Heavy work night, so it’s the usual scant Thursday. Took daughter to choir tonight, then committed the sin of being The First Parent To Show Up afterwards when everyone was in the courtyard having hot dogs. So I went back to the car, listened to the radio, and decided to while away the time cleaning out the supplies from the emergency kit and glove compartment. The excitement was almost too much.
In the glove compartment wallet: expired affinity program cards. Lots of them. Since I don’t pack all those cards into my daily wallet, I put them in the car, under the reasonable assumption that if I ever used them, the experience would be prefaced by the use of the automobile. Consequently I removed them entirely from my brain. Huh: so I was enrolled in a hair-cutting chain’s customer rewards program in 2005.
It’s possible I missed out on some promotions and special member-only benefits. But that’s okay. I stopped going there because I always got the same sullen stylist who hated heads. The one hair-cutting parlor in the world where the stylists don’t rotate out every six days, and I had to go there. There was a card for Eddie Bauer, where I do shop, but my account can be accessed by my phone number. All of them can. There’s no point to the cards.
But if you throw them out, then someone many years hence will have no idea what affinity cards looked like in the mid Oughts.
Well, that’s their problem.
Discovered that the hand sanitizer had leaked out. The hand warmers had solidified. The moist towelettes were bone dry. The packets of burn cream were supple, though. Related: I have burn cream in the vehicle’s emergency kit. It just kills me that I know I’ll never use it. I have a splinter removal kit, an insect bite kit, and a burn kit. No one in the family ever goes the extra inch and does something that requires the use of the kits. And if they ever did, there would be so much drama about the splinter or burn no one would take the time to say “it’s just grand that you’re so well-prepared.”
There was also one of those cards you get to support your local school: ten dollars off a meal over $50 at a restaurant across town that went out of business in 2011. Hang on to that; they could reopen in St. Paul under another name. And so on -
Daughter knocks on the door; she’s done, and spared the embarrassment of Me. We drive home in the sunset, Andy Williams on the radio. We see the moon through the trees, white and kind.
This obit of a local radio announcer says:
An industry pioneer, one of his most notable characters was Charlie Van Dyke, and the duo made up one of the first two-man teams in Twin Cities radio.
While at KDWB, Ekholm interviewed the Beetles -- and coaxed Paul McCartney to give the call letters of the station on the air.
Beetles? Beetles. But please, please tell me what that first paragraph means. He made up a character, went back and forth in and out of character on the air - and this was a duo? That was a two-man team? Who were one of the first?
It was later revised to correct the Beetles spelling, and there was this clarifying revision:
An industry pioneer, one of his most notable characters was Charlie Van Dyke, and he and the character made up one of the first two-man teams in Twin Cities radio.
A one-man team cannot be a two-man team. No one thought Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy were a two-man team, did they?
Related: I browsing product page for a program, that assembles all your images to the one place, where in list they sit for Imagination. Here's the description:
Sparkbox helps you managing images for your design, unlike iPhoto, It is designed to manage the images besides the picture or photograph you took. It is wonderful when you could browse or find your design inspirations, image collections in a delightful and clean image library; It is perfect for designer to manage image collection and take good use of your visual inspiration.
Really nails product, unlike some words, Is it? Right. It goes on:
Sparkbox provides the sophisticated management workflow in the easiest way, managing images are simplified to these little steps:
Here's the splash:
And here's the opening of the video tutorial for iDocument:
Spot the tiny odd little error there.
It's a nice little product, and I'm considering buying it, but this really isn't encouraging. Note: English is not their first language. I cannot speak their language, let alone write it or narrate it. I'm not making fun of that - it's the notion that no one in the entire enterprise appears to have noticed, or been told, or had an investor raise a hand, and say "how about we run this past a proofreader in Kansas just to make sure we didn't bumble-fumber an idiot? Idiom. An idiom."
Saw this in a comments thread at a newspaper site: the reason newspapers should give up on comments threads.
I love this: the Playboy Townhouse.
The whole thing is here. Rotating bed. Of course. Rotating bed with built in bar and LP-tape library, controlled by push-buttons. Of course. Swimming pool on the main floor with an atrium. Of course. It’s nothing more than a swank version of the Lairs boys doodle in their spare time, except it doesn’t have the underground lake with a personal submarine.
You can imagine the slime that would grow on the pool walls, eventually. To say nothing of the rotating bed, but mostly the walls.
Would I want to live there? Only if I could do something about those ceilings, which were modern at the time but spell “oppressively bad 70s architecture” to me now. They were mostly used in colleges and public buildings. But note the accoutrements of the Playboy Townhouse: chess. Books. Objets d’art. The elements of civilization were requirements for the man about town.
Or the last man on earth who has to turn on the floods at night to keep the plague-zombies at bay.
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Motels! Just six. I have another state ready to go, but it's 14 cards, and I think I'll save it for next week. It's always handy to have a 14-page site hanging around.
Oh, did I mention there's a book? See you around.
