I have some travel queued up. It’s all weddings. I look forward to them, but weddings are not vacations. Right? For men especially. We’re remoras on the Girl Ship. On the other hand, most vacations rarely find you at 11 PM in some nice destination reception area taking another glass off champagne off the passing tray and feeling all warm and familial and happy, waiting for the inevitable dance tune to produce mass karaoke to Neil Diamond songs.

So it’s Sweet Caroline, then what? Bum bum bum? Dum dum dum? Pum Pum Pum? I wonder if there’s guidance on the matter. Could Google. Would get an AI overview, probably. Could ask Gemini. I did. It said “they usually sing ‘good times never seemed so good,’ which isn’t part of the song but is fun to sing.”

Whereupon I asked don’t they sing “bum bum bum,” and Gemini said “you’re right, people usually sing bum bum bum, it’s a fun part of the song where everyone joins in.”

So not only was it wrong the first time - that lyric is in fact in the song - it change its, er, tune when I made my second inquiry. It does this a lot. Says something wrong with breezy confidence and then agrees with my correction.

I was talking with Wife about AI tonight, and how I really don’t want doctors to rely on it, and she noted that it was helpful for finding some legal citations, as long as you had the link to the primary source. True. I suppose. But: we were all trained by Google to accept the first link as the best, right? Then the first link became an ad, and we transferred our trust to the ad. Then the first link because the AI summary, which has a vestige of the remaining amount of trust we used to put in the first link.

Anyway. Would you trust your travel plans to AI? Reservations, shuttles, hotels, the rest? I’m sure there are sites that already do it. Seamless series of pulses flashing through fiber and scattering through CPUs, databases contacted and consulted, plans made, and Ding! It only took three seconds, but the website has a fake progress bar or clock to make you think it’s actually working. We’re not at the point where we trust instantaneousness for complex things, but give it a year.

I was using a site the other day that had an hourglass to indicate the passage of time. Makes you wonder what objects from today will be recognizable icons in 50 years, like the way we use the floppy disk icon to save, or the camera icon to take pictures. I’m not sure there will be many choices, because everything is either incorporeal, or something on a phone. Maybe a suitcase. Maybe a pencil. Maybe a clock. It would be odd to wake up in 50 years and look at the interface, and the icons are “gun, cricket, firecracker, coffee cup.”

Texting makes language into vowel-free grunts, interfaces reduce us to stabbing pictograms. Both reduce the range of thought and expression. The Eloi were probably illiterate.

We're going to be doing a lot of Dragnet for a while, and not because it was a fantastic great wonderful paradigm-establishing rule-breaking TV show. It was not. But it was a product of the old overculture, asserting itself in the middle of societal fragmentation and breakdown, and provides a great view of Square America. Then there's the introduction. Every episode began as promotional video for the epitome of American urban progress, Los Angeles. This is the city. As if Joe Friday was your go-to guy for lessons on the burgeoning theater community.

Then there's the look of the sets. If Wes Anderson had directed an episode, and had a double-vision problem that kept him from framing things to his liking:

In the opening moments, Friday describes how the town is changing. There are new restaurants on Sunset Strip! No you're kidding.

Alfie's. Took a while, but I found it.

Friday enthuses over the bold new plans to eliminate the old bygone vestiges of the city for a bright new downtown of tall towers. And here I slammed PAUSE.

It's the Castle, one of the last houses to be hauled away from Bunker Hill.

Another shot of the interiors, and the ham-fisted blocking. You get an idea of the decor of the day, or at least what they thought the rest of the country would think looked like the apartment of a modern young single woman.

Now and then Webb casts from outside his usual stable, and that's where you see a lot of people getting an early break.

It's Angel Hopkins!

Next week: the narration, and the music of LA's biggest PR blitz, brought to you by the greasy hand that stamped MARK VII.

It's 1935.

You can have reproduced sheen for this low-low price!

Sixty bucks was a lot of hay back then, an for a rug design that was "as perfeclty reproduced as possible"? I do love how they assume you're making cocktails for the gang, because why wouldn't you.

Eastern had a gorgeous building. Still stands.

On the other end of the price spectrum:

It’s either four cents or two! Also, one cent.

ONE. CENT.

Great ad, hand-rendered. Wonder whose work it was.

		Mmmm-mmmm, Marmola.

FTC:

Decrying the rise of “anti-fat fraud,” one Commissioner observed in a 1926 editorial that “Fabulous sums are spent on these fakes since the female skeleton became the fashion.” He also noted the difficulty of prosecuting weight loss fly-by-nighters: “They are usually fleet and cunning crooks that engage in the business. When located, they fold their tents and silently vanish, and commence business again in some new locality, under some new name.”

Against that backdrop came Marmola, a purported weight loss miracle made of a little desiccated thyroid and a lot of laxatives. The campaign used the trifecta still seen in the marketing of diet products: claims of scientific substantiation, testimonials from supposedly satisfied customers, and endorsements by Hollywood celebrities – in this case, Constance Talmadge, star of films like Virtuous Vamp, The Moonstone of Fez, and Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots.

Thanks to a court case, we have a list of its ingredients.

1 grain Extract Bladderwrack
½ grain Extract Phytolacca
¼ grain Extract Cascara Sagrada
Rx. 87 Spec.
½ grain Desiccated Thyroid
16/1000 min. Oleoresin Ginger
Po. Saccharum special
3 grains Calcium Carbonate Precipitated
1/24 min. Methyl Salicylate
1/24 min. Oil Anise
1/24 min. Oil Sassafras
Talc Brown
Ivory Black
Aqua for Extracts
Po. Burnt Umber
Red Oxide of Iron
Syrupus Simplex
Lubricating Solution
Aqua for Granulating
Liquid Petroleum colorless.

Possibly worked by making you heave after every meal.

		An absolutely gorgeous ad, pure 30s. Well, a little 20s in there. Note: SHOES HAVE BEEN RE-GROUPED.

From the great Bullock's store, a Hosiery horoscope that's probably more accurate than actual horoscopes:

		"I was born under the sign of Cork, with Straw Rising."

Hmm.

"They satisfy" was the long-running slogan for these nails. I'm trying to parse the meaning here. Did she smoke them all, and this indicates that they satisfy? It would seem to argue the contrary.

See you at Sloppy Joe's Ernie

		A tiny ad, but it got the point across. This is an LA paper, so you're going to have to travel a long ways to go a long ways.

The Grace Line had service between Seattle and New York, which is really quite a voyage.

That will do. More of Eddie's Friends today, and Tuesday Joe Ohio for the paying crowd over at the Substack. Now five times a week! Cheap! Help me build up a cushion for the inevitable defenestration. Thanks for your visit, and I'll see you tomorrow.