"Much Loved" Old Teddy Bears Offer Poignant Photography, Comfortable Memories

Admit it.

Me, relaxing with my childhood teddy bear and
my favorite childrens'  book.  

You're probably an adult, and have been one for a long time.

But chances are, you still have the old teddy bear or other stuffed toy that, when you were little, could not be separated from, EVER.

And I bet you still would never part ways with Teddy. He's in your house somewhere, watching over you, protecting you, making you feel safe just like he did when you were three years old.

Along those lines, a photographer named Mark Nixon put together a book called "Much Loved" a collection of images showing very, very battered teddy bears and similar toys that had been hugged and hugged and hugged in times of childhood stress.

Their owners could never let go of these toys, even well into adulthood, and it's understandable why.

Here's what Nixon had to say about the project on the website BoingBoing:

"......I put the call out for people to bring in their much-loved teddies--the more loved, unwashed, and falling apart the better--to be photographed. I expeted it to be mostly children, but it soon became apparent that the idea appealed very much to adults, and that many of them were still very attached t their teddies. It was as though they had been keeping a long-held secret and could finally tell someone what their teddies really meant to them.

Their strength of feeling took me by surprise. While waiting they would tell some usually funny story about their teddy (How they had nearly lost it at some stage was a common theme) or would speak emotionally about what it meant to them. So the stories and memories became integral to the photographs, adding significance to them and bringing them to life."

Someone's childhood teddy bear
from the photography book "Much Loved"
 by Mark Nixon  

I can so relate to the people who had their teddy bears photographed by Nixon. I still have my childhood teddy bear, and I'm 51 years old.

Compared to the teddies in Nixon's photographs, mine's in pretty good shape. He still has his two golden eyes, and a brown button nose. His fur is matted with age, the bottoms of his white feet are dirty and his mouth is misshapen.

When I first had him, you could squeeze him and he'd say things like "I love you" but that feature broke a long, long time ago.

My teddy sits on a dresser drawer in the bedroom. He's joined by other child-like toys an items I collected as an adult. There's a stuffed Tasmanian devil, from Looney Tunes, that I bought more than two decades ago.

About four years ago, when I had to go into a surgery, my best friend Denis gave me a children's book called "The Gift Of Nothing" by Patrick McDonnell, which charmingly tells us the best thing we can give to our loved ones is time and friendship.

The book is most assuredly in that place of honor in my bedroom.  When I need a little encouragement after a setback that looms large but is really unimportant,  I read "The Gift of Nothing." It always helps immensely.

Lately, I've been obsessed with Minions from "Despicable Me," those cheerful, yellow pill shaped characters who happily soldier on despite all kinds of outlandish and humiliating mishaps

I'm not the least bit ashamed of having these childhood, or childlike items as important touchstones of my life.

We all have bad moments. We all have stress.  We keep our childhood teddy bears and add to our collection because we remember how we felt when Mom yelled at us, or classmate Susie said we were stinky, or we couldn't get the toy we wanted.

The toy panda bear photographer
Mark Nixon had when he was a kid.
He included it in his book "Much Loved"
which shows poignant images
of peoples' childhood teddy bears  

Teddy always made us feel better. We can hug something warm and fuzzy and everything was OK.

That's why a lot of us, as adults, have dogs, isn't it?  If I've had a busy, stressful day, I'll collapse onto the couch. Jackson the Cocker Spaniel will run up, leap up onto my lap and tell me to start giving him a back rub.

Yeah, it feels good to him, but it feels good to me, too. The backrub I give Jackson soothes me more than it soothes him.

It makes me feel like I did when I hugged my teddy bear as a toddler. I bet the you go through the same thing with your dog or cat, if you're lucky enough to have them in your house.

After a few minutes of back rubbing, Jackson leaps off my lap, deposits himself on the floor next to his favorite toy, looks at me, bright eyed and tail wagging and says "Woof!"

That means it's time to play, and chasing Jackson around the house with his toy buffalo or toy cow makes both of us feel great and erases any last vestiges of stress.

Just like when I was a three year old, and Teddy and I, climbing a small hill outside,  pretended we were conquering Everest.

So yes, all adults should have comforting playmates. They could be intelligent beings, like my dog Jackson, or an old teddy bear, or a children's book.

Some people might say clinging to such things is insane.

I say it's the most sane thing any adult could do.

Goblinproofing Chicken Coops and Other Awesome Books

It's an exciting time of year, when finalists for the Diagram Prize for the year's oddest named books is out.

Last year, my favorite was called "Cooking With Poo." and it will be almost impossible to top that.

My favorite this year is "Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop" by Reginald Bakerly, which sounds totally handy in this day of DIY backyard farming. So many people I know nowadays keep chickens in their back yards for fresh eggs. I'd hate to have the chickens spooked, by ghosts, or worse, the eggs we eat become tainted by the Otherworld.

Required reading for anyone with chickens

The Amazon description of the book is priceless:

"In this charming guide, "fairy hunter" Reginald Bakeley offers practical instructions to clear your home and garden of these unsettling inhabitants, and banish them from your chicken coop and kitchen cupboard forever!
In Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop readers will discover:

• Why a bustle in one's hedgerow may be cause for alarm
• Why a garden fumigator may come in handy on evenings at the pub
• Why a toy merchant, a butcher, and a Freemason are among your best allies in the fight against the fey (sic)

Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop is the only complete manual on how to identify, track, defend, and destroy those bothersome brownies, goblins, dwarves, scheming flower-fairies, and other nasty members of the fairy realm."

Um, wasn't a bustle in a hedgerow part of a Led Zeppelin song lyric? Will a bustle in a hedgerow make our backyard chickens start singing "Stairway to Heaven?" I hope not.

In any event, "Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop  would make a fantastic sequel to some movie like "The Exorcist," though. Girl has fresh eggs from the backyard coop for breakfast. Eggs are haunted, so evil spirit invades eggs that girl ate. Horror ensues!

I'm writing the screenplay now. I feel an Oscar in my future, thanks to "Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop."

There are other very worthwhile titles in this year's list of Diagram Prize finalists. One is called "How to Sharpen Pencils" by David Rees, which sounds like a worthwhile guide for completing the ever important task of sharpening a pencil.

The most crucial guide
for pencil pushers

The book's subtitle is certainly a handful: "A Practical Guide and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths and Civil Servants."

Who knew you needed a whole book to learn how to sharpen a pencil correctly? God, life is so complicated!

I'm sure Rees' tongue is firmly in cheek, and the Amazon description of the book is fun:

Rees, previously known as creator of the brash, deadpan, clip-art comic strip, Get Your War On, has set out to do what few of his predecessors in the pencil-sharpening game have, laying forth not just a detailed practical manual of all of the major sharpening techniques and devices but also a thoughtful discourse on the creative, performative, psychological, and even occult aspects of the sharpener’s art. 

Bowing to popular usage, he includes a section on the proper use of electric sharpeners (it involves a mallet) and a trenchant (if profane) discourse on mechanical pencils. Although this reviewer was brought up a little short by the omission of chapters on sharpening in the dark or at higher altitudes, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that this is without doubt the most thorough single-volume work on the sharpening of North American No. 2 pencils currently in existence. 

One is tempted to call it a must-read for anyone who has ever used a pencil. Then one comes to one’s senses and recommends it, rather, to those who possess a home workbench, a dry wit, and/or a healthy appreciation of the absurd. --David Wright 

Next on the list is "How Tea Cosies Changed the World," by Laoni Prior.

I'm fascinated by this book because I'd love to know how a device for keeping tea warm altered the path of world history, as the title implies. Was a tea cosy so effective in some past diplomatic negotiation that it made everyone feel good and avert a huge war?

Will tea cosies alter the future of the world, too? We'll have to buy the book to find out.

However the book appears more about making tea cosies, not their history, judging from the Amazon profile.

Maybe tea cups changed the world more, who knows?

Bad Book Covers and the Streisand Effect

The old saw is you can't judge a book by the cover, but you can sure judge the poor taste of people who design book covers.

Which leads me to the latest fun time-waster I found on the Web. It's a Tumblr site called Lousy Book Covers is a fun way to spend the hours if you don't feel like reading a book, but would rather just mock how bad the cover art is.

The people behind Lousy Book Covers acknowledge they would have toiled away on the site in obscurity had it not been for a shout out from Andrew Sullivan and a stink from a thin-skinned book author.

Apparently, the stink the thin skinned author pulled is example of  something called the Streisand Effect. It's when somebody is embarrassed or offended by something they see about themselves on line or in the media.

They raise holy hell about it, that attracts a ton of attention and suddenly something that would have died a quiet death explodes into the national conscience, futher embarrasing and infuriating the person who complained to begin with.

In the case of Lousy Book Covers, authors and others who don't like having the bad art show are claiming copyright infractions. Though really, it's fair use.

Either the authors don't understand copyright law or they're just harassing the operator of Lousy Book Covers

But no matter, Lousy Book Covers is nice and instructive in how not to design your next big best seller. Hint: Don't hire a cheap artist who flunked Basics of Art 101.  Using dozens of fonts at the same time is a bad idea. A design confusing and weird enough to induce a headache is not going to encourage readership.

If you violate these rules, you will get mocked.

Go Away, Joey Buttafuoco!

I'm all for book publishing, but a new memoir by Joey Buttafuoco has to be the most unnecessary potential new publication to come along in ages.

Buttafuuoco, as only afficiandos of 1980s and early 1990s tackiness and trashiness remember, is the guy who had the affair with then-17 Amy Fisher, you know, the "Long Island Lolita."

He won't go away. Joey Buttafuoco plans a book!

The ever helpful Fisher decided to help her affair along by going to Buttafuoco's house and shooting his wife, Mary Jo in the face, thereby getting rid of her forever, Mary Jo failed to do her part by surviving the shooting.

Buttafuoco now says he's penning a book called "Closure" that's telling his side of the tale, as if anybody cares, according to TMZ. 

Yeah, that's a reason to go on living. Wait around for Joey's hot new book. Sigh.

Buttafuoco puts on his halo as he explains his reasoning for writing the book: "It's time for all of us to move on. My book is closure for everyone and our respected families. It's time."

Uh, Joey? It was time to move on decades ago. What hubris! I'm going to have the last word and close this. Never mind that for most people, this episode closed eons ago.

I'm always fascinated by the number of people who, when caught in something tawdry, milk it for all it's worth. I get the need to make money, but a lot of these people seem to celebrate their awfulness, as if it's something to be proud of. "I'm weird and icky so I deserve to make lots of money because I am weird and icky."

Our beloved Amy Fisher has also made a career of this mess.  She wrote a book or two about the shooting and everything else surrounding it. I didn't read it, but I'm sure it was a literary masterpiece.

She later got involved a bit in the pornography industry. Time to pay the bills, I guess.

I guess the only part of the economy that's doing great is the weird and icky industry.

Cooking With Poo, and Lots of Sand Dredging

Being in a silly mood recently, I was looking at Buzzfeed and found a small item on the strangest book titles.

The winner was called "Cooking With Poo" which honestly doesn't sound that appetizing. I had to wonder if restaurants did this, the health authorities would certainly disapprove.

I thought maybe the book was a takeoff on the Food Network show "Chopped" in which chefs must make delicious meals out of strange ingredients, but I doubt even TV would go as far as Poo.

On the other hand, my dog Jackson goes out in the yard and tries to eat the poo left by the flock of wild turkeys that keep wandering by. But that's another story.

Luckily,  if you read the fine print, "Cooking With Poo" is a Thai cookbook, and the word "poo" means "crab"

So, we're really cooking with crab, which is another, much better thing altogether. We can all take a big sigh or relief now. And I do feel sorry for the author, who is probably a very good cook and is getting picked on for her book she innocently titled, and we all have a middle school mentality.

It turns out that the "Poo" cookbook and many other bizarre titles are the subject of a contest. The Diagram Contest has for years honored, if you can call it that, strange book titles, according to an article in the Telegraph of London. 

I was especially taken by one of the runners up in the list of silly titles. It's called "A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel, Volume II."

Volume II!?!?!?   There's that much to say about digging sand out of a channel? The book, running all of 128 pages, is probably for those people who have insomnia and are loathe to take sleeping pills. I'd read the book to see if there's anything to say, other than people dig sand out of channels.

Maybe there's hilarious stories of people, um, spilling sand on themselves? Accidentally getting sand grains in their sandwiches during lunch? Building elaborate sand castles? Do they use little plastic shovels and buckets to do their work, like a toddler at a beach? Maybe this is interesting after all. Or not.

Past winners of the Diagram awards have been intriguing to say the least. The first year of the awards, in 1978, the big winner was "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice." I wonder if this international workshop goes on to this day.  And are nude mice a problem or something to be celebrated.

Other winners include:

1986: "Oral Sadism and The Vegetarian Personality." I never realized vegetarians have so much fun, so to speak.

1990: "Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual." This sadomasochism seems to be a recurring theme in the Diagram Awards. I'm glad there's a safety manual, though. I support anything that keeps health care costs down.

1994: "Highlights in the History of Concrete": Hey, concrete is partly made from sand. I bet a new book, a collaboration of the guy who wrote the sand dredging book would be interesting.

2002: "Living With Crazy Buttocks" I'd commit suicide inside if I had crazy buttocks, whatever that is.

2004: "Bombproof Your Horse" Because there's nothing worse than an exploding equine.

2006: "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification": Oooh! Look, a rare Target cart in that ditch near the Interstate interchange. Get a photo before it disappears!

2007: "If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs."  Good advice!

Mischievous Books Have Overnight Dance Fun in Toronto

Just found a video that made my day. The people at Type Books in Toronto painstakingly did a stop action video of books dancing around and rearranging themselves overnight after the store closed for the night.

A still from the video "Joy of Books" from Type Books in Toronto

The video is designed to celebrate the joy of books, but frankly, it's a great advertisement for the book store. Anybody who is that whimsical must run a cool store. I almost want to call in sick tomorrow and drive all the way to Toronto just to shop at this place.

“This video is a tribute, a love letter to books as objects. The door closes, the book seller goes home for the day and the party begins. The books get up and dance, they peek around the corner to make sure no one is looking and they have a really good time. It’s magical, it’s whimsical,"  said store owner Joanne Saul in a CBC interview.

Watch this super worthwhile video below: Betcha a Webter's dictionary you'll smile despite yourself.