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| February 20, 2025 - political youTubes |
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| February 19, 2025 |
Detail from a 15th century
Laval,
from a tumblr called Discarding
Images; I think of it as Medieval Saints' Side-Eye.
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| February 17, 2025 |
- BBC
report on Pathfinder, a new white airship now at Moffett Field,
with fascinating photos inside Hangar Two.
- The adjacent Ames Research Center must be in turmoil, I can't imagine. For 15 years, I was
there daily, part of a huge project working
on improvements to and modernization of the Air Traffic Control system's software,
including replacement of the ancient
HOST mainframes which
consolodated radar data; now, it seems a
team
from SpaceX is being brought in to overhaul the FAA's Air Traffic Control system.
Dunning-Kruger, anyone?
- A couple questions but first, a couple unrelated links into the Wikipedia:
April 14 is Black Day in South
Korea, when singles wear black and eat jajangmyeon noodles; and
Sweden had a nuclear
weapons program between 1945 and 1972 -- they developed a reactor but stopped
short of building a bomb.
- Vice, on 'Gooners':
Is
porn destroying us?
- Dwell, on Culdesac Tempe, Arizona:
America's
'First Car-Free Neighborhood' Is Going Pretty Good, Actually?
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| February 16, 2025 - status |
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Struggling with implementing an RSS feed for this
site, as well as with the Windows 11 upgrade,
but updates here will resume.
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| February 8, 2025 - Orbs |
- NASA’s Metallic
Orbs: The
Surprising Briefing Everyone Missed, in 2023.
- What happened to the red pistachio, why were they and
where
did they go? In response to the Iranian hoastages of
1979, now they're grown mostly in California.
-
Super Panavision 70:
The Matrix
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| February 6, 2025 |
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| February 4, 2025 |
- I mentioned this
in
October '22 but in Hawai'i I also learned there's
another macron, it's the
line over some vowels, in some languages. So, two
kinds of cookie, two kinds of macron. At least.
- There's someone for everyone -
Studio
Portraits of Couples in the 1970s at Vintage Everyday. Many of
these photos are like Diane Arbus, but in color.
- Killer
Covers of mystery and crime novels.
- The Charlton Comics
Reading Library was a blog last updated 2020, apparently. Like
Marvel I'd see these comics around, in the mid-1960s, but never
for sale in the stores I knew, which only seemed to have DC titles,
and Classics Illustrated.
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| February 3, 2025 |
- Back from a week in Hawai'i, all on Oahu. Re-visited the battleship
Arizona memorial, dwelling again upon notions of the physical
resemblence
I realized twenty years ago in the Hiroshima Museum,
meta-psychically reënforced this time with the discovery of a
Sadoka
corner within the "Attack" museum of the Pearl Harbor
Visitor Center complex.
- You've probably encountered the
Art of
Bruce Pennington on various paperback book-covers. And
Kurt
Roschl? No, but we should have.
- Sears' Surfman, a boys-wear page from the
1966 catalog. I and my brothers wore some of these clothes...the
blue&white, my first Aloha shirt. And the prices!
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| February 1, 2025 |
| Baguette Girl |
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| January 21, 2025 - Chongqing! |
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| January 15, 2025 |
We've seen this magazine cover previously in these pages but
that was a crude, low-res
color-shifted scan (from a long time ago). Just came across this
version, much nicer.
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| January 10, 2025 |
- An awesome chart from the Home Baking Association
shows variations in Chocolate Chip cookie results when you
change an ingredient,
Cookie
Science, Cookies 101.
- Check which team your favorite retail chains donate to at
GoodsUniteUs.com
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| January 6, 2025 |
- Looking
Forward is a short, contemplative video by Steven
Ascher. Does how you feel about
the future change how your life turns out?
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| December 31, 2024 |
2025 = 452
Happy New Year!
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| December 29, 2024 |
- In The Saturday Evening Post,
What
we ate 100 years ago.
- The Windham Hill videos are in the Internet Archive!
Autumn Portrait
Western
Light
Water's
Path
Winter and
China... I used to check these out from the video store, when I first moved to LA. At one point I transcribed all of them onto a single VHS tape labeled
"Soothing Image."
- Slate: America
invented the perfect grape, then banished it into obscurity. When
we first moved to the new house in 1960 these grapes
were growing along the back fence but at some point early
on, they either died or were torn out. Before, we'd stand
around back there eating them just as this article
describes...that flavor, it's true, not
the same as the red or green grapes at the store
these days; but some purple candy - exactly.
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| December 25, 2024 |
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Van Gogh and Christmas
calls this painting from 1890 'At Eternity's Gate' but I've also seen
it labeled simply 'A Man Mourning' and I first knew it as
'On the Threshold of Eternity'. Van Gogh
considered the image above to be a Christmas painting.
Happy Holidays!
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| December 24, 2024 |
- BBC:
Chocolate
maker Cadbury has been dropped from the list of royal warrants. Begone, pseudo-chocolate!
- Emily Wallace:
In
North Carolina, a cheese ball is the star around which all holiday
gatherings orbit.
- Sounds like a good name for a band, to me:
the
Positive Anymore occurs in some
varieties of North American English, especially in Philadelphia
and the Delaware Valley, Baltimore and its suburbs, as well
as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri; its
usage extends to Nevada, Utah and other western US states
but I've never heard this."I eat meat
anymore" = "I didn't eat meat before, and (but) I do
now", a meaning similar to 'nowadays' or 'from now on'.
- NPR's extensive listing,
In
Memoriam 2024: The Musicians We Lost.
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| December 21, 2024 - Solstice |
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| December 16, 2024 |
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| December 9, 2024 |
- According to Reader's Digest you can see
blue
Stop signs in Hawai'i, but doesn't really explain the phenomenon.
- The Cut: Things
Your Wedding Guests Secretly Despise. Maybe not so
secretly. A too-long gap between the ceremony and the reception. Open-mic
toasts. The garter belt, the cake smashing -- gross.
(archive link since The Cut is actually New York magazine)
- Earthscrapers -- proposal for a residential
step-well
in the D.F. A few levels, sure; but who'd go way down there? Ridiculous.
- The
Shape Of Things is a short story by Ray Bradbury, from 1948.
Surprisingly, out of copyright, doesn't appear to have been included
in any of his collections (but was in
this
Damon Knight anthology.) First line: He did
not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid.
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| December 8, 2024 |
- Absorbing this zany, new (to me) comic artist, Fletcher Hanks:
the
Most Twisted Comic Book Artist of All Time. Sample above, a
whole collection of Stardust (who flies through space by means of his Tubular Spacial) and Fantomah
available in the Internet Archive; his published work only between
1939-41 although he lived on until 1976, when his frozen body was
found one morning on a NYC park bench.
- Trying to understand the kids' new usage of
'flex'
but I'm not quite there yet. Something about bragging; but also
seems to be whatever you want it to mean.
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