Last night I wrote:

Storm rolling in, and it’s supposed to be bad. Or good, depending on how you feel about such things; I like them, although I am a bit more worried about tree branches taking out portions of the house, and I don’t like to lose electricity. Well, maybe that’s not the right word. It’s not lost. It’s absent. On Friday we were supposed to have an absent-power-type situation here for four hours while a tree was removed, and it ended up as six and a half - just long enough to make the ice cream slump and re-firm with lots of delicious ice crystals inside. All the ice cream, too. Three scrounds, useless. Once you have the slightest hint of ice in your, well, ice cream, you wince aforehand before you even bite. And yet you continue, because it is ice cream.

Well, it did rain. Furious, constant, punitive. There has to be a German word for that sort of storm.

Today was sharp and fun; I went to Dinkytown to shoot video for - get this - a video on Dinkytown. It’s good. I like it. I laid down all the video and stills tonight, and will do the VO tomorrow, whatever that ends up being; if you start with a narrative and fit the pictures to the story, then it’s word-driven. If you edit the pictures first then it has a different flow. Daughter went with, and I told her tales of the old places. Tomorrow it’s finished, the piece is finished, and another is due the moment I turn around. And another after that. Yes, I know, it’s called work, something that is a natural consequence of having a job. No complaints.

Just feeling a bit . . . twitchy.

I am going through old photos to cull and winnow for the online backup, as noted a few weeks ago. Came across something that was demolished a few years ago, and let us just say its loss was not particularly lamented.

Can you guess what it was? Put it this way: it’s fun to say there. And by the time this building was taken, its mandate no longer involved the second or third name in its four initials. There was no doubt where the entrance was, I’ll give them that. And if it seemed like a piece of industrial equipment designed to stamp down and turn anything to bone-flecked mush? Bonus!

The most pathetic thing about the picture: those two plants, standing like Buckingham Palace guards, doing their best to bring a happy note to the maw. Gone now, and the replacement - as with so many things from the 70s - is so much better.

As long as I’m tossing out odds and ends this week (and believe me, that’s what you’re going to get if you’re lucky) here’s a screen grab of a place next to an old motel, taken while “researching” the motel site. Looks like it got a haircut.

That’s a term everyone likes to sling around in financial contexts these days, isn’t it? Haircut. It sounds so droll; you can imagine a sharp banker in a fine suit cocking an eyebrow and sighing about someone having to take a haircut, when the truth of the matter is someone dragged to a stump and made to put his head in the blood of the last guy they brought up on stage. Hold still, it’ll be easier for you. The correct metaphor would probably be “have several layers of skin removed by rubbing a hot brick all over the body,” but it would seem as if there’s something unfortunate going on.

Why, everyone has a haircut, eventually.

I don’t go on fark.com anymore. I don’t know how this happened, but it does; you drift away from a site because the feeling that it doesn’t provide what you want grows into indifference. Not anger or distaste, just indifference. Somehow the mix of voices you sense comprise the sitedrifts into something else. I got this in my Twitter feed:

Sums up a certain set of patrons: either trolling, or lazy. Smirky certainties based on you know, things everyone knows. Or it’s lazy trolling. What possible interest would you have in the conversation that follows? Debunking is obvious, and you don’t need to read it. You don’t need to read anyone who agrees with it. There will be a Futurama picture of a frozen head in a jar. Forty comments. Waste of time.

All the cruel kids went to 4chan; reddit sopped up the people who think highly of themselves and their various expertise that sets them apart. So much of the internet seems to be a transcript of the comments made by the spectators at a gladiatorial match.

The second batch includes the fridge for those who favor a strong central government . . .

. . and one for all those women who want old-timey motor vehicles in the kitchen.

The Federal, I'll bet they moved a few of those.

Let us examine the demongraphic assumptions of the Munson Greeting kiosk. I include this because I give high priority to anything that looks like a store display; these never lasted. Always ended up on the scrapheap, bent and rusty. Just like the company itself, it seems - aside from the ads, the Google is silent on its history or fate.

I'll bet this fell down now and then, or got crooked:

I wonder if those were abstract versions of real cards; I hope so. "Draw small indistinct pictures that look like actual cards, but have no recognizable forms aside from vague floral shapes" would be a nightmare assignment.

Let's meet the Young Wife of Today:

Munson didn't employ the finest poets, one may presume. On to Old Wives, who must have been, like 50 or something:

Maybe she could be downright elderly. From a 1945 radio show:

The daughter. You know, I'm starting to see a family resemblance.

These glasses. My grandpa had those glasses. Growing up I thought they were old-person glasses. But now I have some. And they're hip again.

Send Mom a card on Dad's birthday! Let him know he's special.

More pools for the summer season. Doughboy brand this time.

Still around, too. The name? Well:

During World War I, Domain Industries, through its packaging machinery operation, perfected rubber sealing and won the Army contract to seal K-rations. K-rations were a “meal in a can” carried by United States soldiers during battle. During World War I, United States soldiers were known as Doughboys.

In 1947, Domain Industries formally named their packaging machinery operation the Doughboy Plastics Division.

Here's 42 seconds of pro-Doughboy information, recorded in a bathroom:

Let's look at some individual products. SMOKY AND BULGY

A free-squirting waterspout, eh. Usually they discourage that sort of stuff in a small pool.

Two hundred pounds? Good Lord, was Sidney Greenstreet coming over for a dip? There'd be no room for anything else but a cup of water.

SPLASHER the happy, mutated frog:

Added paddling fun. Not just paddling fun, but paddling fun with an adjunct noise companent.

What is it? It's . . .

FORTI-PLYED.

Summer is a time for wearing less clothing and perhaps exposing your midsection, so:

Ann believes dieting should be fun! She gives you a choice! She doesn't ask you to count calories! She gives you snacks! She takes your money! She doesn't give a damn if it works! No, I don't know that. But I also don't think she exists; I think she's one of the Betty-Crocker ladies. Who's on the cover . . . no one knows.

That's it, and again: sorry! I warned you about this week. But there's new Frank, with all his genius toys. See you around.