The primary weekend accomplishment: repositioning the lights my wife did not like, because they are too bright. Now they’re in the front of the house, casting their cruel white blinding power to dispel the night and the evil spirits who slink and skulk in the world of shadows.

In other important news: I made a really good hamburger supper, because I bought the fresh 80-20 from the local grocery store. There’s no reason to buy anything else, and I have accordingly altered my future shopping designs accordingly. This means that the Friday grocery stop for weekend items shifts the sole jalapeño purchase from Lunds to Kowalski’s, the latter having much more fulsome peppers than the latter. I will not buy a jalapeno at CUfB, because the scales cannot understand the concept of a single jalapeno, and an attendant must be called over to swipe the magic badge and approve the sale.

They lost a good deal of my grocery dollars because of this. I'm serious. It's not worth the trouble when I know that other stores will not have an issue. There's absolutely no way anyone doing customer retention research would come up with this one.

I watched some TV but not much; I had writing to do and I just wanted to peck away and see what I could fix. There’s still some kludginess in Joe Ohio pt. 1 that needs clarifying, and I think I did it. Hate to take one more pass, because the beauty of the thing is its serendipity and unplanned evolution.

Still working on the art.

Mostly dealt with a dying hard drive. Appalling read/write speed; guys using a chisel and a marble slab worked faster. So, find a spare drive, wipe, install the OS, transfer everything important, reset computer to boot from an external drive, and muddle on until the new 27 inch iMacs are released. That ate into an entire night.

And now, our 2023 first-of-the-month feature.

A newspaper syndicate in 1922 asked a variety of thinkers and notables what the world would be like in a hundred years. Let's see how that played out.

		Well, will you look at that: the head of the Life Extension Institute believes that Life will be Extended. Eugene kicked off at 64.
		Seems reasonable, but I’m wary of that last line.
		And this seems surprising for 1923, doesn’t it? We tend to think of such ideas coming later.

They don’t have rockets in their frame of reference, though; they’re still stuck on Wellsian ideas, like projectiles.

		Hold on. Hollllld on a minute. This has to be it. This has to be the basis for the Chicken Heart story. The author knew about the experiment, and expanded it into his horror tale. Why else would he have chosen a chicken heart?
		Ah, there’s the nub. Look, guys, it’s either eugenics pretty soon, or it’s mass death at the hands of the inevitable super-race.

Look, guys, it’s either eugenics pretty soon, or it’s mass death at the hands of the inevitable super-race.

The answer to the social foe-paw:

Clumsy idiot

Repeat: it is NOTHING.

Oh, a light comedy

Also goes by the name of “Curfew Breakers.” Also known as “Hooked.” YouTube description said it was a Dragnet-style procedural. Nope: low-budget JD crap about high schoolers doing dope, almost MST3K-proof.

Those were the days when a guy getting popped for bringing in some horse gets the Pearl Harbor treatment.

The movie is useful for several things, like the 1957 conception of the Teen:

Oddly proto-goth.

Heh heh I like smelling the girls

Inadvertent documentary:

Oh look, the gas station is prepared to fill your polishing needs:

A pretty carhop:

Marilyn Madison, I think. Her only credit. Nothing is known. The female lead, seen above wearing Sharpie makeup, has no more roles, and no bio info.

Best of all, a wiiiilllld band that blows it crazy daddy-O.

They must be on DOPE

IMDB is silent, and the comments ask who he is.

No one seems to know.

		Now two ways to chip in!

That will do. Another week on the Bleat begins. Matchbooks starts a new update segment: Hotels. So far there are 273 pages. How many will we have this year? Are there enough to round out 2023? You'll have to keep coming back to find out.