At turns bright and dour, this day. The sole contribution of the window-replacement project was a visit from the electrical inspector, but he was followed by the sprinkler blowout guy - always the final sign that the growing season is done, and the heads will pop up no more until the verdant days return - and the fellow who dropped off my new snowblower. For years I have paid someone to snow-blow the long walk, but the rates went up, and last year I ended up shoveling the driveway a number of times because they couldn’t get here before Wife went off to work. Why? Because they had other clients, of course. This means more work for me, but it means I won’t have to shovel.

I hate shoveling. I also hated paying someone else to do it all, because they’d come all bundled up, freezing, while I regarded them from the warmth inside, Laird of the Manor.

Look what I found on the boulevard on the morning dog walk:

It's a reminder that houses built a hundred years ago had central vacuuming units.

"Honey, did you remember to go downstairs and oil the vacuum cleaner?" is not a common spousal remark.

Yes, they still make central vacs. And what do they call them?

The Arco Wand.

And some people still have them working.

I can’t be the only person who finds NdGT insufferable. I know he has a genial twinkly persona, but his tweets are all about puncturing what he assumes to be your assumptions, and we all know that means he just makes an ass out of U and Mptions, as I allus say. (This is the Yosemite Sam pronunciation.)

This was particularly galling.

Ha ha we’re so insignificant. It’s the old “beam me up Scotty there’s no intelligent life here” bit of conspicuous misanthropy: "admire me, for I regard my own species as regrettable, even though I am a particularly remarkable example.”

Of course you can’t speculate what what cause another species to explore, but it seems plausible that they would be driven by curiosity. I know there are a million sci-fi books that posit aliens driven by religious mania, the desire to cleanse or convert the galaxy. Or you have your environmental activists, like Thanos. (Who was stupid.)

If they were curious, they might be curious about environments different than their own, and what life might have arisen under those conditions. (Although I tend to think that any space-faring civilization would not have come from an aqueous culture, as it’ would seem difficult to create industrial processes in that medium, but who knows.) They might be curious about those planets that resembled theirs, inasmuch as they occupied a particular location in their solar system that had conditions optimal for life. And again, they might not be life as we know it, but I don’t think there’s a whole lotta evolvin’ goin’ on ice planets at the end of a solar system, or molten hellholes that hug the star in a tight orbit.

So they come across this planet on their long journeys, as part of a general survey of What’s Out There, and this planethas orbital devices.

Two possible reactions:

1. Oh, another of those

Or:

2. Oh, that’s odd

If it’s the first, and they’re curious - remember, they’re out in space for a reason - then it’s a matter of figuring out where we are in the technological scale. Unless you posit that creatures roaming the galaxy are utterly uninterested in the scope and variety of exocivilizations, of course, but even the most sociopathic, narcissistic human would be intrigued if he was walking through the jungle and found a launcher for a Saturn V rocket.

If it’s the second, then they would look closer, and see artificial complexity, which - if they are curious - would raise questions. If it’s unusual, it would need to be categorized and compared to other examples; if it’s the first anomaly they’d seen, it would certainly merit study, because otherwise what the hell are they doing out here?

Which, I know, is an anthropomorphic characterization. And NdGT would be keen to let us know that’s a sign of vanity. As if we set the standards for the universe. But he would be the first person to castigate humans who were uninterested in what alien civilizations were like. If humans developed FTL engines, found alien civilizations that were slightly less advanced than ours, and shrugged - looks like Idaho down there dude, let’s move on - he’d be appalled.

He’d also be the first to think he should be called if Aliens did arrive, because perhaps he could intercede on our behalf and explain our deficiencies - with the appropriate scientific indulgence and condescension, of course.

It would be amusing to hear the Aliens struggle to express the reason they have stopped: our bimodal communication system. We have a verbal system and a non-verbal aural system, and also a combination of the two. They have found no other culture that speaks and also has a non-verbal aural system. But sometimes the speaking combines with the non-verbal system.

We'd say you mean . . . music? You don’t have music?

Turns out no one they’ve encountered has music.

Tl;dr: NDT, attempting to show the transcendence of his intellect, is quite the dull fellow.

It’s 1961. A derailment almost misses a house.

I checked on the map; the street looks the same today, if leafier.

		We’ve had ads from this company before on this site. A long-lived retailer. The guilty man was natty, but you’d expect that.

The backstory:

In 1952 John W. Thomas & Co. opened a fur shop in St. Paul, located at 63 East Sixth Street. Its manager reported to Benjamin Dranow, who was at that time managing director for all fur operations for John W. Thomas & Co. Dranow was also a long-time associate of and financial advisor to Teamsters president James R. (Jimmy) Hoffa.

In 1956 Dranow acquired all of the outstanding stock of the firm. Financial irregularities involving Dranow are outlined in a 1958 report to John W. Thomas & Co. creditors, and Dranow was eventually convicted of mail fraud (1961) and of tax evasion/income tax fraud (1962) and sentenced to prison. The company was in bankruptcy by 1959, when Stanley D. Smith, president of Gift House Stamps, was brought in as president to try to resuscitate it. Smith was apparently successful. It is unclear what became of John W. Thomas & Co., but the firm last appears in the 1964/1965 Minneapolis city directory.

Somehow I think there might be something else to write about, unless this is your tenth piece

And ignore those Eisler Jibes! That’s Gerhardt Eisler, a German who spent time in the US as a communist agitator and spy. “Antics.”

Ha ha, what are they doing? That’s so strange.Huey has the pupil-less dark eyes of a servant of a Lovecraftian god

I wonder if they had wooden boards around baseball games in 1961, or whether the cliche had long outlived the real thing. Perhaps the most incompetently designed cartoon I’ve ever seen:

Crisps barmy odds and sods it's the dogs bollocks eton mess upper class, we'll be 'avin less of that Kate and Will bovver boots biscuits, tosser Union Oh, that it would, and that it did.

It was so beautiful.It’s French! Ooh-la-la! It will have the how you say, boobies, no?

No. But one of these does. Can you guess which?

Not the one you might think.

One of the first of the Nudies to gain wide-spread showing in the U.S., although still relegated mostly to the grind houses or, in some situations, long-time schlock distributor Kroger Babb "four-walled" it, by renting the theatre for a flat fee and taking all of the proceeds including, according to one exhibitor, the theatre rental fees.

This film purports to be "A Picturization of Rudyard Kipling's Immortal Poem---The Ladies." It starts with retired soldier and world-traveler Tommy Atkins in a pine lodge enjoying his pipe and 4-fingers of Scotch, and there to provide other creature comforts is the voluptuous Cameo Girl, while Tommy opens a Kipling volume that he allows is an account of his own experience with women around the world.

That'll do; enjoy the update, and I'll see you around.