Tag: defensible spaces
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Zenith + Wallace, part 1 of 3.
I decided to continue having fun with Zenith, since it seems to bring out the best in my craft. So far all the Zenith items I’ve ‘drawn’ have turned out nicely, above the standard of other recent output. Write what you know. Write what you love. Randomly looking through old radio journals for more material,…
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Zenith + Wallace, part 2 of 3.
When FDR took office, he had to fix two parallel legacies of the booming speculative 20s, both of which caused busts in the 30s. There were cross-ties between the two legacies, so he couldn’t fix either one by itself. He had to fix them in a cross-linked way. One boom was initiated by huge government…
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Canadian radios
I’ve often discussed Canadian auto manufacturing and the standard myths. I hadn’t noticed the equivalent in radios before. The American Radio Library has added a few issues of a Canadian trade journal for radio and appliance dealers from the early ’50s. Canadian carmakers started out semi-independent and quickly converged to fully owned divisions of US…
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On-ramp dreams, off-ramp dreams
Lately I’ve been having complex dreams. They started when the NAZI TORTURE CAMP began to ease last spring. Since the VERIFIABLE END of the torture camp this summer, the dreams are getting intense. Tangled urban environments, railroad embankments, interstate cloverleafs, pipes and mechanisms that must be climbed to reach a goal. Here’s what I wrote…
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Disney gets some competition!
A company that runs some of the Branson amusements is starting to build a MASSIVE new theme park with lodges and cabins near Vinita. This is an especially pretty area with lots of woods and hills and reservoirs. Disney and the casinos could use some ‘neutral’ competition in tourism. WPA would be proud!
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The first oil boom was NOT here.
The latest FOIA from John Greenewald at BlackVault is a brief account of a UFO sighting by Sen Richard Russell on a 1955 trip through the Soviet Union. Near Baku, Russell saw a greenish bright orb rising from the ground. He told the other people in the group, who hadn’t seen the orb. A second…
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Cheapskates unite
Random thought, undoubtedly wrong because not based on experience. All US automakers of any size had a Canadian division at one time or another. We ‘carlonized’ other countries less regularly. Our Canadian products were different in two ways from our US cars. (1) More variety. (2) More practical and economical choices. I’ve discussed more variety…
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Skills != books
Randomly looking through old architect books on the web, trying again to find an equivalent to Grandma’s apartment building, a fourplex with a separate service hall. Previously I’d looked through my bookshelf of Dover plan books from that era, with no results. There are some fourplexes but no service halls. While googling, another aspect of…
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Snobascope
Kirn retweeted this item from a film snob who saw only the lens in Carlson’s “I’ll be baaaaack” clip. Shoutout to my bro @justingum (we worked together on Hoaxed w/ @scooter_downey) He shot this clip using anamorphic lenses to give it that beautiful epic feel. I’ve seen several film snobs triggered that Tucker would dare…
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Old poetry
EnidBuzz asked about things your parents said. Most responses are the usual hardass but NECESSARY parental warnings. Some are squishy Christian stuff. A few are purely unique and poetic. Never heard any of them before. = = = = = I especially like the glad/mad. Good advice for a critter like me who always heads…
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Metes and bees
Brownstone is another frustrating visionary. Do they really have a goal, or are they just another Parkinson organization trying to keep running without a goal? From their latest mission statement: = = = = = START QUOTE: The [“virus”] response was as much an institutional failure as it was a failure of rationality and courage.…
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Alt Hopper
I happened to read a little filler about the American origins of our “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Chinese” food. Familiar territory, including the development of chili on cattle drives. This got me thinking about alt history for cattle drives. Our media and movies treat the Wild West as a long period of widespread wildness. In…
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Audits and edits
FDIC is like an insurance company, but one crucial aspect of real insurance is missing. Real insurers can raise rates or halt coverage for a driver who has accidents, or a business that allows too many thefts, or a homeowner who allows methies to squat in his garage. Real insurers, especially at the business level,…
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It’s deeper than iPhones
Latest from Kirn: Today I went to great lengths to express myself clearly in several interactions — with a server in a restaurant, a hotel clerk, etc — and was met in each case by a sort of cheerful, glazed, and rather stubborn incomprehension. Frustrating. Strange. Felt almost astrological. Commenters cite iPhone distraction, which is…
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Downtown upstairs
Old downtowns had a separate world upstairs, and often another separate world under the sidewalks. An item in today’s EnidBuzz gives us a glimpse of one upstairs world: Opened in 1923 as the 900-seat Billings Theatre, built by William S. Billings and his wife Henrietta, who lived in apartments above the theatre. It later became…
