Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

Odd Christmas Lots

    TRexManger

    • Be careful with your art and writing, making sure it can’t be misconstrued. (See above.) In the original draft of my story “Whale Meat” (which I wrote when I was 18) I used the word “frot” as the name of a magical power. I thought I invented the word. A friend later took me aside and told me what “frot” meant. I gulped and changed it to “zot.”
    • My old friend Lee Hart took a forgotten 1844 Charles Dickens Christmas story, trimmed it down some, and modernized some Victorian archaisms. It’s free and very much worth reading. The Chimes is a short novel (about 20,000 words) so budget some time. I did a copy/paste into a Word .docx, so I could control the type size for the sake of these old eyes.
    • While we’re talking Christmas stories, just a reminder that my Christmas story “The Camel’s Question” is still available for 99c on Amazon. More on the story in this entry from a few days back.
    • While troubleshooting my Lionel ZW train transformer, I ran across a nice article on the ZW, which Lionel sold from 1948 to 1966. I may try to repair my ZW, though it won’t happen in time for Christmas this year. Or I may just hunt around on eBay until I find another one.
    • (Not Christmas, but timely): The Altair 8800 personal computer, the one that began the desktop computer revolution, went on the market 50 years ago last Thursday, on December 19, 1974. I found it at the same site with the ZW article. Other interesting stuff there too.
    • Our favorite spiked egg nog is Van Der Haute Egg Nog Traditional. Review here. We get it from Safeway, because Total Wine doesn’t carry it, nor Fry’s, though I won’t claim that no Kroger grocery does. Jewel-Osco carries it, if that’s your local store.
    • If you’re mulling the issue of spiced holiday wines, consider Firebrand Spiced Red Wine, which Total Wine carries. It’s a sweet red with cinnamon, vanilla and fruit flavors that most people would consider a dessert wine. There is no vintage year on the label, which for wines of this sort really isn’t an issue.
    • Sarah Hoyt recently published a book of four SF-flavored Christmas stories, called Christmas in the Stars. $2.99 on Kindle. I bought it but haven’t read it yet, although I’ve always enjoyed Sarah’s writing. And it’s making me wonder if there’s an AI SF story I could spin about Christmas. I haven’t written a short story since 2008, so it’s about time.
    • Some of my older readers will know why lead tinsel was a forbidden pleasure back in the 50s and 60s. Well, you can buy it on eBay. Just search for “lead tinsel.” No shortage of choices. (It seems like the Germans may still use it!)

    6 Comments

    1. Roy Harvey says:

      The best thing about lead tinsel is that it was heavy enough to hang properly. But it could be a PITA to split apart the strands to hang them. You don’t see tinsel any more because the plastic stuff was impossible.
      We would carefully take it all off the tree afterward, compress it into a ball, and then dad would use it to make fishing sinkers. The sinkers were all shiny when they came out of the mold, but turned gray. Some of that silvery color came back if you polished the sinker on your jeans.

      1. We didn’t use it much at my house, though I remember some earlier attempts. We didn’t try to re-use the tinsel; the tree went out to the curb on January 6 (or 7) with the tinsel still on it. At my cousins’ house, they used it a lot, and that’s where I first saw it cross the Lionel tracks and melt.

        Somewhere in my workshop collection is a container with a bunch of wheel-balancing weights, all of them lead. I used to find them in parking lots on a semiregular basis. I don’t see them much anymore, which makes me think they’ve greatly improved whatever mechanism is behind wheel balancing weights.

        1. Roy Harvey says:

          Some states have banned lead wheel weights based on environmental factors. Also, it looks like they are using adhesives more. Courtesy of Google: “States in which lead weights are illegal are California, Minnesota, Illinois, Maine, New York, Vermont, Washington, New Jersey and Maryland.”

          And I have to wonder if wheels and tires have become more consistent.

        2. Bill Buhler says:

          most modern cars have them glued inside the fancy rims rather than clipped on. I occasionally will find a strip on the ground, but it’s pretty rare.

    2. Vince says:

      Merry Christmas to you Jeff and to Carol and to your family and followers.

      I had never heard the word frot before. Had to look it up. Ew. What a waste of a nice combination of letters (much better than cartoon sounding zot). Wish the meanings of words can be as easily replaced as if they were just domain names.

    3. Rich, N8UX says:

      For Christmas 2023, I decided to resurrect the old 1946 Lionel set dad received for Christmas when he was 7 years old, and that he gave to me a few months before he passed. I had not seen it since the seventies, and according to dad, it had not been out of the boxes since the late eighties.

      Everything electrical had to be gone over, including disassembly of the engine and tender, cleaning of the reversing unit, and replacing the selenium rectifier in the #1033 transformer with a 5A diode. The internal circuit breaker also needed a good cleaning, as well as replacing the cord. I’m surprised that little 90 watt transformer survived, as I remember as a kid hooking all sorts of things to it, from transistor radios to my tape player (which caused electrolytic caps to go off like firecrackers), back in the days when I began learning about electronics the hard way. I can still smell the ozone. 🙂

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *