[Kzyxtalk] Pre-stressed mice.

[nsi at mcn.org]

So appreciate your commentary . . .--beth bosk

> 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 ghà irdeanan 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 sà ilean à rda. ('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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