Crime!

Pain!

Many years ago, I did a short job placement at the medical library of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. There were all kinds of amazing things to discover in the collection, but perhaps the most striking thing I found in my time there was a copy of the Oucher pain scale - a variety of photos of children ranging in expression from placid to agonized (there is also a version of the scale featuring simple 'happy face' to 'sad face' expressions*).


The scale was a bizarre contradiction to me: expressions of discomfort and agony on small faces - pained faces, ranked in such a manner, something pornographic about it - and in a hospital of all places. My initial reaction was to find it somewhat perverse, strange and disturbing. My mind kept coming back to it, and what a curious thing it was.


But then pain is a funny thing, ultimately subjective and thus very difficult to measure. Most of us, experiencing pain, would regard it as being either 'really bad' or just plain 'ARGGHHHHH!' - any more than that and words would likely fail us utterly.


This isn't very helpful to those in the medical profession of course, and, in the interest of applying some objectivity to the subject, many different methods of measuring pain have been created. Some of these rely on testimony from the patient, often using key words to evaluate the severity of the pain. Another popular method is to simply give the pain a numeric value from 0 to 10.


In the case of children however, who lack the sophistication or vocabulary to apply words to their pain, pictures may provide assistance. This is the rationale behind the Oucher scale, created in 1980 by one Dr. Judith E. Beyer. Initially featuring Caucasian faces only, it was updated ten years later with a Hispanic version and an African-American version. In addition, the original poster format was gradually shrunk down to a pocket-size version, making it easier to use.


The language of pain and the descriptions we may employ to convey our pain are often quite remarkable, even poetic. From the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, designed to differentiate insect stings:

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

*the Wong-Baker pain scale is virtually identical to this smiley-sad face scale. My research, such as it is, suggests the Oucher may be strictly photographic while the Wong-Baker is drawn.

How Green Was My Sex Life!

Lawrence Lariar is perhaps best remembered today as the long-time editor of Best Cartoons of the Year (second story), but he was himself a pioneering cartoonist, humourist, mystery novelist (under such pen names as Adam Knight, Michael Stark, and Michael Lawrence), and prolific writer.

Lariar's 1955 "How Green Was My Sex Life!" (which he both wrote & illustrated) has long been a favourite of mine. I bought a copy on Yonge St. in the early 90s, & used a few of the pictures for The Starkweather Fix's website, as well as promo for our 1996 CD, "What The Swedish Butler Heard".

Sure, the women are beautiful. But it is the men here who fascinate. The eyes of the males in particular are striking, suggestive (along with the shakey hands) of a barely-contained sex madness.

I was very excited to finally scan this rare work & put the pics (120 of them, by one count) onto my flickr account, making them available to the world at large -- but it looks as though I'd have to break the book's spine in order to scan the pictures inside properly, & I just can't bear to do it. Sorry.

So, for the time being, I present the dust jacket and the cover of the book itself, along with some detail.

Wonders of the Heavens!

An out of this world set on flickr by one of the subjects of our last post, Matthew Kalmenoff.

From 1954. Thanks to astrotter.

Animals of the Past!

I knew that children's sticker books had been around a fair while, though the fact that there were actual Nazi Youth sticker albums in 1940s Germany was news to me.

I'll have to introduce this Golden Stamp Book then as being medieval, as opposed to ancient; first published in 1954, mine is the 23rd printing, from 1982.

The book is written by Rose Wyler and Gerald Ames, with beautiful colour stamps by Matthew Kalmenoff, and line drawings by Robert Gartland.

I wonder whether Golden Stamp revised the information presented throughout its many editions; no doubt much, if not all, of the text would need revising today.

In any case, here's a blast from the past. eBay has an unused copy of this going for $40US, making me wish I had been slightly more lazy about actually putting the stickers in the book than I was.

I believe I still have most of the stamps unused somewhere, but I can't remember where now of course.

The Starkweather Fix @ The Star Club!

This is a scanned close-up off a contact sheet I found recently, which I believe was taken by Mr. Mark Laking. I probably could have cleaned the contact sheet better before I scanned it, but whatever. I think any dust/scratchiness just adds to it really.

Not sure what date this was. I suspect it may be a show known as Fuckfest, in which case it would be May 6 1994. Incidentally, my girlfriend at the time was the spicy hot number in the lower left corner. Me-ow.




The room we're in was the Eclipse Club on Simcoe Street in Oshawa, which was next door, connected to, and sister club to the Moon Room.

Mike Star, of Star Records fame, had been presenting shows for many years (and at various venues, such as the Orange Temple, seen below) by this point -- the banners in the back attest to the Eclipse taking its turn here as the Rock'Roll'N'Blues Star Club of our drunken memories.