Odd
On odd things that are just entertaining.
The end of a comic era
Tonight I listened to the last episode of NPRs excellent and hilarious Ask Me Another, though originally broadcast on 2021-09-24, it didn’t reach my ears until tonight thanks to the magic of podcasts. It was genuinely hard to hear them sign off for the last time. I will really miss this show and the warmth and good spirits of Ophira Eisenberg and Jonathan Coulton.
I’ve been listening to this show since it started, back so far as to have been over syndicated FM broadcast on KQED at home and since on various digital media over the years wherever I’ve been, even here in Iraq. It suffered when Covid hit, the energy and charm didn’t translate well to zoom and without an audience as so many things didn’t and sadly didn’t live to see Covid restrictions lifted. It would have been fitting if they’d been able to record their last show at The Bell House one more time. Maybe someday they can have a reunion show.
US Public Radio has been an anchor of good quality programming, from Car Talk, which I still listen to weekly despite the questions being increasingly out of touch (though the cars have long been fairly irrelevant) and Fresh Air and Terry Gross‘ voice, which came from my mother’s kitchen radio every afternoon from WHYY about as far back as I can remember.
Kitty Poop (1995)
Many years ago (21 years, 9 months as of this post), I used some as-of-then only slightly out of date equipment to record a one week time lapse of the cats’ litter box.
I found the video on a CD-ROM (remember those?) and thought I’d see if it was still usable. It wasn’t – Quicktime had abandoned support for most of the 1990’s era codecs, and as it was pre-internet, there just wasn’t any support any more. I had to fire up my old Mac 9500, which booted just fine after years of sitting, even if most of the rubber feet on the peripherals had long since turned to goo. The OS9 version of QT let me resave as uncompressed, which of course was way too big for the massive dual 9GB drives in that machine. Youtube would eat the uncompressed format and this critical archival record is preserved for a little longer.
Time lapse of the litter box. Shot in Sept, 1995 in San Francisco, CA. Captured with a RasterOps ColorBoard 364 Nubus card from a Sony XC-999 on a Mac IIfx.
Basra Snow Storm
I was feeling a little left out, reading posts by people digging out of snow storms and here I am in Basra where it gets down to 10C at night sometimes and usually hits the mid 20’s during the day. Rough. But the weather here came through with our own sort of snow storm.
Starting to look like a brown-out!
Obligatory shot of the yard furniture getting covered.
Kitty’s head is starting to show some accumulation.
With all this blowing through you can barely see a few hundred meters!
It’s really starting to accumulate. Where’s the snow blower?
It takes some special cleaning after playing out in it.
Cat Watch
Cat Watch
The twins resting after a busy day.
Regional Energy Drink
I’ve run across this energy drink in dramatic packaging. Energy drinks aren’t really my thing, but I thought I’d try it: slightly orange tasting fizzy water, mildly sweet with that slightly weird energy drink taste. But the bottle is fun:
It is made in Austria and seems to be distributed more to the East than the West, at least as far as my travels have indicated. I have seen it in a lot of Middle-Eastern markets, but not in many European ones.
The lid release mechanism is kind of thematically clever.
I suspect this would be a particularly problematic beverage to forget in your carry-on luggage.
Burnt Outlet
Occasionally electrical systems here just catch on fire for no apparent
reason.
Cactus Farmer
Just a few years back, when I was in 3rd or 4th Grade, my brother and I went to visit David and Jesse Lenat at their Cactus Farm. While we were exploring the green houses, their dad, Richard, gave my brother and I each a cactus to take home.
Mine lived in a small pot near a window through the rest of grade school and high school and then my mom cared for it through college. It grew into a little cluster of pencil thin, green, spiky pads over the years.
After I graduated, moved to California and got an apartment in SF; I was home for Christmas one year and took one of the pads wrapped in tissue to California. It grew well there and now produces big, bright yellow flowers every year.
This Christmas, I stuffed two tiny buds into glass bottles and brought them to Iraq and planted in the yard with one of the cat’s help (paw in the background).