Tag: bemusement
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Close can’t close, must close.
This item isn’t important but I couldn’t resist the headline. The story does fit the general theme of institutions proudly going bankrupt to avoid contamination by horrible civilization and life and beauty. Sacrificing all to support chaos and riots and crime and war and ugliness. Good riddance, churches and Hollywood and journalism and libraries. Not…
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Just tickled
Just a trivium that tickled my fancy. In 1958 Chrysler made only two special racing-equipped 300Ds. One was bought by famous racer Norm Thatcher, who souped it up even more and set several major speed records. The other was bought by Herbert Magee, a California chiropractor with no known connection to racing. He picked it…
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Why so innocent?
Younger activists are more innocent and shockable than we were in the ’60s. Even though we had MUCH less information available, we talked and rumored and gossiped among ourselves and figured out who was a nark or a spy. We understood Agents Provocateurs, we knew who was an Agent, and we tried to warn each…
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Sort of halfway disproved…
Last year I was genuinely astonished to find that dry batteries are all fake. They aren’t sandwiches of zinc/carbon pairs as I had always imagined; instead they are wrapped packages of 1.5 volt dry cells hooked in series. This is so unutterably WEIRD that I still can’t believe it. It still seems like an April…
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Random stupid thought of the day
My view of religion is pretty much the standard ‘watchmaker deist’. There’s plenty of evidence for a designer of living things. Evolution simply can’t explain the structures and functions of life, though some form of evolution does occur, perhaps only in the epigenes. There’s no evidence at all of maintenance or customer service by the…
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Perpetual puzzle
This AMC dealer training strip proves that the Hudson fail-safe braking system was still being made in ’57, the last year of the brand. (Books and articles are vague and inconsistent on this fact.) I don’t expect any regard for safety from the big three, but AMC was actively SELLING this feature up to the…
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What is it?
I’m fairly familiar with old electronics stuff. I’ve been around it most of my life, and I’ve been researching and writing tech history pieces for 10 years. This one is a complete puzzle. It’s an attractive deco ad in a 1930 issue of the British Popular Wireless. The text doesn’t say what the Blue Spot…
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More of the oddity
Lately I’ve been noticing an oddity, which may not be an actual trend. The official myth of “the economy” has been based on strictly fake and fictional “numbers” at least since Nixon. If we defined unemployment the same way we did in the 30s, the current unemployment would be the same as the 30s. We…
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New retronym
Headline from the Ankler: My chat with Gabe Spitzer, Netflix’s head of nonfiction sports, at the Netflix Slam tennis event reveals the streamer’s sports ambitions keep growing. Nonfiction sports? I guess fiction sports encompasses “scripted events” like this: One can easily envision this becoming an annual event, one that’s clearly meant to build on the…
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It was weirder than von or de
Truth is stranger than logic! I’ve always been fascinated by the name Daniel of St Thomas Jenifer, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I always ass-u-me-d that the of was an indicator of nobility, like French de or German von or Irish o or Scottish mac. I further ass-u-me-d there was a…
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Unique clothing
An extremely non-generic suspect, peculiar from head to toe and everywhere in between. Shouldn’t be hard to identify this one! He seems to come from the same planet as Klaus Schwab.
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Conjoined Substack
Substack|Substack has created a new and interesting UI|UI bug|bug. When you click into an article, it first appears in this hall|hall of mirrors|mirrors: and then when you click on either one of the titles, it resolves to the usual single-stack setup. Sometimes a UI bug is peculiar to Firefox, but this one appears in both…
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Somebody is having fun
Now that I’ve finally got a working landline again, I’ve been making a few calls to unsubscribe from various services. Back around 1998 when I first switched to Comcast internet and gave up the old musical modem, I decided to add a second web service for backup. I chose PeoplePC for some reason, and might…
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Pinned down the weird
After getting more of the weird lovey-dovey spam from the Trump campaign, I’ve pinned down the exact form of the weirdness. This is how an about to be ex-wife talks to a husband who has already moved on to a nicer lover. Why would The Second Cuming of Our Lord And Personal Saviour Jesus Christ…
Polistra's Mill 