Okay, 2025's better now. We had a worrisome patch, but good news today for a variety of souces. Now, having parted the curtain an inch, I close it anew and point in another direction!

Why we don't live in a simulation: I don't believe that the program would bother with things like "man drops shotgun, and 97 years later someone remembers what the built-in cabinets looked like in an apartment he occupied thirty-nine years ago."

I was looking through a 1928 newspaper to research the opening of a movie theater, and my eyes alit on the Lost and Found section. This is enigmatic, no?

Except I think I know. I lived at the intersection of Irving and the Mall.

Turn right and move forward. You’ll be here:

Our journeys to small towns and the ghostly remnants of transportation networks should tell you what this was. RY has to mean Railway, so C. M. St.P & P is the name, and of COURSE that’s Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific. AKA the Milwaukee Road.

I heard it roar past my apartment at night while I was writing. CLANG CLANG CLANG and then the great shuddering rush of metal. KangKANG. KangKANG. KangKANG.

What’s interesting is that people in 1928 were expected to know what the CMStP&P Ry was. And obviously they did.

What led to a shotgun being left at this location, we cannot know. Unless this simulation has been running a long time, and we can check the logs. Unless the simulation started running a few decades ago, and everything before 2000 is made up. All the newspapers, photographs, records, memories, and so on. I didn't really exist in that apartment in 1986, but my program says I did. I went to the apartment's website and looked through the pictures, remembering things I'd forgotten, noting the exact pattern on the built-in glass-fronted cabinets. I'd forgotten those. When I saw the story it added the memory of the train, and when I looked at the pictures it added memories of the cabinets. I may think I had the memories before, but I didn't.

The program would have to do that a billion times a second on the fly all the time, no?

In other Lost and Found news: We know who you are. Better come across.

HOW do you lose that:

You can still get some.

You know, now that I think about it, this would qualify as a Peregrination, if I continued down the path of meandering exploration. So I won't.

And now, some meandering exploration.

So! What's the journey that takes us from this image . . .       . . . to this one?

An ad I clipped because ol’ Grandma is what, 55? Women of that era entered Matron Mode quickly, at least in the ads. Here she remonstrates her vital, modern daughter for having time for fun. She's carefree because of Duncan Hine's assistance. But who was Duncan Hines? You probably know, but just in case: he was a restaurant reviewer who wrote guidebooks for travelers. Hines worked as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printer, and he had eaten many meals on the road across the United States by 1935 when he was 55. At this time, there was no American interstate highway system and only a few chain restaurants, except in large populated areas. Therefore, travelers depended on local restaurants. Hines and his wife Florence began assembling a list for friends of several hundred good restaurants around the country. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hines wrote the newspaper food column Adventures in Good Eating at Home, which appeared in newspapers across the US three times a week on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. The column featured restaurant recipes adapted for home cooks that he had collected during his nationwide travels. This newspaper article makes it sound as if his eatery-guide was a result of a carefree fellow, not a weary and hungry road warrior: The name was so widely known that people took out ads to point out that they weren’t in the guide, but should be: When we google her name, we find that she dissolved the partnership of the cafeteria in March of 1947, was noted in a society piece about a dog show in 1947, and . . . But there’s no obituary. Googling around some more, I see that she had three kids - a son named Irby, and two daughters: Mary and Edmonia Orendorf. There's a moniker. It was her grandmother’s name, it seems; she had married . . . Mexico Orendorf. There's another great name. Anyway, here’s the space where the cafeteria was, according to the old ads. 207 Broad Street. It’s a sad block of old emporiums, long gone. Not to tread on the Main Street feature, but let's go down the block and WHAT THE HELL Computer, enhance . . . Ah. Well, that’s interesting. 1945, two years before Mrs. Perrin’s coil-shuffling: The Y built another building, and it’s abandoned now. It closed in 2002, “the victim of poor management, neglected and dangerous dilapidated.”