Traish LaRue and the raccoon that quoted Žižek (say shla-voy-ZHEE-zhek).
“Most things people say are just to try to feel better about themselves, like, for example: Stuff THAT in your speedos, Jacuzzi Bob!”
Here’s the recording of last night’s (2021-08-27) KNYO Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show, ready to re-enjoy.
Thanks heaps to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with not only the above MOTA show but also other ones going back quite a way.
And thanks to Bob Young (no Jacuzzi Bob, he) who, when KNYO unexpectedly conked out and went off the air on Wednesday, alerted David Gealey to confirm the transmitter needed some toasted parts replaced that nobody in the area has, and then sent it overnight-rate (in this case more than $200, just for shipping!) to the people taking up the slack for the company whose /entire staff is dead of COVID-19/. Fixed in a jiffy to factory specs and shipped back, it was reinstalled just in time for Friday airpeople, including me, to do our shows. Speaking of which, go to KNYO.org, click on the big red heart and help the station out. Unlike the bloated high-power stuck-up NPR stations, KNYO doesn’t get any annual six-figure tax-derived shot in the arm from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to be in thrall to NPR and associated controlling-interest-posh-money donors, but depends on you. Also, unlike with every other station I know of, commercial or noncommercial, every penny of money donated to KNYO goes directly to something the station needs, like equipment, and electricity, and rent, and water to flush the toilet, and music publisher’s fees (and the occasional transmitter repair), and zero of your money gets skimmed off and diverted into the pockets of the gold-tooth glad-handers lording it over the radio station from their leather chair. At KNYO everyone including management is a volunteer, in it for radio. Click on the heart. The heart. Yes. Just like that. Yesss.
There’s a lot of locally written material in this show. There usually is, but even more so this time. All the regulars and a few surprises, including Charles Cornelius Tyler‘s latest song… And I was reminded that I only seem to mention the Anderson Valley Advertiser when I read something from it on the radio, and never bring it up here or on the MCN listserv or on Mendo.org, even though the AVA is often the source of a full hour of a show’s material, and I’m sorry about having given the impression of taking them for granted for so long, so here: The Anderson Valley Advertiser, a hoot and a holler and only a dollar, the last real newspaper in America. It’s just $25 a year (that’s 50 cents a week) for full access to everything on the website, late-breaking as well as archived material going back decades (and more of that all the time as the scanning and web work progresses). And they’re still printing on real newsprint today, if that’s what blows your skirts up, and it should. Here are full details about subscribing, whichever way you want to do that: https://www.theava.com/subscribe
Here’s another fun thing you can do, and this one’s free: Scroll all the way to the bottom of this page, enter your email address and click on Follow. After that you’ll get a notice by email when I update once a week with something a lot like this but *new and improved*, because it’ll be in your email, the high-tech convenient social communication medium of the Space Age.
BESIDES ALL THAT, here’s a fresh batch of 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:
Lachy Doley had a giant whammy bar welded to his Hohner D6 Clavinet, the Cadillac of clavinets. Now all the kids will want one.
https://theawesomer.com/jimi-hendrix-on-keyboard/636354/
And here’s a look inside L.D.’s /whammy clav/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfBeEYC5kRE
Chinese great proletarian cultural revolution ballet. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWoE6Wu_AJI
All the way to the end, please. The /we did it!/-ness of it. The thrill of victory.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/08/07/meanwhile-at-the-tokyo-olympics/
What part of our lives is not at all like this?
https://boingboing.net/2021/08/21/is-this-the-worst-dark-ride-in-america.html
The original tree-huggers.
https://www.facebook.com/deborah.fischbach/posts/10223890268956856
Type the alphabet. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://typethealphabet.app/
Architectural models in film. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://archimodelsinfilm.com/
I like the idea of this little girl getting her own guitar and becoming amazing with it.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/08/21/6-year-old-blind-and-autistic-girl-plays-guitar-for-the-first-time/
The Surfrajettes. Perfect marriage of sight and sound. Just look at those speaker cabinets. I saw a middle-1960s Karmann-Ghia that color once– it was like melting pistachio ice cream (of the era; they used to dye pistachios bright red, but dye pistachio ice cream a color close to those speakers and that Fender Jaguar guitar). (Two rather more modern cars that look good that color: a 2002 Thunderbird and a Fiat 500 of any year) (Notice, when you look up aqua 2002 Thunderbird, they tend to show them from the side and side-front mostly, because the angle is not so good from the back. And after-2000 Thunderbirds are deceptive in another way: they look great from the side and side-front, but /only until you get close and see how tubby they are/. From across the street they’re attractive, but standing right next to it you can practically smell the mid-life-crisis alcohol sweat of the lunatic right-wing Pillow Guy type who colors his hair, eyebrows and pencil-thin mustache orangish-blonde and squints rather than put on the glasses… Ah, jeez, sorry, back to the Surfrajettes: my Aunt Wanda had a chair like that; the wedge-shaped arms of that chair flap open like a piano bench on the top to hold packs of cigarets (cartons lived in the refrigerator), a weighted-tape-dispenser-size lighter, TV Guide, candy, whatever, as well as they mirror the contour of the guitarist’s sturdy thighs, like the little tree in the very back matches the posture of the girl on the left, and the flat teevee matches the stones of the fireplace and the facets of the right-hand girl’s hard plastic dress. I repeat, The Surfrajettes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyeVjnJg9E
The blue car at the very bottom. Another good color for a car, this one fine-looking from every angle and the right size, too.
https://www.vintag.es/2021/08/peugeot-402-darlmat.html
Cute tilt-shift effect to add to video games. Let it auto-play through several of the example videos. Everything looks better, not just cuter, in tilt-shift… Oh, wait a minute… Yes, there’s my million-dollar idea for the day: Regular prescription glasses to wear all the time, that make the whole real world around you a tabletop-tiny/Viewmaster world. Tilt-shift glasses… Oh my god– no, better: you’d start a company where people upload stereo-pair images, and you’d ship them a real ViewMaster device and stereoptical picture disks. Well, when you do that and the money starts pouring in like the cookie money in /Small Time Crooks/, be sure to cut KNYO a generous check. Or go to KNYO.org, click on the big red heart and give till it hurts.
https://theawesomer.com/tilt-shifted-video-games/636308/
(And I had another million-dollar idea just now: Merciful Briefs ™. They’re regular briefs for boys but without the stupid rubber bands around your thighs they’re as loose and comfortable as boxer shorts but smaller, so they’re even cooler in hot weather.)
[Edit: It turns out that a company already offers the service of making ViewMaster disks from your photos (they call them reels) and selling you a ViewMaster clone toy to view them with. But they only accept 7 images per disk, when a disk has 14 pictures for 7 stereo pairs, so I don’t think this is even 3D… I think they’re just putting the same image in both the left and right eye, completely missing the point of the toy and the experience. I intend to write them a stern letter. But Merciful Briefs ™ are still on the table.]
Cie La Mue/tte sample video.
https://vimeo.com/520969184?fbclid=IwAR1xgPZsL-b7ApfcsjIwFUB9JJPqft_LfIL4rU6kuRpF7CBOCfAjTtIjsT0
Blackadder says MacBeth. A metaphor for the puppet theater of religion and politics in general. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Diva5REt8c
Ironistan.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/24/2047836/-Cartoon-Ironies-of-Afghanistan
Hmm.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1430619733645303818
God-Man will save her. (Recalls the /I sent you a truck, a boat and a fucking /helicopter/ joke.)
https://boingboing.net/2021/08/25/will-god-man-save-reporter-millie-mills-from-covidhead.html
Speaking of which, kind of, though no joke, there’s Facebook Live video shot out the window by Linda Almond, 55, of Waverly, Tennessee a very short while before that flood out there knocked the house down and drowned both her and her husband. Their daughter and son survived. The moment-by-moment of it is fascinating: in the video Linda says, “I wish I had one of those,” and then she says, “I need a light.” They’re smoking cigarets, which, nothing wrong with that, but it’s the kind of clever/ordinary detail hook you appreciate in /fiction/ about people in trouble, even before you learn that’s how people really are.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/24/tennessee-flooding-woman-drowned
This hyperventilating antivax/antimask lunatic again, but improved all over by being musically metallicated.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/08/covid-rant-goes-metal.html
How ya doin’.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2021/08/how-you-doin-its-time-to-make-some-sauce.html
(That coupled with the fuzzy-red-balloon-about-to-pop anti-mask guy –see above– reminds me of Verge Belanger’s late-night radio show, for about ten years of which there was a person who called himself Rev Ron who’d phone Verge up at like 2am almost every week and just yammer for half an hour about space aliens, football team/govt. conspiracies to kidnap and mind-control him, Walt Disney’s frozen head, chemtrails, everything– a sentence of this leading into a sentence of that without finishing any thought because it was all one super-attention-span thought, like the first five minutes of the film /Conspiracy Theory/. Rev Ron had a recurring compulsive-tic word; it was the phrase /in any way shape or form/ compressed down from seven into only two or three syllables that came out in a fast blurt (like enw’sh’pfm)… Australian transplant (via Britain originally and then California) singer Charles Cornelius Tyler used to tell about a word of his father’s: /tenerit/. Charles grew up thinking it was a normal word to announce you were about to speak, that you were finished speaking, or to express resignation or wistful despair or enthusiasm for whatever had happened, was happening, or would come next– a word whose meaning depended on the timing, context and occasion, like a swear word but allowed. Charles was eighteen before he realized that tenerit was /at any rate/, and yes, it still meant all those things, and there’s nothing wrong with that, in any-way-shape-or-form, how ya doin’, like.)
Father and son art collaboration. The adventure continues.
https://www.sadanduseless.com/funny-doodles/
All about Get Smart. (48 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngazWNQkzqA
It’s Leon Theremin’s (orig. Termen’s) birthday today. Here’s the trailer for the definitive documentary about his life, which included stowing away in a freighter from Russia to take New York and the musical art world by storm in the 1920s with his electronic musical invention, the theremin; being kidnapped back to Russia by Soviet spies and put to work inventing secret listening devices for Stalin, and then being found by Western reporters at the end of his long life, in the 1990s, working as a gardener in a music school for girls and brought back to America to be reunited with Clara Rockmore, his lovely 1920s protege and, incidentally, to repair a college professor’s broken antique theremin to good working order with a single sharp glance and a Swiss Army knife.
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2784362777
The feather dance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3uNHWhVVFw
Planet of trilobites. Earth was in fact the planet of trilobites, some of them twelve feet long, for a hundred million years. They’re still around, kind of, as pill-bugs, like mighty dinosaurs are still around as chickens.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/08/is-this-most-successful-animal-ever.html
Headlock. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1431209887724457988
Rubic’s cloud.
https://twitter.com/pickover/status/1429954753493192706
ROUS of Rio.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2021/08/capybaras-move-into-town.html
Relative sizes, rotations and tilts. (via Clifford Pickover)
https://tinyurl.com/y42tjh86
This here’s the ballad of a gentle laxative. Ya gotcher so-lo version, and yer one where the whole band is on the bus. What is irregularity? That’s a good question; I asked it myself when I was your age. Well, son, it’s when you don’t use the toilet at exactly the same time and /only/ at that time every day. I know, it’s weird, but millions of people in the world had it drilled into them that God wants you to decide in advance what time you go to the bathroom. My own stepfather used to wake up with an alarm clock every day at the same time, drink a glass of hot water and take a shit. Your grandmother told me about that and I didn’t believe her… Sure, it’s a free country, you can if you want to. Let me know how it turns out. I guess it might be useful someday, if you’re ever in prison or the army or you’re a bank-robbery hostage or something.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/ballad_gentle_laxative
Pile drivers.
https://theawesomer.com/the-kiffness-x-thai-pile-drivers/636965/
Don’t take my coconuts. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQGgH7ljclY
Glen Gould would highly apparently approve. He was always doing things like this.
https://laughingsquid.com/apparently-kid-piano-soundtrack/
And he’d also approve of this rerun.
https://twitter.com/NYinLA2121/status/1430754715294334984
Don’t sell fake vaccination documents.
https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1430658074377924618
Cactus fasciation (say fay-shee-A-shun).
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/01/saguaro-fasciation-white-winged-dove.html
One-man band.
https://www.facebook.com/ARTEConcert/videos/960661194461201
Eight-man band.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/F761/production/_120092336_theblueacesjazzbandc1930s.jpg
Clockwork 3-D running-catbus zoetrope (say ZO-uh-trohp).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x77UzmM_iE8
I still do all these things, but not exactly these things. My stoplight game is to snap my fingers just before the light changes to make it look to the other cars like I magically changed the light. And I develop a fresh rhythm each time of stepping on the crack, then not, then set a fraction of the distance-to-crack to step, then maybe a crack again, and vary it like a roulette wheel of time signatures. If it starts matching a song I sing the song.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2012/08/games-we-play.html
Sisters with transistors.
https://www.impulsegamer.com/miff-2021-sisters-with-transistors-2020-review/
I’ll bet soldier girls can do it. I’ll bet moms who can pick a car up to get it off their baby can do it.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2021/08/25/shovel-challenge-2/
Moms in fighting trim (who could probably to the shovel trick).
https://snapshotsofhistory.quora.com/An-unidentified-corporal-from-the-US-Army-s-30th-Infantry-Division-based-in-the-San-Francisco-Presidio-stands-at-atten
How we get visual stories.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/08/7-classic-movie-tricks-that-led-to.html
Oy.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/23/2047175/-Cartoon-The-experts-weigh-in
Bubbles.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2021/08/bubbles.html
Where one second takes an hour. I hadn’t seen this yet or I would have put it in the /Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything/-theme post a few weeks ago.
https://theawesomer.com/if-every-second-lasted-an-hour/636312/
“America is a dog playing poker, saying, /War is a last resort,/ and waggin’ his tail.” –Roy Zimmerman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfCZqkpS4PA
Shell.
https://boingboing.net/2021/08/23/casting-molten-aluminum-with-seashells.html
Not the sharpest tools in the shed, are they.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIhOPOzlvTA
Vancouver in the ’70s. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.vintag.es/2021/08/vancouver-1972-1982.html
Kunta, queynte, kunton, cunt. This might be the word you want. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDJutaFuVD0
Rerun: Pleasant, smart-hot Susie Dent explains swears, in the process of which she gets to swear like a sailor. I’ve just always appreciated when women swear. And children– when children swear in a joke it makes it much funnier, especially of course if the punchline relies on it, but it doesn’t have to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C26xJT4BT0E
And rerun: Universal Basic Income. UBI removes any pretended need for overlapping agencies and their bureaucratic clutter and waste and fraud and cheating, truly raising millions of people up out of poverty and despair, and it’s actually cheaper, and better for the whole country, much like the way Medicare For All tosses out the horrific injustices, needless expense and byzantine bullshit of the corrupt, for-profit medical insurance industry and replaces all that with /you can get medical help from a real doctor when you’re hurt or sick./
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl39KHS07Xc
Memo Of The Air 
