Puppies that can't get up:

Dinosaurs that perform ballet:

The extreme weirdness that is Banana Splits, a Hanna-Barbera show that aired between 1968 and 1970:

UPDATE — This video about Pringle sweaters:

It walks! It talks! It's Chatty Schmutzie!

Without any further ado or senseless exclaiming, here is my face and my voice all together for the first time ever on this website, thanks to the Palinode's fancy interviewing and video editing skills:

Summary: I have an intense fear of death and have things I want to accomplish without subjecting myself to an early one by throat cancer, so I quit smoking so that I could sleep at night and not lay awake imagining my own demise over and over. Quitting has mostly improved my ability to sleep, except for when it doesn't. Damnable mortality. Then, I talk about my hopes and dreams. Also, there are dancing cigarettes!

I came across this amazing young woman named Carly this morning at Pacing the Panic Room, and when I watched this clip from 20/20, it brought up an ache in my chest that I had nearly forgotten was there:

Carly spent the first 11 years of her life unable to communicate because she was completely overwhelmed by her autism, and then one day, without having been taught to, she began to type. Her family and therapists did not even know that she could type words, but there she was telling them that she was in pain and wanted help. She is now in her mid-teens and has a blog, Carly's Voice, and a fairly active Twitter account.

Watching her bang her head and flail and make loud noises and then turn around and be able to share of herself in typed words squeezed all the blood out of my heart and left a gaping ache where it used to beat. My older brother has autism which is further complicated by multiple issues including oxygen deprivation at birth, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and scar tissue on his brain from strokes he had in utero, but so much of Carly's story still resonated with my experience with Ward.

There is an obvious intelligence in Ward's eyes that belies his spasticity, bent posture, and grunting vocalization. He has a passion for music that has had him nearly bouncing his bed broken when his favourite singer hits a particular high note. His eyes would flash mischievous just before he nearly choked from laughing when we would discover the chaos he could create with a squeeze bottle of ketchup, raw eggs, and an unattended refrigerator. When I used to read to him out of the Audobon encyclopedia, he would commit himself to the rare act of sitting still, fingers pressed together as I told him about the efficient flying style of the albatross.

This same boy smashed himself against the floor until the carpet was dark with his blood. He put his head through the hallway wall into my bedroom. He bit through glass cups and drank detergent. He was able to speak only once since he was four years old, and that was in his mid-teens when he grabbed my mother hard around her face and used all of his body and mind to say Mmm-mmm-muh-muh-muh-MOM.

There is so much more inside him, a boy now a man turning 40 in November. As a teenager, he wore his frustration violent and loud. It was during that time that I saw him cry, and only that once. Since then, he has grown and mellowed and become a happy man with a quick smile and joy to share. It is a relief to see him this way now after all the anguish I witnessed in his adolescence.

I spent hours talking to him when I was a kid, wondering what thoughts were caught behind the various masks of his disabilities. Hearing Carly's words thrilled me for her and what that might mean for other people with autism, but it also horrified me to think of all that Ward has never been able to say. It finally hit me this morning just how much I have missed of who he is because neither we nor he could find his voice, and I realized my grief while watching another find hers.

Sometime after midnight last night, my brain became stuck in this round of ukulele-centric thoughts. It was ukuklele, ukulele, ukulele for about two hours straight.

I am not sure what brought it on. It might be the Paliinode's talk of banjos lately that got me thinking about my own experience with stringed instruments, or maybe it was some masochistic drive to peer back in on the overarching suburban malaise that coloured my elementary school years. Whatever it was, I remembered that we took ukulele in grade four music class, and I secretly wanted one for my very own with a hardshell case and a guitar pick.

Every kid in elementary school learned to play the ukulele, which makes me think that I wasn't giving my drippy music teacher enough credit at the time. Anybody that can stand to listen to 32 nine-year-olds weakly strumming "Octopus's Garden" on 32 barely tuned ukuleles for months on end has found the good drugs.

We also played "Country Roads", "This Land Is Your Land", and "Delta Dawn", but we managed to devolve the lyrics of those songs into tasteless shadows of their former selves. Someone had picked up some dirty lyrics to "Delta Dawn" that only the most corrupted among us understood, but still we snickered while we sang the part about a porcelain penis with our heads ducked below our music stands. We all knew what penis meant, and that shit was high comedy.

Just as nearly anything can be, given the right twist, I figured that the ukulele could be cool. I actually really like them: they're nice and portable, they're not that expensive, and it could be another creative outlet for me. I have ways to get out my written, visual, and crafty creativities, but not my musical side, and the ukulele is quiet enough to keep the neighbours from registering complaints with the landlord.

Last night, after I'd mentioned the ukulele several times in a row in the tone of an infatuated 14-year-old, the Palinode asked me, "What would you do with a ukulele?" I said, "I would write haunting yet beautiful works."

Even though I am close to dead broke, am recently unemployed, and have to wrangle the trickling stream of income I once wrung out of my recently borked iBook — (Apple? Think sponsorship. Let's talk.) — I found myself cruising through eBay and found a couple of pretty dashing and cheap-as-borscht ukuleles to dream about.

The first is the spashy Kala Makala Red Sparkle soprano ukulele:

And the second is the sweet Kala Makala Blue Burst:

Yep. I headed straight for the sparkles and the fancy paint job numbers, because when you dream, you should dream big, people.

My first musical composition, once I've crocheted my way into building up a ukulele fund, is going to be an ode to a cat what sticks his feet on his owner's eyelids at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday and then completely ignores her when she opens her eyes. It will be called "Ode to a Bastard Cat, Son of a Homeless Whore".