Tag: Entertainment
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Old joke still works
Q: Who killed the president of Tanzania? A: Yes. Q: Who killed the president of Burundi? A: Yes. Q: Who shot Slovakian PM Fico? A: Yes. = = = = = Stupid sidenote: I was trying to remember the real original form of this joke, which was pretty good. The best I could come up…
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Ice cream
Nice warm evening after a long tired (but blessedly NOT very snowy) winter. The ice cream man is driving around, playing his unidentified song that sounds like Lilly Marlene. His tune has been the same for several years, but apparently less than 10. Around 2013 the ice cream man was playing the required Entertainer Rag.…
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Livetech
Caution! Random thought, not intended as logic! When technology is generally sane and non-genocidal, the products of technology look like mammals and birds, like the animals we keep as livestock or pets, the animals we eat. I’ve drawn this analogy with cars. Before 1940 cars were cows or horses, with long noses and ruminant eyes…
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Halal vs AI
This has undoubtedly been said many times (heh) but I don’t recall reading it before. Customized one-hour productions like movies, novels, plays, symphonies and operas are totally unlike all other human activity. All other activity consists of repeated reused segments, interspersed with possibly original commentary or filigrees. The typical job repeats the same transaction or…
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Today is Shakespeare Day
It’s Willie’s birthday and also ‘Talk like Shakespeare Day.’ The poet at the local Weather Bureau was truly inspired.
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Random memory
Nice warm Sunday evening. A random picture reminded me of something… When I lived in KC and taught at DeVry, I was renting a basement apt in suburban Overland Park. The apt was large, fairly modern, and stayed cool in summer without air conditioning. The apt above me was occupied by an older couple from…
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Colorful GenRad
GenRad specialized in both light and sound. I’ve been featuring sound for a long time, now let’s do light. Polistra and friends are processing food, using a GenRad color comparator to check the quality of tomatoes. The Comparator was simple to use. You’d place the object on top of the viewport, then turn the filter…
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Flashy GenRad
Continuing with GenRad’s light measuring tools. Stroboscopes were a GenRad specialty, going through several generations, with the usual assortment of accessories for different industrial uses. Strobotac was one of GenRad’s widely known brands, along with Variac transformers. Their other products were more obscure, known only in research and testing labs. Polistra is aiming a Strobotac…
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Earth Hour!
Might as well keep up this tradition, which I started in 2011. Repeating the 2017 piece, tributing the previous association of electric power with beauty. Electric Parks and Luna Parks were beautiful and ENTERTAINING places, built to provide a terminus for streetcar lines. The streetcars then brought electricity from the hydro dam or coal-powered plant…
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Novelty songs
This morning I sneezed funny, which reminded me of the old novelty song Boop bop diddum daddum waddum CHOO! And they fam and they fam all over the dam. So this song has been running in my internal jukebox. The Muzak in Safeway was playing what seems to be a strictly modern novelty song: I’ve…
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Movies are more honest
Random thought. The movie and theater industries are dishonest in many ways, but both are the MOST honest forms of art in one way. Plays about making plays, and movies about making movies, have always been common. Both industries seem to enjoy displaying how the sausage is cooked. We aren’t encouraged to believe that Walt…
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Puzzling but wonderful
Adding another random thought to this theme: = = = = = START REPRINT: The teams are getting narrower and narrower and more specialized, in all fields. In pro athletics, every game or race is between two identical performers who are at the top of their range, and the difference has to be measured in…
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Today is Scouse Day!
Scouse Day is an annual festival in Liverpool. Wikipedia gives a complex list of dubious origins for the word. The one clear fact is that it was originally Lobscouse. My favorite British dictionary from 1867 says: Lobscouse, a dish made of potatoes and meat and biscuits boiled together. The dictionary doesn’t list scouse at all.…
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