[Kzyxtalk] Gpjira, don't you weep, don't you moan.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Gojira, don't you weep, don't you moan.

     /"Well, one of these nights 'round twev [twelve] o’clock, this old 
town's gonna really rock. Didn't Pharaoh’s army get drownded [sic]? 
Gojira [Godzilla], don't you weep." -Trad./

The recording of last night's (2020-07-17) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KMEC-LP Ukiah* is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0393

*Sorry, but not KMEC tonight, again. Just only on KNYO, the 87-watt 
Little Lion in Fort Bragg. Available info: KMEC's website's been down 
for three weeks, their web stream is off, their phone line is dead, and 
the only people who've replied to my scattershot texts, phone calls and 
emails are people who have no idea what's going on or have an idea and 
are clamming up about it because they know what side their bread is 
buttered on. If you know the story, or know somebody who does, let me 
know so I can blab it and get everyone on the same page through the 
magic of communication. What I know so far: zip. Except for: the 
Mendocino Environmental Center's current with rent to County Supervisor 
McCowen, but approximately $500 in arrears on payment to Pacific 
Internet. KMEC fits in a closet in the back of the MEC and costs about 
as much as a cup of coffee at Schat’s per day to operate, but /somebody 
in the hierarchy of the Environmental Center has to make sure that 
piffling amount gets paid./ Who is that person? Speak up; don’t be shy. 
I just wanta help. I'm not going to hurt you. I will not touch you in 
any wrong way or at all. If you stutter I will not make fun of you. Once 
upon a time I myself had a speech impediment. I had a lisp so thick it 
sounded like tearing sections out of a phone book. I know what it feels 
like. Even if it's hard –especially if it's hard– spill the dang beans.

But that’s not what last night's show's about. It's pretty fancy, as 
usual. Frightening amounts of both useful and frivolous information. 
Musical thrills; I mean literal thrills. Half an hour into this there's 
Lorrie LePaule’s Mendocino Theater Company radio adaptation of the play 
/Trifles/ by Susan Glaspell, an early feminist drama from 1909 about 
small town murder, oblivious official men and a sewing kit with a dead 
bird in it. There's this week's installment of Jay Frankston's 
historical, romantic and numinous novel El Sereno about sixty tumultuous 
years of 20th-century Spain from the point of view of the man with all 
the keys. John Sakowicz' poem /Vespers/. David Herstle Jones' meditation 
on a lusciously predatory bar prostitute. Jerry Philbrick's latest 
festival of gun-totin' elderly racist right-wing belligerent ignorance. 
There’s disease, pestilence, innovation in sport, vehicles, taxonomy, 
creeping fascism, an unusual take on cancel culture, a commemoration of 
the 75th anniversary of the first of hundreds of times the U.S. 
deliberately punched itself in the nose (in the desert, actually) with a 
sloppy atom bomb, and the advent of a new weekly feature of MOTA that 
will be variously titled: Looks at Fox, Focus on Fox, What the Fox, Fox 
in Sox, etc. I'm trying to keep the kvetching about President Ass-clown 
to a minimum, but when it starts taking more effort to avoid looking 
there than to look there, I look there for a minute or two again, and so 
what. Also there’s a long bit exploring Charlie Engel's trials and 
tribulations regarding Sherwood Oaks that really is very fair, I think, 
to all sides in the tragedy that we’re all heading for if we live long 
enough. And that's just some of it. I'm knocking myself out for you, 
here, every time, everything on the table, as disgraced genius Louis 
C.K. and the sainted Alex Bosworth, from whom I seem to be estranged, 
each once said, and if you like it and can use it, great. If something 
pisses you off so you write to complain or to show off how you can do 
better, that's even more perfect. I repeat, spill the beans.

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:

What is intelligence?
https://theawesomer.com/what-is-intelligence/580299/

The closer you look, the busier it gets. Look intently enough and you 
can see Kenneth Patchen's butterflies bigger than the Earth, not to 
mention leopards made of golden wire not merely circling the sun but 
right down there wading around in it up to their eyeballs.
https://newatlas.com/space/images-sun-campfires-nasa-esa

And "Damage has been set at half-a-million dollars." That's all? Money 
was different in those days. People didn't sue you because they were 
painting their fingernails and tripped on the doorjamb. If a train 
crashed, a train crashed. Trains crash. Also, you could buy a whole 
block of houses in San Francisco for what it costs to get your Prius 
fender fixed today, and screwdrivers and toothbrushes and shotglasses 
(and car headlights) didn't have supercomputers in them. They just 
screwed things in or out and cleaned graham crackers out of your teeth 
and briefly held flammable toxic liquid and showed the road ahead. And 
when you graduated from high school you knew calculus or at least 
trigonometry, Spanish, German and/or French, the major dates and locales 
of history, animal husbandry (you could spay your own cat and assist in 
the birth of a calf). You could paint a portrait of someone and they'd 
be pleased with how it came out. Everyone could plumb and wire and roof 
and cook and sew and type and survey and make change at a register and 
do any job that needed doing in a new town. They could make tenses agree 
in casual speech and knew where to put the apostrophe in a sign, knew 
how to dance gracefully, who to hold the door for, to take a slap and 
like it and learn from it and not get fresh with that one again. You 
knew the names of at least a hundred colors and a hundred nuanced 
emotions. You could play the piano and recite from memory at least one 
epic poem and possibly even a whole Shakespeare play. It was rare if a 
person couldn't sing or tell a joke. Also, every spigot everywhere could 
be fixed in a minute with a washer that was so cheap they gave them away 
from a bowl next to the free rulers and paint stirring sticks and free 
golf pencils, and if you were white you could enter any diner, sit at 
the counter, spread out the newspaper (morning edition or evening 
edition of any of a dozen different newspapers just for your city), 
relight your pocket-cigar and settle in for a lunch hour that lasted an 
hour. And the coffee was terrible everywhere, so bad that it’s a wonder 
people drank it at all. So it wasn’t just money that was different.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_wreck_of_the_city_of_san_francisco

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