[Kzyxtalk] Consciousness, the fly in the erntment.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Consciousness, the fly in the erntment.

The recording of last night's (2020-08-14) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0397

Just before seven p.m. they did one of their public safety power cutoffs 
in Cotati, where I’ve been doing the show from for the duration of the 
SIP, from Juanita’s apartment, and the electricity didn’t come back on 
until almost ten p.m. That’s to explain why I started the show not at 
nine but an hour late. Also, when the light came on and I got all the 
machines going and was printing the show out and playing a 1955 warning 
film about the scourge of marijuana and drug addiction, my nose began to 
tickle, so I went into the bathroom to deal with that with a sharp 
scissors, like I have to do now every two or three weeks because I’m old 
and, you know, hair grows in places it never did before, but I was in a 
hurry and accidentally /cut high up on the inside of my nose and began 
dripping blood everywhere./ I shoved a crumpled square of toilet paper 
in to slow that down and proceeded from there. It took the whole first 
four hours of the show to stop bleeding, all the time being way more of 
a tickly annoyance than just leaving my nose the fuck alone would have. 
Let that be a lesson to you. Learn from others’ mistakes and don’t be in 
a hurry, and use safety scissors for a job like that… Also they might be 
going to shut off the power all over the entire Bay Area after dark 
tonight, for the /extreme heat and lightning fire danger/, and I see on 
the map that there’ll be lightning and maybe wind danger in Mendocino 
and Lake Counties too, so if you’re not on the Nixle alert schedule, or 
whatever, be warned. So it begins. The night before the show some 
nutball rode around on his bicycle on the south end of Ukiah setting 
/ten fires/ in less than half an hour. They put all the fires out and 
caught him and set his bail at one million dollars. That used to be a 
lot of money. A /millionaire/, they’d call you, to the tune of Mark 
Knopfler singing the word /millionaire/ in /Money For Nothing/, and you 
could have a new car any time you needed one, and travel to other 
countries, and get married and divorced on a whim as many times as you 
liked, and eat steak, and if a policeman were to pull you over for going 
fifty in a school zone, when he saw who you were he’d say, “Oh! Sorry, 
Mister Vanderschnoodle, my mistake, carry on,” and you’d tip him a 
twenty and sail away. You wouldn’t be riding around on a bicycle in 
106-degree heat setting fields on fire with your drug pipe lighter.

Furthermore, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll 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:

Our sun, image decoded from NASA space observatory data by a hobbyist. 
Beautiful, isn’t it? Apparently anyone can have all the NASA data and do 
things like this because we paid for it. (Click on the image once to go 
to the real one, and then click on that to enlarge it.) Whether you’re 
looking or not, the sun, like quadrillions of other stars, is close to a 
million miles wide and vastly violently chaotically furious, has been 
for billions of years and will be for billions more. It’s capable of 
safely powering all our toys and cars and fun as well as of course food 
production, if we’re ever just smart enough to do it all that way. It’s 
also spying on you, I’m told, in concert with 5G and Wuhan virus chips 
the size of a grain of rice. I just got email from a woman who says, 
whenever people are looking at their phone, or even only have a phone 
and are near you, they’re scanning your metabolism for Bill Gates’ 
benefit and hoovering all the information out of /your/ phone for 
purposes unknown but probably bad. Yes, the sun is spying on you. Twenty 
years ago a man called me at KMFB to explain about how the CIA had x-ray 
satellites that could count the money in your pocket even if you hid in 
the basement. I wasn’t worried, but now, with the sun and all, and the 5G…
https://tinyurl.com/OurChaoticSun

Motorcycle of desire. I adore everything about this majestic piece of 
work except for the very tail end, which looks like an extended insect 
proboscis with a little red tongue peeking out, though its offense is 
mitigated by cleverly being the taillight. And the tool-case panel is 
open inside to one of the enclosed wheels, but no-one would ever ride in 
the rain and/or through a puddle with this, and I repeat, /majestic 
piece of work/, so that’s not such a big deal. If you were a millionaire 
(see above), would you not call these people and say, “Vanderschnoodle 
here. I need that machine immediately. Fast, yes, before dinner, if 
possible, but don’t hurt yourself. Thank you. Yes, the house, not the 
office. Just leave it on the porch. And can you put a big bow on it? Red 
bow? It’s a gift. Thanks.”
https://www.bikeexif.com/bmw-art-deco-motorcycle-haas-museum

This reminds me of the famous cartoon where the woman says, “It's two 
a.m. Are you ever coming to bed?” and the man says, “I can’t yet. 
/Someone is wrong on the internet/.” It also reminds me, not as much, 
really, but reminds me, of an old National Lampoon Shary Flenniken comic 
where a couple have taken in their friend for the night because she’s 
miserable and crying because her husband cheated on her. The man stays 
up comforting the guest, and rubs her shoulders, and one thing leads to 
another and then they’re having sex on the couch, while the ghostly 
smoke-like hand-shape of the man’s wife’s cartoon speech bubble wafts 
through the house, saying faintly from the bedroom upstairs, “Honey? Are 
you coming to bed?” That was before the internet, see. That’s the way 
people used to be. Or they would watch old movies on the UHF channel 
until it, too, like the big network stations, signed off for the night. 
The entire media that wasn’t newspaper presses actually shut off every 
night, to give the transmitters time to cool off, and let you change a 
bad tube, and also to save electricity, because everybody had a job then 
and they had to go to sleep at night, even if only for a little while. 
And then at five-thirty or six everything would go on again, with the 
farm report, and marionette shows about biblical characters, and 
sometimes just a room with a chair in it. As late as the 1980s the 
public access teevee channel in Fort Bragg was just a thermometer and 
wind direction display twenty-four hours a day, and it was silent. (When 
I tried to set up a radio studio on the channel for the high school 
kids, the board refused. Alder Thurman, dead now, then mayor of Fort 
Bragg, on the board, scoffed, “Nobody wants to hear /talking/ coming out 
of their teevee!” And that was the /public access/ channel.) And if you 
were late for something important, everybody would have to just wait for 
you to finally get there to find out why. You didn’t have a phone. 
Ninety-nine out of a hundred movies and teevee shows and stories all the 
way up to just a little while ago would be over in thirty seconds if 
they happened today. “I’m fine, I’ll be there in ten minutes,” somebody 
would say, or “I almost forgot to say, she's not dead, she's just asleep 
from a potion. Don’t freak out and stab yourself,” and they’d go, okay, 
great, and that would be the end of it.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2020/08/have-to-argue.html

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