This is the company I've been calling Famous Vehicle Dealer in this blog, the company I worked for from September 2007 to May 2008. The fact that their financial problems just became public record means that I will no longer hide the company name. However, I have nothing negative to say about Beaudry, other than that I wasn't very happy there. It's hard to stay cheerful when it's obvious that your employer is struggling. It was not a question of mismanagement or anything like that. It's just that while I was working for them, gas prices rose to nearly $4.00 a gallon, and diesel fuel, which powers the high-end motor homes, cost considerably more than that. Who wants to spend $1,000 to fill the tank of a vehicle that gets 8 to 11 miles per gallon? And even now, as gas prices fall, it's unlikely that many people in this economy are spending $60,000 to $100,000 or more on a vehicle for which financing is increasingly difficult to obtain. Although Beaudry laid me off, I wish them well, and hope the bankruptcy filing and restructuring enables them to stay in business.

Karen

Meanwhile, Back at My Life

Yes, I admit it. These days I'm having trouble motivating myself to do anything productive beyond shopping, dishes and laundry, unless you count the daily visits to the dog park.

I have buttons to make for the Democratic Party office and for a collector, and button designs to do for the Inauguration. I haven't done any work on any of that.

I should be sorting through boxes, and getting the old Chrysler New Yorker hauled away, and working on the novels. There are so many things I theoretically have time for. Instead I watch Countdown with Keith Olberman, The Rachel Maddow Show and Doctor Who, my email and my Twitter feed. It's no longer a question of trying to keep up with election news. It's an attempt to distract myself from my personal situation.

My biopsy is scheduled for December 10th. The office visit and procedure will cost $163. The lab cost will be $140 "per specimen." My doctor's assistant says there should be only one specimen.

It will go on a credit card.

Even when I had health insurance, it once took me the better part of a year to pay off one stress test at Tucson Medical Center that fell under the threshold of my deductible. This new procedure costs considerably less than that. If it rules out cancer it will be well worth it.

And no, I never heard back on the latest job opening my main recruiter called about last week. There were supposedly four staff accountant positions available on a temp-to-hire basis. What, did they decide I wasn't worth an interview for any of them? There was something hinky about the industry they were in. My recruiter kept hinting about a regulatory reason why the pay scale changed for the worse between his first phone call to me and his second. The only thing he would confirm is that it's not the health industry, which seems to be behind most of the listings I see these days. The health industry jobs all want health industry experience. What other industry is highly regulated? Airline? Banking?

Maybe the four openings disappeared like vaporware as the company got caught up in the economic downturn. I used to see listings all the time that Citicorp was hiring, for about the same money I was making at Worldwide Travel in the early 1990s. But on Monday the news was that Citicorp was laying off 53,000 people (or 52,000; reports vary). John just received a notice that American Express, which just received government help in the form of deregulation, was raising John's interest rate. We haven't owed a penny to American Express in three years. So yeah, if that regulated industry K. was hinting about was banking, the jobs may not be filled at all.

And I'm getting fewer and fewer search results emails from CareerBuilder and other job sites. The ones I do get often have only one to three listings for jobs I'm underqualified or overqualified for - and they're all in Phoenix or Tempe, a hundred miles away. Latest local news here is that unemployment numbers are expected to be up in the imminent statistics for October, and fewer winter visitors are expected here to keep the local tourist and other industries afloat.

Troubling times. Is it any wonder I'm distracted?

Karen

EMPS: Strange Brew - Electric Chocolate!

Generic hot cocoa from an office Christmas gift, weird Disney cocoa and the good stuff.

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #12, Carly wants to see pictures of hot beverages. We have a number of boxes of tea floating around the Kitchen of the Museum of the Weird, and John probably has some coffee. But none of that is remotely as visually interesting as our stash of hot cocoa. In fact, our hot chocolate is more for the eyes than the taste buds, as we shall see.

The exceedingly generic-looking cocoa tin on the left was part of an office gift from one of my supervisors last Christmas. I've never been able to make myself try this off-brand cocoa, but I like the packaging. The three tins in the middle are from a sample pack we got at Downtown Disney's World of Disney store in Anaheim a couple of years ago. This Disney hot chocolate comes in Sorcerer Blue, Galaxy Green and Rock 'N' Roll Red. And I don't mean just the tins. The hot chocolate itself comes in those colors!

Handmade rabbit cup from Mount Lemmon, classic green mug

To show these to you, I pulled out two of our more interesting cups to hold the cocoa. The one on the left is a handmade pottery cup I bought on Mount Lemmon many years ago. It's dated 1987. The green mug is more recent. It reminds my of Giles's cup on Buffy, and of classic Jadite.

But you want to see the actual hot beverage, don't you? Very well, then. Check out Mickey's favorite, the blue hot chocolate!

This is the actual color.

I did not tweak the color at all on the photo above. It really looks like that.

Buzz Lightyear's fave: Galaxy Green

And here is the green. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough green cocoa left to get it as dark as it can be, or to make it worth drinking.

I drank only a sip of the green cocoa tonight, and none of the blue. I cloned the evidence out of the blue cocoa photo, but the fact is that my three year old cocoa was, well, infested. So now the blue and green tins are empty, but we'll keep 'em for display as souvenirs. As for the red, well, somehow that color never appealed to me as a color for hot chocolate. I don't even want to open that tin at this point.

Psychedelic cocoa!

But as long as we're having fun with hot chocolate in odd colors, let's play with the concept a little more. This is the green cocoa, solarized, with a second layer added using the neon edges effect and I forget what else. It's the Electric Cocoa Acid Test!

Be sure to check Ellipsis every Monday for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, and for links to the previous week's entries.

Karen

P.S. Jama asks what the oddly colored hot chocolate tastes like. It tastes like hot chocolate. Not the best, richest, most wonderful and flavorful hot chocolate ever, but sort of run of the mill, not too sweet, not quite chocolately enough hot chocolate. On the other hand, mediocre hot chocolate doesn't give you that unpleasant feeling of cocoa overload midway through the second cup. Oh, and no dehydrated marshmallows.

Half a Lifetime of Dogs

Three decades of dogs on one bed: Pepper, Noodle, Cayenne, Tuffy and Jenny.

If you read last night's entry, the picture above probably looks a little familiar to you. I did a version of it last night for the Round Robin Photo Challenge, compositing Tuffy into a photo of Pepper and Cayenne on the bed. For that one I tried to comply with the Challenge's concept, which was to match up parts of two photos into something that almost, but not quite, looks like one picture. Even at that I fudged things a bit. Tonight I thought I'd make another pass at the composite image, this time using the tools in my cheap photo editing program to really make it look like the dogs are sharing the bed. And while I'm at it, I'd like to tell you about each of these wonderful dogs. But first, an introduction:

My dad was very allergic to dogs, and I was somewhat allergic myself, but that didn't stop me from being absolutely dog-crazy. I had a poster of AKC breeds on my bedroom wall, and my favorite nonfiction book was called Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs. My childhood dream was to be a dog breeder, and breed Pomeranians back up to sled dog size. When my mom took us on a tour of Europe when I was 15, my brother Steve teased me that I went all the way to Europe to pet dogs. For many years I used to look at the price of AKC collie puppies in the classifieds ($75 to $80).

But I couldn't have a dog, all those years growing up in DeWitt and then Manlius, NY. When I started college at Syracuse University in 1975, I lived off campus for a semester, and after that I was in University housing, where no pets were allowed, through my junior year. I did sneak my tropical fish in for a semester before turning them over to someone else (my brother, I think), and later I had a gerbil named Eowyn, who escaped from her case on a regular basis and ate my prom dress. But these lesser pets did little to assuage my need for a dog.

Princess Guinevere of Westcott Street, a.k.a. Jenny Dog (front row, left) was my first dog ever. It was 1978. I had just started my senior year at Syracuse, and moved into a rooming house on Westcott Street, which belonged to my ex-boyfriend Bob (long story). Bob's live-in girlfriend Cathy had a rather spectacularly unattractive black, curly-haired mutt, which had given birth to four puppies that August. I first saw the puppies at Bob's house. Two of them were black like their mother, and two were black and brown and beautiful. Bob called the two-tone puppies Gillie (as in Doby Gillis) and Princess. A week or two later, Bob arrived at my door with Princess hidden under his jacket, and gave her to me. I promptly renamed her.

Jenny went to class with me sometimes as a puppy. She would follow for a while on the leash, and then get tired and sit, and then I would carry her until she squirmed to get down. It was something like a twenty minute walk to my classes. I had a part time job reading textbooks to a blind grad student named Liz, who loved Jenny and said she resembled a lion with her mane of long hair. Several times that winter I let her outside without a leash, but Jenny soon started taking off and going to see Liz a mile away.

But she was smart and loving, and usually obedient. In 1979 I married John and moved to Columbus, Ohio, where we owned a rock and roll store for a couple of years. Jenny stayed in the store with me, never trying to get out as people came and went. She learned to respond to whistles based on the cadence and pitch of spoken commands, such as Jenny Up! The whistled version of Jenny Dog! is still used by John and myself sometimes to find each other in public places. She loved to play with balloons, which we put in her stocking at Christmas, and she liked to fetch sticks. In 1986 she traveled the country with us on a mattress in the back of the van. But she became ill about a year later, with Cushing's disease. Even with medicine, it got harder and harder to get her to eat. One day she stopped drinking water, and could barely stand. I knew it was the end for her. The vet said she had metastacized cancer. John was out of town at the time, and I had to make the decision alone. I hired a handyman to dig her grave in the desert behind our back yard. I wrote on her stone, "Best Dog in the World." And she was.

I briefly had a second puppy in the spring of 1979, Wafer, short for Wayfarer. She turned up at my door on her own, a cute, unhousebroken black Labrador retriever puppy. One Sunday morning Wafer and Jenny both started barking, alerting me that the building was on fire! We got out, and the fire never reached my apartment. But two puppies in a one room apartment was one too many. I sorrowfully turned Wafer over to the local Humane Association, where (so they told me) she was promptly adopted.

Noodle was a pound dog, listed as seven months old and a "mixed Spitz." I always thought she was a Samoyed / Golden Retriever cross. She was a bit of a dumb dog, nowhere near as smart as Jenny but every bit as affectionate. Her one talent was for getting at any food that wasn't secured behind an impenetrable door. More than once she ate an entire loaf of bread off the counter, when the bread seemed well out of reach. We had to add a lock to the folding doors enclosing the trash. She never learned to fetch, didn't like balloons, and suffered from arthritis and dementia toward the end of her long life. But she was a good dog.

Tuffy Toro was next. As far as we could figure out, she went from her mother's side to someone's home, on to a shelter, into someone else's home, into yet another home and then into our home, all by the time she was six or seven weeks old. She was part chow, timid and skittish, but considerably smarter than Noodle. Her first few days with us, she chewed up two couches and a strip of wallpaper. John was furious, but did the right thing: we paid for a dog trainer, Karyn Garvin, to help us teach her.

Tuffy never got over barking and running away when anyone came over, but she eventually did reasonably well outside the house, such as at church for the Feast of St. Francis. She didn't have much contact with other dogs except for Noodle early on, and Pepper at the very end. She was not the most affectionate dog in the world, but would greet us when we came home, and liked to check up on us. She was very good about posing for my camera.

In September 2007, Tuffy was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, basically cancer of the tongue. We spent thousands of dollars on surgery and palliative radiation treatments, but that bought her less than a year before the cancer spread and she started to suffer. She died on August 1, 2008.

Pepper was my birthday present in March of this year. Like Tuffy, she's part chow. I'm guessing she's also part border collie. I found her on Petfinder.com. She had been on the verge of euthanasia at Pima County Animal Control along with her litter of puppies, because nobody wants to adopt a whole litter. A group called SAFE (Saving Animals From Euthanasia) rescued her, and fostered her and her puppies until the latter were weaned.

In her initial vet appointment, Dr. L. estimated that Pepper was three or four years old, which is considerably older than SAFE listed her as being. John thinks she's older still. She's a little skittish and standoffish, much like Tuffy, and doesn't like to look us in the eye; but she's getting better. She's stubborn and not very obedient - but again, she's getting better. When she's not hanging out a few feet away from me, she's in the back yard waiting to bark at cats. In the dog park she likes to chase and bark at some of the larger dogs, including a St. Bernard!

Cayenne, affectionately known as Cay-Cay (rhymes with "bye bye"), is our newest dog. I figure she's an Irish Setter/Greyhound cross, or something along those lines. We adopted her on August 2nd, the day after we lost Tuffy to cancer. She was at the Humane Society, with a similar story to Pepper's - she had recently had puppies, and a volunteer had fostered her and the puppies. She has a scar next to one eye. I suspect abuse. She was way too thin when we got her. The fact sheet on her said that she "almost ate a guinea pig."

She is a bouncy, affectionate show-off, eager to please and rather needy. Like Pepper she loves the dog park, and loves chasing other dogs. When she gets excited at home, she tries to get Pepper to play with her. Sometimes it even works! And I love her to pieces.

Karen

Round Robin: Split Dogs and Mixed Up Signs

It's Round Robin time! This week's topic, Two Halves Don't Make a Whole, was suggested by Nancy of Nancy Luvs Pix. The idea is to photograph two similar things, take half of each, and line them up so they almost fit together as one photo. Silly me, I thought this would be fairly easy. Take the shots, resize so they match, and line 'em up! But it wasn't quite that simple....

One idea I had for this was to piece together halves of different Mexican restaurant signs photographed along 22nd St., but the dogs were in the car and I didn't want to mess with it. So I photographed signs at the Safeway Plaza, the same place where I photograph so many sunsets.

None of these composites are strictly speaking half and half; I had to crop and fudge to make them work. I think they're close enough.

This one is my favorite of the signs.

But the main thing I wanted to do tonight was composite the dogs, and that was much harder than the signs. Getting two dogs to hold exactly the same pose isn't easy!

Even going through photo archives, it was hard to match up angles and backgrounds and sizes.

Cayenne meets Noodle, a decade late

One cool thing I could do, though, was push two couches together...

...add an extra dog to the bed...

...or even let Cayenne ride with Jenny in the back of our van in 1986!

I suppose that's not exactly the concept, but it sure was fun!

Now go see how everyone else did with this especially challenging Challenge. (And yes, you're invited to play along yourself!)

Linking List

Nancy - Posted!
Nancy Luvs Pix
http://nancyluvspix.blogspot.com/

Jama Hameed - Posted! 11/16/08
sweet memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Sherrie**Welcome New Member** - Posted! 11/06/08
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com/

Gina - Posted!
Gina's Space
http://ginas-space.blogspot.com/

Martha - Posted!
Menagerie
http://meandering-martha.blogspot.com/

Connie - Posted!
Far Side of Fifty Photos
http://farsideoffiftyphotos.blogspot.com/

Steven - Posted!
(sometimes)photoblog
http://sometimesphotoblog.com/

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/

Karen

Weekend Assignment #242: Local TV Host

I tried to write up a Weekend Assignment topic that was a lighthearted take on $700 billion bailout and the 210 page "Plum Book" of government jobs, asking you to write up why you deserve a government job or a chunk of the bailout cash. But you know what? The topic doesn't really lend itself to lightheartedness. So let's skip that and try something else:

Weekend Assignment #242: Local television used to feature lots of kids' shows and late night movies, often featuring a colorful local host. Share a memory of local tv of yesteryear.

Extra Credit:You've been asked to produce a local tv show. Commercial considerations aside, what kind of show would it be?

Not sure who the guys on the ends are.

I've written before about the 1955-1982 tv series Magic Toy Shop on WHEN-TV in Syracuse. It starred Marylin Hubbard Herr as Merrily, Socrates Sampson(!) as Eddie Flum Num, Tony Riposo as Twinkle (who played the Magic Piano in lieu of talking) and Jean Daugherty (the show's writer-producer) as the Play Lady. Oh and college professor Dr. Lewis B. "Doc" O'Donnell played Mr. Trolley, with a trolley-shaped full mask on his head and the rest of his body not showing. The show was on at 9 AM, right after Captain Kangaroo. I used to watch it in my preschool years, and intermittently thereafter when I didn't have school. To be honest, I found the show kind of tame and boring, especially once I started school. But it had a great, memorable opening, about a smile being the magic key to the magic door to the wonderful Magic Toy Shop.

There were lots of other local shows in Syracuse back then. One weekday afternoon kids' show was hosted by Denny Sullivan, and called either The Popeye Funhouse or Denny Sullivan and His Gang, depending on which source you believe, and possibly what year it was. Sullivan wore a striped suit and straw boater hat, described on one web site as "a carnival barker's outfit." That's probably about right. The show was mostly Popeye cartoons, but I think Betty Boop was also in the mix. It was on WSYR, Channel 3.

Popeye also got weekend exposure on Channel 3, with Salty Sam (Bill Everett) hosting Saturday Popeye Theater. He later hosted Saturday Showboat and Salty Sam's Super Saturday before leaving the station in 1980. Everett's real name was Willard Everett Lape Jr. He died in 2004.

Another weekday afternoon cartoon show was Jet Set, circa 1965. It featured Colonel Skip and his fellow astronaut on the Gemini Five spacecraft, broadcasting cartoons from space. Naturally the show was on Channel Five. The only cartoon I specifically remember being on it was Roger Ramjet, which I hated. It must have had better stuff as well, though, because I watched the show faithfully during its brief run.


The coolest of the Syracuse kids' shows, although it only lasted about four years, was WNYS Channel 9's Baron Daemon and his Bloody Buddies, starring weatherman Mike Price as the Baron, a humorous vampire character. (I've also seen the name spelled DeMoan, but that's incorrect. It was, however, pronounced Day-MOAN.) He even made a novelty record, the Transylvania Twist. I was totally jealous when my friend Joel got to be in the Baron's peanut gallery for his birthday. The show was wiped out in 1967 by a fire at Channel 9's studios at Shoppingtown in DeWitt, which destroyed the sets and costumes. The character had started out hosting late night movies, according to what I read online, but I don't remember that.

I do remember the weekend show Monster Movie Matinee, starring Bill Everett as Epal, his real surname spelled backwards. He was the Igor-like assistant to Dr. E. Nick Witty, played by Alan Milair. All we ever saw of Witty was his dessicated hand with long fingernails, although we heard his voice. I remember being excited one time when Epal conducted viewers on a video tour of the Monster Mansion.

There were also adult shows. Ladies' Day and Phil Markert were two of them. My main memory of the former was a tip about cutting up a whole chicken (.29 a pound) to avoid spending .69 a pound on "whole chicken - cut up." Markert I remember as a piano player and disk jockey. He was fairly amusing.

Do I have a favorite among all those offerings? I suspect it depends on how old I was at the time. But I think that overall I have to go with Baron Daemon. And wonder of wonders, there's even Baron Daemon merchandise available from Cafe Press!

Oh, and on the extra credit: I'd do a late night science fiction movie show, with a good dollop of horror and genre comedy.

Update, December 8, 2008: Since a number of people have apparently been looking up various Magic Toy Shop characters on my blog, here are a few additional tidbits of info I turned up tonight, mostly as obituaries:

• Leighton "Sox" Tiffault, known at Fayetteville-Manlius High School when I was there as "Mr. T." or just plain "T" (note this was before Rocky) apparently died in June 2002. He taught music theory and composition at F-M, and was director of the super-select choreographed music group Swing Sixteen, which I once auditioned for though I hadn't a prayer of getting in. One of the songs we sang in a less select high school choir was Busy City by T., and I think he also wrote a spoken word piece we did, Geographic Fugue. His most controversial work was a Mass; people couldn't handle the troping concept, or T's satirical song Let's Go to Confession. Earlier in his career he played piano in the house band of the local tv show The Jim DeLine Gang, which predated Denny Sullivan and the Gang. Tiffault performed unseen as the Magic Piano on Magic Toy Shop, whenever the piano-playing Twinkle the Clown went on vacation. Bye, Mr. T., and thanks for everything!
• Speaking of Denny Sullivan, I've run across an abstract of his obituary, too. He died September 17, 200, age 83. His Popeye-based local show ran from 1962 thru 1971. He was a World War II vet, serving US Army in the Phillipines and Hawaii.

Your turn! Tell us your memories of local tv. If you didn't have kiddie show hosts or late night movies, was there a memorable news or magazine show? Tell us about it! Write it up in your blog along with a link back here, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with a roundup of your responses. Speaking of which: