[Kzyxtalk] Let's get this nightmare started, shall we?

[Marco McClean]

Let's get this nightmare started, shall we?


The recording of last night's (2016-10-21) KNYO and KMEC Memo of the 
Air: Good Night Radio show is available to download and keep and skip 
around in via http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com


Seven full hours of quality edutainment, in part of which Doctor Donovan 
Spencer stopped by to demonstrate his remarkable new phone and its, 
shall we say, /specialized/ attachments, and Stuart Cohen played a few 
of his brand-new songs. Some election information. A lot of material 
about the science of the way we think, and why and how it always goes so 
wrong. At the end I read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, and 
it occurred to me that, since I read it last, years ago, the central 
idea and horror of it has been done and done and done again so many 
times in the flawed-superhero stories I like so much, that the effect 
has been somewhat muted. Remember how in /Torchwood/ Jack, who can't 
die, or rather can't stay dead, is taken back in time 2000 years and 
buried fifteen feet deep, to awake renewed (but still pressed flat in 
earth, with his mouth and nose and eyes packed with dirt and his lungs 
unable to expand) and die again over and over and over until being 
detected and freed in 1912? And in one episode he's explosively 
disassembled so all that's left is, I think, part of his head, and his 
head is imprisoned. And in /X-Men/ Wolverine is repeatedly trapped in a 
similar situation (at one point impaled and then twisted up in rebar and 
concrete and sunk in the river) and his super healing power just keeps 
starting him up again. Claire in /Heroes/. Sleeping What's-her-name in 
/Once Upon a Time/. Professor Hawkline (in Richard Brautigan's The 
Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western) transformed into an elephant-foot 
umbrella stand but with his consciousness intact. Uma Thurman karate 
chopping her way out of a coffin and up out of the grave. The Doctor in 
/Doctor Who/ taking literally four billion years to punch his way out 
through twelve feet of diamond. Things like that. So one ordinary 
drunken man being walled up in a niche in a tunnel and dying once and 
getting it over with doesn’t give the same chill anymore. Hmm. I just 
noticed that these are all stories that really go back to the beginning 
of the history of recorded imagination. Sisyphus. Prometheus. Tantalus, 
Merlin, Woden, Jesus, Cthulhu, Corwin of Amber, so on. They all 
eventually get out, but the experience for them is arguably worse. Maybe 
not so bad for Jesus. This deserves some more thought and development.


And instead of Boston Blackie I played an episode of The Weird Circle 
done entirely with real Scottish actors, where every time anyone says 
the arr sound, even the whispering Mysterious Bride of the title of the 
show, it rolls around for a while like a baseball on a bodhran. I’ve 
never been able to learn to make that rolling arr sound, and now that 
thanks to Dr. Mattson's dental tools I can finally say the letter ess 
without waking up all the dogs in the neighborhood. I suppose I'll have 
to renew my efforts in this other direction. Arr. Arr... Arrl... Dammit. 
I'll get it. Arr. Arrl...


Besides all that, also at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find 
links to a wunderkammer of things to read and play with and learn about, 
that wouldn't necessarily work via radio but that are nonetheless 
worthwhile, that I found while putting radio shows together, and all of 
it for free. Items such as:


The old hokum bucket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPFROyxV5uQ


I haven’t seen any of this famous show. I’m good, as they say, to just 
enjoy John Cleese talking about it for four minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU0eizwlejs


A 3-stage model rocket. Slo-mo camera in both top stages. Then views 
from ground. Pretty impressive. A fully realized project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FEUffhvFuc


And a lesson in why not to let a chiropractor yank your noodle loose.
http://tinyurl.com/ju3ygd9


--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com