[Kzyxtalk] Russell's teapot.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Russell's teapot.

/"Reading a book is just looking at symbols in ink and hallucinating."/

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2024-07-26) 7-hour Memo of 
the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and 
KNYO.org (and, for the first hour, also 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino):
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0602

Coming shows can feature your story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch 
or whatever. Just email it to me. Or include it in a reply to this post. 
Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there 
and read it on the air. That's what I'm here for.

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:

Stanley Pickle, a clockwork romance.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2024/07/stanley-pickle.html

Nine moves. These are some of the best chess players in the world. 
Imagine how the boy felt just at the moment he realized, too late, what 
he had done. I mean, imagine what his entire body felt like. The shock 
and humiliation. He's in his twenties. For the rest of his long life he 
will think back on this and feel that all over again. It was just a 
mistake. Sooner or later we all make a mistake. One time when I first 
went to work for my employer Tim, who I'm still with, I had finished 
fixing a priceless nearly-one-of-a-kind hand-made computer of late-1970s 
vintage that was the communication system for a severely crippled woman 
who could not speak and could only move one hand, a little, like a paw. 
She could choose letters and words from menus on a screen, and send a 
completed phrase to a printer, or to a text-to-speech device, to express 
herself. It had an S-100 bus and many big cards full of chips. Memory, a 
CPU card, a display card, etc. The power supply of it used a transformer 
the size of a melon with exposed taps. When I was putting it all 
together again, putting the covers on, I left it plugged in. I thought 
it was safe because the power switch was off. But the power switch was 
/after the transformer/. So when I moved a bundle of wires, a single 
wire that was attached to the card cage power bus popped loose from its 
5 or 12-volt supply, flipped around, and the end touched a line-voltage 
input pole of the power transformer. Every part on every card in the 
whole computer snapped, crackled, emitted smoke, and was ruined. Many 
decades later, when I think of that moment, my testicles retract into my 
abdomen and a vise clamps down on my head. That's how this chess player 
feels. He's let everyone down. His life is ruined. It's the end of the 
world, except it isn't, it's worse.
https://27thstreet.me/2024/07/21/double-rook-sacrifice-wins-in-9-moves/

Rerun: Bobby Fingers' documentary of producing an art diorama of the 
event where Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire while shooting a Pepsi 
commercial.
https://kottke.org/23/03/a-diorama-of-michael-jackson-on-fire

And an interactive U.S. traffic deaths map. Navigate, zoom in, click on 
the dots. (via BoingBoing)
https://roadway.report/beta

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