A note on our banner art: I will be returning to photos and/or old advertising in 2025. I've gone to AI for fun because it does odd things, the limitations of the medium are illustrative of the tech, a test for the human eye, a strange synthetic dream world. Also, I ran out of old advertising art. And I was repeating myself over and over with the photos.

Someone had a mild gripe about this elsewhere, so I thought I'd address his concerns. Shared, no doubt, by many!

On the other hand, you can hear those buzzing lights, can't you?

I was at the store listening to a presentation about something New and Improved at the paper - sorry sorry, not supposed to call it that anymore. Perhaps I should call it the incorporeal legacy branded entity, or ILBE. The glowing presence on your phone that was once a big thick journal replete with ads great and small, a commercial ecosystem that communicated a sense of community without trying, simply by giving your eye so many small things to skitter over, so many products, so many people working here and there.

PANTS

YOU SHOULD GET A COUPLE OF PAIR

This was typical. And no one accused it of destroying people’s attention spans. So many disconnected things, all a-jumble! Oh, we could figure it out.

You may not need either of these today, and they may not even register as you glance at the page. But over time, page after page, day after day, you get the sense of all these names that run the businesses in your town.

We’re much better off now, googling for fast answers. I get that. But it wasn’t so hard back then. Trust me.

It’s hard to convince people of this, but lots of ads, and I mean lots of ads, are good. The reason people hate ads on the internet is because they are Big, and they are Stupid. For the most part. I go to a website and I have to dismiss a large ad for a refrigerator? It’s like going to get the newspaper on the stoop and your fridge jumps out and blocks your way. Imagine having to stare at a newspaper ad for Golden Guernsey Milk for five seconds before you can read a story. You would come to hate Golden Guernsey Milk.

Anyway, I was listening to the presentation when I got to the cashier, and I had my volume low on my earbuds so I could observe the basics of human interaction. Usually with this clerk it’s just how are you, weather, long day, I hear that, receipt? But today she started to go off on her kids, whom she loves, but they were not stepping up and doing their part around the house, and she tries to tell them she is tired, Mom is drained, and they don’t help.

Do I turn off my headphones and engage in a conversation about how they need to learn to clean up, because it’ll be a skill they need on their own, and risk missing some important part about which I will be quizzed later? WELL OF COURSE

I take out my phone to temporarily turn down the volume, and discover to my horror that the camera is on.

How long, I don’t know, and I had in the depths of my pocket - but even so, it must have looked as though some thick black writhing fog was enveloping me.

Which, in a sense, I guess it was, mentally speaking.

Some of the time. Not all. Yesterday was nice; today, the air leaked out, but that’s inevitable.

Went to vote in the primary, like a good citizen of our fair state, with its high participation in elections. Remember, that’s what matters! Not who you vote for, but whether or not everyone votes. We have a 97% voting record! Yes, but you all voted for Tsar Adolf Ho Chi Madero. But we voted!

Two election judges were dismayed about the column ending. I don’t know if there were more; didn’t poll the room. But I wanted to take a video and show it to my executioner: I walked into a room in a church basement on a Wednesday afternoon and the first two people were sad and mad about the column.

Which, by the way, is here. Last one. Free link.

Daughter loved it, which made me happy. Very happy. She liked the last two a lot, and took the time to say so.

So do I just . . . stop writing columns? I do not. I have been seized by the Substack Delusion. I will be writing a short twice-weekly "humorous" column on Substack for a small fee. I have a goal, and when it’s met - if it’s met - I’ll sever myself from

Will this affect the Bleat? Not at all.

Why not move the entire Bleat over to Substack? Because some of you don’t want to pay, and I get that. I don’t want to throw everyone overboard. I have more control over the look-and-feel of my site here, for good or ill, and it seems like a needless disruption. This is for the cultural stuff with a pointed message, the really discursive wanderings, the old TV discoveries, the random stuff packaged in a daily form.

This they can't take out of my hands. Sounds terribly dramatic, I know, but I've had enough.

It’s 1971.

Kill, Welfare cut! Kill! Kill!

What’s all the hubbub, Bub?

Oh, just goin’ off the gold standard, bro

The wikipedia page on this event is titled "The Nixon Shock."

Inflation, at the time, was under six percent.

In case anyone gave one (1) tinker’s damn for the opinion of the Red mouthpiece:

		Markets liked it! The Dow was up 33 points the day after, the biggest daily rise in its history.

Perhaps a lot people heard "Bretton Woods" for the first time, only to know it had been abandoned.

You’ve heard of the Spruce Goose? Check out the . ..

It would end up as . . . the COSMIC MUFFIN.

The full story is here.

In 1949, Hughes decided to part with the Stratoliner, so he gave it a remodel. He invested $400,000 ($8,319,683 in today's money) into further customizing it and turning it into “The Flying Penthouse.” It lived up to its name: with a redesign by Raymond Loewy and creative input by actress Rita Hayworth, it now featured a bar and a generously-sized lounge, bunk beds in the rear, and a very spacious bathroom. Houston millionaire Glenn McCarthy bought it on a lease, offering it for celebrity flights to and from Shamrock Hotel under the moniker The Shamrock. When McCarthy defaulted on payments, Hughes got the plane back.

Women’s page news:

		When the author herself describes the book in such terms, you know you don't have a work meant to last for the ages.

The totality of her Wikipedia entry:

Lolah Burford (18 March 1931, Dallas, Texas –2002) was an American novelist from Texas. She published six novels, and was married to poet William Burford. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1951.

Well, it’s better than most get.

Papers keen to get that youth market would have a with-it page that captured the NOW SCENE. In this example: God rock!

It was never as big as they suggested it was. I don’t know if this was meant to reassure the Mom and Dad crowd, but it didn’t work.

The "Rip Off" column examines the views of a journalist named Micheal Droslin, who seems to have embraced the idea of a secret code in the Bible that predicted the future.

1971 was nuts.

That'll do. Next for you: 1954 gas. Or is it 1955?