Abso-bloody-lutely!

     “It’s kitchen sink time, Judge. I’ll be pulling out all the stops.” -Douglas Wambaugh

Here’s the recording of last night’s (2022-02-11) Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA), 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 I sometimes forget to mention Kevin MacLeod on the air, for his Scheming Weasel, the intro and outro I’ve been using for ten years now when the show is live from Juanita’s apartment and not from Franklin Street. (It’s the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and Happy Feet when it’s Franklin Street, which it will be next week.)

And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which provided about an hour of the above eight-hour show’s most locally relevant material, as usual, without asking for anything in return. (Though I’m happy to pay $25 annually for full access to all articles and features, and you can be this happy too, or even happier by also helping out KNYO. Speaking of which, KNYO.  While you’re there, tour the new site, recently massaged by whimsical webmaster Chris Dunn, with an updated schedule, elegant design and new features, plus the mobile version works. Either one, desktop or mobile, a big red heart is crying out for you find it and use it. Find it, and use it.

Email me your work on any subject and I’ll read it cold on the radio this coming Friday night. This is a great way to learn to express yourself in writing and be understood. You hear for yourself where to put the commas next time so you never again must clench your fists, eyes and/or spirit in angst because of people thinking you’re saying the exact opposite of what you want to. You learn to vary sentence length. And so on. Verb nouns and nounize verbs, why not? Funly tyrant the language to your will and purpose for a change. Like Orson Welles told Ed Wood: “Why spend your life making somebody else’s dream?” That’s not a question, it’s a whole ocean of pearls of wisdom.

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:

A short, touching, numinous film about the immigrant experience. It makes me think of /The Arrival/ picture book by Shaun Tan.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/02/depayse.html

Stop. I waited for /Private Life/ but it isn’t here. “Your private life’s drama, baby, leave me out, stop.” It’s because in that song they only say stop; they don’t stop, I see now. Carry on.
https://laughingsquid.com/songs-that-stop-on-word-stop/

Faux News on the diseased, criminal, tattooed, unvaccinated migrant caravans massing at the border.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/migrant-caravan-at-border.html

The Tango: Vaccine. Randy Rainbow.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-tango-vaccine.html

Ah, the power of prayer. The wonder of wishing into the air to make your bad gambles or relationship risks or other poor life choices transcend the laws of physics and probabilities and go right for you for a change.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=020622

Speaking of which, back to the ol’ drawing board: The F-35, the Walmart microwave oven of the skies. You wait too long to take off with the motor running, it explodes in a hundred-million-dollar ball of flames. You let your mind wander for a moment, maybe think of a nice sandwich, the $400,000 helmet turns the air off and suffocates you. Fly at night, or in the rain, or cross the International Date Line, the whole thing goes blue-screen-of-death and dives into the sea. Load a bunch of them onto a $28 billion aircraft carrier built specifically for them, from the specs, and they don’t fit in the deck elevator even one-at-a-time, so the whole ship goes back to the shop for two years and another half-a-billion clams in corrective work. It’s only money. Oh, and a few poor schmoes get killed too, lets not forget that. The idea was to kill lots more people, and from /other/ countries, though. But only if they won’t respect our authoritah. Is that so much to expect? A little respect for our obvious bribe-centered military psychological overcompensation? For our ability to rain death from practically outer space on a wedding party by mistake at a moment’s notice, when it would be cheaper just to make every single enemy an honorary citizen of the USA and provide them free college, medical service and a guaranteed basic income till they eventually die of old age singing our praises?
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/12111322

Whereas they were designing and building /these/ sweet works of predatory art eighty years ago. A P-51 could cruise at 440 miles-per-hour at 40,000 feet and had a one-way range of 1,750 miles. That was just 20 years after airplanes were basically motorized kites made of sticks and canvas that could barely go 100 miles an hour for a couple of hours and had to fly /around/ mountains. Germany had a jet-powered fighter plane by 1944, but that was too late for them, and it was too late for them largely because of this terrific airplane zipping around shooting all their shit up. Here, learn about the P-51 Mustang, which I got to see one of and actually touch with my hand at an air show in Reno in the early 1970s, if that wasn’t a dream. It might have been a dream… No, it was real. We all went. In the Torino.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjsrqMe0B3s

This craft’s frame is made of bamboo. In the event of a catastrophic gas leak, the balloon would collapse into a parachute shape. Smart plan.
https://www.vintag.es/2022/02/spencers-first-airship.html

Balloon.
https://twitter.com/presentcorrect/status/1489577091620384776

How easy flying is (if all you want to do is fly), given light, strong materials and a modern little motor. It helps that the raft itself is also a wing. From /The Fifteenth Pelican/ (and, later, the Flying Nun): “When lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag, anything can fly.”
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/10/safety-aside-this-ultralight-looks-like-a-lot-of-fun.html

The Caproni Ca.90 (or Caproni 6000), “considered a technical triumph not only for Italy, but for the world of aviation.” Also featured in /The Wind Rises/ by Hayao Miyazaki.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVnxQCa4ieM

Brave Sir Marx.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/432

Wes Anderson’s /The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders/. (It’s the second movie in.) Also /Lesbian Period Drama/. That’s my favorite. Also “Poopy-di-scoop, poopy-di-whoop.” (The kids will all be saying that soon, driving people crazy.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISRL_g4q-jE

James Maxwell’s giant fairy tale paintings that were all over the walls of David Herstle Jones’ Sea Gull bar.
http://www.artistjamesmaxwell.com/seagull.html

An airgun is not a toy. You’ll shoot your face off, kid. Here, an indelible lesson.
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/05/a-babydoll-takes-a-bullet-to-the-head-in-this-airgun-safety-psa.html

Legitimate political discourse.
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/08/legitimate-political-discourse-the-tv-show.html

Night-time routine. (via Everlasting Blort) (click the sound on)
https://twitter.com/theerkj/status/1487493123802599425

Choir sings /Some Nights (What Do I Stand For)/. Perfect except for the overwhelming thumping. You’d think somebody would have noticed and said, Let’s do it once more but without the guy banging on the hassock so hard. This is why they used to say, “Never give the drummer cocaine.”
https://theawesomer.com/some-nights-choir-edition/656777/

“Yore shootin’ arn work?” BANG! “It ‘pears ta do, yes.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFkpOwsu33E

Evolution.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/02/e-coli-long-term-evolution-experiment.html

Cat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S61ENc51Z1Q

Cat. (via Clifford Pickover)
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/slbsa1/tiptoeing_along_a_fence/

Cat traverses flaw in spacetime. (click the sound on) (via Clifford Pickover)
https://t.co/9Ds6umct1D

Playground equipment for goats. Full disclosure: I hate goats, their teenage-boy smell, their horrible eyes, their rotten-while-fully-fresh meat flavor, their disgusting milk products, but I love this video of them, though I’m worried about metal fatigue. I hope it doesn’t tear and slash around and hurt them. (You don’t have to worry; it doesn’t here. Yet.) Also, I read there are Catholic priests who rent out little herds of goats to wander around your property and naturally remove fire-hazard vegetation. Maybe I don’t hate them. Maybe I’ve been unfair and a goat bigot.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2014/02/goats-just-wanna-have-fun.html

A twenty-minute talk by Herb Deutsch, co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
https://theawesomer.com/giants-by-moog/657089/

Watch an expert restore a tortured tuba. He’s a bit cavalier with the torch, but in this 15-minute video he never hurts himself nor sets the workbench or his sleeves on fire. As with the goat-play video, you can relax and appreciate.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-tragic-tuba.html

What the… what, now? (Its the instruction video for a personal sex massager thingy, oddly reminiscent of the IT bike from South Park.) (Click the sound on.)
https://twitter.com/buttplugio/status/1483957732793204737

Rerun: The expert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Rerun: Animated engines. Many different kinds. You can click on them to easily see how they work. /I love this!/
http://animatedengines.com/wankel.html

English sports. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_6d3JBBo4s

“You gotta kill people to… have respect for people. You gotta kill /some/ people. You can’t kill everybody…’cause you wouldn’t have anybody left to respect…” (Trigger alert: moustachioed Brit in bad light rhythmically barking swears.) (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=8d9C5KHP5z0

Vice girls who hustle hotels.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/02/11/the-bygone-era-of-the-hotel-detective/

Oy vey.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/31/2077716/-DeSantis-spokesperson-responded-to-the-Orlando-Nazis-in-the-way-you-would-expect

Invaders.
https://thenib.com/invaders/

Consider the Kochtopus. (via Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUPr2qEVoAATACw.jpg

Further tiny toy cars crashing movie-like in slow motion.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/crash-compilation.html

What comes of letting kids read Shirley Jackson.
https://i0.wp.com/www.theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/BizarroEntertainUs.jpg

Uh, huh. The moment of freezing, with the voice in her head going, “Shit, I just said that out loud. Pull up! Pull up!” We all know how that feels and can /almost/ sympathize.
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/10/watch-texas-gop-candidate-stumbles-after-admitting-she-thinks-its-wrong-that-kids-cant-laugh-at-the-transgenders.html

“Nuts or genius, all housecleaning is stupid to Francis.” Buckminster Fuller said that a house is a machine for living, so why /shouldn’t/ it clean itself? I remember a story by Isaac Asimov, titled /It’s A Beautiful Day/, about a future where teleportation is cheap, so house doors lead to other houses and other indoor places and no-one ever goes outside in danger of germs and sunburn and heat and cold. That was the main idea in the story. But incidentally houses had something called an electrostatic precipitator, so when you were out (rather in somewhere else) the whole place would charge electrically and all dust and dirt would be repelled from rugs, books and all surfaces, and would spring into the air to be sucked out, /whoosh!/, through vents. Francis, here, probably read that story.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/frances_gabes_self_cleaning_house

Gravity.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/2/7/2078772/-Cartoon-The-vast-conspiracy

There’s walking in Memphis in whenever that song happens, and there’s driving through Vegas in 1975.
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/12111709

And there are tiny eel-like creatures in vinegar, like the jungle of microscopic mites in your eyebrow follicles. It’s okay; they’re not parasitic and they’re not dangerous, they’re just swirling and dancing and eeling kaleidoscopically in the vinegar, the way the mites in your eyebrows think of you as their planet. And the way the two-to-five pounds of bacteria in your digestive tract happily enjoy your hospitality and repay you by helping digest for you all your life and hardly ever rebel against working conditions and block bridges and honk horns and send food back the wrong way. We need each other. (“When someone does you a solid, don’t be a yutz.” -Tony Stark)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/vinegar-eels-dancing-in-water-drop.html

You! Shall! Not! Pass! But then moments later: “Oh, go ahead, I’m a huge fan.” (via Fark)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Goliath_Poldermolen.jpg

Bread.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/02/how-bread-is-made-in-korean-bakery.html

“Chunky. Whatta chunka choc’lit.” Back when a candy bar was the size of a nine-volt battery, before they got bigger and bigger, like soda drinks, and then they started getting smaller, and soon they’ll be nine-volt batteries again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIsLanVMHy0

“Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize. That’s what you get in Cracker Jack.” They still sell Cracker Jacks boxes in packs of three at the dollar store, which is now the $1.25 store. The prizes are not much of a prize anymore. They used to be little plastic toys that you’d snap together, a catapult, a car, a decal of a truck to stick on your arm, a decoder ring, /something/ desirable that could be accidentally swallowed by a ravenous child. Now they’re a mere blotch you scan with your phone to play a video game that doesn’t work. But the food is still good, and good for you: corn, sugar, peanuts. You could do worse, after the apocalypse, than to stumble upon a cache of ancient Cracker Jacks in a dry cave… I remember, as a little boy, talking with my mother about this ad. My problem was, why does the shopkeeper think one marble is worth more than all that other stuff? Including a giant Saturn-shaped yo-yo! How is a marble worth more than that? I think my mother explained that he didn’t want /any/ of it but he was just doing the kids a favor, to be a nice guy. There was something about the way he inspects the marble. He puts it right against his eye… Robin Williams was in a teevee series at the end of his shelf life, called /The Crazy Ones/, about an ad agency in Chicago. It’s goofy but kind of realistic about the way an agency sells ideas to the advertisers; they try a bunch of different things until something sticks, and then run with that. It’s like halfway between /Mad Men/ (which I never saw a single full episode of) and the fictional Alice-In-Wonderland-like rebranding agency /FrogHammer/ in /Slings And Arrows/. Which reminds me: in my clear memory of the Cracker Jacks ad, from almost sixty years ago, one of the things the boy put on the counter from his pocket was a big fat live frog. There’s no frog. Memory is a trick. And yet, the marble. A marble would be an excellent prize to find in a box of Cracker Jacks. Unlike any other prize they ever put in there, it’s entirely harmless if swallowed, and what a thrill, for a child who knows not to chew on something without looking at it first, to find it there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXDC7ZJLEWE

Impressive cardboard marble run. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://laughingsquid.com/cardboard-marble-run-machines/

More Cracker Jacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjTFYhoku_E

Morning ritual.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/tweet-of-day_01340555694.html

A new kind of cuckoo clock.
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/10/the-cuckoo-clock-is-a-captivating-minature-world-by-vered-aharonovitch.html

Ah, yeah. Right there. Mmmmmm! Okay, that’s enough, bye.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/tweet-of-day_01692398871.html

Perspective packing. (via Clifford Pickover)
https://twitter.com/i/status/1491453131070513152

If the moon fell to Earth…
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/what-if-moon-fell-to-earth.html

“Palpatoons, play something relaxing.”
https://theawesomer.com/the-battlefield/657120/

I like the polar bear best. (You have to click on the image at the top to be able to click through the full gallery.)
https://newatlas.com/photography/national-winners-2022-sony-world-photography-awards-gallery/

I knew all the man words and about a third of the woman words. How about you?
https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words

And I know almost half of the British words but all of the American ones. Ziti and albuterol gave me a moment’s trouble. “I’ll take one a them albuterol zitis, please, and garlic fries, and nothing to drink, thanks. Can I pay with a marble? Oh. Okay, how about a bitcoin marble.”
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/10/list-of-words-known-better-by-uk-people-than-u-s-people-and-vice-versa.html

Artzybasheff. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://flashbak.com/boris-artzybasheff-machinalia-anthropomorphic-art-436922/

Deer with an assortment of things stuck on their stupid heads.
https://cheezburger.com/16381701/deer-are-pretty-neat-and-their-antlers-definitely-never-get-stuck-in-anything-viral-thread

Funny hats.
https://www.pinterest.ca/jchamberspage/stupid-hats/

Trump’s funeral.
https://assets.amuniversal.com/1cb6470054c5013a9170005056a9545d

/Africa/ played on instruments in a video game.
https://infinite1up.com/p/totos-africaplayed-on-instruments-in-the-legend-of-zelda-majoras-mask

The trailer for the new Buzz Lightyear movie.
https://boingboing.net/2022/02/09/welp-the-lightyear-trailer-finally-dropped.html

Just keep walking. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
https://newatlas.com/architecture/worlds-largest-kaleidoscope-stufish

Rating the pandemic.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/308222/coronavirus-pandemic.aspx

A demo of different guitar sounds, telling how the sounds are made.
https://laughingsquid.com/sound-of-different-guitars/

I can smell the little dog’s paws from here. They smell like Fritos and moldy dishrag.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2014/02/dog-tries-to-catch-ball.html

“Featuring mechanical mouth with rotating wheel.”
https://www.vintag.es/2022/02/eating-heart-cards.html

Lucky! She won’t have her organs harvested.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/2/8/2079199/-Cartoon-One-fine-day-in-the-Uighur-labor-camp

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” (via Fark)
https://i.redd.it/att2h49ynhf81.jpg

Art. Click through each of the seven galleries. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.emmasteinkraus.com/

Whenever you see something like this, with horses or baby ducks or deer or sheep or whatever, there’s always one or two that wait to go last. What do you suppose they’re thinking? Are they just the ones naturally more afraid of new things and places? Are they the smart ones, thinking about going another way entirely, or do they want to go back and check if they left the stove on, or what? (via Everlasting Blort)
https://twitter.com/madamjujujive/status/1486255023071846404

Voter suppression.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/2/2/2077776/-Cartoon-There-s-no-voter-suppression?detail=emaildkre

“I DON’T KNOW HOW YEZ DONE IT, BUT I KNOW YEZ DONE IT!”
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/02/mel-blanc-yelling.html

Socks. (via Fark)
https://imgur.com/9T2mNtq

Sigh. (click the sound on)
https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1488261239444807685

Rerun: Tom and Jerry a cappella. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f-PvG0o4Mo

Whenever I see the word /abandoned/ I hear it in my head pronounced the way the actress did in Mendocino Theater Company’s production of /One Shoe Off/, this way: eyes closed, the back of her hand raised to her forehead: “I am uh-BAN-dun-ed.” Also, sometimes, I think of the dog in /The Book of the Dun Cow/, going, “Maroooooned!” (via BoingBoing)
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/most-fascinating-abandoned-towns/index.html

Art.
https://theawesomer.com/paper-pencil-manga-machines/657396/

Other factors besides genetics.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2022/02/10/its-not-just-genetics/

A.I.-generated species of birds.The Lesser Bobber, the Rabid Wood-chipper, Henson’s Fractal, the Surly Drunkard, Spectacled Ringwraith (my favorite), Headless Horseman, Eastern Grump, That-Which-Sings (second place). (via MissCellania)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1487913576929103884.html

A famous cartoonist of that era, R. Cobb, often put his characters in settings like these. It would be an American Indian looking right at you, crying a single tear. Or a toilet paper ad /set a green forest on a billboard/ in the middle of a nightmare of smog and concrete and visible traffic noise.
https://www.vintag.es/2022/02/america-crisis-1970s.html

Friends recreating homoerotic USSR farm propaganda posters. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://twitter.com/ochancoco191/status/1386656505491910658

And Ellen Harkonen, petite Potato Queen of 1936. By 10,000 years in the future, the name will have changed remarkably little, to Harkonnen, and the potatoes will be represented by deliberately cultivated fashionable cancerous growths. “Drug him well. I do not feel like wrestling tonight.” (That’s the sort of thing royalty of the villainous House of Harkonnen will say in that distant age, on the planet Giedi Prime, and then for a short time on Arrakis.)
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/ellen_harkonen_potato_queen_of_1936