June 20 2021 - Hollywood Cigarette, please

 

Terry O'Reilly is a podcaster whose program "Under the Influence" covers advertising and marketing topics.  Yesterday he covered fake Hollywood brands.  His CBC podcast is HERE. Maybe you know all this - about Hollywood brand cigarettes and beer.  Cigarettes are the most interesting:  Red Apple is Quentin Tarantino's brand.  It is fake, and shows up exclusively in his movies.  It first showed up in Pulp Fiction in 1994. But the first appearance of the Hollywood brand of cigarettes is Alfred Hitchcock who brought Morley's to life in the movie Psycho.  That was in 1960.  The name Morley is a play on Marleys for Marlboro cigarettes.  It was created by a prop packaging service - The Earl Hays Press. This gets around clearance and fees for real brands. Where else did it occur? The MeTV article HERE says: "The brand would soon repeatedly pop up in tobacco form on The Twilight Zone. Jack Klugman, William Shatner and Telly Savalas all carry packs of Morleys in the classic fifth season episodes "In Praise of Pip," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and "Living Doll." The smokes also surface in "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" and "Stopover in a Quiet Town."   The brand's earliest known television appearance is April 5, 1961, on an episode of Naked City. At the opening of "Tombstone for a Derelict," a young punk played by Robert Redford offers a cigarette to a bum, before his gang murders the poor fellow. After the credits, the police show up, and a pack of Morleys is discovered as a key piece of evidence.  The really well-known appearance is Richie's "chocolate treat"  on the Dick Van Dyke show when Pickles the wife of Buddey Sorrell visits the Petries and pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse - "Here I brought you a pack of chocolate cigarettes".  And where do the cigarettes occur in Psycho? At the end of Psycho, Dr. Fred Richman shakes a smoke from a pack of Morleys before explaining what happened. I should have told you about this earlier, as you can buy a prop pack for $26.00 online.  Consider this a great gift - you can put it beside Jack's All Play and No Work Book from The Shining.   And what is this sculpture today?  It is at 13th Street Winery in their greatly expanded Sculpture Garden - Floyd Elzinga's pinecone scale cut-outs are in the in the bundles. They look like shovel pieces. And then consider Locust Lane Winery - can you see the skyline of Toronto on the left?  That Skydome half-circle is the marker.  Another great location.

May 17 2021 - That's three square meals!

 

I can easily figure out that 3 meals a day came about through school, work and other institutional settings in the 17th century.  Workers would be given an allotted time for eating lunch.  Even before the industrial revolution  of the mid-19th century regularized working hours, elongated working hours, made a hearty breakfast necessary.  What about the ancient Romans and Greeks?  Ancient Grecians ate a light breakfast and lunch and then a big meal at sundown. It is said variously that the Romans ate one meal or three meals a day and that they were fixated on digestion, influencing social customs for a long time.   And the Egyptians? It is said they ate two meals a day, again the hearty meal was dinner.  In all three cultures, meat wasn't a regular staple, it was enjoyed by the rich.  The common word that comes up is porridge.  Everyone ate porridge - usually made of wheat/farro  - and both savoury and sweet. The ancient Chinese seem to have the best diet - a little meat or fish, lots of vegetables, eggs, rice and noodles. They ate two meals a day by the poor and three or four meals a day by the rulers and upper classes.  I do think that the diet above is the diet of the rich. The Middle Ages?  It was the era of dinner - at noon, according to the BBC.  The aristocracy ate formal, lavish dinners around noon.   It was artificial lighting that allowed for dinner to be eaten later, shifting the larger meal to later. And today?  There's a Google answer for this:  we don't need to eat three meals a day.  The only rules are:  eat when you're hungry, don't eat too much, and always have a varied and healthy diet that's crammed full of fruit and vegetables. Isn't that a little bit of home-spun wisdom coming from Google-land!   Here we are at Hidden Bench's barn at Locust Lane.  Travel up the escarpment at Lincoln Lane and Highway 8.  It turns into McLeod, and meets Locust Lane. A wonderful drive amongst the woods and wineries.

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