June 28th, 2024:
- Spooky or creepy music in SF/Fantasy/Horror flicks is assumed to rely on the theremin. I just discovered the Ondes Martenot, which sounds like a theremin but is easier to play. Furthermore, it’s been around for most of 100 years. Not sure how I got into my 70s without ever stumbling on it. Good link on YouTube.
- Carol and I don’t go out to the movies much anymore. We stream or buy a DVD for anything we want to see. This writer offers a cogent explanation for why theaters are largely to blame for this phenomenon. (Crappy movies are the rest of the explanation.)
- This sounds a little (or more than a little) grandiose: A meteotsunami subjected the shore of Lake Michigan in Holland, Michigan to—oh, no!—a 2-foot wave. When I was a kid this phenom was called a seiche, and Chicago got its share, rare though they might be. Certain types of bad weather including strong winds and rapid changes in atmospheric pressure are to blame. Again, I’m surprised I made it to my 70s without ever seeing the word.
- No small number of people have claimed that "return to office" mandates are back-channel layoffs, a way to reduce headcount by having heads quit voluntarily. Now some research seems to indicate that this is the case.
- Ok, this is mondo weird: I spun through the McD’s drive-thru not long ago for an iced coffee and got two pennies (and some other coins) in change. Both pennies were 1981-Ds. What are the chances?
- I was looking for Revolutionary War flags and stumbled upon a list of flags on Wikipedia that would do Sheldon Cooper proud.
- Beethoven was a classical music composer, but his body was full of heavy metal, specifically, lead. The Mayo Clinic analyzed a few strands of the maestro’s hair, and found 64 times the lead found in a typical American today. This likely led to the many medical problems Beethoven had, including deafness.
- Lazarus 3.4 is now available, built with FreePascal 3.2.2. It’s a bugfix release and there isn’t a lot of New Stuff, but get it anyway! There’s nothing else quite like it in the OSS universe.
- A few days ago I received an email inviting me to the—wait for it–Lane Technical High School Milwaukee World Naked Bike Ride. I thought it was a hoax but no—naked bike rides are evidently a thing in big cities. Now, Lane Technical High School (which I attended 1966-1970) is in Chicago, not Milwaukee. There is in fact a World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago on my 72nd birthday tomorrow, but they didn’t invite me. I don’t own a bike, and I’m a long damn way from Milwaukee, or Chicago. That said, I doubt there will be a World Phoenix Naked Bike ride any time soon. It was 113 the other day. People would die.
