What? Why? I'll explain in a bit.

This may be a lame week, as I believe I have a cold. Hard to tell at the moment, because it's been so long since I had one I'm not quite certain of the symptoms. Usually for me it's the throat, a tell-tale back-of-the-room scratch, like burlap wallpaper. This one seems to start in the upper nose, and could just be a reaction to dry air.

Well, it's not a bad ailment if it's eased by whiskey and honey. I've already taken my zinc, and did it on a full stomach because otherwise, you get into this horrible binary mindset: I do not want to barf I really want to barf / on the other hand I do want to barf but I do not want to barf

Anyway. I am collecting ads for the old Forum cafeteria, because there is not a repository on the Internet for the subject. They varied in style, but they were always huge, and presumably brought some nice revenue to the paper.

A reminder that modern life has been horribly hectic for a hundred years now. No time! Must go! Must flee from our hideous child!

I think having something at home is probably more time-efficient than going downtown and standing in line and ordering something.

Anyway, here's the ad in context:

There's a lot going on. Furniture, an extemporaneous speech contest. Dentists and Deceased. A closeup of that Best Speakers picture:

One name is wrong: it's Wanvig, not Wanvige. Oh, there could've been two high schoolers in Minnesota who looked like that, and a completely different one went on to found the Pacific Legal Foundation and became a substantially famous man. But I think this is the right James.

Focus in on the Deceased: all these Nordic names.

No one ever thinks "I wonder what advertisement my obit will run next to. I may be briefly considered while someone looks for a good price on a finger wave."

On a whim I looked up Malon H. Macomber. I can't tell you anything about him, alas, except where he ended up: the boneyard at Earl, Minnesota.

There's not a lot of Earl.

There never was a lot of Earl. But there's that cemetery down at the bottom. Computer, enhance:

Looks like a Russian military storage base after a few years of the Ukranian invasion. I don't know why it's more populated on the right side , with dense rows visible from space. It looks otherwise empty, but it's not. If you look at the banner image, taken from the upper left-hand corner, you see all the little stones.

None of this ads up to anything important, except for the first time in a very long time, thoughts alighted on the memory of Malon. That's all.

ACHOO

Okay, it's a cold.

I watched Close Encounters this weekend, just to remind myself of the primer we all learned for Contact. And I was reminded again of This Guy.

He's the keyboard player. For a long time I thought he was chosen because he resembled what humanity might evolve into, to match the elevated physiognomy of the aliens. (He's set apart in this image by the hue of his shirt and his unhidden eyes. It's intentional.) But I’d forgotten the scene where he first starts playing The Notes.

They’re telling him which notes to play.

You’d think they would’ve briefed him. Maybe not on the purpose, but just the notes. Who is this guy? Some keyboard player from a local Holiday Inn prog-cover band? Some guy in the Special Space Anomaly Perception Division who got tapped for the job because the boss said “who here plays keyboards” and he raised his hand? And no one clued him in about the five notes he was going to play, the five notes that would establish communication with an inhuman extra planetary species? Don't sweat it, we'll tell you when it's time. But not before!

Did they call him the night before and tell him to be on site, sharp, dressed in a shirt and tie? Or did the guy who was supposed to play the keys not show up - he was afraid, ran away in the night, or got drunk and was still useless by the afternoon?

The emphasis goes on the second syllable, but you don't know that until you're past it.

And here it is! More here. This page says it was a product of Magnavox (emphasis on first syllable, but you knew that) - so I'm wondering who Electro-Acoustic was. The Wikipedia page says the Magnavox name was assumed in 1917, in California, but the company moved in the 1930s to . . . Ft. Wayne. Maybe they bought Electro-Acoustic. Maybe it was a spin-off.

We're going to have to spend the whole month finishing up this grainy mess.

So:

Oh Good, Bill’s in this one!

Yeah, I know I don’t know who that is either. Well, last we saw, Tracy was knocked out, going up a chute into a blast furnace.

Big surprise, that. Can we get out of this dimly-lit factory so we can actually see something?

No. Jeez, this print.

So the Ghost gets THE PLANS for the super-secret flying drone, and plugs Brewster the Industrialist. Tracy pursues the Ghost. Interminable car chase shot day-for-night.

Again, there’s nothing particularly Dick-Tracy about any of this.

The Ghost decides to plant a bomb, because they have some footage from another serial that might come in handy:

That stops Tracy, for sure! Good thing he wasn’t speared by the driver’s column. Then it’s back to Dick’s HQ:

Because of course that’s where Dick Tracy would work. He has a plan: hold an emergency meeting of the Council of Industrial Plutocrats, of which there are but two left. (I have no recollection of the rest of them being culled.) One of them must be the Ghost!

Neither seems a plausible candidate.

They have to stay all night at the Ambassador Hotel while Tracy works his plan, which consists of searching the homes of the two guys left. One of them - we don’t see who - puts on his Ghost outfit and goes invisible.
Except a cop comes by outside, and the guys operating the Invisibility Machine have to turn it on. Tracy spots the Ghost and goes after him on the rooftop. Fight! Highly unlikely either of those two codgers would get the best of Dick, but this is the last scene, so . . .

And one more thing . . .

No, two more things. Free-for-everyone Substack on the matter of Christmas movies, and Matchbooks, in which we hit the 400 milestone. Thank you for your patronage, and I'll see you tomorrow.