A boy or a girl and his or her dog.

    “The truth has to be melted out of our stubborn lives by suffering. Nothing speaks the truth, nothing tells us how things really are, nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know except pain. And this is how the gods declare their love.” -Aeschylus

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 fast-paced eight-hour Friday night shows’ most locally relevant material, going back decades. And consider tiny bravely struggling KNYO. Find KNYO’s donation heart and help the station out.

I’m happy to read your writing on the radio. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I’ll take it from there.

BESIDES THAT, here’s a mess of fresh not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I collected for you while gathering MOTA together, mainly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right.

Rerun, because he (Jimmy Buffett) just died. The story of Peanut Butter Conspiracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3GwfpXPgmA

“Keep watching after the credits.”
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2023-08-22-cgcinematic.gif

Flabby bison lungs.
https://boingboing.net/2023/09/02/butcher-blows-air-into-lungs-of-bison-in-facsinating-biology-demonstration.html

Fungus at fungus speed.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/09/tweet-of-day_0422337201.html

A trick you can do with foil-wrapped butter pats. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/10wrxr6/this_little_butter_portion_trick/?rdt=36636

Trick guitar.
https://laughingsquid.com/21-string-acoustic-guitar/

Charles Berthoud’s latest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz3uhkoe5DA

Lyle Lovett – Pants Is Overrated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtAG7FFG10

Paramotoring over Slovenia.
https://theawesomer.com/paramotoring-over-slovenia/715344/

Sigh.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/SiezetheMeansofProduction.png

Finnegans Wake as a beatnik comic dance opera. Show starts five minutes into the video.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_coach_with_six_insides

32 acrobats on ropes, 20 strobe lights, 1 construction crane.
https://theawesomer.com/32-acrobats-1-crane/715497/

“Didja ever take and try and get an iron-clad lead for yourself from a three-rail billiard shot? Why, just as I say it takes judgment, brains and maturity to score in a balkline game, I say that any /boob/ can take and shove /a/ ball in /a/ pocket.”
https://theawesomer.com/pool-trick-shot-artist-shows-off/715667/

Speaking of which, Masako Katsura, Japanese national heroine, the First Lady of Billiards.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/09/masako-katsura.html

Fun with ballistic gel and a pool ball cannon.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/09/cannon-ball-vs-ballistic-gel-in-ultra.html

Fails in Yurp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5GvzJBeQ8A

Bluegrass boulevard of broken dreams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G-WWMHstPg

Sweet. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-UYK4nahoo

Miss Cellania posted a link to the 1992 Robert Downey Jr. film about Charlie Chaplin. The part that stuck in my mind back when I saw it on VHS was where he’s in a bedroom with a fourteen-year-old (?) girl and it’s implied that they’re about to have sex. From across the room she’s acceptable to him, but up close he doesn’t seem to be feeling it. She says, “Charlie, what’s wrong?” He mutters, “I need some more, ahem, you just need lip rouge.” She hesitates a moment. Is he serious? Yes. “It’s over there,” he says. She fetches it. The camera moves in to fill the screen with the lipstick being applied. Ick, now I recall a movie where Steve Martin can’t feel sexy toward his wife until she puts lipstick around her nostrils.

I’ve never liked lipstick, from as far back as I can remember, from when I was a little boy. The idea of it has always nauseated me, just to see it– the texture, the smell. One of the plays I made sound for at Mendocino Theater Company in the 2000s had a scene of several over-made-up middle-aged women sitting on folding chairs, legs crossed, wiggling their shoes. It was a rehearsal. The director of the company at the time, Doug Warner, was near me. I don’t remember what I said, but it might have been a question about the fright-mask level of makeup they all had on; was that intentional? Doug said, “I think they look kinda /hot/.” I said, “Are you kidding.” He said, “No.”

Young women in offices and on sales floors now use less makeup than they used to but they have whole sleeves and calves of tattoos, and metal ornaments stuck through holes not only in the flesh of their ears but in their cheeks and noses and lips. Or a whole zipper of earrings across the length of an eyebrow. I went in for lab work today and the young technician who drew blood had one arm covered with tattooed outlines of various seemingly unrelated objects, maybe to color in later… People can do what they want, of course; it’s their body. I don’t like it, but it’s not up to me. But here’s what I just noticed: none of any of those rather extreme levels of self mutilation are anywhere near as creepy to me as Charlie Chaplin calmly, anticipatingly instructing that girl to put lipstick on.

Later when the same actor played Iron Man I had an uncomfortable feeling whenever he was in a scene with Gwyneth Paltrow. I think my memory mixed her with the girl in the Chaplin movie. I liked that they eventually gave her superpowers of her own. Iron Man didn’t have a superpower. He just had a flying suit. My favorite superhero is a tie between Jessica Jones and Daredevil. Or maybe Powder. Or The Great and Powerful Turtle in the Wild Cards series of books. Or Ned in Pushing Daisies. Or Supergirl. Or Magneto. Or Tom Strong. Or Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood (an anagram for Doctor Who). Jack has the same super healing power as Wolverine of X-Men but no super strength, and he has a special wristwatch to travel through time.

Here’s the whole Chaplin film. The lipstick scene will be somewhere in the middle.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/09/chaplin.html

Art. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.wikiart.org/en/victor-brauner

Exodus.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/09/burning-man-exodus.html

Rerun: Nina Paley’s /This Land Is Mine/. This never gets old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TuZKtTBAFg

“After the driver paid off with the operator, a gun with a hose was lowered from the flying saucer. So there was no need to jump up after him.”
https://www.vintag.es/2023/09/kyiv-gas-stations.html

“The floor, she is lava!” (A gas gun, see above, is male. A tomato is female.)
https://tackyraccoons.com/2023/09/07/materman-steps-in-it/

I keep a slide whistle in the door pocket of my car for just such an occasion. Hmm. Slide whistle, male or female? I remember when I was very small thinking that all dogs are boys and all cats are girls. My first dog, a girl dog, looked like a little old gray-haired mustache man from when she was a puppy and we got her from the pound in Burbank. I still dream about that dog all these decades later. I dreamed about her just last week. And my memory of the dog pound and its surroundings, the curved concrete bridge next to it, the feel of the air, and the sounds and smells, are clearer and sharper than almost anything from that time (1963, I think). My mother took me there just to look at the dogs, and that one was the only one, out of hundreds, who wasn’t barking or whining insanely but who stood quietly behind the bars looking back at me, tilting her head this way and that, controlling me to say, “Can we have this one.”
https://laughingsquid.com/kitten-to-cat-timelapses/

Time-lapse of giant gimbaled telescopes turning and tilting. (via Juanita)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230906.html

“Flab will start to turn into healthy beautifully firm tissue.”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/disco_body_shaper

Rerun: Long long gum ad for long long gum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjlkBkfLzC8

The History Lounge. (via MyOneBeautifulThing)
https://www.youtube.com/@TheHistoryLounge/featured

The De Havilland Sea Vixen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLM0PyUpgZY

Trailer for Hayao Miyazaki’s final film.
https://boingboing.net/2023/09/06/here-is-the-first-trailer-for-hayao-miyazakis-final-film.html

Frank Hartzell’s spread on Fort Bragg’s (CA) Paul Bunyan Days events.
https://mendovoice.com/2023/09/big-trees-name-change-foes-stir-up-paul-bunyan-days-in-fort-bragg/

Playing For Change – When the Levee Breaks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH0-WXUFY2k

Dublin buskers. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://boingboing.net/2023/08/29/videos-of-buskers-on-dublins-grafton-street.html

Art. (via BoingBoing)
https://glitchgallery.org/

Dance.
https://www.biglots.com/product/black-stinger-talkbud-earbuds-with-mic/p810272795

A similar dance to a similar song: El Tango de Roxanne.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic4PQ-tnwJw

The Weavers – Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SxKkVVtpLY

The adorable Simone Giertz (say YEERTS) and her latest project.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2023/09/your-confessions-are-safe-in-this.html

This year’s Thai rocket festival.
https://boingboing.net/2023/09/03/thailands-annual-homemade-rocket-festival-looks-like-a-blast.html

Tenochtitlan as it was. (via BoingBoing)
https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/

The Art Bell Vault. Ba boom ba. (That was his radio intro theme.) (They used that song in a couple of places in the teevee series Dead Like Me, which I loved.)
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/art-bell/

The Adventure of the Average Face.
https://youtu.be/DSIamWME98o?si=0AUzEIcLJZGg8Omy

Morrop. -What? -What, what? -I asked you first. -Morrop. -No, no, Morrop don’t play dat. Shove off, mate. (via Fark)
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3t1Pxws-2Tc/VVk5MR9xZVI/AAAAAAAAEaY/1tfbS1VXYYM/s1600/morrop.jpg

Kirby and Kendall. There was a cartoon in the National Lampoon in the early 1970s where a faery girl is looking up, pissed off, from her bed in a flower at a boy faery with a weary, wasted-happy expression on his face, hanging limply in the air from his magic wings. The girl faery says, “It’s three a.m. and you’ve got pollen all over you.”
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2023/09/03/repost-kirby-and-kendall/

Like a bird in the room, like the terror of ultimate doom, I have tried, in my way, to AIEEEE! /Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!/
https://laughingsquid.com/hawk-startles-guitarist-and-dog/

Oh, my.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNTWafP1n9w

Saruman. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjbixzkcmjA

The Finger Breaker piece… (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzcsArJYYfs

…And that reminds me of /The Legend of 1900/, as so much does, but in this case it’s because of the piano duel between Tim Roth and Jelly Roll Morton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UPftoWxFnY