Wheels within Wheels

Try using one of these.

A few days ago, I posted a picture of an art installation that I’d found online. I don’t know where the sidewalk zipper is, but it seems logical to me that it’s near to this one:

I read, years ago, about an iaido exercise involving the attempt to split a falling dewdrop with a simultaneous draw-and-strike of a samurai sword. This requires much less skill to deal with dripping water.

… wed … can eternal lie?

Maybe they could have had a famous author play at the wedding.

The British are having to shut down an entire village.

Second video via Ace of Spades HQ.

It’s been a few weeks since my last update. I’ve been busy, but not really that busy. I went to a wedding in Missoula with my daughter, celebrated the birthdays of a couple friends, got some stuff done at work, gave my daughter one of my ukuleles which she got autographed at the Jake Shimabukuro concert, and so on. The concert was very good (which I’d expected), and Jake finished with a performance of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I hadn’t). It’s going to be on his next CD. I picked up his DVD, Play Loud Ukulele, while I was in Hawaii … I’m enjoying that, too.

In any case, I’ve been saving this link. It’s to part one of a three-part article on trying to locate the diner portrayed in an iconic painting. The painting always reminds me of the Tom Waits song (and album), Nighthawks at the Diner, although the lyrics seem to refer to a diner in San Francisco, rather than Greenwich Village. It’s a good article, and the website as a whole is worth a look. I’ve long been interested in “hidden history” and the like.

Burt Prelutsky’s essay here resonates powerfully with me.

I have an Android phone and love it, so this looks pretty interesting to me. Via Make.

It’s the Tom Swift Centennial. I started reading Tom Swift books one Christmas when my brother and I each received a Tom Swift book and a Hardy Boys book. Now it’s my other brother who collects them. In honor of the centennial, I think that some Tom Swifties are in order. If you don’t like those, you can look here for others.

And, speaking of bad writing, the results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton competition were released during my hiatus. Personally, I’m rather taken with the runner-up in the Detective Fiction category.

For reading little teeny print.

Related info here, as well as a generator.

Post title from the song.

Dr. Demento is shutting down his radio show after this weekend. He’ll still be producing shows for the internet, but the days of hearing his show on radio are gone, unless you’re in the area of Amarillo this summer.

I first ran across Dr. Demento in the 1970s. At the time, I was on a submarine, and we were pretty isolated from the rest of the world when we were on patrol. For official entertainment, we had small library (a box of books) and weekly movies in the crew’s mess and the wardroom. Unofficial entertainment usually involved books and magazines you brought along yourself, or playing cards. Some sailors crocheted or hooked rugs.

One patrol, I found a couple of LPs produced by AFRTS, the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. One held a recording of a Dr. Demento show. I was enraptured. If I’d had more free time (often in short availability at sea), I’d probably have worn it out. When we got back in port, I tracked down his show on radio and started listening.

When I got out of the Navy and came to Denver, I found his show on KBCO in Boulder. Their format has changed somewhat since then - they used to have yearly broadcasts of The Fourth Tower of Inverness and have a locally-produced thing called “Intervention Day” on April 1st, but at that time, the doctor was in at 7pm on Sunday evenings, IIRC. Later, they moved the show to midnight on Sunday. I couldn’t afford to stay up that late, so, for the most part, I stopped listening. Some time later, I realized that I could swap RCA plugs around to feed the stereo into the VCR, which would allow me to set up a programmed recording at the right time for his show. Since there was no video associated with the radio, I’d end up with Dr. Demento as the soundtrack for whatever show was on TV at the time. This usually meant Baywatch Nights, which added a level of surrealism to listening to the show.

Shortly after that, KBCO dropped Dr. Demento completely. I’ll admit that I kind of stopped looking for him then. I did sign up with this site, but don’t listen often. It’s good to know that the doctor is still in.

Via Slashdot.

… nostalgia for the Navy life.