Friday again? I’m not alarmed or displeased, even though Friday is now my second favorite day of the week. But I feel that galloping sense of acceleration - you know, the whole Time’s Winged Chariot and all that. Still cracks me up that Marvell was what, 25 when he wrote that? I suppose when people were regularly carried off by abscessed teeth at age 40, 25 was the new 50. You wonder how much society’s various ills were caused by general dental discomfort. Everyone was in a bad mood because everyone had a toothache all the time, and hence quickly impatient with long policy discussions. I want to go home and drink and rub clove oil on my gums. You want to invade France, fine, put me down as a yes.

Or maybe not; I subscribe to a Twitter feed that consists of nothing but entries from Samuel Pepys - ol’ Sammy Peeps, as his was known in the Mob - and there’s noting about teeth. Mostly it’s about wind. I know he had stones, and suffered a difficult operation to have them removed, but a lot of his diary entries consists of breaking wind, constraining wind, becoming fatigued after a bout of wind, and so on. I exaggerate only slightly. If you ran across a diary entry by a Restoration-era politician who said he had spent the afternoon voyding Wind with Greate Effort and had retired to his chambers afterwards, you’d think, well, that was the times. They didn’t get our diseases, and they probably ate rotten mutton morning noon and night, so yes, there’d be some episodes where a man might be laid low by fundamental utterances of a profound & unceasing fashion.

Wouldn’t work today as an excuse to leave work early. Sorry, boss, but I just blew enough methane to inflate the Hindenburg and I am exhausted.

Yeah, you look a little deflated. Go home.

Anyway, by acceleration, I mean there are only so many Fridays left before there aren’t any. For ten years it was piano lessons, and then pizza! And for the last few it’s been pick-her-up-from-work, and then pizza! The wonderful finality to the end of the week, the signposts for the slow roll through the years. But, well, Braaazeeeeeel! In about three months I’m pretty sure my mood on Friday will be Wile E. Coyote at the exact second he realizes he’s run 40 yards off the cliff, and is a half-second away from the descent.

Oh God is it going to be cold all next week, my wife asked tonight, and I said yes. Thinking: good. I’ve never wanted this short month to be longer.

But! A great day! I did most of a Diner, ep 14. I handed in a column, spent many hours looking through old newspapers for my new history feature in the paper, Minnesota Moments. I get paid to look through old newspapers; ergo; any complaints you detect from this quarter should be ignored.

Birch the Dog just came over, sat down, and gently released some wind. It’s like he reads my mind. Or blog!

No, one more thing about today. (Thursday. I am not writing the entirely of Friday in advance.) I had an interview about 1950s food ads, based on - well, you know. After all these years. It never stops - and that’s perfectly fine with me, as long as everyone recognizes that I am not an expert, but a guy on the internet who has made some assumptions based on magazines he scanned.

This, I think, is a fair point to insist upon.

It’s obvious that the Gallery of Regrettable Food is my Citizen Kane, except that my subsequent work wasn’t hacked up or shelved, and I didn’t retreat to a sybaritic life where my physical corpus seemed to swell in direct proportion to the diminution of my ability to manifest my will through my work, but otherwise, yeah. Also, Kane didn’t go back and add to Kane with yearly updates.

The interview took place right before I had to take Daughter to the Orthodontist, so she was out of school, lounging on the sofa while Dad walked around and waxed eloquent about glistening gelatin. Afterwards we had a conversation about how I invented Vintage on the Internet.

Really. You invented it. You invented Vintage.

No, of course not - but I was there early. There was later what we call parallel development; as the tools to capture these things became more common, everyone started mining the past. But in my day <coot voice> I had to take pictures with a camcorder and use a video-capture board - NuBus, it was, new tech - and then add the drop shadow manually by copying the image, giving it a Gaussian blur with a 30-pixel radius, then copying the original on top of that. We didn’t have filters, and by Gum we did okay.

It’s a bit of a running joke about me inventing Vintage on the Internet.

Also, possibly kinda sorta in a way, it’s true. Which leads me to my new announcement: starting in March, this site will convert entirely to Pinterest, so there’s just small pictures devoid of context!

Kidding. If that happens, you’ll know the domain lapsed and Chinese hackers took it over. Which won’t happen, because I have auto-renew, and that’ll be good at least a year after I’m worm food. Whenever that is. On good days, like today, I hear the Winged Chariot, and grin: at best, I can beat that. At my worst, I can draw alongside, and wink at the horses.

Here’s some more Twitter complaints about a powerful rocket inaugurating a new era of space transportation and reducing our reliance on the Russians. It’s exactly what you can expect when someone does not conform 100% to the instructions of other people who know better, care more, and would like the power to rearrange other people’s property and priorities.

   
 

 

It’s not enough that he’s making solar panels - which are always yay! because sustainability, unless the exact price point isn’t known in advance.

Whatever money Jonas Salk spent was misdirected, because there was someone ill-shod and hungry a stone’s throw from his lab.

   

It was the car that really set some people off. They thought the whole thing was about the car.

 

Yes, it's the return of Lance Lawson! All new strips! New in the sense that they're frm 1948, but weren't posted before.

I don't quite know what he means. Well, grapple with the solution in the comments, and Lord knows if I'll remember to post the answer.

 

 

More of the Mystery Cues from the Mystery Composer. (Unless someone figured it out and posted it in comments last month.) If you're a student of old movies, #3 ought to nail it for good.

   
 
   
     

As I said before, I post these because they've never been collected, strung together, made into suites, or mentioned at all when his work's discussed. Not as far as I know, anyway.

Bonus: name the two voices in #3.

Instead of the swank old sounds of Goodwill albums, this year we're going to share bad 1960s pop music. The second- and third-tier tunes.

In this case, it's some sententious, pretentious attempt to make "Eve of Destruction" with the Patridge Family:

   

"Red White and Blue is the color of a flag of a nation that's going insane"

 
   

Pray more, if you can! If you can!

No, sorry, prayed out.

No, more! Your country's not what it can be! PRAY!!!!!

 
 
   
It's time for Helen Reed to tell you to give your kids more cupcakes.
 
   

Quite the pot-purry there, but that's Friday. More Sears 1976 catalog, if you're in the mood. Thanks for the patronage, and we'll meet back here Monday morn.

 

 
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