[Kzyxtalk] Hippocleides doesn't care.

[Marco McClean]

Hippocleides doesn't care.

The recording of last night's (2019-06-21) 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-0338

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:

Here in the convenient robotic future of bluetooth-enabled toilet 
brushes and video doorbells that unlock and open the door for a delivery 
drone and electric screwdrivers and motorized spaghetti forks so you 
never have to turn your hand, not to mention Simone Giertz' 
toothbrushing and spoonfeeding robots that leave your hands entirely 
free to wiggle around and do as they please, you need to know how to 
fricking /reset a lightbulb to factory specs/ anymore. It only takes ten 
minutes, but that's if you’re a technician with the company and do it 
for a living, but if you're just the average light bulb consumer and you 
make a mistake on any of the steps you have to go back and start 
entirely over, so settle in. This reminds me of one time Tim sent me to 
an insurance/title company in a skyscraper in San Francisco to install a 
serial-printer-sharing device for an office full of late-1980s 
computers. It wasn’t just the printer box; each computer had to be set 
separately. The manual of steps to go through was as thick as a phone 
book. It took me all night. Bonus: the sun came up outside, and that was 
pretty. And I got to ride in an elevator. And one of the women who 
worked there, who I saw for like three minutes before she went home from 
work, when I showed up, was so luminously Asianly (or possibly 
Mexicanly) beautiful it was like being kicked in the chest just to look 
at her. "What." "Nothing. Sorry." That still happens to me even now. 
I'll be reading or working or doing something and Juanita will come in 
and I'll look up and /stop/, and she's like, "What."
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/20/unintentionally-funny-video-in.html

This video kind of explains some of the stories you hear about people 
who get arrested for doing this disgusting thing. Obviously it's 
different for them than for the people who catch and punish them and 
enjoy being disgusted by them. And really how is it even at all as cruel 
as shaving all an animal's hair off for sweaters or skin off for shoes 
and jackets or making sandwiches out of its leg or sausage out of its 
brains, because that's where sausage comes from: brains. Conversely, 
so-called head cheese is made from the intestines, and is not cheese at 
all. Electric cigarets are not cigarets, nor are they somehow magically 
good for you because they're electric and don't work by old-fashioned 
barely-controlled smoldering. Why, I read on the show last night an 
article about a boy whose electric cigaret exploded in his mouth, 
shredded his tongue and sprayed a section of his jaw and a bunch of his 
teeth out like popping popcorn. The guy in this video just likes animals 
a little more than normal people do, and so what. I like wristwatches 
and eyeglasses; is that gonna be a crime now too? And what about what 
/you/ like? It takes all kinds to make a world. Try not to judge, lest 
ye be judged. That's what Jesus said, and one time he beat the living 
crap out of a little tree because it wouldn't give him a fig out of 
season, but everybody has a bad day once in awhile, even mythical 
ancient superheroes whose dad is the boss of you.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/24550780

And here's just the famous Last Visible Dog scene in /The Mouse and His 
Child/, a slow, languorous, uncategorizable animated kids' film that 
made a big impression on me, though I was technically a grownup when I 
first saw it (18? 19?). I drove with Julie to Grass Valley from her 
apartment in Colfax. It was August, very hot, nighttime, with all the 
windows rolled down in my first car, a green Chevy Nova built in 1971, 
though there was nothing about or in that car, besides the Radio Shack 
cassette deck, that had any innovation or part or method of operation 
that would baffle a mechanic of fifty years before that. You had to 
contort to reach around behind you to crank the back side window down, 
and sometimes you'd be shifting and the linkage would jam and you had to 
coast to safety, climb under the car with a big screwdriver and solve 
the puzzle, separate the transmission levers and push them where they 
belong, like unsticking a jammed typewriter that some mental case has 
vandalized in the thrift store, and I liked doing that. There was the 
dry cereal and potato-bug smell of yellow-brown grass hills and of 
course the smell of the car. Smoking engine oil, exhaust, dusty 
dashboard, floor plastic, Julie's clean white blouse. Other vehicles, 
even far away. We forget because we get used to things, and it isn't 
just that I'm old now and senses are all duller, but all cars and trucks 
gave off a tremendous stench in those days. They used more than twice as 
much gas as cars do now just to go at all, and all that half-burned fuel 
in the air was a /loud/ smell as well as making the air a gray-brown 
haze in big cities that didn't have special sea and/or surrounding 
landform wind luck. But this was the country, not the city. Beautiful 
theater they had in Grass Valley, too, the way theaters used to be, all 
one big hall, not a labyrinth of basically movie closets with fourteen 
seats in each one. Theaters smell as loud now as they used to, though 
with so few children around, compared to the old days when every public 
place was swarming with steaming contagious children, the smell is 
different; the same unreachable corner garbage, but less spoiled food 
and sweat and vomit and stickiness on surfaces, pongy-er cleaning 
chemicals, and mold from the air conditioning, and the reek of burning 
weed or weed vape oil everywhere now. Indoors public places smelled like 
piss then, now outdoors does too. Camps of homeless people with begging 
signs at every intersection and every driveway out of a parking lot, who 
all used to be the children in the theater and the young people in the 
cars going to a movie and feeling like the world is their oyster. And, 
yes, I know I told you this story before and it was slightly different 
the last few times, focusing on other elements and maybe going another 
direction, but you just wait, kid; it'll happen to you. How weird things 
will get for the way things are now to seem pleasant and familiar and 
nostalgic and comfortable. The main weird thing will be, you'll remember 
being young, because of course. Old people remember being young. But, 
you see, now, you don't remember being old. You think you can imagine 
it, but you can't. Stick around, though; life will put you through the 
lawnmower too, and there won’t be a goddamn thing you can do about it, 
so you might as well dance while you can, if you like to dance. I think 
that’s what "Hippocleides doesn't care" means, in the story Herodotus 
used to tell a few thousand years ago. You might look that up on the 
phone in your nose ring.
https://tinyurl.com/LastVisibleDog

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