Shambleau!

     “And in her living cloak she swayed to him, the murmur swelling seductive and caressing in his innermost brain, promising, compelling, sweeter than sweet. His flesh crawled to the horror of her, but it was a perverted revulsion that clasped what it loathed. His arms slid round her under the sliding cloak, wet, wet and warm and hideously alive, and the sweet velvet body was clinging to his, her arms locked about his neck, and with a whisper and a rush the unspeakable horror closed about them both…”

Here’s the recording of last night’s 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 plenty of other ones going back quite a way. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which always provides about an hour of each of my Friday night shows’ most locally relevant material without asking for anything in return, going back decades. And tiny bravely struggling KNYO itself. Find the hidden donation heart there and help the station out with a one-time holiday gift, or even a recurring gift, from your own hidden heart, maybe. And/or try the new fire-engine-red vibrantly healthy KNYO hot sauce, for vim and pep. (“It’s toasted!”)

New stories by David Herstle Jones, Paul Modic, a chapter each from books by Kent Wallace and Clifford Allan Sanders, poetry by Notty Bumbo and other poems old and new, science and art and jokes and dreams, health advice, some perspective on events of the small and big world. A fun article by Marilyn Davin about steak-eating, whisky-drinking, homeless-and-loving-it, spiritual-advice-giving, social critic, enlightened activist guru and chanter of chants Craig L. Stehr. And it all rounds to a close with the gripping and creepy and wonderful 1933 story /Shambleau/, read aloud by its author, C.L. Moore (1911-1987). She was 22 when she wrote it; it was her first sale, like /Black Destroyer/ was A.E. Van Vogt’s first sale. So many of the giants in the old days seemed to spring full-blown from the brow of Zeus without any preamble. Mary Shelley, for example. John Kennedy Toole, William Kotzwinkle… Maybe it’s the internet that changed that. Now they’d have made a thousand skateboarding or unboxing videos and had messy public breakups and so on before they’re even in their teens. The modern equivalent of /Frankenstein (or) The Modern Prometheus/ is a nine-year-old girl shredding a guitar, or a boy balancing standing on his hands on two wine bottles or reaming a racist a new one in a grocery store checkout line… Ah, no, dang it– I see now that I forgot /again/ to include Ezekiel Krahlin’s story in the show. Zeke, that was not on purpose. I’ll do it next week. I’m marking it in the show file right now.

Here’s a link to my dream journal project that I restarted a couple of years ago and have been keeping up– not compulsively like the old days but at least several dreams each week. The latest post is always on top. (I send a batch of dreams from the week all at once on Sunday or Monday night.) (I’d like to read /your/ dreams on the radio and I always offer to. Just email me. Or include them in a reply to this post. Or give me a link to your dream journal and I’ll make a note to go there and check for updates.)

BESIDES ALL THAT, here are some 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.

Book of leaves.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-book-of-leaves.html

All the time in the world.
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2022-cgtime.gif

Night light. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.keitamorimoto.com/select-works-2022

Fashion plan: Be enslaved, get the nice dress, escape, keep it.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-fresh-look-at-princess-leias-slave.html

The Handsome Cabin Boy. Three decent versions, including one sung by Kate Bush.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_handsome_cabin_boy

Brave Sir Bentham, utilitarian knight.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/475

Biomass. One year is one full cycle.
https://twitter.com/pickover/status/1599100336391585793

Melodramatic tai chi checking behavior that’s good for the trapezius and frowning muscles. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://bunkstrutts.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/curtains-5.gif?w=840

“What’s that?”
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2022/12/07/surprise-at-school/

A free tool for colorizing black and white photos.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/ai-tool-colourizes-black-and-white.html

(Almost all) the Adventures of Tintin (for Android phones and tablets)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.moulinsart.tintinbooks&hl=en&pli=1

What.
https://img.atlasobscura.com/ujSoqB7oOnQIP1koJmEDw4aNZXSBhqJTtE3r7NQIYIQ/rt:fit/w:1200/q:81/sm:1/scp:1/ar:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9hdGxh/cy1kZXYuczMuYW1h/em9uYXdzLmNvbS91/cGxvYWRzL3BsYWNl/X2ltYWdlcy8wYTdm/Nzk2Yy0xZDc2LTQ0/M2MtODIwYy1hMzRi/ZTIyYmU0MTE1NTZl/YWVjMWIwMzFlMGFm/NjFfMjAyMjEwMDFf/MTQyMjU3LmpwZw.jpg

What.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2022/12/06/collared-aracari-pteroglossus-torquatus/

Towers of Baloney (that’s the American pronunciation).
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/08/the-towers-of-bologna.html

Cat mind blown.. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1593981169699377159

Art. (via Clifford Pickover)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacek_Soli%C5%84ski

Art.
https://www.tiktok.com/@paulkenton/video/7171449448931888390

Art from your text prompt.
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/

Rudolph’s revenge.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2014/12/rudolphs-revenge.html

The tailor story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4J6O6ke6Jk

Skyler’s prom proposal.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-robin-williams-helped-co-star-ask.html

Rerun: Zenosyne. “Life is short, and life is long, but not in that order.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/zenosyne.html

Sign up and try this. It’s the first project of this kind that has impressed and delighted me to this level since a DOS nonsense-poetry-generating program I bought for $15 and ran on an IBM XT in the 1980s. This one is made to give advice, and it comes with many self-deprecatory warnings. Prompt it with a story idea and see what happens. The old Jews have a word for the reaction you are sure to have; that word is, fittingly in the case of a story, /plotz/ (the good kind, from happiness and excitement).
https://chat.openai.com/chat

Dena Takruri: “How Israeli apartheid destroyed my hometown.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdGcej-6D0

A Bible-accurate Xmas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS_e1DWjaSQ

Antivax people I know from the MCN Announce listserve were antitvaxxing a long time ago– it isn’t just the latest vaccines; they were against vaccinating children for measles, polio, tetanus, yadda yadda. And they’re the same people who’ve been claiming all along that cell phones cause brain cancer. Here’s a graph of the incidence of brain and nervous system cancer over the last thirty years. In 1992, hardly anyone had a cell phone and there were cell towers hardly anywhere. In 2022, nine out of ten people use a cell phone and cell towers are all over the place. If cell phones cause cancer, the line on the graph should be nearly vertical by now. But it’s entirely horizontal. Not even a blip.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/brain.html

Riches beyond measure.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-temple-of-knowledge.html

Calculate the level of your hoarding disorder. I thought I was pretty bad but I’m somewhere in the middle. Whew. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://hoardingdisordersuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/clutter-image-ratings.pdf

I got 49. Not too shabby.
https://www.britannica.com/quiz/united-states-of-america-quiz

12.
https://xkcd.com/2707/

“Isn’t this a support group? Support me!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muZnCSTrq0g

Bathing beauty contest judges of the Monte Rio Water Festival.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Bathing-Suit-Judges.jpg?ssl=1

Ze Frank’s latest.
https://www.neatorama.com/2022/12/07/Ze-Frank-Announces-His-True-Facts-Animal-Awards/

Rerun: The future of law enforcement.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/07/cancel-culture-ends-san-franciscos-plans-for-killer-robots.html

Nighttime downhill trail bike ride. Doo-dah, doo-dah. Nighttime trail is five miles long. (It’s not that long. Also the the next line would be /All the doo-dah day,/ and that doesn’t work because it’s at night. Never mind.
https://theawesomer.com/nighttime-mountain-bike-downhill-ride/690832/

The honking bluesmasters. (In the /O.C. and Stiggs/ issue of /National Lampoon/, O.C. played harmonica and Stiggs called him a honking bluesmaster. That’s where that term comes from.)
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-blues-masters.html

A better asteroid-impact info calculator. Choose an impact point, set asteroid diameter, speed and angle, launch. Reconsider your objections to our learning how to protect against this in real life, and against space science in general. (via BoingBoing)
https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/

Meanwhile at ground zero, which is and has always been everywhere (see above; and think of dinosaurs), there are tests they used to give children on whether this thing will fit there, or how do you have to turn this shape to get it through that shape of hole, if it will even go, or how many of these things can you fit in that box if the X on them is always up versus if they’re on their sides. I was especially good at that. I was good at pretty much all the tests except the one, later, in high school, that had a section where you plod along copying columns of numbers from one list to another with a golf pencil for twenty minutes, to see if you’re suited for a career in a financial scrivening firm in 1846. “Fuck this,” I recall muttering two minutes in, and skipped the whole rest of that one, dragging my overall percentile down out of the clouds. Though it turned out there was a college in Iowa specifically interested in young people who similarly said /Fuck this/ about that. A freight train honked and roared diagonally right through the center of campus twice a day, and the theater was a dark dusty maze-like building from the Civil War era, while the sports complex and the library were light and airy modern-art jenga piles. Anyway, sorry, the video:. Space aliens who’ve figured out faster-than-light travel between star systems see things like this, and what do you suppose they conclude about our formidability to withstand their invasion plans?
https://twitter.com/ronkephillips/status/1599679652414504960

“Do you know Journey?” “Yes.” “Okay, then, let’s go.” This reminds me of several little girls at the Mendocino Community School in the early 1980s who could just, impromptu, get up on a stage and sing this impressively, loud and clear, confident as all heck. One was Rain. One was Midnight. I think one was named Verlaine. Ver-something. Verlette? There were so many very talented kids there: drummers, guitarists, poets, dancers; one boy could really blow on a trombone. Generally their parents were all hippie artists and musicians, some of them quite famous. So it was both nature and nurture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esIYtWPKACs&t=138s

Doi. (say doy)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/12/autograph.html

The negative-space pig of Lucerne.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/08/the-pig-of-lucerne.html

Movie stars looking at mirrors. (via PerfectForRoquefortCheese)
https://neptsdepths.blogspot.com/2022/12/upon-further-reflection.html

“Love you, Santa.” “Love you, Krampus.” Hey, get a room for that, you two. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://mastodon.social/@scalzi/109418256821609840

R. Crumb on R. Crumb. (via Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2ZWrWmypA0

Masturbation is the devil himself attacking you to ruin your life. Keep an eye on the vehement young lady’s Freudian left hand. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.tiktok.com/@dreamsnpoetry/video/7168895944652606763

Absurdism. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Jv79l1b-eoI

Anne Reburn sings Flight of the Conchords’ song /Friends/, to the letter, including Murray’s one-cent-flat “ping” near the beginning.
https://theawesomer.com/anne-reburn-friends/690991/

How we get rebar.
https://laughingsquid.com/turning-steel-to-rebar/

Cello underpants metal.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/06/mr-marcaille-plays-death-metal-in-his-underwear.html

A more civilized age.
https://www.vintag.es/2022/12/1950s-female-fashion.html

Vallejo police destroyed video of five cases of police shooting people (that we know of), before its destruction was allowed (destruction of evidence video, not of people). Now it’s allowed, I guess, (both), so that’s okay, then.
https://www.vallejosun.com/vallejo-says-it-inadvertently-destroyed-records-in-five-police-shooting-investigations/

Abandoned space station? Abandoned shopping mall? Abandoned something. (via Fark)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjJ2EaqVEAAzaH_?format=jpg&name=900×900

Snow-dercycle.
https://theawesomer.com/uncharted-a-snowbike-film/690668/

Cosplay bully/cowards in military body armor, with their large-magazine metal overcompensation penises on display, to oppose people playing dress-up in a style other than theirs, that they think is a danger to kids because it might make them think it’s okay to dress up funny too.
https://twitter.com/MrJonCryer/status/1599276094368403457

I love this. In each case somebody thought of a great thing to do and had to get past all kinds of obstruction to actually get to do it, and it’s perfect.
https://www.cracked.com/article_36177_the-most-mind-fing-meta-moments-in-comedies.html

Santa is a mushroom. “The shaman would eat the mushroom and he would urinate, and his followers would drink the urine and get the effects, and then /they/ would urinate, and the reindeer would follow them around wanting to drink /their/ urine.”
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/12/santa-is-psychedelic-mushroom.html

To Bunk Strutts of Tacky Raccoons: You may have my latest million-dollar idea: a 3D-printed microphone housing in this shape, plastic-chrome or real chrome. Your market would be every garage band with an umlaut in its name, and every dark Goth club on the Strip, and buskers. Maybe also light it milky blue inside with LEDs.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2022/12/08/beware-the-ascidians/

Speaking of which: Jäzz Säbbäth. The perfect HannuKwanzissimus gift for your jazzophile friends. (via TheAwesomer)
https://jazzsabbath.bandcamp.com/album/jazz-sabbath

 

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