Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Spiking a Christmas Song

I was going to mess with an ancient Christmas song involving eating pig heads—surely you’ve heard of “The Boar’s Head Carol”—but that may have to wait for another day, ideally after everybody’s already had Christmas dinner.

No, this morning I want to write about something I learned just yesterday, about another Christmas song that Carol and I both like. We’ve never heard it on the radio, and we wouldn’t know about it at all if it weren’t on our very favorite Christmas CD: Christmas Portrait by the Carpenters (1978). The song is the medley “It’s Christmas Time/Sleep Well, Little Children.” It’s on none of our other numerous Christmas CDs, and my assumption has long been that Karen and Richard wrote it themselves, as it’s a little bit whimsical and in spots a little bit goofy.

I got curious yesterday and looked it up. The song was actually written by four men: Alan Bergman, Al Stillman, Victor Young, and Leon Klatzkin. It’s not new; in fact, it was first recorded in 1953. And when I read who first recorded it, I laughed out loud. It was Spike Jones!

Ok, I suspect young people will wonder who that is, and why his name made me laugh. Short form: Spike Jones (1911-1965) was the Weird Al Yankovic of the 1940s and 1950s. He took popular songs of other artists and recorded them in his own satirical style, with manic voices, gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, and other “special effects”. I came upon Spike Jones and His City Slickers when I was quite young; probably five or at most six. In that era my folks had a creaky old record player and a cabinet full of 78RPM records, including a few by Spike. His best known spoof song is probably “Cocktails for Two.” Note that the linked YouTube item is not a video of Spike and his band performing the song. It’s a sort of primordial music video, with Spike playing a bartender with many of the sound effects done by tipsy men at the bar. I’m sure sophisticates will roll their eyes, but when I was six I thought the song was hilarious.

So when I went looking for Spike’s version of “It’s Christmas Time” on YouTube, what I found is a cut from Spike’s Christmas album—and on this cut at least, Spike himself is notably absent. The song is played straight, with no silly sound effects, but rather a nice choir and lots of harmony. I imagine it’s Spike’s City Slickers band playing in the background. There’s a little bit of goofiness in some of the other cuts from that album, but for the most part it’s just Fifties Big Band vocals playing Christmas standards. Several are on YouTube; listen to a few if you’re interested.

I have to wonder what Spike thought of rock and roll, and what he might have done with it (or to it, more likely) had he not smoked himself to death at 53. He wasn’t a filker (like Bob Rivers of Twisted Christmas) and I wonder if he had imitators. If he did, I’ve never heard of them.

In the meantime, thanks to all of you for reading me in whatever form, and putting up with my occasional Spike Jones-ish metaphors like the Base Four Martians in my assembly language book. Have a fun Christmas, with good food, good wine, good friends, good music (even if it’s a little goofy in spots) and an occasional glance to the heavens, and a word of thanks to God, who gave us the ability to laugh and be silly as we make our way through His beautiful and extravagant creation!

Lazarus 3.0 Has Arrived!

For all you Pascal programmers among my readers: Lazarus 3.0 is out, and available for free download. Here’s the announcement. I’ve already installed it on Win10 and will install it on Linux when time becomes available. (I’m still struggling to write the trademark Jeff Duntemann mayhem-filled action climax of my current WIP: The Everything Machine, the first full-length drumlins novel.)

Delphi now costs over $1000. If I’m going to teach Pascal, I can’t use Delphi, love it though I may–and do. Lazarus is pretty much Delphi’s peer, though it doesn’t…quite…have the third-party component aftermarket that Delphi has. Doesn’t matter. The fundamental principles of OOP and event-driven programming are the same.

For newcomers: Lazarus is a superb IDE and drag-‘n-drop GUI builder conceived as a Delphi competitor, though open-source and thus free of charge. It uses FreePascal 3.2.2 as its compiler. FreePascal understands Delphi’s additions to the Pascal programming language, and will also compile ancient Turbo Pascal programs. FreePascal is part of the Lazarus package and is installed when you install Lazarus. I have fragments of a book on Lazarus that I will return to at some point. But if you know Delphi, well, there’s not a lot more to learn. You’ll feel right at home.

Go get it. I’ve done a lot of work in Lazarus. It’s mature. It works. It can create wonderful GUI apps. And it’s free. What more do you want?

RIP Aero 2007-2023

Aero - Tarry-All 2010 - Best of Winnres - New Champion - 500 Wide

Our little dog Aero has left us, at 16 years 7 months. Last week he was in some sort of discomfort, and by Monday it was pretty clear that his liver and gall bladder were failing. Carol set up an appointment with our mobile vet for Wednesday morning to put him to sleep. But Tuesday noonish, I checked him as I’ve been checking him for several weeks, to make sure he was still breathing.

This time, he was not.

I made sure that his heart was no longer beating, straightened his head, and with my hand on his forehead said my Prayer of Returning over him, as is our custom when dogs leave us:

From our Creator we took you;

To our Creator we return you,

That your life with us may glorify our Creator,

And in the hope that we may someday meet again.

Go with God, my good and faithful companion!

Aero on couch 2007 - 500 wide

When we bought Aero from his breeder, the late Jimi Henton, in 2007, he quickly told us his name by his ears, which as a puppy often stuck straight out either side of his head, like a plane. He was on the small side for a Bichon Frise, and a little shy, so Jimi suggested that Carol start showing him. Doing this required show grooming and a multitude of other details, but Carol bore down, mastered whatever skills were necessary, and by the spring of 2010 Aero became an AKC Champion. (See top photo.)

He was a lot of fun out in the yard, chasing cheap Wal-Mart playground balls with the rest of the pack. As soon as the balls lost enough air pressure so that Aero could push his sharp little teeth against the plastic, he went for the kill and the ball popped.

His kennel name was Champion Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. He lived longer than any other dog we have ever had, both as a couple or earlier, as kids. (Chewy came close, at 16 years 4 months.) He was a lot of fun and we will always thank God for sharing such a wonderful creature with us.

No More Assembly Required

In other words: It’s done. Well, at least the hardest part (for me) is done: Yesterday I uploaded the last odd bits of x64 Assembly Language Step by Step, Fourth Edition to the publisher’s cloud. Now comes the work that I don’t have to do: copy edits, tech edits, layout, proofing. I will have some odds and ends to deal with down the road a ways, like looking at the proofs, building the listings archive, and rewriting my assembly book web page to reflect the new edition.

The publisher hired the estimable David Stafford to do tech edits, which is quite an honor. I’ve known David since the early PC Techniques days, and that guy knows his stuff with a capital-K. If there are booboos, bugs, or dryer lint in that thing, he’ll spot it. (Dryer lint we may leave for the production service.)

I’ve been working on this project since mid-April 2022. This is the fourth edition of the book from John WIley, and the fifth edition overall. The very first edition came from Scott, Foresman at the end of 1989, and was part of a short-lived assembly language series that I acquired and edited for them on contract back in the very late ‘80s. Its original title was Assembly Language from Square One. We were just getting out of second gear in 1990 when Scott Foresman was sold to Harper Collins. Toward the end of 1990, Harper Collins put the Scott Foresman trade book line out of print. I got the rights back in 1991.

I turned around and took the book to John Wiley, who bought it on the spot. I rewrote and expanded the book, which appeared from Wiley in 1992. The title had to change when I took it to Wiley to avoid mixups on retail channel returns, so the book became Assembly Language Step-by-Step. That’s not a bad title, in fact, since the whole point of the book was to do a methodical, patient introduction for people just getting started in computing. The 1992 edition was all-DOS, as you might imagine. In 1999 Wiley asked me to do an update that included both DOS and 32-bit Linux. I retained nearly all of what had been in the first Wiley edition, and added another 200 pages for 32-bit concepts and Linux. It was published in 2000.

That book sold extremely well for its nine-year life. In 2008 Wiley asked me for a new edition devoted entirely to Linux. DOS was almost extinct by then, so it was a good move. With only one tail to wag I was able to go into a great deal more detail about Linux and 32-bit protected-mode programming generally. It was a big job that took me seven or eight months, but the book appeared in 2009, at 610 pages.

As the teens drew toward the 20s and 64-bit Intel/AMD CPUs went mainstream, I enquired about a 64-bit edition every so often. In each case, my acquisitions editor basically said, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.” So I stopped asking, and the 2009 edition kept on selling.

The call came in early April 2022. My old acquisitions editor had retired, and the new one was very much on board with an x64 rewrite. He asked me how long it would take. By then I was 69, and asked, How about a year? He said, Sure.

And that’s almost what it took, whew.

I don’t exactly when we’ll have books. Summer, I’m guessing; maybe late summer. It’s hard to know in this business. I’ve already been asked if I’m ever going to do a 128-bit version. Well, we need 128-bit CPUs first, and in truth I don’t see them on the horizon. We needed 64 bits for the address space way more than the register width. Since the AVX-512 math subsystem on nearly all modern Intel/AMD CPUs already has 512-bit registers, we don’t need the register width, and since 264 is 1.84 x 1019, we’ve already got all the address space we will ever need.  Without 128-bit Intel/AMD CPUs, my guess is that the fourth edition of the book will be the last, and it could well be around long after I go on to other realms.

If I’m going to do any large-scale programming tutorials going forward, it’ll be about the Lazarus IDE and GUI builder. But at least for the coming year, if I write anything at all I’m going to write SF.

But I think you knew that.

Excerpted from Old Catholics: Christmas Eve II

I have about 38,000 words down on a (mostly) mainstream novel about a tiny Old Catholic community in Chicago, which has a 1920s bungalow with an altar and a few pews in the livingroom, with the clergy (a bishop and a deacon) living in two small rooms on the second floor. A good part of what I have down takes place just before and on Christmas. I’ve published excerpts here before on Christmas Eve. I don’t entirely know how the rest of the story goes. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. But people have told me they’ve enjoyed the excerpts. So today on Christmas Eve, let us return to the Church of St. James & St. Julian of Norwich, just south of Devon Avenue at Campbell. The chapter posted on Christmas Eve 2018 comes immediately before this year’s chapter, so if you’ve never seen any of the story before, you might skim through them before reading further. There are mild fantastic elements in the story, especially a little old Polish lady who can read hearts and predict the future–and talk to dead people whom she considers saints. It’s a gentle, hopeful story about eccentric religious people who have no place in the larger Catholic world, banding together to worship God and heal one another of life’s inevitable traumas. Let me know what you think.


Bishop Hughes led them from the kitchen to a small round table standing a few feet in front of the bungalow-church’s front windows. The advent wreath Rob had seen on the Formica kitchen table on Gaudete Sunday was set on the table. All of the candles had seen some use, now that all four Sundays of Advent had passed. Rob remembered the ritual from his childhood: Family members took turns throughout Advent lighting the appropriate candle and reading the prayer before the evening meal. On Christmas Eve, the head of the household had candle duty. So it was that Bishop Hughes struck a wooden match on the side of its box and held it in his left hand while raising his right in blessing:

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we gather for one final meal before the birth of our Messiah, the Lord God Jesus Christ!” Bishop Hughes reached out with the match and lit the shortest purple candle, then the one beside it, then the pink candle of Gaudete Sunday, and finally the tallest purple candle. He held out his hands to Mrs. Przybysz and Mother Sherry, who took them and in turn reached out to take hands with the others to complete the circle.

Bishop Hughes tipped his head back, and spoke the prayer as he spoke nearly everything, with force and exultation:

“O Lord, stir up Thy might, we pray Thee, and come!
Rescue us through Thy great
strength so that salvation,
Which has been hindered by our sins,
May be hastened by the grace
of Thy gentle mercy.
Who livest and reignest for ever and ever! Amen!”

“Amen!” they replied in unison. Bishop Hughes turned and gestured toward the table. Eight places had been set, and atop each china plate was a folded card bearing one of their names-all but the setting at the foot of the table. It bore no card. As only seven people had gathered at St. JJ’s, Rob did wonder why the eighth place had been set at what was already a crowded table. He bent down to peek under the table, wondering if a card had fallen to the floor during the continuous bustle leading up to the Wigilia meal.

Bishop Hughes noticed Rob’s search for the card. “The place at the foot of the table is symbolic of those who share our love for God but who cannot be here with us in the flesh. Our departed, now in the bosom of the Most High; loved ones distant in space and time; the stranger who has no place at any table-“

“And saints,” Mrs. Przybysz interrupted as she bent to place a bowl of cucumber salad and a smaller bowl of horseradish on the table. “St. Ernie and St. Mona both showed up last year. Ernie warned me of evil brewing somewhere and had to leave to go look for it. Mona said we would need a much bigger table soon–and that the fish could have spent another few minutes in the pan.” The old woman sighed. “I do my best.”

“We all do our best,” Bishop Hughes said from behind her, smiling. “God asks no more of us than that. The challenge is to discover the inner strength that few of us realize that God has given us.”

Bishop Hughes pulled Mrs. Przybysz’s chair back. The old woman sat. Rob reflected that it was a signal. He pulled out Suzy’s chair, and helped her scoot in once she was settled. PJ pulled out Mother Sherry’s chair and did the same. Deacon Dan sat, and made a down-patting motion at Rob, who sat beside Suzy. PJ took the last seat, and set his battered leather briefcase on the floor beside him. He looked spooked, and kept glancing at the empty chair at the far end of the table.

PJ sat across from Suzy. Suzy took a library card and a pen from a pocket and wrote quickly in her lap. She poked Rob and handed him the card.

I feel something weird, she wrote. Rob made just a hint of a nod and handed it back. His first impulse was to grin. But…huh? An odd prickly feeling arose in the back of his head behind his ears, like something approaching–or something that was already among them, gathering power.

Rob shivered. He had told himself a thousand times that he did not believe in demonic forces. Whatever he felt did not feel evil. It felt powerful, not angelic but somehow rooted in the Earth beneath their feet. Hell was at the center of Earth, according to Dante and probably half of Christian humanity. Rob tried to focus, desperate to get away from the impression that something malign was creeping up on him.

Then, deep in his mind, a single word, stated quietly but with the conviction of everything high and holy, resolving Rob’s confusion plainly and beyond all question:

No.”

Now Available: “The Camel’s Question”

CamelCover-500 wide.jpg

“Listen, young ones, for I, Hanekh, am a very old camel, and may not be alive to tell this tale much longer. Listen, and remember. If I leave nothing else behind but a spotty hide and yellow bones, I wish to leave this.”


So begins my latest ebook publication, “The Camel’s Question .” It’s now available on Amazon for 99c. It’s a short story, not a novel, and won’t taken you more than ten or fifteen minutes to read. There is a story behind the story, so what better place to tell it than here?

In the spring of 1966, when I was in eighth grade, we were tasked to write a Christmas story. It wasn’t required to be fiction, but it had to be about Christmas. So in longhand on yellow paper I wrote a story I called “Master Melchior and Me.” It was about the camels that carried the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. We read our papers aloud in class, and when I finished reading mine, the class applauded. I had apparently touched a nerve.

I began with the title, which was inspired by a 1953 Disney animated short, “Ben and Me” about the humorous adventures of a mouse living in Ben Franklin’s house. I actually pictured it as Disney-style animation. Remember that I was 13, and “young for my age.” I was writing fiction already by 8th grade, and tended to picture it in my head as cartoon animation. I think I intended to make it humor, but as has happened so often with me, my subconscious had other ideas. The story was serious but upbeat, about a lesson one of the camels learned from the Christ Child.

Jump ahead a few years, to the fall of 1972. My father was battling cancer and losing, My poor mother was worn out by both working as a nurse, and nursing my father past the crude, debilitating, and ultimately futile radiation treatments. I wanted to give her something that would get her mind off her troubles for a few minutes. I was a junior in college and by then had taken a lot of literature courses. I realized that I had written a fable, which is an ancient literary form in which animals are made to think and talk like humans to put across a moral.

By 1972 I had already lost the original handwritten manuscript, so I started at the beginning and told it again, having in the meantime grown mostly to adulthood and written a lot of things, fiction and nonfiction. I didn’t like the title, as Master Melchior at best played a background role. But I didn’t know what to call it, so I kept the original title. The story, however, was lengthened, deepened, and in some respects moved a hair to one side of being a true fable.

It didn’t matter. I gave the typewritten manuscript to my mother as a Christmas gift, and she was deeply moved by it. The typescript went into her dresser, and Gretchen and I found it after mother died in 2000. I scanned it, OCRed it, cleaned it up a little (but surprisingly little, after 50 years of additional practice telling stories) and gave it a new title: “The Camel’s Question.” Of the three camels, two are fairly ordinary. The third–well, he’s a skeptic and a contrarian, and asks a great many questions about the world and its workings, and the men who dominate the world and the lives of camels.

One of those questions is a doozy.

And that’s where I hand the baton back to you. The story’s out there if you’re interested. It sat in a box for literally fifty years. Better late than never, I guess. It’s dedicated to my mother, who suffered far too much but never failed me in any way. It’s only the third story I’ve ever written with no fantastic elements in it.

Ok, ok. Talking camels. I did the best I could with what I had.

Thanks in advance to all who buy it and read it.

53 Years Side-By-Side

Jeffand Carol - 7-31-2022 - 500 Wide.jpg

Carol and I met 53 years ago today, in my church basement in Chicago. Our mutual friend Jackie Ropski introduced us (she was in my grade school class and went to Carol’s high school) and what I now call slow magic happened. We didn’t hurry. We were smart kids (Carol had been double-promoted past fourth grade) and we had the crucial intuition that love grows out of friendship. So we became fast friends, and then let the slow magic do its work at its own pace.

You who have been reading me for a long time know the story of hoiw we met. I won’t repeat it today. What matters is that the magic continues. The photo above was taken last Thursday, at a sizeable air B&B house we rented so Carol’s family could come down for a week and not try to cram eight adults and two little kids into our own quirky but hardly enormous abode. We had not all been together since the end of 2019. It was the first time I had met my nephew Matt’s younger daughter Kate, now almost two. His older daughter Molly is about to start school. Conscious of the passage of time, Carol’s sister Kathy hired a professional photographer to come out to the house and do a photo shoot. In groups, couples, alone, and all together, we took a collective snapshot of the family as it stands now in 2022.

A quick aside: The photographer was terrific.She is Teresa Thalaker, and Arizonans who need a photographer should consider her.

We splashed around in the pool, celebrated both our birthdays, ate maybe a little too well, played Scattergories, laughed a lot, watched Disney movies with our grand-nieces, and reveled in the magic of a family reunited after a period of our history that most of us, I suspect, would like to forget. I saw love at work everywhere around us, among us, and between us.

And that ol’ slow magic is still at work, as I know every morning that I open my eyes and see Carol beside me as though for the first time. We have never been closer, now 53 years on our way to forever, as I like to say. Thanks to Jackie, who helped strike that first spark between us that set the magic in motion, and all those who have since shared our journey with us, including those who have now moved on to God’s ineffable realms. Love works and love wins. Take our word for it. We’ve been there, are there now, and will always be.

The Other 70s

70 today. Yeah, hard to believe. When I was 17 (1969) I found it difficult to imagine being 48, which was the age I’d be when we ushered in a new millennium. Moon colonies? Sure! We’d come so far so fast. How could we not? Having experienced the much-remarked phenomenon of time going by faster the older you get, I remember thinking back in 2000 or so that I would be 70 before I knew it.

Now I know it.

I have only one complaint: I won’t be around to see what great things happen over the next fifty years. I’ve said several times that the best thing about being 12 is that you’re not 13 yet, and the really great thing about being 14 is that you’ve already been 13. 13 was not my favorite year. The good thing about being 70 is that everything from 13 up until today has allowed me to put 13 in perspective, which I did while I was getting dressed this morning. And now, having put it into perspective, I intend to quietly forget about it.

In my view, the best birthday present is…the present. Sure, I could do without social networking and people whose highest aspiration is to be outraged about something new every day before lunch. And I have gripes about Amazon, but Amazon has allowed me to get a lot of books into print at a reasonable cost, something that simply couldn’t be done before 2005 or so–and never as easily as now. Smartphones are so good that we chose not to have a landline when we moved back to Phoenix in 2015. I continue to boggle at the sorts of things one can look up on a smartphone, from local weather radar to where traffic is congested between where I am and where I want to go.

No matter how bad the politics is (and it’s pretty bad) I’ve been able to keep myself from giving it power over me. I don’t do tribalism. The closest I come to a tribe is my circle of friends, now broader and more diverse than it ever was back in the creaky old 20th Century. We survived Woodrow Wilson, easily the most evil President evah. We will survive the one we have now, and whoever comes after. Politics is not worth the ulcers and heart attacks that are its foremost products. I simply do not partake. If I look younger than I am, that’s certainly a contributing factor.

I live in a benign climate (ok, it was 107 today; let’s call it mostly benign) in a quirky but comfortable house, with the woman I have loved now for 52 years. I have 75 feet of wire and an engineered ground, plus a low-band rig I’ve been using since 1995. I have a biggish swimming pool, which helps take the edge off the mostly benign days that occur pretty regularly this time of year. (I don’t have to shovel heat. So there.) I’m hard-pressed to name five things I want and don’t (yet) have.

The days are passing quickly. That’s nothing new. The real challenge is to summon the personal energy to accomplish things with the days that I have left. L-methyl folate wasn’t the solution, alas. I’m still looking. I’m reasonably healthy, trim, get my sleep, and am deeply loved. If I can’t consistently write a thousand words a day, well, I’ll write what I can and call it a win.

I look back across my 70 years, and remind myself that I know who I am and what I’m good at. All else will unfold as time and genetics permit.

Thanks to all of you for being my friends, and for the birthday wishes I haven’t entirely caught up on yet. As birthdays go, 70 is a good round number. 71 won’t be nearly as round, but every bit as welcome. Good luck to all and keep in touch!

Problems with SASM on Linux Mint

I’m scoping out a fourth edition of my book, Assembly Language Step by Step. I got wind of a simple FOSS utility that could be enormously useful in that effort: SASM (SimpleASM), which is an IDE created specifically for assembly-language work. It’s almost ideal for what I need: Simple, graphical, with a surprisingly sophisticated text editor and a graphical interface to GDB. It works with NASM, my assembler of choice. I want to use it as the example code IDE for the book. I installed it without effort on Windows, which is why I decided to use it. But I want to use it on Linux.

Alas, I’ve been unable to get it to install and run on Linux Mint 19 (Tara) using the Cinnamon desktop.

I’ve installed a lot of things on Linux Mint, all of them in the form of Debian packages. (.deb files.) I downloaded the SASM .deb file for Mint 19, and followed instructions found on the Web. There is a problem with dependencies that I just don’t understand.

I got it installed once but it wouldn’t run. I uninstalled it, and then it refused to reinstall.

Keep in mind that I am not a ‘leet Linux hacker. I’m a teacher, and most of what I teach is computing and programming for newcomers. The problem may be obvious to Linux experts but not to me. Most of the software I’ve installed on Mint came from repositories. SASM is a .deb download.

So. Does anybody else use it? If you’ve got Mint on a partition somewhere, could you try downloading it and installing it? I need to know if the problem is on my side of the screen or the other side.

Thanks in advance for any advice you might offer.

The Four-Color Problem

A year or so ago, a stray thought popped into my head as I crossed a large parking lot to get to one of the few remaining indoor malls in the Phoenix area. I stopped. I looked around. I looked around again. And damn, that stray thought was right:

Cars appear to be made almost entirely in four colors: black, white, silver, and red.

Up and down my row it was almost a physical law. I raised my gaze and did a 360. Ah–way over there, a flash of blue! On the opposite edge of the lot was something that looked brown. Or maybe it was just dirty.

There was no yellow. There was no green. Lord knows, there was no purple or pink. (Is Mary Kay still a thing?) It was black, white, silver, and red plus debris.

I first assumed it was a fluke. Or maybe selective vision. Carol and I have a silver car and a red car. Up and down our street it’s pretty much black and white. So there you have it: We notice what we’re used to noticing. But as days and then months passed, the pattern played true: black, white, silver, and red, with an occasional green or blue rounding error. It’s persisted to this day. When I see two blue cars at the same time it startles the hell out of me. And a few days ago I saw the first yellow vehicle I’d seen in over a month. It was a big honking pickup truck. (Could it be a custom, er, bespoke paint job?) Yes, I would be able to see that one coming.

Ok. You who know me know this: Stray thoughts enter my head so often my head might be considered a sort of thought pound. Most of them don’t stand up to close examination. This one has.

Time was, mall parking lots were rainbows. When I was growing up, our family owned cars in blue, various shades of green (including two-toned green), gold, and yellow. In fact, at one point we owned two bright yellow cars at the same time. For a little while, we had a two-toner in gray and maroon. And that was before I left home. Later on, red, white, and brown cars finally entered the Duntemann homestead. I do recall seeing a few purple cars back in the day, though not in front of our house. (As best I know I have never seen an orange car.)

No more. So what happened? My guess is that car manufacturers are shaving costs by limiting available colors. They may keep one paint machine open for special-order colors, and I’ll bet they make customers pay big for the privilege. I don’t know anyone in the car industry or I’d just ask.

It doesn’t matter in any important way. But a little bit of weird urban beauty has passed out of this world. I wonder if I’m the only one who’s noticed.