I’ve still got the blues for you.
“What happened to, if you shoot it you eat it. Don’t they teach kids that anymore?”
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 often provides as much as an hour of each of these approximately eight-hour Friday night shows’ most locally relevant material, going back decades. And consider KNYO, the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and help out if you can. Every dollar donated, whether in the jar on movie night or through the heart or by check (to KNYO, p.o. box 1651, Fort Bragg, CA 95437) goes directly to pay the station’s real-life expenses: rent, electricity, water, equipment, and music publisher and streaming fees. No-one at KNYO gets a cut of it, not even the manager. Furthermore, the first hour of each show now is also on KAKX Mendocino, thanks to Marshall Brown, who teaches at the high school there and maintains the student radio station, and who just got married, I’m told. Congrats!
Last night’s show had and has all the features, all the regular story writers, sections and departments and Eleanor and Del, and a chapter from Dan Hibshman’s new book, with plenty more to come. Next week’s show can feature your story or dream or poem or kvetch, too. 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 and read it on the air. That’s what I’m here for.
Besides all that, here’s an inviting tray of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mainly thanks to the fine websites listed to your right:
Bjork – Human behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0mRIhK9seg
Villagers – That golden time.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/01/that-golden-time.html
Rerun: The lesson of the moth.
https://nationalmothweek.org/2013/08/20/the-lesson-of-the-moth-by-archy-a-poem-by-don-marquis/
That time filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984 when stage pyrotechnics caught Michael Jackson’s hair grease on fire, he didn’t notice, kept dancing, and was rescued by being mobbed by technicians throwing their coats over him, none of which ended up being used in the ad, which is crazy. I’d start with that and build the rest of the ad around it. They did MRI studies and all kinds of scientific experiments that showed that even people who claim to like Coca Cola better really, underneath, like Pepsi –your brain likes it better– but there’s some psychological function twisting this up. You don’t have to understand the function to manipulate it. I’d go with, /Pepsi sets your head on fire!/ with Michael Jackson jerking his head this way and that, grabbing his crotch, spinning around, shrieking. Indelible. And six years later Pepsi actually owned a fleet of Russian war submarines, so I’d tie it in with that too.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/01/michael-jackson-pepsi-commercial-burn.html
Cosmohedron. (8 min.)
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/cosmohedron
A good question.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSZQCM6HGmY/
Cell Block Tango. “Pop, six, squish, uh-uh, Cicero, Lipschitz.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrrz54UtkCc
Still got the blues for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=019HBFdnbxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWeM2UmUxtg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojfn5CsVg9E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X8Iy4H25aI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcfv7zUQw_s
Mollie Moore – Wild world. Understated mastery in a trio. I kind of like the quirky broken-guitar sound. A whole floor full of effect pedals all plugged into each other; that sound is what she chose. There’s something fascinating about each of these musicians and his or her way, the concentration, the machine of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9nRBzmh0M
Definitive Comfortably Numb. These men first recorded this 45 years ago. The song is old enough to be a great-grandmother in a bible-belt state and it’s still magic. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_MXLI5hyEc
Car-optimized-UK project. (via Kottke.org) (Arrow through the gallery)
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2dAJR1MCaU/?img_index=1
I remember doing this as a child, enjoying being destructive and making a mess and also thinking that I was /helping the plant spread seeds/, but knowing that the main thing was the mess part. I think that’s a metaphor for a great deal of human activity. We like to bust stuff up and walk away from it, looking for other stuff to bust up. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1744011885169512894
How we get brown sugar, which is regular sugar with wet brown sauce in it. I’ll bet chocolate syrup would work for this. Almond syrup isn’t brown, but that would be good too. Which reminds me, one of my million-dollar ideas from the column in /Memo/ thirty years ago was almond syrup or chocolate syrup in capsules to drop into a hot drink, in a bowl next to the sugar cubes and cup of cream everywhere they sell coffee, as well as brown sugar cubes, that people would see as a healthy alternative to white sugar. You wouldn’t have to say it’s healthy; it just looks healthier, so by the placebo effect it is, like weird bitter kinds of lettuce, but unlike them by being yummy. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/230511/light-or-dark-brown-sugar
Monkey pastry chef automaton.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2024/01/29/monkey-pastry-chef/
Tire made of rubber chickens. (via Tacky Raccoons) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1088707512578369
A pastel tardigrade, the hardiest life anywhere. You can dry them in a dryer, expose them to the vacuum of space, leave them in an envelope in a filing cabinet for decades, drop a drop of water on them and they jump up ready to run and play like it was a nap.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cute-little-tardigrades-are-basically-indestructible-and-scientists-just-figured-out-one-reason-why/
About the Codex Seraphinianus. (via Neatorama)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1FXQMmXYoA
“At the end of the day, this is a male fantasy about escaping the humiliation of rejections.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thpEyEwi80
Hmm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHuyhWsz2RQ
Or.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RXlUtgXrdE
Tom’s Jeannie!
https://laughingsquid.com/toms-diner-i-dream-of-jeannie-mashup/
Bleagh. Klingon restaurant food but with eyeballs and better music. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMalyUkNBrQ
“It’s simple, really. We can do this one of two ways.” (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.timemachinego.com/linkmachinego/2024/01/18/ive-got-problems-with-your-wifi/
The McBroom Sisters take turns singing, then sweetly finish together.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2013/06/pink-floyds-great-gig-in-sky-1994.html
Speaking of Marshall Brown, here’s Marshall Brown’s and Doug Nunn’s latest SnapSessions episode.
https://www.thesnapsessions.com/episode-55-martin-siemann/
I wonder how much of this is photography and how much is CGI? How are the slow rack-smooth flying parts done?
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/02/winter.html
X-ray photographs of different animals. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://imgur.com/gallery/TGnEkDR
Auction of ancient war helmets. (Scroll down and down.)
https://newatlas.com/collectibles/armor-museum-helmet-auction-rewrites-record-books
They’re 80 feet away from him. He’s just behind that shrub and those trees. He must be whistling very quietly.
https://xkcd.com/2888/
Art.
https://biblioklept.org/2024/01/31/self-portrait-with-palm-fronds-julie-heffernan/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/02/01/yannis-davy-guibinga/
https://tackyraccoons.com/2024/02/01/volkswagen-all-terrain-camper/
https://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2024/01/gotham-city-in-batman-animated-series.html
From 200 million to 0 million years ago.
https://kottke.org/24/01/an-animated-timelapse-of-200-million-years-of-continental-drift-from-pangea-to-today
The Middle Ages in 15 minutes.
https://laughingsquid.com/middle-ages-timeline/
Flotation fashion. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/15371/rick-owens-aw24-fw24-menswear-show-collection-review
Between Laverne and Shirley.
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-01-30-cgsafe.gif
Could humans survive? Enclaves of super-rich ones and their domestic slaves, yes, in bomb shelters stocked with enough air and water and food and power for fifteen years, in a kind of underground Snowpiercer situation. This is why we need a space program, to slowly but surely nudge a giant asteroid off course with rocket engines or bombs, and give humanity a few more hundred years’ chance to deliberately develop all of Earth into a giant Snowpiercer situation, even more than it already has been, instead of having it come in an instant by a mindless hammer. Also in those hundreds of years that we buy with space tech we might grow up as a species and develop a future worth living in, and become spoiled and soft, easy prey for alien domination, or reach the Singularity and vanish into endless worlds of computational matter that will take hundreds of trillions of years to wind down. Meanwhile, there are only eight possible stories, twelve possible rhyme schemes, fifteen basic melodies, and eighteen possible jokes, so maybe the hammer is preferable to an infinity of reruns.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/02/could-humans-survive-major-asteroid.html
Mars in 4K.
https://kottke.org/24/02/mars-in-4k
2,700-year-old Assyrian dog names. Missing from the list: Consume His Life. Also, Don’t Think, Bite might rather be Bites Without Thinking.
https://memooftheair.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/assyriandogfigurines-1.jpg
Bite. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CyqrxVmLZ7V/
Kiss – Psychic Circus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWIW6Ti0PbE
Building a delicate yet powerful Tesla turbine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuzh9mHvzkk
Carnival ride from an antique era. Not shown: how they get the horses back up to the top of the ride again. Probably five guys slogging up a ladder with them. When they talk about the good old days when everybody had a job, that’s the kind of job people had. Now here you are standing all day near the self-checkout counter resetting the machine for people when it locks up because they put a shopping bag on the shopping bag shelf and it felt it and freaked out and refused to continue. UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. It’s a bag. I think I’d rather carry horses up a ladder. No ladder work underground, though. No way. Typing, maybe, or dusting in a library. Or running numbers, by hand, on your feet, the old-fashioned way, and taking a break in an automat with a ham sandwich and lime pie and looking out the window at the rain. A couple of young but already jaded cops come in, you side-eye each other, they get their own sandwiches and pie, sit down way over there, and everyone minds his own business. Or steady, slow, behind-the-counter work at a dim hotel in the old part of town, where you can read and write, think, nap, noodle on the clarinet, chat with the street ladies. Occasionally you wonder about somebody you haven’t seen in the lobby in awhile, and you go up to the third floor, knock on a door and say, “Frank, you all right in there?” “What. Yeah. I’m fine. What’s up?” “I was just worried about you. If you’re fine, you’re fine. Sorry to bother you.” He says, “I’m fine, thanks. I’m just tired these days.” “When’s the last time you ate something?” … “Frank?” … “I don’t remember. Um…” And you say, “I’m gonna make spaghetti and meatballs. I’ll make extra. I’ll be back in half an hour. Do you like Pepsi?” That is an example of a decent job that somebody might have. In the 1980s the Canadian government paid people to write and produce radio drama. France pays new movie makers to make movies. There are plenty of models for society to try out.
https://boingboing.net/2024/02/01/heres-an-amazing-video-of-the-steeplechase-mechanical-horse-ride-at-steeplechase-park-coney-island-in-the-early-1900s.html.
“So let’s begin at the beginning, with your new bloody oven!” (via BitsAndPieces.us)
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2024/01/30/a-challenge-for-elton-john/
Description and visualization skills.
https://kottke.org/24/02/ayo-edebiri-draws-a-new-yorker-cartoon
A box of broken dreams.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/01/box-of-broken-dreams-repost-from-2009.html
I like this man, his manner, and his gentle act. (52 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lCzsjqZZmY
Memo Of The Air 
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