The box, Duncan Birmingham

I read about politics all day, those are the sites I visit, and frankly it's all discouraging. Our American media, presently our politicized government departments, even our intelligence agencies, our senators are not worth the emotional trouble of discussing. Concentrating on such things and becoming experts in details deforms our personalities and it needn't be so. You've already read the same things that I did today, the bogus reporting that dominates the news. That's why I choose to talk about something else instead. They can all just bite me.

Two recent anecdotes and I'll get on with the box.

A man is missing from the office downstairs, a black dude with an outgoing personality that doesn't rub everyone pleasantly. Not everyone gets on with him and he does have his distractors. But he's gone. And replaced. Instead of asking downstairs what happened to him I wrote to him directly and asked where he is, what happened, what's going on.

He wrote back immediately answering all that and said right out that my contacting him made him feel great. We'll meet for lunch tomorrow. He told me he looks forward to intelligent conversation. He doesn't get much of that. He is Democrat persuasion, a natural Obama supporter and a Black Lives Matter enthusiast as well and all that is based on his low information flow and poor information sources. And there is no good reason on Earth why I should disrupt any of that. No reason to impress upon him advanced contrary political information and discussion such as you harbor yourselves. No reason to argue. We can have fun instead. So we will.

My doctor's office left a voice message yesterday hounding me to come in for a checkup. They're concerned my spaz medicine isn't messing up some internal organ or another. Things are going very well and I tend to put them off. The receptionist started, "First, I have your pop-up card with me right here hanging up in the office." For the life of me I couldn't recall what she was referring to. I really was stumped.  It took a very long while for it to occur to me later in the day that she was talking about the 'Thank you for doing me a solid' pop-up card that I sent them. It was first on her mind, a verbal thank-you for a card thank-you sent nearly a year earlier.

I showed you the prototype here. It's simple drawings of solids with a plain cube inside.

But I didn't use that cube. I didn't like the way the prototype works. I thought back to the basics, "how is a cube usually done?" And resorted to the customary box.

You're lucky, you know. I had to figure this out by myself by studying how pop-up books work and now you have all this available on YouTube by authors of "how to" pop-up books. The whole time I considered this mechanism a table, and called it a table, not a box. I've used it scores of times. I used it first as a hand-shaped table top, my own hand, for a card to my sister. The flat open hand held an actual organic bean glued to it and a single raisin glued to the palm that folds with the card. The message read, "You are the raisin for my very bean."

It is the hand that holds neon tetras pulled out of an aquarium and flipping all around for the 'flip out' birthday card.

It is the logs for the bunnies to pop out for the Easter themed birthday card.

It forms the mound and the means for a meerkat holding a baby to pop out of the ground.

It is the picnic table that holds a 3-tiered cake with the 20 page world of ants beneath it.

And many others besides. This table, described here in this video as a box is one of the more useful mechanisms beyond the simple "V" that is used everywhere for everything. Things can be built out from it, attached to it, and on it. It can be displaced so it's not stuck on the central fold. It can be a car, a truck, a boat, a house, a castle, a human body, an animal, a face, a bug, a burial mask, a robot, nearly anything. It can have a roof that folds in the opposite direction in the shape of anything, a pitched roof or a face or a scarab shell with wings. The video shows how constructors used this table / box mechanism in various ways.

I'm jealous. Learning this would have been so much easier with this set of videos.