Mermaids.

    “There is wickedness attempting to completely cover this nation in perversion and seductive seducing spirits. I have never seen more images of more mermaids and waterpeople in my life! That’s a division of the Kingdom of Darkness, and they’re highly technologically advanced, and we have to understand what we’re dealing with. And we have to understand the rules of engagement in spiritual warfare. And we are meant for hand-to-hand combat. And we are meant to bring our cries before the Throne of God to bring judgment on the rulers of darkness of this world and of this nation. Because the rulers have set up a throne in this nation! They’ve set it up! Darkness has completely covered and eclipsed the White House of this nation!” -Amanda Grace

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.

 

Meanwhile, thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which always provides about an hour of each of these Friday night shows’ most locally relevant material, going back decades. And there’s tiny bravely struggling KNYO itself. Find KNYO’s donation heart and help the station out, why don’t you? That would be swell.

Ellie Green, Dan Sutherland, David Giusti (from prison), Frank Hartzell, news from Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund and the Humane Society and Symphony of the Redwoods, poetry by John Sakowicz, Notty Bumbo, essays and stories by Garrison Keillor, Bruce Anderson, Mark Scaramella, Paul Modic… The first chapter of a new book (Death’s Green Eyes) by Kent Wallace, more from Clifford Allen Sanders, Ezekiel Krahlin, the ever-pissed-off-and-misunderstanding David Gurney, Eleanor Cooney, Louis Bedrock, Comtesse DeSpair, Ed Oberweiser, Caitlin Johnstone, Sean Kernan, Mary Krupka, Joel Strauss, Jim Dodge, Mike Firesmith, Shruti Sharma, Amy Ernano, Michel Moushabeck on Nakba Day, Sharon Zhang, and more, including but not limited to Chris Bachelder’s epistolary My Son, There Exists Another World Alongside Our Own, in the collection McSweeney’s 23, published in 2007 and available wherever fine used books are sold. I almost got mine from Copperfield’s in Petaluma, but I ended up getting it through the web all the way from Denver at a third the price and free shipping. I’m sorry, but there’ve been expenses and we just lost our health insurance and I had to go to the doctor anyway, and some scruples need to be jettisoned for the time being. When I win the lottery I’ll fucking /buy/ Copperfield’s and double everyone’s pay, how about. “We all swore if we ever got rich, we would pay the Mini Mart back.”

Here’s a link to my dream journal project that I add to at random every week or so. I want 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. In fact, send me a link to your writing project on any subject. I’m mainly here to read your work on the radio and I don’t care what it’s about, nor even if you swear like Jesus when the tree wouldn’t give him a fig. But don’t rip anybody’s arm off and beat them with it, the way Jesus did to that tree that was doing the best it could but figs were out of season. There are lines a gentleman doesn’t cross, because that’s unacceptable, plus it’s crazy. Swearing is fine. It’s language. It’s communicating your feelings.

BESIDES ALL THAT, here are some not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set aside for you while gathering MOTA together, found mostly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right.

Advice for girls from the Little Mermaid. “You should always find a stranger to obsess over, and then genetically modify yourself for that stranger. Never be comfortable with the body you’re given. If you don’t like how you look, snip-snip!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8xCgC3w1zs

Flight of the Conchords – Mermaids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHGDVUqY9QI

Sally Cruikshank – Face Like A Frog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4unyZNh84M

How to help kids through big feelings. Some resources.
https://getpocket.com/collections/how-to-help-kids-work-through-big-feelings

A young Jon Stewart interviewed George Carlin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCGGWeD_EJk

A few years later Chris Rock did too. This, and the one just above, is the way I remember grownups all used to talk, back when there were grownups. It was the early 1960s. I’d be in bed in my little bedroom in the back, with the door open, and they’d all be in the front room, sitting around the table smoking, drinking coffee, winding down after they’d closed the restaurant for the night. And I’d fall asleep on my book in the safe, wonderful ebb and flow of their voices punctuated by knowing laughter.like clouds of bees flying through and around each other and in and out the windows on the alley and the screen door to the patio. That’s a kind of heaven, to me: everyone talking at once, and I can /almost/ understand them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwCHMM23B18

The Animals – Round and Round, and Boom Boom Boom Boom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vytm9Gt7Ppc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4t42kXMb6s

Harbottle and Jonas – The Mingulay Boat Song. I hear the ghost of an unseen hurdy-gurdy in there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecuxgrISx0A

Kathryn Tickell – Lads of Alnwick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiuMwskhsGk

Babada-bubbity-dungity-dit-dit-dittadoddy-da. Dittagoddy-ga.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjg5-2etoZ8

Baa, dee dahdee dum, dee dahdiddy daaah, dee dahdee dum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbBh2IMYhGE

Bibbidy bobbidy boo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNKuARjkWEg

Shooby-doo-ba, wahh! Jonny Quest intro and outro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gNBFmlNUfM

/Tank!/ (Cowboy Bebop intro.) “I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and the stuff together. Okay, three, two, one, let’s jam.” Ba-dup ba-dup ba-dup ba-dup bah-duh baaaaaah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2N-9EmedA

Little Moon – Wonder Eye. Wow, when the band kicks in! This doesn’t sound right on the radio. The compressor-limiter flattens the volume and sucks all the life out of it. Listen to it here:
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/05/little-moons-wonder-eye-wins-tiny-desk.html

Silver Dagger. In a kind of spring-air Neolithic papier-mache time tunnel. Nice kids, sad song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPU7FPhui1s

Moderator Mayhem, a game for your phone or your desktop browser.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobile-game-to-see-how-well-you-can-handle-content-moderation/

Erotic cameos of antiquity.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/erotic-cameos-from-antiquity

Ladies of the chorus. Ronald Reagan is in this, I’m told. I looked for him but didn’t sit through the whole thing, so.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/05/leonard-turns-dog-people-into-crazy-cat.html

Enough Rita Hayworth to last a lonely mechanic’s assistant a week and a half.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/05/gilda-1946.html

And for the week after that, Hildegard Knef.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/05/hildegard-knef.html

Will to build a pyramid. Freedom under capitalism.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/498

Perseverence.
http://www.steaksmoothie.com/?comic=dunkey

Menu.
https://i.redd.it/rvulfgjzg6xa1.jpg

Tch.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2023/05/18/oof-6/

Sealioning, the puerile argument technique.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2023/05/word-for-day-sealioning.html

Croatian and Amharic alphabet songs. (via Mental Floss)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X28OCn17z-0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxxkNW54BFA

“The idea would be to respond to emergencies in isolated parts of the world by lobbing an SS-18 over the trouble spots and bombing them with food.” Bombing them. With food.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/food_bombs

Rerun: Dutch safety posters. “Gebruik veilig klimmateriaal!” Pay attention. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3_Fhq7sEHo

Art.
https://50watts.com/Harry-Clarke-s-Fairy-Tales

“Somehow my brain couldn’t seem to absorb the meaning of the thing that was draped carelessly across the couch!” Scroll down and down for the full horror.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/a_comic_that_scared_the_senate

The Thing On the Fourble Board. (23 min.)
https://www.quietplease.org/episodes/the-thing-on-the-fourble-board-60.html

A.I. saves time. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://twitter.com/pickover/status/1658192870480683011/photo/1

Tuesco, a documentary. Tuesco means /all fucked up/. (18 min.)
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/05/tuesco.html

Here’s a trailer for a movie I want to see. I don’t have any money to go to movies anymore, but I’d like to.
https://boingboing.net/2023/05/18/the-trailer-for-creator-is-gripping.html

So I was right about the Police Association of America guy being a robot, because his voice didn’t change even slightly in so many years. They didn’t have interactive A.I. twenty or thirty years ago when he first started ringing my phone with his bullshit. Maybe they modeled the voice on the original guy– from the cheese-flavored dog food commercial– “Dogs love cheese…”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/14/us/politics/scam-robocalls-donations-policing-veterans.html

Batman through the eyes of iconic painters. (via b3ta)
https://twitter.com/knightama_/status/1658550981892755461

Alien, if Pixar made it.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-pixar-version-of-alien.html

An hour-long documentary about Gene Kelly, dancer.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2023/05/19/to-live-and-dance/

Four seconds of air. Water is a brick wall at that speed. He gets up by himself afterward, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s crippled for life by that, with back problems and so on that he never would have had.
https://laughingsquid.com/193-foot-high-dive-world-record/

Traffic jams in Moscow. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://newslanc.com/traffic-jams-in-moscow/

Samples from the first mainstream movies to use the F and C words, 1963-1976.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbIrkIgQ3e4

A.I. invents new bowling techniques. Is there anything it can’t do?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWjUY_3ubf4

Your cake and eat it too. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://theawesomer.com/is-it-cake-goes-off-the-rails/705527/

Queen’s /Who Wants To Live Forever?/ but on theremin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um8pe54Ts9A

Quaker names. My favorite: Jane Quitquit. Or perhaps Wonderfull Warwicke. Or the first one of all: Allathya Hortlorke. They’d all be perfect names for a kind of three-wheel motorcycle from the World War One era (that never caught on but should have, like the Stanley Steamer), or names of the never adequately celebrated traveling inventors of a new kind of aluminum egg crate that brings rain in a drought when you shoot it into the clouds from a cannon, or perhaps vaudeville stage performers who sang the National Anthem by farting or by squeezing their damp hands together, or who choreograph-wrestled a team of evening-dressed seals, or who individually discovered Borneo or calculus and /then/ found out that it had already been done, like when Chris of KBHR (K-Bear) learned that the Monty Python people already flang a cow with a trebuchet and all his artistic preparations were derivative. Sad? No. They tried, didn’t they, God damn it. At least they did that.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/05/strange-old-quaker-names.html

Top of the world, Ma. (Just Ma, not Massachusetts.)
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2023/05/13/from-the-top-of-mt-everest/

“Enjoy it, baby.” “Almond Joys got nuts, Peter Paul Mounds don’t.” That was one way people talked (and dressed) in those days. Now it’s all just swearing and drum machines and AutoTune. What’s funny is, the candy bar he’s using his clever trick to seduce the girl with– it has candied coconut in it. Just wait till she takes a bite and spits it out, horrified. Candied coconut is the horseradish of the candy world. The only thing worse is those pulled-tooth-shaped yellow hard wax things that appeared in a bowl by the door at Halloween in second grade. Four things in my life induced surprise instant vomiting: 1. a spoiled slice of tomato when I was already sick, at about five years old, 2. whiskey on a camping trip, fourteen, 3. a bad dream of a fat man with a potato-bug in his mouth, thirteen?, and 4. those paraffin teeth things, second grade, see above. Not in order of severity– the teeth things were the worst– are the worst.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/follies_of_the_madmen_564

“I love you, I need you, and all the other bullshit lines they feed you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGGr7Gu-nRg

“I don’t know what face Michael [Jackson] was making at the time [meaning the time his greased hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial], but I chose a kind of /AARRGH!/ lip.” I think Bobby Fingers is a genius. He has the genius nervous tic of sometimes barking a random syllable. I’ve known people like that. Their brains are just going so fast, the syllable might be a whole paragraph.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/05/bobby-fingers-makes-slightly-deranged.html

Swamp ladies of Estonia.
https://50watts.com/The-Swamp-Ladies-of-Estonia

I repeat. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://twitter.com/pickover/status/1657832550566338561/photo/1

Notes.
https://www.neatorama.com/2023/05/13/Turning-Individual-Singing-Notes-into-a-Song/

“Everyone evacuated to the top, the roof, but even the top part of her building went under the water, and everyone was washed away.” This man’s wife was lost in the tsunami of 2011. He’s still looking for her. In the water. “So far I have done 602 dives.”
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-diver.html

Speed comparison of airplanes. One view of them all, each of them, as you travel along with them. One view from a fixed point as they all go past. And one continuous POV run accelerating from Mach 1 to Mach 30.
https://theawesomer.com/airplane-speed-comparison/705973/

Unsung hero. Paint bucket drummer. If you’re in a hurry, skip to the middle of each of the following. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJdzYY_Fas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JIZOZtU1oI

A significant difference between the parties.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=051723

How a 1765 battleship worked. The sides of the ship were two feet thick, solid wood. Whole forests were leveled to make each one of these things, so they could bust each other up into pieces and the pieces end up either on the bottom or on beaches and rocks all around the world.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/05/how-c1765-sailing-battleship-worked.html

Present day U.S. military bases around the same world, for aircraft carriers and bombers and missiles and staging areas for dragging kids around everywhere to brutalize and be brutalized, instead of which we could have Guaranteed Basic Income, Medicare For All, free higher education, clean water, clean air, a roof over everyone’s head who needs it, sustainable stable electrical power, free public transportation, but who wants any of that? (via PerfectForRoquefortCheese)
https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2023/05/us-military-bases-around-world.html

“I am not a gun.” -Iron Giant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRr5uRmkNaQ

Little cigars whose selling point is they attract women’s underwear parts. This is a better idea than even the candy bar at the rock concert trick, see above.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/05/winchester-little-cigars-ads.html

Abortion laws are torture.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2023/florida-abortion-law-deborah-dorbert/

Another sweet bird. (via Tacky Raccoons) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://twitter.com/cctv_idiots/status/1650167365093539843

Ze Frank, constant delight. (Say ZAY Frank)
https://www.neatorama.com/2023/05/16/Ze-Franks-Animal-Awards-Volume-Three/

It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2023/05/15/parenting-psa-of-the-80s/

Art. (viahttps://blort.meepzorp.com/ Everlasting Blort)
http://www.mister-finch.com/portfolio/

Pastika’s.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=YhMRwO

“Just leave the questions to me, Toots.” (via b3ta) That’s another thing: people don’t call people /Toots/ anymore, or /Choochie/ or /Pally/ or anything like that. I kind of miss it. You know, I am going to start it again, next time I go out anywhere. “Hey, Toots, how’s it goin’.” “I’d like a bag for that, please, Toots.” You try it too. But it has to be a total stranger and you have to say it like you mean it; it should be happy, enthusiastic, sincere and /over/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUdPv8VmH5c

A demo page of new musical instruments. The real-life festival is happening right now. I can’t go. (via Stewart Dickson)
https://www.makermusicfestival.com/building/Partch/

Side view of different kinds of screw anchors doing what they do.
https://boingboing.net/2023/05/16/short-video-demonstrate-how-12-different-kinds-of-wall-anchors-work.html

Let this repeat a few times. She makes a powerful point. All the while, what is that /thing/ hanging around her neck. I know it’s a necklace. What /is/ it.
https://twitter.com/Bagpuss_org/status/1658404247057096705

It really has nothing to do with astrology, and that’s the point, I think. Everybody’s in his own Plato’s Cave. Why assume malice? (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1656138498236786/

And best in show. Imagine the wonderful intricate 3D jazz-concert of computational electrical activity going on in the creature’s brain and the control-and-feedback wiring of its eyes and ears and body and limbs, which includes not only producing and directing the physical activity but the consciousness of love and pack-satisfaction of pleasing the woman by doing it right. Put this side-by-side with supposedly smart people bitching at each other in a newsgroup over their stupid moral or political or religious opinions, say. I prefer the dog.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/05/truant-masters-agility-champion.html