[Kzyxtalk] You say cicada, I say cicada.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: You say cicada, I say cicada.

/"The transition responsible for the pale blue color of liquid oxygen is 
the simultaneous excitation of two molecules from triplet sigma to 
singlet delta. The double excitation avoids spin forbiddeness."/

The recording of last night's (2021-05-14) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0436

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com there's a fresh 
batch of not-necessarily-radio-useful but worthwhile items that I set 
aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Rerun: John Hyatt /Smashing a Perfectly Good Guitar/ (live on stage, 
1993). In the late 1970s I had an amplifier that made my guitar sound 
very like this; it was extreme crunch/squeal vacuum tube distortion, 
like a furious little robot breaking its own hand squeezing the sound 
out of a stainless steel toothpaste tube. I had cut the amplifier 
circuit and power supply out of a then-old thrift-shop vacuum tube tape 
recorder and mounted it inside a speaker cabinet, and at first, before I 
got an electric guitar, I used a pair of heavy headphones clamped on the 
bell of my acoustic guitar for a pickup. Somewhere in all the moves I 
lost that amplifier. Tch. It might be time to make another one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzeoLe6nSrU

This information doesn’t change my plans for myself (I don’t care what 
they do once I die: bury me in a trash bag, render me for chemicals, 
make a theater Yorick out of my skull; do as you please), but for people 
who have a traditional $20K viewing funeral in mind, there’s a lot you 
can learn from this pleasant expert on the subject. For example, there 
are different colors of embalming fluid, including a special red kind to 
replace your blood with (if they get to you fast enough and can still 
force it through) so you don't look quite so ghastly, and they have 
little plastic things for your eyeballs with hooks on the outside of 
them to close your eyelids over so they stay closed and don’t spring 
open at the wrong time when the flesh dries out; they're like the 
fasteners for Ace bandages but inside-out. Also, if you’re too bulky or 
stiff to dress they cut off the back of the clothes and just drape them 
over you and tuck the edges under because what difference does it make 
now? You won't be getting up to answer the door and talk to the 
Jehovah's Witnesses anymore. You can just lie there under your tent of 
clothes and be dead. (via BitsAndPieces.us)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ktLen9cVM

Going literally like sixty in 1899 in an electric car. “As for the 
driver, the muscles of his body and neck become rigid in resisting the 
pressure of the air; his gaze is steadfastly fixed about two hundred 
yards ahead...”
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/05/le-jamais-contente-first-car-to-go.html

And Chicago from the air, 1914. Imagine what this was like for the 
people waving down and pointing at this and that, in that time: magical 
dreamlike flying. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://kottke.org/21/05/aerial-footage-of-chicago-from-a-dirigible-1914

That's it for now, except: Email me your written work and I'll read it 
Friday night on the radio on the very next MOTA.

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