Google Street View. I always check the updates to see if I'm there. I did find one picture that has my car in the usual spot on the street where I park. It's strange to have this record, isn't it? You can call up your street from years ago and think "the old dog was still alive and Daughter's up in that room, right there."

Well, what have we today? Odds and ends. You know how much I absolutely love the Corporate Memphis style, aka Globohomo (global homogenization). I do think I've found the pinnacle of the art form.

The out-of-scale, deformed giganticism is an inexplicable artistic decision. No one likes it, but Apple keeps commissioning it and putting it on the App Store, so it must mean something. But no one knows what it's supposed to mean.

Here's a preview of something coming next week. See if you can find the common theme:

Kidding; there's no common theme. That's a fade between two important imags: the woman who is finding coffee satisfaction, and the sacred receptacle.

Another:

The Rise of the Potato Man is, in its own way, the 50s / 60s version of globohomo. One of these days I'll get AI art to show me what the guy's skull would have looked like. Enormous bone-nose an inch from the top of the head, ear canals at the back.

And: we'll have an examination of this highly significant image.

Trust me, this says everything about the culture at the time.

Also, a glimpse into hell:

What mysteries will we discover together? The actor in the ancient Mask of Tragedy gives a hint:

What will this be about? Wonderful things.

And now, the weekly dream-journal entry, illustrated by AI, because that's what this week is all about.

I was doing a comedy video with Mark Hamill. We were in Portland, and I was supposed to be a local TV reporter, talking about what the locals are bothered by. “Of course, everyone is talking about Russia, Russian collusion, Russian impact on Global Warming,” and so forth.

It was a walk and talk, and then I’d run into Hamill dressed like Luke in The Last Jedi, and I’d be startled, and say “and they’re worried about the homeless.” He would then say he wasn’t homeless, but come to think of it, yeah, he was. That was the joke!

But the show’s producers rejected the bit as insensitive, and had us do the whole thing as a wacky duo in space who made Force jokes, not one of which I remember. I was furious about the changes, but Hamill played along.

But the show’s producers rejected the bit as insensitive, and had us do the whole thing as a wacky duo in space who made Force jokes, not one of which I remember. I was furious about the changes, but Hamill played along.

Before that I had been sanding a pulpit in a Baptist church.

A few days later, a tweet:

I was standing in the spot described in the banner above. A fellow came up and asked if he talk to me for a second. The most honest response would be “I don’t have any cash,” which is true, and would save everyone a lot of time. But he was genial enough, and you don’t want to be rude from the get-go. No harm in saying “sure,” especially when you know he’s going to talk at you anyway.

He worked as a janitor in the AT&T building, he said, and he was four dollars short of what he needed to get his car out of the parking ramp. Really now. Haven’t heard that one before. Can you pay for parking with cash anymore? I wondered. Nowadays you put in a card, and the ticket spits out, and then you put the ticket back in when you leave, and your card is charged. Maybe the AT&T ramp (which would be the International Center ramp, if you want to be precise; it’s around the corner) has the old-style dude-in-a-booth. I almost applied for that job once, back in college. Good place to get some thinking done. Then I imagined the fumes and the despair, and thought better of it.

I thought it was odd he’d mentioned the AT&T building, since it was in the news that very day. It’s one of the undersung buildings downtown. The original design was underwhelming. Back to the drawing board, and the result was not appreciated by our paper’s architecture critic. It was retooled again. The top, however, remained the same.

This is a reference to the old phone company’s top.

But now the microwave crown is gone.

And thus the building refers to something that is no longer there, and the number of people who grasped the reference, if only subliminally, will diminish to the single digits, and those who know will be the people who study such things. In other words, practically no one.

Anyway. I told him again I didn’t have any cash and he offered to go with me to a cash machine nearby. Whereupon I had to say “I don’t give money to people on the street,” and that, it seemed, was that.

Lance's super-vision comes in handy again:

Oh, he knows. Solution is here.

This year's old newspaper feature: a social no-no single-panel illustration. Can you figure out what's wrong?

The answer will be provided on Monday. PROMISE. That gives you an entire day to speculate in the comments!

		Now two ways to chip in!

That will do! Thank you for your visits, and I'll see you on Monday.