bowling trophy

A Saturday that was forecast to be rainy turned out not bad at all.

discover

spooky yard sale

art deco school

Alice the snake (i forget the lady’s name)

Liberace: Christmas at Liberace’s

Liberace and mom.

Runner-up:

My favorite wildflower

The Brad Forrest Adventure Series No. 6 - Yucatan Adventure

The dog ate my homework.

Really.

Okay, I haven’t read the book. I got to chapter 3 then I fell asleep. It’s keen and everything, I was just tired.

So anyway, here’s what happened so far: Brad’s in a frat with this mestizo (which is like half Spanish, half Mayan) named Jose Hernandez. Brad and Jose are also on the university hockey team together (who knew Mexicans played hockey, but whatever). After the big game Jose gets a telephone call saying his father (who is some bigshot plantation owner in the Mexican jungle) has broken his leg and and Jose has to come home right away. So Brad and Jose fly from Toronto to Mexico where they’re met by this plantation foreman or something called Blair Bishop. He tells them that Señor Hernandez fell off his horse and broke his leg because he was shot at by banditos (which is gangsters) and maybe it was the bandito called “El Peso” (isn’t that like a Mexican coin?). Brad meets Señor Hernandez and then they get a message that banditos raided the Hernandez chicle plantation and the workers all ran away. So Señor Hernandez sends Blair Bishop to investigate and Jose and Brad go with him and Brad gets to fly the airplane on the way there (he has a pilot’s license even though he’s like 18 or something). And that’s when I fell asleep.

Brad’s a pretty cool guy. He never swears, the worst he’ll ever say is “golly” (Jose says golly too and “Holy Moses” - you’d think he’d talk in Mexican when he was excited). Brad’s rich because his dad owns newspapers all over the world, but he’s not stuck up, he has to have summer jobs to get money just like a regular guy.

I plan to finish reading this book when I’m not so sleepy.

—

The Brad Forrest Adventure Series was written by Hugh Maitland - the pseudonym of two staff writers for the Hamilton Spectator newspaper. The first eight titles were published by Longmans Canada in 1964-65. Another eight titles were announced on the back cover of the books (”and eight per year thereafter”) but I’ve never seen any evidence that any beyond the first eight were ever published. I’m still looking for numbers 2 (Los Angeles Adventure), 3 (Madagascar Adventure) and 4 (Calgary Adventure) to round out my collection.

More juvenile book series here.

Chinatown dress store

Hope you’re enjoying your long weekend if you’re having one. I just wanted to post a picture from my new camera. Yes, I bought a new one because low-end digital cameras are so cheap now it would have cost almost as much to have the old one repaired. And for the first time in my life, I anted up for the extended warranty.

Boozy Booklets

Last weekend I got these four vintage cocktail recipe pamphlets at a garage sale for a quarter (20¢ really, but I’m such a big spender I didn’t want the change). Price is one of the things that makes collecting these charming little booklets attractive, another is that they hardly take up any space at all - a very important consideration as my cookbook cabinet fills to bursting.

Another charming aspect to recipe pamphlets is that they’re created to push the company’s products and so you get some really, um… creative recipes. For instance, Let’s Serve Cocktails published by Taylor’s New York State Wines and Champagnes features booze in most of its hors d’oeuvre recipes including tuna salad and chip dip. As a friend pointed out, you know you have a drinking problem when you put sherry in your chip dip.

Two of these pamphlets are the latest addition to my thrift store cookbook website Mock Duck. Let’s Serve Cocktails is in the Hors D’oeuvres menu, and Beachcomber’s Barguide is in the Beverages section.

My digital camera is pooched. As of yesterday all I see on my display screen and all I’m able to take a picture of is a field of black broken only by a vertical red line toward the right edge of the frame - a problem I was having from before (you can see it if you look closely). Expect to see more scans and text only posts for the next while (and maybe some bad sketches too).

Some of the search engine terms that people have used that brought them to this blog:

plaster trophy head
how to draw a firehydrant
people sticking their heads through hole
vintage fish wall
Bowling Stencils
pricing for bowling in alberta
miniature bowling trophy
bowling cake
cakes shapped like a runner

Sorry, despite the name of this blog I can’t really help you out with anything to do with bowling. To the person looking for a cake shaped like a runner, here you go:

if by “runner” you mean it in the Canadian sense of “running shoe.” If you mean it in the sense of a person who runs - once again, sorry.

refuse

not a ride