Traish LaRue and the oracle of appalling advice.

   “Every neutrino is left-handed, Jack. That’s how I knew Professor Sheinbaum was the killer. It’s over. Call off your mathboys.”

Here’s the recording of last night’s 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA), ready for you to re-enjoy:

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, whimoch often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material, going back decades. And consider KNYO, the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. Check out the schedule of other fine shows there. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and help out if you can. All of your help, whether in the jar on movie night or through the heart or by check (to KNYO, p.o. box 1651, Fort Bragg, CA 95437) goes directly to pay the station’s real-life expenses: rent, electricity, water, equipment, and music publisher and streaming fees. Nothing is wasted. They use everything but the squeal.

Coming MOTA shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I’ll take it from there and read it on the air. That’s what I’m here for.

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Veronica Lake. The inspiration for Jessica Rabbit. You see that right away.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/i-wanted-wings.html

Wellerman Song in Disney-character voices. (via Juanita)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/3772499179684552/

The Longest Johns – Hoist Up the Thing. (via Juanita)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=SaEXyQg7pCc

High-voltage nebulography. “Now, as for voltage, I find that anywhere from five to thirty kilovolts works great.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVwF4OG-H4

It really was the future and we wandered away from it somehow.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/1950s-kitchens.html

Rerun: Toto’s /Africa/ on a Harpejji G16.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv0q6oBmZxo

Dancin’, protection money collectin’ Sven.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/06/09/repost-bouncing-with-sven/

A case of the shuffles. Learn to shuffle in just five minutes. This is one of the things Janice Joplin meant when she sang, “You only gotta do one thing well to make it in this world.” Here: You’re up for a job, you and another candidate are equally qualified by education, manner, social class, handshake, skin tone, left-right facial symmetry, obvious politics, sex, relevant experience. In every way you’re the same, except you shuffled into the lobby to wait for your interview, security saw that on the monitor, and everyone’s talking about it. That made an impression. It gets to the boss, and you get the job,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pddp8OLi7lo

What we’re pleased by, and embarrassed for people by, changes over the years. The line on the map between what’s acceptable and even attractive, and what’s a source of vicarious mortification, moves around like the hem of a bedsheet hanging on a clothesline in the wind. One year it’s a fine idea to throw virgins into a volcano or burn witches, or call a Brazil nut an N-word-toe or a kind of bug a J-word bug or a kind of giver an I-word giver or a kind of traveler a G-word*, or lie your nation into crippling the National Health Service or into leaving the EU, or into shredding trillions of dollars and killing millions of people just so a handful of obscenely rich monsters can stay obscenely rich for another little while, or makeup on men and J.C. Penney’s hippie costume clothes, or a white person getting married in a kimono or a dashiki or Uggs, or tattooed eyeballs or injection-puffed-up lips or a torture symbol on a chain around their neck, or holding the door open for a lady and pulling her chair out for her, or letting people get away with not showing up for church, and after only the blink of an eye, on a historical scale, everyone’s all, like, What were they thinking? And after another blink it all goes back even worse in the /other/ direction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2DTwK5xysg

The stainless steel Dymo 1570 labelmaker, the Cadillac of the Ford Model-T of labelmakers. My mother bought a regular plastic Dymo labelmaker in 1963 or so, around when we got Pepper from the dog pound. I made labels for all Pepper’s things, beginning with the water bowl, and moved on to label the rest of the world, at least until the package of rolls of label plastic was used up. A lot of it was wasted when I made mistake after mistake from being in a delighted hurry, but there was so much out there crying out for a little sign on it in white-on-red or white-on-black. I don’t remember what ended up happening to it, or why she bought it in the first place; something to do with the real estate office, probably, but I had that covered too: DESK, for example. HAND (for the back of my hand). TOILET. TELEPHONE. TYPEWRITER. And OLDSMOBILE (right on the window, with the Oldsmobile behind it, outside at the curb). That was a great car, speaking of cars. It floated down the freeway like an ocean liner. Everything that opened on it shut with a solid /ponk!/. And it smelled great, especially when you got in and had forgotten to leave the windows open a little in the sun, and it was an oven inside, so you had to sit on a towel to not burn your legs. Though that melted the adhesive on the Dymo labels on the dashboard, which fell right off, and cellophane tape didn’t help, though it gave me the idea to type labels on the Royal, cut them out and tape them on things that live in the shade. Oh, wait, I do remember what happened to the Dymo: I wore it out by being rough and impatient with it till it wouldn’t click properly anymore, and it went to its reward in the spirit world, by way of the wastebasket under the SINK, which had no plastic bag in it. Plastic bags in garbage cans hadn’t come out yet; the can itself was sufficient, and a household task was washing out trash cans with a hose, with the infinite free water there was. Now my employer has a modern Dymo that of course has a whole computer and printer inside it and it took me half an hour to figure out how to use it, even with the manual open right there on the table, but the labels it makes will never fade and they stick to everything but butter. That’s a metaphor for something: a /manual/ for a Dymo labelmaker. My toothbrush has bluetooth functions. I’m not kidding. It was eight or ten years ago; I drove my mother 200 miles to the only dental office she would go to, near where she moved away from ten years before that, and I sat in the waiting room alternating between napping and reading a Cordwainer Smith book whose flavor magicked the entire trip and made it tolerable, the way books do. Somehow I got a computerized toothbrush out of the deal. I’ve never used the bluetooth function and probably never will. I won’t say I can’t imagine what it does; I can imagine a lot of things; that’s never been a problem. But I have no interest in doing anything with it but brushing my teeth. There was a running gag in the Big Bang Theory teevee series of Amy Farrah Fowler hinting at using her electric toothbrush to masturbate with. I just, um– just because you can imagine everything, that doesn’t create time for it all, and the Singularity is still only on the horizon. I don’t think I’m going to make it there. Maybe a copy of me will, from all the crap I’ve ever written. One of the projects I’d like to do is to stuff my 28-year dream journal file into an A.I. program and have it generate dreams. I just asked ChatGPT how, and there it is; that’s my next project. After the ribbon microphone pre-amplifier. After the new roof on Tim’s garage and woodshed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axkx0cuFn9A

Humanity’s next project: the Obayashi Space Elevator.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/obayashi_space_elevator

Engines of the past. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://bustednuckles.net/old-train-thursday-obscure-locomotives/

Watch a man persevere through adversity to make a Telecaster-style guitar body and neck entirely out of cast bronze. It ends up weighing forty pounds, /after/ he took seven pounds off by making the body smaller and thinner than the plan. With pleasant, comprehensive narration. One of the things I made in school was a heavy bronze fantasy religious human sacrifice knife that perfectly fit my hand, whose blade extended like a flap of metal skin from the bird-claw-like tip down around the outside of my fingers to a heavy two-inch sphere at the base. One time years later when I went back to visit, it was in the garage. My stepfather Roland had been using it for a hammer and a pry-tool, and then he died of a heart attack when he was out on a business trip. The damage to it actually made it look more real, like something someone would get cursed for stealing from an ancient alien crypt. That’s something I wonder about: where that ended up. It survived their house burning down. But then where did it go? It’s out there somewhere. The gay art teacher of the class where I made that knife was later beaten to death outside a restaurant in Sacramento, which was awful, but I don’t think there’s any connection, though in fiction a man is beaten to death with an electric guitar by a crooked politician in a season 5 or 6 episode of /Elementary/. (Spoiler.) I don’t believe in curses. I think it’s mostly probability and the Brownian motion of society, where a small but significant number of people will become hair-trigger mad dogs no matter what you do, and drugs, including alcohol and caffeine, don’t help, nor does it help that the people who carry around guns with them everywhere they go, loaded and ready to shoot someone, are exactly the wrong sort of people to have a gun in easy reach when events become frustrating or anything startling or confusing or insulting happens. And it ends up like that video you might have seen of a whole floor of mousetraps and the guy tosses a pingpong ball in and the place goes crazy, everything chaotically snapping at everything else, only it’s not mousetraps, it’s people with guns who fantasize about being a hero and, inside, they know they’re the opposite of a hero, that’s why they want a gun. A word we don’t use anymore, because it’s not acceptable, for a person like that if it was a man was pussy. That was the word.
https://theawesomer.com/making-a-bronze-guitar-from-copper-wire/741986/

Watch a quiet, competent person restore a 1930s gearbox bicycle to new smooth function without stripping any of the character off it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUi0PMG503g

“Because of the enormous length of seam required, it’s unlikely that footballs made of more than 18 panels will ever be made.” Someday.
https://theawesomer.com/a-compilation-of-1950s-factory-films/741993/

The theme of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl (1976), words and music by Cyndi Lauper. So, she was 23 in ’76, that makes her 71. Girls just wanta have fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9RqDx5qOe8

Art tragedy.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/06/st-annes-anglican-church-and-artwork.html

Harmony.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/06/14/dad-harmony-2/

Rerun: Kevin Olusola – Down diddy down diddy down diddy down down down. One listen and you will catch yourself humming and singing this at odd moments for the rest of your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGjg193h4Ok

Rerun: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (via Perfect for Roquefort Cheese)
https://ia803206.us.archive.org/26/items/the-dictionary-of-obscure-sorrows/The%20Dictionary%20of%20Obscure%20Sorrows.pdf

What guitar sorcery is this.
https://theawesomer.com/marcin-tim-henson-classical-dragon/741990/

Cute cups and balls routine. (via BitsAndPieces) (You might want to click the sound on.)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7OjmmYSKY9/

Another! and another!
https://www.instagram.com/takehiro_nagaoka/reel/CkS_7aktSjJ/
https://www.instagram.com/takehiro_nagaoka/reel/C2hL-CNyWpZ/

“Gimme a BLT with avocado and red onions on rye toast, extra mayo, and my train’s in ten minutes, so step on it.”
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9c620956e524fc29f8abe5ec0aff2477

Worship. (via BoingBoing) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://twitter.com/i/status/1799511004327362807

The puzzle of free speech for Nazis.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=061224

*Nikki Limo. Just try to be a little aware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yMOJ043H-A

Rescue.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/06/a-rescue-story.html

How does the cat dress?
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/06/happy-caturday_0474957995.html

What the golem say. (Ka-ching ching ching ka-ching ka-ching ching.)
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-06-11-cggreengolem.gif

Lola de la Mata, tinnitus-suffering musician (say TIN-ih-tuhss), gives back. “An uneasy and often jarring mixture of high-pitched rings, deep scrapes and dull thuds, she employed tuning forks used during the Rhine & Weber hearing test, as well as a Canna Sonora, a rare instrument consisting of aluminium poles arranged vertically across a rack.” Aluminium, that’s the way much of the world says it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7umtdzHM6Q

The billion-year clock of deca-year materials.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/06/making-billion-year-lego-clock.html

Solve philosophy with a short series of trolley problems. It says they’re absurd, but they’re really not. Everyone is making decisions like these all the time, its just that our individual /now/ is so short we can only see a tiny part of the info, just an inch down the track, and a million others are pulling levers, or not, on every inch beyond that, and it’s branching off into a million other tracks with things and people tied to them.
https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

Periodic table of toy elements. (via TackyRaccoons)
https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/752483465949298688/found-and-chosen-jane-housham

About Robot Archie. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://treasuryofbritishcomics.com/news/from-robot-servant-to-acid-house-the-fantastical-life-of-robot-archie/

Science toys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVAl2YeIJ4

Are you an NPC?
https://kottke.org/24/06/are-you-an-npc-or-do-you-have-free-will

Flood of memory.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/06/flood-of-memory.html

World history of our strange sex practices. For those of us still practicing and not quite ready for the bright lights. Or woodshedding, rather, a term for practicing alone.
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/06/11/Weird-History-Talks-About-Sex/

Flower children of 1920.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/flower-children-1920s.html

“The owlcat. This marvel blends the features of a cat with the wings of an owl.”
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/06/fantastic-cat-hybrids.html

See the unbelievable /mystery hole/.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=EwWDpF

Speaking of which: Trump science.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1799894705288761412

An aluminum tornado chandelier. If you don’t care about the build but only want to see the result, skip ahead to about 33 min.
https://theawesomer.com/making-a-tornado-chandelier/741637/

Wasabi World.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=kKFy32

“A pretty good session.”
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/MrNatural.jpg

Further in an endless series of folders of photographs of women I’d like to watch swallow an egg. And you can too.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/louis-feraud.html

Nice doors.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/06/10/repost-ladies-and-gentlemen-the-other-doors/

An analogy. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps

The stupidest sport? Not even. Right down there in the running for it, though. Even so, slow motion and tendentious Elgar turns it somewhat majestic. Skip to 5:40.
https://laughingsquid.com/slow-motion-annual-cheese-roll/

A way to commemorate the 9000 men who died in the Normandy beach landings, June 6, 1944.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-fallen-lest-we-forget.html

It’s all words, but you have to be able to inspect this closely to appreciate it or I’d read it on the radio. How is it really accomplished? I mean, I can see how I’d /start/ to do it, but then what?
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/06/12/inventory-control/

Alcohol. Is there anything it can’t do.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/1960s-house-party.html

Try not to confuse the artist with the art.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C8FC3W1R6Ud/

The church of the cosmic chicken.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=1PcKZT

Ready? (via Fark)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1epqG7WQAIqrtL.jpg

The one that didn’t blow up and kill everyone in it. It’s simultaneously smaller and bigger than I thought.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=nO0lyT

And the original Philtro Aquo-Vac water-cooled radio tube. The size of an American football, and designed for the living room console radio market, as well as for primary circuits of the network of gigantic Tesla coils that to this day broadcast-power everything from henhouse fans to paint shakers to the mighty land leviathans lumbering across Belgium in Anglo-Prussian War 1.3 in the Stockholm Zero-Zero variant timeline (where it’s beautiful this time of year, except for the war), it’s the coolest hottest loudest radio tube ever. “This photo might give children the sense that a vacuum tube is safe to handle. Be sure to inform them it’s not. Use the gloves that come in the package with your new radio equipment. Skin oil and contaminants can weaken glass, ruin cardboard insulation, discolor Bakelite knobs, switches, linen-insulated cables, etc. Always use proper gloves and eye and ear protection where they’re called for. Remember what Tommy Tube sings: ‘Mind the volts, avoid jolts!’ and ‘Be your friend Tommy Tube’s safety elf (Safety elf). Keep careless fingers to yourself! (To yourself!)’” Papercraft-animated Tommy Tube was voiced by Ma Rainey. And hear this in Ada Jones’, then Jack Benny’s, then Arthur Godfrey’s, then Jack Paar’s, then Dick Cavett’s, then Paul Simon’s voice: “Philtro– P-H-I-L-T-R-O, the last word in vacuum tube development.”
https://tackyraccoons.com/2024/06/11/whats-the-big-idea/