Hot Saturday! Cold Sunday. Yard work in both cases. The usual futility of putting down seed and dirt.

I made the best possible hamburger. I watched a serial and the first episode of a new season of a show I enjoy. I grew to like the bourbon I had criticized a few weeks ago. A package from Amazon arrived. I fixed a doorknob,  but failed to fix a faucet. Met a fellow who's going to stain the fence, if the price is right; waited for a landscaper who did not show up. Cleaned out the shed - well, got all the pots out, so Wife could plant. Everything looks better than it did 48 hours ago, but it already feels like we're behind. Plant more! Strew seeds! Dig! Rake! You've less than 72 hours before the window slams shut!

Oh, and I lubricated a window. 

There's a certain amount of mean fun in studying the NFT game. The "digital art" you can buy. The fool-and-his-etherium maxim is in full effect, and the quality of the "art" shows that it is not, after all, a matter of taste. These things are objectively bad.  

		The pitches are all the same, and they all speak the strange slightly-off English. The one that popped up today was "PirateGirls."
		Who wouldn’t pay money for these?
		And they’re so rare! Only five thousand. Here’s what I mean about the English: “ An NFT collection of 5,000 unique, designed by a woman.”
		All the boxes are ticked: a mention of the high holy blockchain, and an insistence on community.
		You can be part of something special! Member-only VIP access in a chatroom in the Metaverse! Anyone with anything in their lives that has the faintest resemblance to actual community would find this ridiculous, so you get the sense that the target audience - you know, the marks - are socially isolated.
		Check out what’s coming up soon: This one’s socially conscious.
		Moonkys. The price is 0,02 (sic) etc, which is $50 at the time of writing. “Gas” is the transaction fee.
		The price is 0,02 (sic) etc, which is $50 at the time of writing. “Gas” is the transaction fee. It's endearing.
		The concepts are just thrown together, like a random sentence generator.
		Oh where's my credit card
		"The largest FNT foodie community in the Metaverse!" 4 followers
		This one has a big backstory. Honeycoin seems to be an African crypto / payment / wallet / whatever thing. "Frens" is "Friends," of course, but more special in that internet way that says "you're part of this community because you understand this idiosyncratic spelling."
		There's a link to a high-school-English level essay about the flowers getting together in the Metaverse to vote on everything. Community, you see.
		Then there’s this junk. Says me, anyway. I guess it was a trailblazer and was very important in some way. A grown man is literally shaking over this historic moment
		Always that bleepity-bleep face.
		That’s a very special NFT. Really!

Says a site devoted to the history of the Anonymice Extended Universe:

Ironically, during the minting process, some of the burned mice actually had very rare traits. A meme quickly arose focusing on Anonymice #7767, a rare astro mouse that was sacrificed in the burn process.

Meaningless, meretricious, low-effort randomized crap for the credulous. My feed will be full of ten more today. THE MINT IS LIVE.

When isn’t he?

This time the Falcon is engaged to an annoying, screeching Texas belle, and her appearance makes one glad for the entry’s scant running time.

It starts with a plane crash:

That's the high point, excitement-wise, in the whole movie. And it's the start.

But . . . it’s empty!

Anyway, an industrialist is missing on the plane. Everyone else, who cares.

One paper seems aimed at people with a familiarity with the Titans of Industry:

Another headline says “Record Set in Flight of Airship,” which seems to counterbalance things nicely.

Everyone was kidnapped in the middle of the flight, of course. Parachutes at gunpoint and all that. Since there is a beautiful woman involved, the Shadow - I’m sorry, Bulldog St. Falcon - finds himself drawn into a mystery. He is also engaged to a loud, tedious Texas gal. He has been engaged before. It never means anything. He just walks around being suave, picking up women by the dozen, then giving them the arched wry eyebrows when they catch him with another man.

The only thing that interests me is what these things say about the times - culture, clothing, conventions, etc. Well, here’s what they did for fun in the 40s.

Nowadays half the people would sue. And because they would sue, the venue wouldn’t do it.

Oh: the obligatory beautiful women who may or may not have had good careers after this programmer:

It’s her! Elaine Shepard, aka the author of . . . well.

Stage and screen actress who began in films as a heroine of the Republic serial "Darkest Africa". After her acting career wound down, she became a freelance journalist and writer, best known for her Vietnam War coverage, which became the basis for her 1967 book "The Doom Pussy", the first book on Vietnam to chronicle aerial combat.

The smart, nervy, intense one:

Jean Brooks.

Criminey:

Her clipped delivery and intense, forceful acting style made her a promising bet for stardom, but RKO lost interest in her by mid-'44 and her roles got gradually smaller until she was dropped in 1946. She and Brooks divorced (his later studio biographies omitted her name as one of his ex-wives). For many years she was listed as a "Lost Player" championed in several magazine articles by writer Doug McClelland. She was eventually located in San Francisco, where she had moved after her film career petered out, and was employed as a classified ad solicitor on the "San Francisco Examiner" newspaper. She had married a printer named Thomas Leddy. Her death at the Kaiser Hospital in Richmond, California, in 1963 of complications resulting from cirrhosis marked a sad ending for a stylish and talented performer who didn't get the breaks she deserved, both personally and professionally.

Dang. Will we see her again in a Falcon? It’s possible. A lot of these actors cycled between the various programmers.

Now some matchbooks - four this week, since I'm closing out the Liquor section for 2022.