Good Bye View-Master

The best toy ever, the View-Master, is being put to sleep after 70 years of making kids happy. It seems the new kids aren't amused by the View-Master. It doesn't have enough moving parts, doesn't make interesting noises and doesn't do all the work for you. You actually have to use your imagination to play with it.

I treasured my View-Master when I was a kid. Maybe that's because I didn't have a closet full of toys, or maybe that's because I was the type who liked being drawn into another world that seemed to be on another plane.

I had Quick Draw McGraw

and Deputy Dawg.

I had the Flintstones and famous places and wild animals. I had Jungle Book and Disney Land and Snoopy and space images. You could hold the red viewer up to your eyes so close you couldn't see anything of the real world but could focus just on the 3-D images in front of your eyes. And you could live in that world as long as you could hold your arms up to your face.

Yep. I loved my View-Master. My kids had them, too, and their old reels are still somewhere in the house with an updated projector kind of View-Master. I'll have to break those out and disappear into the world of 3-D for awhile and remember the days of leisurely sitting on the floor with all those reels spread out on the floor waiting to take me to another world. Stupid new kids and their demanding ways.

Cindy Loo Who In October

What is it with people and Cindy Loo Who? Of my last one hundred blog hits, forty have been direct visits from regular readers, and fifteen have been as a result of people searching for "Cindy Loo Who," the little pixie from Seuss's How The Grinch Stole Christmas . A couple of years ago, I posted an image of the original Seuss illustration as compared to the TV cartoon image, and for some reason, that post is bringing in the crowds, relatively. Maybe it's the weather. It isn't even November yet, and already we've had frost and have had to dust off our winter coats. When it gets cold like this, I start to think about Christmasy things like listening to Nat King Cole and decorating the tree. It's ironic because I am offended when retailers start pushing holiday stuff early, but I don't mind my own private celebrations. When my sister and I were much younger and still living with our parents, we would pick a day in July, close the curtains to darken the ...

I'm In the Paper Today

Here is an article in today's Small Town Newspaper.

The Ultimate Storyteller—in Life AND in Death

I wrote about The Autobiography of Mark Twain in yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper. You can read it here , if you want. This is the photograph I had in mind while I read Clemens' dictations. He really was a masterful storyteller, even when rambling on about the poorly designed door knobs in Florence or in describing the Countess Massiglia, who he described as a "pestiferous character." About her, he said, “She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward.” And I laughed out loud.

Scout Moves

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