| |
| December 3, 2023 |
- I recommend Lee Sandlin's "Losing The War" to anyone curious
about WWII; didn't realize he'd died (in 2015, age 58), more
good essays at his site, here's another, the
one about the cat where I learned he and his wife were
like Ray Bradbury and my mother: non-drivers. Myself as well,
at least for a while; as I postponed getting a car until I was almost 27 with the same ecological goals.
- Portuguese
Orange, Persian Portugal. Like how everybody else
calls pineapples
ananas.
- Spoiler Alert: now you don't have to see them.
10 Most Disturbing Endings in Movies or actually, summaries and the
endings of the ten most disturbing movies, according to
some Reddit sub.
- Ths guy's great, the Pre-Modernist:
Advice
for time-traveling to medieval Europe and concerning
eating spoiled meat in the Middle Ages. (What? No, of course
they didn't.)
- See the car the original RoboCop almost drove, Concept Art by Robert Webb... a
two-seater cop car?
|
| November 29, 2023 |
- A couple gift links for you, from the Washington Post. Last
Spring I mentioned 15-Minute Cities and Agenda 21; yesterday they published
How the suburbs could become 15-minute
cities. Close-in suburbs, perhaps. Also from yesterday's paper,
A rural post office was told to prioritize Amazon packages. Chaos ensued. If you live in the country, too bad, seems the USPS has made a deal with the Amazonian Devil (or perhaps it's just that that DeJoy guy actually is the Devil). "Like
any prudent business, we do not publicly discuss specifics of our business relationships." Note that mouthpiece
statements to the contrary, insisting that the Post Office
turn a profit is Republican small-gevernment BS -- the reality is the USPS is a federal government service
mandated by our Constitution, just like the military.
- In the New Republic, The
Red State Brain Drain Isn't Coming. It's Happening Right Now.
- In AlterNet, How Jesus
came to resemble a white European.
- Fodor's
No List 2024 with photos documenting the over-tourism.
|
| November 18, 2023 |
|
| October 30, 2023 |
- A collection of
Fall Harvest covers from the Saturday Evening Post.
- Citroën Ami review at Motor Trend. An EV
worthy of consideration? Or just an enclosed golf cart...top
speed, only 28 mph.
- A couple about the wonders of Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown
LA, back in the day: an old
LA
Weekly review, from 1999; and a more recent, much longer
Collector's
Weekly article. I visited hastily during my final days in Los Angeles
in late '93, long after it had been remarkable, when the façade looked like
that post-1960 photo. I have a hazy memory of the chapel, downstairs; no
recollection of the meal. Instead, I preferred Beadle's Cafeteria, one of
two along Colorado Blvd in Pasadena, where I occasionally had
the battered fish for lunch, during my earliest days in LA working at JPL.
An LA Times article (which also mentions
Clifton's) says that one finally closed in 2006. Their sister operation,
the Pasadena Cafeteria, down the street on the other side of Colorado Blvd,
had a kind of custom, automated organ-music system, but the food was the
same.
- CNN Business: America is falling out of love with candy corn, in 2 charts. Worth a look for the chocolate bar graph.
Without an appealing texture or flavor, what reasons
are left to buy candy corn? Indeed.
|
| October 28, 2023 |
Tom Scott pedals
his own retro-futuristic monorail pod in Rotorua, New Zealand (centre
of the North Island). Velocity
Valley is where Google funded this
Shweeb prototype.
The name is a reference to the German schweben
meaning "to hang/hover/levitate", and indirectly to the suspended monorail Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. (Today's pic is from
my
own Wuppertal page; I first rode the Schwebebahn in 1984.)
This hanging, personal transport pod reminds me of another proposal, the
NASA SkyTran which
isn't really getting off the ground either, but the bicycle-powered aspect
of the Shweeb is also reminiscent of
the dreamy Pedal Train envisioned by
Steven M.Johnson, one of the visions for the 21st century collected in his
Public Therapy Buses, from 1990.
|
| October 21, 2023 |
- Unlike most places, I find their waffles acceptable; although
I'm sure it's an intolerable place to work, a notion confirmed by this
Waffle
House training video, which seems to imply the cooks
there can be illiterate.
- 2023 Nikon
Photomicrography
Competition 'Images of Distinction' award winners. That link drops
you into the middle of the slide show, a picture of human neurons.
- Pew Research US Religious Knowledge quiz. I got 13 out of 15.
-
I knew her singing career began 'way before "Downtown" but I wasn't
aware that "I Will Follow Him" was actually a hit first for
Petula Clark,
on the Continent, in French and Italian, where the song was known as
Chariot
(and in Germany, as
Cheerio),
with very different lyrics.
|
| October 10, 2023 |
- I've been learning about the Reading Wars (or to be precise, the
Wars About Teaching Reading) after hearing an American Public Radio
documentary, "How teaching kids to read went so Wrong." Took a while, but
a transcript finally appeared, and with my further
research I now understand the political angle: that teaching students to
decode words by sounding them out is considered Conservative since it's
old school traditional (and teachers, generally a Liberal lot, find the
drills boring). However, I agree with this Post editorial from
earlier this year: Cut the
politics. Phonics is the best way to teach reading. (gift link) It's
what worked for me. Can't fathom this weird 'cueing' approach with its
three questions; but then I don't understand the methods they're teaching
kids for doing arithmetic these days, either.
- The Huell
Howser Archives seems to have all his various shows. I got into
this doofy former Marine and football player's California documentaries
when the library was shifting over to DVDs; I noticed so many of his
shows there, on the exiled VHS shelf, so took some home. An example: when he drove
the
Ridge Route in 2003.
|
| September 12, 2023 |
- In the Washington Post,
Seven state flags still
have designs with ties to the Confederacy -- AR, CA,
GA, MD, NC, SC, and VA.
(gift link)
Fun fact about Arkansas: you can get to all six of the
states bordering it by driving due south from some point
inside (but the areas to reach Oklahoma and Tennessee that
way are very small, and the Missouri is only possible because of its
bootheel).
|
|
