[Kzyxtalk] Pre-stressed mice.

[Marco McClean]

Pre-stressed mice.

/"Literal machine translation often misses the mark by a mile, but true
translation can seem to spin off past the moon. Take 'He was never more
sinister than when he was at his most polite, which is probably the truest
test of breeding.' (J.M. Barrie's description of his Captain Hook.) Here it
is in Scottish Gaelic: 'Bheir e air falbh thu gu saoghal dìomhair. Tall
agus tana, tha a ghàirdeanan sìnte a-mach a' toirt comhfhurtachd agus
uabhas dhuinn.' Which gives, 'It takes you away to a mysterious world. Tall
and thin, his outstretched arms comfort and shock us.' And there is the
entire story compressed to madness, backwards and in high heels, or rather:
Agus tha an sgeulachd gu lèir air a dhlùthadh gu cuthach, air ais agus ann
an sàilean àrda. ('And some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky
stanes to pieces wi' hammers, like sae mony road-makers. They say it is to
find out how the warld was made!') Eat your tea and get to work."/

The recording of last night's (2019-08-16) Memo of the Air: Good Night
Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KMEC-LP Ukiah is available by one or
two clicks, depending on whether you want to listen to it now or download
it and keep it for later and, speaking of which, it's right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0346

KNYO always comes through like a champ because it’s the first place the
MOTA signal goes. On show nights, half an hour or so into the show I’ve got
used to putting on a song and using the time to go to KMEC’s computer via
remote to check whether the proper switch was set so I won’t be kicked off
the air /there/ by automation reverting at the top of the hour (10pm), and
I put it right if it's not right and leave it alone if it is. (Then at the
end of the show, just before 5am, I let go of KNYO and set KMEC back to
normal.) But this time, at 9:30, the switch I’m used to seeing in KMEC's
operating computer was not on top, and the song was half over and I didn’t
have time to go digging. Were things working anyway? I listened to KMEC on
my phone: someone's singing soulfully in Spanish about his inflamed
corazon. Tch. Alicia, formerly of KMEC, works at KZYX now, but I texted
her. She phoned KMEC. Turns out, a deejay there who shall remain nameless
had wandered in, decided to just cut off my show that I spent all week
getting ready for and instead play her own records, because, heck, why not,
ya know? Sorry, bye, and fixed. And… I think that’s fine. She's not likely
to do it again, but eventually something else goofy will happen or
something will break or a person will get a wild hair or a cosmic ray or an
EMP will flip some bits, and we will all deal with it. Really this is more
like the world I'd like it to be than rigid compliance with expectations in
all things. Fascist clockwork may make the trains run on time, but slack is
the meat and potatoes of life, and so what if nothing is perfect? Think
what a nightmare a perfect world would be. We wouldn’t even be conscious of
the horror of it. It'd be like Camazotz. (Not the cross-eyed Mayan bat god
but the planet in /A Wrinkle In Time/.)

Besides all that, at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you can find a fresh
batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless
worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while gathering the show
together. Such as:

Blink and they’re gone.
https://vimeo.com/305929872

Clearly if you're afraid of mountain lions and other big cats you should
always have a roll of toilet paper with you, on a stick, to offer up and
occupy the beautiful monster while you flee slowly backward blindly into a
crevasse, and/or to trade to get your little dog back before it's too
punctured to be of any use.
http://misscellania.blogspot.com/2019/08/wild-cats-vs-toilet-paper.html

Instinct. "Of which we lost most."
https://hemaworsten.blogspot.com/2019/07/instinct-of-which-we-lost-most.html

About the ants. Can't we all just get along? No.
https://theawesomer.com/the-world-war-of-the-ants/535357/

And English translation captions for a seal. There's a caption contest on
the last page of every New Yorker magazine, and I don't know why but I
always imagine the caption to be something like what this seal is saying.
It's just primally funny, for the same reason: the little office workers,
or rich people at a cocktail party, or space creatures, or someone trapped
on a desert island, always saying, "Blefgh! … GAAGH… mmmph!… NNNUHngg," and
so on, and understanding each other like an amorphous cloud of birds, the
sky black with birds, all turning this way and that at the same time, ink
swirling in a glass of water.
http://misscellania.blogspot.com/2019/08/talking-seal.html


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