I am Beef Stroganoff.

     “The world seems a little less funny without you in it.”

Here’s the recording of last night’s (2020-07-03) KNYO and KMEC* Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show, ready to re-enjoy. (Left-click for instant-play. Right-click to download.) And thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with the latest show and also other ones going back awhile. And you can go to Links To Recorded Audio, see above, and hear older shows yet.

*Some distressing news, besides that Carl Reiner died: Friday morning I got via text from the on-hand engineer that Mendocino Environment Center’s (KMEC’s) internet service has been interrupted with no firm reconnect date. As this internet thingy is how my show and many others’ shows get to KMEC live, this particular show was not heard on the air in Ukiah but only in Fort Bragg. (If you’re solvent enough to pay the MEC’s back internet bill, please do; you’ll be a real hero, and not the kind of hero that gets other people killed, like in the 2005 film Serenity, but the Carl Reiner kind of hero.) (We still have Mel Brooks, until they cancel him for being a Holocaust-denying Nazi racist for writing /Springtime for Hitler/, like vandals just painted RACIST FISH on the Copenhagen statue of the Little Mermaid, commissioned in the year 1907 and unveiled in 1913.)

And some thrilling news: I’ve been in contact with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose new project is a series of 25-minute edutaining radio shows titled /Tales From The Resistance/, and starting next week I’ll be airing one every week, as well as other material from the magical Mime Troupe. Mimes on the radio! That’s what I’m /talking/ about.

And here are links to worthwhile educational items that I set aside for you while gathering last night’s show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:

Riot police, all of them armed to fight a war (!) march into a public park to break up the properly-masked-and-socially-distanced peaceful violin vigil for the very kid the police murdered. The camera woman says sadly, Oh, no… No, no… over and over, which you’ll discover you are already saying, yourself. Or maybe you’re not, because you’re worn out from saying Oh, no to our suckworthy present world. Sociologists call this /Oh, no/ fatigue.
https://twitter.com/jessiedesigngal/status/1277126019246260224

Finger ninjas, part 4. Collect the whole set. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/mr-manos-is-the-finger-ninja.html

A safety message from your local Fireworks Control Board, scourge of styrofoam hat-heads everywhere.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2020/07/fireworks-safety-2020.html

A whole Indonesian scooter-modifying community to learn about and wish to join or actually create your own local chapter of, right in your own town. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://youtu.be/uVeVZ-Iugkg

A girl, and a fan, and a fellow. A bit shaky on the slow-motion splits, nothing at all like the dance mastery of the superhuman Nicholas Brothers, but luminous into somewhat numinous.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-girl-and-fan-and-fellow.html

A lot of times you see somebody in a vehicle up in the air and you think, /That’s not flying. Call that flying? ‘Cause I don’t,/ like the old woman said to the filmy, fishy, smelly, seductive invading aliens wafting creepily up away from the cats in Carol Emshwiller‘s /Almost the End of the World/. A helicopter, for example, is just constantly frantically needily clawing at the air to keep from falling end-over-end out of the sky. But this guy is flying. No noisy motor. No seatbelt, even. He nonchalantly takes his street shoes off and puts his teevee slippers on. Dangerous? Sure, though, notice: from takeoff to landing he is in a parachute, in a box of pillows. /Leonardo da Vinci/ could see this all those hundreds of years ago and cogitate for an afternoon and make this out of stuff just lying around in Italy of those days and fly in it, or rather send a small village boy up in it first, just in case, and within a decade or two wars would have begun to be fought in the sky, and we wouldn’t have had to wait so long for progress upward. We’d have cities in outer space by now, circling the sun like Kenneth Patchen’s leopards made of golden wire. This project is the very definition of inspiring. He is a leaf on the wind. Watch how he soars.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2020/07/flying-couch.html

A virtual tour, in a dozen (so far) short videos, of the Studio Ghibli museum. Hayao Miazaki was always all about flight.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd1b2TUlpmDLU7YpPu889Lg/videos

A short film about stoneworker Etsuro Sotoo’s involvement in the construction of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Spain. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.nowness.com/series/constructed-views/stone-cut-la-sagrada-familia

Bauhaus ballet. (30 min.) (via b3ta)
https://youtu.be/mHQmnumnNgo

How they did it in the old days.
http://marriedtothesea.com/062820/sitting-in-the-same-room.gif

Speaking of which: Two-Ton Tony Galento’s training tricks.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/tony_galentos_training_regimen

But can you songify President Ass-Clown? Challenge accepted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ign_vZupjno

A happy trick involving bicycles.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2020/07/tweet-of-day_3.html

Scottish Power To The Key Workers posters.
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/cobolt-collective-power-tae-the-key-workers-illustration-graphic-design-250620

There’s some swearing in this. Even if that bugs you, it’s worth it. In places where they have flamingos, they know what this guy is singing about, if you call that singing. Out of their natural environment flamingos are crazy boasting bastards. And they’re not pink because they’re pink. They’re pink because of special bacteria in what they eat.
http://dial-a-nihilist.com/im-a-flamingo/

“Think about it: a mask is just a bumper sticker for your face. Conservatives, now your mouth can own the libs without even openin’ itself.” He has a little trouble keeping a straight face at the end. The truth is all just happily bubbling up out of him like a fountain.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2020/07/we-gotta-do-it.html

I like it that the artist gave Hegel a little potbelly. It lends gravitas to the philosophical bushwah, as both are historically accurate. That’s those particular philosophers there, all over.
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/348

SNL health product commercials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGYDWO5Fhtg

The future. Click on Closed Captions (CC). Click on the gear (settings). Click Auto-Translate. Choose English. This is 2020 forseen in 1947, when my mother was 18 years old and typing 130 words a minute on a manual Royal in the office of Youngstown Sheet and Tube. It had not quite yet entered her mind to run away to California. It would be ten years before she’d meet my bio-father, a young architecture student with a smart mouth. Radios all had big hot vacuum tubes in them in 1947. And they envisioned /this/:
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2020/07/television-il-de-demain.html

Rerun: The apprehension engine.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/mark_korven_and_his_apprehension_engine

This amazing performer blows the longest trill in trumpet history. He never runs out of air because he uses his cheeks for an air reservoir, like the bladder of bagpipes. He’s not faking it when he staggers and almost passes out. You can die from trying this. Horn players have dislocated jaws and even had a stroke from this. There’s a fine line between ecstatically hyperventilating and popping your brain like a balloon.
https://27thstreet.me/2020/06/30/hurricane-season/

If I had unlimited money for a house full of big blank walls and at least one /very/ bright, high-rez video projector, there would be something like this on a continuous loop, for art, with the music off, of course, or better music, like Yes or ELP or AWB or Brian Eno or that Irish /Emu/ woman singing in an ocean of reverb. It would be to your left on your way to the (normal-size) bathroom, not even in a prominent place, that’s how rich I would be. It’s an hour of sharp busy video of our sun, the heating system, where each day takes one second. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://petapixel.com/2020/06/30/this-10-year-timelapse-of-the-sun-was-made-from-425-million-images/

The above image, zoomed all the way in, to see the Sun Duck that the old Lithuanian witch down by the tracks was always telling you about.
https://imgur.com/in55wbg

Rerun: Literal version of Total Eclipse video. In media years, this is ancient. Media years burn faster than dog years anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk

This one in the series is particularly useful.
https://theawesomer.com/everything-is-a-remix-reality/578942/

Ambition.
http://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=070220

Among the fishes he rests in pieces.
https://laughingsquid.com/robotic-spy-squid-encounters-cod-fish/

Oh, Jesus. Oh, for fuck sake.
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/woman-arrested-after-pointing.html

Maybe they just did not-see that.
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/trump-america-first-eagle.html

Why are you alive?
https://theawesomer.com/why-are-you-alive/571090/

Your stabber stabs. Your slicer slices.*
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2020/06/tableware.html

Your tooter toots.
https://laughingsquid.com/trombone-rifle/

Your fractal image generator generates fractal images.
https://theawesomer.com/pouff-light/579052/

If you’re in a boat and there’s a bear swimming in circles with his head stuck in a jar, you do what you gotta do. /Benny, come around again. I almost got it./ Teamwork.
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/29/watch-family-on-a-boat-rescue.html

The Mahammad [sic] Ali of all sardine packers.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/world_championship_sardine_packing_contest

Oscar Mayer’s great new Sack O’ Sauce in a Can O’ Meat.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/sack_osauce

Restore.
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/spend-a-relaxing-hour-watching.html

The true colors of ancient insects turn out to be teal and orange, the color scheme of a thousand modern science-fiction films, as though the filmmakers were clued in to this ancient secret by an interdimensional alien time traveler playing a prank on his power-mad brother that risks the destruction of the universe but what can you do? They don’t hate each other, exactly, they’re just rivals in a contest that has gone on since before the beginning. We are less than ants to them… Or it might be, as a writer for Cracked.com put it, “To be fair, it’s not necessarily laziness per se. Your average colorist has to grade about two hours of movie, frame by frame, in the space of a couple of weeks. It doesn’t take that many glances at the deadline bearing down on the calendar before you throw up your hands and say, “Fuck it. Everybody likes teal and orange!” Take the next mental step: Why does everyone like teal and orange? Perhaps because that’s the color everything used to be at the dawn of oxygen-based life? Hm? After a hundred million years of anaerobic vomity slime-brown, anything would have been a drink of cool clean water, so teal and orange it is. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://gizmodo.com/incredible-amber-fossils-reveal-the-true-colors-of-anci-1844219875

It’s always an appropriate time to recommend reading Roger Zelazny. I’d start with /Lord of Light/, but I just mentioned bugs preserved in amber a moment ago, so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber

“Through my own extensive internet research, I’ve learned that all I need to be safe is this tea made from mulewort.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/30/1957092/-Cartoon-Faces-of-the-maskless

Night parade of 100 demons.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/night-parade-of-one-hundred-demons

Speaking of President Ass-clown, President Ass-clown more and more reminds me of the robot in the Oz books but minus its good qualities (bravery, loyalty to Dorothy). Here, from Wikipedia: “Tik-Tok is a round-bodied mechanical man made of copper, that runs on clockwork springs which periodically need to be wound, like a wind-up toy or mechanical clock. He has separate windings for thought, action, and speech… When his works run down, he becomes frozen or mute or continues to speak but utters gibberish… As Baum repeatedly mentions, Tik-Tok is not alive and feels no emotions. He therefore can no more love or be loved than a sewing machine.”
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/30/how-trump-really-dealt-with-ru.html

A dance to the nations of the world song to show which countries Britain has militarily invaded mostly in service of a handful of truly Dickensian rapacious conscience-free trading company magnates. They avoided Ecuador for some reason. Why, do you suppose? What, or who, were they afraid to rape and shoot and plunder and bring civilization to there?
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/30/someone-made-a-dance-to-the.html

Out of this world, by Jam Handy. “Heaven and Hell battle for the soul of a bread salesman.” (20 min.)
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/out_of_this_world_psa

Trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E47JEgJ2kMM

“It’s fascinating to see just what the algorithms do with this sort of information, and if I’m polluting their dataset with car pictures instead of faces, then, well, that’s my little way of fighting the Rise of the Machines.”
https://jalopnik.com/running-car-faces-through-an-ai-face-processing-algorit-1844238536

Helicopter Canada 1966. (60 min.) (via NagOnTheLake) This is okay. I’m sorry for what I said about the helicopters, before.
https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2020/06/26/canada-in-all-its-glory-circa-1966-curators-perspective/

Should this cop have a gun? He doesn’t seem to need one, and clearly he can’t control his temper and shouldn’t be a cop until some sort of correction is applied that works better than the last time and the time before that.
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/miami-dade-cop-aggressively-pu.html

Happy Coltrane sing-along. I hope a passenger is the one holding the camera, and it’s not the driver, though the driver gets Father of the Year for fathering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utXqrsRoYWo

*And a little more about tableware. A tableware toccata.
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/07/optical-arts-tocatta/