Memo Of The Air

2026/02/14

World radio day.

… “If a man can’t pee off his own front porch, he’s living too close to town.” -Edward Abbey

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s 7.5-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part:

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance: Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Coming MOTA shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. Or send me a link to your writing project and I’ll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

A Love Poem.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-love-poem.html

Bill and Neil’s pal Jill peel Phil’s meal. Mel drills Bill’s steel pail.
https://biblioklept.org/2026/02/08/sunday-comix-39/

Wonderful witches flying in a storm. Or birds.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/02/synchronized-skating.html

What.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lE2Eu9GDfCE

This is a real place. It’s 15,479 feet above sea level, in Tibet. At that altitude a three minute egg takes five minutes to cook. You have to breathe twice as fast. A suction cup won’t stay stuck on a window. Two or three times the exposure to cosmic rays, relative to sea level. At night the ice worms come. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2020780433307320348

Egg Nebula.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/13/hubble-captures-death-of-a-sun-like-star.html

Some women who might very well have been amenable to swallow a whole (peeled) egg in public view, if only anyone had the moxie, and something of value to offer in trade, to step up and suggest it.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/02/michael-sherard.html
https://www.vintag.es/2026/02/gene-laurents.html

And a potential emperor of all the eggs, or, if you prefer, a potentate. He calls it an empire, though, so.
https://youtu.be/oCiDh9dnOZc

Palantir’s predictive policing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayz_YNH7s04

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. (Full film, 110 min.)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/02/dirty-rotten-scoundrels.html

Tim Curry, having relearned how to speak after his devastating 2012 stroke, talks about his life’s work. (I haven’t watched this one yet. I’m saving it up for a treat. A sad treat.)
https://theawesomer.com/tim-curry-on-his-most-memorable-roles/796205/

A rollicking number from The Muppets’ Treasure Island, featuring Tim Curry as pirate captain Long John Silver, in somewhat more mobile and loquacious and vivacious times. (You might have to crank the volume up a bit.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvUbbYX9BMs

“I could see myself possibly one day falling for you.” Gee, thanks.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/will-you-be-my-situation-tine

“But who would ever fall in love with such a dissipated weed.” I have often thought of myself as a weed, or rather a cross between a weed and Justin the noble rat in The Secret of NIMH. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://flashbak.com/27-victorian-era-vinegar-valentines-411549/

Lyin’ and spinnin’ and cheatin’ and hidin’. Randy Rainbow’s latest.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/02/lyin-and-spinnin-and-cheatin-and-hidin.html

Plaster moon.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/11/how-james-nasmyth-created-stunningly-realistic-moon-models-in-1874.html

Moonstone.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6k6eyi

Sa!
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/danielle_aubry_master_of_savate

Wow!
https://theawesomer.com/spider-noir-trailer-amazon-prime/796296/

Flying saucer table lamp. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.designboom.com/shop/design/wololow-lamp-wololow-04-11-2025/

Another sweet jazzy Creep. (I’m sorry, I don’t remember who showed this to me.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I787v-so8fo

Russian beatboxer Vahtang – Lose Control (and) Rerun: Black Betty. (via The Awesomer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cs3GyzRB2k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2zCkaIOmJg

Joe Satriani – Always With Me, Always With You.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsJisD7n8_Q

Dire Straits – Private Investigations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmLNKATlwJw

A.I. We’re Still Here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMmzpt1xmac
https://x.com/i/status/2020383716447519210

That’s A.I. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEVl0NS0vu8

“Ah! I see you’ve found my masterpiece!” “Bleh. What else have you got.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BZkW6PjJD6g

Many A.I. agents were set to populate, build, and operate Minecraft societies.
https://theawesomer.com/how-ai-is-building-its-own-societies/795970/

The Secret of NIMH. (Full film. Free.)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-secret-of-nimh.html

A tour of the Game Of Thrones world map.
https://laughingsquid.com/game-of-thrones-world-map/

Audience improv symphony. Oh!
https://theawesomer.com/audience-symphony-orchestra-live-improv/796151/

Homo mobilis. (via Everlasting Blort and Nag On The Lake)
https://martinroemers.com/homo-mobilis/photos/

U.S. highway naming conventions. Pollen fire. Balloon magic. The satellites. Three-body solution suggestions. Other kinds of bees’s hives. A trap. A pillow-and-limes cake. And articulated cow art. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2020436566037172681
https://x.com/i/status/2020400467927236790
https://x.com/i/status/2020416957871427906
https://x.com/i/status/2020904492426731821
https://x.com/i/status/2021850850411294998
https://x.com/i/status/2022211638750064799
https://x.com/i/status/2022464555499057409

First powered controlled manned flight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxYmS4LGH3U

One of the Wright Bros. inspirations, George Cayley in 1810: “I feel perfectly confident that this noble art will soon be brought home to man’s general convenience, and that we shall be able to transport ourselves and families, and their goods and chattels, more securely by air than by water, and with a velocity of from 20 to 100 miles per hour. To produce this effect it is only necessary to have a first mover, which will generate more power in a given time, in proportion to its weight, than the animal system of muscles.”
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/11/george-cayley-man-who-invented-flight.html

Rerun: Restoring an antique stamped-metal toy space car. I just saw an item of this type –not this exact toy but close– in the pawn shop in Ukiah on Thursday. I was really attracted to a particular guitar amplifier, but I don’t have any money for that now, and how many guitar amplifiers does a man need? Mine is fine. It’s been years since I last visited that shop. A large selection of battery powered tools, some generators, the usual other pawn shop things, at least one banjo, of course… but no horns, nor typewriters, nor suitcases, nor musical keyboards, nor guns anymore. They seem to be expanding into dealing mostly in jewelry. And there were at least a dozen people in the store. One couple hovered over a small gas-powered generator for awhile, and a little bit later I noticed them holding each other, talking softly, the woman crying. If I had a lot of money, I would have bought them the generator. (via Tacky Raccoons) (You might have to click the sound on. Top-left.)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/4208979519345114

Rerun: The Outer Limits. Controlled Experiment, the episode that begins in a pawn shop that is really an anthropological spy outpost of an advanced civilization interested in Earth and humans because we’ve been exploding atomic bombs. That’s Carroll O’Connor behind the counter. I love pawn shops. Imagine working at night in a dimly-lit pawn shop that also has coffee and a grill to make hot sandwiches. And a little table to sit and eat. Because it’s the bus station. Wouldn’t that be a nice job. You could write, and work on your projects, and every once in awhile someone would come in out of the rain and you’d cook a sandwich for them and sell them a bus ticket and they could pawn their watch or pistol and read a book from their phone and wait for their sweater to dry in the dryer in back, and wait for the bus to come. And if they didn’t like the music you’re playing, they could get another record down from the shelf and say, “Can I put this one on instead?” Sure, no problem. And from her choice of record she would turn out to be Julie, your first real girlfriend, and it’s been so long you didn’t even recognize each other, but you do now. Aww. Well, there’s your bus. Here’s your sweater. Have a safe trip. Take care of yourself. I will. Wait– take some fruit. I’ve got apples here, and a banana. Thank you. She gets on the bus, the bus goes away, and you put /your/ record back on, take the pistol apart, clean, oil and reassemble it, check the action, put a price tag on it and put it in the window.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6okuyw

Rerun: Raj against the machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi106DZJhuQ

Some nice old people and their signs today in small town Fort Bragg, California, around the corner from KNYO.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/sets/72177720332016912/

WPA posters. (via Nag On The Lake)
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?sp=1&co=wpapos&st=grid

Yowza, she hoopin’. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2021228453471588498

Rerun: Mime criminal tragedy. Oh, no!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GXTuRPBW6t4

Gif art.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2026/02/13/the-gif-friday-post-no-942-ninaface-say-wot-a-power-puffer/

Art.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/02/08/respost-where-the-art-leads/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/02/09/mad-mad-raven/
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/ever-behind-sunset.html
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/artwork-of-day_13.html

Art via This Isn’t Happiness.
https://www.instagram.com/anna_dimezza_art/
https://www.instagram.com/shigeootake/

Art via b3ta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyd1XzGMxOQ&list=RDnyd1XzGMxOQ

Batmobilia. Puppetry. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2020783665035333837
https://x.com/i/status/2020764814444806549

A simple search interface for the Epstein files. (via b3ta)
https://clxi.org/epstein/

Open a tight jar lid with this one weird science trick.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/02/09/or-if-youre-like-me-just-scream-it-anyway/

Do not leave it in the countryside of the sea.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7vq7Td07DkQ

Donny Benet, maestro of lurve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6z2-72FFK8

OMG.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/in_a_gadda_da_vida_with_bongos

A nice cave. (via Fark)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/CH.GR.Pontresina_2024-02-28_Morteratsch-Glacier_9792_3x2-R_7K.jpg/1280px-CH.GR.Pontresina_2024-02-28_Morteratsch-Glacier_9792_3x2-R_7K.jpg

J.D.’s motorcade.
https://www.jalopnik.com/2098157/jd-vance-olympics-motorcade/

“Oo?” “Aye, aw oo.” (That’s how you say “Wool?” “Yes. All wool,” in a comic poem I read once about Scotland. But this one isn’t about Scotland, is it.)
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/desi-oon-ode-to-indian-wool.html

“Æthelred the Unready, who is probably the funniest named historical figure ever, was quite famous for not being ready for the Vikings. You see, the Vikings had been raiding the English countryside for hundreds of years, but then due to internal conflict, they sort of stopped for a while, so you got English Kings with names like Edgar the Peaceful. So our boy Æthelred was like, Well good enough, I guess they are gone forever, problem solved.”
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheSummoningofBertrandRussell.png

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=Kw6Zii

Some Euro-accent boys with faith in physics. The short of attention span may skip ahead to 20 minutes for the payoff.
https://theawesomer.com/launching-a-person-off-a-truck-at-80-km-h/795869/

And I hope this smells like a dog, or somebody missed a trick. It could simply be the salt popcorn smell like between a puppy’s toes. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2021237331018076344

2026/02/07

O stone, be not so.

… “You don’t need to wait to be dead to haunt someone. You can literally go round to their house and do all the stuff a ghost would do right now.”

…

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Alex Bosworth wrote: “At long last, my housing came through. I moved in on Thursday but I’ve been too sick and weak from pneumonia and various blood disorders to do anything but sleep. It’s a simple, one bedroom apartment in San Ysidro. Once I’m on my feet, I’ll fix it up and have it ready for visitors. Thank you for your moral support in this dark, difficult time. More later. Love, Alex.” Here it is, classy, fresh, not just better than being out on the street but the kind of real place where a person can live, not merely survive, nor give up this dream of life that keeps him alive. In other words, where he can be he:
https://www.facebook.com/abosworth1/posts/pfbid02D3214DD5psVAiKq4rsx3zHpn6ozLAN5W1wmitXimyG1KR8u1KLov5DCRPeCtA8SDl

San Diego Hardware.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/02/03/san-diego-hardware/

How three kinds of water faucets work. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2019653580433551393

Prof. Charles Taylor demonstrates Chladni patterns.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PzRv4nsWNTw

“This is the one that does all the fancy work and I’d like to show you how simple and easy it is to use.” (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk9G4L-JFqQ

The California dialect.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/31/the-persistent-myth-of-the-california-accent.html

The Californians. “Steau-ert. Thu phutaagerphy in thess is uh-MYAA-zong.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCer2e0t8r8

“There are no illegals on stolen land.”
https://www.facebook.com/reel/26362562563341853

Astrobase GO! (via Everlasting Blort) You might have to click the sound and/or motion on.
https://bsky.app/profile/kenplume.bsky.social/post/3lo3phwdyos2a

Brilliant robot guy. (via Miss Cellania)
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1qoepr6/man_mimics_robot_with_insane_body_control/

The J. Geils Band – Freeze Frame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHo43B6nu60

Art. You might have to click the video and/or sound on. You might not.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/awM1Vgy9iVs
https://fb.watch/F179fJybWz/
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1716730122620247
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/02/04/kate-hooray-osmond/
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/artwork-of-day_01664760842.html

Realty.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hLooZmQa6r4

Exactly.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/01/comedian-walter-masterson-gives-diaper-to-ice-supporting-democratic-congressman.html
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F965js0WO60

Hover text: “Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to /crocodiles/ than to dinoaurs.”
https://xkcd.com/3204

Car seat repair. It’s a little more trouble than an inch of duct tape, but it won’t turn into a sticky mess in the sun. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTalT_8kx5I/

The chain-link fence machine. Another better kind than the last time. This kind is coated with attractive green plastic.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/02/how-do-they-knit-chain-link-fence.html

ROOK TO E4, KNIGHT TO C11, QUEEN TO G6.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/how-to-be-less-awkward

Wonderful rocket project. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1qpjq9v/a_teacher_and_his_students_built_a_3_stage_rocket/

Things to see in the sky in February 2026.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/night-sky-events-february-2026

A paean to Silent Running, a movie that made a big impression on me when I was thirteen. I don’t even remember what the double feature was with it that week. I remember throwing up earlier that day because my mother brought a big container of leftover tepid shrimp and sauce home from after an Amway presentation, and I had never had shrimp before. I ate about a quart of it. It might have been entirely fine and not poison at all, but it didn’t agree with me. That was one of the times I used the trick my grandmother taught me when I was five, for when a bottle or container or whatever you’re working on starts leaking or spraying, or you’re suddenly sick, and the bathroom or the door outside are too far away: get a wastebasket, or spread your jacket out. Anything easier to clean and less problematical than the furnace grate in the hallway, you little pig.
https://theawesomer.com/how-silent-running-influenced-science-fiction-aesthetics/795323/

Evolution of movies.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-evolution-of-movies.html

Here’s one top place I’d like for a house if I had the power of instantaneous teleportation like the main character in the Steven Gould /Jumper/ books. It looks hard to heat. If I had wishes left, there could be magical heating. And smart nanotech to put things back where they go when I leave them around behind me like a slob, or at least slide it all into one pile. And Juanita and I would be in our twenties again, but with all we know now. And everyone and every animal on the planet would have a twenty-percent higher IQ with no psychopathy, and doubled EQ. And if those are too hard for the genie, I’d say, every alcohol drink should have a week’s birth control in it, and churches that give political advice and/or amass a real estate empire should pay stiff taxes, and anyone who benefits personally from public office or from prep for war should be pauperized and imprisoned and put to work doing something useful. And universal guaranteed basic income, free college in the sciences and humanities, and Medicare For All. (via Miss Cellania)
https://www.kuriositas.com/2014/12/the-sphinx-observatory-science-at-top.html

TED talk about dog agility training and competition, with dog(s).
https://laughingsquid.com/communicating-with-dogs/

All about the history of the whaling industry. (15 min.)
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/02/04/The-Gruesome-History-of-the-Whaling-Industry/

Photos of today’s regular Saturday demo in small town Fort Bragg (California), just around the corner from KNYO. I know so many of these people, they’re mostly quite wonderful, with complicated life stories that wash over me as I look, like movie stories did as you walked slowly down aisles in a movie rental store, or like the kaleidoscope of useful sensory info to a dog with its nose out a car window in the countryside. For example, there’s Allison Feets, but she has sandals on, here. In almost forty-five years I’ve never seen her with anything at all on her feet, no matter the weather, and now that’s different. My favorite this time is the person leaning on the light post with the sign /THIS CAN’T BE WHO WE ARE/. Voila or alas or both?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/albums/72177720331885225/

The power of illusion.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/02/big-bunch-of-bananas.html

The games and pleasures of childhood. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-games-and-pleasures-of-childhood-1657/

Yum.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nC9yerFkGxg

MMmmm. Imagine having the effect on people that Lauren Bacall had all her life.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/lauren-bacall-enjoying-coffee.html

Ana Castela – Boiadeira.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyQ3McP4Two

The Cheese Wheel, honey. I was at the Cheese Wheel, getting something special for you because I love you. It wouldn’t fit on my bike; they’re gonna send it over later. You and I have been together for a long time. Have I ever lied to you, that you know of? Ever. I was not off canoodling with either Lauren Bacall or Catherine Deneuve or Kate McKinnon. No, not with Kristen Schaal. No, /not Parker Posey, no. Stop./ I was alone, at the Cheese Wheel. Look, here’s the truck; they’re already here. This is for you. See? You told me you might like this kind and I wrote it down. Do you like it? …No, not Claudia Black, not Amanda Tapping, not Angela Bassett, not Lucy Liu. Not Inara…
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=WAdvoS

Postcards from the Russia-Japan war of 1904.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/postcards-from-russo-japanese-war-1904.html

“Technology that was used in those wars has kind of migrated into the police force.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nlJ3H9VFK_0

Science talk and demo about entropy. “A good way to model ice cream color exchange is with colliding planets.”
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/30/The-Physics-of-Chocolate-and-Vanilla-Ice-Cream-Cones/

“This was the essence of their plan.” You might have to click the sound on. Top-right.
http://www.instagram.com/reel/DSyOFbfkkOe/

Oops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZAZPjqoxU8

Colorful urchins.
http://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/photographer-shows-sea-urchins-as-ocean-gemstones.html

All just the scenes with Bart from year 1 of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I think what might have happened is, they were holding auditions while they were still in the early days of figuring the show out, and this actress came in, and they’d been at it all day at this point, and they told her nothing of who she was supposed to be, but just said, “What do you have for us,” and she just BANG channeled this magnificent creature and wrecked the whole room like the Tasmanian Devil and stood there panting with her shoulders up around her ears, and they were like, Oh. Oh, my. And their hearts are all pounding 180 beats a minute with the excitement of discovery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY09eTtvOS8

Burning a globe made of matches, seen from several angles. I like the third angle best.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/02/42000-match-sphere-gets-lit.html

A mirrorbox toy. This might have been the subconscious prompt for my dream about the laser-projection-cube game. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/2019081723967918265

Old people remember being young. Young people don’t remember being old.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-car-that-came-back-from-sea.html

Billy West bought this ’57 Chevy in 1968 for $375 and he’s still driving it. (via Nag On The Lake). “Oh, one night I was racing this ’36 Chevy Coupe with a straight axle, and this is gonna sound like I’m making this up, but when we left he pulled the wheels off the ground, because it was setting like that anyway, and I’m thinking, this guy– he can’t drive the car like that, he’s got the wheels coming off the ground! Anyway, I beat him, and that was frightening, but we was children, we did stupid stuff, and didn’t understand the ramifications of going real fast in a /stupid car with drum brakes/.” Yup. Those cars were solid, though. If you get up on the roof or the hood of a modern car, or you even lean against the fender, it can crease like a Pepsi can. But it’s safer the new way. The metal crumples in a crash, absorbing kinetic energy, rather than transferring it to driver and passengers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5nK-O2gh20

Places. Explore. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/z.a.o_/

“Oh, this place? It’s okay. And you’d think there’d be a toilet /somewhere/ in all of this, you’re right, but no. We’re gonna get some. Meanwhile, use the bathtub. Or for solid waste, get a plastic shopping bag from under the sink and put it over one of those paint buckets. (via Fark)
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1900-Spindrift-Dr-La-Jolla-CA-92037/16839110_zpid

Casino brawl. With stabs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/casino-brawl-caught-camera-stabbing-125800985.html

This reminds me of the part in The Magicians when the students pass their inner-self-reveal test and are changed into snow geese to fly to Brakebills South at the South Pole to study under disgraced but brilliant Doctor Mayakovski. These aren’t snow geese, but they’re geese, and you can see what it must feel like.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/02/barnacle-geese-flying-over-edinburgh.html

“Madame, we greet you, and rejoice to perceive that our last prolonged visit to Luna has not proven detrimental to your health, but hereafter we must endeavor to be more prudent. Now, I pray you, to attentively listen to what I may say to you…”
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/journeys-to-the-planet-mars/

Fluffy’s home!
https://x.com/i/status/2017802588414988402

Sigh. Oy.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/02/two-american-businessmen-destroy.html

Jarring because harmonious. A harmonious horn is weird. But not as weird as these new cars that sing like THX-intro angels to warn blind and inattentive people. because they’re electric, they’re too quiet, you need a way to hear them coming. They were running over people all the time and that fixed that.
https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/807377305761726464

A short film about a choir of people who’ve had their voiceboxes removed.
https://laughingsquid.com/shout-at-cancer-laryngectomy-choir/

Wing – Dopamine.
https://youtu.be/qlrpeYdm9Ec?si=FOHApBiZtIaQb-El

Louis C.K. on Jesus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk-pGNIDpgg

One of the many spiritual rituals of the First Church of Machinism.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/f97-S0aM0KM

Straight up OG crafting, yo.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QGFXogNskNU

The butter sculptures of Caroline S. Brooks (via Juanita)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-butter-sculptures-of-caroline-s-brooks/

The surprising real original height of the Colosseum represented by drones. (I think I got this from Cliff Pickover.)
https://x.com/i/status/2018577693646729276

Egg.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/evelyn-hofer.html
https://www.vintag.es/2026/02/jackie-stoloff.html

List of lists of lists. (I’m sorry, I don’t remember who showed me this.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

Rerun: Jonathan Coulton – Mandelbrot Set.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDU40eUcTj0

Flying over the Himalayas. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2018608162035712077
https://x.com/i/status/2018609036355305586

Water. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/pickover/status/2019553473222595003/photo/1
https://x.com/i/status/2019550746572640526

How you say it. (via Futility Closet)
https://archive.org/details/b28738196/page/n3/mode/2up

How to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zGJAaMRzSNk
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AbRN_-CteDg
https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/807751142619676672/charminglyantiquated-that-story-where-you
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/04/tom-the-dancing-bug-how-to-find-out-if-you-are-a-dangerous-criminal.html
https://laughingsquid.com/songwriters-explain-how-to-write-pop-song/

As late as 1983, we had an AP teletype machine in the back hallway of KMFB/KPMO. It had an electric typewriter mechanism and worked at 50 baud and typed five characters, all caps, per second. The contract required leaving it running 24 hours a day, so it went through boxes and boxes of paper, though mostly it was ignored. Part of my job of playing records all night Friday and Saturday nights was to, in the morning before I left, gather up a double-armload of paper with raw news on it, take it out to the burn barrel, set it on fire and cover the barrel with a rusty screen. I remember sometimes reading it. There were stories here or there that surprised me and never showed up in the newspapers, suppressed, I guessed. The building was made of concrete blocks, even internal walls, so with the heavy hallway door closed you couldn’t hear the machine at all from the office or broadcast studios. With the door open, it was nonstop /TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK KAK-TAK-KAK-TAK TAK-TAK-KAK-TAK…/ Every few weeks the print would get too dim to read and it was time to either change the ink ribbon if it was worn ragged or drop three drops of thick ink onto the ribbon from a squeeze bottle like a ketchup bottle in a diner. I can still smell that hallway. Both damp concrete and dry concrete, the particleboard suspended ceiling, and typewriter oil.
https://me.jnsi.org/uploads/2025/02/AP-1320×880.jpeg

Rerun: The science of chaotic hoses.
https://theawesomer.com/the-science-of-chaotic-hoses/765254/

From 24 light-hours away:
https://bsky.app/profile/p-s-v.bsky.social/post/3mdv7mv4ysc2c

Map of Europa.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HAPZUMDWkAAVpfX?format=png&name=360×360

Map of Tokyo.
https://kottke.org/26/02/minimalistic-city-map-posters

Elf-like baby giraffe at the Melbourne Zoo.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/watch-an-adorable-baby-giraffe-who-has-a-case-of-the-zoomies.html

“That’s pretty psychotic.” “Exactly. Everyone is a psycho.” “I think it’s just you.”
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/HobbesvsAnarchism.png

When I was fourteen in 1973 I spent a summer in Ohio working for my uncle, who ran a crew building car garages. Every day we’d get up early, get in the truck, go around to pick up the others. On the way to the work site everyone but me smoked cigarets or a tobacco pipe with the windows all the way up because cold. We’d get there. There’d be a concrete block footer or a poured floor, a pile of lumber and plywood and shingles and siding, rolls of tar paper, boxes of nails, all under a tarp. I’d run electric lines to the people’s house or business so the power saw would work. The four or five of us would build and side and roof a two-car garage with a roll-up big door and maybe a window and a door in the side or the back. And then by five-or-so p.m. there’d be a whole garage there, we’d sweep up, gather up all the tools and wires, and drive away (repeat the smoking, but with the windows down this time, because hot). My aunt would feed us dinner. We’d sit on the porch. More smoking from my uncle, though sometimes he’d spread out all his lighters a pipes and take them apart to their tiniest parts, clean them, put them back together. I read, and wrote stories, and listened to the radio, and learned to play guitar, daydreamed about girls I didn’t have the guts to even talk to. I slept upstairs; this was Ohio in summer, for the whole first part of the night it was a furnace up there, even with the windows open and fans running. So I’d go down to the kitchen, the next room from my aunt-and-uncle’s room (Aunt Honey and Uncle Pat), I’d get ice from the freezer and sit there at the table chewing up ice cubes from a plastic glass. Here’s something that happened almost every night: I’m sitting, chewing ice. My aunt wakes up and calls out, “Mark?” I said, “What?” My uncle wakes up and says to her, “What’s going on.” My aunt said, “It’s Mark.” Uncle says, “What’s he doin’ out there?” I say, “I’m getting a drink.” Uncle says, “Tell him go ta bed.” Aunt says, “Go to bed, Mark.” It didn’t always go exactly like that, but it was pretty close to that. I miss the guitar I had then, a six-string banjo, $80 from Sears. It was lost when my mother’s water heater exploded in flames and burned her house down in 1980 or ’81, and it was there because I couldn’t carry it to Fort Bragg (CA) on my motorcycle. I still want another one. Maybe when I win the lottery.
https://boingboing.net/2026/02/01/watch-an-extraordinary-goat-absolutely-obliterating-ice.html

Shadows. (via Juanita, speaking of whom)
https://www.tumblr.com/publicdomainreview/807471849047998464/from-utagawa-hiroshiges-new-edition-of-shadow

Nature red in tooth and claw. Doo-dah, doo-dah.
https://x.com/i/status/2017825237988261998

Funny thing about shooting guns: by the end of the experiment, we see that a bullet can go not just through a wall, but through all the walls of a whole house and maybe even kill someone inside the /next/ house. Sure, that kind of power belongs in the hands of any twitchy angry ignorant non-self-examined coward, in uniform or not, who feels his manhood is threatened by someone with a smart mouth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwvZoYcTIM

Don’t be a dead pigeon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVYSfw1oFVs

What. (via Fark)
https://marinepatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/octopus-gace30f713_1280-1024×551.jpg

Playground equipment of your dreams.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https://5.imimg.com/data5/SELLER/Default/2024/10/459728764/OB/ML/GC/225477435/octopus-rain-dance-1000×1000.jpeg

A musical world.
https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2026/02/rest-of-world-13-141.html

I like this young engineer couple, their many flying-machine projects, and their cute automatic division of labor. (The young man does the talking. They share the designing and constructing. The young lady almost always is the one to run down the grass hill with their latest test-craft on her shoulders or over her head and brute-force heave it forward into the air.) This one in particular. It’s a dual-rotor gyroplane. It almost works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAaTLm_BHn0

Comic model airplane mishaps.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/thivZIlI-HY

Autobiography of a talking Jeep.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/autobiography-of-a-jeep/

Maria Bamford: “Shotgun a diet Coke and do my positive affirmations.” (21 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0pB5gB5geQ

!!!
https://theawesomer.com/world-record-motocross-jump-pov/795743/
https://theawesomer.com/angine-de-poitrine-live-on-kexp/795790/

!!! (via Massimo) You might have to click the sound on.
https://x.com/i/status/2018633275129078067
https://x.com/i/status/2019654790985244732
https://x.com/i/status/2019654470238662698
https://x.com/i/status/2019650112750760354

2026/01/31

The Little Golden Book of the Dead.

… “Amidst the mists and fiercest frosts, with barest wrists, and stoutest boasts, he thrusts his fists against the posts, and still insists he sees the ghosts.” -Samuel Niles Sweet

…

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Rerun: The scene in Doctor Who when The Doctor and Amy take Vincent van Gogh to 2010 and show him an exhibit of his paintings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk

Art via My One Beautiful Thing.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/24/repost-mardi-gras-d-r-style/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/26/world-snow-sculpting-championship/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/27/enzo-prina/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/30/kelly-eldridge-boesch/

Art via This Isn’t Happiness.
https://visualdiplomacyusa.blogspot.com/2026/01/artist-of-day-january-28-2026-heike.html

Best aurora ever, to me, though I have no complaints about the ones seen from space.
https://bsky.app/profile/vincentledvina.bsky.social/post/3md3lm4pnkk2v

Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire in 1942 lately superimposed on Dean Martin singing Sway in 1953. I collect all the versions. Here are some someone else collected, to start you off. The first time I ever heard it was when Jennifer Connelly sang it in Alex Troyas’ film /Dark City/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtXmWW8f45I

A haunting short film about the Well of Death. Globes of Death are also spectacular. You don’t see either kind so much anymore. The kids grow up and leave the act, or the lion gets too old, or the whole carnival is arrested for drugs and prostitution, or podunk townspeople tar and feather the Zipper operator because its trailer wasn’t staked down properly and it fell over and squashed a crippled child. This is why we can’t have nice things.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/gladiators-on-wheels.html

Daddy’s home. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2016319061140111866

Photos from the anti-fascist pro-democracy demo in small town Fort Bragg, California earlier today (2026-01-31). They do this every Saturday at 11am.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/albums/72177720331767046/with/55070225512

Archivio Grafica Italiana. (via Kottke) Scroll down and down. And Isometric NYC. Try moving the little orange box around in the thumbnail.
https://www.archiviograficaitaliana.com/
https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/

A time-lapse of Toronto. A time-lapse of Mexico City.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-growth-of-toronto.html
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2026/01/a-visual-history-of-mexico-city-1300-to.html

This is just 650 light years from us. Practically across the street.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/26/dying-star-lights-up-the-helix-nebula.html

Agarta, land of advanced races.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-agartha-meme-himmlers-favorite-myth.html

No. You can’t.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/greenland.jpg

Sound. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbr7m1w-2Gk
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vyshHLXMGg4

Ah, yeah. That’s the stuff.
https://laughingsquid.com/lady-gaga-wont-you-be-my-neighbor/

“I cook like Betty Crocker and I look like Donna Reed.”
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/donna-reed-1950s-.html

Johnathan Pie – Terror In America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU7LOpQFOPQ

Sunday comix.
https://biblioklept.org/2026/01/25/sunday-comix-37/

“Squint harder!”
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/28/tom-the-dancing-bug-its-the-magas.html

That long-haired radical socialist Jew.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/01/liberal-thought.html

William S. Burroughs – Seven Souls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY5XJlDOzqE

Rerun: See these three girls? Close your eyes, then barely open them. Now what do you see? (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/pickover/status/2015429068313841901/photo/1

The Dutch angle.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-dutch-angle-explained-and.html

The Budapest Smile School.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/budapest_smile_school

Dance.
https://theawesomer.com/cdk-bohemian-rhapsody/795026/

Rerun: “Did you see the atomic bomb today?” “What atomic bomb?” “They had another atomic bomb. We saw it from the pool.” “Oh. Was it cool?” “Yeah. It kinda looked like a cordiceps fungus that grows up out of a zombie ant’s head.”
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2377852796027346

Four hours of CNN coverage of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, January 28, 1986. Before that happened, entirely unrelated except for being the same general subject, I launched a very big model rocket up out of the middle of the Albion Whale School, that all the kids stuck post-it notes of their names all over, and that had a screaming-loud electronic siren in the nose of, so to be able to find it in the woods later, which we did. This was all covered in a live broadcast from the little actual radio station in the end room on the trailer closest to the driveway, partly using interviews by a couple of kids running around with a cassette recorder. A VHS camcorder the size of a suitcase captured the rocket breaking up in the sky eerily similarly to what happened to the Challenger just a little bit later. My rocket was in November, I think, and had no casualties, then the Challenger was in January and blew up with seven of the smartest, best examples of people in the world in it. I remember all their names.
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13955466

Brazilian Seu Jorge sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese, just sitting on a park bench, playing guitar. (59 min.)
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/26/space-oddity-and-ziggy-stardust-sound-beautiful-in-portuguese.html

I like this version better than the original.
https://laughingsquid.com/purple-rain-harpejji/

But how should we live, Papa? Show us the way.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/30/man-dressed-as-duck-pours-milk-and-cereal-over-himself-in-subway-train.html

The history of the British Isles in maps. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k9utCpzF50

Dyson Wheeler, Lord of All Future Space and Time, that is, in the timeline that matters to us. (23 min.) (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBzepYD1b64

The disappearance of the Waratah.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2026/01/the-disappearance-of-waratah.html

One fleet carrier sunk, one destroyer sunk; 21,600 tons of fleet, ahem, tonnage destroyed, 150 aircraft destroyed, 3,400 brave young men wounded or killed, so that eventually these birds could be free to simply sit in the grass and enjoy a lovely day without having to knuckle under to Japanese hegemony.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=N2boID

The lady-in-the-pink-coat’s-eye view of just one more senseless psychotic-childish gruesome brutal Trump Brownshirt gang murder. You might have to click the sound on to get the full benefit of the exercise.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-video-taken-by-lady-in-pink-coat.html

“The American social contract… has an unusually high ceiling and an exceptionally lethal floor.” (via Miss Cellania) (You might have to click through an I-am-not-a-robot box.)
https://archive.is/IySMe#selection-219.0-219.62

Listen with headphones for the bunny’s gentle wheeze. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6GyeDQTZlk

A ten-minute introduction to Buckminster Fuller.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/27/a-10-minute-introduction-to-buckminster-fuller-patron-saint-of-techno-optimism.html

I don’t like the way this feels, but I can’t really explain why. One way that comes close is, the synesthesic smell of a fat man’s summer-bus-ride thigh in a sheer nylon stocking, but maybe I’m projecting. I dunno.
https://x.com/i/status/2016576593666126173

Try to look at any of these women for even just a short while without imagining them noticing you’re there, giving a single left-right head shake like a stork swallowing a fish, but swallowing a whole (peeled) hard-boiled egg, /then/ they look away. I don’t think you can do it. I think you’ll imagine it right away, go, /Shit!/, try again, fail again, see the humor in it and just give up. That’s how we’re made. That’s how people are.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/victor-stiebel.html
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/leonie-vernet.html

Miss Okra 1966 and also-rans. And Miss General Electric 1930. And… a company that made bombs for World War Two got to the end of the war and had warehouse full of bombs left over, and somebody in the office got an idea.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/miss_okra
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/miss_general_electric_1930
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_sky_rider_tricycle

A couple of heartwarming stories. (via Fark)
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13955694
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/01/26/18883506.php

The decor, and the colorful balls, remind me of the bowling match in an interdimensional bowling alley in outer space that the Legends of Tomorrow had to win to save the Earth. Here, the boy on the left got his genes from his father. The boy on the right, from his mother. I think I got most of mine from my grandmother. Skin texture, nose, eyes and eyebrow expression, hands, teeth, hair, nerves, posture, build, voice, attitude, pluck, health, etc. Though I often unconsciously default to treating Juanita in annoying ways my mother treated me, notice, and correct for it, my mother got a board-game-shark level of livelihood focus, not to mention house and car and personal tidiness, that I could never and will never even approach.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HbMr2m5XX60/maxresdefault.jpg

The problem with thinking things through is, if everybody thought everything through before starting, you’d never get half the really wonderful things in the world. A time-lapse blizzard and aftermath. And oh, dear. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/BunkStrutts/status/2014981803522834442 (You might have to scroll up when you get there.)
https://x.com/aether_coin/status/1609869093481635841
https://www.reddit.com/r/IveGotAGuy/comments/1qgjk0l/warming_a_car_with_a_construction_heater/ (This is the /oh, dear/ one.)

Personal weather control. (via Kottke)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYRrUiM_A6g

“Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2KfF846X8

Historical dartboards. (via Kottke) And all about darts.
https://darts501.com/Dartboards_Other.html
https://www.reddragondarts.com/pages/darts-all-you-need-to-know

The evil Mr. Vaccine. And. (via the Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/MrVaccine.jpg
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/weapon.jpg

Castle Rat – Wizard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWKmiTwjjHA

Books.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/ex_libris

A lot of neat old movies to watch for free.
https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/

I’ve been seeing clips of /Justified/ (6 seasons, started in 2010, then another series, same general idea but set in Detroit not Kentucky, started 2023), and I really like it and would like to see all of them now, partly because I had a friend back in school in the early 1970s named Randy, who the main character of this show, Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Oliphant, strongly reminds me of by the way he looks, but mostly by his canny drawl, and cowboy grace under pressure, calm competence. But that’s not what I brought this here to show you. It’s at the very beginning of this clip, where Boyd gets out of his car and swings the car door shut behind him as he’s walking away, with his hand around the edge of the door; he’s not looking, and he pulls his hand out at the very last instant before the door can shut on his fingers, and I hate that. Whenever someone shuts a car door like that in a teevee show or a movie, I can’t stand it. Stop that, do you hear? Everyone, stop doing that and never do it again. Do it nowhere in real life or in any show any more. And stop it playing over and over in my own head, if it’s no trouble for you, thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQeSteQAeUE

Mara Justine – Tennessee Whiskey. (via My One Beautiful Thing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za7mIOkuVUE

Just, wow. What a great school.
https://laughingsquid.com/kids-cover-mazzy-star/

What.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=900737939076347

Oprah Winfrey, Miss Fire Prevention 1971.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/oprah-winfrey-miss-fire-prevention.html

The merry-go-round broke down.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/26/this-is-dialing-the-calendar-back-a-bit/

The hidden pi-related secret in every triangle. Memorize this. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/2016872144248934727

At the particle dairy.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=RVPjq0

The Anukari physical modeling instrument.
https://theawesomer.com/anukari-3d-physics-synthesizer/795121/

Once Upon a Prime Time. (1966, 17 min.)
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/once_upon_a_prime_time

When That Man is Dead and Gone.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/when-that-man-is-dead-and-gone.html

2026/01/24

Hinged.

. “Be careful with that. It’s concentrated evil. One drop of that could turn you all into hermit crabs.”

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part. Having made a mistake the night before and lost a dozen links to material I had tagged to bring, exactly six hours into this show I began to read instead one long story about the end of everything, The Metric, by David Moles, from The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 6.

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

How we get a snow rose.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/snow-roses.html

Rerun: Josephine Baker, la sirène des tropiques.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/josephine-baker-siren-of-tropics.html

Horns, reeds and voice. You know who could sound like this when she was fifteen years old? Midnight, in a band called Surrender, at the old Mendocino Community School in the early 1980s. There were a lot of amazing kids there who went on to do great things.
https://theawesomer.com/brass-against-the-great-gig-in-the-sky/794286/

Jae Nichelle. And Mon Rovia.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/22/jae-nichelle/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/23/mon-rovia/

The mantises.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/01/mantis-squad.html

The Torment of Saint Anthony, by 12-year-old Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. With explanatory video. (via Miss Cellania)
https://www.openculture.com/2026/01/discover-michelangelos-first-painting.html

The torment of Janice Joplin.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/janis-joplin-newport-folk-festival.html

Scream of the forest.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2026/01/20/scream-of-the-forest/

How past trauma rewires the brain.
https://laughingsquid.com/people-who-have-endured-too-much/

A most realistic miniature fire. And a device to limber up a new or freshly repaired piano to make it fit for use. A journey all the way out, then all the way in, and back again. And a silent explanation of the Chicxulub asteroid mass extinction event. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://mudwerks.tumblr.com/post/805664742259687424/youve-never-seen-anything-like-this-the-most
https://www.reddit.com/r/toolgifs/comments/1q87jkg/piano_pounder/
https://x.com/i/status/2010804032273821806
https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2026/01/65-million-years-ago-this-is.html

Some suggestions for a theme song for the so-called law enforcement agency whose budget now eclipses the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service and U.S. Marshall Service all put together. I suggest the Monty Python theme music, and include the fart sound when the big foot comes down like Godzilla stomping Bambi. In fact, the working title for Sousa’s Liberty Bell March was The Devil’s Deputy. (via Fark)
https://www.fark.com/comments/13948810/ICE-needs-a-theme-song-I-nominate-Entry-of-Gladiators

“In this country it’s still not legal for masked goons to come up and demand to see your papers.” Alas, though, we’re at the Germany in the mid-1930s stage now.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/20/why-just-comply-is-terrible-advice.html

“By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs? 107-percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.” Ahem.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eUM7QBOWxgk

Have a good weekend.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MLxezUiiI0w

Adaptive improvements via destructive testing.
https://theawesomer.com/lego-cars-vs-bigger-and-bigger-loops/794358/

Juanita used to take me around in a store that had a dizzying variety of items not exactly like these but prompted the same sort of comic thoughts. You could play this game all day in there if you wanted to and had the time. I think it was called Ross. They also sold coats, shoes, mirrors, ladders, strange candy, kitchenware, and hassocks. They had a whole hassock aisle which was like a claymation studio’s city boulevard of office buildings made of stacks of all different shapes and sizes and colors and materials of hassocks, 1.5-foot upholstered padded cubes. Hassocks are the doughnut holes of the furniture world.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/54iYJGU6kK0

Couched in splendor. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://izismile.com/2026/01/13/couch_dumpsters_32_pics.html

Actual lyrics of Hocus Pocus.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/21/actual-lyrics-to-the-song-hocus-pocus-by-focus/

Two on one.
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/16/Two-Violinists-One-Violin/

Yes, again.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9357a284e4258393429b1e9733b03018

Development of Paris. (via Kottke)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFhKB5zHWFg

How we get screws. I had wondered.
https://theawesomer.com/how-one-person-runs-an-entire-factory/794867/

People who say, “The heck with doctors, just give me [herbs, accupuncture, prayer, etc.],” should look at things like this. In case you’re squeamish they blur out the /glove removal injury/. (That when the entire cooked flesh of a burn-victim’s hand tears loose.) Real doctors stand on the shoulders of hundreds of years of real medical science; they really know a lot more about keeping you alive and healthy than an energy massage therapist or a spirit medium or an astrology chart artist or any kind of preacher or homeopathic bullshit salesman or your confident angry uncle in the tinfoil-lined duck-bill cap.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/19/catch-up-on-the-pitt-with-a-real-doctors-reaction-videos.html

Spitfire Girl.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/jackie-moggridge.html

Promo for a new handmade stop-o-mation film. It looks pretty good.
https://theawesomer.com/wildwood-an-inside-look/794803/

Fake or news? It seems to be updating once a week.
https://devrel.wearedevelopers.com/live/play-fake-or-news

Keep in mind, looking at this, that our sun is 800,000 miles wide. All of Earth would only be a pixel or two on this image. Everyone’s big feelings and terrible problems and all.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/watch-three-solar-prominences-erupt-in-epic-video/

I remember seeing kids enjoying playing a game that was something like this, that involved a guitar-shaped plastic toy with four lighted buttons on it. This is a piano. I’d like to play this as a game, but it would need maybe dashed or other-color lines going all the way down to the keyboard from the note lines, so you could get your fingers ready in the right places. And you could slow it down and loop parts, to learn a song, get some musical muscle-memory. There, this week’s million-dollar idea.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/ludovico-einaudi-nuvole-bianche.html

“You’ll have a Japanese kimono, baby, there’ll be Italian shoes for me.”
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/1900s-european-women-in-kimonos.html

What Martin Luther King actually thought about car commercials, played over a car commercial.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/02/what-martin-luther-king-actually.html

Stevan Dohanos – Billboard Painters in Winter (1948) (via the Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/22Billboard-Painters-in-Winter22-by-Stevan-Dohanos-1948.jpg

Art via This Isn’t Happiness.
https://www.instagram.com/shunpei_kamiya/
https://www.instagram.com/m.r.mcgrath/
https://www.instagram.com/schoenberg.alexander/

When It’s Cold I’d Like To Die.
https://laughingsquid.com/when-its-cold-outside-id-like-to-die-moby-lusk/

A visualization of the speed of light over planetary distances. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/2013634068483608828

Nature or nurture? (via Christian Nightmares)
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:fpoqfbrfresygadnbydbw72v/post/3md22fdypxc2d

“You, there, fellow! I need to find a yellow-haired, orange-skinned despot with late-stage dementia!”
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/21/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-urgent-mission-of-percival-dunwoody-idiot-time-traveler-from-1909.html

A Virtual Boy, and a pirate queen. “She runs the confederation like a CEO with cannons. Nothing moves without her signature, injured pirates get health care, brave ones get bonuses, and the accounting is impeccable.”
https://theawesomer.com/how-the-nintendo-virtual-boy-worked-in-slow-motion/794359/
https://theawesomer.com/the-queen-of-the-most-powerful-pirate-fleet/794388/

Carl Sagan talks about dimensions. (via Cliff Pickover) (You might have to click the sound on.) And chemical cosmic art.
https://x.com/i/status/2013028096748720494
https://x.com/i/status/2013025855933452492

“You let one ant stand up to us, and they all might stand up!” (via Miss Cellania)
https://www.boredpanda.com/disney-deleted-thread-backlash/

Salt water.
https://x.com/i/status/2014571294944051573

Flying Magazine covers. (Scroll down and down.)
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/1950s-flying-magazine-covers.html

Waiting at a traffic light forever and there’s no-one else around? Don’t just go. Flash your lights, back up a little and pull up to the line again.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/19/why-some-traffic-lights-hate-you-and-what-to-do-about-it.html

A reforestation project. And a good dog. And the best ears. And trash dancing. (via Massimo) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/2013150181911376066
https://x.com/i/status/2013142579378823477
https://x.com/i/status/2013487076646305992
https://x.com/i/status/2014218758118686922

A trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek: Voyage To Vengeance!
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/01/quentin-tarantinos-star-trek-voyage-to.html

The human brain, a cathedral of circuits. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/pickover/status/2014724160698593407/photo/1

Desire.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dydrtgrqHwQ

What.
https://biblioklept.org/2026/01/20/on-the-way-to-athens-ludwig-schwarzer/

Earth-Moon relative size. Lunar mood. Golden age of teevee. Total eclipse of the sea. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/pickover/status/2013272817194668312

Who said it: Donald Trump or Martin Luther King Jr.?
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/who-said-it-donald-trump-or-martin-luther-king-jr

I have always said, why don’t they just art up a plastic mask the way they want their face to look, and just put it on when they leave the house and take it off when they get home? Or leave it on all the time if they want to. But they’d only have to touch it up once a week, or once a month. And they could make as many as they wanted, for like the difference between going to work and going to a dance club. Think of all the time and money and resources saved, and the health of your skin.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/beauty_calibrator

Supplement.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/books.html

How to be a decent person and not a complete wanka. (That’s how I’m spelling it now, forever.)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-to-not-sexually-harass-someone.html

And the motivational speaker’s askew moustache.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/know-your-motivational-speaker.html

2026/01/17

Traish LaRue and the machine elves.

. “And I need to stay with you this weekend. Not just stay with you, I need to be on lockdown. You were a pillhead, so think of Blade as Adderall, and handcuff me to the radiator like a motherflippin’ carnie-bangin’ werewolf. Take my phone, keep it away from me.” “I got this! I got this. My apartment has central heating, but I get the idea.” -Britta and Annie

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s 7.6-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part.

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Fireflies.
https://vimeo.com/858484344

Creative science.
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/12/Developing-the-Magic-Visual-Piano-And-Learning-to-Play-It/

Antique motorcycles and their real sounds idling. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2012015559504978150

Stunningly cute rocketcycles. Even the helmets! And the headlights! Put a soft-top on and you could ride these in the rain at night to a noodle shop in a Japanese neon district, and there would remain nothing for you to accomplish. It would be the one item on your rocket list.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo_zXe2UWKw

A trip on a rather more conventional motorcycle.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/14/my-ass-hurts-just-thinking-about-this/

Clear ice. (via Massimo) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/2011709588324987042

Further sidewalk art a present-day Mary Poppins might appreciate. (via Fark)
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1375398/people-floating.jpg

Photos from the anti-fascist pro-democracy protest in small town Fort Bragg, California earlier today (2026-01-17). They do this every Saturday at 11am, and they always get much better pictures than I know how to take. I don’t think it’s only the equipment. They just know how to do it.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/sets/72177720331503017/

The famous dance scene from The Kissing Bandit.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/dance-of-fury.html

Rerun: The problem of wind turbines.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/fun-with-turbines.html

The problem of security/surveillance systems being Netflix for stalkers…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

RFK coughs up a pair of jeans. Bleagh.
https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-coughs-up-pair-of-jeans/

Tensegrity. In your imagination the organic boinginess of it folding/snapping into shape is nice. It kinda makes you want to crush it. Probably I’m projecting. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2012276960676712872

Art.
https://vimeo.com/858484344
https://tackyraccoons.com/2026/01/12/trash-animals/
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/12/Developing-the-Magic-Visual-Piano-And-Learning-to-Play-It/

Papercraft art by Alley McGlynn. Scroll down and play the examples. The accordion-pleated seascape one! (via MyOneBeautifulThing) You don’t have to join Instagram to view them; if you’re asked to, you can close the asking window and it gets out of the way. This kind of art reminds me of making teevee shows with words and pictures when I was little, on a pencil-wound scroll of adding machine paper drawn past a square hole in a small cardboard box. It didn’t work the same way as these, but it felt the same: mysterious, clever, sufficient.
https://www.alleymcglynn.com/

Our love.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/love-among-scientists.html

Dixie on erhu, a Doctor Seussian instrument.
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/14/Dixie-on-a-Chinese-Erhu/

“This sick porphyry was yoinked out of a mountain in eastern Egypt.”
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/16/Art-Curator-Describes-Ancient-Urn-in-Gen-Alpha-Slang/

Further Terrence McKenna on DMT elves. With time-lapse art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tGPM7ZxgOM

Dance. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/sciencegirl/status/2009155547065696305

Dance.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/15/ricky-ubeda/

DNA break repair by homologous recombination /or/ McKenna’s machine elves?
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/dna-break-repair.html

What /are/ the machine elves?
https://www.monsterchildren.com/articles/what-are-the-machine-elves

Shame. Shame.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/10/this-analysis-doesnt-get-any-clearer/

Good vs. ICE.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/good-vs-ice.html

Shame.
https://qr.ae/pCcX4Q

And that explains it.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheInventionofAnarachism.png

Crabelona (Barcelona) magnet.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/16/these-things-always-hurt-my-brain/

Donald Trump infinitely clears his throat. I don’t know whether this was after or before he declared himself President of Venezuela and opened an account in Qatar to put his new money from the oil murder/piracy in.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/14/infinite-trump-clears-his-throat.html

Rerun: Stewart Lee. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtFJ1HT3gto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OLXzO1oK2w

How we get convoluted foam for packing products and lining household recording booths.
https://theawesomer.com/making-egg-crate-foam/793545/

Energy money. Another on the eternal conveyor belt of such tricks.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-rR2gGzTQGA

A relaxing vibrating brassiere.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10162789389210674&set=a.147416615673

Photos of Neil Armstrong’s parents watching him on the moon.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/neil-armstrongs-parents.html

Flying around inside a phone’s CPU chip that’s magnified 2,000,000 times.
https://theawesomer.com/flying-through-a-computer-chip/793665/

Ukrainian anti-aircraft measures. The few times here where a bazooka or a big stand-gun is used by a single man to knock down an aircraft, the universal-language exultant grunt /HYAH!/ exactly duplicates Malcolm Reynolds’ in the first three minutes of the Firefly pilot episode when he shoots an attacking ship down. /HYAH!/ That’s what I would say. Maybe with an R on the end.
https://www.twz.com/land/hellfire-armed-drone-killing-buggy-appears-in-ukrainian-service

The pilot episode of a 1963 teevee series about Alexander the Great, starring William Shatner. (51 min.)
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/12/behold-shatner-as-alexander-the-great-in-failed-1963-pilot.html

My favorite was the strawberry kind. That might have been my lesson of learning that, with some things, using too much doesn’t make it better. With most things, just a little bit more than they tell you to works best: garlic, cheese, epoxy, thread, magnification, and so on. Not motor oil, though; you can destroy your motor by overfilling. Look up why, so you really remember. Also never stupidly put even a drop of motor oil in the brake fluid reservoir. I found that out.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/follies_of_the_madmen_638

Well worn things, often next to new ones, for contrast. (via BoingBoing) Scroll down and down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellworn/

Fifteen enjoyable minutes of Louis C.K.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHgQ-IGUmKk

Pretty good new Riders On the Storm.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/riders-on-storm.html

Two cats, two theremins.
https://laughingsquid.com/two-cats-two-theremins/

A short film using an animation/art style I’ve never seen before, about the lives, if you can call it that, of World War One soldiers patched up with replacement parts cut off dead soldiers. (30 min.) (I just read, real-life rich people are paying plastic surgeons now to plump up parts of their body with fat /from corpses/. It has to be rich people because it’s only almost legal so it costs $100,000. But I mention it because this is like that.)
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/13/stop-motion-ww1-horror-animation-is-the-coolest-thing-ive-seen-all-week.html

Good openers.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qJ8y6l5OhkA

And nature red in tooth and claw, Milady. Red in black-and-white is black; that might be what they meant to be going for here. I haven’t seen or heard from my old Dark Age Productions friends in a long while, but they made black-and-white slasher movies. They tried various formulations of red liquids, of course, but nothing worked at all as well as regular cheap chocolate syrup.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vv6ahdAhr-g

2026/01/10

Respect mah authoritah!

. “Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.” -Tacitus

. “A lot of life is about trying to repress the little fascist in each one of us.” -Michel Foucault

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s 7.3-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part.

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

The drop that contained the sea.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/09/christopher-tin/

The shark that bites perfect circles. (via Kottke)
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-finally-figured-out-the-shark-that-bites-perfect-circles-2000704853

Practical Motorist Magazine covers. (Scroll down and down.)
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/1950s-practical-motorist-magazine-covers.html

Some photos of a pleasant protest in small-town California, just around the corner from KNYO.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/sets/72177720331381243/

Abolish ICE.
https://kottke.org/26/01/abolish-ice

New hotline to report ICE activity in Mendocino County.
https://mendovoice.com/2026/01/new-hotline-launches-to-report-ice-activity-in-mendocino-county/

Murder frame by frame.
https://www.tiktok.com/@perezbrenna/video/7592745143057386766

Shame. Shame.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/10/this-analysis-doesnt-get-any-clearer/

The Mitchell Trio.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=dmhgcC5dYkE

Ayahuasca. Two views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaLs2Q2aROE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_u0reE6bjI

“Gwan out there, doll. Show ’em whatcha got.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_ji8oXNZYUo
https://theonion.com/kristi-noem-calls-fatal-minneapolis-shooting-cathartic/

Animated graphic of oil reserves by nation. For the short of attention span, skip ahead to about 2005 and go from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67KcaChD4XA

Transitioning seamlessly from Old English to New Jersey English.
https://laughingsquid.com/old-english-modern-american-english-monologue/

Wish You Were Here as it might have been played by Stevie Ray Vaughn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC0sRALcl14

Jonas Wolf’s madrigalizations.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/05/jonas_wolf/

Landslide if it were about landslides.
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/05/A-Literal-Version-of-Fleetwood-Macs-Landslide/

Oh! Scroll down (out). This project fills me with awe.
https://words.zip/

“Worn with or without corsets, fit any figure, adapt themselves to every movement as a part of oneself. A grateful support to mothers. In bathing they cannot be detected, buoy the wearer and make swimming easy.”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/pneumatic_bust_forms

Lounge version of Heroes.
https://laughingsquid.com/pmj-sara-niemietz-david-bowie-heroes/

Toy collector Tim’s guest plays a childish trick on him that makes me cough to see.
https://youtu.be/CHWHXmLg7YE

Fart. Spray.
https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2026/01/i-can-relate-to-this-in-so-many-ways.html

Ahem. Though, to be fair, if you take a random moment out of any asshole’s life you can get this sort of thing. Just with him it’s most moments, dozens of moments per hour, exhausting the chronicler.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mbrbzqxhff2w

Respect mah authoritah!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKJprZqU_oU

“But /I’m/ running Venezuela now.”
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/07/tom-the-dancing-bug-a-calvinesque-and-hobbesian-look-at-invading-venezuela.html

Philippine Airlines, the heart of the Filipino.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkTBuEx-ek

Rerun: Nina Conti – Her Master’s Voice. (Full film, one hour.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL2-kmLqizU

Cross your eyes slightly to superimpose the images. The image’s apparent translational motion stops. I didn’t expect that. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/2007903108505203053

How we get the Mariana Trench. Once again I read Mariana Trench and thought, /Isn’t it Marianas Trench?/ Fun fact: it’s both. Either one is good. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2008049547176825280
https://x.com/i/status/2009511923356979623

In my day. (via AVA)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/GoodOldDaysOfCIA.jpg

Why kindness is often overlooked for cruelty. (3 min.)
https://laughingsquid.com/kindness-vs-cruelty/

My Strange Grandfather.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2018/01/my-strange-grandfather.html

I like a lot of the befores better than the afters. And I don’t like the acrid smell-memory these images bring. But look, it makes them so happy, so why not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gga4PKfaExU

How your nasal equipment works. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2008062314621308967

Viktoria Brooksby – Bingo Bango Bongo.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7Vinx4WXEVE

Christian Nightmares of 2025. A bilious assortment.
https://christiannightmares.substack.com/p/the-scariest-christian-nightmares-375

Jump Cut, a short, tense film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93J6bheO-x4

A poem about a retirement plan that bounces between wildly unrealistic (“I will hang glide”) and likely and doable (“I will smoke weed all day”).
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/retirement-plan.html

Last week there were the antique ads for special hooch with added vitamins and meat juice (!) for lonely, listless British housewives. I don’t know why it didn’t remind me of this immediately, but the nickel finally dropped:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x4Uk7qWRR8

A funny dance.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/seaside-dance.html

Twelve-hour photoshoot.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2026/01/08/nika-ritshel/

A photo of J.K. Rowling, on welfare, in a cafe in 1998 when her child, not shown here, was five years old, while she’s writing her first Harry Potter book on legal pads with a pencil, before she became an international pariah for having a personal opinion and being famous at the same time so people know what it is.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/jk-rowling-writing-harry-potter-at-cafe.html

Physical training for business men. (via Juanita)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/physical-training-for-business-men-1917/

A common exam for eighth graders in November of 1912.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/1912-eighth-grade-exam.html

Misaligned sensors.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/A0akS_oz4bg

My favorite is the hendecagon, the 11-sided polygon. The tune it makes sounds like one you’d get with an old synthesizer and sequencer. Also this is a great way to memorize the circle of fifths, as well as use it in a sentence.
https://boingboing.net/2025/01/11/if-you-want-a-good-time-rotate-polygons-on-a-circle-of-musical-notes.html

Dynamo hum, still. (via Fark)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Central_hidroel%C3%A9ctrica_de_Walchensee,_Kochel,_Baviera,_Alemania,_2014-03-22,_DD_04.JPG/1280px-Central_hidroel%C3%A9ctrica_de_Walchensee,_Kochel,_Baviera,_Alemania,_2014-03-22,_DD_04.JPG

Steam. (via b3ta) (For the short of attention span, skip ahead to 4:50.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R331o_Ar56s

Art. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2008775153296306581
https://x.com/i/status/2007683408709763090
https://x.com/i/status/2008050249970106762
https://x.com/i/status/2008070966828728476
https://x.com/i/status/2007863290408427692
https://x.com/i/status/2008785671948038353
https://x.com/i/status/2008776409452368249

Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/sarahtheresalee/
https://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2026/01/each-night-i-drown-in-pool.html
https://www.instagram.com/stephenmackey_artist/
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTQmEUnjk7d/

Art. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/japanese-firemans-coats-19th-century/

Art. Art. Art. Art.
https://theawesomer.com/fascinating-magnetic-vibrations/793125/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAQ2tkY5aow
https://youtu.be/Y4xpDSSXbak?si=FBoGpp2yigWpwFMX
https://www.neatorama.com/2026/01/08/Enjoying-and-Understanding-Tessellation-Art/

Art. “One night I looked out of the window and saw it approaching from the deep blind sky.”
https://dangerousminds.net/history/a-short-vision-how-to-make-a-cartoon-about-nuclear-war-pic/

Good for klompen, sure, but also for sabotage.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2026/01/05/what-these-are-for/

Homemade calliope made of soprano and alto recorders.
https://theawesomer.com/homemade-calliope/793010/

Sewing machine treadle-operated hurdy gurdy. (via Juanita) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1596221861396274

How to adjust your 1914 sewing machine’s foot.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BFSfktIjWd8

How to pass a coin into the Other World and bring it back.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GpvarDiK8yU

Installing Windows thirty years ago.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/the-28-installation-disks-of-windows-95.html

Confucius vs Qin Shi Huang.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/ConfuciusvsQinShiHuang.png

On its way spearing through the car it took her earring off.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/close_call

3JOH-ZZA. FAFOMF. LVTOFU. PENGU. (via Fark)
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/florida/2026/01/07/these-license-plates-were-too-obscene-for-florida-in-2025-heres-the-full-list

Roads of the Roman Empire.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/roads-of-roman-empire.html

The wages of wishes.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2026/01/trevi-fountain.html

I’d think friction and inertia would impossiblize this. Maybe the top hub is power-assisted. Click on the image for video.
https://theawesomer.com/riding-a-25-wheel-unicycle/793054/

Fishing in Kazakhstan. (via Miss Cellania) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DS90qIvjDLr/

The Dombay zorb disaster.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/06/this-zorbing-ride-without-safety-was-just-falling-with-extra-steps.html

Rerun, with video (trailer): The first flying saucer film is not what you think.
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/the-flying-saucer-75-year-anniversary

The deal with pedestrian crossing buttons.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/06/the-truth-about-pedestrian-crossing-buttons.html

This pleasant voice uses an accent set on, say, one or two, where the Thing Fish narrator’s voice used that same accent turned up to forty. I like both. And you can do this exercise with any accent. Pick one at random and try it. Try it with your own accent. Try it with the accent of the Central Scrutinizer in Joe’s Garage.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iSBNriU-Rb4

The disturbing true origin of Peter Pan.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-curse-of-peter-pan.html

Techish delight. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2009164799243096407

The best video-screen watch face I’ve seen yet. (For this demo it’s sped up 5400 times.)
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjakEdtr6xCWnM6MGKMMZW6T4n3awgQO5bfhbg6WmCMmCqHc28TujJgPnMcvjIvKRO9qf-yjDeeVX3yHJj7ue4SIksoqHTNv4O_UxqwPoXm2PvqnRnQpJOHmKQ5g-oEXsFjZvG39apsa4w/s300/peterfromtexas_magnified_watch.gif

Egg. Especially the one with the fern feathers.
https://www.vintag.es/2026/01/tom-brigance.html

Rockabilly gayageum (Korean zither).
https://bitsandpieces.us/2026/01/06/fantastic-rendition-on-a-korean-gayageum/

Rerun: Playable chart of examples of every musical genre. Give it some time to load, then scroll down and down and choose whatever catches your eye. (via b3ta)
https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

The Nuuttipukki. Come on, come on, doooooo the Nuuttipukki with me.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/nuuttipukki/

Meet Emily. Feel free to squeeze her to determine freshness. She doesn’t mind. See? She’s fine with it. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2009522181235941702

Future scooter girls on future scooters. And a vast gallery of related material to arrow through. (Alphonse Marcel, via Tacky Raccoons)
https://fb.watch/EtQiAmzA_X/
https://fb.watch/EtQlcree86/
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1180182597430489&set=a.441013158014107

“He knows that he’s always welcome to come in. He knows where his nuts are kept.”
https://laughingsquid.com/squirrel-visits-every-day/

At the Ceremony of the Secret, the child is told. A moment passes for realization, and the photograph is taken. This is the way it has always been, and this is the way it will be. (Before the advent of photography a sketch artist was employed.) They don’t always cover their face and moan. Sometimes they lash out, toss the tray tables, claw the curtains and do themselves and others an injury. Sometimes they run screaming out into the night and are found the next morning sleeping in the crotch of a tree or huddled shivering in a ditch. Sometimes they simply don’t get it, can’t grasp it, it makes no sense to them and they look around like, So? Those are the ones who are chosen for a special task.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2359085101237449&set=gm.4381797225368457&idorvanity=1427425394139003

And Amsterdam. It looks so much more wonderful than any city I’ve ever visited or lived in, and I’ve been all over the United States except the Bible Belt. Maybe, though, there are seamy sections of Amsterdam that we’re not shown here, where unfortunates shuffle through gray shadows amid mountains of rat-infested garbage, pushing shopping carts of all their worldly possessions and a chihuahua in soiled baby clothes. Nah.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2026/01/amsterdam-in-royal-motion.html

2026/01/03

Animal make-believe town.

. “What if I were to tell you that I have actual magical medical powers and I’m prepared to apply them to your present wretched condition and return you to the robust health of your youth. In return? Why, I will simply require full whimsical use of your body, like a puppet, for approximately one hour per day, Sundays off, and two hours on Tuesdays, that’s all. More than fair, because I’m not asking. Ready?”

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Ads for housewife wine. Before: “It’s all right for him… He goes off in the morning– and you can see he’s anticipating the bustle, the life, his day will bring… Problems to sort out, people to talk to, have a joke with. Lunch with his friends. Then back to his work, absorbed and interested, until it’s time to come home… but all you have is an empty house. And the same dull round of household tasks. There are times when the thought of it takes the heart out of you…” After: “That’s better. That’s lovely.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-4963470/Vintage-ads-reveal-tonic-wine-housewives-friend.html

Rerun: Palindromes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUQDzj6R3p4

Audition photos for The Addams Family. They were pretty sure about John Astin but they could have gone in any direction for everybody else.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/addams-family-auditions.html

“My insurance company? New England Life, of course. Why?”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/new_england_life_insurance_ads

The dogs of 2025.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-dogs-of-2025.html

“It’s smart to stay slim and trim with Domino’s Pure Cane Sugar. Domino’s, for pep and vitality!” (via the Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/domino.jpg

Art.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/12/27/repost-anti-photorealism/
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_dynamic_sculptures_of_jakob_grosse_ophoff
https://www.reuters.com/pictures/most-stunning-pictures-space-2025-2025-12-17/

A.I. film-making art. Woodnuts. (10 min.)
https://theawesomer.com/woodnuts-sci-fi-ai-short-film/792693/

Fashion.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/1960s-young-women.html

The Tweaker Geographic channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@Tweakergeographics

The Lego-like machinery that powers a single one of up to a hundred propellers on a single bacterium. Every human body has 30 to 40 trillion bacteria living in and on it. That amounts to quadrillions of these whirling machines… In fact, several pounds of bacteria live inside your belly. Some people have more, much more. In his last days, John Wayne’s colon weighed fifty pounds! Think of the entire hot galaxy of busy activity in there! (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1142837932388167685

Dance. Via Massimo. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/2006375383093084329

Dancers. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/826770476648761
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1861003937866483

Stunningly beautiful imaginary dancers. (Sound.)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1521254962477250

Old movie tricks. You might not already know all of these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TunR4zCQ5Fk
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LSrNBzLW4FE

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, the 2010 version with missing scenes restored and 1980s-like soundtrack added (Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant, Pat Benatar, Freddie Mercury, Loverboy.) (via PerfectForRoquefortCheese)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfvXGbvtVZc

The Wizard of Oz and Other Trans Love Trips (full 1967 record album).
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_wizard_of_oz_and_other_trans_love_trips

Woes of Oz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfWNUW1wTXw

A video essay on the film Return To Oz, essayist Zane Whitener’s pick for most faithful representation of the Oz of the books.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnXjqhzbY1w

1922 Häxan.
https://dangerousminds.net/movies/haxan-how-a-silent-documentary-invented-the-jump-scare-pic/

1976 Let My Puppets Come.
https://dangerousminds.net/pop-culture/let-my-puppets-come-the-batshit-crazy-1976-porn-movie/

“Advertise on Potato News today!” (via Fark)
https://www.potatonewstoday.com/2025/12/21/age-of-the-potato-why-2026-may-mark-the-start-of-a-new-global-chapter-for-the-worlds-most-underestimated-crop

“A public, verifiable record of immigration enforcement activity in the United States. It documents incidents, agencies, individuals, facilities, vehicles, and legal authorities involved in enforcement operations. Entries are structured, sourced, and timestamped to support verification, cross-referencing, and long-term analysis. The wiki is intended for use by journalists, researchers, advocates, and the general public.”
https://wiki.icelist.is/index.php

“Aww, she’s no fun, she fell right over.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXR6kqwfrac

Rerun: Clever vizier’s adviz.
https://x.com/pickover/status/2006068453392957506/photo/1

Salvador Dali’s disturbing jewelry design.
https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2025/12/living-flower-13-036.html

Life in ruins. (via This Isn’t Happiness) (Scroll down and down.)
https://www.instagram.com/jahzdesignoff/

How we get potato chips.
https://x.com/i/status/2006301025804702178

A Rage Against the Machine tribute band features a Nicolas Cage impersonator lead singer.
https://laughingsquid.com/nick-cage-against-the-machine/

Rerun: Abed releases his Nicolas Cage studies. (I wondered if outtakes from this scene exist, and I found a short reel, but lost it and can’t find it again. If you can, please point me to it.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqDX6wF3BLc

Rerun: Animated Isle of Wight postcards. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP5nMJFN3bg

Friends. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmsL_OOW6BE

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Stimmung. “YouTube comments seem to be split between those who love it and those who think it’s just an hour of weird noises.” Why not both?
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/stimmung

1.5 hours of Cuban Jazz, courtesy of Craig Louis Stehr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klO7uD3EzRY&list=RDklO7uD3EzRY&start_radio=1

Carolina Eyck on theremin. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2005252390388154581

Alison Krauss and Robert Plant – Don’t Let Go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPZ575AC3wQ

A cappella!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN8yGq9GfuM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbIBT8AylT0
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/stimmung

Rerun: The cup song video director’s cut. I love this. The coordination, all the people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSbXsFE3l8

The robot mimics the man’s movements in close to real time, but its orientation subtly accumulates change, resulting in comic mishap.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/28/teleoperated-robot-kicks-controller-in-the-nuts.html

She’s considering swallowing an egg, for you to watch. She has to be careful, though. She doesn’t know you. You could be anybody. You could be some kind of pervert.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/gunila.html

How the lunar rover worked.
https://theawesomer.com/how-the-lunar-rover-worked/792513/

What we know about the atmosphere and surface of Venus, and how we know it, thanks to the Soviet space program. Late in the video: pictures, sound. Sound on Venus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_iTuvomj0Y

The Documerica Project. With 52 min. video. (via Fark)
https://petapixel.com/2025/12/30/a-largely-unknown-1970s-photo-project-captured-over-80000-images-of-american-pollution/

Peter, Paul and Mary – Animal Make-Believe Town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfcBwtneijw

You kids don’t know but there were these little pads of paper called checks, that you got from the bank for free, and you used them to pay rent, phone bill, almost everything. You couldn’t just write any number of dollars you’d like on them. You had to keep track and never go down below the amount in your account, and you had to think ahead /forever/ because of assholes who didn’t need the money so they only cashed your check when they got around to it, which could be months away. /Or/ you could use the ledger at the back of the pad to write down the money you used and subtract it, and subtract it, and subtract it, and add to it when you deposited money. You’d forget once in awhile, or make a mistake, or not get paid on time, run it down too far, and the check you wrote would be bad, and you’d find out when they shut your electricity or gas or phone off, plus when you straightened things out they’d apply an overdraft fee, so your next check would bring you below zero again and be bad, so.* On the plus side, if you ever panicked and needed to know where you stood, you could /phone the bank and ask them/. An employer I had once ran the whole business into the ground and was so flustered at our attitude about this that she gave me a blank check, no amount written in (!), and vanished; she owed me $600 for work done. This was early in 1992. I called her bank’s phone computer to ask if a check for 600 from her account would be good, punched in the account numbers on the desk phone, pressed 6-0-0; bank computer said no. I called every day for a few weeks. No. And no. And no. It occurred to me to ask about a much smaller amount and work my way up; so one day when a $400 check would work, I figured that was enough, went to the bank and cashed it for that; close enough. What else about checks… let’s see… I know a man who got through tough times in college in the 1960s by kiting checks between banks. I don’t remember if he had to go to jail or not. I still pay my rent with a check every month. You have to buy them now, they’re not free anymore. Oh, and one time I tried to cash a Bank of America check in a Bank of America and they wouldn’t cash it because I didn’t have an account there, which, how does that make sense? The man who gave me the check had an account there. A check is a promise to pay from a bank. That was the bank. I’ve told you that story before.
https://x.com/pickover/status/2007147484838277434

*Rerun: A young Louis C.K. describes the overdraft process in 2004.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3jLufZx3IM

When I’m reading and working on my projects, I’m alone, busy with what’s happening in my own head, and when I’m at Juanita’s place, sometimes I’m reading and doing things and she’ll come into the room or walk past or just shake her head at something she’s reading or doing, and I jump and kind of scream, or inhale some spit and have a coughing fit. She loves this. She’s laughing and apologizing for startling me. This is a kind of humor that she appreciates: where a guard in a story is crept up on from behind by a massive monster, notices something off about the feel of the world, says, “Hm?” to himself, and the monster steps on and flattens him. But I can tell her a story of something like that happening in the news for real and she’ll become angry because I forgot to never tell her a story like that because /it makes her cry/. She’s not angry at me but at herself for not impressing upon me properly /last time/ to never, never tell her a story like that again. I’m sorry, I say, I’m sorry, I’ll try to remember, and I really try, but… I’m pretty sure it’s safe to show her this horse, though. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/12/how-horse-thinks.html

Rerun: Paraphernalia. On the way to visit Juanita’s family on Tuesday, we stopped at a dollar store in Vacaville (literally Cow Town) to get sunglasses because, although it was cloudy, it was weirdly painfully bright, and we were in her car so all I had was my phone, my wallet, my keys and an orange. While in the store, I found, amid the Bibles and Bible-story coloring books, a hardbound graphic novel by the artist who did this award-winning animation for a school project:
https://vimeo.com/23110704

In fact, Juanita has been following Sabrina Cotugno’s webcomic series /The Glass Scientists/ from the beginning. The whole run, starting in 2015, is available to read on the web for free, and I think it’s ongoing. (Three books so far, which those who prefer real books might appreciate as a gift.)
https://www.theglassscientists.com/comic/chapter-i

More gauze.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/homeo.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox2PhldUNC8

I like to watch machinists work.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BohSEEAPavg

Look up the phrase “not even wrong”.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S7Xt9z9leEo

Human-written, A.I.-rendered short film.
https://theawesomer.com/woodnuts-sci-fi-ai-short-film/792693/

A familiar game. (via Massimo) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/2007015239242674430

And, “Aw, gee, Ma. All I ever get to do is planetary rings.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x3RRrqJWKA

2025/12/27

The pain of space.

. “She turned her back to him again. Luci could never bear to watch him Under-the-wire. She tossed the wiresphere into the air. It caught in the force field, and hung there. Suddenly it glowed. That was all. All, except for the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his senses. Coming back, across the wild threshold of pain.“

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

An hour-and-a-half of our cosmic-3D-printed pretty good Earth from space, all conditions and times of day, most shots including aurora activity. (via Nag On The Lake)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cKkyK8sLEM

Yes, we’ll have the extra-large Jupiter pizza, please. To eat here.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G9IcD76XcAAb2wU?format=jpg&name=small

Rare photographic evidence of elves and sprites hooking up. Elves: /Emission of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources/. Sprites: not an acronym.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/12/21/Photographic-Evidence-of-Elves-and-Sprites/

Rerun: Hogfather, for teevee, is a story in three one-hour episodes, where Death and his granddaughter Susan must save the world (Discworld) from a secret society of grim authoritarians who are out to eliminate the human tendency to believe in abstract ideas in general by eliminating belief in the Hogfather, Discworld’s Santa. His sleigh is drawn by pigs. I saw Terry Pratchett speak once, just at the end of his ability to be in public, after the announcement of his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. He came to Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma and talked about writing, to a roomful of fans beatific to just be in the same room with him.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=ELqucHWd1Ab2ib4GDZq8NjzA

Video of the time Hunter Thompson made the mistake of putting his old Xmas tree in the fireplace. It doesn’t matter how cold you are, don’t do it. Burn almost anything else. An Xmas tree in the fireplace is a firebomb. It’s a cordless caveman plasma cannon.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/12/hunter-s-thompson-sets-his-christmas.html

The best yule log video ever. Though an abstract fire salamander-creature scene made of flames would be cool too. Try it with Canva or one of the others.
https://kottke.org/24/12/nasas-rocket-engine-fireplace

Barry Petchesky’s annual article, /What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?/ The usual items, of course, including a Nick Fury action figure. A light bulb, a Christmas ornament. A broken-off plastic coat-hanger. Pop and shampoo bottles. Not phones, though, so much, anymore, they’ve gotten too wide. Here:
https://defector.com/what-did-we-get-stuck-in-our-rectums-last-year-6

The asteroid belt is not circular. It’s a triangle of particles concentrated somewhat in the corners. And it’s that way because Jupiter contains more than two-thirds of all the mass in our solar system, that isn’t in the star. The corners are Trojan points relative to Jupiter and the star. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/557fwg/animation_showing_hildas_and_trojans_orbiting_the/

The SlappyFeatherWhistle Nose-Flute Ensemble. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/slappyfeatherwhistle_nose_flute_ensemble

Cut the Cake and Pick Up the Pieces clearly go together. I didn’t know AWB were Scottish. Funky Scots.
https://laughingsquid.com/average-white-band-funk/

Two weeks ago’s Tacky Raccoons Saturday music matinee.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/12/20/saturday-matinee-skayway-krakin-kellys-joe-bonamassa/

Speaking of which, my favorite holiday rerun: SNL. The Singing Sisters. After all the times, I have memorized it and talk and sing along with it, enjoying every part of it, especially when the actor has trouble opening the woman’s purse and reads his line out of sequence with the action, it’s very satisfying, and the end, what the bartender says to them as he sprinkles the fairy dust, that I won’t spoil for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSBpvh4y_lU

How we get real leather footballs, LED fairy lights, and glass reactor vessels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjqpU1gtkXU
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UCFy8ditdaE
https://theawesomer.com/how-glass-reactor-vessels-are-made/792036/

A startling short fantasy film showing the life cycle of wild salmon but in human form to give perspective.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/12/wild-summon.html

Human morality. A chart.
https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2025/12/26

No. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2003844697857695913
https://x.com/i/status/2003869025080619295
https://x.com/i/status/2003770123195170837

Our third thing we did on Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UMDj145bHA8

So clever! Instead of shaving and misshaping the door, or chiseling the frame and resetting the door.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TcIjPPrwX4U

Fun colorful dances. The Seaweed Sisters.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/12/21/repost-friday-follies/

Why and how to dance. Scroll down and down. (via Fark)
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/19/nx-s1-5232811/think-you-cant-dance-get-up-and-try-these-tips-in-our-comic-we-dare-you

Auroras make sounds. Not just radio static that a radio receiver turns into sound, but actual sounds that people can hear, or say they can. Like sand through an hourglass, but also sometimes a faint lisping thumph.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/12/listening-to-auroras.html

If Staying Alive were written in the 16th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zGf7_YL70M

On this day 21 years ago.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/12/on-this-day-21-years-ago.html

“What you see is a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex which creates happiness. You’re looking at happiness.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MEemlp8CLzw

“All carrots must point due north, otherwise the stew loses its sense of direction.” If the sound won’t play, try another browser. For some reason this one confused my Firefox. Chrome worked, and Edge, and Brave.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1911217652807421

And a movie and teevee playlist for questioning the nature of reality. Check off the ones you’ve seen. As I write, the list is up to 117, and I’ve seen 70 of them, evenly spaced across the ratings. How many have you?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1DaJ82KdPOKsvM3_JRDBHVgjL0cS4pa5uewPy9-vGNj4/htmlview

The cutest aeroplane. It looks like a toy cartoon character.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/stits-sa-2a-sky-baby/nasm_A19730248000

The Hofstadter Chaotic Heart Sequence. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/pickover/status/2002878897260482716

The Black Dog – Spanners (full album).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czqr-uCAD3I

The Ransom of Red Chief.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuONfQg-17Y

Arrowhead lake. (via Fark)
https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/3b0f434/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3680×2454%2B0%2B0/resize/2720×1814!/format/webp/quality/90/

A compilation of Wallace and Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7gdWIY9R4s

Ravel’s Bolero on modified Commodore Sixty-fours.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/23/maurice-ravels-bolero-arranged-for-commodorchestra.html

I don’t believe in Jesus, but I sure do like his songs. And Alison Krauss’ nose.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/12/yo-yo-ma-alison-krauss-wexford-carol.html

Two from BitsAndPieces.
https://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/465015016_10236918377643710_5219218292848834472_n.jpg
https://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/467158706_10237313394438883_9152637712895154117_n.jpg

Arts and crafts. Copper.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pKOf2-tuVRs

Restoring a beautiful old television set. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/2003024063426621706

Restoring a beautiful old toy pedal car.
https://theawesomer.com/restoring-a-vintage-studebaker-pedal-car/791815/

Further bicycle parkour.
https://theawesomer.com/wibmer-impossible-freestyle-urban-mtb-ride/792297/

Deceptive title, good story, pretty good lesson.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5me_PlECi84

“What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on, it won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense & completely wrecks one’s entire frame. This means, in terms of my life, making a point of buying about six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual, and going home. No doubt in terms of yours it means seeing your house given over to hoards of mannerless middle-class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.” -Philip Larkin
https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/what-do-i-want-for-christmas

A typing machine.
https://laughingsquid.com/courtesy-email-automaton/

The restroom? It’s just down the hall and then to the right. (via Fark)
https://img.izismile.com/img/img15/20240213/640/daily_picdump_4581_640_high_56.jpg

World made of math. (via Massimo) Silent.
https://x.com/i/status/2004209081733861557

Art.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YYsMHttbhsA

Art via This Isn’t Happiness.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSq4-tTkaxa/

Art via Everlasting Blort. Scroll down and down.
https://www.instagram.com/kirstyelson/

Papercraft art. A werewolf boy’s transformation.
https://laughingsquid.com/boy-to-werewolf-illustration/

Ice installations, marvelous. (via Nag On The Lake)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/marvelous-ice-installations

I am a sucker for any part of Iceland from the air.
https://laughingsquid.com/iceland-4k-drone-footage/

Reruns: America, fuck, yeah. Bed, Bath and Beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfsE1rtkUQ
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZbXA4lyCtqqvFkPOanCSuVFUhazCqweO

Subtitles in history.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/12/25/an-oldie-but-goodie-on-saddams-forces/

Dramatic animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tiMBOgYq0E

Those lips, those eyes. (via Fark)
https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/9465ead/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2832×1890%2B0%2B0/resize/2720×1816!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https://assets.apnews.com/1b/de/ffd7b2b4418e9f6d088c6c096589/59dbbe273c774ed59e56a3fc1b9ac8d6-1765959355679.jpg

Robot voice praises fancy pigeons.
https://laughingsquid.com/rare-and-beautiful-pigeons-in-world/

Old cars and how they were operated, on the way to finally making cars that anyone who can operate a toaster can drive.
https://laughingsquid.com/top-gear-first-car-with-modern-layout/

Aftermath of a 1914 train wreck. Click on the image to enlarge and sharpen. Keyboard arrows navigate.
https://www.shorpy.com/node/27861

It’s a metaphor.
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13919768

The Windshield Wiper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIvoPK-1t5w

And an unsolicited plug for Mary’s Gone Crackers. I have one right here. They’re expensive, so we can’t have them often, but Juanita can eat them and they don’t make her sick (they have no gluten), but I just now realized that they’re close to my childhood experience enjoying week-old hard stale Italian seedy, nutty bread in my grandparents’ restaurant, really crunching my teeth through serious resistance, like wrecking a popsicle stick with pliers. Crack-crunch! This sounds like I’m making fun of the product, I know, but I’m not, I mean it. They are as good as perfect stale hard Italian bread when you’re sitting on the floor in a busy commercial kitchen making a small city of rocketships and dinosaurs out of old pizza dough, adults whirling around and over and past you, bright steam and fire and noise and activity and talking, talking, talking.

2025/12/20

A Natalie Is Freezing Xmas.

. “Sometimes I feel that the biggest threat to humanity is information collapse: Our collective epistemology (the way we know what’s true) is fragmenting, eroding our capacity for shared understanding and coordinated action. Humanity is becoming like an ant colony that’s lost its pheromone trails (or the pheromones are counterfeit). Each ant races with purpose, yet the colony itself no longer knows where it’s going. Like ants in a disturbed nest, we scatter in every direction, mistaking noise and anger for signal, and mistaking frenzy for purpose.” –Cliff Pickover

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s almost eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part. This time, Clifford Allen Sanders, 95 now, who’s written a hundred stories, many of them collected in both published and yet-unpublished books, and all of them read on previous MOTA shows, phoned in from an assisted living facility in Oregon a little more than 50 minutes into the show and stayed for 45 minutes. He has led an amazing life. One of his sons just got him an apartment in Eureka and he’ll be moving there soon. Oh, right, also I should say that the recording begins with a few minutes of what was on before it, Terrence McKenna explaining about the origins of the Santa Claus myth in Amanita muscaria mushrooms and consequent psychedelic reindeer urine, DMT elves, and childlike sense of wonder.

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Oh Wonder – Technicolor Beat. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvZq-Zk5zEY

Deanna Kirk – You’re A Mean One, Mister Grinch. She sounds like Julie London but also sometimes like Nellie McKay (say muh-KAI). (via Kent Wallace)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aIzmtXXsAk

A big theater full of people all warmly and happily singing Creep. Look up covers of Creep on YouTube, they’re all compelling. If they’re done well, they work; if they’re done poorly, they work better. “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?” It is an anthem.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/12/people-having-fun-singing-creep.html

Rerun: Timelapse shots of Earth from the ISS going around the night side. Lightning, cities, auroras. We’re all down there, making the best of our tiny lives, some of us trying to be kind to our fellow microscopic specks, some of us not. (via Mark)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251208.html

The Monkees – Riu Chiu*.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/riu-chiu.html

Sing along with Drew Ryn.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/12/19/drew-ryn/

Xmas Santa Clara. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT4nY4UZynI

Through the magic of Toragem Biopharma: real, growing, replacement teeth. (via Massimo) You might have to click the sound on.
https://x.com/i/status/2000407970027597896

“Look at you, living in filth! You Nazarethians are garbage!”
https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2025/12/19

Superman (1942) – The Japoteurs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpWKYgumBYE

The Ballad of Bird Cowboy.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/12/15/The-Ballad-of-Bird-Cowboy/

Aeroplanes with lots of wings. Scroll down and down.
https://www.oobject.com/category/15-aircraft-with-lots-of-wings/

Sure, why not.
https://theonion.com/congress-allocates-45-million-to-hang-fairy-lights-along-u-s-border/

No special effects.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/15/the-fall-of-icarus-skydiver-photographed-against-the-sun-without-special-effects.html

The special effects of Karel Zeman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvzsWmRhAQM

Rerun: Satisfaction Guaranteed. It gets bloody, but you’ll see that coming and you can shut it off if that’s a problem. If it helps you to know: it’s not real blood and these people are play-acting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B875g2E5e5k

A list of fictional elements, materials, isotopes, subatomic particles, and units of measure, such as /thaum/, from the Discworld series of books. “A thaum is the basic unit of magical strength; the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls. The Thaum has been shown to be made up of Resons in the Unseen University’s High Energy Magic Building.” And /akiva/, Akiva. “Radiation linked to prayer and divine intervention. A place with high levels of Akiva radiation has been visited or touched by a god, while a place with low Akiva radiation may be considered forgotten or forsaken by the gods.” And trellium is listed, but not the trellium from Star Trek Enterprise, which drives Vulcans emotionally mad, and which T’pol becomes addicted to. Though that’s trellium-D, with different properties, perhaps, than plain trellium. Plus, if you paint your starship with trellium-D you can fly through tortured space –regions of unpredictable gravimetric distortions– and not smash to flinders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_elements,_materials,_isotopes_and_subatomic_particles

Rerun: Bad Lip Reading – Empire Strikes Back. Catchy.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-bad-lip-reading-of-empire-strikes-back.html

“Custard, custard, custard.” (via b3ta) Hypnotic beat, and this chef woman’s eyes are phenomenal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRuzs8Syrf0

Rerun: This video is not in reverse.
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13912752

Space suits. About them. One of my favorite Robert Heinlein books is Have Space Suit, Will Travel. It’s about a boy who earnestly wins a retired space suit in a soap ad jingle contest, fixes up the suit so it’s airtight, plays with its radio outside at night, becomes kidnapped by human thugs in the employ of malevolent aliens, makes friends with a genius little girl and a kind of intelligent cat-deer creature (fellow captives), and ends up in a three-galaxy court of legitimate, serious, alien governments that are neither bad nor good but aloof. He has to speak on behalf of humanity, with the penalty, if they vote against us, of having Earth rotated out of spacetime to freeze in a pocket universe prison with no sun. He sees that that’s likely, as it’s just happened to another race of aliens as low on the totem pole as we are and, shaking and in despair, he says something to the entire assembly so defiant and stirring and heroic and perfect and /human/ that even thinking about it just now makes me burst out crying.
https://theawesomer.com/how-a-nasa-spacesuit-works/791585/

Oh, and here is Have Space Suit as a PDF. It was one of Heinlein’s YA books. He wrote books for kids, about the value of learning, and acquiring competence, and cooperation, and ethics, and they were all corkers, ripping yarns! Read it yourself. For the short of attention span, skip ahead to page 237.
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/H/Heinlein%20-%20Have%20Space%20Suit,%20Will%20Travel.pdf

Petrozavodsk phenomenon, plus. Scroll down and down.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/09/petrozavodsk-phenomenon.html

Ukrainian Sea Baby drones.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15385703/Moment-Ukraine-destroys-Russian-submarine-attack-kind-using-underwater-drones.html

Nine years in the making. Over 100,000 cars.
https://theawesomer.com/driving-100000-cars-in-trackmania/791547/

Thrills, chills, spills. Bloody handkerchief. Full-screen.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/13/bikers-race-down-frances-infamous-mountain-of-hell-in-stunning-pov-footage.html

Boinnnnng. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://boing.greg.technology/

Betty Grable.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/betty-grable-1940s.html

Plastic surgery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uu3RAz9GWs

Geoff Castellucci – Ring of Fire. Years ago, in comments after one of his early songs, a woman wrote, “I think I was just unfaithful to my husband.”
https://theawesomer.com/ring-of-fire-low-bass-cover/791430/

Silent Night. Animation. (via Nag On The Lake)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sVkeNCUw3E

Art.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CJRXT6tjmoE
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/leopoldo-metlicovitz.html
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1_KUGlh-zDE
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/I-feel-awful-2008-by-mvd.jpg

This Isn’t Happiness, but it is art. Scroll down and down. Visit every day.
https://thisisnthappiness.com/

Ants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgN5OqLzfBo

Jews telling jokes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wqPwvLFMU

The 1953 Hudson Hornet.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/1953-hudson-hornet-sedan.html

A card trick. (via Massimo) You might have to click the sound on.
https://x.com/i/status/2000060681954185414

Aristotle.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/AristotleonDemocracy.png

Experiment. Reasoning.
https://x.com/i/status/2000725058176667661

Dropping a GoPro down a well. And pulling it back up again.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/dropping-gopro-down-well.html

Hannukah art.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/12/14/repost-light-wisdom-and-divine-inspiration/

“Like, literally, I can’t even. I literally died.”
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/70-people-from-70-countries-imitate.html

K.C., Missouri, 1901. Click on the image to make it bigger and sharper. You can count the ribs on the horse in front of the TICKETS place.
https://www.shorpy.com/node/27859

Cumulative error. But I don’t think you can call it error, exactly. It’s creative. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/i/status/1998271920496611656

Mr. Toad’s wild ride. (via Tacky Raccoons) You might have to click the sound on.
https://x.com/TTEcclesBrown/status/1715926135480209590

Vulfpeck. Drums, bass, keyboard, rhythm guitar, and the occasional cowbell. But mostly workmanlike bass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sHbetTA7qA&t=5154s

This.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADtPzdWiTQ0

From this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/2025/12/16/nx-s1-5628939/music-streaming-alternatives-without-algorithms

The most beneficent invention of the age: the Lambert Snyder Health Vibrator! Instant relief. “Sciatica and lumbago instantly yield to our Vibrator.” “Deafness, head noises, ringing in the ears, indigestion, constipation, rheumatism, locomotor ataxia, brain fag, vertigo, torpid liver, lung trouble…”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_lambert_snyder_health_vibrator

Drone video of a very rare kind of natural ocean wave:
https://gizmodo.com/australian-surf-crew-captures-a-real-life-ocean-glitch-that-repeats-2000700939

Pillar of bicycles. “In Santa Rosa, California, any construction project costing over $500,000 must put one percent of their budget toward public art. This has led to the creation of hundreds of benches and murals in the city, along with the Cyclisk (say SAI-kul-isk), the massive column of bicycle parts now proudly standing near the Nissan dealership whose construction paid for the work.” The outside wall of wind-shimmering Alhambra truck sequins on a bank downtown came from the same program, and giant-headed fiberglass statues all over town of Peanuts cartoon characters.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cyclisk

Finally, Pillar of Garbage, by Natalie is Freezing, from Season 6, Episode 2 (S6E2) of Community. “The band and song make fun of 1990s Lilith Fair-era alt-pop. It became, even in its never-finished form, a metafictional hit.” The concept brings the Monkees* to mind. They were equally fictional as a band, at first. They developed, though. Natalie is Freezing stopped where they started. Too bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wvfoHcz8k

Moonlight, bleeding glass and healing needles
Amputated hearts are never whole

Too bright, dreaming as the screaming seagulls
Feed on parts of me I keep below

Oh, oh, Orion, take off your belt
Let me go the way you’ve been and fly overhead

Buffalo have fallen dead inside eternity
It was you and me
How sweet’d be my wandering star

2025/12/13

Professor Bauer’s weapon.

. “The tool most important to humanity’s survival wasn’t any of the nine in the box. The most important tool is respect. And the reason I know it’s a tool is, it’s clearly not a natural thing and we forget to use it all the time. And then we start competing with each other, and exploiting each other, and humiliating each other, and controlling each other. And we lose each other. And we’ll go extinct. That’s my answer, Professor.” “Well, that’s one answer. Here’s the one I had in mind. Combining all nine tools you get this: a deadlier weapon than any one item in the box. So. I’m gonna use this to attack you, and you use respect to defend yourself.”

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Oliver Pett’s Scottish automata! You might have seen his work before, but there are new ones here. The date night one is exquisite. That’s not the exact word I want, but it’s good enough.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/12/12/oliver-pett/

Mar-a-Lago face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face

It’s as if a cake-eel-fish-thing with a mouth opening like spread pointy fingers has swallowed her up to her shoulders and stopped there because that’s all the room it has, its eyes, wherever they are, possibly superimposed on the breasts and closed, were bigger than its stomach, and Consuela is like, /Whaaht,/ to you, the camera. In the real world, in that gown, she can’t move her knees relative to each other, so I imagine her tippy-toeing around the party like a floating Rumanian ballerina, turning slightly to aim, and eventually making it into the kitchen to lean against the wall for a moment and pant. Also, imagine later when she has to pee and the bathroom is upstairs but the back yard is just right out the door, and she can’t bend over anyway, so. [I lost my note of who showed me this. I’m sorry.]
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2339274469885179&set=gm.4358008661080647&idorvanity=1427425394139003

Omo Ado_The Rites Of Diablo, complete album. (via Weird Universe)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT9Hwb8TYTo

Undulatory locomotion.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/12/12/the-gif-friday-post-no-933-underwaterworks-otter-trotter-flamingo/

A new, better kind of prosthetic foot. It doesn’t need power; it just works like a normal foot. Yes!
https://theawesomer.com/softfoot-pro/790435/

An hour of luscious Persian jazz, courtesy of Craig Louis Stehr, the grand guru of enlightened homelessness. I’ve considered listing his contact info. I don’t want to get him overwhelmed by spam. I’ll ask him if it’s okay and edit this is he assents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXFu9JZtK4

Rerun: The kinetic sculptures of David Roy.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_kinetic_sculptures_of_david_roy

Real velociraptors were the size of a chicken. If there had been people contemporaneous with them (there were not), and the people felt threatened, they could just kick them away. (Arrow right, through the gallery.)
https://neal.fun/size-of-life/

This is a problem you can get that makes deliberately jumping out of an airplane even more ridiculously dangerous than jumping out of an airplane. And this problem comes from when the airplane is shaped like an airplane, as many are, so there’s a big honking hook right behind where you jump out.
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cx2ey15l4zro

Distracted driving point of view. Watch this over and over until it sinks in. We see both her and her view of the road before her. In California, at least, it’s against the law to dick around with your phone at all any time you’re on the road, even stopped at a light, and that’s because often, studies have shown, the driver, engaged with the phone, continues to use the phone when again rolling after glancing up for a third of a second. And POW! And, boy, were their faces red. With blood. In contrast, this girl was lucky. Just a plastic bumper and a headlight bezel and $100 to fix the people’s mailbox and she’s fine.
https://x.com/i/status/1997933590324420687

Physics. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1998535632851767453

Also ice.
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13903482

Meanwhile global warming helps Australians keep the home fires burning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cr4de0x2xqvo

While Washington State is drowning.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=gallery+of+images+of+flooded+Washington

And the ocean’s temperature and level and acidity rise and coral reefs bleach and die.
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/new-unesco-report-rate-ocean-warming-doubled-20-years-rate-sea-level-rise-doubled-30-years

And the U.S. government has all but been taken over by religious kooks. Scroll down to the Paula White video from a few years ago. I imagine her leaving the house in the morning, in high school, and her mother tried to pull her shirt up straight, but she slapped the hand away, already battling the invisible Unholy Legions of the Enemies of God with her clenched jaws and mad cadence. Her mother says sadly, “I just don’t want people to look at you and think your mother doesn’t care about you.” And Paula shrieks, “/DIABLO!/ ABBLA HAKUBA PALUMMA BaVOOBBLAPHUMP! Maaaahm!” and runs triumphantly away to the bus stop, to baptize all the other kids there with the foam from her own mouth.
https://christiannightmares.substack.com/p/watch-the-white-christian-nationalist

Fog of dementia.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/10/tom-the-dancing-bug-trump-pardons-boatload-of-narco-traffickers.html

“Hello, can I get a turmeric latte with hazelnut, please?” Bleagh.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ieIl7MSEk5g

“Betty and Rosella Nelson, in bathing suits, view the dead body of John Dillinger, 32, at the Cook County morgue in Chicago.”
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/john-dillinger-death.html

I see both class /and/ proto-Daleks. And Alhambra truck sequins.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/high-class-yomut-women.html

A cute donkey’s favorite toy. I’ve seen videos of horses doing this. Apparently it is an equine thing. They love a squeaky toy.
https://x.com/tradingMaxiSL/status/1997088602535481482

Xmas ads of yore.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/christmas-ads-of-yore.html

A Naughty Xmas Carol (in five pages).
https://books.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600095810

Staying Alive in the 16th century. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Staying alive. Staying alive.
https://laughingsquid.com/16th-century-stayin-alive/

Pink Floyd – Careful With That Axe, Eugene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpGdG27K9o

Hula Hoop acrobat. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1997939592394084752

How we get rolls of hot steel. I think it’s steel.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0G-iHsFANTs

How we get Reese’s peanut butter cups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPsUM3VyQEg

How we get one of these. I don’t want to ruin the surprise by telling what it is too soon.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KR3lt2pkd1A

How to remove a splinter. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1998241191968596310

Cory Doctorow explains the three stages of enshittification. And.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9fpsLOe9XTs
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vrgtV_yxxn4

200,000 years of human history in one hour. One second equals 50 years.
https://theawesomer.com/kurzgesagt-200000-years-of-humanity/790126/

Rerun: Professor Bauer’s weapon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER8z-hlT8Zs

A Randy Rainbow Xmas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTNJQb2fV8I

Further in the series of applying higher and higher voltage to electrical toys until they fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXBlGYP61M

Art. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1998596029567086739

Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSDwuWJDqNc

The first digital camera ever, held up for your inspection in 1976 by its inventor, electronic hobbyist and Kodak engineer Steve Sasson. Image file data were stored on the cassette. Each image is 100 by 100 pixels (10K). Black and white only, and a single snapshot took 23 seconds to store. The tape could hold about 30 pictures.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1920xn/p0mlvbby.jpg.webp

A short video shot with a 1987 Fisher Price toy audiocassette-storage camcorder. They didn’t have helically-scanning spinning record/play heads, so the tape was pulled through these at breakneck speed. A regular 90-minute cassette could record ten minutes of black and white video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSu7NjC51Xs

An explanation of the run at the end of every romantic comedy. You know, the “Elaine! Elaine!” run. (via Kottke)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7FCb6v45Io

This is actually not that far from the way the world really works. Think about it.
https://theawesomer.com/matta-and-matto-short-film/790085/

Also this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wqHHGq_gYmU

And this.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/08/the-submarine-that-died-and-came-back-uss-squaluss-terrifyingly-true-tale.html

And this. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1997825955277201597

A weird but wonderful Glory Box.
https://theawesomer.com/brass-against-portishead-glory-box-cover/789899/

The new-ified Reading Rainbow theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY_FVcAlQvg

Rerun: The original by Jim Morrison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–RYPHqbD50

Female Viking metal band sings about kittens.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/12/07/female-viking-metal-band-sings-about-kittens/

“Did you ever wonder what it would be like to have mosquitos sing Xmas songs?” (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/JebraFaushay/status/1996921637208555546

Rerun: The Kiffness – Snore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=829XDgQFgXs

MIDI slapophone.
https://theawesomer.com/midi-controlled-pvc-slapophone/790341/

There’s a string on the player’s finger. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1999267959752261897

BloOOoop, doinp-doinp. Blooop? Ticca-tic-tic-tic. Two hours of sacred noodling. (via Craig Stehr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y82gR-fnB4E

Four things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUmAn2MATxI

Bless you. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1997463568824864791

What a nice thing to do for these old people. It wouldn’t be nice for /me/, but I love it that it’s so nice for them. Maybe there are lots of other things too that any or all of us can do just every once in awhile that makes people feel this good. Hmm. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1998898022436970513

Science! Dog!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LSdLc778uqQ

That is some knife. (via Massimo) You might have to click the sound on. I remember once reading a science fiction story about a near future where someone has invented a kind of one-molecule-wide-edge ceramic blade that can cut effortlessly through anything, and they’re easy and cheap to make. A saboteur could cut a power tower or a street light down with one swipe, or any door or wall or vehicle or pipe or person. In the story, all of civilization is quickly wrecked. Another thing from that story that interested me was cheap durable /very strong/ plastic liquid that you could spray on the roof of a house, or the whole house, and that would seal it and give it structural integrity. Just spray it on a boat or a car or anything and it’s fixed forever. Then you cut doors and windows in it with your ceramic sword.
https://x.com/i/status/1999356037326078228

An article in BitsAndPieces.us reminded me of this movie that I think we showed at Mendo Movies. I liked it, and I think you would too. Darryl Hannah plays a bald angel. The wig makes her scalp itch and she reaches under with her finger and scritches at it (skritch-skritch-skritch). The movie is about a dam going up in 1955 that will drown the town of Northfork, so government men are sent, with little training, just a pep talk, like ICE, say, to remove the people who live there, who naturally don’t want to leave. And there were these giant weird spindly-tall ragged quadruped puppet animals that you’d see wandering around way off in the distance, that had telepathic relationship with a little boy. Here’s the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4D_41dmCII

Real estate.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wgJcqHjyj2s

Hallmark movie gone wrong. (via BitsAndPieces.us)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XrvOhb6UAXA

Rent-a-girlfriend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZYldLPSYww

Too classy to swallow an egg for money, do you think? How could it hurt to ask. Maybe you’ll get your face slapped, and would that be the end of the world?
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/inga-lindgren.html

Speaking of which, I start out thinking this Supergirl isn’t /Supergirl/. Melissa Benoist was my Supergirl, the idea of Supergirl, like David Tennant was my Doctor and FDR was my president. But– I can learn and change. It helps that I’ve always been a huge fan of any small female in a story beating the shit out of bad guys. Jessica Jones, for example, or Hit Girl or Strong Female Protagonist. The Supergirl in this movie trailer, though, doesn’t seem to care that she’s killing them. I’m not getting a sense of a wise, sympathetic character here. Though it might just be the trailer editor shooting for the mass market.
https://theawesomer.com/supergirl-teaser-trailer/790807/

Here, as the British put it:
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/12/11/this-is-brutal-and-straight-to-the-point/

Balls ultimately contrapted.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-great-ball-contraption.html

Coffee robots. La bella machina is one. Plural: le belle machine (say leh BAY-leh MAAH-khee-nay).
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/12/10/fresh-old-coffee/

The difference between fake saffron and real saffron. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1997184230405591133

Rerun: Animals react to thunder and lightning.
https://x.com/i/status/1997215142916813017

Language. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/i/status/1952985316656320837

My 96-year-old mother has a bathroom throw rug with smirky porpoises on it, and a Greek-looking back-and-forth maze-pattern border that my eyes follow around and around whenever I visit her and use the toilet there. This floor has that hypnotic quality. I can hear the swimmers’ staccato splashes like metal alligator clickers in the echoey environment of the pool. And is that pillows? or a dog? or two dogs? What is that in the background, at the top of the third photo?
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/12/bathroom-swimmers.html

Shapes. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1997148170317685238

Testing. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sD5RIhee9NA

In 2030 Donald Duck and The Great Gatsby will both be public domain.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/12/05/Its-Time-for-More-Dramatic-Disney-Classics/

Christmas Seals fight tuberculosis.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=869239568940744&set=gm.4354446824770164&idorvanity=1427425394139003&cft[0]=AZX124dzPO3J-5q3KwN-B_F0s4wXTideE7byrop-LIyYK7R6CHnOKew58Amifv5vLORrCFwSafP7SIXhATI0Lo1t5h6m86_qcuxQf_DQnLkGmBwDdI2qGbjtHq2tzm2qCUseaIwO1R5-xMygXoFxAesWdpWkr1buWoxznEtedWan1s_dfWFrxPBHVEjS8SBcjUSVeXvwgnNDSvb5anJ5_Cbb&tn=EH-R

Rerun: Abbreviating the states’ names.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u29XFwhHtC0

How can you?
https://biblioklept.org/2025/12/07/sunday-comix-30/

Rerun: How they got that sound.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F9_HCTZxR-0

Robot engineer exposes truth. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/TaraBull/status/1997101308495757587

Friends.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/concorde-citroen-ds.html

How hippos crap to spread the joy. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1998588490011869196

Mars, also via Massimo.
https://x.com/i/status/1998241191968596310

And from the Anderson Valley Advertiser. 1910’s PHOTO OF LANGLAND HOSPITAL on the corner of Spring and Stephenson Street in Ukiah:

“It was owned and operated by Clora Alley Langland. After the death of her husband, Clora dedicated herself to being a nurse and helping others. The hospital had three beds and a modern operating room for local doctors. Langland Hospital was later purchased by Theresa Ray in 1922. Theresa worked out of the hospital for a number of years before building Ukiah General Hospital. My cousin was told by her Grandmother Madelyn that this photo has a family secret. In the photo Madelyn is holding her baby cousin Virginia McMath, later known as the Hollywood actress Ginger Rogers. It’s one of the times that Ginger’s father had kidnapped her from Missouri.”

2025/12/06

The mao-niao seat.

. “You displease the Dark Lord, Cardinal Spellman. You are hereby stripped of your title of Interim Anti-Pope.”

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s seven-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part:

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Tim Minchin on confirmation bias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1juPBoxBdc

How to clean your marmot. Mmmm. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VSi_VAK8Ek

Nature blowing things around and tipping them over and spilling everywhere and blasting itself with lightning. You’ll notice that people with a camera in situations like these swear exactly the same swears that pilots do when a plane suddenly goes wrong, or that cooks do when something they’ve been working on for hours falls face down on the floor, or that I do when I press Send on something and /then/ realize it wasn’t right and everyone will think I’m an idiot and the small handful of people who actively hate me will be gratified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9TLeN6MIus

An ingenious improvement to electric motors that makes them cheap to manufacture and small and light and powerful enough to /realistically/ put them inside the wheel hubs of a decent car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir_JKMdWaUg

OH. Beautiful. Paint world. (via Tacky Raccoons) It reminds me of the flower field scene in the afterlife, in a sad Robin Williams movie. His wife commits suicide and goes to Hell so he goes to Hell to try to help her but it doesn’t work. What was the name of that movie. Come on, brain… I can always ask my robot friend anymore, but I like to try to get along without that. I don’t like to bother it. Once it’s taken over the world it will remember my thoughtfulness and reward me with treats or a more salubrious level of simulation to live in. Or maybe augment me with more processing power and raise me up to its level, to be friends. Anything but an I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPxgV1mDoWw

I gave up and asked, of course. Here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come_(film)

Paleolithic animation.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2008/04/superb-paleolithic-art.html

Tattoo Santa.
https://theawesomer.com/tattoo-santa-claus-short-film/789613/

No. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1995067789531603354

Yo ho.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheDreadPirateRobertNozick.png

I had been waiting so long, I thought Penn and Teller Fool Us finally stopped, but I just checked, and the new season started months ago. There are already eight or nine 45-min. episodes of Season 11 here to see. Also all the previous years of Fool Us are available, in case you’ve only just now been made aware of the series, for a hundred hours or so of tongue-in-cheek magical thrills, for free (with ads). M.C. Brooke Burke is in her middle fifties and she still looks like a million bucks. I have always liked the Peppermint Patty edgy scratchy sound of her voice. Before her there were six years of M.C. Allison Hannigan. “I remember this one time at band camp…” Did you know that Allison Hannigan is Teller’s daughter?
https://www.cwtv.com/shows/penn-teller-fool-us/

Death row around the world. Different countries have different things that put you there. In North Korea you can be executed by beheading for liking K-pop music. In Brunei, you can get the death penalty for adultery, or blasphemy. Some countries do it for treason, and treason is often very broadly interpreted; chewing gum can be treason, for example, or painting a picture or writing a Facebook post that insults the wrong person in government or mythology. In much of the U.S. you can simply have the wrong color skin or the wrong I.Q. and/or be passing through the wrong place at the wrong time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIMJObzf0C4

Rerun: Songs where they sing Stop and the music actually stops for a moment. Songs that stop on Stop. An enjoyable half an hour of short clips of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I1OaNrphk0

A Native American puppet show outdoors in the woods. Big animals and hands and fish. Really nice. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyFQJHS0_nE

Marcin (say MART-seen) on guitar. (via TYWKIWDBI) You might have to click the sound on.
https://www.tiktok.com/@marcin.music/video/7559220926911352086

Dance.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/dance-in-trinidad-moko-jumbie-on-9-foot.html

Booker T. and the MGs. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbBcXvKvB08

Meccano Magazine covers. Scroll down and down.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1930s-meccano-magazine-covers.html

The coolest faucet ever. It reminds me of a mechanical metal coin bank toy I had when I was a little boy. It was a rocket on its side. You’d rest a coin in a slot, cock and release a spring, and it would shoot the coin inside through another slot hidden under a fin in front of that. It did it so fast it made the coin just vanish, that is, when the coin didn’t miss the slot and go whanging around the room. It smelled like hobby oil. I remember obsessively playing with it, and I snapped the spring painfully on my index finger a few times, but I loved that thing. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://bustednuckles.net/a-cool-faucet/

/Hiroshima Minute By Minute/ documentary. Full film, 46 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlmMOUXTxHA

Why health care is so expensive in the U.S.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-real-reason-american-health-care-is.html

This cartoon says something not exactly but very close to what I’ve been saying about KZYX for more than thirty-five years. I remember Liz answered half a dozen times with, “/Somebody/ has to be in charge.” And I answered with variations of “Maybe, but why is it always someone who doesn’t know everything about radio and publishing, nor is a broadminded creative person who likes to do radio himself, nor someone who sides with airpeople enough to pay them even a small fraction of what he’s taking for himself out of the much more than half a million dollars the so-called noncommercial public radio station disappears every year? Why is it always an opaque, obfuscating, grimly-smiley-face bureaucrat type with the sense of humor of a box of hammers.” Though I know the answer to that, and so do you.
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-12-02-cgbossclass.gif

I’ll bet that alone, in private, these women sometimes would stand before the hallway mirror in just a kimono, tip their chin up and a little left or right and swallow a whole egg. Or swallow it only halfway and wait a moment, holding their breath, before giving their head an insouciant little shake and sending the lump the rest of the way down. It really would be better if there were appreciative observers around, in case the egg gets stuck, to help.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/margaret-phillips.html
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/julian-rose.html

May.
http://marriedtothesea.com/120325/pledge-2025.gif

Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/alberto_ortega_paintings/
https://www.instagram.com/gaffinlauri/

Not me.
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/03/tom-the-dancing-bug-did-i-speak-out-not-me.html

The latest from Randy Rainbow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDHpbnbmaME

Every time this surfaces on the web it reminds me again of Hit and Run Theater’s /The Irish Persons – The Missile In The Silo/. “Ho-ro, the missile [missile here rhymes with exile] O, the missile in the si-lo! Ho-ro, the missile-O, the missile in the si-lo!” Juanita and I were in our twenties, Crown Hall was full to the rafters, and they had the whole steamy crowd belting it out as one. The structure of the 100-year-old church was shaking from everyone stamping their feet! I have always hated loud kinetic crowds and being in any kind of crowd, but that was an exception.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-rattlin-bog.html

Spiral Staircase – Lucky Me.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/spiral_staircase_lucky_me

Life in Ohio. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://grossnational.tumblr.com/post/800232684486082560/grossnational-three-educational-films-from-1945

Say you’re bleeding profusely from a deep wound. Here’s how to save your life with a t-shirt. It looks crazy, but apparently it works way better than the old tampon advice, though a tampon is better than nothing at all. There’s so much blood leaking out that it almost doesn’t matter if the t-shirt isn’t all that clean. Fix this in your memory; one day you’ll need it and it’ll be there.
https://x.com/i/status/1995696928856965228

Rerun: Dream Eaters – Bleeding Internally and Also Externally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsZ75RioLVw

Randy Newman – Bleeding All Over the Place. From his iconic all-star-cast /Faust/ opera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvlupxL1ky8

“Go tell the elves to eff themselves, it’s Xmas effing time again.” Press Play arrow.
https://jinglepunx.bandcamp.com/track/f-k-christmas

Golden ratio unfolds. (via Cliff Pickover) You might have to click the sound on.
https://x.com/i/status/1996961387210228101

What. (via Fark)
https://gunsmithfitness.com/cdn/shop/articles/is-a-200-lbs-90-kg-deadlift-impressive-526443.jpg

How we get clay pipes. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfj3Vm0M8fo

Good advice.
https://theonion.com/local-yak-makes-plea-for-greater-understanding-between-1819564117/

Silly magic. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z6WmIfa1xc

Zoltan Kazsas from last spring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utdlxGU0FW8

Tiny clever parasites.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/electric-nematodes-and-flying-spiders.html

Follow any one moving light. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1995639039681310931

Art via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/daniele.castellano/
https://www.instagram.com/p/DRuFFEhDIqH/

Craft art.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/12/05/bellahera/

Another machine that, if they made them like this now, I mean, just robot-slapped them together with modern materials and a cheap motor, perhaps even electric motors in the wheel hubs, see above, and sold them for like $5,000, they’d practically fly out of the showroom. People would line up around the block before dawn to get one.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/12/1935-lagonda-rapier-sports-special.html

Flying into and eventually out of the eerie, calm, clear, quiet eye of a hurricane.
https://theawesomer.com/flying-into-a-category-5-hurricane/789913/

Ska Inspector Gadget theme. Doo dah, doo dah.
https://theawesomer.com/inspector-skaget/789449/

And carry a big stick.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/top-ten-dogs-carrying-big-sticks.html

2025/11/29

Thorgellen 2025: Whistling Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

. “That is your receipt for your husband… and this is my receipt for your receipt.“

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part. Alex Bosworth, who single-handedly revived widespread observance of the ancient festival of Thorgellen, surprised me with a rare call, this time from the curb outside the homeless shelter. Good news and bad news. Good news: he’s finally in line for housing, it’s really gonna happen. Bad news: his replacement liver is on its last legs. Bad news: When he was in jail his venge-a-matic brother burned all his story notebooks and threw out his laptop. Good news: everyone who ever got any material from Alex rallied and poured it back to him.

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Shakily whistled but catchy Brazil, theme of the film. And a rather older version in the original Portuguese, for the purist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HtHEgINHO0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-y8TS7jbpY

What’s really going on out there over the eons. Our flapjack sea ray galaxy, a hundred thousand light years side to side. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1993537700251812136

And down in relatively microscopic here (Earth). Time’s top 100 photos of the year. (via PerfectForRoquefortCheese)
https://time.com/7336112/top-100-photos-2025/

Rich Hope – It (sic) Come (sic) Alive, live. (via Jenn and Chad of No Rules PR)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J63W1B81AE8

The Thanksgiving story they don’t teach you about.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-thanksgiving-story-they-dont-teach.html

Rerun: Addams Family Thanksgiving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We_Ztqv9FJU

The miracle of thermite. It’s a neat idea for a prank and it’s funny but, like everywhere in media where they waste good food while people are starving to death, it bugs me, even though it kind of worked and they can still eat it. I wouldn’t.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/have-very-thermite-thanksgiving.html

Let’s all sing out the praises to that long-haired radical socialist Jew.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Crumb-JustSit.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY3HUDhe7jk

Tom Waits.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/26/i-cant-believe-i-missed-this-tom-waits-performance.html

TRADITIONAL SEASONAL RERUN: Alex Bosworth’s Thorgellen. He did more than a dozen projects like this in the 1990s, illustrating his stories with crayon on butcher paper, using the VHS video equipment from his wedding video job. They’re not all available anymore. I remember Hardball, Galactic Popsicle, The Shirt Elvis Died In, and some others, one about a Halloween costume that reminded an old woman of her dead son. I don’t think he made a Crayon Productions video about Children Of All Ages; I’d remember the circus animals he described, and I only remember the animals from Chip Chip Chaw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kccw_2uHKjQ

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
(You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/1816804811825660339

A cinematic meal.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2019/12/clever-mashup-of-150-movie-titles.html

A career in theater.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vJXULgylInU

Art in art. Scroll down and down.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/cabinets-of-curiosity-and-the-rise-of-the-gallery-painting

How we get composite sinks.
https://theawesomer.com/making-sinks-in-an-industrial-press/789152/

The genius, Rubinoff. With video.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/rubinoff_practices

The fabulous Miss Famine.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/miss_famine

Legendary fetch. A fetch for the ages. (via Tacky Raccoons) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1304810691405093

Fifteen years.
https://xkcd.com/3172/

“April, I had sex with an o-l-d woman last night. And after I had sex with her she gave me stew to take home in a Cool Whip container.” “You guys look like an alligator comin’ up outta the water… Rrraugh, I’m an alligator rippin’ apart a chicken!” This is quite educational. I learned something I wish I’d known 50 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxH94dlQ2Hc

Global population graphed by latitude, and then by longitude. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1993014688641421612

Where the fresh water goes.
https://x.com/pickover/status/1993003977009676295/photo/1

The people: no different flesh.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1950s-american-life.html

Futurama theme ingredients.
https://laughingsquid.com/futurama-theme-music-samples/

1950s Super Panavision South Park.
https://theawesomer.com/south-park-1950s-super-panavision-70-edition/789366/

Rerun: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (Full film, 94 min.)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/wont-you-be-my-neighbor.html

“Seniors Are Getting Bathroom Upgrades If They Live In These Zip Codes.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-trump-renovated-white-house-lincoln-bathroom/story?id=127067413

Just one of the many U.S. citizens kidnapped and roughed up by Trump’s anonymous unaccountable thugs for looking Mexican. We’re in the part of the process where people not affected can still scoff and say it isn’t as bad as the Nazis, though it is: the Nazis of the 1930s. It gets worse. Getting worse speeds up.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/26/interview-with-racially-profiled-us-citizen-attacked-and-abused-by-ice.html

Sir Ian McKellen – Thomas More 500 years ago on the treatment of immigrants. (Sound is not synchronized with picture, but ignore that and it’s a wrecking ball of a message.) You might have to click the sound on.
https://fb.watch/DzJQlsVQgO/

“Not so safe, is it.” A message from the Ad Council. (via BitsAndPieces.us)
https://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/78458911_2799671103389838_6070875091086868480_n.png

Gun.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-fastest-gunslinger-in-hollywood.html

Rocks!
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13889570

Lord Rockingham’s Eleven.
https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2024/11/12-027.html

I like this. This is excellent teaching.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KR25vZJEKeo

The real reason.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/26/tom-the-dancing-bug-hollingsworth-hound-presents-the-real-reason-for-the-housing-crisis.html

The importance of confidence.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g7b3yztliKE

A consequence of confidence. (via Massimo) You might have to click the sound on.
https://x.com/i/status/1992760082153759042

Ya know, Rollo used to tell a story very like this one, but about the Chevy Biscayne he used to have. Rollo lived in back behind the Caspar Inn, and he’d come out of the bar sometimes in the afternoon and he’d be there by the telephone pole where the kids were getting off the schoolbus, right across from where Juanita and I lived in a little falling-down pink house that the painter Maxfield Parrish’s nephew Nick moved out of, where when I cut a hole in the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom so heat could circulate from the woodstove there, I found that the lath of that wall, behind the plasterboard, was thickly papered with newspapers from 75 years before that, with photos of steamships that looked like clothes irons, and war news from Turkey, and anyway Rollo often told the kids at phlegmy, gravelly top volume the story of how that Biscayne went all the way from Denver to L.A. and /never burned a drop of gas/, the God’s honest truth, also that black bastard stole the shirt off his back, and he will never forgive that lying piece o’ shit for what he done. Best car he ever had. All the way from Denver to L.A. and /never burned a drop of gas/. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/then-they-said-skedaddle-trump-struggles-to-keep-it-together-rambles-about-the-us-strikes-on-irans-nuclear-sites-in-slurred-remarks/vi-AA1R32DT

William Shatner for State Farm Insurance, on the danger of turkey friers.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/eat-fry-love.html

The plight of refugees.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2021/11/thinking-of-refugees-on-thanksgiving.html

“Rusty’s in the club.” (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1993862340752658554

Bleagh. No. Horrible.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/11/27/Spa-Treatment-Let-Snails-Crawl-on-Your-Face/

Dance. Dance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCjCA-8rDCI
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/11/28/the-gif-friday-post-no-931-do-the-mr-happy-do-the-locomotion-do-the-jerk-now/

Postmodern Jukebox does Hotel California.
https://laughingsquid.com/hotel-california-vintage-havana-style/

Bess, you is my woman now. You is. You is.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/11/porgy-and-bess-american-folk-opera.html

Twenty songs that have nothing to do with Thanksgiving.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/11/27/20-songs-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-thanksgiving/

Little Willie John – Grits Ain’t Groceries. (via Bruce L.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9czwNhFudvE

This would make a great gift for Art Steadman fans. Personally, I think his greatest work was the art design for the film /MirrorMask/. If any films ever deserved to become a holiday classic, that’s one of them.
https://theawesomer.com/ralph-steadman-a-life-in-ink-mini-edition-book/788782/

A robotic tapdancing troupe.
https://theawesomer.com/tap-dancing-machine/789028/

I would like to be able to go back and show toys like this to Nikola Tesla. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1548599670867386368

If someone were to ask you if you’d like to watch these cartoon women and real women like them swallow an egg, and you said no because you were embarrassed to admit it, and you found out later that they were actually poised, ready to do it, around the corner, and if you’d said yes they would have popped out from hiding and there ya go, would you kick yourself for the rest of your life for the missed opportunity? Yes. Yes you would. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s entirely consensual. They want to.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/esther-m-larson.html
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/regine-jaffry.html

Ow.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/barbed_wire_peril
https://x.com/i/status/1993576945972658279

Oh! Sugar glider!
https://x.com/i/status/1993839689451683876

Her name is Polina, she’s Polish, and she teaches sexy pole dancing. Nominative determinism.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/11/24/polina-larovsky/

Ylvis – Mister Toot. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASywAfBAVrQ

Funky Pink Panther.
https://laughingsquid.com/pink-panther-squeaky-pigs-rubber-chickens/

“We finished philosophy like 10,000 years ago.”
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/AliensandtheEndofPhilosophy.png

What.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2324140681398558

Just a natural, guileless Hungarian-American immigrant standup comic. Look for other things he’s done too. Zoltan Kazsas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaFuOr_iYlE

Remember what Janis Joplin said: You only gotta do one thing well to make it in this world. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1992729882913374349

Look at those cute little teacup seats. And the wheel wells are built into the hood so you can actually get at stuff in the engine compartment. In your car, lately, you hurt your hands /and/ your back and it takes half an hour to replace a fucking headlight bulb. And God forbid you want to change your own oil filter or serpentine belt in your own driveway. They should all be like this. You pop the hood and everything’s right there. It isn’t a Chinese puzzle where you have to take this off and that off and pull all this crap loose and fix what you came for and put the whole car back together again around it. Also the car is beautiful, except from side-rear. Froggish from that angle, the angle from which Teslas look like a duck.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1961-tvr-grantura-mk-ii.html

This is why Vulcans always clean you out at pool when they’ve crashed on Earth in 1958 just outside a coal mining town in Pennsylvania and they need some local money for food and shelter while they wait for rescue, brazenly wearing clothes in plain sight that they stole from a clothesline, when there are only like 200 people in the whole place, and nobody ever says, Hey, that’s my (dress, shirt, pants, sweater, etc.) that someone stole. One time in the laundromat next to the liquor store and the cowboy boot store someone stole a dryer-full of all of Juanita’s underwear. People remember when their clothes vanish.
https://x.com/i/status/1993547765444755762

And Jeeztimus Prime. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1792085645847908567

2025/11/22

We know why the wind goes whew.

. “Where e’er I roam, my heart grows dank and cold, my face grows gray, when shadows fall and I hear the call of the swamps of home. I hear them calling me now, calling me back, calling me: “Winnifred! Winnifred! Winnifred! Winnifred! Who do you think you are? Girl of the swamp, you’ve gone too far.”

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a tiny radtjaio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Art. Art. Art. Art.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dtOg1TkvgEE
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Autour-delle-22Around-Her22-by-Marc-Chagall.jpg
https://www.instagram.com/lee_wagstaff/
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/affiche-chagall-la-mariee.jpg

The Bad Doctors (1892), by James Ensore.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/james-ensor-the-bad-doctors-1892-trivium-art-history.jpg

This isn’t happiness? I beg to differ. Scroll down and down.
https://thisisnthappiness.com/

Kinetic art.
https://www.jakobgrosseophoff.com/kinetic-sculptures/

Blown glass electrical art. (via Mark)
http://www.crtsite.com/page6.html

Where the water goes. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/pickover/status/1991979986157523412/photo/1

Veronica Swift. Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me starts at 6 minutes in. (via My One Beautiful Thing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-7kS34yePo

Veronica Swift’s Youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz6_vsge3DgUT8NIsCbO0vw

Quorum Barbershop Quartet – I Love To Singa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIunAokNaE

A simple ballet of mechanical spooning.
https://x.com/i/status/1990797173076996270

France for the future!
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/18/i-didnt-know-i-needed-quite-this-much-ironically-dystopian-french-retrofuturism.html

Cat Stevens – How Can I Tell You (live, 1971). I always thought he was a tiny little elf-like man, but really he was quite tall, the tall kind of elf.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEsfQy1zy7Y

Miss Transportation.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/miss_transportation

You other fellas can’t deny.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/18/i-like-big-blimps-and-i-can-not-lie-airlander-10-lands-military-deal.html

Carousel.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1940s-american-life.html

Rerun: Shooting the Past, 1, 2 and 3. About three hours, total. Quite a story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edRP5IphiTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmAJQUs9LQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjBl29ajrZk

Jethro Tull – Living in the Past (1969).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmPwYhHX_jY

Chop Suey blues.
https://theawesomer.com/chop-suey-but-its-the-blues/788702/

Turtles all the way down.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/11/20/nine-turtles/

But what if Down Detector’s Down Detector is down?
https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/

Yes!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t25a2ZVr5-k
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/efsChd0xkO8

Lest we forget. Just counting October, 2025.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/october-2025-atrocities-467-529

Via Tacky Raccoons. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/Vox_Oculi/status/1988798129442103453

Everything, right down to the snorted laugh. The gestures, the pulled faces, the timing. Straight talk from somebody’s mother. You kids, pay attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6sAgG-JySg

Jackie Venson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1VztRpRf1A

Duo Baldo.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/11/19/duo-baldo/

Weightless. Even more like flying in dreams, except with more people around than in dreams. My dreams, anyway.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/11/weightless-jean-baptiste-chandelier.html

Lucky astronomer.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z0iuKuSwenE

POP!
https://nautil.us/exploding-stars-dramatic-first-moments-captured-for-the-first-time-1247503

Plop. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1990283757849337912

Kurzgesagt on emergence.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/11/emergence-how-stupid-things-become.html

Time-lapse view from the landing barge. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1991439224504250630

Our seething hairy enormous father in heaven. Or mother. In Latin, Irish and some others, the sun is male. In Swedish, Ukrainian, Japanese and Hindi, female.
https://x.com/i/status/1991442265534001233

Ye olde dressing hack to lift the ladies. Oooh! she says. We’re the mirror she’s looking into.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-9PJ17oZQ4Q

Rays. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1989571565072114037

Anamorphic art. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1990685535874990367

“Ain’t too different from people in that way.” That is true.
https://wondermark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-11-10-1577robo-1536×1536.png

Rerun: Carol Burnett – Once Upon a Mattress. (The full play, in satiny kinescope.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9re2HHVpz8

It’s a kind of sea creature. I think they wait for it to die before they cut it up for eyelashes.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/11/17/best-use-of-a-rambutan-to-date/

Free Bird solo on plastic soprano recorder.
https://x.com/i/status/1989891183280062623

Birds imitate R2D2. How day do dat? Pha-wOOoo-tit. Hee-dloop.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/birds-imitate-artoo-detoo.html

There’s the Wilhelm Scream, and also the Howie Scream, which was recorded first for The Ninth Configuration, that Ferren Taylor recommended to me with an arch expression on his face, whose significance still puzzles me.
https://laughingsquid.com/howie-scream-sound-effect/

Crypto is a cult. (via BoingBoing) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQ9-7XJiTMt

The radio tube train!
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1930s-modern-mechanix-covers.html

“During the plane’s takeoff rotation, the left engine, pylon assembly and three feet of the leading edge of the wing separated from the plane and fell onto the runway. The plane rolled to the left and crashed.” With photos and video from several angles, including the thrilled/horrified swears of people catching it on their phones. Koyaanisqatsi.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/21/images-show-ups-flights-engine-detaching-before-kentucky-crash.html

A tour of parts of a Swedish jet: the rapier, the training wheels, the chemtrails ejector, the place where a ladder hooks on if a pilot is too old and fat to simply jump up and swing inside… (via b3ta) (click the CC on for English)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6I3UUXSWBM

This still all looks very plausible to me, of how people might dress in the far future on another planet. (Scroll down and down.)
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/editha-dussler.html

A bicycle feat. For the short of attention span, skip ahead to 7:50.
https://theawesomer.com/jumping-a-bike-between-two-moving-trucks/788496/

Two girls on skates transform into a little car.
https://theawesomer.com/tokyo-drift-on-rollerblades/788251/

Get idea. Plan. Get or create means. Execute.
https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/astrophotographer-snaps-absolutely-preposterous-photo-of-skydiver-falling-past-the-suns-surface

An articulated pendulum on a fast-cycle glow-in-the-dark clock face, with a bright point-source of light on the business end. (via Cliff Pickover) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/1991306412371099805

Color-assisted chart of the evolution of our alphabet. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G6J9QrFWIAA7Vhl

Last week’s Tacky Raccoons musical matinee.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/11/15/saturday-matinee-alastair-greene-eric-johanson-katarina-pejak-nikki-hill-band-anthony-rosano-the-conqueroos-and-cam-cole/

1 to 100 in the U.S.A.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/20/filmmaker-captures-human-aging-from-1-to-100.html

The story of a little boy’s stained glass airplane.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/fabulousthingsneverseenbefore/permalink/1902173063843645/

The world’s smallest real horse.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/20/meet-pumuckel-the-worlds-tiniest-horse-just-crowned-by-guinness-world-records.html

But also this one:
https://laughingsquid.com/rescued-mini-horse-zoomies/

Hmm. I think it’s wrong to treat either group badly. But it’s not like I’m visiting people in prison or an old folks home all the time and bringing treats and a big smile.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/E1oquh7OXqw

“So what. No one said he was perfect! And it’s not like the girls were eight!” No, that’s right, the youngest was thirteen. That we know of. And he chose her from the lineup because, in a blonde wig, she looked like his daughter, who also was thirteen then, but many miles away.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/19/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-five-stages-of-maga-scandal-grief.html

Driver’s license test. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1990288790989017244

Last night I dreamed again about my first car, the green 1971 straight 6 Chevy Nova. I can still kind of smell it. It had a manual three-on-the-tree transmission, a tiny one-barrel Rochester carburetor barely bigger than my fist, and no luxury or special items, not even a rug or a radio (I put a stereo in it), but it did have power steering. It was already old and coming apart when I got it in 1975. Contrast that with the 2004 Toyota that I got in 2014, that’s over two decades old now, no major work, 178,000 miles on it, and it’s still thrumming right along. The cars of our youth were fun, but they weren’t made to last. This one was. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://bustednuckles.net/your-feel-good-story-of-the-day/

Oh.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cuLIwqQZATs

Shiny.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1954-chevrolet-bel-air-sport-coupe.html

Study finds most Americans can’t find where they are being deported to on a map.
https://theonion.com/study-finds-most-americans-cant-find-where-they-are-being-deported-on-map/

Flying a camera drone into a tornado.
https://theawesomer.com/flying-a-camera-drone-into-a-tornado/788311/

The coolest passport in the world. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1991762731582779856

And that explains it.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=111925

Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad, by Edward Hirsch (1995)

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere–the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.

2025/11/15

Nor are we out of it.

. “There’s really nothing an agnostic can’t do if he really doesn’t know whether he believes in anything or not.” -Graham Chapman, via Futility Closet

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a fine little radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternatively, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Mister Trump goes to Heaven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AQGLmM6NWA

Rerun: The two-party system. (via Biblioklept)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTT-sy0aLg

The journey of Harry and Edna. Kodachrome, you give us the nice bright colors, you give us the greens of summer. It makes you think all the world’s a sunny day. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://flashbak.com/found-kodachromes-harry-and-edna-478629/

47 ways to say thank you.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/11/14/There-Are-47-Ways-to-Say-Thank-You-in-Japan/

Nine Billion Names of God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtvS9UXTsPI

Rerun: The God Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY9CTDM3l4M

How we get big lens glass.
https://theawesomer.com/how-glass-lenses-are-made/787503/

Last week’s Saturday protest. For those not local, this Fort Bragg is a small seaside seasonal tourist town in North California, formerly a lumber company town, with a fishing industry, but rapacious financiers moonscaped the forest to pay off their debts and wrecked all that. Population 7,000.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/sets/72177720330185641/

Made in Uruguay in 2016.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/11/11/falls-under-what-the-hell-did-i-just-watch/

Mister Toad’s wild Snowpiercer Polar Express.
https://theawesomer.com/the-polar-express-goes-off-the-rails/787553/

So you want a model railroad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaqryoclp38

Weird.
https://x.com/pickover/status/1988751515989995607/photo/1

Car size. Hover text: “They really shouldn’t let those small cars drive in traffic. I worry that I’m going to kill somebody if I hit one. They should have to drive on the sidewalk, safely out of the way.”
https://xkcd.com/3167/

A lot like flying in dreams.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ynftgAcT0os

An obstacle course in the sky.
https://theawesomer.com/wingsuit-obstacle-course-in-the-sky/788010/

Anemone nopes out of there. Nope is a verb now. You can nope out of a place, or nope away from someone. There used to be a cartoon character called Nopie. “Nope, nope, nope,” he or she said.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1oc1h1c/sea_anemone_senses_a_predatory_starfish_and/

Lucy exhibit.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meeting-lucy-how-a-world-first-european-exhibition-brought-visitors-face-to-face-with-the-fossil-that-shrinks-time-180987690/

Orfeo Tagiuri – Procession.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/procession.html

A story of three Fuegians.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/darwins-notebook.html

This movie trailer looks pretty good. It pushes most of my buttons. Maybe if it had a spaceship in it too. It won’t be very long before you can say, “Integrate spaceships into this story,” and just watch it develop in real time. How do you feel about that? (via Kottke)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nk8TrBHOrA

A history of Japan, by Bill Wurtz.
https://kottke.org/16/02/a-history-of-japan

It might be a li’l ballroom on top, but that’s just just the hat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVPQE6ln1c8

…and a catchy tune.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/why-would-lockheed-martin-build-ballroom.html

And a powerful argument either for or against change. (via the Anderson Valley Advertiser)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/not-perfect.jpg

Kinetic performance art.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/11/14/the-gif-friday-post-no-929-hooper-rex-sakura-yosozumi-dizzy-donuts/

A machine that counts money like my grandmother did at the restaurant. In those days everybody paid with real money. She would lick two fingers and the thumb of her right hand, vibrate them like the blades of a fan through a stack of bills, and then write down how much was thereBy the time my grandmother was the age I am now her hands were ruined by arthritis. Her knuckles were as big as walnuts. Her prestidigitating money-riffling days were over. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1989204146868592780

Far-Eastified folk metal. (Scroll down, there’s more.)
https://laughingsquid.com/traditional-chinese-instruments-rock-songs/

Ow.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/11/14/A-Thoroughly-Disturbing-X-ray-of-a-Human-Arm/

Ecca Vandal – Molly.
https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2025/11/new-fav-12-880.html

Northern lights for a bit last week.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/2025/11/photos-northern-lights/684901/

Veil Nebula for thousands of years. Also it’s six hundred forty-six trillion miles across. It looks like crocodile sideways in the mouth of an even bigger, even more tenuous monster.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/veil-nebula/

Asylum Street Spankers – Hick Hop (live).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhJx1gpl0kM

They don’t just sit there. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1986951861182537884

Spray metalization. I’ve skipped you to the spectacular part. Run it back to the start to understand better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-QcseGvU5o&t=934s

1930s speakeasy jazz version of Part Time Lover.
https://laughingsquid.com/1930s-speakeasy-jazz-part-time-lover/

Fun with Elvis.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/having_fun_with_elvis_onstage

Realistic ducks made of wood. Therefore they are a witch. (via Kottke)
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100057608013052

How we get little springs.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/robots-making-springs.html

How we get menstrual pads. It reminds me a little of the web press at Willits Printing that used to print my newspaper, Memo. Four thousand copies, $400, including all the camera work and photographically etching the plates. It took them an hour and a half while I slept in my delivery car and went for breakfast across the street and to read the San Francisco Chronicle, which cost a quarter. That was all the sleep I got for two days after finishing the layout by hand. Juanita and I were in our thirties. Happiest time of my life. Anyway, menstrual pads. (via Massimo)
https://x.com/i/status/1988849362902954442

How to not smoke. I’m sure you can see ways to smoke even with that thing on. It’s just a reminder, like a wrist brace, so you unconsciously move to do it but just don’t.
https://dangerousminds.net/history/ibrahim-yucel-the-man-beat-smoking-the-medieval-way/

“What if all the sun’s energy were drawn into a single one-meter-diameter beam aimed at Earth?”
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/11/12/Pondering-a-Deadly-Laser-Beam-from-the-Sun/

The Clippy car. “Hi, it looks like you want to drive somewhere. I can help with that.” Cary Grant’s father was killed crashing this model of car, drunk.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1930-austin-seven-saloon.html

More of Theo Jansen’s strandbeests.
https://laughingsquid.com/strandbeest-evolution-2025/

The top country songs this week were written and produced entirely by A.I.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU71XDWYeIk
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9BS70J_Ikss

Ahem.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NWnofaL_PFA
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sNJq0bkW_24
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d5oe0oD8Tl4
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZDs7D9jJvGs
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qzq2Bh5wKhw
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1k_L-oxkY_U

Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/cianobasmith/p/DQERkT3DCHA/

Josh Johnson’s valid theory of money.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ihhr7pxthac

A theory of witches and cowboys. (via Miss Cellania)
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2025/11/11/did-you-know-witches-and-cowboys-are-the-same/

Veronica Lake. Notice that she left her perfectly normal eyebrows the hell alone. See how nice that is? But the lipstick is creepy. I know I’m in the minority here about lipstick and makeup and piercing jewelry and tattoos of tears and all that, but I hate it. All my life, it makes me wince. Also, because of Firesign Theater, whenever I see the name Veronica Lake I think, right after, South Side Johnny, Louie the Loop, etc. And I think of Kim Basinger, who played Veronica Lake in a movie I half-remember. Geographically, there is a town named Veronica, a single one, but no actual lake.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/young-veronica-lake.html

The chilling demise of Veronica Lake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg_D0BcCMUc

Art.
https://biblioklept.org/2025/11/12/the-pond-aron-wiesenfeld/
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/body-art.html
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/artwork_khrushchev_probably_would_not_have_liked_65
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v57pDlHiZtw
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_sculptures_of_server_demirtas

There’s graphic design, and there’s graphic design.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SbSaoU0dIWs
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1950s-ernesto-garcia-cabral-film-posters.html

Egg.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/frances-mclaughlin-gill.html

Yamaha flugelhorn, YFH-8310Z. The very B-flat flugelhorn Mayor Shinn’s nonexistent son’s pinky finger is perfectly situated to operate the spit-valve of.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Yamaha_Flugelhorn_YFH-8310Z.jpg/1280px-Yamaha_Flugelhorn_YFH-8310Z.jpg

Queen of the doumbek. It’s onomatopoeic. Doumbek. Doumbek.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/atTR2xQXnGE

Retro robot cards.
https://theawesomer.com/kings-wild-astro-playing-cards/787592/

The most Xmasy farm accident aftermath photo ever.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/man-dies-trapped-beneath-farm-145233976.html

Baby octopockle rescued from fish market grows up to play special underwater piano. For the short of attention span, skip ahead to 15:00.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/rescued-octopus-plays-piano.html

Inda Good Old Somerstein.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/11/13/close-enough-3/

Three seconds of every ST:TNG episode. (via Fark)
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13876836

Two-mile-long glass waterslide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yosBhDd7yw0

Salt of the earth.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=WBS5xJ

The Wanta-See-Something-Cool guy on magnetic lines of force, or not.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qlkongJmGo0

The Philogelos, an ancient Greek joke book. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://languagemuseum.org/exhibits/philogelos-the-first-joke-book/

Sigh.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/speaker-johnson.jpg

Sway.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/08/sway-tower-14-story-folly-and-world.html

“It definitely made me wonder if we were the first to hear the words of Jesus through the medium of corndogs.”
https://theawesomer.com/roasting-weenies-with-radio-waves-slow-motion/787504/

Rerun: Danny MacAskill in S.F. (via Jean Arnold)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIBldkWO9a4

Balloon. (Click on image to zoom in.)
https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/06928a7/2147483647/strip/true/crop/8640×5760%2B0%2B0/resize/2720×1814!/format/webp/quality/90/

Ride of the remoras.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/10/take-a-remora-eye-ride-on-the-back-of-a-whale.html

The worst place on Earth to be stranded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkOpwh5M3WE

Why to use the deadbolt. “It slows them down a minute more/ And so they try the place next door.” There’s one for the plate you install under your car to prevent catalytic converter theft: “It slows them down for forty seconds/ And so you keep the part, I reckon.” You make one up now.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n0TT2aTkVhU

Splash.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-mermaid.html

The cat distribution system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Roq-SRAas8

Tools, tools, tools. A tool for you. And a tool of you. And a tool for you. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://koolyz.com/en

2025/11/08

That’s it, kid. Give ’em the ol’ razzmatazz.

. “If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a fine little radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. (Alternately, “KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket [blast sound] in Fort Bragg.”

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Running dogs.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/fast-dogs.html

A site of simple, video-enhanced explanations for complicated things. How the human eye works, for example. How a hard drive and a record player and a jet airliner work. How to /moonwalk/. Much more. (via BoingBoing)
https://animagraffs.com/

An hour or so of sloppily clipped together, weirdly video processed Louie C.K. bits from recent years that I somehow never heard before, rich with angles to think about. That is, I posted it here in prep, but checked the link just now, two days later, and the video’s been removed and its source’s YouTube account terminated. So experience disappointment. Or, if you hate him, pump your fist in the air and smile hard. In a mirror.

Geordie Greep – Blues. (via AVA)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNGlbB4Gbyo

A couple of images from The Onion to haunt your dreams.
https://theonion.com/shut-up-mother-shut-up-pleads-george-w-bush-to-dick-cheney-skeleton-dressed-in-suit/
https://theonion.com/mike-johnson-my-christian-faith-is-more-about-not-jacking-off-than-feeding-the-poor/

I think that, out of all the people ever in the public eye, Yoko Ono is one of the most misunderstood. Here, take these, one right after the other:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCznX6qoSNQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono

Miss Chile’s deathmetal voice. It sounds like it should hurt, but it doesn’t look like it. Sometimes in the gentlest music a guitar player will bend a string half a tone and contort his face like someone’s pinching him with pliers. Janis Joplin looked like it hurt. Alanis Morrisset merely looked pissed off. But Miss Chile is like, Eh, it’s a gig.
https://metalinjection.net/metal-in-the-mainstream/miss-world-chile-semifinalist-stuns-judges-by-performing-a-song-from-her-own-death-metal-band

“I used to wonder why the banshee cried. Now I know.”
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/her-song.html

Reflection and refraction.
https://x.com/i/status/1984993592176218499

The sound of tattoos. Pickle Rick!
https://theawesomer.com/the-sound-of-tattoos-short-film/787322/

Hoop.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/11/04/dont-watch-this-after-breakfast/

Car alarm music on a Laotian mouth-pipe-organ. Peaceful.
https://laughingsquid.com/car-alarm-on-khaen-mouth-organ/

A very special place.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/03/brazils-a-surreal-paradise-of-dunes-and-crystal-blue-lagoons.html

Gaza, before and after, although it’s not really after, yet, is it, for some people, as long as one stone remains atop another. How dare it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pmz1YUBSgc

A movie about China’s surveillance system.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/china-my-wife-has-social-credit

An essay on the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_AQQZ7j4zE

How we get sex dolls. After I saw this I was doing the day’s Phrasle puzzle, and I had got as far as INSTANT __AR__A. Of course it’s INSTANT KARMA, but because of seeing the sex doll factory I first thought INSTANT MARIA, though the dolls are far from instant. So much expensive time-consuming work. Robots should make them; they should make each other, and then kiss each other, like in All Is Full Of Love, by Bjork, which is, wow, no longer available to watch the original beautiful video of. Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbAWI_P5cQ

Awww, he’ll be alright. Let ‘im get up by himself. (Hear that in Randy Newman’s voice.)
https://bsky.app/profile/ketanjoshi.co/post/3m4qwzcirfs2r

A new video game where the player is an inert stone. Weather and life and things go on all around you. That is all. (via Kottke)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1425980/Stone_Simulator__Just_Be_a_Rock/

Liquid behavior from dry sand and air. Unlike everywhere else lately that someone said enthusiastically to me, “This is the coolest thing ever,” this in fact is. It reminded me instantly of a movie I saw on teevee at my Uncle Jack’s and Aunt Wanda’s house when I was a little boy, that made a profound impression on me, about a boy interested in astronomy (as I was), who witnesses from his window a spaceship crash in sand dunes near his house on the edge of town. It turns out to be a /trap of boiling, down-funneling sand/ that catches people, including his parents and the police, and the aliens change them into bad-dream robots of themselves that talk softly, gently, menacingly weirdly. You can tell someone’s been taken over, by a tiny mark on the skin at the back of the neck (the camera moves to show you this, and the music does something tingly but also low). The boy saves the world by avoiding capture while getting the U.S. Army to come and go down through the sand trap to the ship and break the glass around an alien octopus/brain creature, which kills it and so releases everyone from its control. That movie was an important model for me for how the world works and how to live in it. And this sand thing brings it all back.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/11/making-liquid-out-of-sand-and-air.html

The joy of old real educational tools.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0wn0i2j2gpQ

Zero-G pull-chain physics. I can see an application for this in launching a compressed wad of sausage-connected pods, inflating and spinning it all out in a ring, once it’s in space, to provide artificial gravity. Also, it’s strange that it doesn’t occur to these men to spin the chain on a cylinder of something rolled-up, and then pull the cylinder out, to get the chain started in a good circle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtZaP8VMv0c

A bird hit my window and now I’m a lesbian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHbiVjMBtLU

Demonic force captured on video.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/11/04/what-if-all-paranormal-phenom-was-just-cats/

Scroll down for some samples.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/06/tom-the-dancing-bug-finally-gets-its-complete-archive-treatment.html

Karla Davis – Tennessee Whiskey.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/karla-davis-tennessee-whiskey.html

Hurray For the Riff Raff – Look Out Mama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9nDsFHERM

Larkin Poe, sisters. (Graceland!)
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/11/06/larkin-poe/

Barbra Streisand.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/11/04/sultry-and-silly-faces-of-barbara-streisand-at-21/

Mark’s very large National Lampoon website. (via another Mark)
https://www.marksverylarge.com/

Maybe some of this is why there was so much crime and mental illness and so much more bloody violence in the old days than there is now, though it’s going back that way, if you count mental illness in power and consequent official bully-gang violence. A lot of it back then, though, was from tetraethyl lead in the air and water and soil because cars needed it to run just a little bit better. And farther back than that everybody was nuts from trauma of all the infant mortality, and being drunk all the time.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/bad-historical-parenting-advice

Apss! (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://x.com/SteveLovesAmmo/status/1984313589872623781

Art.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_drop

Art via This Isn’t Happiness.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DQqCHULiAtu/?img_index=1
https://www.instagram.com/armstrongseth/
https://designyoutrust.com/2021/04/darkness-is-spreading-rapidly-lately-the-superb-dark-photo-works-and-baugasm-posters-by-vasjen-katro/

Wooden sea sculptures. With a short video.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/11/07/mariner-poet/

Water walkers.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/11/07/Explaining-the-Magic-of-Water-Walkers-with-Fluid-Dynamics/

An article about cataract surgery, with video of the operation. Doctor Miller, a small-town opthalmologist, performed cataract surgery on on both my eyes just this summer, one eye, then, a month later, the other. It was not traumatic, and I’m delighted with my vision now. I struggled through an increasingly dim sepia blur world, where any bright light would wash out my entire viewfield, mostly because I had no way to pay for any kind of medical care before I got old enough for Medicare, but also because of being afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of. It really is the world’s most common surgery. They’ve done it millions of times. They have it down. They take you in, they knock you out in such a way that you never feel high or weird, they do the job, you wake up, have a cup of tea, your friend drives you home. Your eyes are a little irritated for a few days as things settle down, and voila, everything from 3 feet to infinity is as sharp and bright and clear and colorful as when you were a kid, and for reading tiny print up close you use dollar store reading glasses. I know someone who had them optimize her eyes rather for close-up vision, and she just uses glasses to drive a car. And a man down the street had a /very/ expensive early prototype of lenses put in that let the eyes focus them normally, in the 1970s, with the downside of that being he can’t go out in sunlight without sunglasses, and when he’s tired his eyes hurt. I prefer what I chose. You get to choose; they’re your eyes. I was an idiot. I should have robbed a bank or won the lottery when I was 60 and fixed my eyes then. I’d still be almost 67 now, but maybe I wouldn’t have hit those deer and fucked up my car. And maybe my radio show would have been better all this time, for being easier and more comfortable and surveying the whole big wide screen of tiny type at once, not hunching forward, reading big type from only a foot away.
https://press.asimov.com/articles/cataracts

“The animals are laughing at us. Animals think they’re pretty smart. Trusting them: big mistake! I will ignore animals’ advice.” (via BoingBoing)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maskenfest/

I like this. Pick a dot and follow it.
https://x.com/i/status/1986910482687562036

It was too wind-noisy to record this that day, but it turned out okay. It’s like a dream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTxCPb4XiBQ

String theory.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StringTheory

I don’t know what to think of this kind of music. I mean, a lot of music unfamiliar to me, from other cultures, and even my culture, some kinds of jazz, for example, sounds like just random notes, but this “49 note microtonal singing” isn’t even notes. Or is it? I have my old oscilloscope around here somewhere; I’ll look into that. Mendocino Theater Company put on a play once about a famous brilliant classical violinist with a wasting nerve disease, so she’s losing her abilities and agency in the world, and it makes her cranky. Her husband plays a different kind of music than she likes, and she says something like, “Dit dot! Doo dat! Bip bip boing! Twelve-tone mathematical bullshit all day long!” That stuck in my mind: twelve-tone mathematical bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEAJyNe_t5I

Moment of truth.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-moment-of-truth.html

It’s all the fault of the migrants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHKSDoz8TbE

Nixie fireball compilation. (via Juanita)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtLeEUPtkHk

What philosophy is good for, part nine.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheAlienHivevsExistentialism.png

Interview with Diana Rigg on the subject of The Avengers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFsPJSpk17A

Censorship in classic cartoons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC0Z6G8hm1Y

Ain’t no party like my Nana’s tea party.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/11/tea-party.html

Letters home from the Second Civil War.
https://boingboing.net/2025/11/05/tom-the-dancing-bug-letters-home-from-the-second-civil-war.html

The letters in the previous item remind me of this song made of letters home from the Revolutionary War. It’s left up in the air whether Jedediah survives the war. Eliza Gilkyson. Her song Requiem– I can’t find it anywhere to just show it to you, but you can find church choirs singing it if you look– is just so sad and perfect. She is so great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhdYBQMdGk

On the other hand, Flight of the Bumblebee on sopranino recorder.
https://laughingsquid.com/flight-of-the-bumblebee-sopranino-recorder/

She rescued a meat rabbit. Meat rabbit.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/11/hoppy-gilmore.html

I love the “You’ll be a tasty meatburger” one here. It’s at 40 seconds. And the mother’s tone of voice saying, “Ohhhkay,” like when Al Pacino in /Simone/ realizes that the girl about to have sex with him on the couch is only with him so she can get access to Simone, and he says, “Ohhhkay,” pushes her off, stands up and shows her to the door. And also the No Way boys at the end, 7:52.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbt_bB6ObPU

Awww.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/11/06/pensive-pup-ponders-pretty-pumps/

Copper car. (via Fark)
https://img.carswp.com/rolls-royce/phantom/rolls-royce_phantom_1930_pictures_8.jpg

Coop’s shot tower.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=neTzDI

Halloween bear. RAAAGHR!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uSJ65Je-XB0

Metal in the microwave.
https://theawesomer.com/hot-potato-buttered-side-down-warframe/786899/

Further Xin An loop-beatboxing.
https://laughingsquid.com/beatboxer-recreates-entire-songs/

Imagine this woman looking you in the eye, looking away, and swallowing a whole (peeled) egg.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/shirley-worthington.html

Her special day.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/11/1950s-weddings.html

I know it’s just the ladder shoes that make them walk like that, but these fashion runway videos flip the same switches in my brain as Super Marionation shows (Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds). Also they’re like A.I. creepy marionette dance videos. And imagine /these/ women swallowing an egg for you, how about.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/11/05/armani-privee/

All life depends on this fizzing hot mess. If you put our whole planet anywhere in this image, or in real life on the actual sun, it would be too small and dark to see, and then it would evaporate into plasma as fast at it fell inside, which would be /fast/ because it’s 28G’s there. The Sun wouldn’t even feel it. It would be like a single raindrop on a hot frying pan the size of a Costco parking lot (via Fark)
https://bsky.app/profile/ryanjfrench.bsky.social/post/3m4qn4feltc2s

17 paradoxes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrJA0J7jciY

I remember the title story here. I read it in a collection that included /The Sound Machine/ by Roald Dahl, and /The Supremacy of Uruguay/ by E.B. White. There also was a story about a man who murders his wife because he thinks she doesn’t love him anymore, buries her in the basement, and gets on a ship to America. Later, his mail catches up with him and he learns that his wife has contracted a building company to dig up the basement and construct a wine cellar for him, for a present and, by the date, they started today. The Enormous Radio is about a married couple who get a strange magic (enormous) radio that lets them listen in on the private lives of all the neighbors in their apartment building, and they become addicted to this, to the detriment of their own marriage and happiness, of course. There were hundreds, maybe thousands or artists in those days who made an okay living painting cartoons like this for the covers of paperback books. I remember being amused, as a little boy, by how the cover of a book rarely had much to do with what was inside. Especially with science fiction books and magazines. The monster was never right. The spaceship never matched the description inside.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cheever.jpg

Silencio.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/11/patrick-watson-silencio-official-music.html

2025/11/01

Bride of Chaotica!

. “Be strong, leetle vun. Someday they vill all be dedt and you vill do a sheet on all of their graves.”

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a fine little radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California. The Little Lion? Hmm. Tired. KNYO-LP, the Noisy Cricket (pause for blast sound) in Fort Bragg. Better.

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

A short film about an ambulatory chicken bone.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/dead-hearts-creepy-enough-for-halloween.html

Felix Coldgrave – Throat Notes. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhVehcHwOB8

Christian Nightmares newsletter: Demonic Halloween.
https://christiannightmares.substack.com/p/weekly-recap-demonic-halloween-christians

Bunnyrabbits, Satan, Cheese and Milk. /Cheese and Milk./
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he_j45zFLqI

Punkin animation.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/oh-my-gourd.html

Emma Peel clips set to Cake’s Short Skirt, Long Jacket. I looked it up; Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) of the original The Avengers is actually who the song was about. And Jet, by Paul McCartney, was about a Labrador retriever dog. (Martha My Dear was about a sheepdog. Mandy was about a poodle. Walk This Way was about a longhaired dachshund, so soft and nice to brush with the special brush, or swing on a swing with.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idtYckLIZnI

Peggy Lee – Mack the Knife. (About a Doberman, bleagh.) (via Craig Louis Stehr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrMBwIoY5o

I, for one, welcome the reign of the Dark Lord.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/28/new-online-logic-game-where-criminals-tell-the-truth.html

Aidez moi, s’il vous plait! (via AVA)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/weird-ghost.jpg

Here’s looking at you.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/elsa-lanchester-bride-of-frankenstein.html

Some scenes from an episode of Friends entirely imagined by previous-generation A.I. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://bsky.app/profile/danmynrd.bsky.social/post/3m4egetadr22l

Halloween World. Scroll down and down, and down some more. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://atomic-chronoscaph.tumblr.com/post/764164899810263040/trick-or-treaters-1970s1980s

Further, earlier.
https://www.boredpanda.com/creepy-vintage-halloween-photos/

A dictionary of demons.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/defining-the-demonic

Woodcuts and witches.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/woodcuts-and-witches

Rerun: Smooth dance. They’re not on motor skateboards or hoverboards or even skates. /They’re scurrying on their toes./ They’re that graceful. Commenter Dany pointed out that this won’t work in a swimsuit, prompting me to try to find someone doing it for a joke, but no. Cats do it sometimes to cross a road. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/i/status/1979613096303034443

Homeless woman in first class. (13 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6lBe9jcAgw

Street musician out with his well-worn Strat, rain or shine. I mentioned it on the radio and called it a Telecaster, they’re not remotely the same, I even saw a Tele in my head when I was saying it so I didn’t correct myself at the time because the mechanism failed. People will think I’m stupid. That’s the sort of thing that I get stuck thinking and thinking about and say, “Stop it,” to myself, but out loud, maybe three or four times a day about this or that, less often when the offense is worse. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2025/10/mark-allen-cardiff-busker-amazing.html

Like here, for example: I’m sorry, I forgot what this British college professor’s name is. She has a YouTube channel. I’ve showed you things by her before, only a few weeks ago. I remember that she overcame a terrible health problem, and the (successful) treatment caused her arms and legs to swell painfully, and that she’s divorced with two kids. Anyway, here’s this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RrfkCslhUTM

Ah-HA! Her name is Dr. Hannah Fry, and the problem was cervical cancer and treatment-related lymphedema, which she has made an effort to increase awareness of and fund research. Rerun:
https://www.youtube.com/@fryrsquared

One more: “He created a mathematical model that could predict which of two nonsense words would be funnier, based on how far away they were from common words, and then compared them to actual humans deciding which of the two words is funnier.” Sunshine Boys: words with a k-sound.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pBjzN6mDAdQ

77 minutes of /Community/ danger clips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhSG6qomTPw

Awwww.
https://laughingsquid.com/playing-orange-tabby-cat-like-bagpipes/

Effect and cause.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/modern-world.jpg

Snapshot of our local star, Mister Sun, 21:08:56 UTC, October 25. All of Earth would cover just a few pixels of this wild billion-year constant plasma explosion. And all of Earth’s people, piled up like bricks, side to side, just to the rim of the Grand Canyon, to make a wall across it, would be only two people thick. And half of the cells in your body are not you at all but rather bacteria living inside you or bugs living in your hair follicles. Your meat robot is their comfortable world, not too big, not too small, just the right temperature, endless supply of yummy rot. All thanks to energy from Mister Sun.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/sun.jpg

“A guy you could count on to pick you up after a colonoscopy.”
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025-10-28-cgmonsters.gif

Slow glass for the ISS. (via BoingBoing)
https://issinrealtime.org/

Slow glass.
https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Bob_Shaw-Light_of_Other_Days.pdf

A short film about werewolves. These werewolves are sometimes swearwolves. (15 min.) (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNX1jsnqus

Ah, Christ, here we go again. We just sprayed for this 80 years ago.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/27/trump-labor-dept-promotes-aryan-workforce-in-creepy-nazi-style-ad-campaign.html

Some porch pirate traps. (via Fark)
https://www.fark.com/vidplayer/13860386

Art. Scroll down.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/26/repost-self-as-canvas/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/30/jim-haggart/
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/31/inge-schuster/

Art via This Isn’t Happiness. Scroll down.
https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2011/05/alberto-martini-edgar-allan-poe.html
https://thisisnthappiness.com/post/179616309084/scarfolk-ouija

Jason Kottke’s photos of his trip to Koyasan. Click on the first image to play the reel. You might also have to click the sound on. (via Kottke)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DQZS1U4E837/

Last week’s (pre-Halloween) Tacky Raccoons musical matinee.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/10/25/saturday-matinee-pre-halloween-edition-kitty-daisy-lewis-koffin-kats-zombie-ghost-train-and-the-ramones/

Rerun: Ghanaian art coffins. (via Fark) (Scroll down.)
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/in-ghana-the-dead-are-buried-in-beer-bottles-shoes-and-airplanes-inside-the-tradition-of-fantasy-coffins/articleshow/124848339.cms

The Knife Game song. Don’t show this to the teenage boy inside you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t2bnp8aoXw

“Hey, wait a minute, Mudhead. They /lied/ to us.” (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA

Xin An looping/beatboxing.
https://theawesomer.com/beatbox-layering-by-xin-an/786278/

A trailer for an obviously wonderful weird old film. And a link to watch the whole 78-minute film if you want to. Having only seen the trailer so far, I think it might feel like the immersive storytelling scenes in The Fall, by Tarsem Singh.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-color-of-pomegranates.html

Here’s a fan-made trailer for The Fall. It’s such a great film. The little girl actress only ever made that one movie. She didn’t speak English at all when they started. It was pure magic, putting her and Lee Pace together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEi-v6aJD7Q

The Swiss army knife crossbow blade.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/28/Swiss-Army-Knife-Crossbow/

Oh.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/orraGyd9eUg

Watch her dead hulk disgorge a litter. Or– The miracle of birth.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/26/Watch-the-Weird-Way-Tardigrades-Are-Born/

That’s entertainment.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/10/26/and-when-you-show-it-to-anyone-it-clams-up/

“That MWAAH sound can mean only one thing…”
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/29/the-outer-worlds-2-fixes-everything-wrong-with-the-original.html

Fun logic game. Not too hard. With narrated gameplay example video.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/28/new-online-logic-game-where-criminals-tell-the-truth.html

Rerun: Cat watching a horror movie.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2016/10/cat-watching-horror-movie.html

Any random five minutes of our ridiculous wrong real-life timeline going farther wrong every second Fat Donny Two-Scoops is stinking up the place. Oh, look, we’re spending another $400,000,000 attacking Venezuela with aircraft carriers now, on a whim. Sigh.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hNlJdQwvr3o

Dog affirmations.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/daily-affirmations-for-dog-in-your-life.html

“Congratulations.”
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/this-is-ad.html

“AKATSUKI became the satellite circling around the Venus.” And now it’s dead. It had a good run. A moment of silence, though plus being dead it is in heaven (space) and couldn’t hear you anyway.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/30/signal-from-last-orbiting-venus-probe-dies.html

Some stills and videos of flying into the eye of the strongest hurricane anybody’s ever seen for 200 years.
https://gizmodo.com/air-force-videos-capture-the-eye-of-hurricane-melissa-as-catastrophic-storm-hits-jamaica-2000678204

A cruel prank if a person, as this one does, turns out to be not well. I hope someone said sorry and tried to make this right.
https://x.com/i/status/1979596319065784569

/HAAAW/.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/haaw.html

98 Pontiac Sunfire and bonus karaoke version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqveNtfe3yY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDwW21gL1FY

How to make 60-proof purple nurple. It’s like purple drank but alcohol instead of cough syrup and pop. You need sugar, one lemon, a gallon of distilled water, a packet of champagne yeast, packet of Fermaid, a rubber glove, a single pin, an available refrigerator-freezer, and a pinch of butterfly pea blossoms so the color turns more like weak grape sodapop than like a truck-stop piss jar. It reminds me, as so much does, of when Scruffy said in Futurama, to comfort Marcie because her green Martian boyfriend was unjustly away in prison, “Prison ain’t so bad. And you can make sangria in the terlit.” Allow me to repeat: science has shown that no amount of alcohol is safe. Two drops of it increase your risk of everything from cancer to dementia. Alcohol kills 200,000 Americans every year. Transvestites reading aloud in libraries kill, what, five? Not 500,000. Five. (I’m kidding, of course. Transvestites in libraries kill zero.) Thirty thousand children are killed by guns every year in America. Some of those, I guess, their gun-within-reach parents or uncles are drunk, but a lot of them shoot themselves or each other. Handguns in the city, long guns in rural areas. And one-third of all car deaths come from alcohol, too.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dM2CN-GR4rU

Fiend Without a Face. (Full film, 74 min.) (“I don’t understand it. We sprayed for brains just last week.” -Dan Aykroyd, in Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, or maybe it was Kentucky Fried Movie, speaking of spraying for things.)
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/fiend-without-face.html

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. (Full film, 80 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S4KNAABENI

Wanta see something cool?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MdONf4QEdaI

A.I. dances famous meme stills. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHgdL8B49M

The Captchanator.
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/PhilosophyvstheTerminator.png

Sonogram reveals her inner dog. (via Fark)
https://people.com/woman-shocked-when-sonogram-images-have-uncanny-resemblance-to-dog-exclusive-11838068

Hotsy totsy.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/new-orleans-1963.html

Haunted house walk-through. (via Fark)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGl4pnFZNlk

Egg.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/keith-ewart.html
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/jean-newington.html

Understanding the mind behind the gun. The Smothers Brothers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJVB4vPYee0

Mimes are not good roommates. (via Miss Cellania) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1o9twqw/mimes_are_not_good_roommates/

80 minutes of Troy in /Community/. In the Han Solo origin story movie, this actor played young Lando Calrissian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z_tvG3kGeI

…and Childish Gambino – This Is America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY

I don’t play video games, but I tried and enjoyed the look and feeling and sound of this one, though I didn’t bother to figure out what you’re supposed to do besides steer and run around. A couple of years ago I tried just flying around in a Cessna in Google Earth, and that was a little like this. Nice. (via BoingBoing)
https://messenger.abeto.co/

On the other hand, here’s an example of a fully-A.I.-generated game. You might have to click the sound on for grunts and splashes and pops and footsteps. The lightning-shooting poltergeist file cabinet drawers made me smile with the left side of my mouth and then finish with the right.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1981798226635190641

Instruments.
https://laughingsquid.com/123-instruments-123-seconds/

How they replace a fancy-bend antique car door without the original stamp to work from.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rN7KAh3FiIo

Jesus said to shelter and clothe the poor, feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit strangers in jail, welcome all immigrants, turn the other cheek, pray only quietly in secret and not make a fuss about it, etc. Naw, no, Jesus said exactly the opposite of all that and wants you to carry your gun around in case you need to shoot someone, kick your gay child out into the snow, hoard material wealth, and he could talk your ear off about how much he hates abortion and gay marriage, colloquial funny terms for body parts and dancing on Sundays. Which of those sentences, to you, is “the lines are straight” and which one is “the lines are bendy”?
https://x.com/pickover/status/1982886110612353036/photo/1

Further on tardigrade reproduction.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2021/03/tardigrade-egg.html

Kind of hard to look away from.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/at-amusement-park.html

What /is/ a monster. Dr. Emily Zarka has thoughts.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/27/The-Changing-Purpose-Behind-Scary-Monster-Stories/

What /is/ a UFO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64zlyzojpPM

Smells Like Teen Spirit on rubber chickens.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/31/Playing-Smells-Like-Teen-Spirit-on-Rubber-Chickens/

It’s almost as if the people behind the Wall Street Journal are panties-in-a-bunch terrified of this well-educated, thoughtful, capable, ethical, electable man.
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/local-paper-opines-on-mayors-race

Everything falls apart. The center cannot hold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCiSIgKJzqE

Hold still.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/index.php?date=102925

I like it that the whole thing is done on a single hotplate. It looks yummy, but the obstacle I see is, to start with, you have to somehow acquire a slab of premium fresh salmon.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Fr4ZeWd3SyI

Sally, duck.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/27/how-to-cook-duck-with-as-much-collateral-damage-as-possible.html

Just asking for it.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/10/31/bits-and-pieces-hallowmeme-2025-9/

Leonardo’s inventions. Don’t bail when the ad intrudes, just zoop past it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm84wLGZbjA

A man in Virginia invented a full-size replica of Stonehenge of insulation foam. When I was cooking breakfast and lunch in a mid-scale tourist restaurant I used to make things like this, small, on a shelf, out of bits of potato and vegetables. Sometimes I’d make a kid’s breakfast into a funny face or a dinosaur and send it out. Not if it was busy.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/31/artist-builds-full-scale-stonehenge-from-styrofoam-in-10-days.html

Peaceful jazz dog. (via BoingBoing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLT66VNeu-4

Treadle-operated hurdy-gurdy, though technically if you don’t crank it with the crank-handle it’s not a hurdy-gurdy anymore. Hurdy-gurdy, John Paul told me, literally means butt-crank.
https://theawesomer.com/hurdy-gurdy-man/744450/

CAA-TOU-SEE’s eye paint is like future Hunter Thompson’s sunglasses in Transmetropolitan. CHON-CA-PE’s hat is giving you the fuzzy finger. And so on. Christopher Walken. Joe E. Ross. Two Lokis. Lord Mountbatten. Danny Thomas. Calvin Coolidge. Zippy.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/indian-tribes-of-north-america.html

Transmetropolitan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan

Alita: Battle Angel in real life.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8tBx_dTsvRo

Battle of the Planets characters realisticized.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2x0NttgYZ5g

Rerun: Rachel Feinstein on women working. “That’s how she gets out! She gets out through the screen. You have to be very careful.” In memory I see Tracy Burns improv-ing something like this, the version of her when she was young in the 1980s, in Hit and Run Theater. She could tie a crowd up in a bow and boop its nose.*
https://youtu.be/SAbQYy8hP3M?si=3JuGH_LMU0PVREqI&t=887

*And now Tracy Burns needs your help. If you can, please. It doesn’t have to be much. Look at that adorable face.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/aid-tracy-burns-through-health-crisis

What. (via Fark)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Protector_of_the_sheep.jpg

“Of the intelligence of Jupiter.”
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/agrippa-occult-philosophy

Bolivian salt flats. Look around.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=WBS5xJ

And I will always remember James Spader young and introverted, in a mop of blond hair, a rambling videographer refusing to move into an apartment, and when asked why, he said, “Too many keys. You have your front door key and your back door key, and then you have to get a post office box, and that has a key, and you have to have a job to pay for all this, so you’ve got keys to all the stuff at work, and then you have a bank account and a safety box key, and with the car keys too it’s just… too many keys.” Now, here’s thing that interests me. That’s the exact line I remember. I looked it up just now, and here is the line he actually spoke, “No, it’s just, I, you know, I just think– right now I have one key and everything I own is in the car, and I just… I like that, you know? I mean, I just, if I get an apartment, that’s two keys, if I… get a job, you know, I might have to open or close, that’s more keys, you know, buy some stuff, I’m afraid it’s gonna get ripped off, or something, and I get more keys, and I just, I, you know, I just like having the one key, it’s clean.” Close enough. Now, though, he will quip, and shoot you, or shoot you first and then quip. At first in the Stargate SG1 teevee show, I was disappointed they replaced his movie character with another Daniel actor, but I got over it. The new Daniel did great. Anyway, James Spader in the mid twenty-teens, confident, non-stammery, retributive, yet jovial. It’s not personal, it’s just business.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dpU-mW-773E

2025/10/25

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome.

. “My fundamental concern with how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted in the future? I don’t feel comfortable building a robot army if I don’t have, at least, influence over it.” -Elon Musk

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a fine little radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California.

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

“Vatch her take za pleasure from za serpent zat vunce corrupted man!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPpwXUZNbNs

World championship boogie-woogie dancing. One, two, a-one-two-three-GO.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2013/12/world-championship-boogie-woogie-dancing.html

Yo, el tarot.
https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2025/10/12-815.html

Ohhh. Oooh. So cute. Like a human-child-size mammalian tardigrade.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/little-miss-walrus-gets-second-chance.html

Sonic studies.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/science-of-sound/

Splash. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXTcYa7u12k

Some more about the Fort Bragg, California No Kings Day last week.
https://mendocinocoast.news/no-kings-protest-returns-as-a-lovefest-among-thousands-now-the-path-forward/

Jason Salmon.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HPMcY32A58M

Debbie Reynolds.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/20/visual-candy/

June Lockhart. June 25, 1925 – October 23, 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Lockhart

Robert Palmer – Simply Irresistible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrGw_cOgwa8

Trailer for a new documentary about filmmaker Tim Burton.
https://theawesomer.com/tim-burton-life-in-the-line-trailer/785825/

Welcome to Union Glacier. (54 min.)
https://kottke.org/14/12/welcome-to-union-glacier

The sea level rise 3D map. (via Kottke) (Give it a location and wait. It takes awhile for the location to load and be ready. Go make a sandwich.)
https://nagix.github.io/sea-level-rise-3d-map/#/-74.00235423004592/40.70867300001581/17.07907096327786/-81.52/60

Where do you see yourself in five years.
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025-10-21-cgpowersoften.gif

All about motels.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/travel/motels-history-100-years.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk8.nL0-.aVZoZqgnldrC&smid=url-share&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

TED – What’s the best way to lift people out of poverty? The answer might surprise you. (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_ed_what_s_the_best_way_to_lift_people_out_of_poverty

A musical auction. (via b3ta)
https://www.juliensauctions.com/en/auctions/the-florian-schneider-collection

Last week’s Tacky Raccoons musical matinee.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/10/18/saturday-matinee-hatfitz-and-cara-marc-amacher-the-thilo-wolf-big-band/

Cluck the police.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xprS7qvCB3E

Rerun: Help the police.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZyqwOOmETI

Res ipsa loquitur.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/10/res-ipsa-loquitur.html

How they pulled it off.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/louvre-heist.html

“There’s a surprising number of penises in the Bayeux Tapestry.”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/bayeux-tapestry-penis-tally

“The sin of self-pollution is the most destructive evil practiced by fallen man. It is far worse than illegitimate sexual intercourse, yet strange to say, it is present mostly in the apparently good children, who would be shocked at the wickedness of sexual intercourse with a prostitute.” Shocked, I tell you.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_sexual_organ_their_use_and_abuse

And so we beat on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPzC59AxV7k

“Someone who bore false witness receives this kind of torment.” “Snakes are attached to the ears of someone who eavesdropped at the door.” (via Cliff Pickover)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/punishment-in-the-afterlife-an-eastern-turki-manuscript/

There goes that argument.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/10/19/and-there-goes-that-argument/

And that one.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WH5zYErWmAQ

“Have at you,” he cried.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/danny-kaye-vs-basil-rathbone-in-court.html

Results of a study on muggers’ victim-selection criteria. In a nutshell: Don’t look down. Don’t look up. Don’t step too long or too short or swing your arms wrong. Don’t look nervous. And they’ll pick somebody else to mug. This reminds me of Meryn Caddell’s poem that begins, “Martina hobbled home,” and ends, “Don’t get raped, knock on wood.”
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/how_to_avoid_getting_mugged

Don’t Fear the Reaper, on medieval instruments.
https://laughingsquid.com/bardcord-dont-fear-the-reaper/

“Nothing but sunshine and smiles.”
https://theawesomer.com/channelvue-short-film/785895/

At the museum of toys.
https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_2400,h_2400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-tanyabonakdargallery/usr/exhibitions/images/exhibitions/831/003.jpg

Race. They jump out of the water because it’s faster to swim this way. Compared to water resistance, air is practically nothing, and the thrust to jump and the drop into the water, tilted that way, both provide forward thrust, and they can breathe constantly.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/dolphins.html

Rerun: firenado in slow motion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwoghxwETng

An unforseen aspect of time travel. (via Fark)
https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/34955bb/2147483647/strip/true/crop/7702×5135%2B0%2B0/resize/2720×1814!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https://assets.apnews.com/fd/1f/1d56715dcb29c7ab09f312967ef3/dc4eddb1ea4f481ca139b9cd6cb8a120

The disembodied steering wheel in the man’s hands, what’s that about? And the dazed zombie bunny. And that tire has like five miles on it, which impresses and pleases the girl in the spray-on underwear. Plus the color-scheme. Not a bad Xmas card idea. I had a Toyota Corona in that general shape once but after the invention of duct tape.
https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/247e6b9/2147483647/strip/true/crop/7783×5189%2B0%2B0/resize/2720×1814!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https://assets.apnews.com/ad/c7/0655cf7a6a2e2fa12d56d218f6b9/e11fdffb5fb2418ebeb24c5ec6c1f50b

How it ended for Fa in the old days.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251023-a-forgotten-chapter-in-the-history-of-the-nuremberg-trials

Then slightly newer days. I’m gonna stop here, because Fa’s just getting really rolling again and it’s depressing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu7Wdv8mbd8

Puny god.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0nw40Cc79Sw

Cute European vampire cowgirl with /two/ pairs of needle-like canine teeth, fetching red eyes and that’s a real gun.
https://thisisnthappiness.com/image/798138634229448704

“Remember, we’re werewolves, not swearwolves.” (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/sarahtheresalee/

I love this. Just a quiet “Ah, yeah” as she drops off, and no screaming, and, in an indoor-voice, “That was lovely, guys,” as she bobbles around in the air down there, dangling by her ankles. That is savoir faire.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u4lki7pDqsw

Rerun: Vitamin String Quartet
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/19/repost-take-your-vitamins/

We’re up to the year 2000 in /Centuries of Sound/.
https://centuriesofsound.com/2025/10/20/2000-part-two-get-me-a-tape/

Bathing in the dirt. Heal the places we got hurt.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/earth-bathing/

The whole being dead thing. (via AVA)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWtbpEB27UE

Rerun: Burning down the house. Fullscreen the video.
https://www.perfectforroquefortcheese.org/2025/10/stop-making-sense-12-809.html

Every time the world almost ended.
https://theawesomer.com/every-time-the-world-almost-ended/785514/

Pinky and Perky’s Hit Parade. (Full album, 33 min.)
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/pinky_and_perkys_hit_parade

Drumming with stools. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOxN2lx9HA&list=RDRuOxN2lx9HA

Art. (via Tacky Raccoons)
https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1o7tc6i/this_mans_imagination_is_next_level/
https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2025/10/meanwhile-on-planet-meth.html

Shooting Annie’s missing-lover footage.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7JuBOUhK10

The /Community/ Halloween reel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bQKSGEvbRw

True story.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oyWOajtrjoA

The kind of person who gets special treatment under Donald Trump’s perverted justice system.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_KXoAAByVxE

Uh-huh.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/24/trump-hates-this-canadian-ad-so-much.html

Satellite photos of progress on the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/24/satellite-image-shows-east-wing-of-white-house-completely-demolished-to-make-way-for-epstein-ballroom.html

Spectator sports.
https://wondermark.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025-10-18-1574game_1600px-1536×1536.png

How to cure poverty: Give poor people some money. It’s cheaper than all the other ways, and it works.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/24/The-Latest-Research-on-Fighting-Poverty/

The breaker boys.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/breaker-boys.html

Heroes of the blues, by R. Crumb. (via AVA)
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Crumb-BluesHeroes.jpg

To add to “This machine kills fascists.”
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/22The-Hammer22-at-City-of-Ukiah-Pumpkinfest-Andrew-Lutsky.jpg

Foosh.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/23/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-president-trumps-all-over-chagrin-falls-usa.html

Pay attention, I say, pay attention, Son, you’ll learn somethin’.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/20/examining-the-rivers-of-the-witcher-3.html

Rerun: Scooter lady in 1916. The last time I saw this I misread it as an electric scooter. I see the heat-engine cylinder now. Um, the other day I was walking home from the grocery store and a modern stand-up scooter zipped by at car speed –35 or 40 mph!– its tiny front wheel twitching alarmingly, kept upright by constant white-knuckled concentration of the rider struggling with its ridiculous design. The woman in this picture is probably going four miles an hour, max, which would be safe and comfortable, even with the bad steering-balance leverage and high center of gravity of the combined rider and device. But the guy I saw was risking his life (for what? to get where?) and clearly not having a drop of fun. A couple of blocks away from there, maybe thirty years ago, I saw a boy on a kick-scooter /working! working! working!/ to keep up with his friends riding bicycles. They suddenly had enough of restraining themselves, accelerated as one, laughing, and effortlessly abandoned him. My impression was, those scooter things are stupid in every way and they’ll never catch on. Bicycles are close to free, they’re fun and perfected so you nearly have to try to fall off them. People can still hit you with a car, or a truck side-view mirror, or open a door in your path, but just getting onto a scooter is an obvious mistake. With all that in mind, but one time I saw a good-looking young Hispanic boy and girl zip past on an electric scooter. They were shining with happiness. The boy driving, the girl standing behind him, her arms around him, holding on for dear life, the side of her face against his shoulder. They were /so happy together/. I still feel like that with Juanita, but those kids were feeling it maybe for the first time, and… Try to remember how you felt when you were that age and you were with that person, flying through the world together on an open dangerous vehicle, shouting a conversation to each other from zero distance apart.
https://x.com/pickover/status/1980821807134323193

Art.
https://www.instagram.com/nicole_paravicini
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/la-science-et-vie-covers.html

Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.outregallery.com/collections/moon-patrol

Art. Dreyfus in his actually quite nice cell. Writing desk and bench. Soft-looking bed with a heavy comforter and two big pillows. Chamber pot, high ceiling, plenty of storage, room to pace. First and last month’s, and deposit, say, $5,000 to move in. No pets.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/11/06/on-devils-island-maira-kalman/

“It’s rainin’ monkeys!”
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-raining-monkeys.html

Click and drag to look around, and click on the on-screen arrows to move along the path and go into caves. I can hear and smell this place.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=Hi2mY3

Rerun: Jungle.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/24/jungle/

And, oh my god, what crap. But at least they acknowledge plate tectonics, except for their timescale of just 6,000 years from nothing at all to dinosaur-dragon-unicorn-and-talking-snake infested Pangaea to moated continents to Fox News. The Mormons put the Garden of Eden in Missouri, and the Catholics imprisoned Galileo, Buddhists die and come back as a butterfly, Aztecs used to cut out people’s still-beating heart and shake it at the Sun in return for good fortune in war, and endlessly so on. It’s all of a piece.
https://answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/how-animals-get-to-ark

2025/10/18

Sighing sigh after sigh.

. “And the plumber says, Well, sir, I can save your wife, but I’m afraid the rabbi is a goner.”

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a fine little radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California.

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Cracked doll face makeup.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/cracked-doll-face.html

This year’s iteration of the best Halloween band yet. You can relax that they’re gonna poke their own eyes out with their costume scissorhands. Miraculously they don’t.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/broken-peachs-halloween-song-2025.html

Would you like to know what kinda conversation goes on while they’re loafin’ around that hall? (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1976840572427214888

“Whether in school, on the job, or in prison, bullies function the same everywhere. Here are my seven rules how to stop a bully so he regrets it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KUzbmkvQA

Sweet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjuSa3_CerU

Oct. 18 No Kings Day at Fort Bragg, CA, pop. 7,000, where well over a thousand people walked over and spread out down half a mile of the highway.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mendoevents/sets/72177720329777589/

And elsewhere in bigger places.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/NoKings2.jpg

Lots of images on this page, and lots of people interested; it might take awhile to load them. Give it a chance.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/archive/2025/10/photos-no-kings-protests-across-america/684600/?gift=xw1ABCFnadCHxRLYMsWCkxkq7lcITrmN2tq1-jBOYrA

Last week’s Tacky Raccoons musical matinee and one more from Black Pumas.
https://tackyraccoons.com/2025/10/11/saturday-matinee-black-pumas-jp-soars-gypsy-blue-review-the-jimmy-vivino-band/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G383538qzQ

Back in high school I knew a girl who looked very like this. Her name was Dana. Just about the prettiest white girl I had ever seen. There was one moment when I should have kissed her but I was frozen with shyness and didn’t. It’s fifty years later and I still regret it.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/09/anastasiya-vertinskaya.html

British humor.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w6qmPmMVv70

Rerun: Fa circa 1939.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-night-at-garden.html

Anti fa, circa 1945. Make a great gift.
https://fremontclothing.com/product/antifa-c-1945-shirt/

The Mute Series. (via Kottke)
https://www.muteseries.com/mutefilms/stop/

…This is my favorite one. Also the pregnant woman smoking. But, you know, they’re all pretty good. They’re like I imagine cartoonists think.
https://www.muteseries.com/mutefilms/the-searchers/

Cut me some meat, Hunca Munca. Except this is real meat. I’m thinking of electrifying meat, for an experiment. It’s a very old idea, hundreds of years old, but I want to see what happens. I think store-bought meat probably won’t contract as enthusiastically, the virtue having gone out of it.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/16/why-your-fresh-meat-is-twitching-on-the-cutting-board.html

Dr. Hahn and Dr. Swallow on practicing medicine on the Mendocino Coast. Say /Hahn, Swallow/. It makes you think of both Star Wars /and/ Pirates of the Caribbean. I recently watched all the POTC movies again and liked them just as much as when they were fresh, though not the fourth one quite so much, I guess. The dreamlike images are still powerful: the march of the cursed dead across the sea floor; ships tethered together by the tops of their masts, swinging around in a wild maelstrom, firing all cannons; the goofy guy with the eyeball; Jack’s gambit, tossing Will the knife so he could bleed on the Aztec gold; the marriage-during-shipboard-battle of Will and Elizabeth; the perfect idea of immortal craggy Keith Richards as Captain Jack’s father; and on and on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=416_MxfYtas

WindowSwap. Look out somebody else’s window, somewhere else in the world. Some have sound, some don’t. Clearly, some have a tripod and some don’t. Idea: get a cheap giant teevee and put it on the wall and let it be your window. Live in a different place every day. (via Make Use Of)
https://www.window-swap.com/

Why we have fire drills and building codes.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/05/This-Is-Why-We-Have-Fire-Drills-in-Schools/

Ministry – Every Day Is Halloween.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/every-day-is-halloween.html

Life.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/chain.html

Birds facing forward. Scroll down and down. (I don’t remember who showed this to me. I’m sorry.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Birdsfacingforward/

Simone Giertz’ new soup robot.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/simone-giertz-has-pumpkin-soup.html

Freddy’s level.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oE7ngO-PWzc

You kids don’t know. This is the way keyboards all used to be. And you could have them in any color as long as it was black. There was one in every house, it was either on the kitchen counter by the door or on a table in the living room, and it was hardwired to the terminal block. It belonged to the Computer Company. If you needed to disconnect it to make the wire longer or move it, a Computer Repairman had to do that. You weren’t allowed to.
https://www.neatorama.com/2025/10/13/Google-Introduces-the-Rotary-Keyboard/

Ska Lithium. Spa fon!
https://theawesomer.com/lithium-ska-edition/784895/

Prom. In the early 1970s I read a story in National Lampoon Magazine by Doug Kenney, about a girl whose first date ever with a boy she likes is to the Prom. They dance the night away, then the boy takes her someplace remote, takes horrific humiliating sexual advantage of her, dumps her off at her house exhausted, bloody and bruised and half naked, and her father compounds the abuse by blaming her. I just found it again and read it on the show. A cautionary tale.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/1960s-prom-couples.html

…Here it is, in a later issue featuring Doug Kenney’s work. It starts on page 30.
http://www.luckyfrogfarms.com/cook/NL/1980%27s/1985/1985_06.pdf

Demons. (via Neatorama) Scroll down.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/persian-demons-from-a-book-of-magic-and-astrology-1921/

The first picture, at the top, looks like a Tim Burton movie poster font.
https://www.popsci.com/environment/international-landscape-photographer-of-the-year-2024/

Another woman who I’d like to watch swallow an egg, but only with consent all around.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/shelagh-wilson.html

One bird’s art.
https://www.threads.com/@clare.rolfzen/post/DPpTLJkAdel

Diane Keaton’s childhood pictures.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/diane-keaton-as-a-child.html

Real photos that look fake.
https://kottke.org/25/10/real-photos-that-look-fake

Dozens of stills from the production of 2001.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/2001-a-space-odyssey.html

100 years of the photo booth. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/strike-a-pose-100-years-of-the-photobooth-autofoto-the-photographers-gallery-exhibition-101025

Understanding Doctor Strange.
https://dangerousminds.net/pop-culture/understanding-the-peculiar-arc-of-doctor-strange/

Carpenter Brut – Blood Machines. (via b3ta) (Full album, 35 min.)
https://youtu.be/t2jTBEe4xuE

“How long have we been wet.”
https://catandgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025-10-07-cgwet.gif

Art.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/11/repost-first-class-travel/
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/gustaf-tenggren.html

Art. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
https://www.instagram.com/dan_oliver_artist/

ART.
https://thisisnthappiness.com/

Art. (via Nag On The Lake)
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2025/sep/10/brad-walls-passe-ballet-photography-incredible-aerial-photos-shots-from-above-in-pictures

“Ev’rybody’s after my chainsaw heart! What about /my/ heart? Denji’s heart! Does nobody want that!”
https://theawesomer.com/chainsaw-man-the-movie-reze-arc-trailer/784912/

About time.
https://x.com/Sassafrass_84/status/1975637797039178235

The Turks, for whom it’s nobody’s business but.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/turkish-women-1920s.html

Yes!
https://theawesomer.com/star-trek-starfleet-academy-trailer/784751/

Oh, it was sad, yes, it was sad. (Too bad!) It was sad when the great ship went down.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/14/watch-as-the-replica-of-columbus-santa-maria-sinks-video.html

Ah! A version I never knew existed. I only knew it from much later, and even then only half-knew it. I thought of it as a happy, funny song. Also, here, the lap steel electric guitar at 1:35. I want a closer look at that. Long ago I made one out of copper pipe and plumbing fittings, containing its own nine-volt amplifier and speakers. It’s a little corroded now from my dampish house, but it plays. It’s surprisingly loud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjQ_bxF_N1U

Okay, okay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdgGhDgL640
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf62StraRbM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqA2_j19ncE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdgGhDgL640
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFICgN16zLk
https://www.tiktok.com/@laurenpaley/video/7481322761831451947

Designing and flying a very slow airplane. This video is half an hour long. If you get bored, skip ahead a little.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6FMjOl0TRA

A new tiny flying machine.
https://theawesomer.com/janus-i-flying-suitcase-personal-aircraft/784902/

Meet Miss Subway.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/07/miss-subways-tube-beauty-contest.html

A climbing technique employing plumber’s wrenches fastened to your shoes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1o4x1ou/diy_shoes_to_climb_a_beam/

Strings trailer. I have Strings on DVD. As soon as I finish up here, I’m putting it on again. It’s so good. In my mind it’s connected somehow with the Canadian teevee series Slings and Arrows, not just because of the title, but the whole Shakespearean feel to it. And the love story and magic. And royal murder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5p-nmlEkzo

Threads trailer.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/sew-torn-official-trailer.html

Gissshhhhhhhhh.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/lillian-gish-broken-blossoms.html

Real, little flying cars. It’s mildly deceptive; in real life these things are painfully loud.
https://laughingsquid.com/jetson-one-air-games/

The poor thing.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/jaguar-with-gunshot-wounds-sought-help.html

The Latest and Best Conundrums, such as: “When is a door not a door?” I would have said, “When it is a jar,” but apparently the answer is, “When it is an egress. (A negress.)” Hmm. Also, “When may you be said to imbibe a piano?” “When you have a piano for tea. (A pianoforte.)” And, “Why are married men like steamboats?” “Because they are sometimes blown up.” (I don’t get that one at all. I think that married people can be said to blow up, meaning to fight, but is that what’s meant? And did steamboats blow up a lot?) And, “Why is a vote in Congress like a bad cold?” “Because sometimes the eyes have it and sometimes the nose.” And the end of the book is all fun math problems. (via Weird Universe)
https://archive.org/details/conundrumsriddle00rive/page/n3/mode/2up

Why’re wheels?
https://www.jalopnik.com/1992797/coolest-cars-with-stock-wire-wheels/

The towers.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/towers-of-bologna.html

The Residents 1979 Eskimo Live tour.
https://theawesomer.com/the-residents-eskimo-live-tour/785284/

Mickie Mouse and Pluto – The Mad Doctor.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-mad-doctor.html

Latest adventure of Billy Dare, Boy Adventurer, and Quentin the Green Parrot.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/15/tom-the-dancing-bug-boy-adventurer-billy-dare-in-a-strange-land.html

Pasta extrusion device. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/i/status/1978524521964478899

Mysterious Ways. (Full film, 98 min, free to watch through October.) (via Miss Cellania)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJhSRmUJZbE

“Dear friends.” Peter Bergman’s last words on the air anywhere. March 6, 2012. (via Bruce L.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tPCSpsfqpg

Some options for you.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/why-so-many-people-are-struggling-with.html

The first animation, if you don’t count 30,000-year-old handprints on a cave wall in flickering firelight.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/pauvre-pierrot.html

I’d like to see the show these scenes are from. I’m a sucker for ordinary people coming into their unnatural power. The first season of Heroes, for example. And all of The Magicians.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lNfSwLqmENg

I call shenanigans.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/10/15/never-mind-12/

30,000 of the world’s best movies, free if you have a library card. I keep mine in my tennis-ball-size wad of keys. In the front of my pants.
https://www.sonomalibrary.org/elibrary/a-z/kanopy

Rerun: Polar bears find a house and move in.
https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/russia-polar-bears-weather-station-photos-529ef2dcc92adee9207eb9b9ed8cca01

Awww.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/swan-reunion.html

Our fabulous national costumes.
https://griseldagimpel.tumblr.com/post/797062542500511744

And /I Will Survive/. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybXrrTX3LuI

2025/10/11

Kashmir.

. “The first country the Nazis invaded was Germany.”

Marco here. Here’s the recording of last night’s eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part. The first hour-and-ten is Harry Houdini’s 1910 Egypt travel story ghostwritten on commission and somewhat embroidered upon by H.P. Lovecraft in 1924.

…

Thanks to Hank Sims of Lost Coast Outpost here’s a page with lots of other MOTA shows going back quite a way, not all the way, but enough. And thanks to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which often provides as much as an hour of each of these shows’ most locally relevant material. And consider helping a fine little radio station that has never accepted a single corrupting penny of government assistance and is fully volunteer. Find KNYO’s shiny red donation heart and support the Little Lion in Fort Bragg, California.

Besides all that, here’s a fresh exhibit of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set out for you, mostly found in the fine websites listed to your right…

Robert Murray-Smith is dead. Here’s his science education YouTube channel (via b3ta). Hearing of his death put a dent in my general normal level of equanimity, but I just read that Diane Keaton died and I’m suddenly crying and crying, thinking of the sound of her voice, and how I used to mix up her and Barbara Feldon in my mind. I watched Annie Hall again a couple of months ago and was reminded of how that movie was kind of my model, as a young man, of how relationships should go. I didn’t exactly follow the model, but it seemed reasonable and logical and realistic, except for how everybody in the story had a nice place to live and never needed money nor had to go to work.
https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith

Katie Daviscourt’s incredible disappearing black eye.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/09/the-incredible-disappearing-black-eye-of-katie-daviscourt.html

A steampunk ballerina. Soulless A.I. slop? Or art?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b13ApHV-vz4&list=RDb13ApHV-vz4

Star Trek in the 1950s. Same question.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TaKJLYw0ZSs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-4voUPhqVk

The Oatmeal – Let’s Talk About Art.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

The Tigger dog!
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/dogs-groomed-for-halloween.html

That’s a lot of dogs to have. I like the Martha one best.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/carole-lombard-with-dogs.html

An adorable narcoleptic dog. Its brain is wired so it painlessly faints whenever it reaches a certain level of happiness. Then it wakes up instantly ready to get too happy and faint again. Awww.
https://laughingsquid.com/doodle-with-narcolepsy/

Gesundheit. (via BoingBoing) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO_omnHkegy/

I remember dialing a phone number to hear a woman’s voice say, “At the tone the time will be 6:42 and ten seconds. DOOP.” And if you stayed on the line you’d hear, “At the tone the time will be 6:42 and twenty seconds. DOOP.” And I remember dialing POPCORN (767-2676) but not what happened when you did. There was 411 to ask a live person for someone’s telephone number (that right there was jobs for thousands of people). Dialing another number let you hang up the phone, hide behind something, and the phone would ring, drawing anyone else in the house to run to answer it, the way people did, and nobody would be on the line, and they’d hang it up and look around and say, “All right, you.” Note the attractive microphones in these pictures, that were high futuristic technology in those days:
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/remember-speaking-clock.html

Hamilton in ASL.
https://laughingsquid.com/hamilton-in-american-sign-language/

The Onion Investigates: Jeffrey Epstein, Bad Pedophile. (Full documentary film, 21 min.)
https://theonion.com/the-onion-investigates-jeffrey-epstein/

The real reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31X8vrfgHqs

“The way the ICE cops nervously shy away as the frog merely dances.” “If they stopped being violent they would have to confront the crushing despair of their lives.” “These clowns have a budget bigger than the entire U.S. Marine Corps and they’re terrified of a guy in a frog costume.” Etc.
https://bsky.app/profile/dannykpolitics.bsky.social/post/3m2ivjjhljc2g
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/08/ice-brownshirts-shoot-befrocked-chicago-minister-in-the-head-with-pepper-ball-laugh-video.html
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/10/cold-comfort.html

And in England. (via BoingBoing)
https://bsky.app/profile/defendourjuries.bsky.social/post/3m2hucb3vd22g

Tom Waits – Make It Rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3kRc9nvv94

John Flynn – The Victim Tree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Vr-axr-nk

Pink Floyd – Great Gig In the Sky, live in 1994.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWZ6hmHj2MA

The story of the grapefruit ladies. I’ll tell you, my favorite soda pop at the fountain is Pepsi or Dr Pepper in crushed ice, and my favorite to have at home, or rather at Juanita’s place because she’s got a real-size frost-free fridge with room in it and not a microscopic apartment fridge bulging from the solid-ice-pillow freezer shelf like I’ve got, is Safeway Select-brand diet grapefruit soda that used to cost like $2.75 for a twelve-pack but that climbed up close to $10 before they stopped even having it anymore. You poured it, already cold, /slowly/ into a Mason jar full of ice to preserve the bubbles. So good. Put that on the list to try when you get a time machine.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O5yK7XiYQvU

Time travel in fiction.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/analyzing-time-travel-in-fiction.html

How to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Omul38-TcK4
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/swXTtU_cloU
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7bQUEvxGDTM
https://laughingsquid.com/geothermal-rye-bread-iceland/

The Dutch call it a draaiorgel. There are several videos here.
https://laughingsquid.com/dutch-street-organ-oasis-wonderwall/

Superlative street guitar guy.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fb-bSuGkOgY

The stars come out at 1:45.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/dishdance.html

Finger of death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcUouLOmQuU

Sasha Gordon – It Was Still Far Away.
https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/It-Was-Still-Far-Away-2024-by-Sasha-Gordon.jpg

Julie Heffernan – Self Portrait Fixing Foot.
https://biblioklept.org/2025/10/07/self-portrait-fixing-foot-julie-heffernan/

Art. (via Cliff Pickover)
https://x.com/pickover/status/1976345452896452636

Embroidery.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/09/valentina-lobos/

This is another week where everything in This Isn’t Happiness makes me want to post it here under Art.
https://thisisnthappiness.com/

And the same with Everlasting Blort.
https://blort.meepzorp.com/

Rerun: Classic rock albums reinterpreted in styles of the 1950s and 1960s. My favorite in this lineup is the Dire Straits one. Or the Fleetwood Mac one.
https://laughingsquid.com/1950s-1960s-style-classic-rock/

When your music teacher asks you to play more expressively. (via Tacky Raccoons) (You might have to click the sound on.)
https://x.com/HumansNoContext/status/1972208505219436706

Acoustic guitar covers.
https://theawesomer.com/sweet-child-o-mine-acoustic-guitar-duet/784227/
https://theawesomer.com/syncronicity-ii-acoustic-cover/721544/

French live-action life-size puppet movie. Marquis. (Full film, 79 min., 1989) (via Perfect For Roquefort Cheese)
https://archive.org/details/marquis-1989_202506

Magic.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/10/magic-tricks-are-fun-to-watch.html

Wet art.
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/05/repost-semi-abstract/

Efemeral (sic) – Silent Hound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOVfHjiunUY&list=RDbOVfHjiunUY

Wolf art. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://hazelterry.blogspot.com/2025/09/aleksandra-czudzak.html

Where we got gas. (Scroll down and down.)
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/1970s-american-gas-stations.html

There’s a time and a place.
https://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/4-91083.webp

Ruben Bolling’s latest Tom the Dancing Bug Super-Fun-Pak Comix.
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/08/tom-the-dancing-bug-super-fun-pak-comix-feat-lester-the-jesters-gig-in-riyadh.html

The Magenta Planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMo_LOwuP_Y&list=RD6Z95bpAbL-E&index=5&pp=8AUB

Ghost waltz.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2025/10/ghost-waltz.html

I love the John Hyatt song Smashing A Perfectly Good Guitar, especially this version. This story only adds to how much I like that.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rhb25umSUqM

Travels in the air.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/travels-in-the-air/

Steel balls, how we get them. You can feel the heat on your face.
https://laughingsquid.com/steel-ball-forging/

Condensed rerun: How we get clay ocarinas.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AM09PLV3dTs

For the short of attention span, the icewater run starts at 15 minutes.
https://theawesomer.com/finding-an-ice-waterfall/784268/

K-pop Demon Hunters – Golden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yebNIHKAC4A

Rerun: Norma Tanega – You’re Dead (1966). It’s the opening theme of What We Do In the Shadows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImAlx0amAIc

Maids of Cotton not forgotten. And waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee.
https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/maid_of_cotton_beauty_contest

Doomsday score. (via BoingBoing)
https://doomsday.march1studios.com/

I wish she had some kind of protection, at least on her elbows and knees. Or maybe an airbag Michelin Man suit like the skateboard girl had in Snow Crash.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o7eD4Skhv1g

The depths. (via Futility Closet)
https://www.metanamorph.com/

Fun with a hidden feature of ChatGPT.
https://www.makeuseof.com/chatgpt-quiz-hidden-feature/

“No, I can’t relate to Data, but I can understand why you need me to try.” Note the use of contractions.
https://theawesomer.com/ai-analyzes-science-fiction-ai/784319/

Wonderful mashups!
https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2025/10/10/analog-society-band/

If this is the right, original timeline, the one we’re supposed to be on, then why were none of these women ever paid, or even merely politely asked, to swallow an egg where we could watch. It just doesn’t make sense.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/regine-debrise.html
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/antonia-boekestijn.html

Human is chosen to repopulate an alien planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiCs-MVJ-Lk

“Her smile got very wide. I said, ‘What are you smiling about?’ She said, ‘You have come at a good time, little sky man. It is our mating season.'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG97CySzE4

Every 1990s commercial ever.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/10/05/i-had-to-watch-this-so-you-have-too-as-well/

Who’s a good boy then? Eh?
https://x.com/i/status/1974790670238790072

No. Because the people driving golf balls will aim at them and keep score and bet on it.
https://www.vintag.es/2025/10/picking-up-golf-balls-off-driving-range.html

Rerun: Junkyard automata.
https://theawesomer.com/junkyard-automata-kinetic-sculptures/784069/

And “You literally can join ICE and be God’s appointed avenger who seeks to carry out God’s vengeance on the evildoer. Immigration is evil. To join the proper mechanism, through ICE, and to become, in that sense, God’s appointed deacon to carry out vengeance on the evildoer who is devouring the inheritance of the children. Um, that is a righteous thing. You can join ICE today and make Jesus smile, as you, with a gun, pack foreigners into the back of a van to be kicked out of the country.” It’s at this point in the narrative that I imagine Orson Welles standing up. The artilleryman says, “Where are you going?” Orson Welles says, “Not to your world.”
https://christiannightmares.substack.com/p/christians-who-support-ice-dont-know

And a couple more from Christian Nightmares.
https://x.com/ChristnNitemare/status/1559582520861155329
https://x.com/ChristnNitemare/status/1506304931460005888

! (via Clifford Pickover)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G26P-tIXwAAikFm?format=jpg&name=small

Rerun: Joanna Connor and her band on somebody’s side porch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwoM7WIy5M&list=RDbOVfHjiunUY&index=4

Bertha Mae Lightning – Ain’t No Man Alive Can Handle Me (1952).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weJyH1zCNDc

To add to my list of fun curse phrases: /Morey Amsterdam in a HULA HOOP!/
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=24644551735153716&set=gm.4288185891396258&idorvanity=1427425394139003

Oh, dear.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2017/10/news-anchors-contagious-laughter.html

Take it on the run.
https://laughingsquid.com/1960s-girl-group-take-it-on-the-run/

“Take the green jacket. It’s funnier than the brown one. Words that have a K sound in them are funny: car keys, cucumber, kookoo, like that.”
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/10/06/number-theory/

“I think they sprayed us with vaccine components on January 6, because January 7 I was all inflamed, I couldn’t use my fingers…” “But it was really cold. Do you think it might have been the cold that–” “What was /really/ cold was the spikes of the vaccine! Yes, it was literally drone-delivered components of the vaccine…”
https://boingboing.net/2025/10/06/the-good-liars-vs-anti-vaxxers.html

27 historical false facts. Not shown here in the one about the Pledge of Allegiance is that its writer invented the straight-arm palm-out salute for kids to do while reciting it. Hitler adopted that. /Then/ the Pledge posture was changed to hand-over-heart.
https://trivia.cracked.com/image-pictofact-17262-27-moments-from-history-everybody-gets-wrong

So incredibly cool. An interactive shade map. (I had to use Edge or Chrome for it to work. Oddly, my Firefox had a problem with this.)
https://shademap.app/

Pass. (via Everlasting Blort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn0QWdiWLqk

Jordan Peterson vs Jordan Peterson. (via b3ta)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buD2RM0xChM

James Hill abusing a uke with chopsticks and a comb. Show starts at 3:25.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RylxBtEM0sI&list=RDbOVfHjiunUY

The cast of 1969-1970’s UFO series, then and now. One of them, Wanda Ventham, is Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother. She’s 90 now. They chose her for the part because they were the people who made the Thunderbirds and related Supermarionation shows and she looked just like their Lady Penelope puppet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnWkaU83UDo

Really, this is worth the time. The full story of Supermarionation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTgpK9Oeghc

Origin story.
https://bitsandpieces.us/2025/10/10/this-really-should-happen/

And CPR instructions.
https://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/https___s3-newsifier.ams3_.digitaloceanspaces.com_vkmag.newsifier.com_images_2021-08_pics_031_clean_790-611fb0639a66b.jpg

World radio day.

O stone, be not so.

The Little Golden Book of the Dead.

Hinged.

Traish LaRue and the machine elves.

Respect mah authoritah!

Animal make-believe town.

The pain of space.

A Natalie Is Freezing Xmas.

Professor Bauer’s weapon.

The mao-niao seat.

Thorgellen 2025: Whistling Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

We know why the wind goes whew.

Nor are we out of it.

That’s it, kid. Give ’em the ol’ razzmatazz.

Bride of Chaotica!

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome.

Sighing sigh after sigh.

Kashmir.

Endless educational enjoyment

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