A housecleaning note: I've been alerted that there is a tiresome troll in the comments. I don't know what drives people to put on a mask and taunt people who are utterly indifferent to his remarks, but that's been the nature of this thing since the Usenet. So, one warning. Any more of this and it's the ban - not because people can't handle disagreement, or want to live in a bubble, but for the reason airplanes deny boarding to people who have appalling hygeine.
I bought Gas Station Simulator. It’s fun. It took half an hour to turn on the lights, move the piles of sand from the gas pump islands, order gas, and service two customers. I have this dread that I’m going to be interrupted doing the necessary clean-up and restocking because there will always be someone at the pump, waiting for a fill. There’s no self-serve.
Since this is a game, you have to fill the Bobcat with gas before you can move the sand. This means you have to find a jerry can. Then you fill it up. A full tank will not be sufficient for all the sand, so you have to go fill up the can again. We call this entertainment.
It gets one thing wrong. It doesn’t have a pneumatic ding-rope. Not yet, anyway. Cars appear, and you get a notification on the screen. There should be the tell-tale ding-ding. Perhaps that’s in the DLC! I can buy a pneumatic ding-rope for $1.00 USD. That's how these games go - you get hooked, you get invested, and you hand over actual money for incorporeal objects.
That's ridiculous, you say. It's not actual money. It's just fiat currency, numbers on a screen. You're not driving to a store and giving someone a silver dollar for a virtual ding-rop. Yes, you pedant, that is correct. You know what I mean.
I wonder if guys who worked in gas stations eventually developed a finely-tuned sense of the car and its occupant without looking. The dings! are always close together, but if you drive slowly, they're spaced farther apart - but it would be barely perceptable. Unless you had become preternaturally attuned to the variance. If you heard one ding, but not a second, things were wrong. There had to be a second ding.
I wonder if there's a cheap horror movie where a guy's working a station late at night, and hears one ding. I wonder if it would have any meaning in an age of self-serv, with the ding-rope was meant to alert the attendent inside who was working on a car in a bay, and hence didn't see the car come in.
I wonder if I have any photos of the ding-rope at Dad's station.
Well, of course.
That shed on the right side used to hold vending machines, and I gather they didn't work out. At one point there was an early microwave oven, apparently exposed to the elements, and that thing was sheilded like a nuclear reactor. It made horrible sandwiches into hot horrible sandwiches. Vinyl cheese and cardboard meat. You'd be better off heading inside for a Slim Jim or a Zagnut.
I just looked at the street view to see if there's anything visible from space, and no, of course not. But I was happy to note that the station has 140 reviews and they're really good. Most recent:
"Best fuel prices, clean store and restrooms."
That would've made my dad happy to know.
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.
How do we get from here . . .
. . . to there?
I'm missing something. There was an newspaper story that made me write "Culture for the new medium" as an idea I'd fill in later. I did not fill it in. But it was probably something like this:
The growth of radio was intended to stimulate and elevate the finer elements in the culture. Why, a simple tradesman, at the end of his long day, could enjoy some Schoenberg, just as if he was in the auditorium himself.
One of the earlier radio conductors was this fellow, and I'm sure he was mentioned in the clipping I neglected to file correctly:
Before Al Hirt, there was . . .
Alfred Hertz was the second conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, and replaced Henry Hadley, in 1915, when the orchestra was just four years old. Hertz remained with the symphony until his farewell performance April 15, 1930.
During that period he built a professional organization, and the orchestra began to record for Victor’s prestigious Red Seal label. The symphony recorded Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain for Victor during the late 1920s.
Hertz was no stranger to San Francisco, and was here during the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, conducting the orchestra for Enrico Caruso’s Metropolitan Opera tour.
Hertz later described the earthquake as sounding “Something comparable to the mezzo forte roll on a cymbal or gong.”
From his 1942 obit:
His bushy beard and twinkling eyes were known to music lovers in a score of cities where he had filled long engagements or conducted symphonies and operas on tours. Crippled since a childhood attack of infantile paralysis, he always walked with a cane, but briskly and cheerfully.
Dance of the Automatons:
About that last one: it’s from Coppelia, by Delibes. It’s about a robot.
Dr. Coppélius is a doctor who has made a life-size dancing doll. It is so lifelike that Franz, a village youth, becomes infatuated with it and sets aside his heart's true desire, Swanhilda. She shows him his folly by dressing as the doll, pretending to make it come to life and ultimately saving him from an untimely end at the hands of the inventor.
The Valse: my mother loved this one, and played it on the piano frequently.
I did a google search for the sheet music I saw sitting on the piano all those years . . . and found it.
One more thing:
The Star Trek: Picard season one finale episodes, "Et in Arcadio Ego, Part I" and "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part II" feature a planet named Coppelius, the adoptive homeworld of a group of highly evolved synthetic lifeforms akin to the lifelike dolls fashioned in Coppélia.
And that’s how we got from one to the other.
Its wiki starts: "Plainview began when Z. T. Maxwell and Edwin Lowden Lowe established a post office in March 18, 1887. The town received its name due to the vast treeless plain surrounding it."
I imagine they had a good reason for establishing a post office. Or perhaps they just stopped because the horses were tired, and said "You know, this would be a nice place to get a letter."
Twenty-thousand souls. Will it be a charming quiet slumbering hamlet, or some place that looks scoured and hollow?
This looks like an AI drawing, completely with garbled not-English text:
An old store, obviously. I love the second-floor office, or lookout, or whatever it was. Absolutely severe and unadorned.
It makes me sad, too. For all sorts of reasons.
Uh oh.
You get the feeling that the whole town had a going out of business sale about 30 years ago. Moving along . . .
Stores like this indicate there was prosperity once, right? Those nice big display windows on the side, full of . . . hats? Shoes?
The project is the fifth Hilton Hotel built by Conrad Hilton in the United States, and opened in 1929. The premiere hotel for its day—it was located by a Greyhound bus station—featured a store where travelers could purchase knick-knacks and souvenirs, a ballroom for events, and a private club.
The hotel continued to be open until the 1970s and then sat abandoned for more than 30 years.
More at the link, including pictures.
Again, I’m not sure what AI would have done differently.
What's in there? There has to be something in there.
The rare chameleon building, which responds to the cars parked in front
Hotel or office?
I’m going with the latter.
It looks mothballed, or . . .
. . . or home to something secretive the windows cannot reveal.
This modern motel must have been the reason I visited this town.
I don't know what "plaza" is supposed to connote here. And "Inn" seems a bit much. You're a motel. Embrace it.
The Cinematreasures page says it has a lot of windows for a movie theater, and they have a point.
Perhaps that was an upstairs lobby? Or offices.
I think we have the answer to the question posed at the beginning - charming slumbering hamlet, or scoured and hollow? - unless I was being really selective when I took the screen grabs/
It looks as if the windows were always bricked up thus.
No doubt about its purpose, of course, but a bit of a mystery: why the black patch on the cornice?
Here’s the bushel under which you’re not supposed to hide your light
Rather underwhelming courthouse. Seems ashamed to admit it has a dome.
“We came in $1500 under budget, boss. You want the money back, or you want some pointless ornamentation?”
I think I’m done.
I love the lettering for PLAINVIEW.
Could it all come back? Sure. Will it? Your answer to that says a lot about how you see the country today. How, and why.
Its wiki starts: "Plainview began when Z. T. Maxwell and Edwin Lowden Lowe established a post office in March 18, 1887. The town received its name due to the vast treeless plain surrounding it." 
