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Wishes are horses
While waiting for the bus in front of the store, I noticed an ordinary** car parking fairly close to me, which caught my attention. Typical mid-size ’90s GM sedan in good shape. The store isn’t crowded at this hour, so customers park near the store, not near the street. Must be a store employee? Nope.…
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GREAT Fairness Doctrine work
StraightArrowNews wins the blue ribbon with this feature on the border wall. In just a couple minutes they dissolve the partisan crap from both sides. Clear graphics show how long the border is, where the walls are and where the gaps are, and the LONG process of gradually strengthening the wall. After seeing this, no…
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Thanks, Ike.
Duane Jones, writing in 1954 and aiming at businessmen, constantly emphasized that women were THE CUSTOMERS for nearly all products. All these things helped to usher in a new freedom for women, both economically and socially. And two world wars, coupled with the Korea and Indo-China conflicts, have since advanced it almost to the ultimate.…
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Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO…
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More boxtop thoughts
Continuing from previous. One of Duane Jones’s basic principles: There’s no point in advertising or boxtopping if the product itself isn’t good. The product must “repeat when sampled”; the first try should entice another try. This is naturally true of naturally addictive products like alcohol, but the standard should apply in a more ethical way…
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We need more dramatization, not more facts.
At the start of the 2020 “virus” hoax, I stupidly hoped that getting out the facts would persuade people. I shouldn’t have let myself harbor such hopes, since I’m the one who constantly shouts EXPERIENCE IS THE ONLY TEACHER. Those hopes faded quickly, replaced by my own jail EXPERIENCE with psychopaths. Good teachers and good…
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Universal boxtops
Frank Edwards, in selling his short features to radio stations, mentioned that his books would serve as ‘self-liquidating premiums’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, so started looking it up. The idea was developed by adman Duane Jones in the ’30s. His best premium was a Blarney-stone charm bracelet offered in exchange for 25 cents…
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Big Birn Bibble
Kirn is seriously wrong on this one, and commenters called him down. When my son was very little he asked me: “Why do so many people live in little houses when there are mansions?” “It’s not their choice,” I said. “Then whose choice is it?” he asked me. I am still trying to come up…
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Right for the wrong reasons
Governments are telling us recession is a good thing. Everyone, left and right, is bemoaning and mocking this “hypocrisy”. Truth: Recession is a good thing. The governments are speaking the truth for a multitude of false and evil reasons, but that doesn’t make it false. In culture and technology and economics and individual life, drunken…
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Whimsical correction
Vintage.es has pix of people listening to radios. Most are German, but this one is delightfully American, and reminds me that the Zenith Transoceanic was originally meant to be a portable for boating. So the Zenith needs to be added to this whimsical item, especially since the Transoceanic has a specific Okie connection for me.…
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Much better!
Here’s a much more valid and informative comment by another of Kirn’s discussers. Polarization is bad now but it was worse in the early 70s. At that time there was a full-on violent left wing insurgency underway. Thousands of bombings by people who believed they were the vanguards of a communist revolution. Then it ended…
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RTFM, idiot.
In Kirn’s continuing discussion of misdefinition, one commenter says: Half-seriously just waiting at this point for the Regime to redefine election victory: “Ballot totals are only part of the story. To truly understand who won an election, we need to take a holistic look at a number of variables…” That’s not a wild ironic redefinition,…
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Not new
Kirn is musing on the arbitrary definitions of recession and inflation. The whole late 20th Century notion that your immediate experience is less reliable than information broadcast on electronic screens needs to be reconsidered. It was a case of mistaking science fiction for fact and stemmed from a kind of daft optimistic boom-times delirium. Well,…
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AI comprehends comprehension
I hadn’t looked at good old CookingFlavr.com in a while. Today it’s treading into my area of partial expertise, language and speech. Quoting the definitive and authoritative definition: = = = = = There is Plenty of Evidence to Support the Claim That Solely responsible for language comprehension is a False Claim. First and foremost,…
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Hard answer to soft question 3
Third in a stupid series. EnidBuzz asked: What do you like to do the old-fashioned way? Most common answer: Everything. Hard answer (lit and fig): Your mom. = = = = = FWIW, I’m pretty damn old-fashioned, but I’m newfangled in one way. Many of the commenters mentioned drying clothes on the line. Nope, I’ll…
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