Welcome to the working week. Hope you're all replentished. I worked a good deal on this and that, and got my affairs in order. No particular reason, other than one should get your life backed up and sorted, and these things should be updated and checked once in a while. And as long as we're at it, let's make sure all the portable batteries are topped off! Steady, my pounding heart. Hey, maybe I'd better reposition the wifi nodes to maximize converage? Nah, I'm beat as it is, better take a nap.

I'm not a man given to murderous rages, but lately I have found myself overcome with a red mist that makes me feel as if I could stride into a battle like Conan, swinging my broad accent in one hand and a spiked ball with the other and leave behind a trail of grue and woe. It has to do with my dishwasher.

The lower basket no longer fits on the rails. When you push it into the depths of the dishwasher, it falls off. Why? It's possible that the basket has changed shape, and contracted over the years. It seems unlikely. Whatever the reason, the act of falling off the rail while laden with dishes means I must crouch and hoist it up and shove it back into place, all the dishes clattering together, and it fills me with purple rage the origin of which it may take years of therapy to untangle. It's possible that I have displaced any number of emotions and put them in a little box in my brain called "dishwasher reactions". Or it's the crashing sound that sets me off. Whatever it is, I used to be surprised at the primal fury I bring to the simple act of getting a dishwasher basket back on track. Now I expect it.

Was it the wheels? One or two didn’t turn freely. I administered a jot of lubricant; they spun as merrily as new pinwheels. It was not that. Some googling informed me that I was not alone in this problem, but of course no matter what small strange and unique problem you may have, there’s someone else who had it too, and asked about it on Reddit four years ago. The general consensus: you need wider wheels. Some people said that Bosch had offered to send them gratis, if you called.

So I finally called, and got a very nice customer service rep. We hit it off right away. I was in full soothing “I’m a reasonable man” voice, because why wouldn’t you want to start off kindly. She had me read off the looooong serial number for the dishwasher, then read it back with words for every letter, noting “L as in Lileks.”

I asked her if they trained the customer service reps to do that whenever possible, and she laughed and said no, she thought it would be funny.

She says could indeed send me four wide wheels, and she would look up the price now . . .

I said you know, this was not my fault, it was a common problem and I’ll bet you’ve heard it before, I’ve read a few posts in which the customer was not charged for the wheels. Also, I have eight wheels, and I really don’t want to pay eighty dollars for small plastic wheels for a ten-year-old dishwasher.

She paused and said she understood, and could give me four for free, but not eight.

“I am happy to meet you halfway,” I said with good cheer, and that was that. They’re en route. So hurrah. I will not be filled with cruel fury over the matter ever again, because I know a solution is nigh.

Good thing I didn’t murder anyone, I guess.

The next day I put the lower basket back, and not only did it fall off the track, it spat two wheels, which skidded off under the kitchen island. I did not care. I know that the situation will be solved soon. It can do what it wants.

Then it was time to see if the ice maker problem had been solved. Just as people complain about the Bosch basket on Reddit, so do they complain about the ice maker on the Samsung fridges. They are prone to seizing up. I mentioned this before a few months ago: if you don't use enough ice, it keeps doing the Sorceror's Apprentice routine until it's so full the augur cannot convey them down the chute. Then the back of the unit freezes and everything is solid.

You can, if you wish, push the CONTROL LOCK and XX button simultaneously until one blinks, and then cycle through until you see dF, which starts the defrost cycle. It will beep for thirty minutes, after which nothing has changed. Repeat four times. Nothing has changed. Sigh. Turn off the fridge at the circuit box, wait 12 hours, hope.

I gave the ice container a yank. It did not budge. I yanked it again. There was no budging.

Anger: rising

Quick, check the box with all the displaced fury, the one formerly filled by dishwasher anger, anything left

Oh good lots

I TEAR OUT THE ICE BUCKET WITH THE HORRIBLE CRY OF A MAN WHO HAS ABANDONED REASON AND TASTES THE BLOOD OF MADNESS

It came out. So we have ice again!

The trademarks of a 100 years ago is our theme this year. Apparently it took a while to approve them, because Mr. Sexton et al had been waiting for two years for this:

"Diamond" really isn't the word you want to come to mind when it comes to toilet paper, is it?

Today we linger . . .

Where are we? It’s obvious!

Really, it is.

		A fascinating building.

One might say this movie was the result of Dragnet and the realistic procedural cop genre it introduced . . . except that I’m pretty sure it was already in production when Dragnet had its first season.

It’s about some beat cops, not the fedora-clad detectives. It starts like you’d expect Dragnet to start, with shots of the radio dispatch room. I swear we’ve seen it a dozen times.

They just loved to show this room. One thinks it might have been larger.

At one point the cops pick up a kid and take him home, just to get him away from a bad crowd. The kid’s already pretty hard.

That would be Billy Gray, who went on to Father Knows Best, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as the sequel, The Day the Earth Tried to Maintain the Pose but Moved Slightly, before quitting acting and becoming an inventor and car racer. He invented, according to his imdb bio, the F-1 Guitar pick. He is 87 today.

I'm cutting out a lot of stuff I'd written while watching, because it's all about the movie's tonal shift. Romance to cop drama to music numbers to gangland rubout movie. The real interest is what we do here: the inadvertant documentary.

Grayson’s: a department store chain. Scant info online. I mean, nothing, really, except hits for another building that’s gone residential.

This should be easy:

That would be the Bradbury on the left, because that was the Cozy on the right.

Hard to believe it's the same location:

It gets serious near the end. All in all, a solid B - and probably everyone who went to see it left thinking “that wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour and a half, not at all.”

That will do. Matchbooks and a free column at the Substack. Or you can get five a week for $5 a month. Why wouldn't you?