'Tis, I guess. The season. Took a tour downtown to find the Top Five Christmas Trees accessible by skyway, this being the best use of my abilities. You know, I think I will start writing a manifesto about the state of contemporary newspapers . . .
. . . and that instantly makes people think I'm going to do something bad, right? Delusional accounts of perceived wrongs and grandiose solutions. Nothing good comes from that.
Now, if you called it an editorial, that would be different.
The shed door was finally replaced, at ruinous expense. It has become the New Gazebo of the backyard. The first door rotted and fell off the hinges. The second door, custom-made because the door frame is a non-standard size, wicked up moisture from the bottom, rotted, and separated from the jamb. The third door was made by an incompetent handyman who declined payment because, in his words, “I failed you.” And indeed he was correct: the door separated from the hinges in a week, because he had custom-cut a hollow-core door and the screws had less than half an inch of purchase. Got the latest handyman through ACE, so I assume some competency. I’m going to get my money’s worth out of that door. I’m going to go out back several times a day just to open and shut it, thinking “now there’s a door.”
Okay, enough of this. Time to stop writing pointless things and go pointlessly work out.
LATER How do you know you live among decent folk? This:
Either everyone did this on their own, or some concerned citizen sorted it out. Probably the former. At some point two different lanes formed - the small cart and the big one. Maybe there were no more than two carts in either lane. Everyone who came along afterwards had to make a decision. And they all made the right one. You'll note there's a red carts, though - that's from Traders Joe on the other side of the shopping center. Someone willfully put the cart in the wrong corral, requiring someone to make that transitional angled move. That could have signaled that chaos was permitted, but order reasserted itself through communual action.
Faith in humanity restored! Well, no. It's funny- I have little faith in humanity at a certain level, but faith in humanity in a surpassing fashion in the most general abstract sense: the universe is better with us than without us, because even if there is no one else in this vast cosmos, and it will end in meaningless heat death with no record of our accomplishments remaining, we will have given everything meaning simply by observing it, and finding it a source of thing an unconscious universe can never understand: beauty and wonder. We are the ghosts in the machine.
I was reading this article about the universe’s speed of expansion, and how there were some things that couldn’t be described by present theories. Time for new ones!
“And there are other ideas, like funny dark matter properties, exotic particles, changing electron mass, or primordial magnetic fields that may do the trick. Theorists have license to get pretty creative.”
As I may have said before, I don’t buy the dark matter theory. You may take that for what it's worth, based on your estimation of my scientific expertise. (I have none.) If you have to posit the existence of something to explain something else, and you cannot prove its existence except by saying “well, what else could it be?” Then no, sorry, you’re making stuff up.
But now I had to wonder if there was something they were actually calling funny dark matter. It would not surprise me. "Well funny dark matter explains the missing mass of the universe. Perhaps it's better to call it 'dark comedy.' Also, there's string theory, and there's also silly string theory."
We will learn new things when the Extremely Large Telescope comes online. Quite the apparatus. Could use a better name, though. I mean, what's next? The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope?
By the way, are we going through a mass UFO hallucination in New Jersey and elsewhere, with people reporting planes and ordinary drones as part of the unexplained drone phenom, or is something else happening? Have the last two years been a dribs 'n' drabs drip-drip modified limited hangout revelation that UFOs are here but we're all, like, hey, it's a mystery! Bizarre, these things, huh? Whaddya gonna do. Anyway, I got stuff to do. Text me if they land and start vaporizing people.
Speaking of which: watched Alien: Romulus. Not a review, although if I had to say, I'd put it at the third position. AMinor .
The soundtrack borrows extensively from its predecessors, and leans on some Brucknerian pastiche. It recycles that flute motif, which contributed to the unnerving mood of the opening of the first movie. I remember how it felt: a simple two-note motif, pitiless and indifferent, played against a deep bass growl. I'm lucky to have seen it when it first came out, when no one knew anything. Trust me: it was terrifying from the opening seconds. It was just raw dread.
The first few minutes of the latest iteration are a collection of duplicated moments from the first two movies: the retro graphics on the terminals, the wake-up sound for the computers. It’s a distinctive sound that sounds like a clipped-off synthetic voice. TICA TACKA CHICKA BICKA
Which works better?
There’s the red laser cutting through stuff, as in the opening of Aliens. A cargo bay with hanging chains. Then there’s a shake-and-bake planet with rain and analogue switches. Claustrophobic trips through ducts. Very efficient world-building, assisted by the fact that we know this world already. It all feels like a reset that denies the existence of everything that followed Aliens, as if it happened a year or two after the original.
If you think about it for a moment, it irritates intensely, because it had better earn this - and the fact that the cast is a bunch of irritable youths who are HARD AND STRONK BALD WOMAN, a guy who’s the closest to maturity as you’ll get and hence I suspect will die first, BiPOC android, weak female, our heroine, Rey Skywalker, some lippy Brit. Lots of swearing, of course. I don’t recall much swearing in the original Alien.
After the first OH NO THINGS HAVE GONE SOUTH sequence it’s apparent this is basically The Force Awakens of Alien movies, and that’s not necessarily bad. It’s been a while. It’s okay to do a reboot-homage. In the end I didn't find any of it as compelling as Alien or Aliens, because the heroine was 12 and weighed 87 pounds and had sufficient upper-body strength to climb a rope into a moving spaceship. Ripley was not weak, but she was not required to be physically strong, and she was a grown-up.
There are only two Alien movies, still, but after this I'd say, well, okay, two and a half.
It’s 1956.
We’re going through StarTribune newspaper ads.
Waxing the floors occupied such a large portion of the housewife’s industry. No one waxes the floors anymore, do they? Do they even sell this stuff?
What’s noteworthy is the use of copy right above the ad in the style of the paper, which makes it look like news.
It was written by “Mary Ann Williams,” who may or may not have existed, although something nags at me and says she was the product “reporter” on the paper who wrote a lot of sponsored copy.
Tucked in the corner of the page: another ad.
Why? It certainly does nail BEACON to your attention for a moment, until you turn the page. But it lingers after that.
Formulas 1 - 70 didn’t do anything, but when he hit on 71, why, he knew he would change the world:
Appetite suppressant. “Contains no harmful drugs or chemicals.” Well, that’s nice to know.
There’s more to say about this, but that'll be a Here to There.
Space Command!
That name was still used for my parents’ remote control, when they got a big console downstairs in the Room of Recliners. Note: according to the text, the Space Command is the Space Commander.
“You don’t have to shut off long annoying commercials, while answering the phone, unless you want to.”
Unlike today's battery-powered remotes, the Space Command was purely mechanical: pushing a button caused a tiny hammer inside the control to hit an aluminum rod that produced an ultrasonic sound. The TV interpreted the various clicks as commands to turn the TV on or off, mute the sound, turn the volume up or down or change the channel. There was enough noise from pressing each button that folks began calling the controller a “clicker."
As long as we’re on TVs, let us take this opportunity to remind ourselves of the existence of the only set made by a mad man:
I love the ads.
I’m partial to this one as well:
Or, if you like:
It was election season, with ads galore. Great for the paper’s bottom line.
In 1956, Mikan was the Republican candidate for the United States Congress in Minnesota's 3rd congressional district. He challenged incumbent Representative Roy Wier in a closely fought race that featured a high voter turnout. Despite the reelection of incumbent Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the inexperienced Mikan lost by a close margin of 52% to 48%. Wier received 127,356 votes to Mikan's 117,716.
Returning to the legal profession, Mikan was frustrated after hoping for an influx of work. For six months, Mikan did not get any assignments at all, leaving him in financial difficulties that forced him to cash in on his life insurance.
I guess I’m burying the lede, as they say. He has a wikipedia entry because he was a famous professional basketball player.
It is possible they could be less appetizing, I suppose.
Interesting: the address comes back to the Hopkins VFW, where many of the postcard shows have been held.
