Ah, Friday. It’ll be a lonely weekend - Daughter is at Camp, Wife and Exchange Student are heading up to Duluth, and I’m minding the dog. But don’t worry. I’ve plans.

1. I am going to eat a pizza. Not the entire pizza, but heck yeah one half of it, The dog will get all the pepperoni from the other half. This will make him happy for several seconds and will be forgotten and replaced with disappointment when no more is forthcoming. But he will smell a rabbit and his internal dialogue will be reset.

2. I will finish editing the New York and DC footage for the movie I will give to Emma, our Exchange Student. I had to fade the dialogue in a scene at the WTC because she probably doesn’t care about what I was telling Daughter, how she was a toddler smiling in the room as the horror played out on the tube. I don’t expect her to remember. I am sometimes surprised when she doesn’t remember things she used to, but the teen brain is constantly overwriting or eliminating from the file directory the early stuff - a design defect in the human mind that’s one of the great sad things about growing up. I told her that parenthood is like living with someone who goes senile and doesn’t remember things anymore, and when they get to the point where they think they’re remembering all the things that need to be recollected, their parent doesn’t remember things anymore.

There’s a bright, solid, important stretch where you have to pay attention and nail things down. It’s why I take videos. But what will become of them? The equivalent of a stereoscopic viewer card some great-grandkid finds in a drawer in their dead parent’s belongings? You can only hope that someone somewhere sometime is curious, and discovers what you left, and is grateful for the window into the past.

You expect to be forgotten. You hope to be discovered. For whatever you did. For years I’ve been scanning and organizing my mother’s photographs, and discovered a shot the other day I’d never seen. I had one picture of my dad on a horse with a rifle; here was another.

It was like a deleted scene in a favorite movie.

BTW, my dad called last night. They were short a transport driver; the oil fields had starting hiring again, and he went west for work. Doesn’t that sound absolutely American? In 2017 men still light out for the Patch, and that’s heartening. So Dad had to drive a semi to deliver some oil, and had to wrestle with the big heavy hoses to get the product out of the tank and into the ground. He likes to drive, and a man likes to be useful, but he did almost complain a bit, because the temp was in the nineties and you know, and so was he.

Some people would worry if their 91-year-old father was driving 9,000 gallons of explosive fluid, but I worry when he’s not.

 

3. I will watch an old black-and-white movie, and wish I could have been there. Either in the movie, or in the theater. Either one. Years I would have liked to have experienced: 1927, 1939, 1944, 1957. Ah, but at what age? To be 18 in 1939 is different from being 40 in 1927. How much experience would I want to bring to those dates? You think of yourself at 20, and wonder if it would be wasted on you, or if you’d bring the know-it-all enthusiasm of youth to the marvels of the day.

4. I will have ice cream, it being Friday. It’s the same brand, the same flavor: Stoneridge Chocolate Peanut Butter. It has chunks of pure peanut butter. I also have a dish on Saturday night, and when I finish, I’m sad; there will be no more ice cream for a while.

Before any of that happens:

5. I will arrange all the cords in the back of the TV, where the internet comes in. There are 12 items in need of electricity, and I intend to consolidate and cinch cables and make everything look squared away.

Even though no one ever looks.

But they will when they’re done. By God I am going to show that arrangement to everyone who comes over. No one will say “I thought you had an Apple Router; what became of that?” But if they do, oh, I’m ready.

I got Google Wifi. STOP THE PRESSES you say: you got a MESH? I got a Mesh. But why didn’t I get that other brand that everyone talks about when they talk about MESHES? Because it was much more expensive, and I wanted to toss a grenade into the home integration system. If all goes the say it’s going I will have Amazon, Google, and Apple products competing for control, and one day I will just say “Who Am I” to the air and a voice will tell me who won.

YOU ARE GOOGLE. WE ARE GOOGLE.

I am not google! I am a free man! (Bangs a desk, makes a teacup dance)

(hahahahahhahaha)

Well, it’s not Google Assistant. It’s just a Mesh. I got it because my upstairs connection had dropped to zilch, for reasons I couldn’t ascertain. I used to get fast internet in my studio, and then it just stopped being fast. Troubleshot the new additions; disconnected everything; walked around with a sniffer; no explanation, except perhaps that Scotty had transported a wall of clear lead into the walls under the assumption that I would be carrying whales to the 24th century. So I got the Mesh, and everything is good. Here’s a sign of how good these products have become:

Daughter and FFES needed to be at a friend’s house at 5:30. At 5:25 I started setting up the network.

Dad, we have to go

Hold ON, it’ll just take a moment to establish a domicile-wide invisible information network . . . okay, wait, sorry, I need to scan a QR code. Okay it has it. We’re good. Let’s go.

There was a glitch at first - it wanted my Google PW, and however many times I typed it in, it was rejected. Finally I showed it to Daughter and told her to type it. Instant success. This generation has a preternatural ability to correctly input type if required, which makes their typos and nonungrammatical wordings all the more mystifying.

Anyway, it works. Everything found everything and now I can control my wifi from my app, prioritize devices, create guest networks, and so on.

As with so many other things I've bought over the last few years: Apple should have made this. Another market they shrugged off.

6. I will have bourbon.

That'll hold me until the house fills up again.

 

 

Five more stories since the last time we took a look:

 

 

 

I don't think anyone's confused; of course it's a parking ramp. Note the way the windows lengthen, indicating . . . well, I've no idea, but it breaks up the monotony.

 

 

 

 

As noted, I'm going through the entire Gildersleeve series this year - and there's a lot. Season 5 is underway. Peak of the show's popularity and creativity.

 

   
 

Wonder if the vibraphone was discernible on the old radio sets.

   
   
   

   
 

Direction to the orchestra: "the word we're looking for is 'Yoinks.'"

   
   
   

 

   
 

Ha! Big chords of decision! Ending in Peavey's theme.

   
   
   

 

   
 

 

It's rare they blew lines. But now and then they really blewthe lines.

   
   
   

 

   
 

 

Perry throws a hammer through the Fourth Wall, which wasn't unsuual - but in this case, it made no sense. I mean, that's him.

   
   
   

 

   
 

AD: 1941, and you probably can't sleep. That's understandable. Brother, is that understandable.

   
   
   

 

From the1966, so this would belike those TV theme complations that made in the 80s to pique the nostalgia of Boomers.

It's Love Nest in the Longines Style, followed by Manhattan Serenade.

 
   
 

Love Nest was the theme for Burns & Allen; Manhattan Serenade was for the now-forgotten (sorry, fans) Easy Aces.

   
   
   

 

That'll do - thanks for stopping by this week! A few updates at the Permanent Collection, which is a look at 20th century ad art as seen through the eyes of 25th century historians. I've set it to repeat last week's, for context.

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