What cuetlaxochitl said. (Say kwet-luh-sho-SHEE.) It sounds like Chinese but it’s Nahuatl, and it means poinsettia.

     “In the first drawer I keep my magic stones: One carnelian against all evil and envy. One moonstone to make you sleep. One red coral to heal your wounds. One lapis lazuli against quartan fever. One small jasper to help you find water. One topaz to soothe your eyes. One red ruby to protect you from lightning.” –Kaspar, the second of three singing kings

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 lots 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, going back decades. And tiny bravely struggling KNYO itself. Find KNYO’s hidden donation heart and help the station out with a one-time holiday gift or, if you can, a recurring gift from your own hidden heart. And/or acquire a concentrated vial of new and improved heart’s-blood-red KNYO hot sauce, for vim and pep and vibrant health. (“It’s toasted!”)

New stories by Marilyn Davin, Ari Yovel, Ezekiel Krahlin, David Herstle Jones, Kym Kemp (/the/ Redheaded Blackbelt), Paul Modic, Craig Louis Stehr, John Sakowicz, Mitch Clogg, Mike Sears, Nick Wilson, Mike Firesmith, Garrison Keillor, the Comtesse DeSpair, and so on. I forgot to read the usual chapter of /No More My Echoing Song/ by Clifford Allen Sanders, but I’ll make up for that next week. And I didn’t read from Kent Wallace’s book, because he called to read a timely story from the point of view of Mary-Mother-of-God’s Chicago/New-Jersey/Florida-mob-accented donkey and King Melchior’s equally colorful camel. (Yonda lies da camel of my faddah.)  Poetry by John Roedel. My dream journal, and a few tentative experiments with ChatGPT. And the usual survey course of music, science, tasteless jokes, art and architecture… And at 3:45AM (6 and 3/4 hours into the recording of the show, see above) I put on the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s /A Red Carol/ (58 min.), then closed with William S. Burroughs’ quavery/gravelly reading of his own /A Junky’s Christmas/.

By the way, here’s a link to my dream journal project, 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 send me a link to your dream journal and I’ll make a note to go there and check for updates.

AND 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.

Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah. (57 min.) (via Vulture)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71U-3s_2e-U

Amahl and the Night Visitors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2-W1jwu4M0

Hit and Run Theater’s 1995 /The Nutclucker/. The entire adorably goofy project.
http://www.thesnapsessions.com/holiday-special-the-nutclucker/

From the Guardians of the Galaxy Xmas special.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E1ULv6LcOk

The Singing Sisters. This is my favorite short Xmas bit ever (right up there in the pantheon with The Bloody Olive), all the way through the final line, nearly the only line from the bartender; I’m not about to spoil the gag by quoting it here, though you’ll see it coming a mile away. As with many three-or-four-women full-range-of-talent sketches (singing, acting, timing, bathing suit competition), my brain plays with replacing the ladies with Tracy Burns, Pamela Stonem, Ellen Callas and/or Kathy O’Grady.from Hit and Run Theater in the early 1980s, and the men with Harry Rothman, Steve Weingarten and Doug Nunn from the same era. Same flavor of casual improv-ish excellence, like flashbulbs flashing in your face, but in a nice way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSBpvh4y_lU

Some more from where that came from (in this case via Everlasting Blort and MissCellania).
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/12/merry-christmas-from-saturday-night-live.html

Tom Lehrer made all his songs available to download for free, made them public domain so you can do what you want with them– perform them, make a show of them, use creatively, whatever. He says, “You’re welcome.” But all of them in one place like this won’t last forever, so jump if you’re gonna jump.
https://tomlehrersongs.com/

When seals sneeze. It’s the wet sort of sneeze, as you might imagine.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2022/12/tweet-of-day_01575214968.html

Which is real?
https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/index.php

A dream world. The past in recently revealed photographs. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.rferl.org/a/color-photos-archive-planet-albert-kahn-history/32166970.html

An ad for a store, but a true story. The Christmas truce. (via MyOneBeautifulThing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM

The future of warfare.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2022/12/22/last-minute-gift-ideas-christmas-weaponry/

The future of medicine.
https://www.vintag.es/2022/10/bizarre-medical-treatments-20th-century.html

And yet somehow they left out the Lawson vaginal washer. Another true story: just before I saw this device I was dithering over the wisdom of using, for a quote at the top of this post, the old saying, “It ain’t the miles, it’s the sand in your vagina.” Done and done. Because that’s also true: it ain’t, and it is.
https://www.vintag.es/2022/12/the-lawsons-vaginal-washer.html

Rod Serling’s 1964 /Another Christmas Carol/. (86 min.) (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbp1du33l0c

Cat on percussion.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/17/cats-performing-music-is-what-the-internet-was-made-for.html

The pains and audacity of Nardwuar (say nard-wahr).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk6_B5pibt8

The first commercial typewriter. (via Clifford Pickover)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malling_Hansen,1867,_D%C3%A4nemark.jpg

America’s department store Xmas monorails. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W780LSQHbYY

Minnesotastan’s youth.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2022/12/fifteen-years-old.html

Glass cracking goes five times as fast as a bullet from a gun, and this is just regular glass, not even Prince Rupert’s Drop glass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAO1i9Z9GpQ

Gunhild Carling wailing on the bagpipes. She can play anything. If you can blow in it or bang on it or squeeze it or wiggle it, it doesn’t matter, she can play it. She comes from a circus family. She can contort into a pretzel, do a somersault on a slack-line, she speaks seven languages, including ventiloquism. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W780LSQHbYY

This is science. This is an important part of the way science should be taught. Kids are stimulated to think of how things work, and imagine what uses the knowledge can be put to. (via TYWKIWDBI)
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/y2kjmi/experiment_on_the_chinese_space_station_during_a/

Speaking of which, here’s another. I like his enthusiasm. And as he learns and adapts and guesses and changes course, it gets more and more interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wnTy_FhdM

You want more like that? Here, look: measuring the tiniest forces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXoZQsZP2PY

And look up Sabine Hossenfelder’s YouTube series. And Physics Girl. And Vi Hart’s math videos. Simone Giertz. Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day… There’s so much, and there are so many great teachers.

Speaking of whom, Vi Hart plays and sings 314 digits of chromatic pi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWFJDqq035k

Experience can also be a great teacher. Other people’s experience, if your smart. Put the helmet on your head. You know what doctors call two-wheelers who don’t wear a helmet? Donors. (via TYWKIWDBI)
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/xdqcer/proof_helmets_really_do_save_lives/

Charles Berthoud in a Michael Myers mask on musical saw.
https://laughingsquid.com/michael-myers-musical-saw/

A new branch of gymnastics to cheer for: Tossing and being tossed. But it’s not so new. Many film and radio stars of the 1930s through the 1950s started in vaudeville when they were small enough to be tossed around. Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton, Ish Kabibble, Baby Snooks… They weren’t at this level, though; in those days they just /tossed/ them on or off the stage and didn’t necessarily bother to catch them. Everybody had fourteen kids; if you broke one you could just go get another one. (via Bruce the trumpet player)
https://www.reddit.com/r/maybemaybemaybe/comments/ztcq3x/maybe_maybe_maybe/

“Disney doesn’t do googly, dear. There’s not a single eye in Disneyland that’s googly.”
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/22/actor-jack-plotnick-again-spoofs-vintage-walt-disneys-wonderful-world-of-color-footage.html

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bWyhj7siEY

“The girl from iffy-doo-dah– whassit? whassit?” “Ipanema.” “Ipanema! Thassit! Girl from Ipanema1” (Montage of 1980s British game shows.) (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Hym84thUc

I thoroughly enjoyed Tom Cruise’ science fiction films: /Minority Report/, /Oblivion/, /Edge of Tomorrow/. I haven’t seen any of his Mission Impossible series except in short clips. Things like this make me really want to. I’ve said it before: he’s a Scientologist, he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch, eh, so what? He’s a good actor, he picks good projects, and he works hard at it and risks his life for it again and again. A few of his relationships went wrong but whose haven’t? Nobody ever accused him of hitting them. One time in 2020 he lost his cool and swore at a crewmember who wouldn’t wear a covid mask, and that’s okay with me because the guy was endangering the project and /all/ of their jobs. I hope Tom Cruise doesn’t get killed one of these days doing the next amazing thing.
https://jalopnik.com/watch-tom-cruise-jump-a-motorcycle-off-a-cliff-in-the-n-1849910216

‘Course.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=121822

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=121822

What would Burning Man have looked like in 1963? Artificial intelligence paints it for us.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/what-burning-man-looked-like-in-1963-as-imagined-by-ai.html

What downtown Victoria looked like in 1907. Nobody had a car in those days, nor needed one. So peaceful. The trolley went slowly enough that you could swing right up onto it or step off at your destination without waiting for it to stop. Of course, everyone was drunk all the time and you could die from a toothache. Pretty much the only people around to see in a film like this were in the vigorous young prime of their lives, having won the lottery to survive childhood and not yet subject to ailments of old age, which started at about 35 when the teeth your father hadn’t knocked out of your head as a child started all falling out or needing to be yanked out with pliers anyway.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/21/colorized-videos-from-urban-areas-across-the-globe-during-the-first-half-of-the-20th-century.html

The 1987 Muppet Holiday Special, with original commercials. (55 min.)
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/22/you-can-finally-watch-the-1987-henson-holiday-special-complete-with-original-commercials.html

The Maccabeats – D’ror Yikra. (via MyOneBeautifulThing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itIG4WU3WUc

Why a handful of people will always end up owning everything until we change the system in one tiny, sensible, easily do-able way. (Make sure to click on appropriate buttons to activate the animated graph illustrations.)
https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/

I don’t disagree with the man’s argument as stated. But it’s even more simplistic than the films he criticizes. It’s as though he were criticizing the real production of the world we’re all participating in, by saying, /The characters are born, they fumble around for seventy years, and they die, and they don’t really do anything or change anything or stand up for anything; they’re just there and then they’re not./ It’s true, but there’s more going on. Also the Marvel and DC movie stories about supers are a small fraction of stories about supers, and many of them are rich with symbolism and strong life lessons for kids, chief among which: If you’re powerful enough to kill people by flicking a pea at them with your finger, don’t kill anyone even if your really want to. Because with a gun, which there are hundreds of millions of scattered around America on shelves in closets and in pockets and gloveboxes and balanced precariously against the mud-room doorjamb, all you have to do is wiggle your finger and the person who pissed you off by being insulting or the wrong color or eyeing your woman is dead. Don’t. It’s the main one of the Ten Don’ts? My favorite supers that instantly come to mind are only a little super: Jessica Jones, Daredevil, River Tam, Ed Chigliak, Cal Lightman, Scorpius, Spock, Data, Chihiro, Emily Kolburn (and Android and Two, of Dark Matter), Gil Hamilton, Helen Magnus, both popular 2010s series versions of Sherlock Holmes…
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/20/what-are-superheroes-good-for-anyway.html

Mighty Mikko (1922 book of Finnish Fairy Tales). (via PerfectForRoquefortCheese)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/mighty-mikko

“Look for straight lines and perfect circles, something nature doesn’t make.”
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/mudlarking-on-thames.html

Snow and ice coming off roofs and towers and things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqT9TVskXV0

How we get washers. It’s more of a clothes washer, though, not a dishwasher. I don’t know why they call it a dishwasher.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2022/12/21/dishwasher-factory/

Semicircles rotate at different speeds. The semicircles never change length. Follow one at random. (via Clifford Pickover)
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/eov5bb/what_happens_when_semicircles_rotates_at/

He shoots! He scores!
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/477

A serious proposal before the city council to build a sex dungeon. They’d better do as these women say, or there will be serious consequences for a bad, bad boy.
https://twitter.com/fguzmanon7/status/1605412312860573700

Fire.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/hot-stuff-zagreb-film-and-nfb.html

A fun flash-paper magic tutorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NumWFbyo-Yc

A homemade replica of the best and most real batmobile, including working weapons: rotating blades, smokescreen, rear flamethrower. (Flamethrower at end of video.)
https://theawesomer.com/worlds-greatest-batmobile-replica/692221/

3 seconds from each Star Trek: TNG episode.
https://laughingsquid.com/3-seconds-star-trek-next-generation/

Awww. (via Fark)
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/16/53/72/3849858/3/rawImage.jpg

Waiting to go on. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://kateabbey.co.uk/projects/22/

Xmas of Europe.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/19/national-geographics-45-minute-aerial-tour-of-christmas-in-europe-is-pure-holiday-magic.html

This is the future. Right now it only works on recorded files, but it won’t be long before whatever you record or stream with can do this in real time, or close enough to real time. And by then it’ll do it for music, too, and video. All your old videos and recordings of bands and events and plays, where the mic was too far away and the camera /and/ camera work was crappy. But try this free tool now on a digitized cassette tape of your grandmother telling about the war. Really.
https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance

Pickle Queen of 1947.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/quickle_queen

“I didn’t know that Heaven was a little spot in Honolulu… Oh, good Gawd! Nuts! Fricken-fracken-/fuck/.”
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/20/hilarious-bloopers-from-hollywoods-golden-age.html

Slap Hitler’s face with your old used rubber.
https://www.shorpy.com/node/26901

Here they come/ walking up the beach/ They get the funniest looks from/ everyone they eat.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/photos-of-aliens-emerging-from-sea.html

A music video made of cancer CAT scans.
https://laughingsquid.com/justin-wright-hellbrunn-automatons/

George Crumb – Black Angels.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/george_crumbs_black_angels

Interesting place. Nice voice.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2022/12/structures.html

And, Free! /FREEEE!/ (via Fark)
https://twitter.com/mondomascots/status/1604396056472522752

 

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