Hot hot hot hot hot hot hot: upper nineties, and that’s just fine with me. The temp on Monday was 99, which I think qualifies as “upper nineties,” although my weather app says “Feels like 98.” Oh. Elsewhere in the metro it cracked 3 digits; hottest day in May since the Dust Bowl period of ’34, when the newspapers ran stories day after day about the murderous heat and the citizens felled by Sol.

“Just like Brazil is going to be,” Daughter said, and I thought “with less air conditioning, and you can’t flush toilet paper, and beware of public tap water,” but I have to keep that to myself or else I seem negative and unsupportive.

Which I am, I suppose, but also positive and supportive.

I weeded and seeded, although not as much as my wife did - she had to move hostas from this place to that place, lest there be bare spaces on the boulevard. I’d like to think the energy and devotion indicated by the hostas grants us some absolution for the bare spots on the lawn; it suggests there is naught that can be done with that space, but here, look to your left. Focus on the verdant success that delights your path.

Wife also found some rogue trees growing on the cliff in the bushes, and these had to be sawed down. Got out the new hedge trimmers to trim the hedge, and no fingers were lost.

If you’re wondering whether the annual Mulch Woe is underway, yes - 17 bags. It’s like an annual fitness test: can I pick up a bag and hurl it into the car without difficulties? I passed. There was also noisy removal of tree seeds, since a ton of little white things - looking like albino Google Map pins - were dropped on the patio. I would be inclined to just let them go away, as they seem to do, but wife bade me to get out the blower.

And here’s another lesson in human nature. When you hear a leaf blower, you hate the person who is using it. That noise. God. That sound. Oh, it stopped - OH NO THAT WAS BUT A TEMPORARY SURCEASE. When you’re using it, you’re aware that no one likes to hear it, but hey, it is getting the job done, and Job #1 right now is Getting the Job Done. Also, when you turn it off for a moment, it’s not because you’re finished; you’re moving the setting from exhale to inhale. So there’s always a little gap when people think it’s going to get better, but you’ve just moved from Suck to Blow. Rather like watching a Star Wars movie.

No, that’s not a comment on Solo. Haven’t seen it. I’m sure I will, some day. Not excited. Why? Perhaps it’s the subject matter. Here’s a story that involves the entire galaxy, and spans a period before and after a civilizational upheaval that stretches across untold systems, and we keep going back to the same damned characters. I have the feeling it will be fun and inconsequential, and since we know the principle characters survive, there’s nothing at stake.

Not to say prequels can’t work. I’d like to see a prequel to Casablanca, but we’ll have to wait until CGI can replicate a younger Bogart. Once that tech’s bulletproof there will be many interesting movies that use old actors.

Or will there?

Will anyone care? I think there’s a vast catalog of movies that have completely dropped off the edge of the world, and while Casablanca still has cultural currency, it’s part of the Old Stuff that taxes the modern attention span. There will always be an audience for it, but it will diminish. Let me explain why, he said, making this up as he went along: when I was growing up, you were used to black-and-white movies. They lived side-by-side with color on the TV, and often they were your favorites because they had BEMs or spaceships, or vampires. Black and white was the palette of Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, running in the late hours of Saturday night, and the style and tone of the shows made black and white cool. So you had a generation that grew up accustomed to the style of a previous era.

The style on the other side of The Wall. The cultural Wall that went up in the early-mid 60s.

So now black and white is an interesting choice used sparingly, but not in the style of the black and white movies? Unless there’s something about B&W that forces the artist to conform to the old styles? I don’t know. The B&W sequences of Twin Peaks: Returns are among the most haunting of the entire series, and it makes you wonder if B&W won’t become a way of indicating a time that has passed into fable and myth.

But yes, I’d see a Casablanca prequel. Or how about this: remake Little Caesar or Scarface with CGI, reproduce the scenes but add the dynamism of modern movies. Remake all the old great classics with the original actors, and juice it all up a little. Yes, I know, heresy - but it would bring the actors and the old movies back to life for a new generation. After a few decades of huge, sweeping, bombastic, overwhelming, confusing, unreal CGI punch-fest epics that the brain never accepts as real, they’d be refreshing.

When the tech gets to the point where CGI Eddie Robinson grins and we buy it, that’s when the opportunities open up. When the tech can give us a Harold Lloyd who seems like a real chap, solid, living and breathing, that’s when interesting things might be made.

Or we can do a Boba Fest movie.

It’s 1957.

Someone shot Grandma with the happy trank:

It’s an interesting kitchen: no cupboards, bizarre counter behind the oven wedged in by a window. But it has electric cooking’s “heavenly cleanliness.”

		You have to love the controls. They’re so space-age and modern - why, even the buttons are contoured to fit your finger. Those were the controls on our GE ranges, although the units were configured differently. The clock fell apart, I remember that. It broke. Turning the dials didn’t turn the hands unless you pressed down very hard.

“Boss, I have this theory. Ending a price in the number seven will boost sales.”

“Okay. Give it a whirl.”

Seventeen cents for a cup and saucer. Seventeen cents.

I don’t know why I didn’t clip the full ad.

Possibly because it has a strange allure, just like this. You know that the hair is shellacked in place. When she moves, it moves in a single mass, back and forth or up and down.

		I don’t know why I clipped this one in this fashion, except - well, youhave to wonder what the photographer said. Look ill, but not too ill. Look as though you’re sort of sexy-ill, in a tramp way, but not a cheap tramp. One of those moll-types who talked a little too loud and drank a little too much and still had her looks, but that would all go south soon and the boss would get another gal. Ill like that.

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You know, I think these were going to go in the Lint tumblr. That’s why they’re cut up. This would have had a caption along the lines of “Start them off on the Reich Foot” or something.

There's nothing so quenching and refreshing as something that mentions the US Patent Office on the label, is there?

This is somehow both beautiful and disgusting:

The background is shimmery and dreamy; the ice cream is harsh and strange.

The mind cannot put the two things together. Well, it can, but it doesn’t want to.