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| December 21, 2024 - Solstice |
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| December 16, 2024 |
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| December 9, 2024 |
- According to Reader's Digest you can see
blue
Stop signs in Hawai'i, but doesn't really explain the phenomenom.
- The Cut: Things
Your Wedding Guests Secretly Despise. Maybe not so
secretly. A too-long gap between the ceremony and the reception. Open-mic
toasts. The garter belt, the cake smashing -- gross.
(archive link since The Cut is actually New York magazine)
- Earthscrapers -- proposal for a residential
step-well
in the D.F. A few levels, sure; but who'd go way down there? Ridiculous.
- The
Shape Of Things is a short story by Ray Bradbury, from 1948.
Surprisingly, out of copyright, doesn't appear to have been included
in any of his collections (but was in
this
Damon Knight anthology.) First line: He did
not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid.
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| December 8, 2024 |
- Absorbing this zany, new (to me) comic artist, Fletcher Hanks:
the
Most Twisted Comic Book Artist of All Time. Sample above, a
whole collection of Stardust (who flies through space by means of his Tubular Spacial) and Fantomah
available in the Internet Archive; his published work only between
1939-41 although he lived on until 1976, when his frozen body was
found one morning on a NYC park bench.
- Trying to understand the kids' new usage of
'flex'
but I'm not quite there yet. Something about bragging; but also
seems to be whatever you want it to mean.
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| December 6, 2024 (updated) |
Loudspeakers are attached to the village's PA system, so this family can
enjoy the political songs, slogans and lectures broadcast all day long
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| December 1, 2024 |
-
Is scrolling through random videos your 'jam'?
IMG_0001 serves
up vids people uploaded between 2009 and 2012 via the
iPhone Photos app's "Send to YouTube" button.
More like this, but recent (claims to be from last week) at
astronaut.io -- although
initially, only seven-second samples are displayed, and you
can't go back; the 'Stop Switching' button gives you some
navigational control.
- New from the Space Telescope:
the
Sombrero Galaxy, M104.
- Many have recorded "My Favorite
Things"...but only Coltrane carries the song so far and into
such mystical territory. It's not a different version so much
as a message from a parallel universe.
How
[his version] changed American music, in the
Smithsonian magazine.
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| November 29, 2024 |
George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), Daniel Boone escorting
settlers through the Cumberland Gap
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| November 23, 2024 |
Vintage and Rarely Seen Comic Strips, one of the Facebook groups
joined to liven up the feed -- here's an unlabeled sample
from 1955 discovered there today.
(source: possibly
Rusty Riley)
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| November 18, 2024 (updated) |
- Soon, the mighty
United States will be towed from Philadelphia, where it's been
rusting away, pier-side, for decades; to Mobile, Alabama, to be sunk to create
the world's largest
artificial reef. More photos at NPR:
Record-setting ocean liner makes its final voyage.
- Here's something new: twelve minutes of a
Generator
Organ Trio performing in Richmond, Virginia. What's this?
Molasses
Industries markets hand-crafted wooden boxes powered by
cranks which emit electronic tones. My nephew has one, which I
had the pleasure of playing last week. Once, during an acid trip,
while listening to 'Exile on Main Street' for the first time, I
had a vision of rock-n-rollers playing instruments like these (which
also emitted colored lights).
- At Quartz,
Let's talk about airplane boarding -- and why
it's so hard. Mentions Dual Boarding, which I've experience just
once, at the IST aerodrome in İstanbul, with the plane out on
the tarmac. Why not open two of the hatches, fore and aft, for easier
egress? (Because that additional jet-bridge would cost money)
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| November 8, 2024 |
- In Slate,
Last
Stand of the Pinocchio. May as well give up on fact-checking; the
folks who need correcting aren't paying any attention. They think
we need a total and complete shutdown of "fact
checking" until our we can figure out what is going on!
- At Jacobin,
Democratic Party Elites Brought Us This Disaster. The story
that is about to be pushed hard is that Harris lost because she was too
far Left. It will be pushed because this is the Democratic establishment's
go-to explanation for all its failures even as we're all begging
them to be more progressive.
- CNN:
Republicans
red, and Democrats blue. But it wasn't always that way points out how
blue was associated with the Right since Union troops wore that color in
first-Republican Lincoln's Union Army (and red with the Left because of
course, they're all commies) but disingenuously, mention of 'redneck' is
always avoided in stories about this color shift and when exactly it happened.
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| November 5, 2024 |
- Hodad -- a long-forgotten word which bubbled
up through my sub-conscious today.
What's
a Hodad? Nomadic News answers; a non-surfing beach person. I
encountered the word when I received one of these plastic models,
Bob
Koenn's Silly Surfers -- this must've been via a
1965 Christmas gift exchange, at school. More about them
at Davy Crockett's Almanack, including beach music they
inspired. That Hodad, Makin' the Scene with
a Six-Pack... what is it he's smokin' -- is
that a big joint?
- Star Trek TOS -- "Can
you give us any more?" What I'd be saying, if I was still
trick-or-treating.
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November 1, 2024
This is Luce,
the Vatican's new mascot, created for Jubilee 2025. |
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| October 29, 2024 |
- Ancient Lights -- cryptic old signs in London,
explained.
- "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
-
Rattan vs. Wicker:
What's
the Difference? Bob Vila explains.
- Found a beat-up 1948 book in a gutter yesterday,
Rhymes and Chants of Young America,
discarded immediately, in passing; but later, intrigued, what
was that? Searching about online, filtering a lot of
'West Side Story' and the best review I could find was in
Awful Library Books, a blog of a couple librarians they
posted between 2009 and 2023. Here, they also wondered,
Is That a Rocket in Your Pocket?
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| October 27, 2024 |
A new schedule has me riding through town on public
transit once a week. This alien's on a heavily-graffitied
wall along the way.
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| October 20, 2024 |
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A couple pairs of videos.
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| October 16, 2024 |
Roz Chast, from You Can Only Yell At Me For One Thing
At A Time. Like me in the first grade, can't read the board?
Click to zoom.
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| October 14, 2024 |
- Pascha is a high-rise brothel in the
Fatherland. Its
Wikipedia page says that, in August 2005,
two women, 19 and 29 years old, rented two rooms in the Pascha and announced
over the internet that they would pay any man €50 for sex; the goal was
to find out who could have more partners in one day. In the end they had sex
for 11 hours with a total of 115 men, and about 1,700 others had to be turned
away. The German tabloid Bild turned the story into a headline the
next day. The women insisted that they had paid the men from their own
vacation money and had not received any compensation from Bild or Pascha.
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| October 13, 2024 |
- Martha Stewart,
Lawn-Ruining Halloween Decorations You Should Never
Use. Spreading fake cobwebs in trees and
bushes looks festive -- but it can be detrimental to birds
and other small wildlife, causing them to get stuck or injured.
No actually it looks like shit and spreads micro-fibers,
I say ban it!
- Greyhound Bus
Stations at Roadside Architecture.
- Slate on "directionally" - the Wrong-Direction Election. His
claims ... might not be strictly true, but they are directionally
so, because he's talking about a real problem, or at least a feeling
that there's a real problem.
- Two final Canadian notes: the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto's a
massive natural history/anthropological affair; they've got a rock more
dazzling than any diamond, the
Light of the
Desert, the world's largest faceted cerussite gem. Unlike diamond's
sturdy carbon, this cerussite is rather delicate; but has more fire.
Also, in the next province over, Atlas Obscura on
the
Twisty History of Montréal's Outdoor Staircases.
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| October 11, 2024 |
Home again from second Canadian sojourn this year. Shiny new quarter here, the first currency I received bearing the likeness of the King. |
| October 6, 2024 |
- Joining
the
Idaho Stop (where bicyclists can treat a
STOP sign
like a YIELD) cyclists can now ignore traffic lights,
in Europe, some places --
Traffic
light exemption for cyclists: new study from Lyon.
Both of these are what I label Momentum Laws, created to favor and elevate the status of bicycle riders.
Video explanation of the new sign from the Ministry of
Ecological and Inclusive Transition.
- 12-year-old Slate article:
Chaos
Theory: a Unified Theory of Muppet Types.
I'm definitely an Order... although it's an
understandable reaction to Our World, you
Chaos Muppets make me crazy. In the Hundred Acre Wood we are
represented by Rabbit, and in a softer way, Kanga.
Ich bin eine Ordnung!
- In CrimeReads, 7
James Bond books better than any of the movies.
Only two in this list by Ian Fleming,
Moonraker and Thunderball. True, those
movies kinda sucked, but Thunderball
begins the SPECTRE/Blofeld story which continues
through OHMSS and You Only Live Twice,
the last few novels he completed, all good. (I ignore the
post-Fleming Bonds... I read the first couple by
Gardner, then moved on.)
- A BBC journalist visited Diego Garcia:
What
I found on the secretive tropical island they don't want
you to see.
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| September 24, 2024 |
Julia Wertz on Waldorf Salad, which I reject due to the celery. I
wonder how she feels about
Watergate Salad, a popular dish in areas
of the US where potlucks are common, according to Wikipedia.
I last had that at a family restaurant buffet, in Kansas.
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| September 15, 2024 |
- A 'Star Trek' compilation; every time he says
Fascinating. (15 minutes)
- Twelve years late with this Slate link about it,
but since I still encounter the expression,
Why do they hate humanity? 'Stop trying to make amazeballs
happen.' (Please! Use fetch instead!) No, please don't use either one. Three other
words being used differently nowadays, whose new definitions I can't quite
grasp are stan, chat and flex. A related slide-show of 15 (non-slang) more,
at Dictionary.com,
Do
You Cringe At the Sound of These Words?
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