I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

"How long is the road to Perfection? What must we go through in life to reach our goal, whatever it is? And by what means can we lose our way?"  From Mystic Magazine, 1954.  

"Peter Puck wants to know if marriage ties are worn on wedding days."  From The Children's Newspaper, 1925.  See The Collected Lost Meanings of Wedlock.

"They know any minute they might have to fight."  A collage of two elements from The Gateway, 1969.

From The Old Line, 1949.

Mixing vampire humor and 1970s tropes (like pet rocks, lava lamps, disco music, bell-bottom pants, mirror balls, and of course mood rings), the web series Grave Mood Rings pokes fast fun at classic slow-moving Gothic soap operas like Dark Shadows and the Canadian series Strange Paradise.  In addition to a vampiric Viscount, a castle is home to a groovy Doctor (a phlebotomist, naturally), a jolly housekeeper with her own laugh track, a werewolf Vicar, and an arch-nemesis riddler wearing a Sphinx mask.  Corny wordplay, the occasional bizarre sing-a-long, and haunted doughnuts punctuate the proceedings, in the tradition of the sketch comedy of MadTV, Kids in the Hall, and SCTV.

A still from Grave Mood Rings, courtesy of Dare-g on Tumblr.

From the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' Our Dumb Animals magazine, 1955.

The dark secret that gym memberships don't disclose: "Exercise that is performed as a task is a drain on the nervous system."  From Healthful Living, Based on the Essentials of Physiology by Jesse Feiring Williams, 1934.

"In everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic."  From Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Through the mists of time, this cat had a premonition about you.  From the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' Our Dumb Animals magazine, 1953.

"Once God of beauty, here I am. Now decayed — a wretched man."  From The Gateway, 1969.

"Death uses the calendar to nest." —Gary Barwin

"Other people are only shadows that we frighten each other with, hurt each other with."  From Dark Shadows episode 1228.

Everything symbolizes:

• the body
• something beyond itself
• the mind
• choices or crossroads
• living, being, and passing away
• the female principle
• freedom and progress
• interior life
• something fundamental
• majesty and judgment
• lust
• the beautiful qualities of God
• some one thing
• power and oppression
• everything else

"Sleeping men confess their vices, but a man has to be awake to describe his dreams."  From Bright Horizons, 1954.

A surrealist, dadaistic, even post-contemplationist spoof of slow-moving Gothic soap operas of the 1970s.