(G)Nat’s school had a caucus today. They had to vote for a Republican and a Democrat. (G)Nat voted for Hillary Clinton and McClain.

McClain? John? From “Die Hard”? Really. Why?

“Because he won’t raise taxes and he was captured by the enemy for eight years, and he’s from Arizona. And he’s a nice guy.”

I didn’t have the heart.

Another cloudy day. Man, I could use one of these:

That's an ad from a 1937 Scientific American. Look successful - be successful! Let increased melanin levels lead people to make assumptions about your character and financial status! Turn the magic status-beam on your spouse and child as well. Brown them all! Brown the hell out of all of 'em! Make your toddler look like Rockefeller Spawn! Sleep with the device pointed at your secret regions! Peel off your burned skin and tape it to a picture of Jean Harlow and put it under your bed and try not to think about it while you're at work! Then send it Dale Carnegie! Change your life with the HEALTH RAY!

A few days ago a story noted that 25% of Britons regarded Winston Churchill as fictional. I’d guess a few people responding to the survey were having sport with the pollster. No doubt a few were products of modern educational ideas, which probably regard Churchill with faint horror. History must be made relevant to restless youth, after all, and if people eventually come to believe that Wnstn Chrchl – texting having taken the place of newspeak, with the difference that it was voluntarily adapted – fought the Nazis in World War One in 1898, what’s the harm? We’re all friends now anyway.

But it reminded me of this, from an Esquire “Dubious Achievements Awards” compendium in 1984. Talking about Twiggy. In 1967.  Blithering idiot.

That’s 22 years after the end of the war. That’s like a modern American model expressing ignorance about the nature of Ronald Reagan’s post-movie career. This either means she was unusually stupid, or – more likely – there was a fatal conflation of her own dim brain, poor schooling, and a general cultural drift towards collective amnesia. There are some people who enjoy rummaging through the past, as I noted the other day, and those who are constantly angered by it. By its failings and idiocies and all the things it should have done but didn’t do. The world would be so much better if they had just done their part, dammit. I get the occasional piece of mail from someone who believes my appreciation for certain graphic styles and cultural attitudes of the Fifties is unsupportable given the apartheid of the South. These people will go their deathbed unhappy about everything.

In case you’re wondering what yesterday’s cryptic “end of Bleats” announcement meant: I am moving to Movable Type, which means a real true blog with comments, permanent links, tags, RSS feeds, etc. All the cool stuff the cool kids have. If only I could figure it out.

Oh, I have it installed and running; that was fun. I’m not that stupid. But I cannot accept the default templates. They must be customized. Everything that can be customized must be customized. So I redesigned one of the templates, uploaded it, and shazam X3, as Gomer would say: it worked. I created a new entry. It overrode everything I’d done. I have no fargin’ idea how to get around this. I know what you’re saying: son, you’re trying to customize a template that does not deal with graphic elements in a way you’re used to. Correct. Why don’t you use the Stylecatcher plugin? You do have it installed, don’t you? Correct. Well, then, do what the help page suggests. It suggests I use the option in the menu. There is no “Select a Design using StyleCatcher” anywhere in any menu anywhere anytime anyhow.

I have succeeded in loading Style Contest templates into my style browser, and have applied them, and been informed I have successfully applied them and republished the site, and they do not show up. In fact it managed to destroy the page entirely, putting all the columns at the bottom of the page. Time to rip it up and start from scratch.

Don’t email me until I send up flares. I need to figure this out myself.

New Ad in the Archive, right here. See you at buzz.mn!