Yes, that's the theme of the Bleat banners: all is opening up.
A day off. Sitting in the gazebo, listening to the leaf blowers up the street, dog dozing on the couch, mild breeze. Birds. All very peaceable, for those who think Minneapolis is some strife-wracked nightmare dystopia. Went to the store; supplies back to where they were before This, although ground beef is still high.
Put it this way: no one seems to be bracing for anything, and that’s nice.
It’s been a while since we weren’t bracing.
Oh how rough we’ve had here at the Jasperwood Compound, I know, with our uninterrupted food and drink and internet and entertainment and the like, with a few passing days of unpleasantness. Can’t complain, shouldn’t, mustn’t, but there’s the accumulated disorientation that unmoors you, and gives everything a distinct sense of falseness. Normalcy feels like a veneer, still sticky to the touch. Plague fears are now off the table - not in fact, perhaps, but certainly in spirit, and the ritual masks seem like a convention inherited whose origins we knew once but came to forget. Of course, no, we all know, we all remember - but the sun is shining, the stores are stocked again, you begin to assume that the place you want to visit will be open, and the imperatives of summer seem to have peeled off the clammy caul of March and April, he said, dramatically.
But it’s not normal, because there is a ravening spirit still at work. Diminished, now wrecking its way through the culture, erasing careers and TV shows and movies - a sudden gust of something that has been whistling through the cracks for years, and is overdue for rebuking. I don’t know what form that would take, or if it will happen.
Anyway. Two days off, including tomorrow. Who-hoo, stay up late, watch movies! Rented “Ad Astra” and was bored dead with remarkable speed, even though it looked like a movie I’d love, and showed a world I’d like to visit. But it was a boring world, and the narrator didn’t seem to find it very interesting, either. Could be my fault.
Anything else? Somehow at dinner we got talking about robots and the Three Laws of Robotics . . . how did that come up? Can't remember. At the end of the conversation Rotaria looked a bit confused, and said "This is a thing, they voted on?"
No, no, it's just in a story.
"Ah," she said, and waved it away. It just struck me as hilarious - so, these are not UN laws? Not from the government? Okay, fine. Not that's she's uninterested - she's going into engineering in college, like her dad.
How long, you might ask, are you hosting an exchange student? Don't they usually go home by now? Yes, but there's been this thing called DISEASE, and she wasn't going back to hard-hit Barthelona, as it's actually pronounced, and her parents thought she'd be safer here.
You can imagine their reaction to the news.
She's with us until early next month, and it'll be a great loss when she's gone. But at least Daughter need not live in the basement, where she's been camped like a mole since school evaporated in March.
Remember March?
Welcome to a new pit you haven't seen before.
It's downtown. The building on the background is the new hospital expansion; the building in the front is the new Wells Fargo branch. The pit will produce . . . THE LARKING.
Some context: this is what the block was. Parking lot and drive-in bank.
You may now commence the "who's going to live there LOL Minneapolis is over" but no, that's not the case.
Hate to break it to some people, but it's not that simple.
From my vast collection of things with almost no monetary value whatsover, I bring you this week's entry.
1964, it seems - an anniversary stamp. A momentous event. It's a . . .
Blériot XI monoplane. With fewer than 30 aircraft made before World War 1 still preserved around the world, this aircraft would be significant for its rarity alone. But this Blériot, together its French pilot, Maurice Guillaux, also holds an important place in Australian aviation history, pioneering civil aviation in this country by carrying the first airmail from Melbourne to Sydney in July 1914.
Leo J. Fowler tells us what life's like after you've been in the jug.
It's recreated. The confessions were supposedly verbatim, but the reading is recreated. Interested?
Here you go.
Oh, how I love this schlock.
He was mostly popular in England, and I don't know how much impact he had stateside. We had our own; we had plenty.
As elevator / shopping music, though, it's perfect. This has a touch of the Seventies to it. Wikipedia: "He continued to record occasionally until the 1990s, from the 1970s primarily on the Phase 4 label.[ He also developed business interests in publishing and recorded for Starborne Productions, a company supplying "canned music" for use by easy listening radio stations and others."
Somehow that doesn't surprise you at all, does it?
1950 I wonder if they'd still be friends today.
And we're done, except for the additions to the Chain Store Age magazine repository. That sounds fancier than it is. Anyway, thanks for the visits this weekend - have yourself a fine weekend, and let's expect a better Monday, and better days after that.
