A Crummy Commercial

Pa (rising) "You wouldn't think jus' reachin' up an' pickin'd get you in the back." I was picking some apples - just a few "gallons": https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/09/lamest-invention-of-2026.html but afterwards I was reminded of this from The Grapes Of Wrath : I hadn't been working as hard as the Joads but I'm older than Russell Simpson (Pa Joad) was in 1940 per the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Simpson_(actor) Old Russ would have been 60 (or maybe 63 ?) and I'm 71  :) Charley Grapewin (Grampa Joad) was my age in 1940: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Grapewin But Grampa Joad didn't make it as far as the peach orchards :( BTW a contemporary Tom Joad would just have to substitute Socialists for Reds: source:  https://clip.cafe/the-grapes-of-wrath-1940/every-time-ya-turn-around/ It's a different name but it allows our contemporary government story tellers to sell fear with their fiction :( Best Regards, Ch...

Previously noted that cowbells are popular in the CFL: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/11/cfl.html But one thing noticed when the World Serious moved to FL for the 3rd game was cowbell.  Per AI this is apparently a thing with rules: the shortened original:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mtOXAIODnGc    the whole original:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVsQLlk-T0s Here's an example of cowbell from Tropicana Field in 2013: source:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfuyFRRj5pQ But what else would you expect from a Florida team, normalcy ?  Tropicana Field appears to be a spaceship: There are little tufts of sand or coconut shells or ? kicked up when a ball hits in the outfield: Oh yeah => the Brewers WON the 2026 series in 5: It was inevitable, the Brewers 2026 season reminded me of one of the Kilauea eruptions on the big island of Hawaii.  A video of lava coming down a road - not super fast or red hot but just an unstoppable wall: ...

This was an interesting video about Milwaukee: source:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkAOA1wQEVQ   I remember that smell, it was sort of funky but not really horrible like alewives on the beach,  it was just a strong smell.  The area near Ambrosia chocolate smelled nice.  And there was a distant burning smell I remember from the ever burning dump fire in Germantown.  I didn't spend much time near 27th street and the Menominee river valley.  It's kinda in between Marquette University and American Family Field.  I remember seeing a Marquette student on TV once mentioning the smells around the university as the winds changed.  I always thought that yeasty smell was from the breweries but I'll take this fellow's word that it was Red Star yeast accounting for the smell.   John Gurda had an interesting article on Red Star closing: https://archive.jsonline.com/news/opinion/red-star-era-ends-at-valley-complex-d24o0ri-145232185.html...

Yet another actor from the 1960s dies: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/walter-koenig-dies-age-90-chekov-star-trek Last mention of Walter Koenig in the blog: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/09/questor-meet-mr-trent.html He was listed as being in The Questor Tapes but ?  If it had been bought as a TV series he would probably have had a bigger role. Of course Chekov was supposed to be of Russian extraction - remember that the mid-60s was amidst the cold war versus the Soviet Union.  So in that way, Star Trek forecast the thaw in relations with the post-Soviet Russian government.  Then with the Ukraine war Russia was back as the bad guys.  Now who knows what el orange has in mind for the Russians ?   Orwell mentioned this in 1984 , that there are no forever friends or enemies amongst nations. I think the biggest episode for  Walter Koenig as Chekov was the one where all the Star Trek crew are aging rapidly except for Chekov: that time adrenaline saved Che...

I thought this was quite a picture: Who knew that John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper and Mickey Dolenz hung out together ?  And the young woman, who is she (supposed to be Mackenzie Phillips or Jenny Agutter)?  Here is what one of the all knowing oracles proclaimed: Sometimes a picture is interesting and the technical quality, composition and lighting are insignificant - it's the subject matter that makes the picture.  Kind of like this previously referenced picture: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/10/clint-eastwood-buddy-ebsen-danny-kaye.html or the picture of Dizzy Gillespie looking at Ella Fitzgerald (although it's excellent technically): https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/12/summertime.html Celebrity and Novelty are the driving force behind the internet. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb5F-DB7m5g This video transfer is of excellent quality (no colorization horror, colorization was the precursor of AI slop IMO) although it's not perfect, the uploader puts their marks on the presentation, briefly but persistently :(    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_and_the_Voice_of_Terror Holmes enlists his contacts in the London underworld of 1942 to fight Nazi sabotage and the "voice of terror" who gloats after every successful 3rd column attack on England.  But Holmes has a 'scope and the ability to glean whether a broadcast is live or recorded just by doing some plots: Holmes also has an ingenious light cane: That guy thinks of everything ! But for me the definitive fictional London detective during WWII would have to be Michael Kitchen of Foyle's War along with his "Watson", Anthony Howell as Sgt. Milner and Honeysuckle Weeks as his driver, Sam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle's_War ...

I was watching this Veritasium video on Ytterbium based atomic clocks (OMG a rare earth element !).   These clocks are precise enough to allow at least an order of magnitude better measurement of the Einstein prediction of how gravity changes space-time. source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyZEqSPeMwg the NIST blog page on this experiment:   https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/putting-einstein-test-worlds-most-accurate-clocks The original clock based tests (Hafele and Keating in 1971) were done with Cesium based clocks - those clocks have a signal with a frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hz or 9.1 GHz.  Curiousmarc on Youtube has recently been refurbishing similar equipment to attempt to duplicate the initial experiments, the latest was fixing a power supply to allow portability: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pne1yKr3V_s These cesium based clocks are the basis of GPS - corrections must be made to account for the GPS satellites speed and altit...