Apparently the Labor Market Is Heating Up

Since just days after that $65-a-month LinkedIn job I saw this one.

On the one hand, they are only promising zero dollars, but they are offering it per year, which is twelve times as long to be employed as per month offers!

Thinking of Dropping an Application in Anyway

Just ran across this job listing on LinkedIn and I’m thinking of seeing if I can snag an interview just so I can ask if they’re getting a lot of ironic applications in.

Or maybe the job is, like, two hours of work a month? If that’s it and I can do it remotely, okay. I bet I could do like a hundred of those jobs a month.

Also Here’s One of My Dumber Giggles for the Week

So, when I write up these Mary Worth plot recaps I copy out the dubious inspirational quotes first. And to do that I start by copying the last quote from the previous plot recap. And then I delete most of the words from that quote, so I can start typing a new one in just by double-clicking on the one word and typing. This week, this resulted in my getting this ominous declaration from the creator of one of the most beloved comic strips of all time:

I’m sure Charles Schulz said “don’t” at some point in his life, I just suppose it probably wasn’t at one-week intervals like this.

It feels weirdly threatening, like he’s worried I’m thinking about drawing Snoopy’s nephew Stretch or something.

I Have Had Enough of This Week

So I’m going to treat myself by eating Cheese Idaho.

You’re welcome to join me even after the whole Sloppy Johio incident.

I See Why Maybe Superman Didn’t Visit All These Kids in the 70s

So I have this friend who sometimes sends me Archie comics. That’s not his idiosyncrasy. I mentioned a while back that I liked the Archie where they do something weird, like the gang are all super-spy kids in the future or something. So now when he comes across, like, this comic from the 70s where an alien robot genie lands in Riverdale and turns Mister Weatherbee into a suspiciously Alf-like alien, he sends it my way. We should all have a friend like that. Mister Weatherbee sees no reason his being turned into a suspiciously Alf-like alien should stop him from hurrying on to the faculty meeting.

Anyway I ran across this advertisement, which I can totally understand why they had to run it in Archie comics rather than in a Superman book:

The Fan Club Corporation of America of Medina, Ohio, is making the bold assumption that Lex Luthor does not read Archie comics. … Maybe it’s not that bold an assumption.

Okay, so, if I were a friend of Superman? I would not mail away for the one thing in the universe that he’s vulnerable to other than magic. (Magic I’m not worried about, since it doesn’t really exist.) I think the Fan Club Corporation of America of Medina, Ohio, may have misunderstood their market.

Well. One footnote. If we’re talking red kryptonite? The kind that does something wacky like turn Superman into a two-headed Supercow for a day? And he still has to attend the city council meeting as Clark Kent where Lois Lane can see him? All right, I’ll take $2.50 worth of that. Heck, I’ll buy $7.50 worth of that. But if that’s what they’re selling then they should make it clear.

Anyway, why do they need to know your age and whether you’re M or F to send you a $2.50 Kryptonite rock?

The level I’m operating at today

Spent a long, long time chuckling at how this “Smoky Carolina BBQ” vegan jerky advertised itself with a picture of Kentucky, a state that is neither North or South Carolina, before finally noticing the company name is “Louisville” and that’s the largest single thing on the entire package.

Part of the trouble may be that I don’t eat jerky, so it shouldn’t much matter to me where it comes from.

So this week as you see me not understanding things, consider, this is my understanding-things baseline.

A Report From Our Hipster Bar’s Costume Contest

So, turns out Carmen Sandiego took the first place prize in the costume contest last night. I don’t know who won.

In which I wonder how exactly poison works in the Superman universe

So I was reading this collection of 1950s issues of the Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen comic books, apparently. For the most part these are stories about Jimmy Olsen being up to some nonsense for extremely complicated yet ridiculous reasons Superman dare not explain until the last page. Or that Jimmy Olsen can’t explain to Superman, again until the last page. It’s a lot of strange behavior from what are presented as people.

Here we get to a story that’s about this Ruritanian country that figures Jimmy Olsen is the Crown Prince. And he figures, fine, he’ll be king for a couple days while the wicked prime minister tries to kill him. Wouldn’t you? That develops about like you’d figure.

Panels from “King For A Day”, a story running in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #4, March-April 1955. Story by Otto Binder, art by Curt Swan and Ray Burnley. I do like the position of that insert circle, and the way Clark Kent’s X-Ray Vision can be pointing right at the soda in the other panel. It’s the sort of small touch that makes for a good reading experience. Anyway when Superman drinks the poison without suffering any, the evil minister figures his underlings have screwed up the poison. So that’ll be a mark against them on the next employee review, which is a bit of a mean thing for Superman to do to them. On the other hand, they were poisoning the king, so they have to have expected someone would mark something on their records.

And … so … what was it in the soda that looked like poison? Little axe blades? A miniature version of that woman who’s sometimes in Spy Vs Spy and kills Spy and Vs Spy? A tiny magnet to pull a bunch of lead dust together into a bullet once it’s swallowed? What did Superman’s X-Ray vision X-see?

Anyway you’ll be glad to know Clark Kent is able to stop Jimmy from drinking the poisoned soda without revealing his secret identity of Batman. He thinks to ask “Hey, can I have that exact soda you’re drinking right now before you have it?” and Jimmy figures, yeah, why not? In the end, Jimmy Olsen stops being the fake king of this Ruritanian country.

In which I admit to not having seen Discovery or Picard

I’m not avoiding them. I just haven’t had the energy to watch stuff even if I like it anymore. So I just have missed out on how they’re changing the Star Trek world. But apparently they’re doing something. I was poking around Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki, and discovered this alarming verb tense in the article about lithium:

Yes, I appreciate that they found an episode to quote for the atomic weight of lithium, especially since they got lithium’s atomic weight wrong. (It should be between 6.938 and 6.997 for most lithium samples.)

I assume this means something exciting has been going on with proton decay in the new shows and I honestly can’t imagine what.

Is this a Lower Decks thing? Again, I haven’t seen it, but it seems like the destruction of all lithium, everywhere, is maybe a Lower Decks thing.

In which I think I’ve spotted the problem

So why aren’t there Ohio Safety Matches anymore? I have a hypothesis.

From Bizapedia, the official pedia of Alberto Santos-Dumont’s canard biplane. And yes, I understand why the Ohio Match Company might incorporate in Delaware: Delaware is ALSO the name of a suburb of Columbus where Rutherford B Hayes was born. His house was been torn down and replaced with a BP gas station, but I don’t think the corrupt Compromise of 1877 is specifically at fault for the house-demolition or the Ohio Match Company going out. I think the match company can blame a bad gust of wind that came at the wrong time.

In Which I Encounter Some Bambi LARP

It was another banner night for seeing nature when I took my walk yesterday. Three or possibly four rabbits along the sidewalk, for example. (I passed the same spot twice and there was a rabbit there each time but I could not attest under oath that they were the same rabbit, as I did not get the rabbit’s name, and would not have remembered it anyway.)

But the high point was seeing a rabbit alongside a skunk. The rabbit, more, was charging at the skunk, and circling around it, the way they do when they are very excited by a thing and would like it to be a thing somewhere else. The skunk, meanwhile, was hustling along. Making good speed, for a skunk. Skunks have really good de-escalation skills. Like, there’s Brooklyn bartenders who study skunks to learn how to get everybody to chill. The rabbit, though, was chasing down the skunk, for all that the skunk was trying to get out of this and hurry off to campus. Running around it, running up to it, backing off and running back up to it again.

I couldn’t follow this into the night to see how it resolved. But, night rabbit, I hope that scenario played out the way you had imagined it would.

After the recycling truck has left

A couple pieces fell out of the recycling bin when the truck picked it up this week. There’s no doubting it was our recycling. I recognized the brand of vegetarian imitation tuna that’s somehow cheaper than real tuna. (That’s probably nothing to worry about.) The salad dressing bottle. Couple of other things that were definitely ours and were just sitting in the street. So I took these things, that had until yesterday been in the to-be-recycled bag in the breakfast nook, until they were put in the bin and taken to the curb, back from the curb to go inside and get put in the to-be-recycled bag in the breakfast nook. And at that point I realized I was in some existential comedy/drama and I don’t know that I can handle that in 2020. Please send meaning.

Fascinating coincidences of South West England

I was reading about the town of Pensford in Somerset, England, because hi there I guess we’ve only just met for the first time. That’s the sort of thing I do, is all. Pensford’s Wikipedia page has this to say about famous residents:

Philosopher and physician John Locke FRS 1632-1704, known as the “Father of Liberalism” lived in John Locke’s Cottage in Belluton within the parish of Publow with Pensford from shortly after his birth until 1647.

And, gosh but that’s a lucky coincidence on John Locke’s part. Just imagine the quarrels he might have got into if he had been living in Thomas Hobbes’s cottage instead. They probably still had the quarrels anyway, but they would have had to argue about who was in whose cottage too.

Some more things to say about The Story Of Brick

To get back to The Story of Brick, as told by the American Face Brick Association. I don’t want to over-sell the joy I feel in this book. I know these are hard times. Maybe things that bring me a little cheer are intensified. Still, I think there is a lot to enjoy here.

There’s a stretch of book trying to show what the different brick-laying styles are. In the text this is done by pictures. The eBook reader that for some reason gave me this, though, puts some of them as text. So it’s full of weird ASCII art. Like, here:

The Common or American bond, in order to secure transverse strength of wall, can be treated in a way to produce pleasing effects, as may Fig 7.

m
	ZZ3EZ~]C~Z3CZZI]CZrj.
	Fig. 3.
	Common
	ME
	oc
	:es3c
	U^r

The Flemish bond (Fig. 5) is secured by

mi
	nm
	immzznm
	izmmz.
	DCZS3
	IIEE3E
	nnc

Header Diamonds

|/>)(\(//-/>
<<|//-<-\|<|(\-///\\)|)--</>
())((//<-<
(-/(<\|/-(|(
/(>>/()|-->
(\))|(()(/|-->|/)-->)>>-)||</\/\|(|/<((<|/-(\\|)-)/\>-(>|/)\
	

Herring!

               .-_|\
              /     \
      Perth ->*.--._/
                   v  <- Tasmania

And despite that fine presentation of good new LinkedIn passwords for me, it just runs a picture for “Chimney Top”. I know what a chimney top looks like. I have one on my house. At least I did last time I checked. It’s been a while.

OK, I’m back. Yes, my chimney top is still there, along with all the chimney middle. You may mock me for checking that nothing had come along and swiped my chimney top without my knowing, but I remember that this is the year 2020. You know what would be stranger than something stealing the tops of chimneys of otherwise untouched buildings? Every single day since the 14th of January.

I don’t fault the book having a pro-brick agenda. I’m sure there’s a comparable book from the American Wood Shingles and Shakes Association that keeps pointing out how lousy bricks are. This if the shingles and shakes people get along. But the enthusiasm this book brings to bricks sometimes paints weird scenes. For example, remember the Great Baltimore Fire that destroyed over 1,300 buildings in February 1904? Me neither but I’ve only over driven through 1904 on the way to 1908 or 1894. Yes, I’m a Coxey’s Army hipster. But the American Face Brick Association notes “there was something saved, however, for a special committee … reported that between 200,000000 and 300,000,000 usable brick worth $5.00 a thousand were recovered”.

So now this paints a scene of a time when “brick” was the plural of brick? Maybe it was a character-recognition error. No, but they do this all over the book. All right. Let me move on.

So this also paints a scene of Baltimore, smashed by a catastrophic fire. Through the smoldering ruins, though, a civic leader stands up. I’ll assume his name was “Archibald”, since that’s an era when civic leaders had names like Archibald or Edwin or Vernon or all that at once. “It is not all lost, my fellow Baltimoreans,” cried Archibald, holding up two pretty good brick in his right and one fractured brick in his left. “There is merchantable salvage comprising a million and a half of dollars of brick here!” I bet his news was greeted with deep, impressed looks from the survivors picking through ruin. I bet they shared their joy and brick with him. And then Archibald interjected, “Herring!”

So it’s a good thing to know there were a quarter-billion still-usable bricks in Baltimore in 1904. It shows what kind of a craftsman I am that actually using them seems like maybe more effort than they’re worth. Of course, what they’re worth was a million and a half dollars, according to Archibald Edwin Vernon. That is a lot of effort to not go to. It’s just I think of my own uses for used bricks.

There’s one set behind the microwave so we don’t push it up against the wall when we press the door-release lever. There’s a brick I use to get a crowbar in the right place, when I do my annual prying-open-of-a-window-some-cursed-former-resident-painted-shut. There’s one we keep in the basement, next to the stairs, so that we can stub our toes if that hasn’t happened already. I think if we stretched our imaginations we could use as many as two more brick.

So that covers a market for five used brick. This leaves 1904 Baltimore with needing to find applications for only a quarter-billion more brick. They could solve this by building more houses, sure, but that’s still 40 to 60 million houses to use up all that brick. It makes one wonder what they were doing with all those brick in the first place.

Herring!

In which my e-book reader is calling me out

I do not know how it is I came to have a copy of the American Face Brick Association’s 1922 tome The Story Of Brick: The Permanence, Beauty, and Economy of the Face Brick House. The title alone, though, is so much the parody of the sort of thing that I would read that I had to go back and check whether I had made a joke about my getting a book like this. Of course I have. I have done this more than once. Within the last ten weeks.

I can only dimly imagine how ridiculous actually reading this is going to be. It starts well, though:

“If we possessed the story-telling magic of Sir Walter or of Dumas, the elder, we could write a best seller on the subject of brick, which most people think of as very commonplace. ”

I recognize when an “if” is pulling a load.

Which title is better?

I noticed this documentary while looking over the schedule on Turner Classic Movies:

TCM does make the documentary, about jazz tap dancing, sound interesting. But do remember that I am a person who finds every documentary and every bit of nonfiction interesting. I would happily watch 65 minutes on the North American Numbering Plan even if it didn’t include rare footage from the 1930s.

What do you think? I get where No Maps On My Taps makes sense as a title for this film, but it’s hard to see where that’s preferable to No Maps On My Taps.

One more thing about bubble wrap

Oh yeah, so that thing where bubble wrap was created as “a failed wallpaper”? You know what the failure was? Of course not. Here. According to Wikipedia the first prototype bubble wrap was made in 1957 when engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes “sealed two shower curtains together, creating a smattering of air bubbles, which they originally tried to sell as wallpaper”.

There are many historic events I would like to witness. The first transmissions along the transatlantic telegraph cable. The first person to build a house, rather than extend shelter from an available cave or copse of trees of whatnot. Merkle’s Boner. Whatever the heck the Invasion of the Sea Peoples was. And now, to this, I add whatever conversation happened between Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes that resulted in a declaration I must conclude had the substance, “gentlemen, we have all the wallpaper we could ever need — it’s right here in these shower curtains!”.

Wh … What does Wikipedia think I am capable of doing?

From the essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent:

I know how long it takes me at the beach to just pile together enough sand to make a little one-foot-across round island right at the shoreline. Extrapolating from that, a supercontinent would take me more than a full week.

I … mean I’m flattered but … how?

---

Also I would like to say I was looking up Supercontinents because did you know that Pangaea was not the only time that all the land in the world was huddled together in one continent? That the continents have been breaking apart and coming back together over and over again? That this cycle of all the world’s land reuniting and then splitting up again has happened something like ten times that we know of? Doesn’t that give you the same awesome thrill of “being five and knowing dinosaurs were a thing”? Yeah, I wanted to share that with someone. Not because I thought anyone was going to expect me to make a supercontinent for them.

---

Also I have this silly thing moved up to today because I wasn’t able to write my Mary Worth plot recap on time. Stuff, you know? And things? There has been too much of all of that lately.

In Which Clickbait Gives Me Some Much-Needed Good News

I bet they did it by shortening the red carpet, though. I’ll give you four to one odds that carpet does not meet FAA standards. If it does, it certainly does not meet ICAO standards.

Whew!

I bet they still try to up-sell me to a bigger model than I need. I just need a subcompact, I’m tall but not that tall.

Why It’s Worth Having A Land-Line Phone Even Today

Someone or something phoned, waited out our answering machine’s introduction, left the message “your call is very important to us” before hanging up. You don’t get that kind of service from any other medium for avoiding communication.

What’s got me late and vaguely offended today

My love and I discovered the existence of a town named Oxford, Michigan, and wondered why it had that name. The obvious reason would be it hosted a college, but we couldn’t find one. Maybe a chautauqua? Not that we could find. From the map it looked like it was a lot of swampland, even by Michigan standards, so I said, maybe it’s where they used to have oxes ford the river? And then I remembered I had a book, Michigan Place Names. It says the name was given by Otis C Thompson “since nearly all the settlers had ox-teams and would probably hold on to them for some time”, which is close enough that I feel like the world is undercutting my jokes about the world and I’m very busy with my sulking now.

The Tea Wants My Attention

I may have mentioned that I like to drink tea. If I haven’t mentioned that I like to drink tea, let me mention that I like to drink tea here: I like to drink tea. So I hope we’re all caught up here. This past week I’ve been drinking tea from work, from the office. They got the tea from … somewhere … somehow. I don’t know. The tea bags, though, have these little tabs trying to be entertaining, and I’m fascinated. Oh, there’s some of mere usual ones, like the warning that minds and parachutes function only when open. But then there’s pieces like this:

Among economics, the real world is often a special case.

OK. If that doesn’t wow you, though, try this:

Pawn shops are loan-ly places.

It’s no Kabibble Kabaret, I admit, since it doesn’t openly hate women. And yet the tea just keeps on giving, for example:

Dressmakers treated customers ruff in the 16th century.

If that hasn’t got you acknowledging the existence of a joke, please consider this one:

Indolent philosopher: Mr I Can’t.

I would not dare speak for you. But for me, I wish to read all of these aloud, imitating whoever it is Saturday Night Live had in the 1980s to imitate Gene Shalit. And, at the end of each reading, saying loudly, “Wink!” while wincing half of my face in a way that suggests I know the concept of a wink but haven’t figured out how to do it myself. Anyway I don’t know how long these tea bags will hold out, but they certainly inspire in me the thought: huh.

How Things Are Going In This 1983 Kool-Aid Man Comic Book

Comic Vine describes the plot of this comic as: “Kool-Aid Man battles the thirsties in outer space and the baseball field. Will the thirsties leave the kids high and dry or will Kool-Aid Man save the day?”

Kool-Aid Man, crashing through the walls of the spaceship while his human friends are dressed for the vacuum of space by wearing blue jeans: “I’m helping!”

I’m late because there was a John Candy comic book, that’s why

Yeah, I’d like to get a thing done today but a friend made me aware there was a comic book based on John Candy’s remembered animated series Camp Candy in the late 80s. And … just … like, I know they used to make comic books for just everybody, like Bob Hope or Jerry Lewis or … I’m going to guess Gene Autrey. But this? I had no idea and so that’s why I spent the whole day lying down and trying to figure this all out.

Comic Vine’s Wiki has the covers to all the issues. It has summaries of the stories for half the books, too, for example the one where “a lovestruck moose invades the camp and causes problems for everyone”.

I’m Sorry But This Toilet Paper Roll Is Distracting Me

Yeah, I apologize for not getting things done on time today but I want to know the story of this lone non-conformist toilet paper roll and I think you do too. It’ll be a heartwarming children’s book about being true to yourself that will escape being turned into a CGI-animated movie on the grounds that nobody can work out how to make toys of the characters that won’t end in sad conversations.

Yes, this is 12 Mega Rolls, which if I understand toilet paper mathematics correctly is the equivalent of 47 Ultra Rolls, which is the same as 92 Hyper Rolls, three guineas, two shillings and sixpence, which is the equivalent of when the bathroom’s steamed up from the shower walking into a ten-foot cube of paper foam.

The Most Wonderful Thing I’ve Seen About Equinoxes All Year

So I think I had the question everyone has about equinoxes, which is, how does the fact that the solar year is just about 365 days and six hours affect on which date the equinox happens? So this brought me to the web page about it on Calendarpedia (“Your source for calendars”, which is definitely marketing to me). And of course I’m glad to know that my guess about how leap days affected the equinoxes basically panned out. But more, the page offered this chart:

Table provided by Calendarpedia’s “When Is The Fall Equinox?” page. They also provide a chart of the equinoxes and the days of the week.

And I am sitting and thinking about its disclaimer, data provided `as is’ without warranty. Where would I go if I needed a projected fall equinox date with warranty? If I had the warranty and fall didn’t arrive on that date, who would I send the unused portion of the season to, and what kind of form would I fill out?

What I Can’t Stop Thinking About Today

So what I can’t stop thinking about today is a Wikipedia sentence, of course. It’s from the article about Pitt Fall, a drop tower ride formerly at Kennywood Amusement Park in Pittsburgh:

In June 2011, it was put for sale and bought in early September to an undisclosed buyer.

So … in 2011 — in this decade — someone just went to a major amusement park, bought a drop tower ride, carted it off, and we don’t know who? I mean, the owner’s neighbors have to have sometime said, like, “Hey, did the blue duplex down the street always have a 251-foot-tall metal tower in the front yard?” You’d think we could find who bought the Kennywood drop tower just by looking up more. I don’t know how it’s been kept a secret eight years now.

Not To Brag, But I Am A Truly Popular Person

And my cell phone is a very necessary thing to have which I rely upon often.

I know what you’re wondering and the reason I don’t have a call from Dad is that somehow his phone and my phone have decided to ignore the other, and Verizon’s advice is “I dunno, the both of you come to a store together and maybe we’ll think something out”. I’m in Michigan. My father lives in South Carolina. Verizon has yet to suggest what store the two of us might reasonably visit together. Well, I’m sure he’s doing all right.

I Have Questions

If you don’t find this funny, that’s all right. I don’t fault you. I’m not sure I can say why I found this funny enough to photograph. But it’s my blog and I’ll post what nonsense I feel fit here.

Fess Up

So. Reader. Look. I regard us as friends. Maybe not great friends, not, help-you-move-to-a-new-apartment level friends. But friends. Out meaning well for each other, even if we sometimes screw it up. Giving a heads up when we see a comic strip we’re sure the other is going to love. Warning when you see we’re marching unprepared into at least a Category Two Drama Storm. That kind of friend. OK? So that’s why I have to ask about this thing from the sidebar of a YouTube video I just watched.

Also: what, precisely, is “easy” about thinking to trowel cement on three rolls of toilet paper? Just trying to think about doing this makes my head hurt in a way that, like, covariant tensors do not. The doing of this might be physically easy but imagining a world in which I would is I promise you not.

Exactly which one of you is telling Google, “You know what Joseph needs? The suggestion he line up three rolls of toilet paper only to trowel cement over them. Plus 34 other things to do with cement, each explained in an average of 26 seconds. But he’ll be so fascinated by that he won’t even notice this Five-Minute Crafts video is fifteen minutes long”? What is it you think you know about me? What are you drawing these conclusions from?