Fun fact: when I was little I thought going over Niagara Falls in a barrel was something people did at least once in a lifetime, for the heck of it. Like, I was convinced there were long lines of people, rolling barrels, waiting their turn to go over the falls.
You see, it was featured in so many of the things I read or watched, like adventure books, or comics, or cartoons, that I thought it must be part of a normal life thing. You went to Disneyland (well, that was featured in the comics), you visited the Grand Canyon, and well, of course you went over the falls in a barrel.
This type of razor-sharp hold on reality is why I spent vast amounts of time in childhood learning to walk really silently, to balance on a narrow ledge or to get out of ropes tying my hands together. Not to mention watching out for quicksand, and having plans if I should fall into it. Because my choice of entertainment had told me those skills were absolutely vital if I hoped to survive.
I remembered this as I tried to find an image for today’s blog. Another fun fact: Midjourney clearly didn’t read the same books I did as a kid, because “barrel tumbling over Niagara Falls” was unobtanium and I’m tired and not in the mood to fight it.
Why did I remember that?
Well, partly because I’m feeling guilty about not having finished reading The Man Who Sold The Moon — but it has been truly odd and stupid out here with occasional episodes of not sleeping — and I was thinking of stories of that period. A lot of it written by Clifford Simak.
And today, in the car, on the way to an appointment, when there was absolutely no way to write anything down, I thought of the opening to a Clifford-Simak like story, where the journalist comes in to the newspaper to finish a piece he’s been working on, and the robots are finishing cleaning up, the automated AI coffee machine is yelling because it ran out of grounds, and a spaceship is visible through the plate glass window taking off, in the distance.
Maybe some day I’ll write it, except that as of yet there is no story, just the man (?) going into the office in the early morning and dealing with what’s for him a completely normal bog standard start of the day, but to us is amazing and fantastical. Of course, when a story presents that way, usually starting to write it tells me where it’s going and what the story is. Don’t try this at home. if I’d done this as a beginning writer, I’d have pages and pages in which he fixed the coffee maker, drank the coffee, finished his article, went out for lunch– It’s just at this time in my life, I’ve written so many stories my subconscious only spits out the beginning when it is ready to tell ME the story. — brrr. Just got the cold suspicion that thing is a novel. So I’m going to let it lie until I have at least a week or two to run it from beginning to end.
Anyway, because I was in the car, and didn’t have the means of writing the story, it saved me from the stupid of starting it. (They lie in wait these novels. Worse than the dreaded Portuguese spider-fish under the sand on a sunny beach.) Instead I started thinking about how charming those Simak stories were, in a world that was very much like mid century America, only with sentient, fully automated houses that looked after their people by making them food and flying them around and stuff, or diners run by AI (though he didn’t use that term) who had the personality of motherly, gossipy middle aged women. I thought of his stories in which the newsroom was weirdly automated — not in the way you’d expect — or there were newsfeeds from the stars, or whatever, but they were still banging out the stories on typewriters.
And of course, news were produced, sold, consumed via newspapers.
Of course, the man was a newspaper man. And nothing against him for that, but also he was capable of working out chains of event and consequence. I know that, because I love his novels. But apparently not capable of working out that the kind of tech that gave you seemed-sentient robotic diners would also affect a whole lot of other things. A tech level where the house flew would probably have affected…. well, everything. Semi-sentient houses that fly would have blown up the mid-20th-century society and ethos all to heck and back.
Only of course, people don’t think like that. And even if they did, it would be hard to sell a story like that, because present-day-reader wouldn’t have an in. Meaning they couldn’t mentally move into the story and live there long enough to bond with the people and feel the emotions.
But you know, some things do remain the same. It’s just most classical science fiction assumed a lot more things would stay stable in the change of tech.
And …. we still do.
Recently I read (and linked at instapundit, though of course I can’t find it now) an article where the author was talking about how we’re hitting a massive changeover post in which all our institutions of knowledge are failing.
Our very own Sargent Mom did a post about our educational institutions passing away.
But the thing is…. it’s not just them. It’s everything.
We didn’t get the future of starships and flying houses. (Yet. I’m still holding out for starships and colonizing other planets. I’ll pass on flying houses.)
What we got instead seemed small and innocuous. it was the the ability to process vast amounts of data, so distributed that everyone has a mid-century computer in his pocket, and on his desk, pretty much. And these computers give us the ability to talk to anyone around the world. Oh, and to publish our own news and editorials to be read by thousands or millions. And … upend the world.
We started tumbling in the nineties with ecommerce and the internet, and Amazon and and and and–
And we haven’t stopped. Yes, it is completely making over our knowledge institutions, and the way we learn and communicate and–
A lot of things are passing away, some of which we need and will be surprised as they pass and might or might not have a replacement.
The thing is, when the barrel is going over the Falls, it’s difficult to tell what’s going to tumble, and what will move, and what will get broken. Or what will be functional in a weird way when we stop tumbling.
There is no way to know it.
My younger duct tape brother is telling me the responsible adults around him — well, I didn’t talk to the responsible adults around me, okay? — told him going over the Falls would kill him, even in a barrel.
Fortunately societies aren’t just fragile humans, and the barrel is a metaphor. As are the Falls.
The tumbling isn’t though.
There’s a good chance our society will be alive at the end of it — I’m not putting hands in the fire for Europe and I know other societies will break, badly — and functional. But I suspect we wouldn’t fully make sense of it if we were dropped in the middle of it today.
Fortunately, we’ll get there one day at a time, which makes it easier.
Just…. watch out for unstable floorboards (they make noise) and quick sand, and keep moving, stay flexible. I think it’s okay if you make some noise, but do learn out to get out of binds that you find yourself in.
Or in other words, remember everything is going to tumble and change. Big or small, everything is going to change. Everything.
We’re in the barrel. We’re tumbling.
Brace. Stay positive, stay alert, stay ready to shift and survive.
…. Be ready to take the weight when things come crashing down, because a lot of things will. Oh, not — hopefully — civilization, the monetary system, or technology. No. but the institutions, the certifications, the way things are done. The things human live by.
Remember that any of that could go away, and keep an eye on it.
Be nimble enough to see the next thing, to build the next thing. To create the future.
Stay ready. Keep going. If you fall, pick yourself up. If your buddy falls, pick him up.
And keep moving.
According To Hoyt 
“Then I noticed the dame at my desk, wearing my spare fedora and drinking my flask.”
(grin)
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Back to Calvin and Hobbs, with Tracer Bullett.
(“I’ve got 8 slugs in me. One’s lead and the others are bourbon.”) Good heavens, Calvin must have been as bad about reading every book his parents left lying out as I was.
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Hm. I -almost- quipped from that. (grin)
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Ah, but Calvin’s participles never dangled.
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Had no idea the spider fish was a real thing. Guess I’ll have to restrict myself to beach chairs and suntanning.
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The ocean is chock-full of things that would make H.R. Giger blanch.
“Hey, look at this new thing we pulled up from the deeps!”
“GAAAH! Put it back! And drop a couple of nukes down after it!”
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Believe it or not, reading about the spider-fish was less bad than what I had thought it was. I pictured fish hiding in the sand on the beach and wondered how they were able to survive out of the water like that. But since there are some fish that can breathe air (look up “airbreathing catfish” sometime), it wasn’t completely implausible to me that these were another example.
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I was absolutely sure quicksand was a quick, deadly death — until my 40s, when I learned that I had literally frolicked in it as a kid. Turns out the flash floods that frequently scoured the dry washes in the land of my youth left behind silt deposits that literally were quicksand. You sure wouldn’t want to try driving a vehicle over it, but it never endangered us kids in the slightest. Much to our mothers’ dismay, however, it did have a bad habit of swallowing our shoes…
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Your descriptions of practicing for escaping quicksand, walking silently, and balancing on a narrow ledge brought back many memories. Also trying to be Batman (in his world’s greatest detective era) Unfortunately I was more like Watson than Sherlock. I noticed everything but deduced nothing.
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Why did WP say my comment couldn’t be posted? There was nothing in it to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of innocence. (Assuming anyone is innocent around here).
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….. until proven guilty!
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It’s just WordPress being WordPress (Delenda Est). I think there’s a keyword filter in it, apparently undocumented, and controlled by an overcaffeinated minion.
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WP minion, not Sarah’s minion. She’s actually gone and looked when I figured out, through trial and error, some of the weirder auto-mod trigger words, and no such lever or list or incantation is to her admin access available. This also matches what I can see in the day job WP-backend web site for which I do admining.
WPDE.
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Sorry, did not think the minion would ever be under Sarah’s control, but I left that unstated.
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Quicksand usually isn’t very quick. However, park a piece of heavy equipment on it in the evening, and you might find it sunk out of sight the next morning. The builders of the NYS Thruway encountered that problem several times; as I’m sure builders throughout the ages have found too.
What is quick is walking across what you think is solid ground and finding it’s only cover over a bog. Vegetation acts like a net and can hold you under long enough to drown, and then you get preserved for hundreds of years until the bog dries up and some enterprising farmer or archeologist digs up your soapafied corpse.
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It was also a real problem when your horse suddenly started to sink and panicked. The river near where I live was infamous for that, and people hired guides after every major flood to find the firmer places so others could cross in safety. There was only one ford in 100 or so miles of river, all the rest changed after every good rain, or when the upstream spring runoff reached the valley.
Four-Wheel-Drive types still end up having to be pulled out using daisy-chains of bigger vehicles almost every year.
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Tractor’s Stuck is a fun parody of Thunderstruck by the Peterson Farm Brothers. What does one do when the tow-iest thing gets stuck?
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Pull it out with the bulldozer, of course! What? You don’t have a bulldozer? :-D
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When the tank retriever sinks out of sight a bulldozer won’t help.😉
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Answer: Suffer!
I only got the garden tractor stuck in mud. (Once. I know when and where to avoid it.) I was able to get it out with the “big” (compact utility) tractor and a length of towchain.
There’s a piece of meadow on the property that’s off limits to tractors in springtime. The above mentioned sticking place has hardpan shale 6-12″ below the surface. The meadow is probably 4-6 feet deep, with a soil largely pumice and a bit of clay. I try not to walk there.
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Fort Stewart, Georgia, aka Camp Swampy.
Watched our medics try to pivot steer an M113 APC between two trees. The tracks chewed through what turned out to be “crust” not “pinestraw turf”. Immediately, the spinning tracks excavated huge volumes of mud from underneath.
The APC sank like a stone, ground guides hollering STOPSTOPSTOP!!!
The driver cut the throttle, and the thing settled to within 2 inches of the top. Another quarter second and it would have submerged, likely killing all aboard.
Later, we sent recovery vehicles to extract it. it took -three- M88A1s to pull that thing back out of the bog.
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For those not in the know, those are Tank recovery vehicles. My first Guard unit had two.
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IIRC we lost an Army crew over in Latvia? about a month ago during a joint exercise when their armored vehicle went into a bog and just went bloop. Took a whole bunch of excavators and recovery vehicles to extract it.
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Lithuania. Took two days of work to get the thing out of the bog.
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The M88 weighs about 50-70 tons, depending on subtype and load. An M113 weighs about 15 tons loaded.
Surprised they got that 88 out at all, without strip-mining for it.
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M113 gonna weigh a whole lot more if it’s full of watery mud.
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Maybe we can convince some Lefties that Getting Into A Barrel To Go Over The Falls will save Gaia? [Very Big Evil Grin]
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Tell them Trump thinks it’s a bad idea. 🤣
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They would enjoy life in our colony on Venus.
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The one with the blanket trees, ham bushes and soap root?
March on !
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I remember seeing a news story back in the 90s I think describing how people would get their news in the future. They had a great deal correct. You would choose your news sources and the subjects you were interested in and the computer would provide you with the information you wanted. On the other hand, the computer printed out the articles at night so you could read them in the morning and the news sources were the dominant ones of the time.
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This is what I think of as the Flintstones/Jetsons brand of speculative fiction: the “technology” is different, but it’s all in the service of a lifestyle identical to the 1950s stereotype. I don’t mean to be too hard on Hanna Barbera here: the fact that the Stone Age/futuristic families were just like the ones they knew was a big part of the joke (like Judy whining about having to do the dishes when all that was involved was pressing a button). I’ve certainly noticed it in more serious fiction as well, where the problems of the main characters, no matter how different their circumstances, seem indistinguishable from the author’s. (Note to writers: if your characters live in a pre-industrial society where spinning, weaving, and sewing have to be done by hand, “being obsessed with clothes” has a very different connotation from the interests of your average 1980s teenager).
Incidentally, speaking of the Jetsons, I was thinking today that what I really envied about their lifestyle was their car. No, not that it could fly, but that it could fold up into a small, easy-to-carry briefcase. Can you imagine never needing to look for a parking place again?
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I guess you could be “obsessed with new stylish braided cord” or “obsessed with new tiny bands of embroidery to sew onto your existing clothes”. But first you’d have to finish surviving and stuff.
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Well, and the fact the concept “teenager” would be utterly alien to pre-industrial society denizenry.
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Check Pohl’s “Day Million”. The beginning:
“On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.”
The final line:
“Balls, you say, it looks crazy to me. And you—with your aftershave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night—tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?”
One of the best lines in SF.😎
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But the thing is…. it’s not just them. It’s everything.
Yes.
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Seriously though, your thoughts on Simak did make me think about the hazards of writing the near future. The story that is the intro to my latest (as soon as I finish the last story) book, I wrote in 1979 about a near future Los Angeles where all the exterior walls of the houses are solar panels/one-way mirrors, everybody works on “the set” and gets everything via “the chute”, nobody ever leaves home seemed oddly prescient during COVID and its aftermath. Only problem was I started with a very cute scene where “the set” died as CRTs used to, by fading in and out, etc. Had to go back and rewrite that part.
Sometimes I wonder how much about every day life that we had growing up is totally unknown to younger generations because, why would we think to tell them about such things? Just as my grandparents didn’t bother to tell me about life without indoor plumbing. I wrote a little about this when I wanted to pay a tribute to Warren Zevon’s song Carmelita https://frank-hood.com/2022/10/31/carmelita/, a song he wrote in 1972. I’m sure his lines, “I hear mariachi static on my radio, and the tubes, they glow in the dark,” make little sense to someone born in the digital age.
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—
The opening line of “Neuromancer” made no sense. “The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” That was black and white static on the TV we had at the time. Years later, I saw some newer TVs that had a solid blue background between channels.
Decades later, I saw a TV that had a grayish background. Ah, perhaps Gibson had a TV like that. But did TVs do that 1984?
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In 1984, it wasn’t so much the type of TV but whether you got your reception by antenna or cable. If your TV was connected to cable, then non-used channels were gray, black, or blue depending on the cable provider’s choice I suppose. If you had an analog TV that used an antenna to receive broadcast signals, then you got the black and white static.
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Thank you! Up to now, I am the only person I’ve ever encountered with this complaint, and everybody dismissed the actual wrongness of that line as “it’s just style, man” or an extended rationalization of why Chiba City would have black and white fleck static in the sky at night.
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Ummm…on color TVs the static was in color, too. :-P Not much color, but some.
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Color TVs! Imagine that! Actually that’s all I could do until I went to college where the dorms had color TVs and I discovered what a Red-Shirt was. :)
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The current joke that some comedian’s tell:
“We had 3 channels!” <- Nope, only had two. ABC and NBC.
Dad and mom had 3 named TV remotes <- Whichever kid was closest.
“Be the TV antenna.” <- Yep. This happened. Stand there and hold it in place.
Color TV? I was in college before I saw one. Folks didn’t have one until I graduated college and married. Which is just before the youngest graduated HS.
Of coarse it was possible to live where there was no TV.
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As to your comments, I’m surprised you had ABC. ABC was the latecomer as a network, consigned to UHF in my area, and your TV had to have a UHF receiver.
As to the 3 remotes, ditto. I also served as translator for the NAZIs on Combat! because I took German in high school. I swear the six guys in that squad must have killed off a whole division of Germans.
I wasn’t a human TV antenna, but I remember spending an afternoon on the roof repositioning our antenna to try to catch those faint LA stations.
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ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS. I served as remote control and rabbit-ears adjuster. The PBS station made most of its own programming and I remember it fondly. We got a color TV when Wonder Woman was on prime time, and I was impressed that she really did wear red, white, and blue.
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Taking me down nostalgia road. Remember Dialing for Dollars? Seems every city had one guy hosting old movies in the afternoon with lots of commentary and the call-in game of course. Then late night from LA we had Seymour hosting old SF movies that he made fun of. An ancestral version of Elvira and MST3K. One of his schticks was his slimy wall. I was impressed when Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood showed his show on in the background without making anything of it.
Doggone it, now you’ve got me thinking about the radio DJ wars of the 60’s that were probably before your time. Darn, I’m old! LOL
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Local non-network station KTVU in the SF Bay Area had Creature Features with host Bob Wilkins, showing old SF and horror movies every Saturday night starting around 9pm from 1971 to 1979, and then hosted by John Stanley from 1979-1984. Creature Features in teh Bob Wilkins era had huge ratings, beating the network stuff including Saturday Night Live regularly.
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Very popular for the Late Late Show — before the station signed off until morning. Dead channels were a daily occurance.
(I once saw an excellent poster for a church: Vampire, woman, crucifix — and the words “Are your children learning about the power of the cross on the Late, Late Show?”)
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In my area, all three TV stations went to a half hour of “news” at 10PM. Then they’d start playing some TV show – usually British – but it would be an hour-long show, and they went off the air at 11PM. Still broadcasting the test pattern, so presumably it cost the same whether they ran a show or not.
I saw the first half of most episodes of “Space:1999” and “UFO”, and a couple of seasons of “The Avengers” that way.
We got cable in the mid-’80s, but it wasn’t until much later that I got to the the last half of all those episodes.
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Yeah, on reflection I think Creature Features started after the news, so more like 10:30 or 11:00. The stupidpedia entry has a 9:00pm premiere time, but I don’t remember it being that early.
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Cincinnati, Dayton, and a lot of other tristate cities had color TVs in fair numbers, fairly early.
Because Ruth Lyons, on The Ruth Lyons Show, had her show in color fairly early.
And she used to show her studio audience on TV and then describe some of the outfit colors, for the b&w viewers and the radio listeners, and do other things for the b&w viewers and radio listeners. And then she’d do her ad for the TV manufacturer that was a sponsor.
And to be fair, her sets were pretty nice, and her celebrity guests wore nice colorful outfits too.
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Indeed white and black random flecks with occasional pops of color. Mostly because US color TV was created by superimposing (heterodyning?) the color signals on top of the existing signal, so existing hardware worked unmodified. This had some odd side effects. One was that old color TVs would have a high pitched whine as they approached failure when displaying white letters/lines on a black background. This was because the luminance (brightness essentially) signal had been heterodyned onto the audio and the comb filters aged capacitors were leaking some of the luminance value into the audio signal, usually at the high frequencies. Early Games like Pong or Combat made this REALLY obvious as they tended to be white lines on a black or deep blue background.
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Usually that’s just the flyback transformer ‘singing’ at 15,734 cycles per second. Used to be 15,750 but they shifted the line and frame rates slightly to make the composite color system work better. As the transformer aged, the varnish would become brittle and allow the powdered iron core to vibrate at that teeth-setting-on-edge frequency.
I used to work at a TV station back in the 1970s. I still remember that the color subcarrier was 3.579545 MHz, and the Y (luminance) channel was 30% red, 59% green and 11% blue. Audio was inserted by a separate transmitter tuned 4.5 MHz ‘above’ the video signal. There really wasn’t much chance of interaction between the video and audio signals.
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When I was a kid that was a big problem; the transformer screeching in the background. My parents couldn’t hear it, and it annoyed them when I would turn the volume up so I could hear something over the screech.
I was in my 20s when I lost the ability to hear in that range. Unfortunately, the loss has continued to the point that even with hearing aids, I have trouble making out voices.
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There had been a number of stories about first setting foot on the moon. What none of the authors dreamed of was that would be half a billion people watching on live television. The Apollo 11 camera and audio signal was received by the big DSN dish at Honeysuckle Creek in Australia, retransmitted to Houston via geosynchronous communications satellite, processed, then rebroadcast around the word by other communications satellites.
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And the Apollo 11 downlink video was a lot higher quality than what made it from Oz over AT&T underwater lines to the various TV networks around the world, but the locally recorded NASA direct-to-tape reels of that clean signal which came down on that dish have been lost.
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NASA didn’t just lose those tapes; they lost a bunch of stuff from other missions, and the Mars and Venus probes too. Pretty cavalier for something that cost so much to get.
Theoretically the tapes were public domain, but other than occasional shares with academia and aerospace contractors, NASA squatted on its hoard like a dragon until it lost interest and tossed the tapes out in the trash.
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There are two treasures still around on the internet. One is the “Apollo Flight Logs. These are transcripts of ground to spacecraft and internal spacecraft audio transmissions for all the manned Apollo missions. The second are the “Real Time Apollo” accounts where extensive video, audio, and photos have been pieced together for Apollo 11, 13, 15, and 17. Real time means that the account is second by second for the full duration of the mission (including hours of static during rest periods unless you want to listen to internal ground communications). Perfect for binge watching.
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“…I thought it must be part of a normal life thing. You went to Disneyland (well, that was featured in the comics), you visited the Grand Canyon, and well, of course you went over the falls in a barrel.”
And all in the same day!
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Right? :D
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“The Werewolf Principle.” I first read it when I was in elementary school, and was fascinated the idea of a whole commensal robot civilization living in parallel with the human one, without one being subordinate to the other.
It was just some throwaway backstory, but sometimes its those throwaway bits that grab my attention.
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I love the Werewolf Principle. used to be my favorite novel.
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Okay, (1), where can I preorder that book?
(2), we share an era, if not a locale. Quicksand and Яussians everywhere, the Falls clogged with bobbing barrels, and the future with specific but oddly not general changes. And I still love the speculative fiction of the variously-defined Golden Era.
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aye. I love it too. If you search the blog for the Future of the Past you’ll see the project I’m involved in with such fiction.
As for the book….. I have a dozen others in the way.
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It wasn’t my post: It was John Carter’s Postcards from Barsoom – I just linked to it, because it was interesting. And I really, really like the notion of education as a sort of self-directed exercise for the mind, of pursuing knowledge because one loves the subject … not jumping through the academic hoops on the way to getting a useless certificate.
I was able to pursue my own degree in English lit because I loved the topic, and enjoyed the process, and not because I expected to get anywhere with the degree. Oh, it did guarantee that I could write with some degree of expertise, use correct grammar and spelling – but that was it. Everything I did after college was building on the basis of that general education.
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That’s what I did, only with History (though I took a lot of English Lit. I just didn’t want to take Chaucer). Nowadays you have to take the Bob Dylan method if that’s still possible. I always intended to make my living by writing–fool that I was. But what goes around comes around as they say.
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Our Hostess wrote
Actually what we have in our pockets far surpass most large computers of the 20th century,
Comparing what is in my pocket to 3 major “super computers” of the 20th century
Period Apple phones are similar to my S22 an Iphone 13 is ~1Tflop, Iphone 16 is 2Tflops plus.
So a modern cell easily surpasses the best late mid century computer (cdc 6600) by 5-6 orders of magnitude. It surpasses a Late 20th century super computer by almost 2X in flops.
Cost? The CDC 6600 was $6-10 Million (62 million cost adjusted to 2025 dollars), The SV 1 was a paltry $500,000- 1 million (just shy of 1 million cost adjusted for the base model). I think I dropped $750 ($815 adjusted Darn you Biden you ex Turnip in chief) on the S22 in December of 2022 when my S20 fried itself. so the cost is inversely 4-5 orders less than that of the CDC 6600. So cost/flop is something like 9-11 orders of magnitude less. I’d venture to say NOTHING else has had that kind of change in human history over a span of ~60 years.
What we do on our phones was JUST starting to be a concept in the ’90s. We have seen the change gradually. It is well and away as amazing as flying cars if not more so in many ways, based on where we were when I started working in the industry in 1983
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Cost and quality of steel, 19th century. Crappy steel little better than surface hardened pigiron was a semi-precious metal in 1800. By 1900 we were making cheap toys out of steel beyond the wildest imagination of 1800. And up went cities the like of which had never seen. Steel cost dropped something like four or five orders of magnitude.
Absent Carnegie, almost none of the 20th century is possible. Of all the improvements in steelmaking, his most important one was to make good steel a cheap commodity.
Iron-mongery was nearly static for five thousand years, trivial refinements at best. Then, in less than 100 years, we jumped to supermetal that was cheap and commonplace.
Note: this is why the Marxoids try to demonize him to this day. Carnegie uplifted far more humans than any “progressive” ever did. (or “all” proggies.)
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Truly the change from wrought iron to steel is amazing and critical to the modern word (we use the stuff as practically disposable look at cans. But is it 10 -12 orders of magnitude better? Darn it Jim I’m an ex Software Engineer not a mechanical engineer. Tensile strength of base steel is maybe 4 orders of magnitude better than base Iron wrought or cast iron. Some of the modern variant alloys add maybe a magnitude or two. I suspect it’s a macro effect versus a micro effect. It is REALLY hard to get 10+ order’s of magnitude with something strictly physical.
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The Washington Monument was capped in 1884 with an 8.9 inch 100-ounce pyramid of cast aluminum. At that time aluminum was a precious metal, the same price at $1.10 per ounce the same as silver. Two years later, Hall invented the electrolytic aluminum process. Now we throw pop cans away.
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Though we shouldn’t throw aluminum cans away; they’re one of the very few materials that actually makes economic sense to recycle. Costs less to get good aluminum out of recycled cans than out of ore.
… Which is why, in some parts of the world, you’ll see people digging through trash cans, pulling out the aluminum cans, and sticking them in humongous plastic bags. Then when the bags (that hold maybe 300-400 cans) are full, they haul them off to the local recycling center on their bicycle. They make enough money for daily food that way.
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My husband once pointed at my watch and said it was the second-most powerful computer I’d ever had. Then he thought a minute and corrected himself, because it was third—behind my phone.
It’s true. My family’s first computer was a Vic20, where the 20 stood for K of RAM. It used a cassette tape drive for a couple of exterior programs.
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My first computer (early ’80s) was an AppleII+, with (IIRC) 64k of RAM; I added a CP/M board to allow running a better word processor than the Apple crap. It was not cheap; ~ $2k plus another $200 or so for a second floppy drive. 10 years later it was replaced with a 486/33 PC, with 1MB of RAM and a 200 MB (woo-hoo!) hard disk. Upgraded to 16MB of RAM for “only” ~ $400, and got one of the first WD 1GB disks when they came out.
Now I’m running Win 10 on a 3.5GHz Pentium on a Dell XPS8100 board from my wife’s old computer from ~ 2008, with 16GHz RAM and dual 2TB SSDs, with other associated “stuff”. No need for more; I’m not a gamer. And I’ll probably use it until it croaks.
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Same.
Started with an Apple IIe with CP/M capability, and two 5.25″ Floppy drives. That computer was still working after 12 years when I donated it to the after school care class for kids games. I hadn’t been using it for a few years, but parents had it for a few.
Next computer was a Gateway with a hard drive.
Currently using a 3 year old MS Surface Tablet 16 GB RAM and 256 GB flash drive. Since the mechanical spin drives are usually what wear out, I won’t replace it until the battery fails (even then, already out of warranty, we’ll see what is available after market). Also not a gamer. Nor a programmer, anymore. This will work for me.
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“…my subconscious only spits out the beginning when it is ready to tell ME the story.”
Yeah, I got a whole novel out of a shoe lying in an alleyway. That one began as a comment at MGC. ~:D
First thing that happens after the detective finds the shoe, he finds the foot that it belongs to. The very next thing that happens is a rain of giant spiders. And by giant I mean as big as a Harley.
Because this is my brain.
As to the rest of it, much will change but much more will not. People will still eat, still drink, go to the bathroom, be born, die, etc.
However, -institutional- arrangements like your newsroom may change completely.
For example, the Director of the FBI was having a cigar with Joe Rogan a couple days ago. He talked non-stop for hours, in an unstructured interview, which was transmitted unedited.
That is a new thing. That happened because the Lamestream Media is dead. It died. Suicide, from my perspective. It’s all down to the fact that I will not watch those schmucks on CNN play gotcha with public officials, but I will watch Rogan talk to those same officials. The reasons why don’t really matter in this context, just the bare facts are enough.
Joe Rogan doesn’t have a “newsroom” filled with guys chugging out scripts and talking-points for him. He’s a comedian and an ex-MMA fighter. He sits down with the FBI director and says “Hey Cash, nice to see you man, what’s up?” Then Cash Patel lights up a stogie and TELLS HIM what’s up, for two hours.
And I learn that the Fentanyl crisis is killing 40,000 Americans per year. Which sounds bad. So I looked it up, and found that the Vietnam war killed 58,000 American men from 1955 to 1975. And then I did the other big wars: Korean War, roughtly 12,000 a year for three years. WWII, 405,399 from 1941-1945, 100K/year. WWI, 53,402 1917-1981.
I also learn that the Director of the FBI and the President think that the Chicoms are doing this deliberately, as an act of war.
I also learn that Canada is in this up to our necks. And that a lot of it is happening down the road from me on the Six Nations Reserve, funded by China, India and Iran.
And then yesterday the OPP busted a drug ring that operates up and down a road I drive on all the time.
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2025/06/11/when-they-say-canada-doesnt-have-a-fentanyl-problem/
46 kilos of fentanyl is just over 100 pounds. The news article says that’s enough to k1ll a small city, but as usual they are bad at math. F@tal dose is 2 milligrams. 1 kilogram is 1,000,000 milligrams. That’s 500,000 f@tal doses per kilo. Times 46. That’s 26,000,000 doses. Enough to see off half the nation.
Sharp eyed readers will discern that the Danforth Shooter’s cousin had a similar amount of carfentanyl in his apartment waaaay back in 2018, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and TV was in black and white. Of interest in this regard is that the AI Assistant for Duckduckgo states “Despite a lengthy investigation, authorities were unable to determine a clear motive for his actions, although mental health issues were noted as a significant factor.”
What is Canada’s #1 priority right now, according to the government? Climate change. Okay? This is where we are.
Which is why A) the news is dead and B) Cash Patel is on Joe Rogan instead of CNN and C) that I still have to connect my own dots, but at least I CAN connect them, thanks to a long memory and a suspicious nature, despite Them frigging with the AI and the search stuff.
The future? Everyone will still be eating, sleeping, and putting their pants on one leg at a time the same as always. We are Humans, we do not change. Even if they mess with our DNA, that will remain the same unless we all get turned into newts or something.
But everything else? Imagine a guy from 1825 coming here and discovering the crap we all put up with every day. He’d freak out. It’ll be like that, and it’ll happen so fast you won’t even believe it.
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I heard it was over 100,000 fentanyl ODs per year down here. That’s like 300 a day. 10 times as many as ‘gun violence’ which is a Public Health Crisis! But, fentanyl? Who cares? Certainly not the ‘compassionate’ Leftroids.
Besides, isn’t MAID the ‘leading’ cause of death in Canuckistan?
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MAiD is not yet the leading cause of death in Canuckistan. But they’re working hard on that, currently I think it is #9 after car accidents, cancer and heart stuff. Death by gunshot wounds are waaaay down around #50 or lower.
There are nearly 10,000 -deaths- per year in Canada from fentanyl, last year we have numbers for is 2023 and it was 8,500 some-odd, things have not improved. I add that numbers from Canada are getting pretty bendy, and may or may not reflect Reality (TM) with high confidence.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that’s what it is. 8,500 in a year, every year since Covid, is a lot. Putting it into historical perspective, Canada lost 66,755 in WWI over 1914 to 1918, that’s 16,000-ish per year. We’re losing nearly half or more what we lost in the worst war we ever fought, and nobody cares. The justice system is playing catch-and-release with these goons.
To reiterate, our government’s priority is climate change. Oh, and fighting #OrangeManBad. That’s important too.
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I’ve heard just 75k fent.
Still 7.5k total shooting rate (1), which comingles licit shootings and wrongful shootings.
Anyway, If Floyd was on par with an excuse for shutting down significant chunks of US economy, surely the current rate of opioid deaths is at least as much? Hence, tariffs, etc. from Canada’s support of the PRC fent trafficking stuff.
(1) from a different year.
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Gun deaths in the USA are about equal to 40,000. That’s including all sources. In Canada there are about 300. Making fentanyl a -much- bigger deal here, percentage wise.
To Sarah’s point though, I can guarantee you that zero Canadians in 2000 were thinking that by 2025 we’d be living in Cold Mexico complete with cartels. That’s a Future Shock worthy of Alvin Toffler.
When I say that #Liberals aren’t idiots they’re criminal saboteurs, this is what I mean. You can’t make Canada into Cold Mexico in 25 years by accident.
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“Even if they mess with our DNA, that will remain the same unless we all get turned into newts or something.”
I got better!
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The funny thing is, I suspect we will get the flying houses, just in space.
Space habitats seem like the easiest and lowest cost way to colonize the solar system. But I suspect they won’t end up as giant single fab systems that everyone buys a patch of and lives on it.
Rather, I expect them to become modular frames that link up utilities and work spaces that are easiest to run at scale, and people hook their houses into them. And when (or if) you change jobs or hab, you have your house towed to its new home.
Someone who likes to live light, or just starting out on their own may have little more than a sleeping pod and a storage locker, and rely almost entirely on the hab facilities. While someone more established, or just more inwardly turned may well have whole orchards built into their homestead. But moving is going to be way harder, what with the extra mass, and much larger impact to the colony as a whole.
Even so, I could see someone who’s entire profession is oxygen farmer for the hab, with their meticulous kept greenery for converting the hab CO2 into human usable O2 and other produce.
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Or whole cities, via spindizzy.
Remember Thor V!
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💀And for those who don’t remember it;
Black with their blood was the brick of that barrow
Toppled the tall towers, crushed to the clay.
None might live who flouted Maalvin
Earth their souls spurned spaceward, wailing.
IMT
Made the sky
Fall!
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Visualize Houseboats. Big in Portland both on the Willamette and Columbia. Also in Puget Sound. Anything from a true house to self propelled yachts and smaller boats. England and Europe have canal boats.
For that matter Motorhomes, tiny homes, and trailer/5th wheels. Which TPTB really hate, because you can just pack up and move your lodging. They want us in parole controlled apartments using only public transportation, and liking it.
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I am absolutely obsessed with those magic tents from Hary Potter that look like something you can barely.kay down in inside and they’re fully funished homes with bathrooms on the outside. I would pay a lot for one of those.
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Non-Euclidean architecture! I love it.
I also like non-Euclidean geography. It’s so fun.
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The future is what we make it. Lets make it better than today, but lets still torture our characters to the delight and titillation our readers, if any, our muse demands it be so. The muse only dangles the story in front of you because she knows you can’t do anything with it in the car, so instead of working on something she knows you need it feeds pablum to your brain to makes sure you are still alive. I think my muse hates me, oh look a squirrel.
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/Recently I read (and linked at instapundit, though of course I can’t find it now) an article where the author was talking about how we’re hitting a massive changeover post in which all our institutions of knowledge are failing.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ten-warning-signs
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That is correct.
Points are more or less accurate.
Over all, I go about half ‘that is clearly correct’, and one third ‘is sorta off’.
He is sorta correct to identify the humanities/behavioral academci fields as covering critically important answers.
But, the fundamental problem there is that displacing liberal arts with critical theory has resulted in a change to the behavior patterns that underlie PMC providing services to clients.
Freedom of speech is effectively based on the premise that word magic cannot witch anyone, and that there is an objective reality that is what it is, without any regard for the things that we might say about it. IE, the things we previously called civil society were based on a consensus about which kind of magical spells did not actually have the power to witch anyone or everyone.
For some academic generations now, bad answers have pushed out good answers.
(Perhaps king among those is government intervention centric economcis pushing out Austrian economics, particularly when it comes to academia assigning a valuation to the products of academia. )
But, if word magic witchcraft is real and important, then it might be very important to have politics in factions, so that one’s own faction could do the protective magics that are the only way to protect against the magics of the opposing faction. The magics of the opposing faction are of course the source of all ill.
A couple years ago, I was reasonably confident that academic engineering had still retained tools and mindsets such that it was actually possible to be a scholar in engineering, and to talk to people within the field and potentially resolve disputes and differences of opinion. I may have since lost my mind, and gone blackpill.
Anyway, a lot of the long term suckers for university promises have in pursuit of humanities driven themselves insane from a US cultural perspective.
Some amongst the insane are no longer of American culture, and in particular are deeply worried about how they have been witched through the languages by people in ancient prehistory. They fear that other faction persons can witch them again by speaking of Jesus, of mathematics, or of common understandings from five or thirty years ago, or of some prior cohort or generation.
With them, the peace consensus does not hold, because they have chosen savagery.
They have attempted to patch the formal legal system to continue to operate with them involved.
Arguably, they have actually made it less persuasive to everyone.
Reiterating prior conclusion:
1. There needs to be some sort of reform to medical practice and to medical research.
2. I do not know whether engineering education can endure at universities, but my intuition remains that the future of engineering training is at schools that are not universities, and which do not offer what we have called the undergraduate degree.
3. State Bar exams need to be opened up to everyone, explicitly including JDs, and JDs are probably going to need to cope with the painful friction of all the idiots which being so inclusive will add to the practice of law.
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On point (3) — the tribal gatekeepers must maintain control over who is allowed into the Sacred Practice Of Law. And Medicine, definitely Medicine. Where would we be if we had Too Many doctors and nurses? Why, that might make medical treatment more available to more people, and drive costs down! Who could live with that?
Of course a harsh, unforgiving universe they don’t understand, that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about their preciousss feelings, plays no part in their problems.
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Lots of arguments that I can find may also work against me.
Relevant to many of my claims about universities, credentials, expertise, PhDs, professions, etc., is that I am butthurt because of my feefees.
I may have my own problems to fix, but those seem hard. I’m more confident trying to analyze a big mess of assertations, and then shouting that I am correct. Being angry distracts me from awareness of my problems, but it also distracts me from fixing my behavioral issues.
Anyway, to some extent Austrian economics argues that I am wrong to just write off a bunch of scholarship as being garbage. A similar argument to why Fauci might be wrong to shut down the economy on his say so, might well apply to me and my dooming on tertiary education, etc.
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Years and years ago FermiLab had a weird result that suggested FTL communications happened. It was pointed out that they (at the time) did NOT go “Ooh, fantastic discovery!” but “We have a result that should be impossible. HELP!” and eventually it was found there was a weird communication setup that made the test result APPEAR to be FTL, but really was not. And that is how things are supposed to be. Don’t trust UNTIL verified.
One of my favorite true stories in history is the (re?) discovery of X-rays. Roentgen was attempting something he knew was considered impossible in a sort of “Let’s just check on that, shall we?” and sure enough, it WAS impossible. But serendipity… serendipped.. and suddenly a new part of the spectrum opened up and medicine advanced.. because one physicist said, “Oh yeah?” and Did Something.
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A family member who was a Roentgenologist (now called radiologist) went on partial pilgrimage and genuflected at the University of Wurtzberg where Roentgen had his lab. Everyone else was somewhat amused and/or befuddled.
Said family member also bowed to the original X-ray in the museum in Berlin.
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I, too, can pass on the flying house, but I still want my flying car, Gosh darnit!
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We have enough problems already with idiots in non-flying cars. Can you imagine the mayhem if they flew, too? :-o
Talk about lifestyle changes, could anybody before the 1960’s have imagined that 50+ people would die from traffic collisions every day? And we’d think nothing of it?
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It would have a profound thinning effect on the number of idiots, though. At quite a price, granted, but still. Our culture is far too safe, which allows idiots and socialists to flourish without consequence. Consequences need to make a comeback.
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Unfortunately the idiots have this annoying tendency to kill innocent people, and not themselves. :-(
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Exactly why I don’t particularly object to drunk driving on motorcycles. Yes, they can kill someone, but most likely it will just be themselves.
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So there are some cases where we assume that ‘removing A leaves a concentration of B’, and it may not be true.
amusingly, idiot removal might be such a case.
Yes, cetarus paribus, we would expect fewer idiots from removing what we can approximate a bit are idiots.
However, most of the idiot removal proposals are likely to be a bit stressful and traumatic for the survivors. If one starts out sheltered enough, hearing about a fatal accident can be a bit upsetting.
Anyway, there would be enough wreckage per death that the actually upsetting parts of clean up would stress a few people more.
Fallout would probably not be as theoretically neat, or strong as ‘the stress and trauma inflicted would cause a lot of people to be that much stupider’.
LOL, what do I know, it is pretty much bed time.
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One of the most interesting predictions I have seen of late is that, for ground cars, once the self driving stuff matures insurance companies will force it’s use for almost all driving, with simply outlandish rates and some roadways off limits for any self-driven ground vehicles.
I imagine flying cars will be much more along those lines, operable only at significant remove from actually maneuvering them by hand, making my painfully accrued aircraft piloting skills another in the useless pile, like operating a dial telephone, gapping points in a tune up, or pretty soon the ability to drive a vehicle with a stick shift.
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Change happens at its own pace, and it’s on each of us to be as prepared as we can be. Clothes & weapons: some assembly required, and with our luck it will be dark at the time. Practice!
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The smartphone in my pocket has more power than the Cray Y-MB from 1988:
https://thewriterinblack.com/2019/05/24/computers-how-far-weve-come/
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You could make a short comic bit out of the newspaper man if the story he is writing up is something we wouldn’t find news. That is, give it a punch line instead of a plot.
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There’s an old story about two newspapermen in a hotel lobby when a naked Babe Ruth comes running through, chased by a woman with a knife.
“That would make quite a story,” one said.
“Yep, if we’d seen it,” the other replied.
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Today’s shiny object/squirrel (with apologies to squirrels) is Sen. Alex Padilla of CA, who barged into Kristi Noem’s DHS briefing and apparently assumed Security would both know him on sight and defer to his exalted status. Uh, no. Which is why Senator Padilla wound up face down on the floor outside the presentation room.
Not arrested, and got private time with Noem after his identity was confirmed…and after the briefing. But still, the schadenfreud is strong with this one.
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“Do you know who I am?”
“Why, did you forget?”
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Oddly what he was apparently shouting as he barged in was something along the lines of “There’s something I have to know!” for which the answer should have been “Have you heard of a thing called ‘Google’?”
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Lucky Senator Padilla. With tensions as they are (C.F. Brian Thompson and Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim) he is extraordinarily lucky he didn’t end up with one (ore more) sucking chest wounds. I shall need to borrow our Hostess’ shocked face as I am Shocked! Shocked I tell you to find that a Senator from the great state of California is a grandstanding dumbass.
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speaking as a member of the last tranche of people who learned to use a slide rule, I find the pace of change somewhat amusing. I suspect that the ability to focus will become ever more valuable as the amount of noise multiplies.
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If a flying house lands near you on chicken feet, run away very fast.
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My grandparents had a cabin up on the Canadian border, and along one of the 2-lane highways through Bottineau had signs in the ditch, “Beware of quicksand.” That, combined with all my old TV shows and movies that I watched had me convinced that learning how to get out of quicksand was a must-have skill set. Alas, my fears were overblown, as I’ve never yet encountered it while out walking. I’m fairly disappointed.
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I too have never found it in real life.
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Some of the tidal river muck near my home approached quicksand levels. It was kind of like the odd ooblek in that it was vaguely non-newtonian. Step on it hard and you were ok stand still and you sank in. Oh and it was inhabited by angry fiddler crabs that were NOT pleased you were in their territory lest you take their females. Basically avoided by locals, non local fisherman would end up losing boots and shoes in it.
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Speaking of things tumbling….
https://x.com/MichelleMaxwell/status/1932831889238474805
Sooprise, Sooprise……
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Only surprised that it’d be so obvious. Isn’t there a saying (I forget the specifics and the source) that any entrenched institution will eventually start behaving as if it’s controlled by a cabal of its enemies? Well, for the institution known as the USA, that cabal is the Democrats; and the Democrats themselves are starting to follow the maxim as well.
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unfortunately, the original source appears to be a satirist
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Yeah, that sounds right. I think it was in the context of conservative politics: if you assume every conservative organization is controlled by a cabal of its enemies, all the stupid decisions will make sense. Considering the complete stranglehold on news & public opinion that our enemies used to have, it’s not wholly inaccurate; they did exercise a lot of control that way.
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…. Be ready to take the weight when things come crashing down, because a lot of things will. Oh, not — hopefully — civilization, the monetary system, or technology. No. but the institutions, the certifications, the way things are done. The things human live by.
“What’s your plan, Doctor?”
“Do what I always do. Improvise.”
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“Make mistakes! Confuse your enemies!”
Back when it was good.
Doctor Who, RIP…
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I think automobiles were plenty dangerous at least as far back as the 1950s, or where did songs like “Teen Angel” come from? I hazard a guess that automobiles are nowadays safer than ever, there’s just so many more driving on the same old streets!
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These days automobiles are so safe it’s almost impossible to die in a car crash. The only deaths you hear about are “thrown through the windshield”. Gee, guess who wasn’t wearing their seatbelts? Of course, “hit by a brick from a mostly peaceful man on an overpass,” might be becoming a close second. “Your Honor, it only took him 5 minutes to kill that entire family in their beds. 99% of his life he was peaceful.”
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“Thrown out of the vehicle” is popular locally, so are head-on collisions where both parties are going 55+. Hint – smashing into a Mack’s front bumper when you are both doing 70 MPH will defeat seatbelts and airbags.
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–
Vehicle VS Mack truck anywhere even just the tires, at any speed, tends to shorten lifespan for all occupants in the vehicle. Seatbelts just insures recovery finds everyone in the vehicle. Same with going off cliffs. I’d say “through guard rails” but there a lot of highways out west where it is a long way down with a lot of nothing between you and the bottom, there are no guardrails, limited earth beyond the white line (seriously, take the head on, or drive into the cliff off the other side of the road), and it is a long, long, way down.
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Aaaaand, Israel has struck Iran and is expecting a counterstrike. Looks like Greta and Co got deported just in time.
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God grant that we got our ships out of the Gulf. East of the Straits of Hormuz, it’s possible to set up a defense in depth.
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And right on cue, Iranian state media are talking about children being killed in the strike. Oh, and by the way, the top leadership of the Republican Guard got taken out, but think of the children!!!!!
(Legal Insurrection has a live feed).
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No doubt kids did get killed. The IAF hit the top of the Iranian military and the top of the Iranian nuke program in their beds. Kinda like the Israelis got hit on 7 October, and some other notorious nights.
If the Mad Mullahs had restrained their own homicidal mania, those kids would be alive.
I certainly hope the average decent Iranian comes to their senses and give the Mad Mullah weirdbeards a taste of the cross, four nails each. Absent that, things may get more spicy for a week or two.
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“Kinda like the Israelis got hit on 7 October…”
If you find a picture of a dead Iranian girl in the back of a pickup truck and Israeli soldiers posing with their boots on her, then I’ll say it’s similar.
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kinda like
darkness, dude, it was after lights out.
I would have assumed a “misread” required actual malice on that one. Did you genuinely just walk into the doorframe? On oopsident?
lol.
Just for the record, i hope the Israelis kick Mad Mullah ass so hard the 33rd century says WTF just happened?
Fortunately, they are trying to get the locals to wipe off the dingleberries, via opening a can of whoopass on some key players, instead of just saying “done with your shit. This ends today” followed by opening a bunch of canned sunshine and glassing 10 million Persians.
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Yeah.
Seems like a good evening to lube a couple bolt carrier groups, and keep the things handy.
Will froggy come courtin’ to my middle of nowhere? I expect not, but a little visual inventory and convenient placement might not be a bad plan.
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Don’t neglect the potential for cultures to reverse course. In my to-be-finished-someday Space Guard novel, society has become much more conservative. Older adults arranging meetings between eligible young adults. Men marrying women significantly younger than they are. And so forth.
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I FULLY expect that, actually. NOT what I was talking about.
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I actually was thinking earlier today about chiming in on Celia’s Chicago Boyz post on that.
I think letting go of that desire was the correct choice.
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Now, we find out if Iran did assemble some basic nuclear weapons.(Little Boy “gun” device, same as the South Africans built.)
I suspect that event was the trigger. Either Mossad found out either that they had weapons or that they started assembly.
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Since they were enriching uranium instead of doing anything with plutonium, I’d bet a gun-type device was their plan all along.
That’s the type a US grad student designed and built save for the fizzy and splodey bits at one of the east coast US universities for his PhD thesis a few decades ago, all based on open source. I think they credited his grilling by the Feds as his thesis defense…
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Stuck in mod. Test: uranium.
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Nope. Test: plutonium.
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Nope. Test: gun-type device.
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Nope. Hmm. Test: enriching uranium.
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Well, heck. None of those words key worded me into mod. I wonder what did it…
WPDE.
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You forgot “random glitch in code more irrational than rabid weasels”.
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Israel has said they were starting to assemble 15 nukes.
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Now my stuck-in-mod comment is not showing up at all, so let me try again with some words changed: The Persians were enriching U, and a gun-type is the easiest use of that, so I would bet that is their design.
Implosion might be more efficient per mass of U, but it is also trickier, so for their first I’d bet on gun type.
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Oh, and now I can see my stuck-in-mod there again. WPDE.
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And some good news:
YAAAAAAHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
….ahem…
Spaceballs 2
https://redstate.com/katie-jerkovich/2025/06/12/may-the-schwartz-be-with-you-mel-brooks-makes-huge-announcement-about-highly-anticipated-sequel-n2190418
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As I told Sib when the trailer(?) announcement hit my in-box, “Well, now we know the date of the Apocalypse.” Or, since this is Mel Brooks, the Alpaca-lips.
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Isn’t there a line like that in an Imagine Dragons song? “This is it, alpaca lips?”
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