Shadow Flutter

You can read The History of Television — Part I directly below this post. Fast forward to the 1980’s. They say cable television was invented in 1948 or 1950, but I think they are lying.  I think that Wikipedia entry in the History of Television has been put there to test us, to see if we are paying attention, to see if we are exercising our critical analysis skills, because if cable existed in the early ‘80s I never saw it.  They must have been hiding it in some lab.  But the technology had improved in many areas. We now had color TV — black and white had been consigned to the museum — Good Riddance — you could see the picture at night, there was no crackle in the audio, I almost never had to jiggle the antenna wire, and I no longer had to watch potato farming and Gumby on Sunday mornings. But entropy was conserved with the preachers.  Gone were the small town preachers, replaced by televangelists who were everywhere. In addition to being on TV all Sunday morning, t...

1950’s When I was a young shaver, we didn't have TV until my aunt gave us hers. It had a six inch screen with vacuum tubes. The electronics sat in a tray and took up more space than the cathode ray tube. (Which is saying something given the size of cathode ray tubes at the time, even one with a six inch screen).  You'd turn it on and wait and wait and wait while the vacuum tubes “warmed up,” what ever that means. If today's standards applied then, you would be on the phone with the cable company before the picture displayed.  The TV sat inside this massive piece of furniture that looked a lot like a cabinet but was wider than it was tall, yet stood as tall as I did, an eight-year-old boy. The thing weighed a ton and took 4 guys to carry into the house.  I’m convinced with the slightest assistance it would have plowed through the floors to the basement. The six-inch screen looked ridiculous overwhelmed as it was by the size of the cabinet.  All that for this...

This is an old photo of Devil's Slide taken in 1873 or 1874.  Pretty neat, huh? Take a close look at the train. Right behind the engine is what looks like a coal bin and may be part of the engine platform. That makes sense because you would have to keep shoveling coal to keep producing steam. Following the coal car is what looks like the train personnel's living quarters. It has windows. Wish the caboose was in frame. Imagine living and working on a train as it traveled across mountains and valleys.  A very different life.  I wish I could do this just once. That trough-like (for lack of a better word) object descending and scarring the mountainside looks manmade. But it might be the Slide referred to. If so, does that mean its nature's creation? To me it looks manmade, and if so, it's probably a conduit for water and ugly contaminants that would otherwise flood mine shafts and miners. Wouldn't go in the water.  Ugly, and the water is probably unhealthy, even t...

Books of a Different Kind: 1 Knitting With Dog Hair First, disclosure: I haven’t read this book, and I won’t.  My excuse is I can’t knit, and even if I could I don’t have a spinning machine.  Nor do I want to make one.  (Yes, the book includes instructions for building a spinner.) Personally I think this takes recycling a bit too far.  But for those who are interested … The complete title is Knitting With Dog Hair: Better a Sweater From A Dog You Know and Love Than From A Sheep You’ll Never Meet .  So there you have it, the reason -- intimacy -- a way of taking Fido with you to places where Fido is not welcome.   At 112 pages, it packs a lot of information and includes chapters and sections on Chap. 1: Why a Dog (What Will the Neighbors Say)   Chap 2: Collecting the Raw Material (How Much is Enough & Storing the Harvest) Chap 4: Spinning the Yarn (Making a Drop Spindle) Chap: 8: Projects (Golden Retriever Sca...

Liquid Assets in the state of Georgia Bonds Stocks CDs Guns No, this isn’t one of those SAT or IQ test questions where you are asked to pick the one that doesn’t belong.  A gun is actually a liquid asset in Georgia.  This would be a SAT or IQ test question in the state of Georgia.  Bonds Stocks CDs Cars Cars are definitely not a liquid asset in Georgia. Let me explain. When my brother and I sold our parent’s home in Georgia, we had to do two things before turning the house over to the buyer: get rid of the car in the garage and the guns in the house.  So my brother and I made the 650 mile drive down the freeway, me driving and both of us eating potato chips and Rancho flavored Doritos. In the garage sat my dad’s 1989 Buick Electra, a total of 32,000 miles on it.  My dad getting on in years, and never a good driver , parked it there 10 years ago where it sat till this day.  It had sat there for so long, it had...

Looks a lot more peaceful than it does now

Earth Abides  is a Science Fiction Classic, a post-apocalyptic (not dystopian) novel written in 1949. Isherwood, Ish for short, is living in a bungalow in the desert doing research for his thesis when he is bit by a rattlesnake while picking up an abandoned hammer he finds in the sand. When Ish recovers from the bite, many weeks later, he learns that something like 99% of the world's population has succumbed to a flu-like plague. He returns to his parent's home, but they are nowhere to be found, and neither is anyone else in the neighborhood. Strangely, almost everyone is buried. There are survivors, but they are few and far between, individual grains of sand spread across the countryside and cities. Eventually Ish hooks up with several other survivors and the Tribe is born. I've heard great things about this book from fellow Science Fiction lovers, and there is certainly plenty to chew on here as Stewart puts the tribe through its paces, but I had trouble with the sto...

Is there a philosophy of plastic bags?  Their use?  The nature of their being?  What one can know about plastic bags?  The ethics of plastic bagging?  I would not have thought so, but there is a convenience store and supermarket nearby that makes me wonder. The convenience store, like all convenience stores, sells junk food at exorbitant prices. Yet this doesn’t stop me from going to the store every day to purchase a couple bottles of pepsi, some chips, and an ice cream or two.   The first time I ever bought something in this store that’s what I purchased.  And this is what happens: I place my items down at the register, and the male clerk rings up each item, placing each one right back down on the counter.   I swipe my credit card, and he gives me a receipt.   Then we stare at one another.  Waiting. I refuse to say the obvious.  He must take the first step.  We wait.  We stare.  The line builds....

Upon entering the great Azetc City of Tenochtitlan, Cortez's conquistadores behold the following: By far the largest city in the Americas, Tenochtitlan occupied a cluster of islands in a large lake.  Interwoven with canals, the city reached the mainland by three long and narrow causeways.  Fresh water arrived by a stone aqueduct.  Most of the whitewashed stone adobe buildings were small and humble, but some lofty aristocratic houses embraced internal courtyards and gardens.  Above all, the Spanish marveled at the immense palace of Moctezuma.  Cortez declared, "In Spain there is nothing to compare with it."  The city's central plaza of tall stone pyramid-temples also dazzled with a combination of red, blue, and ocher stucco.  Dedicated to both Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec's god of war, and Tlaloc, their god of rain, the largest pyramid stood sixty meters tall.  Every year it hosted public ritual human sacrifices of captured people, their...

The Only One, by Caola Dibble The Only Ones is billed as a near future, post-pandemic science fiction novel.  But there is nothing post-pandemic about it.  Millions are dying and continue dying of diseases, great and small, and no one is more susceptible to these diseases than children.  This is a world in which orphans abound, streets and buildings are regularly sprayed with industrial strength antiseptics, and people are hosed down with anti-pathogen solutions as they move zone to zone.  Government institutions shatter or fray.  Cities and suburbs retain some form of order, while rural areas are lawless.   But not everyone is susceptible to the diseases.  There are those called “hardys,” mostly women, who are immune to some or many of the diseases.  In a world where children are dying at an alarming rate, there is a demand for children; and where there is a demand, a supply follows.  Black market cloners pop up around the wor...