Almost like being in love.

     “The human fascination with fun has led to many tragedies in your short but violent history. One wonders how your race has survived having so much fun.” -Tuvok

Here’s the recording of last night’s (2021-01-22) KNYO Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show, ready to re-enjoy.

 

As well as all the regular MOTA features and surprises and what we in the industry call the droll slog, the show ends with a Firesign Theater recording from 1973 that I, a card-carrying Firesign Theater afficionado [say uh-fiss-ee-oh-NAH-doh], did not until recently know even existed: /TV or Not TV/. (It’s not the entire troupe but mainly Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman.) In case you wanta skip straight to that, it starts about seven hours and ten minutes into the show and runs forty minutes. Bonus activity: Simultaneously play this silent 8mm film of Proctor and Bergman doing a later on-stage version of /TV or Not TV/ for enhanced simulated verisimilitude and further reclamation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLlEnLTIsc

And thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with not only the above MOTA show but also other ones going back awhile.

Besides all that, here’s your weekly sack of links to not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set aside for you while gathering the show together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right.

The graceful ethereal blanket octopockle, languid butterfly of the deep.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/01/tweet-of-day_17.html

Birds on an amplified fence wire. (via b3ta) I don’t know if they still make school buses the same way as they used to, but I remember discovering that you could flick your fingernail on one of the reinforcing rectangular-cross-section stripes along the side of the bus and it would make this sound:
https://vimeo.com/461038425

Further birds on amplified wires.
https://laughingsquid.com/70-birds-play-electric-guitars/

Nyckelharpa.
https://27thstreet.me/2021/01/18/nyckelharpa/

Crystal bachet (say bah-SHAY).
https://laughingsquid.com/cristal-baschet-cover-of-interstellar/

Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling, come on, baby, shake that thing. (Hide over there from the dancing bear.) Gum. The dancing girls are chewing gum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1ozCWyUlCg

Nya-nya.
https://boingboing.net/2021/01/21/na-na-na-na-hey-hey-ey-goodbye-to-donald-trump-of-course.html

Places you can rent to shoot your movie in. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.shootfactory.co.uk/uk-location-category/quirky-unusual-locations/

Now everything looks like a place to shoot a movie in.
https://www.shootfactory.co.uk/uk-location-category/quirky-unusual-locations/

“In real life, Orville Redenbacher [say hor-FEE-leh HRAY-t’n-bahr] drowned in his jacuzzi (say yuh-COOT-see) in 1995 [say non-TEE-nuh nonna-tih-FAH-fuh].”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjzg_tVXLFQ

How they talk. (via EverlastingBlort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHIJfbYhQFg

“Trump is gonna give you such a health care, people are gonna be begging Trump give us a break from the health, you’re gonna be tired of all the health. And it’s gonna be /so easy/. Believe me. /So easy./ Two weeks, you watch.”
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-lies-2649961270/

Luge on wheels.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/01/17/switzerland-mountain-coaster/

What goes around goes down.
https://jalopnik.com/watch-this-russian-nissan-350z-donut-cut-itself-into-an-1846086303

Product placement.
https://tinyurl.com/SNL-ESPN-CLASSIC

A nunch of butts. Capitol Steps.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/01/21/lirty-dies-a-nunch-of-butts-capitol-steps/

39 cents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEb_epsuLqA

Retrofuture images.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/461478293072592536/

Retrofuturism: The Future We Dreamt Of. (65 min.) I just noticed that I always say it with a P sound in it: /dreampt/. Do you do that too?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRRbTbc7i0M

Think up a spaceship name and this program will design that ship. Here, I’ve started you off with the U.S.S Henny Youngman:
https://ship.shapewright.com/?name=Henny+Youngman

Or the /Dauntless Whore of Orion/.
https://ship.shapewright.com/?name=Dauntless+Whore+of+Orion

Vespasian culture.
http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2021/01/in-brunei-they-are-making-some-far-out.html

Rerun: Reckless Youth. The doctor looks not exactly like but a little like Fred Lemin. (Hi, Fred!) “That was my first exposure to New York intellectuals.” Dutch is Mike Mazurki. Mary is Carrie Fisher. Almost everyone in this film is dead no, so you see what can happen.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/01/reckless-youth.html

Human murmuration.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2021/01/human-murmuration.html

Juanita sent me the link to this. It’s an Irish tapdancing advertisement for something, one of the new kind of ads where you have to guess what for.
https://youtu.be/dC2-X1Gk1Cw

An Irish step-dance that shows how Irish step-dancing started in the first place. It’s the pee-dance.
https://www.facebook.com/juanita.watkins.714/posts/10220763577617461

Rerun: Further frantic dancing. Ow, my back.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/01/22/dancin-up-a-storm/

A beautiful teapot based on Hero’s Engine of two thousand years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTrXJ6aZPsg

The Magazine of Science and Invention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL47-RIyj8E

The vacuum tube, miracle of our modern age. We always think of the future as fulfilling our desires by merely refining the current popular technology. George O. Smith’s science fiction of the 1940s involved a future of ever more highly developed, higher-frequency vacuum tubes that could transmit power losslessly over great distances and copy solid objects and teleport people between planets. Whatever new thing you wanted to do was just waiting on the next kind of vacuum tube. There’s Heinlein’s /Thorsen/ tube, for example, providing computer memory. It was a cathode ray tube, but with slow-decay coating, so the electron beam would lay down an entire planar array of bits and then scan the array to read and/or flip the bits –very dense storage– for use in, for instance, /Drafting Dan/, which was the plausible idea behind all modern drafting programs. And it was the basis of the self-aware A.I. that generated the C.G.I. Lunar patriot Adam Selene, who guided the largely bloodless revolution that freed the Moon from Earth’s tyranny. So, um, anyway, the vacuum tube, still as cool as it is hot, and the other way around too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JzxX75oYc

The vacuum dugong and its little stripey associates.
https://boingboing.net/2021/01/22/cute-dugong-eating-on-the-ocean-floor-video.html

The nuclear salt-water rocket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvZjhWE-3zM

Some of the weirdness of Mars. You might recall the spider iconography in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ /Mars/ books of the early part of last century. We’re only just able to see this stuff now, though, with our best instruments in actual low orbit around actual Mars. Hmm.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/mars-is-weird

The ultrasonic obliterator.
https://theawesomer.com/ultrasonic-obliterator-slow-mo/607171/

I love this. Especially the hover-text: “Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec’s dynamic range issues.“
https://xkcd.com/2414/

Art. (via EverlastingBlort)
https://www.booooooom.com/2020/12/29/artist-spotlight-laurie-lee-brom/

The owl scale.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-owl-scale.html

What. (via Fark)
https://vesti.ua/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/iStock-668538338.jpg

A placid Japanese typewriter from the Rape of Nanking era.
https://laughingsquid.com/horizontal-cylinder-toshiba-typewriter/

Don’t be a dummy. If you see something, say something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-5nelJWvKk

Barbara Lynn, her yellow pre-CBS Telecaster, and her joyous signature move. /Byeeaaaow./
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Y7sEO7Low

Jeanne Moreau. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://flashbak.com/pictures-photographs-jeanne-moreau-437346/

Thanks. (via EverlastingBlort)
https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1349932778171686912

“God /dammit/, you guys.”
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/377

Bill Wurtz bursts back upon the scene.
https://theawesomer.com/bill-wurtz-here-comes-the-sun/607514/

Party like Betty White’s 99, which she is.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/01/17/betty-white-turns-99-today/

Practice lips.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/01/20/practice-lips/

Practice bagpipes chanter. Illegal in California, Vermont and Sweden, but you’re a wild rebel; what care you for their puny law. Scissors and a plastic straw is all you need. Also cellophane tape for if you get the holes in the wrong place.
https://laughingsquid.com/musician-plays-plastic-straw-like-instrument/

The historical Scottish /Gate of Chairs/. (Compare to the historical New Zealand /Toothbrush Fence/.)
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/01/21/a-stand-of-seats/

The trash creations of Dinaa Amin.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_trash_creations_of_dinaa_amin

/Troll Bridge/ (a short film to the memory of Terry Pratchett). (28 min., including /The Ballad of Cohen the Barbarian/ over the end credits).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7v_TdLviUE

And outtakes from the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. (2 hours)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jpj7xx4MIA