Weekend Traffic Jam - Week 156

Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot!
My posts for the link up will go live on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EDT or, if you live in the future like I do, on Fridays at 3:30 a.m. CE(S)T.

Dawn is ready to embrace the spring sun and go on her first trip of the year.
How about you, do you already have trips planned or do you travel all year round?

But first, are you ready for the weekend?

As part of the reboot, we will be featuring a different blog every week.
How about stopping by and saying hello? Let them know we sent you.

This week our spotlight is on InkTorrents Graphics.

Soma from InkTorrents Graphics says: "As a child, I was mesmerized by the world of ink and paper, which turned into a lifelong passion for art. As an eternal lover of stories, it is important for me to have a background story to the art I'm creating.
Whether I'm playing violin, guitar or piano, I use melody and dynamics to tell stories.
I deeply love science. Seeing nature through science-coloured glasses gives me a profound joy. When it is dark outside and I am not in the midst of an ink-and-paper adventure, I am most probably playing with my telescopes, catching starlight.
I feel at home in nature, looking for small hidden surprises and geological clues while hiking along trails.
All these different interests and venues fuel and inspire my art.
I am happiest when I am travelling and experiencing the world up close. My camera and I are inseparable. I use it for journalling and for creativity, capturing the abundance of colour and movement around me.
I have been painting ever since I was a child. I have always loved watercolour, but I also let the subject of painting dictate the media. I use oil, oil pastel, ink and markers as well.
My husband and I live with our lovely kitties. They do provide a lot of fun inspiration for my artwork and stories!"

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!

Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household - The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings shares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.

Cat from Cat's Wire has what she calls a jumping spider brain. She has many interests and will blog about whatever catches her attention - crafts, books, old movies, collectibles or random things.

Rena from Fine Whatever Blog writes about style, midlife, and the "fine whatever" moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she's been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.


Here are some of my picks from last week's link up.

Jill shares ten spring tops with us.

Linda tells us about a sanctuary for many.

Nancy's highlight of the week was a concert she didn't even want to go to at first.

Lisa's book/movie recommendation made my ears go up!


Let's link up!

Guidelines:
This link party is for blog posts only. All other links will be deleted.
Please link only blog posts you created yourself. Please link directly to the URL of your blog post and not the main address of your blog.
Please do not link to videos, sales ads, or social media links such as YouTube videos/shorts, Instagram or Facebook reels, TikTok videos, or any other social media based content.
Please do visit other blogs and give the gift of a comment. 

Notice:
By linking with Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot, you assert that the content is your own property and give us permission to share said content if your post or blog is showcased.
We welcome unlimited, family friendly content. This can include opinion pieces, recipes, travel recaps, fashion ideas, crafts, thrifting, lifestyle, book reviews or discussions, photography, art, and so much more!
Thank you for linking up with us! 

 

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Silent movies - Lonesome Luke, Messenger

Have you ever heard of Lonesome Luke? Chances are good that you know the actor who adopted a different and much more widely known persona after Luke, but will you recognize him?
Today I have a short from 1917 for you - Lonesome Luke, Messenger.

Here's the "plot".

Luke and Snub are messengers.
 

One day, they are supposed to deliver some big parcels to a girls' seminary school.
Luke gets "invited" in by one of the girls and immediately thrown out again by the matron which only increases his and Snub's urge to get back in.

That's no stuntman rolling down the stairs!

Snub makes it in as a contractor asks him if he wants to fill in for his "paper hanging assistant" who's late.
Luke finally manages by posing as a lineman and announcing that it's "free telephone sample day".
As you can imagine wallpaper, glue, ladders, and cables allow for ample slapstick action.

It's pure chaos from here - people trying to escape from one another, running here and there, crawling down chimneys, dangling on telephone wires, and in the end everyone chases Luke!

Pouting girls, but Luke hasn't given up yet.

The first escape.

Aaaand he's back.

The second escape. Nice jump!

From the autobiography: "The cunning thought behind all this, you will observe, was to reverse the Chaplin outfit. All his clothes were too large, mine all too small. My shoes were funny, but different; my mustache funny, but different. Nevertheless, the idea was purely imitative and was recognized as such by audiences, though I painstakingly avoided copying the well-known Chaplin mannerisms. ... Not only was the get-up imitative, but it was an offense to the eye originally. I cleaned it up as time went on until it was self-respecting before it died, but I do not like to recall it ...
I was convinced both that the character had gone as far as we could take him and that I had a better."

And he had. Did you recognize him?
It's Harold Lloyd before he came up with the "glass character" that we think of when we hear his name today.

Actually, the look with the glasses - which didn't have lenses, by the way - became so iconic that it seems every time someone else wears round glasses in a silent movie, people comment "He looks like Harold Lloyd!" although the glasses are the only similarity. People even had a hard time recognizing Lloyd if he didn't wear them.

Back to Lonesome Luke, though.
67 films were produced between 1915 and 1917 - one reelers took them about a week to make -, but most of them are lost now. I read in a post that only 14 of them survived, in a later comment on a video it said they found some more and are now up to 18. Still not that much.
If you think that today's short doesn't sound like much, you are right. However, you have to keep in mind that this was in 1917. The idea of films and of comedy in particular were still very different then ... or was it? To be honest, seeing some of today's comedy it really doesn't feel like that sort of humor is gone completely.
Take falls, for example. Why have been home video shows with people falling into lakes, off chairs or stages, etc. been so popular? Schadenfreude. Falls were a big thing in silent movies, and as you know by now, the actors often did their stunts themselves. How about Lloyd rolling down those stone steps? I sometimes have a hard time watching these things and yell "ouch" a lot, but I know enough people who'd still find that as hilarious as an audience over 100 years ago.

Luke was popular with the audience, but Lloyd wanted more than chases and pratfalls.
Actually, before starting to read his autobiography I hadn't known that his beginnings were not in being a comedian, but a stage hand, grip, stage manager, assistant electrician, etc. - at a young age - but also playing small and then bigger roles.
"Hence I knew my theater from Shakspere to the xylophone players." (That's no typo, there used to be different spellings for the Bard.)
Then his father moved to California, Harold started working as an extra in movies and met Hal Roach who was another extra at the time but then started producing at the Bradbury mansion (torn down in 1929 for a parking lot).
Do you recognize the stairs?

Picture by Lemuel S. Ellis, ca. 1887, via The Huntington Digital Library

I can see how someone who had worked theatrical ambitions from early on might get bored with Luke eventually, and of course Harold Lloyd will stay "The Boy with the Glasses" for most of us which I'm sure he would prefer.


Sources and further reading:

1. Harold Lloyd with Wesley W. Stout: An American Comedy. New York : Dover Publications, 1971 (unabridged republication, with minor corrections, of the 1928 work)
2. Trav S. D.: Lonesome Luke's Lively Life: Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd and the Rolin Film Co. On: Travalanche, July 31, 2025
3. John Bengtson: Harold Lloyd Takes A Chance on Court Hill. On: Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd film locations (and more), January 1, 2014
4. John Bengtson: Lady Cops (and Harold Lloyd) Reveal 1914 Lost LA Treasures. On: Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd film locations (and more), December 12, 2021

Nostalgia - Snails

"When Mr. Peter Knoppert began to make a hobby of snail-watching, he had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time. ... 'I never cared for nature before in my life,' Mr. Knoppert often remarked - he was a partner in a brokerage firm, a man who had devoted all his life to the science of finance - 'but snails have opened my eyes to the beauty of the animal world.'"
That's from the beginning of one of Patricia Highsmith's short stories about humans and snails, this one being "The Snail-Watcher", the other one "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" (both of which you can find here (although there are two versions for "The Quest")).

Highsmith loved snails and kept hundreds of them as pets. She took them along to parties sitting on lettuce in her handbag and she smuggled them into France in her bra because she didn't want to leave them behind in England.
I read both of her snail stories at a young age in an anthology, but "The Snail-Watcher" impressed me more, and the image my mind formed of the ending has its own little room in my head jumping out every time I see a snail.
If you know the stories, you can imagine why. Have I mentioned it being a horror anthology?

There are other snails in my childhood memories, like the freshwater snails in the ponds of the park near my home.

We used to walk around on the walls and look for snails (we always left them there in case you wonder). From what I remember, my guess is that they were great ramshorn and great pond snails. There were fewer of the ramshorns, and I was convinced that this made them the Queens of the Snails, so it was very exciting to see one of them.

Left: Great ramshorn snail
Right: Great pond snail
Picture by Se90 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Of course, we were also fascinated by land snails (not slugs, they creeped me out, especially after a big rain when the path up to the woods was covered with them, it looked like an invasion). The most common one you see here is the garden banded snail, but it was special to find escargots (which we call "Weinbergschnecken", literally "vineyard snails").
My friend and I once found two of them in the street and decided to put them in a safe spot in a garden, but the garden owner was outside and told us not to dare, so we left them on a wall (although they and other kinds of snails are no pests!). Afterwards, I worried a lot about their fate for quite some time, thinking we should have found a really safe spot. Sorry, little snails!
I would also like to apologize for being one of those annoying kids who sometimes poked your eyes to see you pull them in and for picking you up by your shell, we didn't know that it can hurt you.

Actually, I haven't seen any escargots in the wild in years, but snails kept inspiring me in my creative journey, in wire wrapping, needle felting, and bead embroidery.

And then there is Nelly of course.
Nelly came in two colors, blue and brown with spots, and a size of 10 cm. In the 60s, Steiff had a few designs that were only produced for a short time - 1961 to 1963 for Nelly - and were quite unusual for cuddle buddies.

Beside Nelly, there were for example bats and colorful spiders (and I could still cry over the story the lady from the toy store told us about not being able to sell them and throw them out instead of candy during the town's carnival parade, argh!).
When the ex and I got our first Steiff price guide, we immediately knew we wanted to have all of them, not for their rarity, but because we thought they were really cute (I still think that).

Nelly is made from cotton velvet with faux leather underneath and has a painted rubber shell and rubber tentacles/feelers whose ends were prone to break off as you can see on one of them.
Isn't this little pair adorable?

Did you notice something about them, though? With those shells they are no land snails and I never thought about that until today. I wonder why Steiff made that choice.

There you have it, my snail memories.
I spared you one when I inadvertently ste.... nah, let's forget about that.

Chain of hearts

The beads have been calling to me quite loudly for a while, but with my thumb being stupid, the big projects on my list were still out, so I thought it needed something simple for them to be satisfied for now.
Simple usually means something familiar that I don't have to think much about - experimenting often means ripping out and several attempts - and which I can easily take a break from without risking it turning into a case for the infamous WIP drawer.

This chain of hearts was a perfect little project for that.
Earrings are not my strong suit because I often don't remember what exactly I did with the first one (experiments!) to repeat it for the second one or I'm just getting bored after the first one.
For these earrings I only made one heart at a time over the last few weeks, quick enough to not get bored or stress out my hand. 

I used pearly white seed beads in the sizes 8, 11, and 15 seed beads.
Originally, I had planned to use tiny ceramic hearts made by my friend for the bottom. I had put them in a safe place specifically for this ... Erm, does anyone know where that safe place is? I found the tiny stars, the owls, the foxes, the blueberries ... I found everything but the hearts. So I decided to try size 15 hearts for the first time and although it was a bit fiddly, I think they turned out very cute.

I have no doubt that the hearts are going to turn up in the next few days now that they are not needed immediately.
As that touch of color from the ceramic hearts was missing now, I added a silver bead embellishment instead.
Do you think I should have added tiny hearts in a completely different color?

Weekend Traffic Jam - Week 155

Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot!
My posts for the link up will go live on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EDT or, if you live in the future like I do, on Fridays at 3:30 a.m. CE(S)T.

It's already May 8 where I am - 81 years ago, World War II ended.

Picture by Darja Lindeberg via Unsplash

Are you ready for the weekend?

As part of the reboot, we will be featuring a different blog every week.
How about stopping by and saying hello? Let them know we sent you.

This week our spotlight is on The Cannary Family.

Gina from The Cannary Family says: "My blog is my little corner of the web where I write about my family and home - the two most important things to me. It's not meant as an example of "how to do it", rather a place to share my family's life with whomever cares to read about it. For that reason, you will notice it is not monetized or sponsored in any way. I love all of the positive comments I get and I love following other blogs, too!
So if you are here in my little corner of the world, cheering me on and celebrating life with me, thank you! You will likely have noticed that the focus of my posts have shifted as my life has. I think it's interesting to write about how a family changes over the years, and that's the title of this blog after all."

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!

Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household - The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings shares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.

Cat from Cat's Wire has what she calls a jumping spider brain. She has many interests and will blog about whatever catches her attention - crafts, books, old movies, collectibles or random things.

Rena from Fine Whatever Blog writes about style, midlife, and the "fine whatever" moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she's been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.


Here are some of my picks from last week's link up.

Gail shares a rainbow of bags with us.

Here's a cascade of "berries" made by Mie.

I'd love to try Nancy's quinoa tabbouleh.

Mireille searched for pink at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.

Deb prepared her front porch for spring and summer.


Let's link up!

Guidelines:
This link party is for blog posts only. All other links will be deleted.
Please link only blog posts you created yourself. Please link directly to the URL of your blog post and not the main address of your blog.
Please do not link to videos, sales ads, or social media links such as YouTube videos/shorts, Instagram or Facebook reels, TikTok videos, or any other social media based content.
Please do visit other blogs and give the gift of a comment. 

Notice:
By linking with Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot, you assert that the content is your own property and give us permission to share said content if your post or blog is showcased.
We welcome unlimited, family friendly content. This can include opinion pieces, recipes, travel recaps, fashion ideas, crafts, thrifting, lifestyle, book reviews or discussions, photography, art, and so much more!
Thank you for linking up with us! 

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Silent movies - Brown of Harvard

Have you recovered from last week's movie?
This week I bring you "Brown of Harvard" from 1926.

First the plot (with spoilers).

Meet Tom Brown. He's handsome and athletic and his parents are proud of him going to Harvard.
The first thing Tom does there is to start flirting with a young lady in a car - daughter of a professor - the second is falling out with his roommate Bob McAndrews (that's what the intertitles say, but there are pages calling him McAndrew, maybe that was the name in the original stage play?) who's just as handsome and athletic, but also studious.

Instead Tom moves in with Jim Doolittle who's shy and weakly. Tom defends Jim against the others in the dormitory and Jim idolizes him.

William Haines and Jack Pickford
as Tom and Jim

Tom meets Mary again and a rivalry develops between him and Bob over her which escalates when Tom forces a kiss on her.

No means no!

They continue their rivalry in sports, first rowing. Tom replaces Bob after an injury, but fails after a night of heavy drinking over Mary. He decides not to go back to Harvard after the vacation, but his father convinces him to go back if he loves Mary (the old "wear her out" tactics) and also to take up football instead of rowing.

On the day of the big Harvard-Yale game, Jim is lying in bed with a cold. Because of a newspaper article, Tom thinks he's not on the squad, but right after he leaves to pick up his parents, the coach calls setting an ultimatum of 20 minutes or Tom will be off the squad for good.
Of course Jim runs out into the heavy rain to let Tom know and he even hangs on to the streetcar to stop it which ends him up in hospital.

During the football game, Tom hurts his ankle, but when another player hurts himself, he goes back into the game and gains 90 yards before letting Bob make the crucial touchdown. Take that, John Wayne! Indeed this was John Wayne's film debut as a Yale football player, he was uncredited, and I didn't even notice him.

As Tom comes to the hospital to tell Jim, the nurse comes out of the room crying. Jim has died and Tom has a breakdown. But luckily Mary arrives and can comfort him.

The film ends with "The Dickey" (a private social club at Harvard) picking up Tom for a parade as one of the best men of the year, along with Bob.

This is the third "Brown of Harvard" film based on a Broadway play from 1906.

The movie was very popular and "helped" Haines getting typecast in the role of the wisecracking young man who finally gets his life together until the audience tired of that.
I'm already tired of it after just one movie.
While I readily admit that Haines played the role well, I find Tom utterly annoying, and not being a sports fan, I don't think winning a football game, no matter how important, is enough to forgive everything. He behaves "rotten to a very fine girl" (his own words to Jim), not once but twice, and when he doesn't get what he wants, he's like a toddler throwing a tantrum. I always hated that "boys will be boys" excuse.
To be honest, I would have been fine with Bob and Mary getting together.

If she doesn't walk back to the store with me
so I can spend more time with her, I'll
just smash the eggs, jam, and milk and
then she will have to go back.

Haha, what a hilarious idea. Not.
It didn't work, either.

I guess there's the fact that he's quite kind and caring towards Jim. The scene where he rubs liniment on sick Jim's chest is genuinely nice. The scene in which he learns of Jim's death is dramatic, but overacted in my opinion.

Another reason why this movie doesn't work for me is the football game. I have watched sports films, but the sports scenes can't be too long or I get bored. Also I'm not a fan of the "rah rah rah" atmosphere.
It might work for others, well, it obviously did and still does, but I was already too annoyed by Tom.
I will be watching other Billy Haines movies, we'll see if I will like them any better.

Bookish pet peeves #1

I call this #1 although I don't even know yet if this is going to be a series, if it is, it will probably be an irregular and rather spontaneous one about the little things that annoy me about books - just as today's post in fact.
It's not a new pet peeve of mine, but today I got something out of my book cabinets and there it jumped at me again.

Let me start with something a little (actually a lot) earlier and non-bookish, though.
My siblings and I used to have stamp "collections". I can't tell you anymore where those stamps came from exactly and I say "collections" because we were enthusiastic, but didn't know that much, also they were quite small. My favorite stamp series were not those that had colorful pictures of animals, flowers, buildings, inventions or whatever. Those were pretty, but I was drawn to those with the same design in different colors.
One of the extra benefits of having a pen pal in England who also sent little gifts sometimes was getting different stamps. The Machin series which ran from 1967 to 2022 was my favorite. So many pretty colors! I'm not the only one, there are whole videos on them, and when I just asked my sister about her favorite design, she didn't hesitate to name this one as well.

Public domain
via Wikipedia

This wasn't just limited to stamps, though. I liked all the colors for shampoo bottles, chocolate bars, if I gave it more thought the list would grow for sure.

Now to the books.
I'm sure you all know the stories about people going to a bookstore - probably not happening as much anymore now - and asking for two meters of blue or red books to complement the interior design of their living room. One of my fellow trainees at the library had been a bookseller before and told us that it had actually happened to her. It also happened that someone wanted an encyclopedia, but asked if it also came in a different color because it didn't match the couch.

Maybe you already know where this is heading. I'm absolutely fine with books looking different in my cabinets, it's a sign of the variety.
But ...
This are all books from Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series which runs from A to Y (as Grafton sadly couldn't complete it). I know there are only 24 books, that's because there are two novels in one of them.

If you go to her website, you have a list of the whole series ... and all the covers look the same. Oh, how I wish I had those!
My books, however, well, you can see it for yourself.

I started out with the German translations, but not in order. I bought one book, liked it and then added others from fleamarkets or used book sites. So there are not only two publishers, but also different editions from one of those. They were also the ones who decided to print the titles in different directions and in different spots on the spines, change to a larger format from the letter O on, and then drop the series completely after R.

So then I had to change to the English editions and had to take what I could get my hands on first. The result is even wilder than for the German editions.

Do publishers even know what that does to a brain like mine?