Eh, only 86 degrees today. I’d hoped for 88.
What “retirement” is like, part 394: I’m at Target, but it’s a different Target. I’ve decided to move things around when it comes to the rote destinations. There are three from which to choose. One is right out, because I don’t like it. I just don’t. The layout is not the same as my usual Target, and the grocery department is miserly. The second is the one to which I have been going for decades. The Usual Target, hereafter UT. The third is next to a Home Depot, and that makes for efficient trips. It also has a different layout, but that’s because it’s bigger than UT, so everything feels different. It’s as if they just stretched the UT in all directions and filled it in with . . . I don’t know, the stuff. Seventeen percent more bananas.
I went to get a few foodstuffs, and ended up getting entirely different foodstuffs. I also spent five minutes in the bathroom cleaning aisle judging products on their ability to whiten grout. They all seemed to dance around the issue. Oh, we’ll get that mildew out! Yes, but will you whiten? We’ve got bleach! Great, but does that just disinfect or does it have significant whitening power? I’d really intended to go to Home Depot for some stuff specifically formulated to whiten grout, so I didn’t really mind the inconclusive results.
That is “retirement:” taking as long as you like studying bathroom foams and gels, and not reaching a firm decision.
Well, let’s go to Home Depot. Here was the stuff, right where the app said it would be: aisle 1, bay 11. What a world. I looked at the bottle for warnings, and they were basically this:
May ruin everything
Do not use without a will on file
The first one was concerning. It was not to be used on “natural stone,” and I don’t know if my bathroom shower tile is “natural stone.” It appears to be. This stuff would indeed get the gunk out of the grout - reviews said it bubbled and the gunk emerged, like demons called out by holy water. No one said it ruined their stone. Everyone seemed to be happy. But. I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t do something to the stone, or the sealant, if it had any. This might be another patio situation, where a minor fix ended up complicating everything. Well, let’s go home, take a picture of the tile, give it to AI and see what I should do.
This is a perfectly sensible use of AI, by the way.
The health warning concerned Fumes, and I was advised not to breathe them, and to have a fan going, and a mask, and a LifeAlert bracelet that would detect immobility after a set period, or a rope tied to a bell in another room you could jerk if you felt yourself losing consciousness. Do not pour on skin, visible bone may result. Not a toy. Active ingredient: .07% xenomorph blood. If ingested, contact doctor via Zoom and wave hands around wildly, as voice box will have dissolved.
I didn’t buy it. Ah: here are bales of Scott Bathroom Tissue. It’s not the softest, and in fact can be used as a fine-grit sandpaper in a pinch, but on the other hand, barring a shuddering bout of choler, a roll will last a long time. I looked at the price, and wondered: that seems high. Got out the Target app, checked, and sure enough, two dollars more. So, because I am “retired,” I ambled back to Target and bought the lower-priced item. All in all, I spent 40 minutes in unhurried shopping contemplation.
Oh, forgot! Got a bunch of paint chips. The house stager had suggested painting everything, and even though we are not moving, because I will have to be dragged out of here with the three-pronged hook used to pull dead gladiators off the floor of the Flavian Amphitheater, and I’m sorry that’s the end of the discussion, some new paint would be nice. All the lighter whites looked the same. I took 12. When I got home I put them up against the wall and they all looked blue.
In the evening I cleaned out a closet, which somehow repopulates itself like a magically refilling flask of wine you read about in Sinbad stories or something. I threw out a DVD reader that did not. It lost its ability. Any disk you put in produced the same reaction: spinning, lights, lol what is this bro. Watched football, ran on the treadmill to counterbalance the turnover ingestion thirteen hours earlier - yes, that is how my mind works - and now, my friends, to work.
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The Summer Replacement Show is a bygone concept. A popular show would retire for the season, and a variety show would be inserted in its place. In the case of the Jackie Gleason show, they put in something whose name told you that the spirit of the Great One was still guiding your evening entertainment. Take a look at the credits.
As it turns out, he was more than a writer. Oh, yes - that is Buddy Rich on the skins.
When I was a kid I always thought he just . . . appeared, summoned by the spirit of the age. It's always surprising to see him in square-john uniform.
I continue to wear out your welcome with grainy grabs from threadbare kinesecopes, bit there's a reason. We are illuminating the tenuous threads between now and the great bygone Television Then. What's My Line, as I keep insisting, is a valuable resource, because it wasn't a dumb TV game show. It was aspirational middlebrow culture. I mean, the host was married to the daughter of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But we'll have more on him some day.
Now and then, you come across someone who had a very long run. He was not a mystery guest.
I think they had to put on masks because it was possible they knew him, but he wasn't famous enough for Mystery Guest Status.
And then there's this cheerful fellow.
He was a mystery guest. Took the whole thing as a lark and had a very unserious time, which seemed to suit him right down to the ground.
It’s 1922
Again. Because we’re still studying the office supply ads of a hundred years ago. Why not? Who else will, if we don’t?
The Shadow of the Pen:
“A trial balance can be struck almost automatically whenever desired.”
Oh, the larcenous machinations that sentence no doubt produced.
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Buy them and give them away. The KEYTAINER. The 20s was a golden age of neologisms, I think. |
Expecting people to recognize names of yore like Lysias:
Lysias was a speechwriter:
Lysias displays literary tact, humour, and attention to character in his extant speeches, and is famous for using his skill to conceal his art. It was obviously desirable that a speech written for delivery by a client should be suitable to his age, station and circumstances. Lysias was the first to make this adaptation truly artistic. His language is crafted to flow easily, in contrast to his predecessor Antiphon's pursuit of majestic emphasis, to his pupil (and close follower in many respects) Isaeus' more conspicuous display of artistry and more strictly logical manner of argumentation,[4] and later to the forceful oratory of Demosthenes.
Lycurgus was a “lawgiver of Sparta.”
He is referred to by ancient historians and philosophers Plutarch, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Polybius, and Epictetus. It is not clear if Lycurgus was an actual historical figure; however, many ancient historians[2] believed that he instituted the communalistic and militaristic reforms – most notably the Great Rhetra – which transformed Spartan society.
The Rhetra, or proclamation, was the Spartan Constitution. But:
The Spartans had no historical records, literature, or written laws, which were, according to tradition, prohibited. Attributed to the mythical figure of Lycurgus, the legendary law-giver, the Spartan system of government is known mostly from the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, a treatise attributed to the ancient Greek historian Xenophon, describing the institutions, customs, and practices of the ancient Spartans.
It gets a bit misty, with historians referencing previous historians who also weren’t there at the time.
Historical records were prohibited? Damn, guys.
The Xerox of its time:
I think we’d be surprised if we went back to an office of the era and heard someone say “run me off fifty copies of this.” But they could.
The Lybrex agents were in the Woolworth Building, so they must have been on the up-and-up:
Variants of these were still around, in phone booths, in the later days of the 20th century. And maybe beyond. Airports had big banks of them. No more.
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“Who the hell is in the corridor outside, making all that noise?” “Civilization” So many small things to make business better, so many tricks, inventions, innovations. |
Sigh
I can smell it from here
When did the Ditto system fall out of use? We knew the phrase “ditto fluid” in grade school, the last memory I have of the term.
It was a Spirit Duplicator, which sounds like a transporter device that improves on the Star Trek version.
But the name Ditto preceded the invention, I think. It was a brand of typewriter ribbon.
INX
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INX that does justice to your signature |
We end with our old friend. Trading off the standing feature, it happens in the best regulated families, and at the same time making you wonder why he didn’t go with the Grand and Glorious Feeling trope?
That will do for today, except of course for the updates (free as ever like all this stuff for now) and the latest chapter in the Joe Ohio story, over at the paid section of the Substack. Thank you for your patronage, as always.
