[Kzyxtalk] Our town.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Our town.

Here's the recording of last night's (2023-08-18) seven-plus-hour-long 
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg 
(CA) and KNYO.org:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0554

Email /your/ written work on any subject and I'll read it on the very 
next Memo of the Air.

I was just now formatting this mostly-finished post and thinking about 
what specific parts of the show to mention in short, and there was a 
loud /POP/ from the apartment park across the industrial yard. Lots of 
screaming, children screaming, women wailing, a distraught man 
warble-bellows something incomprehensible over and over. Sirens are 
instant because the police department is just a few blocks away. 
Everyone scatters. Several police cars arrive, one immediately tears off 
again. More sirens elsewhere, going away, attending to another matter. I 
don't feel like messing with this project anymore right now; I'm just 
gonna make spaghetti and meatballs... Oh, wait, here are the EMTs and a 
fire truck. A dozen uniforms mill around while someone grownup-size is 
loaded onto a folding gurney, plus yellow barrier tape is strung up, so 
it must have been a stupid gun this time and not a stupid fireworks 
accident. All is calm again. All of this in little more than the time to 
write it in. Hmm. Okay, right, spaghetti.

Time passed. I've cooked and eaten. They're wailing and crying again 
over there, mostly the women, so the person must have died, I think. 
Also, no kidding, somewhere in the distance there's an ice-cream truck 
playing /Turkey In The Straw/. And... scene. America.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a 
fresh batch of dozens of links to worthwhile items I set aside for you 
while gathering the show together, such as:

The last scene of the final episode of /Northern Exposure/.
https://vimeo.com/156496656

The pinnacle of poster art. This is another one of the distinctive forms 
of art that makes me wish we were further along in the science of 
replacing malfunctioning natural eyes with techno-eyes that can be set 
to make the whole world look like this or that style. I suppose I can 
shortcut the process by something like Google Cardboard with real-world 
video pass-through, but the latency would make driving or even walking 
difficult and dangerous.
https://www.vintag.es/2023/08/gino-boccasile.html

Any old abandoned theater would make an excellent retro-future real-life 
radio (or teevee) station. Live radio (or teevee) events every night. 
Free popcorn. Vacuum tubes instead of transistors everywhere possible, 
and the antenna tower growing up from the roof like the Eiffel Tower, 
with a halo of fizzing deep-blue fluorescent lightning bolts propped 
pointed outward all around the ball on the top in the fog. When I win 
the lottery. (via NagOnTheLake)
https://www.presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/stage-left

Gauntlet of the birds. It's like the Klingon Rite of Ascension. You go 
down the middle and they painfully side-eye you. It's tense but over 
quickly. Now you are a warrior and can choose your warrior name: 
Hawkblast, or Pecksmith, or really whatever. This isn't the full minyan 
of ten bird-spirits but it's so hard to gather enough serious 
participants anymore that it still counts, like the Supreme Court.
https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=5YHTFN

And, say your parent is almost dead. Here's some good advice. It can't 
hurt to read it and it won't take long.
https://www.deadparentswhatnow.com/

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