[Kzyxtalk] A Natalie Is Freezing Xmas.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: A Natalie Is Freezing Xmas.

/"Sometimes I feel that the biggest threat to humanity is information 
collapse: Our collective epistemology (the way we know what's true) is 
fragmenting, eroding our capacity for shared understanding and 
coordinated action. Humanity is becoming like an ant colony that's lost 
its pheromone trails (or the pheromones are counterfeit). Each ant races 
with purpose, yet the colony itself no longer knows where it's going. 
Like ants in a disturbed nest, we scatter in every direction, mistaking 
noise and anger for signal, and mistaking frenzy for purpose." –Cliff 
Pickover/

Marco here. Here's the recording of Friday night's (9pm PDT, 2025-12-19) 
almost eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 
KNYO.org, on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first 
three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in 
whole or in part. This time, Clifford Allen Sanders, 95 now, who's 
written a hundred stories, many of them collected in both published and 
yet-unpublished books, and all of them read on previous MOTA shows, 
phoned in from an assisted living facility in Oregon a little more than 
50 minutes into the show and stayed for 45 minutes. He has led an 
amazing life. I don't know if you've seen the movie Zelig, but Cliff 
Sanders is kind of an Okie Zelig character in the real world. One of his 
sons just got him an apartment in Eureka and he'll be moving there soon. 
Oh, right, also I should say that the recording begins with a few 
minutes of what was on before it, Terrence McKenna explaining about the 
origins of the Santa Claus myth in Amanita muscaria mushrooms and 
consequent psychedelic reindeer urine, DMT elves, and childlike sense of 
wonder.
https://memo-of-the-air.s3.amazonaws.com/KNYO_0675_MOTA_2025-12-19.mp3

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or 
kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your 
writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

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

The Monkees - Riu Chiu.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2025/12/riu-chiu.html

"Look at you, living in filth! You Nazarethians are garbage!"
https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2025/12/19

Space suits. About them. One of my favorite Robert Heinlein books is 
Have Space Suit, Will Travel. It's about a boy who earnestly wins a 
retired space suit in a soap ad jingle contest, fixes up the suit so 
it's airtight, plays with its radio outside at night, becomes kidnapped 
by human thugs in the employ of malevolent aliens, makes friends with a 
genius little girl and a kind of intelligent cat-deer creature (fellow 
captives), and ends up in a three-galaxy court of legitimate, serious, 
alien governments that are neither bad nor good but aloof. He has to 
speak on behalf of humanity, with the penalty, if they vote against us, 
of having Earth rotated out of spacetime to freeze in a pocket universe 
prison with no sun. He sees that that's likely, as it's just happened to 
another race of aliens as low on the totem pole as we are and, shaking 
and in despair, he says something to the entire assembly so defiant and 
stirring and heroic and perfect and /human/ that even thinking about it 
just now makes me burst out crying.
https://theawesomer.com/how-a-nasa-spacesuit-works/791585/

A big theater full of people all warmly and happily singing Creep. Look 
up covers of Creep on YouTube, they're all compelling. If they're done 
well, they work; if they're done poorly, they work better. "I'm a creep. 
I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?" It is an anthem.
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2025/12/people-having-fun-singing-creep.html

Finally, Pillar of Garbage, by Natalie is Freezing, from Season 6, 
Episode 2 (S6E2) of Community. "The band and song make fun of 1990s 
Lilith Fair-era alt-pop. It became, even in its never-finished form, a 
metafictional hit." The concept brings the Monkees to mind. They were 
equally fictional as a band, at first. They developed, though. Natalie 
is Freezing stopped where they started. Too bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wvfoHcz8k

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