The Fustering mostly ended today, and all has smoothed out.
Someday. Someday I’ll tell the tale.
Left the office a bit early to take delivery of this beaut:
Toro toro toro! A local company, although the engine is a B&S. Four stroke and AWD, baby. I still wonder if this was wise - it’s going to be a hell of a job to mow the hill, even with AWD - but then I remember the money I’m saving. It takes ethanol-free gas, which I can buy in cans at the hardware store. Saturday I fire her up. Hearty breakfast, then out to tame the wild veldt.
I’m actually looking forward to it. The only question is how I get it in the backyard. There’s no direct path. The old team figured it out somehow, so I guess I can figure out a way, but it’ll involve some lifting. And that’s why we work out!
Say, why is your forearm so sore, and your shoulders plagued in the morning by a persistent ache?
Because I work out! See, if you work out, you know why you hurt. If you don’t, you blame it on age or a mattress that has the firmness of a fresh blancmange, or bad posture, or sitting too long. Hoist metal every day, and there’s a easy reason.
I am having a carpal flare, though, and I’m trying to recall what session of uninterrupted mousing may have caused it. I know I was so bothered this weekend that I did the entire set of motels for 2025, which meant cutting and rotating and resizing and touching-up 96 cards, so that may have been it. There’s a lot of tapping and clicking involved in finding the places on Google Street View, too.
I suppose it’s the virtual equivalent of aching feet. In the future when it’s all done by headsets, you’ll have sore eye muscles from all the glancing and blinking.
Speaking of our bright digital future:
The Internet has judged this ad and found it wanting. I agree. It’s bad. But it’s not just “cliched set-up, intentionally lame characters, saturated colors, deadpan tagline,” and all the other plagues of the industry. It hits people on a different level. There’s almost an instinctive revulsion.
1. The depiction of the destruction of useful things hits you wrong, because you sense smug triumphalism.
2. It’s a lie, and we know it’s a lie; the iPad cannot simulate the tactile experience of playing a piano, or the way the brush feels when it stirs thick paint. And please don’t tell me it can replace a camera that has a proper lens.
3. All of these colorful objects and hand-made devices, destroyed, reduced, compacted, and turned into . . . an inscrutable dark slab. There’s really no sense that the slab contains the essence of the things that were described, only a simulacrum.
I’m glad the reaction is strong, and amused how many people pointed out that the ad works better if you run it backwards. At the end all these instruments and tools and colors and toys are conjured out of the device - and then perhaps they vanish, and we see the slab, and someone picks it up and slips it in a backpack.
More and more we see these devices - and I have one, and I like it - as something that consumes us more than we “consume content,” a mental version of the Chinese Finger Trap.
We know the experience of tapping a picture of a keyboard to get a note: it isn’t real. We know the experience of striking an actual key, the way it yields but has its own presence that reacts to dynamics, the way the note comes from a soundboard of wood hewn from a tree instead of a tiny speaker. Painters know how committing a brush to a canvas is commitment you may or may not fulfill, but how noodling on glass on one of an infinite set of virtual canvases is underscored by the knowledge that nothing need be finished, and anything can be abandoned without cost.
It’s like an ad that shows the press crushing the family Fido, and ends with an iPad that shows a video of the dog.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
Yes, it's Brillo!
Wikipedia:
Brillo is a trade name for a scouring pad, used for cleaning dishes, and made from steel wool impregnated with soap.The concept was patented in 1913, at a time when aluminium pots and pans were replacing cast iron in the kitchen; the new cookware blackened easily. The company's website states the name Brillo is from the Latin word for “bright", although no such word exists in Latin.
Not surprising. Although:
In Spanish the word brillo means the noun "shine"; however, German, Italian, French, and English do have words for "shine" or "bright" beginning with brill- deriving from Latin words for beryl.
Interesting: I always associated that word with an English female name from a certain era.
This product has been around my entire life, and it seems as if everyone had some Brillo about. Not a big firm, though:
The company merged with Purex Industries in 1962. The Dial Corporation acquired Purex Industries in 1985. Church and Dwight acquired the Brillo business from Dial in 1997.
In 2010, Armaly Brands of Walled Lake, Michigan, primarily a manufacturer of sponges, purchased the Brillo business from Church & Dwight. At that time there were about 50 employees, down from a high of about 150 in the 1990s.
Walled Lake? Yes. Wikipedia starts . . .
The Walled Lake Amusement Park operated from 1929 to 1968.
In September 2022, a QAnon adherent and local resident shot multiple members of his family before being killed by police.
Er
On September 11 in Walled Lake, Michigan, a QAnon adherent named Igor Lanis shot his wife, one of his two daughters and the family dog following a heated argument. The wife and dog were killed and the daughter was hospitalized. Officers from the Oakland County Sheriff's Office and Walled Lake Police Department shot and killed Lanis after he opened fire on them.
The other daughter, Rebecca Lanis, was out of the house at the time and was not harmed. She told reporters that her father had once been kind but had become rude and unsociable after becoming obsessed with several QAnon-related conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election. Lanis posted about her experience to r/QAnonCasualties shortly after the shooting.
I tried to follow the link, but it went to a wikipedia page about QAnon in general. I saw this:
In early 2019, Twitter removed accounts suspected of being connected to the Russian Internet Research Agency that had disseminated a high volume of tweets related to No. QAnon that also used the #WWG1WGA slogan.
And that is? Where we go one, we go all
Ah. QAnon solidarity slogan. Eventually I found the story . . . And the Reddit post.
Better, perhaps, to think about the Amusement Park.
Where perhaps they cleaned things with Brillo, never thinking that the stuff would one day be made in their town.
|
We continue with Grand Island, which fills up three folders. Was there a reason, or was I just snap-happy?
