The bins are out. As I noted before, we are rejiggering the office. A floor is being relinquished, and it's a wise move. We have too much space for too few people, especially when a lot of the people don't seem to come by too often. I am keen on getting a window seat, and have noted that I am in the office every day, as opposed to someone who pays a monthly visit. I do not think I will get a window seat.
There's a staircase that cuts through the three-floor office, and I suppose they'll close it up. This means finding a new home, or none at all, for a big slab of polished black granite on the bottom floor landing. I wonder how many employees know its origins. There have been so many departures and so many new people that its history isn't common knowledge anymore, and your average new kid hired for WEB APP METRICS or whatever would be surprised to learn it had a history. It's from the facade of the old building.
It has Duralumin! I thought that was just a 30s trade name, but:
In 1906, German chemist Alfred Wilm (1869-1937) discovered that the hardness of aluminum could be significantly increased by adding a small amount of copper. This discovery prompted the creation of "duralumin" (also known as "hard aluminum"). Its high stiffness and hardness make it widely used in aerospace and other fields.
It was severe, but glorious in its own way:
The numbers would only rise, until that one day when they ticked down for good.
Pursuitant to the recent Bleat and subsequent Substack piece about the oil-leaking egg punisher from cheap-jack junk-house Amazon, I give you the whisker purchased at Christmas time:
I tell you, it’s enough to make a man give up on buying anything from them. It’s all Chinese junk now.
As I have warned you, we're light this week. Much time spent on sudden logistical imperatives for the funeral. Example: we have some videos for the life-story montage. Great. What format? They're on DVDs. Great. Are they on playable disks, or are they loose files in folders? Does the disk show a menu when inserted into the player? The disk shows a menu when inserted. Great. Actually no, not great, but we can figure it out.
All this will impinge a bit on Bleat length next week, but there will always be something to earn your visit. I may be pumping out Substack content 5X a week and my broadcast duties are now four times a week with the addition of the Hewitt show and Generalissimo's podcast, plus the Diner and Ricochet, AND on Monday morn I owe no less than four pieces to various places. So.
Better than no one wanting anything, of course. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
I was going to give you some I Love Lucy comic strips today, but things are so mad and tight I think I'll wait until Monday. Something to look forward to!
I was attempting to find my way out of a decrepit house with a series of old, dim stairs and passageways. I remembered that there was a room I could use to escape, because I could just pull up the screens, so I went there - only to find it was much nicer than the rest of the building. The screen did not go up; the window went out, and when I pushed it - quietly, as there was an attractive woman sleeping on the sofa, and I didn’t want to wake her - several decals on the window fell off into the flower boxes. Now I felt bad about ruining their decorations, and vowed to find a way to get the decals out from the other side and reattach them.
But: flash forward. I was explaining to the previously sleeping woman how I was going to make her a bookmark that had each letter of her name in a Pantone color card, with the color referring to the attribute each letter represented. She was impressed. I also apologized for my appearance, having had a late night, and she said no, you look great. Which was nice.
Unfortunately, she came with a group of friends I didn’t find particularly interesting, and I was obliged somehow to go to a bar with one, who resembled the actor Wes Studi. He wasn’t very talkative.
AI, asked to make art of all this, gave me this:
And then it thought no, Pantone is a gum, right?
Hold on you meant something else, which is a skin cream, right?
LANCE HAMFACE era. Such verbosity:
We don't talk much about Ice Collars anymore, do we?
Don't remember this one at all - but these are the lowest charting songs, after all. Sometimes that's because they came in at the year, but sometimes it's because they just couldn't break out.
Nostalia throwback? Has that doo-run-run feel.
There are two uploads on YouTube and both have comments complaining about the absence of sound. Hmm. Anyway: "Daniel Boone (born Peter Charles Green; 31 July 1942 – 27 January 2023) was an English pop musician who became a one-hit wonder in the United States with the single "Beautiful Sunday" in 1972. The song was written by Boone and Rod McQueen and sold over 2,000,000 copies worldwide."
