Step right up.

   “A guy with experience in invasive vegetation once said to me that bamboo is like a cold slow fire that is alive. If you don’t keep it in check it will destroy everything.”

Here’s the recording of last night’s 8-hour-long 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 MOTA shows going back quite a way. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, whimoch often provides as much as an hour of each of these 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. All of your help, 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 that money, not even the manager. Also the first hour of each MOTA show now is on KAKX Mendocino too, thanks to Marshall Brown who runs the media tech department at the high school there. Another project Marshall Brown helps makes possible is SnapSessions.

Coming MOTA shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch. 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 a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right:

So you want to write a fugue…
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/05/21/pep-talk/

Charles Berthoud (say bear-TOO) – Taprica.
https://theawesomer.com/africa-all-bass-cover/740714/

Marcin Patrzalek banging with abandon on acoustic guitar on security video in an elevator, drawing the night watchman’s attention away from a daring jewel heist elswhere in the building, no doubt.
https://theawesomer.com/black-sabbath-in-an-elevator/655618/

Our sun, the heating system.
https://newatlas.com/space/nasa-solar-storms-videos/

How to tell how fast a black hole a billion light-years away* is spinning. For when CAPTCHA evolves so you need to know this in order to log onto your renter portal or order a pizza through your phone. That sounds nuts, sure, but imagine how nuts everything now seems to those of us who grew up in a world of typewriters and paying your phone bill in cash at the Rexall, and your rent with a check in an envelope in the mail, and cashing checks you got in person at the bank with a live teller (or signing the check over to somebody else you owed money to). And where you could fix your own car with two screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a socket set, and a trip to the parts yard, and if you didn’t have money for insurance you just drove carefully enough to not crash into things. Gas cost 18 cents a gallon. A set of four recap tires cost $50, balanced, installed and out the door. Your ordinary job covered your rent by the second week of the month. Everyone had a phone, sure, but it was one phone per house, and it was screwed to the wall in the kitchen and you took your turn; when you were anywhere else, you were away from the phone, though there were payphones out in the world. Teevee shows and movies came on when and where they came on. If you weren’t there then, you missed it until rerun season. There was a lot more punching people in the nose in those days, too, rather than shooting up a school or anonymously bitterly bitching back and forth at them for the rest of your life on web forums. Life was entirely in person. When things got salty and you weren’t up to take it outside, you’d say, “I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry,” and the other person would say, “That’s all right, then, we’ll say no more about it,” and that would be that. Even children were more grown up about things than grownups are now. Grocery stores often had a whole aisle of new books for sale, half of them thrilling science fiction. They were like a quarter or 35 cents. Comic books were 12 cents. There were whole separate stores that just fixed and cleaned your clothes, or sold record players or church organs, or men’s ties and socks and boxer shorts, and the families that ran those stores lived upstairs in the store or across the alley in back. You didn’t have to learn all over again every twenty minutes how to live, or how to talk, or what to watch out for so not to be made a fool of. Work boots and vacuum cleaners and blenders and washing machines were built to outlast the human race. I’m still using my first pair of work boots. I’m still using a vacuum cleaner and a microphone that were made during the Korean War. You plug them in and switch them on and they work.
https://gizmodo.com/supermassive-black-hole-spin-quarter-light-speed-1851492036

*Meanwhile the radiation from that black hole ripping a star apart started out on its way here a billion years ago. Here’s a video story about what things were like a billion years ago on Earth and how they got to be the way they are since then.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/one-billion-years-ago-is-this-eden/

Robot Etch-A-Sketch.
https://theawesomer.com/building-a-robotic-etch-a-sketch/740313/

Coming soon to an operating theater near you. “Preserving life one head at a time.”
https://newatlas.com/medical/head-transplants-robots-brainbridge/

Star Trek TOS (The Original Show) theme for theater orchestra and theremin. The pretty theremin player’s plucky smirking rebellion against frantic direction from the conductor to /knock it off/ with the occasional extraneous exuberant /zzzzip/ fillips is icing on the cake. She’s like, Yeah, right, you’re not the boss of me. /zzzeeep!/
https://laughingsquid.com/star-trek-theme-on-theremin/

Meteor, in this case a comet fragment.
https://laughingsquid.com/portugal-spain-meteor/
https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/comet-explodes-over-europe-in-astonishing-explosion-video.html

World’s longest wingsuit proximity flight. Fullscreen this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kooYQ0IOnoM

So you’re raising a telekinetic child.
https://theawesomer.com/so-youre-raising-a-telekinetic-child/740403/

Dr. Manhattan’s sad superhero origin story. Fans of Watchmen, the graphic novel, have mixed opinions on the subject of the movie and, later, the teevee series, but I like all of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnrzW0NeKQ8

Space bimbos. /Space babes/, though, is the polite term, if you ever want a chance with one, such as Claudia Black or Amanda Tapping or Katee Sackhoff or Hanna John-Kamen or Sonequa Martin-Green or Wanda Ventham or Jolene Blalock or Sabine Hossenfelder… But be rude and be lonely, fine, it’s a free solar system, it’s a free galactic protectorate.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2024/05/22/space-bimbos-ii/
https://tackyraccoons.com/2024/02/19/space-bimbos/

Speaking of which, space, the final frontier of magnetic reverb.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/from_another_world

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” -Douglas Adams
https://gizmodo.com/euclid-space-telescope-largest-space-images-dark-matter-1851495931
https://newatlas.com/space/james-webb-first-direct-images-galaxy-birth-cosmic-dawn

The uncatly valley.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/05/tweet-of-day_01977998994.html

Pat-and-Sean’s medley/mixup/mashups. (via Juanita) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.instagram.com/patandseankelly/reel/C5ogd_hJEs3/
https://www.instagram.com/patandseankelly/reel/C3oDZE-JN2H/

Freda Payne – Band of Gold. Since you been gone it’s all that’s left.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/05/band-of-gold.html

Putting aside the pitch for the product, this reminds me of a YouTube clip of a Pink concert, where a hypnotically, languorously high audience girl slowly got up on the stage, moved close, smiling the whole time, and licked the patient performer’s cheek*. Pink said gently into the microphone, to the crowd’s gentle, appreciative amusement, not mocking, “Yeah, she’s rollin’.”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/follies_of_the_madmen_596

Speaking of rolling.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2024/05/24/friday-bits-dance-party-104/

*I just tried to find the Pink event, to show you, but instead found this girl’s ASMR project. I like the whispering. “The lens tastes weird,” she says. The lipstick and makeup and crap that her tongue has to get past to get to the lens are all fine with her, but the lens tastes weird, tch. Maybe it’s the UV coating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAMRgIssC_s

Awww.
https://boingboing.net/2024/05/19/shy-jumping-spider-cleans-eyes-in-cute-video.html

Best cat ears. The way they sinuously floop.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2024/05/tweet-of-day_0421494564.html

The Kiffness – Bath Cat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P51bzBBnHU0

Sandwich cat sounds.
https://laughingsquid.com/recreating-classic-cartoon-sounds/

The 1939 Hammond Novachord.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMEuibX4c04

Tom Waits – Step Right Up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTdScE3Rqh8

A rhythmic world.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/05/orange-animated-film-by-sylvie-trouve.html

Drum-kit-enhanced classical music. (You might have to click on the image.)
https://laughingsquid.com/modern-drum-tracks-added-to-classical-music/

RAS syndrome.
https://laughingsquid.com/modern-drum-tracks-added-to-classical-music/

Daikaiju.
https://boingboing.net/2024/05/24/giant-monster-themed-surf-rock-from-huntsville-alabama.html

More cowbell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imh7_XQRJxE

Power skritcher.
https://x.com/i/status/1792183637066010798

Who’s a smart bird. /You/ are. /You/ are. /You’re/ a smart bird, yes, you are. /Yes, you are./ (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/05/now-i-want-pet-crow.html

Boulder or paint? Or both. Probably both.
https://www.bitsandpieces.us/2024/05/23/boulder-or-paint/

Rerun: How to buy a used car without getting screwed.
https://kottke.org/16/05/how-not-to-get-screwed-buying-a-used-car

Watch man attacked by a team of off-work mariachis stand his ground, lose his ground, and stand it again. He shows remarkable restraint, holding his fire until he can hold it no longer. To be fair to the mariachis, we don’t know what led up to this. He might have started the trouble by busting up their wedding gig with his /backpack flamethrower/. (via Fark)
https://news.sky.com/video/share-13141033

There were more atom bombs ready to go, for after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo would have been next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v5tymzKrIY

Jupiter, a big fat deal. Lots to unpack.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-seven-most-amazing-discoveries-weve-made-by-exploring-jupiter-180984352/

Starship engine room in the elegant future. (via Fark)
https://www.contemporist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/modern-sculpture-140524-1241-01.jpg

Heaven, it looks like.
https://theawesomer.com/26000-days-inside-the-mind-of-a-stunt-pilot/739986/

Life is flashing before your eyes.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/life_is_flashing_before_your_eyes

Tech in anime.
https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/anime-depictions-of-gadgets-and-technology.html

Sabine Hossenfelder (see above), physics professor, explains portals without employing the red herring of cake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cox7481IE6o

A mini-episode of Lackadaisy. It’s a popular webcomic and series of YA graphic novels, now branched out into teevee. (via Juanita)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqkUy8M-GfQ

Full pilot episode of the prospective Lackadaisy teevee series. (30 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vffu6FG4YP4

Another one of the Movie Recaps projects. I like movies this way as much as watching the whole movie. Also, you can play the sound of their projects while you work or drive, and it’s like watching three weeks of movies in an afternoon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_3APD70fk

Rerun: John Hartford, tapdancing banjist. (via 27thStreet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOA86MeCrro

Musical theater songs sung as sea shanties. Here are a couple. (via MyOneBeautifulThing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zim8-2M7Jk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6c9yqnvHbI

Art. (via My One Beautiful Thing, and This Isn’t Happiness)
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/05/20/eric-lepape/
https://www.instagram.com/jangkoal/

What.*
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=Ec4Bdp

*Sometimes a picture of somebody makes me think the person has just become aware of your look and is about to say, blandly, calmly, comically, a little embarassedly annoyed: “What.” This woman is the queen of that. i think she’s pretty, but the makeup makes me wince. I can smell it, and feel it. Makeup on people is often like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Not as bad as jewelry of metal or bone or plastic or ceramics jammed through the actual flesh, but I can’t help it, I don’t like it. It is their body; they can do what they want to it; it’s none of my business. It just gets my attention because it makes them look deranged, so I have to worry about what they might do next, and go wide around them, and think about them instead of what I was thinking about before they popped up all self-mutilated and vivid.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/05/florence-marly.html

“Not just beyond your imagination, but “beyond /everyone’s/ imagination.” It looks like the style of an early 1970s American movie that you really liked and forgot all about and need to see again right now. (via Dangerous Minds)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fxa5NuVrqU

The little white Ford Falcon 12 photos up from the bottom of the page. If they made those now, with modern materials and a modern motor, maybe electric, everyone would want one.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/05/people-with-automobiles.html

The people, no different flesh. There’s the happy bride with her present, just what she always wanted: a fine new G.E. electrical alarm clock. Somebody’s getting his reward later on, after the guests have all gone home.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/05/1950s-home-interiors.html

My mother took me to Seattle the year of the World’s Fair there, when I was three. The fair was over. We went up into the Space Needle, which was /The Future/ (in the thrilling sense the little robot girl means when she says to Frank in /Tomorrowland/, “I’m the future”), and I loved it even though you couldn’t go out on the ring-deck and look straight down over the edge; it wasn’t a platform, it was just decorative; you were kept way back from the edge, inside. I got a five-inch-high plastic statue of the Space Needle that it took until I grew up to somehow lose. I just looked; different vendors have nice ones in different materials and in oddly modified shapes, but none of the ones I see on the web now are the right one, the right shape, the right soft green. Also mine had a flexible white spire antenna that you could compulsively fidget with at the dinner table while reading your book, which (the antenna, not the book) succumbed to material fatigue and departed early in our relationship, the Space Needle and I.
https://www.vintag.es/2024/05/1962-seattle-worlds-fair.html

Childhood hero exposed as terrible person. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Oz6BRUHSQ

This scrape is like the scrape scene in /Galaxy Quest/. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4mQnp4H0fk

Rerun: “We are the space robots. We are here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E0ot9iJm_k

Carrot-thlhu. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1792383523896414554

Ceiling of the Spanish Synagogue of Prague and of the Fatima Masumeh Shrine. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://tinyurl.com/SynagogueOfPrague
https://x.com/pickover/status/1793073235057336455

Eeek. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7W3rd1CP9R/

Making mochi.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/05/mr-bone-makes-mochi.html

Patent diagram for an illuminated advertising tower.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/illuminated_advertising_tower

How people with an automatic-ice-making fridge get ice. The big commercial icemakers in restaurants I used to work in worked entirely differently, with fewer moving parts, and they smelled strongly of cold mold. No-one ever cleaned them. To clean them you’d have to shut them off and empty them completely out, and there’s no time for that. Ice is civilization. Also the soda pop dispensers in convenience stores and fast-food places can be pretty bad, germwise. Maybe they’ve solved that public health concern by now with some kind of antifungal antiseptic in the soda pop itself. That’s how I’d do it. You can’t force people to do the right thing, but you can fix it so they don’t have to. And the side-effects might be positive, as in, it cures athletes’ foot or clears brain plaque and so mitigates Alzheimers’ symptoms. Or you might get cavity prevention. We get the idea that side effects are all disorientation, heart attack, nausea, vomiting, suicidal ideation, etc., but there are often as many positive side effects to things as there are negative. Whatever you dwell on, you’re gonna get more of that: antisemitism, silverfish, pornography, lawn care noise, kids sassing back, MSG, and so on.
https://theawesomer.com/inside-the-ice-maker/740544/

This reminds me: Tales From The Loop. It’s set in Ohio, but it’s rather a European-feeling /Eureka/. The year of ten episodes is all one big story, but the stories stand on their own feet, so you can start anywhere in it. My favorite episode is the one where a lonely man is transported to a parallel world where the friend of his dreams actually exists, but is not quite the person he dreams of. Or, no, it’s the one where a father lets his life go to hell, obsessing about the safety of his daughter, and he learns an important lesson, sells the monster robot, repairs the house’s fusebox and electrical system, a metaphor for his own sanity, and so wins his wife and family back. I guess they all have the quality of, whichever one I’m thinking about becomes my favorite. Anyway, here’s Philip Glass’ sparse, Satie-like solo piano version of the music from Tales From The Loop:
https://kottke.org/24/05/0044655-todays-music-to-work-to

Smoke On The Water by The Doors.
https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/ever-wondered-how-smoke-on-the-water-would-sound-if-the-doors-wrote-it-watch-here.html

Rerun: A Reading Rainbow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–RYPHqbD50

Scenes From An Italian Restaurant in the garage.
https://theawesomer.com/middle-aged-dad-jam-band-perform-billy-joel/740379/

Susan Rice, Funny Old Bag. “Hi! It’s nice to be here. It’s nice I got up those fuckin’ steps! Honest ta God. Wait, I’m gonna fluff my hair so my ass looks smaller.”
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2024/05/24/susan-rice/

Like a dream about being a hero. Have truck, right place, right time, why not? it’ll work! And then no hesitation, because no time. /No, don’t, it’s dangerous!/ [Jumps in, slams door, jams it in gear, steps on the gas, follows instincts, saves two hundred people from exploding in flames.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdFd9AVlIOQ

“You think you’ll get over it, but all these years later you lie in bed and the whole thing comes ’round again.”
https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/titanic-survivor-recounts-his-experience-in-gripping-interview-video.html

How the world turns.
https://theawesomer.com/globe-spinning-automaton/740723/

A black hole bigger than the universe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71eUes30gwc

And Marilyn Bellamy posted to her weblog NagOnTheLake an article and video about a carnival ride that she called the ride of her nightmares because, even though it isn’t at all abusively kinetic, just looking at it gave her motion sickness. I wrote after that:

In 2010 the Sonoma County Fair had a bunch of rides left over from Michael Jackson’s actual personal backyard amusement park, including The Black Spider, with pods that spun in three groups of three from arms that also turned, faster and faster, so you’d be spinning, pressed by centrifugal force against one side of the pod (or smooshing the person you’re with against the side of the pod) and, at random, being jerked backward or forward as the phase of the two spins aligned or opposed, all in a strobe-lit environment of diesel smoke and deafening thump-crash thump-crash music and screams. I was already nauseous when we got to the fair in the first place and probably shouldn’t have eaten the concession stand gyro. The ginger candy that Juanita insisted would settle my stomach did not. You see where this is going. At least I managed to mostly catch the mess in my jacket, which I washed and wrung out in a sink in the lav by the animal pens.

The two rides I liked the most that time were, 1. Swing seats on long chains hanging from a carousel that lifted up and smoothly spun around, and 2. Seats in a ring around a tower. The ring rose up sixty feet, /dropped/, free-fell for about a second and braked to a smooth stop. It felt like you feel sometimes when you’re falling asleep– the moment of weightlessness as your brain decouples from your body muscles and you start to dream. Sometimes it’s a sharp jerk and wakes you up, but most of the time it’s bliss.

When I was a kid, all rides were desirable and perfect, even the ones no parent with a brain in their head would let their kids go on. Now, meh. Every once in awhile you see a video where a clearly superior-model mother or father holds a small child out in front of them on an upside-down chair or in a basket, facing a teevee playing a point-of-view flight or roller-coaster, and they tip it and twist it and wiggle it to correspond with the action, and the child is /fascinated, off its head with joy, steering the craft/. In /Hearts In Atlantis/, the little boy and girl are on a Ferris wheel, they have their first kiss, and the boy repeats what he heard earlier as he realizes its significance: “That’s the kiss against which every other in our lives will be measured.” “You are so weird,” the girl says, smiling. The roller-coaster ride in the upside-down chair in the little child’s mother’s lap, from last week, is like that.