Those little points of light may be planets. If I remember what I saw last night on my app, the left dot is Mars, and the right dot is Jupiter, the most terrifying of all the planets. Or is it? I think it's horrifyingly enormous. Saturn's big, but the rings make it friendly. Oh excuse me Jupiter has rings, you say, and you're right, but c'mon. Faint little wannabe rings. They'll be gone some day, and Saturn will have to come up with a new personality. I'm just glad our species arose in the time when Saturn was thus adorned.
Then again, if the distance was different, they'd all be unnerving. Or would we be used to them? Silly question. At that distance there wouild never be any us in the first place.
Planets exist in deep time, millions and millions of years; here we fuss over the hours. We have Sprung Ahead.
I asked Natalie if she had any clocks to change, and she said no. Well, microwave and stove, but no clocks. Her generation may be clock-free. And here I raised her to respect things like this:
Note the brand name. Crosley. They don't make clocks anymore, or at least I can't find any on the website. It's a revived brand.
Powel Crosley Jr. (September 18, 1886 – March 28, 1961) was an American inventor, industrialist, and entrepreneur. He was also a pioneer in radio broadcasting, and owner of the Cincinnati Reds major league baseball team. In addition, Crosley's companies manufactured Crosley automobiles and radios, and operated WLW radio station. Crosley, once dubbed "The Henry Ford of Radio," was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2010 and the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2013.
The original company ceased operations in 1956. The current holder of the name and logo revived it in 1993. They make furniture, too - the logo doesn't have the electrical bolt through the letters. In 40 years it'll probably morph into a potato chip brand.
I also have this clock. I prefer analogue clocks. They sum up the hour and its place in the day. Digital clocks are nothign but a recitation of the incessant present.
A good weekend. It warmed nicely, validating my decision the other day - or night - to shovel just a path, instead of the entire damned walk. Everything melted away. I just worked on this and that, since Monday is a three-deadline day. One of the things on the to-do list was "Reinvent Self," something I jotted down last week in the trough. This one was not checked off as "done," despite my occasional musings on what that might mean. Wife suggests a new hobby. Woodworking or something. Learning Italian. Eh. That's not what I mean. I think I meant "stop doing all the things I do, because the payoff has diminished, and I've worn a rut so deep I can rest my elbows on the edge of the trough." I think I need to write a novel.
But that will take some other, more pressing duty I have decided to put off.
One of my more significant failings is doing things I shouldn’t be doing and not doing the things that I ought to do. The upside: more content. You might have noticed that I’ve been poring over Annual Reports, dropping the occasional find here in the Bleat, often in Hiatal times. I completed the first big batch (Heinz, Borden’s, Gamble, 711, and Dayton’s) this weekend. It’s about 450 pages. I have no idea when it will go up. I’m toying with just dumping it all in the Misc section and letting people gorge.
Kidding! Due to go up in, oh, 2032 or something. You will see exciting things.
1970 B. Dalton's bookstore, where all the hijackers from The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 met to discuss plans.
It's not the only site in the queue. The other day I discovered a site on pre-war 1940s ads I did during the lockdown. Forgot all about it. Five hundred pages.
Wait a minute, pre-war 1940s ads? You ask. Wasn't the whole 40s thing about the war - at least until we won? No. Took us a while, you know. The ads are often unsettling in retrospect, because you can sense what’s coming - so many ads flexing military might and strength, reassuring everyone we had this covered. So that will be coming in 2040, on the 100th anniversary. or maybe 2140 if I've uploaded myself to the Neurolink Internet Archive.
I'm sure this will be popular. You'll upload a AI version of yourself based on your social media activity or other sources, it'll copy your voice, and perform on demand. No one will think twice about accessing a site that has untold numbers of disembodied AI copies of dead people sitting inert in mainframes. You'll stumble across someone who has no visits, or maybe just one, with a comment that has an URL for making money at home.
Be assured I will not write a novel about AI.
Our Monday feature, for some reason:
The trademarks of a 100 years ago is our theme this year.
Have some Shoyu:
Mountain White Ball. Or, Mickey Mouse, when the roof fell in. As they said in that Star Trek ep.
Gee, it's a Batcheller production! Those are always swell.
Hey, gang, it’s Murder Time! Let’s swing!
Nice title cards.
We begin with a cynical shabby newspaperman who goes to a bar, and asks to see one of the girls.
Since it’s a College Picture:
Not a line you hear in most crime dramas.
The college gal:
Yeah, fresh out of high school, that one.
They go back to campus, which is a rather dreamlike place.
The bells are playing in the campanile, but then they stop, and there’s a gunshot, so everyone assumes the person playing the bells got popped.
So that’s the murder. The College Gal knows something but says she doesn’t.
You, the audience, can pay absolutely no attention to anything that follows. Go to the popcorn stand. Use the bathroom. The thing just rolls over you like fog.
I'll leave you with a sequence that consults the college's resident audiologist. I am amazed that no one’s sampled this for an electronic dance raver.
