Bright day with tasks. First: return the sander (etbf) Wife bought to do the back door. Or rather undo it. Remove the stain, get it down to the wood, then retain so it looks nicer. All these little things you do to give the place an extra pop. She bought a hand-sander that had a tiny vacuum and bag, so the wood dust wouldn’t go everywhere.

You know of course that the wood dust got everywhere. But why? Because the bag broke. A throwback to the days when the leaf-blower bag ripped, and I didn’t know it until I’d walked around the yard sucking leaves in one end and blowing them out the other. Well, I said, you should take it back. She stopped by the store on the way back from an appointment, and from I gather got something of a confused run-around with instructions to talk to Dave. But Dave’s not there, man.

I said: I will take it back and return with a replacement. I would not make that statement if I did not fully trust my ability to do so. If you’re wondering how I was so sure, it’s because I know the store; they’re decent folk. And our case was unassailable. It had failed after an hour’s work. On the day of the purchase. Surely they’ll exchange it, if I am calm, reasonable, and implacable, and that always works.

Kidding, of course. But! They exchanged it for a new one, after some squinting at the defective part and making appraising faces while I stood there not looking at my phone or out the window or anywhere but directly at the clerk. Calm, reasonable, and implacable. Also, I had a hammer in my hand, and I spun the handle in my palm with obsessive repetition.

Kidding of course. This duty done, I went straight home and started sanding. Kidding of course: I went to the gym and hoisted, went to Traders Joe for basics. There's a new flavor of yogurt. The clerk was excited to try it. Then to Infinite Intoxicants, where I was informed I have five dollars in points to use. I declined, because I didn't want to use it for the $3.99 5 calorie grapefruit juice when I could use it on a good bottle of bourbon. This, of course, is pure fiscal illiteracy, since money is fungible. But that's just how it works in the brain.

My brain, anyway.

When I got home I set to sanding, completing the job Wife started yesterday at 2 and ended at 9. Another great example of teamwork. We are appraising various stains. Then I made a delicious supper of chicken burgers with a little dash of Nashville Hot Chicken seasoning. As I was eating I remembered I'd had cajun blackened chicken chunks for lunch, and a chicken sausage with Cry Baby Craig's hot sauce for breakfast. You'd think I would remember such things, but A) my mind is really elsewhere most of the time, and B) these were three distinct things. The sausage was cylindrical. The chunks were quite irregular. The burgers were circular. So it's really quite a varied diet.

We chatted kindly and calmly with laughter after dinner, and she went off to tennis. Things are really nice around here. I couldn't be happier.

Kidding, of course. Except -

Ahhh, stay tuned. This is still absolutely normal, and better, and unreal. Doomed. Except -

DIFFERENT SUBJECT NOW

We'll have a few of these this week:

This caught my eye at the V&A.

Let us resize and undistort the one on the left, best as the source material permits.

I fed it into grok, and was thus informed:

This multicolored flag with numerous vertical stripes, displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) atrium alongside the Pride flag (and often the orange Refuge Nation flag), is known as the EU Barcode flag. It's a conceptual design rather than an official flag, created in 2002 by architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture as part of a European Commission brainstorming session on visual symbols for the European Union.

What the Stripes Represent

The flag's design deliberately evokes a barcode to symbolize the "common effort of a group of states retaining their own identities"—a metaphor for the EU's unity in diversity. Each vertical stripe corresponds to the primary color(s) from the national flags of the then-25 EU member states (as of the 2004 enlargement), arranged in a narrow, vertical format to create a dense, abstract pattern. This avoids prioritizing any one country while highlighting the collective mosaic of Europe.

What a joyously human thing.

Another thing that caught my eye, simply because it is, in London terms, so ordinary:

The name dates the building. Or does it?

It was created in 1833 as National Provincial Bank of England, and expanded largely by taking over a number of other banks. Following the transformative acquisition of the Union Bank of London in 1918, it changed its name to National Provincial and Union Bank of England, then in 1924 shortened its name again to National Provincial Bank.

That could be a mid-late 20s building, but I think it's older. The bank's name was submerged in a merger in 1970.

I just want to go back, tomorrow, and spend a week just walking around and looking up, finding new things.

By the way: I haven't been to downtown Minneapolis since the day I quit.

It’s 1946.

Again, the Los Angeles Times ads, because they’re so interesting. To me, anyway. And it’s MY SITE. So there.

The front page of the paper had an enormous photo of a mushroom cloud in the Pacific. Atoms were the future! Atomic everything! Even hearing aids.

And of course what goes well with an Olde Towne Crier, but Atoms?

“Let’s go down to the jewelry store and buy a record player.”

What the hell is that thing? “Does not connect to a radio.” So some of them did?

This is remarkable: a big apology for poor service.

WE SCREWED UP SORRY

It has always been a policy of United Air Lines to keep the people fully informed of what United is doing and planning to do.

Before the war, United talked about its fine service. It was fine service. We were proud of it. And our passengers appreciated it. They told us so!

Today, while our service aloft continues to merit approval, United's handling of its passengers -on the ground-—is not what it should be.

You probably have found it difficult to reach our offices by telephone, or if you have called in person you have found long lines of passengers waiting to be served. Often you may have found it impossible to get a seat on a United Mainliner, unless you have made a reservation well in advance.

We want you to know why... what we have done... and what we are doing about it.

Now we're all suspicious.

Something else you don’t see in modern papers, or anywhere else for that matter: ads for backyard poultry homes.

Of course, you put it together. Shingles extra.

What, am I supposed to go down to the Plane Store and buy one?

I understand the simple need to get the brand across, and get your name out there as a vanguard of high-tech and American know-how. I suppose it gave fliers a feeling of ultra-modernity, knowing they were on the 4. But was it really that important to advertise? This can’t be aimed at the airlines, because it looks as if they’d all signed up.

There were four civilian crashes of DSC-4s in 1946. FOUR. All but one had fatalities.

Kids today, they have no idea.

And they have no idea how much most merchants hated them. Hotels, they were used to it. Stores, restaurants, not so much. Unless it was a place that catered to tourists, you got a hard look.

“Yes, hello? I’m calling from the FTC.”

As it turns out, no, you don’t drink it.

It was a dye, but it didn’t look like a dye. How many people chugged it on a hot day I can only imagine.

Page-turners for the ladies:

About the first:

Around the corner from the elegant townhouses on Albion Place is Britannia Mews, a squalid neighborhood where servants and coachmen live. In 1875, it’s no place for a young girl of fine breeding, but independent-minded Adelaide Culver is fascinated by what goes on there. Years later, Adelaide shocks her family when she falls in love with an impoverished artist and moves into the mews. But violence shatters Adelaide’s dreams. In a dangerous new world, she must fend for herself—until she meets a charismatic stranger and her life takes a turn she never expected.

As for the other:

On June 28, 1946, Goodin published Clementine with Dutton. The novel is a coming-of-age story about a red-haired tomboy named Clementine. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called it "a chronology with funny, tender highspots, that manages growing pains without parody or maudlinity," concluding that it was a "very pleasant, lightly subsurface tale of adolescence, which sneaks up on you."[8] The novel was adapted into the film Mickey in 1948.

She was 23. She’d write four novels in total.

The Lie, about a mother who must pass her daughter off as her sister,[was Dutton's top fiction title for the fall of 1953. However, Kirkus reviewed it with much less enthusiasm. Goodin's final novel, Dede O'Shea, was released by Dutton on May 29, 1957. Of its eponymous heroine, Kirkus wrote, "A ragingly young Californian makes a pleasant heroine with an addiction to truth -- and consequences.”

Died in 1983, at 60.

Mickey:

That'll do. Thank you for your patience, and don't forget: there was a free Substack yesterday. Consider a paying subscription, as they say. Six months hence I'm going to need the scratch.