Underdog.
“With whom did you leave my thirty million bucks?” snarled Jacko, the gun in his hand as polished and deadly as the grammar in his mouth. -Harper J. Cole
Here’s the recording of last night’s 7.3-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, which 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…
Kinky Friedman, of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, is dead.
https://27thstreet.me/2024/06/27/asshole-from-el-pasp-rip/
Arabs got talent. Apparently wow is wow in all the languages, like oy and hmph. This is less robotically precise than some famous Asian troupes of this style of dance, but it adds to the experience, for me.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/06/24/mayyas/
Foolproof plan. Just one problem.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2024/06/22/key-and-peele-with-an-awesome-plan/
What happened before history. Vas you dere, Charlie?*
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2016/06/what-happened-before-history.html
*Why, yes. Yes, I was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAX2RuZm-Fk
Well, there goes the weekend, if you have one.
https://calculatingempires.net/
In heaven everything is fine.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/retro-americana-is-on-the-menu-at-these-17-diners
This is the Underdog theme version I’m singing over and over in my head, and out loud when alone, lately. The background humming that leads into it, I make into a musical dog howl. Ah-WHOO ooo-oo-oo-oo-oo OO-ooooh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQaLrI6I2MI
Audio map. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.audiomapa.org/
Music changed forever. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/music-just-changed-forever
About the gay accent. It’s okay to call it that anymore; science has established that it is a thing.
https://laughingsquid.com/gay-voice/
Corgi!
https://laughingsquid.com/corgi-skateboards-down-stone-steps/
Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/jangkoal/
Art. (via Biblioklept)
https://biblioklept.org/2024/06/27/the-pleasures-of-dagobert-detail-leonora-carrington-2/
How to tell a painting from a portrait. It’s the lips that give them away. So soft. My hero. My little hero.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/06/23/unquote-679/
The Exotica Project. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://exoticaproject.com/
Tobe vacuum tubes. “They’re filterized.” (via WeirdUniverse)
https://repository.duke.edu/dc/adaccess/R0467
A cab driver took pictures of his passengers for 30 years. This is a very different world from the one I live in, and I’m fascinated by it. (via Kottke)
https://www.huckmag.com/article/ryan-weideman-nyc-cab-photography-in-my-taxi
A little encouragement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izyZLKIWGiA
Rerun: Kevin Olusola – True Colors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adJIBx0O4r0
Rerun: Katy Perry – Firework.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGJuMBdaqIw
How we get carbon fiber bicycle frames. A lot of skilled hand work on space-age materials. Whereas I got my steel bike at a yard sale forty years ago for $25. It’s single-speed, it weighs about forty pounds, it’s been out in the weather all this time with the same tires and the same bolts and nuts and the same chain and hard seat and everything, and it still works. Every couple of years or so I squirt some 3-in-1 oil in its various joints, and that seems to be enough for it. I can’t even remember the last time I had to pump the tires up. I think it was 2014 or 2015. It was the year my mother broke her hip. She was tango dancing and she caught her high heel in a flaw in the floor. She’s 95 now. Except for two knees and the hip and some teeth, she’s all original equipment, and she has a comparable percentage of her marbles to my count of mine. Speaking of which, I just read where Dick Van Dyke said, “I have all my marbles, and I’m old enough to be Joe Biden’s father.”
https://theawesomer.com/how-carbon-fiber-bicycles-are-made/743049/
How we get the big bongs.
https://theawesomer.com/how-giant-bells-are-made/743212/
Birds allow ants to swarm over and clean them. Everybody wins.
https://hasanjasim.online/a-photographer-captures-an-unusual-image-of-a-crow-bathing-in-ants/
“Sauron is often portrayed as a force of pure domination and destruction, but that was more Morgoth’s deal, Sauron was originally a student of Aule, the Smith God, and was interested in a perfectly ordered world that progressed through industry and craft. In a way Sauron’s was the world that came to be, organized advanced industrial capitalism (or the Soviet system, I doubt Tolkien saw too much difference) which globalizes the economy and destroys local traditions.”
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/SaurontheEconomist.png
Wait a minute. What have you done with the /real/ red spot? (or) A charming spot but clearly not the spot for me. Science is nice, but fans of the Wachovski sisters’ film Jupiter Ascending know the truth behind the red spot.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/is-jupiters-iconic-red-spot-the-same-one-that-cassini-observed-in-the-1600s/
Finally, a new kind of piano that’s still a real acoustic piano and not a computer. It doesn’t say here how much one costs, but I’m going to guess, as much as a new house.
https://theawesomer.com/ravenchord-piano/743124/
The best rat and mouse trap ever, for just $14.95. (via Grant Miller)
https://tinyurl.com/TheBestRatAndMouseTrapEver
Why they call Earth Deathworld. (It’s the parakeets.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxQYpbiIPqY
Explore the world of cigarets. (via Things Magazine)
https://www.zigsam.at/index.html
Rerun from four years ago, verbatim: Thirty or more years ago I read a science fiction story that I’m almost certain was titled /The Boy Who Walked Around the Moons of Jupiter/, about an 18 or maybe 20 or 22-year-old boy being interviewed by a technology reporter because he was engaged in a project to early-virtual-reality walk on a treadmill around the approximate equator of 3D images of all the then-known moons of Jupiter. At the end, the boy called out to his mother to come in and clean him because he’d pissed himself again and couldn’t stop his game without having to start all over. “Mom!” She didn’t come in right away, so he shrieked, “MOM …I’m wet!” This is like that, except real, and the video-game-playing boy doesn’t care that he’s disgracing himself but the mother cares. (If you can find that story for me, the Moons of Jupiter one, I’d be obliged. It’s as gone as the song, from the same era, about Samson’s Radio Dogs that I’m starting to wonder if I just dreamed it.) (Another thing but from only like fifteen years ago that I’m having trouble finding is a weird ten-minute video of sexy dangerous or distressed women on paperback book covers computer-morphing from each to the next over music made of deep OOOoooming sounds and metal squeaking and clanking– it was called Pillow Girl. That’s gone. But in compensation I’ve just learned the Urban Dictionary definition of the term: “A Pillow Girl is a female who puts many pillows on their bed that they don’t sleep with. Example: What a Pillow Girl she is.” I like that and will be saying it occasionally on the radio, where appropriate: What a pillow girl she is. Also it might be a cute thing to say in a baby-talk voice to your pet dog. It doesn’t have to mean anything; dogs are good at tone of voice. Yes she is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTomMm61Ixw
“These are the new FreeAim VR shoes, shoes that allow you to walk in VR with your actual legs.”
https://theawesomer.com/freeaim-vr-shoes/743177/
“In 100 years we went from grammar schools teaching Latin and Greek to universities teaching remedial English to native English speakers.” (via the Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/diagramming-sentences-in-the-19th-century/
Huge toy airplanes.
https://theawesomer.com/the-worlds-largest-r-c-airplanes/743211/
Good morning, campers. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://bustednuckles.net/camping-saturday-new-restos-and-resto-restos/
Couched in luxury.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/women-on-sofas-1960s.html
Do your own google search for “landfill couches”.Really, do it.
[Your search results here.]
“We were ready to throw it away, but we were just ignorant.” But were they really? Is it art to throw a mess of crap in a corner of an art gallery and put a title on it? How is the janitor supposed to know it’s not trash? It’s trash. You can tell by mentally putting it next to art and asking yourself, Which of these things is art?
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/painting_mistaken_for_dropcloth
Read this aloud at conversation speed.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/06/21/brave-new-world-4/
Counterintuitive entropy.
https://theawesomer.com/making-order-from-chaos/743295/
Okay. Got it.
https://boingboing.net/2024/06/24/john-oliver-on-trumps-plans-for-a-second-term.html
I’ve been reading books from the library in the Internet Archive. You might have to make an account and log in to read more than a sample of this or that. I have had some trouble logging in, depending on what computer I use, but no trouble ever when I just let it log me in via my Google account. Here’s something via Futility Closet that I saw today.
https://archive.org/details/godsmannovelinwo0000ward/mode/2up
And The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. Click on the three dots, then Visual Adjustment, and turn the brightness up all the way. They scanned it too dim. But it’s beautiful; let it convince you to buy the big real book, for yourself or for a gift, if you can.
https://archive.org/details/arrival00shau/mode/2up
On the other hand, giant publishing companies sued the Internet Archive over the lending of just 178 titles, and won, which set a precedent so the Archive just this last week /had to remove half a million titles from lending. Also in the one-step-forward ten-steps-back department, Oklahoma just required public schools to have a King James bible in every classroom and for teachers to teach from it. Next stop, Republic of Gilead. Or maybe the train won’t be stopping at all, and it’ll be like /Snowpiercer/.
Further:
https://boingboing.net/2024/06/24/john-oliver-on-trumps-plans-for-a-second-term.html
Rerun: Insult passphrase generator. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.cheswick.com/insult
Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/p/C8cpduyIVRl/
Oh blinding light. Oh light that blinds. I cannot see, look out for me.
https://theawesomer.com/blinding-lights-ska-edition/743007/
Baby girl, bitch girl, baby baby girl.
https://laughingsquid.com/the-baby-song/
Concatenation. A single kinetic minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2WGHP4V2Hc
Immigration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBr2CojKYbg
Exterior Kansas map projection.
https://xkcd.com/2951
Roadside America. (via Things Magazine)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-margolies-photographs-of-roadside-america/
Experiments. (via Things Magazine)
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/experiments
“I roll my dice to check the horse for oil.”
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=062624
THE WHITE DEATH. When a waifish Southern woman coughs blood onto the lace around her sleeve, and it’s not from being punched in the mouth, that’s a bad sign.
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/06/26/The-Perfect-Human-Predator-is-More-Deadly-Than-the-Plague/
She knows. She’s messing with them.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2024/06/26/kids-smh/
There is good, there is good, there is untapped good! Like, inside, the woist of us is good.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/06/1950s-teenage-boys.html
Rerun: Live music is good. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fjBw48bgtc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZQsF1-LfSg
“Are you a Mexican or a Mexican’t.” “I’m a Mexican.” “Good.” And “I can’t believe you committed suicide! (Sigh.) I can’t help you out of this one, Joe.” Film dialog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2WGHP4V2Hc
And rerun: The best and wurst of bad acting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2BKT-8FD4s
Memo Of The Air 
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