Alexa, press my Tide Dash Button

imgur

"[Amazon] Prime shoppers who know exactly which products they buy regularly should check out Amazon’s Dash Buttons. For $4.99, you get a Wi-Fi-enabled gizmo that places orders for you. For example, you can buy the Tide Dash Button and attach it to your washing machine. When you’re running low on laundry pods, just push the button, and your order is placed on Amazon.

You get a $4.99 statement credit for each Dash Button the first time you press it, essentially making the button free. Dash Buttons are available for household items, health and personal care products, pet supplies, groceries, and kids’ and baby needs."

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/making-the-most-of-amazon-com-prime-store-card/

Hey there Hossaroni!

"Hey there Mr. Cartwright. Nice to meet you. My name is Armand Ellroy. I wonder if I can get a photo and autograph. My boy is a big fan of yours."
"Sure Armand. Hey what kind of name is that. You one of the Eyetalians?"
"No Armenian actually. I am Rita Hayworth's manager."
"Really? So let me ask you. Are you getting any of that gash?"
"Oh no it is a strictly business relationship."
"That's too bad. I hear she is hot stuff. You know you remind me of my high school gym teacher. He taught me a lot of stuff."
"Really. Like what? Climbing up a rope"
"I guess you can call it that. Hey after this you can come back to the Ponederosa and I can show you my rare clumbers. Scooch in close now."

What do you wish still existed from your childhood?

Reddit best comments, answers...

There was this toy that was just two balls with a sulfur coating or something, and you would clack them together in one hand to make a crazy loud noise and some sulfur smoke would pop off from it.

Super Soakers. Water guns today suck, they are not even close to the first and second generation super soakers.

The excitement of getting your pictures back from the photo place.

The really sour warheads and Altoids Mango Sours. Shit was awesome.

The occasional feeling of not having a care in the world.

Saturday morning cartoons

From Enmity to Amity in a Century

Link to original

The families of Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron) and his first credited kill have agreed to meet on the centenary of that fateful dogfight 100 years ago.

The painting depicts a British aircraft flown by 2nd Lieutenant Lionel Morris and Captain Tom Rees. The aircraft was a two-seater F.E.2b aircraft designed by Geoffrey de Havilland* and was a "pusher" design having its engine located behind the pilot. This allowed the gunner free use of his machine gun. 

Von Richthofen is depicted flying an Albatros D.III aircraft which was superior in every way.  At that point in time, von Richthofen was not yet a squadron leader but would soon be named one after the death of his mentor, Oswald Boelcke, in October, 1916.
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*Geoffrey de Havilland was the cousin of actress Olivia de Havilland. The latter was in the news recently for celebrating her 100th birthday.

This post used 100% recycled tags. 

The Forty Year Rule

Overheard at Lem's:

Ron said...

I wonder if the '60s interest is due to it being 50 years since the war....like how we talked about the "Greatest Generation" of WWII in the '90s.

August 20, 2016 at 7:43 PM

I've heard of a so-called "40 year rule" from a video I linked to back here: Lindsay Ellis (Nostalgia Chick) said that a generation will get culturally obsessed with the generation 40 years prior to it -- just recent enough to be in living memory, but just long enough that it can be romanticized.

Hmmm, where does that leave us? A mid-1970's revival? But if Ron is correct, we're overdue for a 1960's nostalgia trip.

How would that play out in pop culture?

[editor's note--this post has used 100% recycled tags. Tag Lives Matter]

səuıɥɔɐɯ ƃuıʎlɟ ɹıəɥʇ uı uəɯ ƃunoʎ ƃuıɹɐp əsoɥʇ

link to original

Joel Haski plans to fly upside down from Perth to Sydney next year, which will mean hanging from the straps of his harness for 15 hours. He’ll have wheels fitted to the top of his wings, too, so he can even take off and land inverted. When you’ve been flying aerobatics for 26 years, you gotta keep it interesting.
***
It’s not all fun and games, though. About one in 10 passengers is a puker, and if they miss their sick bag the consequences of that 200km/h slipstream can be spectacular. “A guy vomited out the side of the plane once and it just covered my windscreen,” Haski says, wincing at the memory. “I had to land looking through chunks of meat pie.”

How I admired those early WW I fighter pilots as a kid. There seemed to be a mini craze too in the mid 1960's; this was probably the 50th anniversary stuff. If so, where is the centennial?

Jonny Quest: The Shadow Of The Condor (1964). This Hanna-Barbera cartoon series was waaay ahead of its time. It remains a personal favorite.

The Blue Max (1965)  This hooked me. My dad took my brother and me to see it in the theater.

It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). This may have started the craze, but I think not.

Get Smart: Snoopy Smart vs. The Red Baron (1968): My brother and I asked my dad to record this on super 8 film because we had to miss it and couldn't wait to see the rerun.

Enemy Ace comic book (1965): A good place to pick up German phrases.

There were lots and lots of scale models to build. The best were Renwal's Aeroskin series:

And finally there was the 1966 song:

linky

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[Added] I forgot about Milton-Bradley's "Dogfight" (1963). That was another causative contender:

KLEM TV

Something I missed out on as a kid:

linky

I never realized until tonight that it was a Red vs. Blue match-up.  My folks only had B&W TV until I was too old to covet this toy from commercials.  I've been accused of seeing the world in B&W terms -- maybe that's why.

KLEM FM

linky

7-2-78
Below towering Clark Peak I paused on bridge crossing a swollen melt creek. As I leaned on the rail watching the the water rush swiftly away, I could see in it my life's past moments like a rushing river passing through me and vanishing never to be relived. At that moment I turned about to face the oncoming deluge of foamy water. Here was the future! It was the part of the river flowing from who knows where. I knew I couldn't really get to its source but would have to wait for each wave to pass through and then it would swirl off to someplace just as illusive.

The good old days

Memory Lane

KLEM AM

Betty or Veronica...?

link in case the video doesn't load

....It's the animated version of the eternal question: Ginger or Mary Ann?

Another question:  Did you have one of these?

"Back To The Future films will never seem dated."

"BACK TO THE FUTURE IS NOW ALL BACK AND NO FUTURE" ... (excerpt)

What strikes me about this trilogy now, during the final week of the final year of the saga's Hill Valley narrative, is the way the individual movies, unlike their characters and town, have improbably escaped the ravages of time.

Once we got about twenty years out from the first film, their 1985 scenes became "period," too, like the 1955 scenes. I showed the trilogy to my son and daughter not too long ago, and they laughed as hard at Marty's once-hip ski vest and feathered hair as audiences during my era laughed at the 1950s signifiers. My daughter, who is a lot older than my son and is studying film history and sociology in college now, was intrigued to see how a trilogy conceived and filmed in the '80s viewed life in the '50s, and what it said about 1980s life without meaning to.

The sense of cultural superiority seemed more palpable to me when I watched the series with my kids than when I watched it during its original run, or when I revisited it in the '90s as a college film student. I was 16 when the original "Future" came out. The eighties were my adolescent decade. Few teenagers have the self-awareness and humility to recognize that the time they live in is not, in fact, the most technologically and culturally advanced time that the human race will ever experience, and that snickering at the past (as depicted in movies or history texts) makes the laughing person seem clueless and arrogant; I was no exception. I'm humbler about that sort of thing now because I'm in my forties and seen a few decades turn over. When I watch the "Future" films today, I am not just watching the films, I am watching myself—or I should say, I am thinking about who I was when the films came out, and cringing a little bit at how much I thought I knew, and how much I didn't know that I didn't know. When I was in high school, I laughed during the diner scene (along with everyone else in the theater) because Marty ordered a Pepsi Free and the counterman thought he was demanding a Pepsi for free. Now I laugh because the Pepsi Free name was discontinued in 1987, two years after the first "Future" came out. The joke is not about the obliviousness of the '50s adult, it's about the arrogance of the '80s teenager.

KLEM FM

I heard this one at work today and it stumped me. I knew the song and melody from many listens on AM radio as a kid. But I had to Shazam it in order to remember it.

For its time and place -- 1969 America -- the song seems very out of time and place.

KLEM FM

Link in case the video doesn't load

I remember the very first time I noticed that song--it was back in my dissolute days as a grad student, in a bar.

I was raised on Country Music--thanks to a father who liked it even before it was called "country music" (link) and (link). Of course I rejected it for rock and roll, growing up. But that Judds song somehow penetrated the haze back in the 1980s before it was too late.

KLEM FM

[Continued-in-part from my previous KLEM post]

Speaking of Joni Mitchell's song "The Circle Game," I think it anticipated the following scene in "Mad Men" in every important way:


Mad Men: The Carousel from ray3c on Vimeo.

Here's the Joni Mitchell song, "The Circle Game:"

Link in case the video doesn't load 

KLEM FM

Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain" always reminded me of Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game."  If you're a fan of both songs, perhaps you've thought the same or maybe you knew it already. Not until tonight did I realize that they are explicitly related. Joni Mitchell explained:

In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock'n'roll band (...) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favourite haunt, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get back in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. 'Cause he was over the hill. (...) So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth. (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called 'The Circle Game.' Link

Here's a video version of "Sugar Mountain" that includes some rare before and after banter by Young which usually gets deleted in compilations:

Link in case the video doesn't load

KLEM FM

Dino Valenti of the Quicksilver Messenger Service wrote the song, but The Youngbloods made it famous in 1967.

I like the '60's era celebrity footage equally cut with "normal" people footage. I think I spied Sixty Grit with Carol_Herman.

Speaking of hippies, did you know that this summer marks the 50th anniversary of Ken Kesey's 1964 west-to-east Merry Pranksters road trip?

It Never Rains In Southern California...

...except for days like today.

The Grindstone

Having a wheel and four legs of its own

Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone

To get it anywhere that I can see.

These hands have helped it go, and even race;

Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,

Not all the miles it may have thought it went,

Have got it one step from the starting place.

~from Robert Frost's The Grindstone (1923)

__________________________
A grindstone belonged to my grandma's yard when I was little. It stood outside withstanding Wisconsin weather year after year. I saw it once a month or so on Sundays when we visited. I guess it had been my grandpa's and maybe his father's before that but they were already dead by then and I forgot to ask my dad about it too. My dad never farmed for a living and so the grindstone never passed down. He showed me other useful things.

A grindstone must have been handy on a farm in the days of steel plows and scythes. I never saw it make sparks fly but it must have done that in its day. Come to think of it, that's probably why it was outside (and why Frost's grindstone was outside too). It's not the kind of tool to keep and use in a barn around sawdust or straw. But farming changed and that grindstone became a relic—a sort of lawn ornament and a plaything for me, my brother, and my cousins while the grown-ups chatted inside.

No doubt that grindstone had abetted the killing of countless blades by whetting blades, but those of the surrounding weeds by then outnumbered the kind that this device had sharpened. I thought of none of that then. It was enough to just play with it and turn its heavy wheel. A fixed handle cranked the stone disk around and around. Getting it going really fast and then letting go of the handle made it hard to grab it again without getting hurt—such was its angular momentum. But that's not what I called that force then. I didn't know what to call that force then—I just knew that the grindstone had it and I never forgot it. And though that grindstone is long gone, it was a starting place for lessons learned many years on.