If you're having comments-problems, it's entirely my fault. Sometimes I use the template with the old code. Every year I resolve to make this thing streamlined and automated, and every year there's Cruft and Drift. Do you remember them 1960s British comic duo, Cruft and Drift. Catch phrase was "ooh, that's a slice of streaky bacon."
Saturday the trellis arrived. It was from Wayfair, which means Chinese boxes shipped from far away. I removed all the parts and laid out the bags of parts. One section fit together with ease, as it should. Not exactly a flawless fit - it slopped over by an eighth of an inch, but this would be covered by vines. The welding was bad. Looked like an ugly blotch of bird crap.
The other section did not fit together. There was no way to force it. The two pieces simply would not join.
wHy DoNt yoU Do iT StRaiGHt Trust me, it didn't fit.
Well, call up the website, complain, order replacement parts. They will arrive in a week.
Teh consequences of krepification of things. I’m sure when I start to assemble the rest of it there will be another problem, and I’ll go through this again and get more parts, and maybe if I’m lucky there will only be three screws left over.
Sigh. Head inside to get some cold water. Hit the ice machine in the fridge.
No ice.
Get out the bucket. No ice. It is no longer producing ice. Or rather it has not produced ice for a while. The fridge is what, two, three years old? Dead already? Hit the web, look for solutions. Could be a clogged filter. Well, the filter is old. Need a new one. Check the web, see who has it locally, drive there. See the man in the orange vest. (I guess I'm doing Broadway is My Beat dialogue now.) Talk to him. Ask him about the filter.
“Oooooooh,” he says, and inhales sharply. “That’s a good question.”
He was talking to another Home Depot clerk, who says “Aisle 40, bay 3.” Go there. Find it. Go home. Spend ten minutes attempting to liberate the filter from the adamantine carapace of plastic. My Bog, seal a dead body in this thing and it'll be perfectly preserved for a thousand years. Put the filter in the fridge, which goes in like one of those self-destruct triggers Ripley had to use to blow up the Nostromo. Just in case, let’s do everything we can on our end. Test the ice machine reset button: chimes, so it works. Toggle the ice-maker function. Finally, as the manual suggests, reboot the fridge from the circuit breaker.
Yes: reboot the fridge.
None of these things result in ice. Ergo, it’s a circuit board. Ergo, it’s a service call. Ergo, it’s money.
Go to the store for ice, because we need ice. There’s a bag of regular ice for $2.99, the stuff that dissolves on contact with liquid. Then there’s the Rich People Ice. The stuff for the One Percenters. It’s $5.99. Dense cubes in discrete plastic containers. Orbs the size of golf balls, thick and heaby as neutron stars but of course without the massive gravitational field. I buy the hoi-polloi ice and go home.
On the plus side, we turned on the air conditioning, and it works!
How's your week going?
What is the point of rewatching a TV show?
For the fourth time? For the fourth time?
I started a new series this weekend, something that was - gasp - a network show. EVIL! It’s basically the X-Files except Catholic, with demons. Skeptical rational female expert, big serious interesting guy who works for the church vetting cases of miracles and demons.
In the first episode she goes to her fridge: I see all these half-cans, and think "the top row should tumble out every time she opens the door."
They're all margaritas.
So that's her quirk? Or one of them? Margarita-lovin' smart shrink gal, or smart shrink gal who has a problem?
I suppose the moment it grabbed me, aside from the really, really good sequences of night-terror hallucinations, was the introduction of the evil weasel from Lost who everyone hated. I hadn’t thought of him since forever, but was glad I had the opportunity to hate him again. The great thing about this fellow's physiognomy: it sums up weakness, contempt, amoral deviousness, self-loathing, and a certain cold, cruel intelligence. His dislike of his own face created a personality that . . . made his own face.
Utterly nasty in Lost. Does that mean he got a redemption cycle? Must I google that? Must I care?
Lost started showing up in my Twitter timeline last week. Anniversary of the end, I guess. Hadn’t thought of it for a long time. Loved it, got frustrated, felt distant from it, stuck with it, found the conclusion satisfying but couldn’t quite say why.
Can’t possibly imagine going back and watching it all again. I’d probably enjoy it again if it was the only thing in the world left to watch, and you pithed the part of my brain that recalled certain SHOCKING TWISTS. It gave the impression of something that might make sense once a few key revelations clicked into place, but everything that was revealed only served to obscure something larger.
This line from the Wikipedia summary of season 3 is typical:
Time travel elements also begin to appear in the series, as Desmond is forced to turn the fail-safe key in the hatch to stop the electromagnetic event, and this sends his mind eight years to the past. When he returns to the present, he is able to see the future.
Seems like a big deal. Seems ridiculous. But we just rolled with it, because the show was always rewriting rules and expectations.
I think it managed to wrap it up with some overall philosophical / spiritual summation, but I’ll be switched if I can tell you what it was.
But: I will rewatch Rome, and I will rewatch Boardwalk, and I will rewatch Deadwood. It’s the absence of metaphysical hoo-hah that gives them mythic heft.
And I will watch Evil, since the reviews are good and there are only 37 episodes.
Just as soon I finish the 4th rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return.
It’s 1927.
The GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF MODERN TIMES!
Mmmm perhaps not, but heat-in-demand was nifty thing. Gramps liked it when the pretty nurse applied it with pressure, too!
Battle Creek Equipment Company was founded in the late 1920’s and incorporated in 1931. It was founded to continue the work of the Sanitarium Equipment Company that was part of the world-renowned Battle Creek Sanitarium, the pre-eminent spa (known as the "Sans") of the late 1800s’ and early 20th century.
The product seems to be electrical now. Back then it was full of Renu-Heat crystals. I expect the same stuff is in those hand-warming packs we buy in the winter for emergencies, and never use.
I wonder how many people dumped the hot-water bottle for these. Certainly less blubbery.
Children, it’s time for your Irish Moss
Irish Moss - or at least one kind - is used as a thickener in dairy products. Stands to reason it would stiffen the bones, Mother!
The days of wet, acidic, humming radios are over:
Ludwig Baumann and Company was, for a while, the largest furniture company in the nation. And then it wasn’t. Dead by ’54.
Before embarking on radio manufacturing, the Grigsby-Grunow Company had started in 1921 as the Grigsby-Grunow-Hinds Company in Chicago, making such automotive aftermarket items as its "Premier" brand of sun visors.
By 1927, the company had annual nationwide sales of $5 million in manufacturing products such as "Majestic" battery eliminators for home radios.
The device, developed by inventor William Lear for Grigsby-Grunow, eliminated the need for a cumbersome array of lead-acid batteries and chargers to power radio receivers of the time.
They promoted a radio show in 1928, the Majestic Theater of then Air. During the Depression they branched out into appliances - a gutsy move, and not exactly a barn burner, but they survived, made portable radios after the war, and went into TVs. But the competition was too stiff, the business too thin - they went bankrupt in 1955, staggered along for a while, but the signal went dead in 1962.
So many radio companies. Like PC makers in the 80s.
Sunbeam! A familiar brand from an unfamiliar company.
Chicago Flexible Shaft? Founded by John K. Stewart, who also put his name on Stewart-Warner, a brand that still exists. Sort of. The Sunbeam nameplate was sold off at some point. It’s complicated.
Here's another ad, showing the Little Princess.
Johnny Johnson and hiss Hotel Pennsylvania Orchestra:
What a clean recording! It’s like you’re there in that massive hotel, across from Penn Station, living the high bright modern life of the 20s.
Here it’s the Statler Orchestra. Interesting. That was a chain of big hotels. Seems Statler had a hand from the start, although it didn’t buy it outright until 1948. The name was changed in 1949.
Well, he could, you know.
“Mama’s little martyr.” An insult to someone who was also “wearing a towel around the neck destined for the collar of a conqueror.”
One suspects this is aimed at Mother, and her tender aspirations for the Young Chief.
Children like cake. Yes. This is so.
They play the nostalgia angle here, the “good as it was before modern manufacturing ruined our basic pleasures.” Best of all, as the last word of the text tells you:
That'll do, he said with a vacant indifference that characterizes the current mood when the life's professional identification, which naturally shades into the personal, has been taken out behind the bar and shot in the head. Now we have the penultimate week of DC Heroes. Thanks for your visit, and we'll meet again tomorrow.
