Zombie Run and Walk for Autism (Vaderday Saturday)

Earlier today there were some fun-looking events in town. I did not go to them, but some friends went to both. First is the !st Annual "Walk for Autism", with its cool Darth Vader artwork. Vader is flanked by a bat, a ballerina, a generic ghost, Harry Potter, and a cowboy. Troy DeShano created this top-notch poster design. This event benefited the Autism Resource Network.
Yesterday morning, there was also the 5k Zombie Run. Some friends participated in this, and there are lots of photos going around of large numbers of people all made out to be zombies. Wish I could have gone to this one to get my own photos. This one also had impressive poster art (by Dale Crawford). I think these events will be around again next year.

Skeletoff, Skeleton

This post is in honor of Balou's fine old "Born a Girl" blog. It's been defunct for quite some time. She got it from the Usurper blog. I think it's a fine visual Halloween joke.

Here I am

I figured it would be a good time to put a picture up of me. Yes, an actual picture. As opposed to an image of Kevin Spacey playing a bald supervillain in a movie. Click here to see
Yes, it's the time of year for it.

How is everyone doing with their Halloween costumes? Or is anyone going to any fun parties this weekend?

Kin Fong Restaurant, Kalkaska, MI

Old menu card from Kin Fong Restaurant, 537 South Cedar Street, Kalkaska,Michigan, 49646. (Probably circa 1975 or 1976).

I find little reference to this place looking around. I think it has been gone for a very long time. One I did find was this bit from a yearbook from Grand Ledge, Michigan, from 1976:

"Debbie Clark is seldom seen without a pretty smile on her face, she en- joys sewing, cooking, baking, bicycling and outdoor sports. Next year she plans on working at the Kin Fong restaurant in Kalkaska Mich, and then will attend Andrews and study to become a Dietician."

Searching also reveals Kin Fong as the first name (or first and middle name?) of some Chinese-Americans. I'm pretty sure that "Kin Fong Restaurant" in Kalkaska was the first and only Chinese restaurant found in a large section of the country.

How do you like the complete dinner for $2.60? I'm 90% sure that this was the first Chinese restaurant I'd ever been to, and I've loved them ever since. Does anyone else have fond memories of a Chinese restaurant?

Tubular Tuesday - Live at Montreux

Halloween is near, so here is a version of "Tubular Bells", one of the pieces of music considered by many to by the official song of Halloween (Its main rival, the theme from the movie "Halloween", is a sort of rip-off of the earlier "Tubular Bells").

The song actually pre-dates the movie "The Exorcist", and when it came out, it was like nothing heard before. Its inspirations include "Brigg Fair" by Delius. But thanks to its association with the movie, "Tubular Bells", like the Sleestak, gives children of the 1970s the creeps.

Get well Mr. Spock

From Yahoo news: "LEONARD Nimoy isn’t well! The actor — who who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek — is recovering after having “a minor benign abdominal surgery”. According to his rep, the Sci-Fi actor — who had to miss an appearance at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday — is currently “recovering beautifully.”

"19 Road" on the Path of the Beam

This would be a "Postcard Friendship Friday" feature if I could find where that meme went to.
I've taken to reading .... er listebning to audio books lately. They sure do seem to make the time pass quicker.

Currently, I'm listening to "Wolves of the Calla", a middle book in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series.

Tonight, in the section I was listening to, the characters were having a lengthy discussion of how the number "19" appeared in just about everything they were doing. It is a lot like the situation with the repeating numbers in the TV show "Lost". I think the makers of "Lost" got the idea from "Dark Tower". I could not help but notice driving by a sign for "19 Road" during this discussion, so I turned around and came back and got a picture. This 19 Road sign was found on M-115, which lies between Clare and Frankfort.... oh wait "Clare and Frankfort" has 19 characters in it... But anyway.

I had a little bit a problem with the first disk in this many-disc audio book set that I listened to. I had the CD player set on random shuffle, which meant that the narrative was jumbled up. That's not quite as bad as you might think, since the narrative itself is already somewhat jumbled, with the usual flashback techniques that authors like to use, along with lots of time travel.

Does anyone have any audiobooks, or books on tape, that they particularly recommend? Or warn against? I'm going to be seeking more out.

My favorite book in the "Dark Tower" series was "The Wastelands". This was before King was creamed by a minivan, which among other things caused him to feel he had to rush to finish the series. The coolest thing in that book was Blaine the Mono: think of a nasty combination between Gollum and Thomas the Tank Engine. King's creativity at its best. Below is some excellent original Blaine-inspired music that I found on Youtube, accompanied by images of Blaine the Pain from different sources. By "BggProductions". The music is definitely going off the rails on a crazy train.

"Wolves of the Calla" takes place at a town named Calla Bryn Sturgis. I originally thought it was named after the motorcycle mecca of Sturgis, South Dakota, but it is instead named after a director of western movies (including "The Magnificent Seven", which I think inspired this novel). The postcard below is an old view of oxen on the streets of Sturgis. It is a postcard from the Library of Congress collection. Modern photos show a similar street scene with motorcycles instead of oxen. The olden-days view fits Calla Bryn Sturgis more, since in the novel it has an aspect of a Western town.

To dream of Cleveland

I would have made this an entry in "Postcard Friendship Friday", but I can't find that blog feature, and it is Saturday, anyway.

To the right is an old postcard from the mid 20th century of The Fountain of Waters at the Fine Arts Garden at Cleveland, Ohio.

I had to get up very early this morning, then I went back to sleep. When I did, I dreamed of Cleveland, Ohio. The earliest part of the dream I remember being at the bottom of a steeple with not very good stairs or ladders that I was compelled to climb for some reason. It was in a very old church. I was afraid of heights, and did not like how there were huge open windows in the narrow steeple. Part of the climbing involved pulling myself up on tiny pencil-like pegs that were embedded in the vertical interior walls of the steeple. No fun.

Eventually I ended up 40 or 50 feet up and came out into a room. Perhaps something that had been used for a church youth group or something. Notable in the room were two huge paintings similar to the cover art of the record albums I have seen for the 1960s Batman show. I have no idea how this would end up in the dream: I've not seen that show or thought of it for years. I decided to take some pictures of the paintings, perhaps for a future blog post or something. Whomever it was who compelled me to climb inside the steeple was in the room too, but I have entirely forgotten who or what this character was.

There were some large windows in this room that was apparently half-way up some very tall pre-1900s church built of dark brick. I could look out and see the late-dusk skyline of Cleveland, Ohio. It was the remnants of a glorious sunset. I looked out one of the windows and saw close by the stadium for the Cleveland Indians baseball team. It was a lot smaller than I thought it would be: the 50 foot vantage point of the church room window was higher up than the stadium was.

I left through some sort of glass door, and there was a ramp like on the top of a hill, that gently sloped downward toward the stadium. I remember noting that it appeared to be handicapped-legal: except where it came to the railroad tracks which were a total barrier. I figured maybe I could get a picture of the infamous Cleveland Indians mascot logo emblazoned in the side of the stadium building... maybe for a blog post or something.

Passing through the stadium building, it had become even smaller in the dream: no more than an auditorium. I figured it was easy to walk around in it because the Cleveland Indians weren't in the playoffs and weren't needing it. Then I was walking around downtown Cleveland, which was really nice, and I was wondering because Cleveland is supposed to be as bad as Detroit... And that's my nonsense dream.

Anyone have any interesting dreams lately?

Well, yes, he really was a rocket scientist....

Clint Kennard passed away most of a year ago. He was a great man, and also a friend and someone I worked with.

And he really was a rocket scientist. That's a good description of someone who ran the research and technology office at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

I've come into possession of some of his interesting papers... mostly about technological advances at the heart of the Space Age.

The device below is the "Evacuation Chamber" patent number 3,111,074, filed October 5, 1961, invented by Clint Kennard and Carl W. Gerhardt. "This invention related to chambers or vessels whcih may be evacuated to pressures below atmospheric pressure." To be used to simulate physical conditions such as "temperature, solar radiation, infrared radiation, entry and re-entry effects, x-ray radation, and meteoric bombardment." Basically a device to be used to help prepare people for space travel...


It's really huge. I have added the red stick figure next to the door (#46) to give some idea of the scale.

What it really reminds me of is the Swan Station "Hatch" from the TV show "Lost".

Postcard - Gordon Park Beach, Cleveland, 1912

Today's vintage postcard view is from 1912, and is of the "Beach at Gordon Park, Cleveland, Ohio".Make sure to click on this one and see the enlarged view. The colorization process worked out pretty well, I think, and it reminds me of a certain type of painting. However, I don't know enough about art to say which kind. Maybe some artist who painted people lazing about in parks in Paris in the 19th century.

The back reads: "Dear Brother and Sisterand all. I think I will be going to Medina in a short time and I would like to have Floyd come and send Sister Rachelou to go home with me as I am a little stronger..."

Whoever it was, he/she was not strong enough, because the pencil indentations had become so light as to be totally illegible.

Google fixes Gmail

It was one of the worst computer ideas of the last decade: Google's so-called Gmail "conversation" grouping?
Why?

• Emails in the same conversation that happened to have subject lines changed to reflect the topic (good email ettiquette!) were not grouped in the same conversation anymore. So much for it being "conversation" view. Ever have a conversation in the real world where you didn't change the subject as the conversation went on? No, I didn't think so.
  
• Emails in different conversations with different people were congealed into useless lumps of aggregated emails just for having the same aubject line. Again, so much for it being "conversation" view.
  
• It lost emails: you couldn't tell if you got anything new or not.

The fix is in "Settings". And once you do it, it is like night and day. Much better. Gmail's superior spam filtering and searching now together at last with sane inbox organization.

Can anyone think of other computer pet peeves they'd like to see fixed? I can think of a few more:

• Awful non-standard keyboards like the ones with double-high enter keys, or the recent Dell ones with the giant spacebar that gets hit all the time because it is in the way. There should be no good reason why an old IBM keyboard from 1984 is better in design than most keyboards today.
• No keyboard on iPhone. The Android phones seem to always toss one in, but Apple won't put on on the iPhone. Why do you have to pay a lot more to have less?
• Missing eject buttons on the DVD drive. Come on do they cost so much? Two of the last three computers I've gotten were missing them. This is one bad idea that Apple was years ahead of everyone else on: Apple made it much harder to eject discs long before PC makers decided to follow.
  
• Power buttons. They are hard to use and hidden. Things were a lot better with computers such as the IBM-AT: a clearly labelled button that turned the computer on and off, like a light switch.

Enough techie rant for now. What's bugging you about the machines?

Three books

Going through stuff, I found some books...

"Logan's Run" by William F Nolan and George Clayton Johnson.

The first one is probably familiar to many from the old Michael York film. This "Logans Run" book to the right is the first movie edition from 1976. It has red foil in the movie-title logo. The movie was actually based on a fine book from 1967, and there are two fine sequels to it also. One big difference I noticed that was in the book, the world Logan ran around in was the entire earth. In the movie, they compressed the locations into the single shopping-mall like city. The remake movie is supposed to be out in 2012, and will make the characters younger as in the books, instead of the 20-somethings from the 1970s movie.

"The Inverted World" by Christopher Priest. I remember being greatly impressed by this one when I read it in the late 1970s. The cover to the right is from the 1974 edition, which is probably the first edition. The scenario? The last remnants of humanity are packed into a city on a very strange world... and the city has to be moved slowly along a pre-determined but totally undeveloped path or it will be destroyed. So they keep building tracks in front and removing them behind. Sort of like the toy trains in "Gumby". Click here to see a picture of one of those Gumby trains that can go anywhere because it always has a piece of track in front of it.

"Fellowship of the Talisman" by Clifford D Simak. This is probably a first edition, from 1978. The cover art by Michael Whelan is wonderful (click the picture to expand), but the lettering of the title is sub-par, as was typical of many Science Fiction Book Club books.

And, of that title. No, it was not followed by "The Two Lighthouses" and "Return of the Royal Guy". Despite the unfortunate title. it's really not much like "Lord of the Rings" other than involving a quest. You've probably never heard of Simak before. One of his stories was adapted as an episode of original "The Outer Limits" entitled "The Duplicate Man". I consider Simak to be one of science-fiction's few greatest writers.

Thoughts? Anyone read these, or know of the authors?

But what of the cukes of Hazard?

Northwest of Michigan's Meawataka / Colfax Amish area lies Hazard County. At least that is what this sign along the road, seen to the right, says. The area is full of farms selling produce. I have no idea if any of them sell cucumbers. Below is a picture I found of a vast pumpkin farm. Most of the pumpkins were marked $2.00. I got one. I'll likely go back for more.
The sign below advertises haunted hayrides. There seems to be some sort of Mystery Spot thing going on: the sign is leaning one way, and the shed is leaning another. Must be some result of the ghosts' ectoplastic energy.

Happy October!