“It’s not even halfway up the tires,” you say”

Once again I must assert that Taylor Swift is an android. A slinky blond with a pretty face who sings country and pop in revealing outfits, she was designed to appeal to the straight white male demographic. Android.

I wonder if includes classic Windows 1.0 error messages. We used to live in fear of the dreaded General Protection Fault.

Or, stop poaching fish in your dishwasher, which is evidently a thing.

Or, stop poaching fish in your dishwasher, which is evidently a thing.

Very good. For more, I strongly recommend Strunk and White: The Elements of Style, the best style manual ever.

Fun fact: the airplanes in Look Who’s Talking were in fact John Travolta’s personal planes. By all accounts he’s a skilled and highly qualified pilot.

I recently visited Hershey’s Chocolate World in PA, and took the ride showing how the chocolate is made. It was like a Disneyland animatronic ride designed by B-team imagineers the day after the Super Bowl while nursing cataclysmic hangovers. “Yeah yeah, sugar, cocoa and milk... let’s wrap this up and get the hell…

Reader’s guide for young people: the lead photo is a still from a famous episode of I Love Lucy (1951-57). Lucy and Ethel get jobs at a candy factory, then try and fail to keep up with the production line.

Fun fact: Gerrymandering goes back at least to 1812, when Mass. governor Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) signed a bill redistricting portions of the state. Detractors noted the resemblance of one of the new districts near Boston to a weird salamander, hence “Gerrymander”.

The date the airplane’s airworthiness certificate was issued is available in the FAA’s public records, which you can read online for free. Just type the airplane’s tail number into google; in the US they are in this format: N1243A.

The relationship between the nation’s bathroom functions and tv comics is old and storied. In the early ‘50s Milton Berle was a sensation. More or less everyone in American watched his variety show, and many bought then very expensive tv sets just so they could watch him at home. City water pressure plummeted every…

In the fall of 1964 my family took some time off from work and school to visit relatives in south central Mississippi. We got there in pretty good order (three days on two-lane blacktops) and were just settling in when the the ground started shaking and everything fell off the tables and shelves. Our first thought of…

Fun fact: the latest sunset does not occur on the solstice, but a few days later. In the mid-latitudes, it’s on 27 June, and is about one minute later due to the ellipticity of the earth’s orbit.

Top Secret!, Paramount Pictures 1984

Fun fact: Judge Judy is the highest paid performer on television. She earns nearly fifty million dollars a year.

Fun fact: the lead photo shows data entry operators manually typing data onto punch cards. From the ‘30s until well into the ‘70s punched paper cards were a primary means of storing and entering data*. Each card help up to 80 characters, represented by a pattern of small punched-free rectangular holes. I my own…

Fun fact: in the original Godfather the baby in the christening scene is Sofia Coppola. Diane Keaton later admitted that she had no idea how to hold a baby.

Pocket calculators reached the US market in 1971, the year I graduated from college. I did an undergraduate degree in physics on a Keuffel & Esser Log-Log Duplex Decitrig, the king of slide rules. And yes, I carried it in the leather case on my belt.

Sound on a vinyl record is represented as mechanical grooves, which can be seen under magnification. It always seemed to me that you could just make a hi-res optical scan of the record surface, then do everything else in software, akin to OCR. Has someone done this?