Cold front.

Some scenes, especially foreign ones, seen for the first time are captivating. I like the Paris pics. Thanks.

(Snake on a plane.)

From a site called "Dreamstress."

Getting older, still amazed at how certain images immediately strike women as alluring and inebrieating, sending them off on flights of fancy which they can never quite put into words... (Or that they know better than to put into words.)

But many (most?) men, seeing the same image, will feel nothing at all... Certainly not attraction.

I see a road like that, presume it to be mid-century French, and imagine Panzer creaking along, scraping the wall.

(This came to me when Mickey asked Big Mac a fashion question.)

Ah, here

Subway stations make me think of Sarin... Ours is a world of villainy and violence.

Thanks, so it's not just me.

Does anyone remember a blog or marketing site from 2012 that blended images of historic places in modern contexts? The Hindenburg crash site was one. Another showed a contemporary young couple flirting next to the Eiffel tower as Hitler stood nearby 70 years earlier. I can't find it in Google.

It can be weird to think that previous generations are, like, human beings who walked around in our same meatspace.

Yesterday I went to UCLA for a platelet donation and surprised a young nurse at the reception desk: She'd blushed when I caught her with the radio. "I always sing along with Minnie," she said.

When I replied that she was buried essentially across the street, right next to Marilyn, the nurse looked at me like I was bullshitting.

But no, really. (Marilyn was the biggest name I could drop… Armand Hammer and Buddy Rich and Dennis Wilson and Walker Matthau would have meant nothing to her.)

I always sing along with this Minnie. Even though I first heard this song done by the mighty LedZep. People say they "stole" a lot of blues songs, but I think they did the blues world a big favor, turnin' people on to these songs.

My bosses are going to Paris next week. I wish they'd hire me permanent full time and take me with 'em!

"It can be weird to think that previous generations are, like, human beings who walked around in our same meatspace."

Some years ago Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the Von Braun rocket team, told me a story about the launch of Explorer 1. The Jupiter-C that launched that satellite was a rather thrown-together combination of a Redstone first stage, and a cluster of Loki rockets for the second and third stages. The Von Braun team and the JPL engineers responsible for the Lokis had not had time to put together electronics to sequence the second stage off of the first stage. So Stuhlinger's job during the launch was to stand outside of the blockhouse with an octant, watch the trajectory of the first stage, and after burnout wait for a certain angle to be reached. At that moment, he had to press a button to send a command to start the second stage, and the window to do so was only a couple of seconds. Ernst told me that the first stage burned longer than planned, which threw off all of the pre-planned caluculations, and he had to do a quick estimation in his head. As we know, he got it right and Explorer 1 became America's first successful satellite launch.

The next time I was at Cape Canaveral, I made it a point to go to that pad (pad 5 IIRC), and stand outside the blockhouse in the spot he described. And I looked out in the direction he would have been looking. And for a moment, it was like I was there.

> So Stuhlinger's job during the launch was to stand
> outside of the blockhouse with an octant, watch the
> trajectory of the first stage, and after burnout wait
> for a certain angle to be reached.

Jesus fuck.

Morbidly fascinating.