Another one of those fugue nights – six things going on simultaneously all through the evening. Three things remain to be done. Took some time out to talk to my dad, who called up to check in. He asked what (G)Nat was doing, and I mentioned they’d studied Pearl Harbor.

“Well, tell her great uncle was at Pearl.”

What?

What?

“Vernon. My brother. He was on the Pennsylvania.”

You never told me that.

“I didn’t? I must have. Well, he was.” He helped fish guys out of the drink and manned a 14” gun.  I never really knew that uncle; he moved south and became a Texican long ago. But I’m sure I met him when I was very young, when all the uncles assembled in Fargo to head north for the secret journey to the border to see their father. But that’s another story.

Spent most of the day on a video. While the end result will probably be as blocky as most web videos, the pre-compressed version looks sweet enough. This time I took the HD camera and a tripod, which gave me 27% more legitimacy, and I shot three times more stuff than I needed. I couldn’t find the exact music, so I recorded my own. Floyd Cramer with a beat stolen from Sweet. It’s up at buzz.mn now; link at the bottom.

A friend at the paper dropped off some books he'd culled from his library; one of them was pure perfect Interior Desecrators material. He made a note about one page that made me grin: Dave Brubeck's Kitchen. Imagine my surprise when I read the copy, and learned that this was indeed Dave Brubeck's kitchen:

Man, that was hypermodern in '71. Wonder what it looks like today? Here's an article on the place. It says the Brubecks lived there from '54 to '60; the current owner bought it '74 and changed nothing. So I've no idea if this is a different Brubeck house, or whether the book passed the place off as the Brubeck house. But once Dave Brubeck lives in a house, it stays the Dave Brubeck house.

Silly me. I meant to cap yesterday’s smallish examination of Soviet propaganda with a video found on YouTube. Here it is. Catchy number. It refers to a specific moment in history, too – Lord Curzon’s ultimatum to the Reds after the seizure of a British ship. There's a fellow at the end hawking bonds:

He looks like a Bolshie version of the Ha Ha guy. You know, this guy:

Anyway, here it is.

That's it, alas - busy night. New ad, of course. But there's time for Christmas music, of course. If I can sum up today's entry: Snow.

See you at buzz.mn for the video. And if you don't mind: buy the book. (Note to the peculiar person who left a comment on buzz about how I should be ashamed to ask people to buy the book, because me and my wife make a lot of money and I should give the book away - you're right. Especially when I consider how long I've been charging a subscription for this site.)