The last good day of the year, and it was brilliant. Seventy degrees, bright, perfect for putting up the Christmas lights. And I did! But I’d bought the wrong kind, so I took them down. They were illuminated for about 37 minutes, during which I was no doubt roundly cursed by all the neighbors - that bastiche, he got a leap on us all! Except for the fellow who never takes them off the tall tree, and has only to plug them in once a year.
But that moment is filled with doubt. One year they won’t come on. Get out the ladder. Example every bulb. All 2000 of them. Or, move. I’d move.
I blame Apple for all that follows. At some point they went to USB-C, which has a small plug. If you had to move data between computers that were USB-A, you needed a thumb drive that had one connector on each end. I had a 30GB thumb drive the size of - well, my thumb, and it had a plastic shield that covered the USB-A part. At some point it broke off, but I didn’t care.
Fast forward seven months, to Saturday. I sliced off the tip of my thumb while cutting an onion, which gives a man an excuse to cry if he wishes. The thing about cutting off part of your body is that it doesn’t hurt right away, much. You’re informed of the situation, but it’s as if the body decides “we’ll deliver this pain later, when nothing can be done but endure it.” I’d rather have it all up front. But no. It took a few seconds to bleed, as if the thumb is startled: hold on, what did you do? Really? Well, I’d best order up some clotting agents - oh, they’re on back order. It’ll be a while.”
I have a medical kit in the closet, never used, fully stocked. Not like the one in the office. I had a trace of a headache the other day and wondered if the kit might have an aspirin. Lol no, as they say; there was only one thick gauze pad, and one of those blunt useless scissors included in emergency kits. It’s as if they think you’ll be too stressed to handle something sharp, so here’s something that makes kindergarten scissors look like ginsu knives.
I have the feeling that “ginsu” means knives . . . whew, no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginsu
Ginsu knives were originally called Quikut, made by the Quikut division of Scott Fetzer Company and was located in Fremont, Ohio. Since "Quikut" lacked panache, Ed Valenti, Barry Becher, and copywriter Arthur Schiff created a name that alluded to the exceptional sharpness and durability of Japanese samurai swords.
While the name Ginsu was invented by Becher, Becher later translated the word as meaning "I never have to work again.”
There’s something to remember, should you ever win the lottery. If you’re interviewed about how you feel, simply say “Ginsu” and leave it at that.
Anyway. The home medical kit had Band-Aids. There was a tube of antibiotic on the table from daubing the dog, and I’m sorry if I just created a new euphemism for something. Caught the guy daubin’ the dog! I disinfected my finger and put on a a bandage and went back to making dinner.
Of course, the antibiotic and the blood made the bandaid fall off, so I had to find another, which fell off again, and then I found another to wrap around the finger perpendicular to the one that went over the top, creating a useless cloth thimble that had the adhesive property of a Post-It Note in a sandstorm. Eventually the clotting agents did their work, but I still had a tender spot where there used to be, well, a finger tip.
Twenty-four hours later I pulled a thumb drive out of my laptop and forgot A) I had a raw hole in my fingertip, and B) the bandage had slipped to the side, and C) the USB drive’s lack of a cover meant that the metal prongs to which the hinged cover was affixed were, in fact, naked to the world. I’d probably touched them a hundred, two hundred times before, but now it was exactly like a needle going into my hand GAAAHAHHHAHAHAHADAMNFRITZINRICKIN
You can build your life as carefully as possible, but you will never anticipate how the loss of a supernumerary plastic cover will, some day in the future, cause momentary agony because you had sawed off a fingertip the night before. You just can’t game that out.
Really good burgers, by the way. The onion was the perfect touch.
Tomorrow: either it’s healed, or I forget about it again and apply hand sanitizer and have to bite the knuckle of my index finger for a few seconds to keep from cursing. But I’ll probably be in the office there will be no one there, which is good, because if anything happens that requires more than, or less than a two-inch square of gauze, we’re screwed.
Back to TV's early sci-fi show, Tales of Tomorrow. Brought to you by . . . .
You know, Kreisler didn’t sell watches. They sold watch bans. How much money was there in watch bands? Enough to sponsor a network TV show?, apparently. If anything, it told you how much of a markup there was on these things.
Anyway.
This ep concerns someone who gets some evil inside them First we meet the housewife, who's relaxing in housewifely fashion:
Oh, do I have to? Okay. April 25th, 1953.
Murder in the air in Moscow! Well, that's a switch.
Let’s meet the guy who comes home from work:
Always strange to see an actor of his stature doing a show like this, but he had to so something before he became, well, an an actor of his stature.
Don’t recognize him? Listen:
Anyway, he’s created a SERUM, as scientists did in those days. Hhe wants to help people be better. But his wife sneaks some, and she becomes . . . bad.
She starts listening to negro music and playing with her hair and talking in a careless manner. Frankly, it’s a nifty piece of work.
Then it’s back to watchbands.
You get both EXPANSION and the expensive look of a golden bracelet! It won’t pick your arm hair! Another version has simulated lizard skin!
$12.95!
Back to the show. Rod Steiger, Scientist, goes back to the lab to work on the Serum. He has an assistant:
You wonder what happened to these bit players who walk into a show for a few moments. Do they think this was the start, the ticket to stardom? What did they do when they realized . . . that was it? The phone didn’t ring. No one really thought you had it. You had your shot. You didn’t miss. You just hit a bullseye so big anyone could've nailed it.
Poor guy. Shuffled off into obscurity after this, probably.
That'll do; Matches await.
YES I KNOW WHO IT IS
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