Tag: Entertainment
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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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Elegant joke
EnidBuzz asked ‘What sounds do you enjoy hearing, other than music?’ The last one belongs to a refined category of deadpan country humor. When eating in a bad cafe, “Hey, this might be a good place to build a restaurant!” When Horace Dodge rebelled against Ford and set up his own company, “There are thousands…
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Cargo cults
Following on the unsurprising Newsweek disappointment… When dinosaurs grow big and arrogant, mammals will take over one way or another. After sensing the threat, a dinosaur will try two different responses, both of which will ultimately fail. One is suppression, and the other is fake adaptation. Fake adaptation has a cargo cult flavor. The dinosaur…
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Speaking of TIL
TIL about the only astronaut who deserves to be treated as a hero. Until now I disdained the whole space endeavor. As a nerd I was supposed to follow it eagerly, but I found it boring and purposeless. Here’s one astronaut worthy of emulation! = = = = = START QUOTE: Japan’s main TV network…
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Reaches the same conclusion
Ramesh Thakur writing for Brownstone reaches the same conclusion that I reached a couple years ago. Thakur is comparing the British Post Office mess, which was finally compensated way too late, with the “virus” holocaust, which hasn’t even decisively stopped let alone compensated. The two monstrosities are infinitely different in scale. The PO mess ruined…
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Non-opposite day
Today is Hell is Freezing Over Day and Hug an Economist Day. Unlike some recent days that were complementary, today is a tautology. (More seriously, the stated purpose of Freezing Over day is inaccurate. Supposedly this is the time when winter gets bad. In fact the end of Jan tends to mark the end of…
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Why ban silliness?
For some reason Elon decided to clamp down on Taylor Swift memes, most of which are fake pictures. Why bother? It’s just fun. Nobody is harmed, nobody is persuaded to do horrible things like “voting”. Taylor is a billionaire with her own army of lawyers. If she had wanted to halt this trend, she would…
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