From the Boston Globe of 50 years ago today, a master class in the humorous layout of an unrelated wire photo next to an unrelated wire story. A fine art, and one lost in the Internet age, to be sure.
(Oh, wait, you mean it was unintentional?)
Catching up with my millions of devoted fans.
Eight-and-a-half years after I randomly namedropped Rip Vowinkel in a Hope Street post, my SABR Biography Project article on his life and times has been posted. I wasn’t a SABR member in my Hope Street days, and had no idea that the first mention would someday lead to the second.
That one was fun to do. More are on their way.
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Never had this happen before: I was running last night down the sidewalk of a local cul-de-sac when an obviously canned female voice spoke up from the nearest house: “Hello! You are being recorded.”
On the way back I stuck obdurately to the distant side of the street … but the sensor must be sensitive, as my retreating back was again treated to “Hello! You are being recorded.”
I can’t remember ever being treated to that level of suburban surveillance before, though I’m probably an outlier. There are probably wealthy suburbs in America where you can scarcely walk to the nearest corner without hearing a chorus of warnings.
Of course it is jarring and obnoxious, although I am trying to see both sides. Something probably happened to spur these people (I don’t know them) to install this system, and whatever the something was, it was probably not something I would want done to my home and property.
In my dreams I would return to this house at a time when the occupants were out. I would walk up to the sidewalk outside their home wearing one of those rubber horse masks and carrying a cello. I’d sit my intruding arse down on the sidewalk in leisurely fashion (I’d bring a folding chair too, I guess) and treat their recording system to a Bach cello suite, Pablo Casals-style. And then I’d walk off camera the way I came.
I have never in my life so strongly wished I could play the cello.
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A new Bandcamp release is cued up and waiting. I might hold off until mid-June, which will be my tenth anniversary on the platform. More likely I will let it fly earlier.
I wouldn’t be shocked if the occasion generated a statistical review of my first decade as a recording artist — even though Bandcamp is one blog-topic that no one ever has asked me to write more about.
(There aren’t actually that many topics that anyone has ever asked me to write more about. I should probably take the hint.)
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Speaking of writing-more-about, Taylor Swift is in Foxborough this weekend and the Boston Globe is covering it with a fury they should probably bring to bear on about 1,000 other subjects.
What the hell — at least they still employ reporters.
Also on the media front, I note the recent death of Sam Zell, the billionaire businessman who bought my former employer, Tribune Company. It was not hellaciously long after Zell took over that I quit my Tribune Company paper and left journalism behind forever.
This decision wasn’t particularly Zell’s doing, though he didn’t make me want to hang around either; he was vulgar and not particularly likeable from a distance.
In retrospect, I do give him credit for wanting to invest at least a small chunk of his pile in newspapers. Not that many people did. I was in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania at the time, and I’m not aware that any of the local richies had any interest in investing to maintain the local paper as a community institution.
Now hedge funds own American news organizations and are steadily gutting them for profit. The richies probably don’t care. Perhaps they are too busy fitting out their houses with security systems that make intrusive public announcements.
Bridges, crossed.
As a postscript to yesterday’s post about college commencement, I went into Boston this morning to pick up my son from his dorm room for the last time.
I arrived at the parking garage at 10 or so (damned traffic.) The kid brought up the rolling hamper and we had the car full (rather more full than I expected) by maybe 10:35. We left the parking garage at 10:53, beating the stated deadline to be out of the dorm by a full seven minutes.
The nearest garage to his dorm is on the other side of several sets of train tracks, and a pedestrian footbridge connects the campus and the garage. The Footbridge of No Return provided the setting for a few neatly symbolic shots:
Don’t look back, kid.
He had his hands full, but damned if I was going down to help him. He’s a college graduate now; he can solve his own challenges.
Fulfilling his last official obligation to the alma mater: returning their hamper. Not exactly how Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky ended their college careers, but that’s OK.
It also occurred to me that I’d been so busy during commencement weekend, and so focused on other things, that I’d set foot in any number of interesting places — including two of America’s most historic sporting venues — without ever taking out my walletcard to celebrate the occasion.
Well, it wasn’t too late to include Mr. Guetterman in the weekend’s festivities.
After the pomp.
Well, well, well.
It seems that this weekend, some pomp went out and got itself good and circumstanced.
At Fenway Park, too.
(Note to anyone wondering: Fenway Park is actually not a great graduation venue, because the graduates are seated in the outfield with their backs to the grandstand, and the family members are far away in the grandstand. I didn’t pick very good seats, and that didn’t help. But all the same it was OK. The weather was beautiful.)
If my old friends who used to read me are still reading now, they might remember my mildly angsty post about the first drop-off of my older kid at school in Boston.
Well … five years, one big family move, one miserable rainy Parents’ Weekend, one pandemic, one late-night/early-morning radio show, one big change of major, a bunch of Concert Band concerts, countless Friday nights with the game club, and various pack-ins and pack-outs later, the kid is an alumnus.
His school (Arts, Media & Design) graduated Saturday afternoon in Matthews Arena, a historic old barn that was — among many other things — the original home of the Bruins, the Celtics, and the Hartford Whalers (who began their existence in Boston before moving southwest.)
And the entire college graduated today at Fenway.
The deadline to move out of the dorms is tomorrow at 11 am, and the kid wanted to stay to the end. So as I type this, relaxing at home with a rye sour, he is sitting in Boston in a suite with a pile of dirty laundry, a half-empty take-out box of chicken shawarma and a headful of mixed emotions. (I am reasonably certain there is no beer, booze, or cannabis; there may also not be any remaining suitemates.)
And tomorrow, that chapter of his life — which for most intents and purposes is already closed — will end for good when I text him and tell him to roll the big hamper down to the parking garage.
He doesn’t have a job lined up, nor (for the first time in his life) does he have an organized setting to make friends and acquaintances. Pretty much all he has in the immediate future is a small bedroom in his parents’ house, in a town where he didn’t grow up and to which he has no attachment.
(He also has a commuter rail line a 10-minute drive away that can take him to Boston for either job interviews, or the occasional understandable wallow-trip to campus for another order of shawarma and a walk around the familiar old world. I won’t scoff.)
A few meaty talks await regarding his future — what he really wants to do, and what he’s willing to do to keep himself occupied while he pursues what he really wants.
This could, in a worst case, turn into a parenting job as complex as any we have undertaken to date — a finely nuanced tango of we-love-and-support-you-but-get-a-move-on.
We will acknowledge that the desired future often does not develop on demand … while reinforcing that he can’t sit around and wait for it.
The kid would be better served with a good father, but I’ll try not to fuck it up.
For reasons too many to elaborate here, we are very proud of him, as a human being and a student and a caring young adult. And once he is fully launched, there will probably be moments when I look back and wonder why we ever encouraged him out of the nest.
Anyway, a new chapter opens tomorrow. If you were to drop in on his suite tonight and ask him what he thinks of that, I don’t know how optimistic he’d be.
But one way or another, I’m optimistic the next page won’t be too blank for too long.
Myths of the inland sea.
For quite a while, the Wikipedia page for Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” claimed that Lightfoot would only allow the song to be used in movies or TV if the producers obtained the consent of the family members of all 29 men who went down with the ship.
(This policy served more or less as a de facto rejection, since no TV or film producer would want to put in that much effort.)
That always impressed me, as it seemed like Lightfoot was putting the well-being of the surviving families ahead of his own financial gain. This also ensured that the song would never end up someplace it shouldn’t, like in a farcical teenage sex comedy movie or a Quentin Tarantino shoot-’em-up or something.
Following Lightfoot’s death a couple of days ago, I went back to the Wiki page to revisit this claim and … it’s not there any more. I suppose I was sorry to see it disappear.
A quick search through old articles on Newspapers dot com does indicate that Lightfoot exercised a blanket refusal to allow the song to be used commercially. At one point he denied its use to a filmmaker producing a documentary about the ship’s sinking. At another point his agent raised a fuss about the song’s appearance in a CBC program. (The CBC’s response was that it was allowed to use up to 12 seconds of music in its programs without asking permission, and the snippet of “Edmund Fitzgerald” was within that time limit.)
I don’t know who controls Lightfoot’s songs after his passing, but it would be nice if they were as unbending on this matter as he was.
rejoyce.
A little thematic music from a wonderful album I haven’t heard front to back in far too long. The short, moody, uncharacteristically jazzy piano-bass-and-drums jam that arises at around 2:48 is one of my single favorite bits of Starplane on record.
Anyway: Today I fulfilled my long-simmering goal of running the James Joyce Ramble, a 10K road race in Dedham, Massachusetts, and you get to hear all about it.
(A younger and more energetic Kurt Blumenau would have written his roundup in pastiche Joyce. The older, more mature, and flat-out tired Kurt Blumenau will spare you.)
Course: Quite nice. Crosses the Charles River twice; if you squint you can pretend it’s the Liffey.
Rolling and pleasantly challenging, also. None of the uphills last quite long enough to really become pains in the arse, which I suppose makes them “inclines” rather than uphills. For every incline there’s a downhill, and downhills rank alongside bourbon and Fender Stratocasters on the master list of Gifts Given Us By a Merciful Creator.
Maybe a mile of the course winds directly through the leafy campus of Noble and Greenough School, which is about as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real New England prep school, so that was a cool change of pace. (Nobles’ alumni include a current co-owner of the Boston Celtics … the inventor of the iron lung … a handful of NHL hockey players … the governor of Massachusetts in the year I was born … and a clutch of Lowells, though not Robert; he went to St. Mark’s in Southborough, which I’ve driven past.)
Weather: Drizzly, misty, overcast; appropriately Irish.
Music: This has to be the first race I’ve run in years where the pre-race hype music didn’t include either “Country Fried” or “Shut Up And Dance With Me,” so, big points for that.
The pre-race tunes were actually quite limited in volume, but at various times I heard “Rockin’ Pneumonia” and the big overture from Tommy, both of which were pleasant changes of pace. See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.
The Joycean entertainment on the course also included a kid playing some sort of Irish tin whistle and the bells of St. Paul’s Church playing the Chariots of Fire theme, both of which were pleasant surprises.
The Joycean entertainment on the course: This was kinda underwhelming — not that I was there to be entertained, but still.
Basically, every so often, there was a guy in a scally cap and a vest, or a woman in a cloche hat and a shapeless gray coat, reading aloud. (There were about three times as many of them on the Nobles campus as anywhere else; I wonder if the kids got extra credit for volunteering.)
There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but to tell the truth, I think the concept of the James Joyce Ramble would work just about as well without the live readings. They’re traditional and offbeat, but I can’t imagine anybody does the race for the readings.
Actually, if I’m really gonna spill the tea, I would cheerfully swap a couple of the readers for the large, easily visible mile markers that I assumed such a well-established and well-organized race would have. Just by chance I happened to look down and see “MILE 3 JOYCE” spray-painted on the road, and after that I kept track of things with periodic glances downward, but signs work so much better.
(You know what might be fun? A 10K where the course is lined by a whole series of really amateur, falling-down crappy, but enthusiastic King Uszniewicz-style blues and R&B bands. Like, guys with $100 guitars and pawnshop drumkits who couldn’t get hired to play Wednesday nights at the local BBQ restaurant. That would be a hoot.)
My results: I have no idea how the hell I did this, but I ran a 46:58, good for 86th place out of 666 finishers in the open race.
(Results are accessible here for the skeptical: http://www.iresultslive.com/?op=overall&eid=5585&racename=10kOpen)
To put this into perspective: On April 2 I ran a 5K in 23:31, which I considered satisfactory and the result of a good, steady, sustained effort. Not remarkable, but an acceptable representation of what I’m capable of these days.
And what I did today, in so many words, was to run a 5K in 23:31 — and then reel off a second one at the same pace without stopping. Did I mention I have no idea how the hell I did that?
I mean, I felt good and strong the whole time, and I worked hard, and felt like I kept a consistent pace and made a good effort all the way through, but … yeah, I wasn’t expecting that.
(The lesson there is either that longer distances are my thing, and I should do more 10Ks … or I need to push myself a lot harder when I run 5Ks. Maybe both.)
Since my traditional goal for 5Ks is to finish in less than half my age, I figured a good goal for a 10K would be to finish in less than my age, and I did that.
I said “open race” earlier because the Ramble doubles as the USATF National Masters 10K Championship. The Masters start a few minutes ahead of everybody else, and their results are tabulated separately. I would have gotten curb-stomped in the Masters race, as my time would have placed me 147th out of 238 finishers. But, I’m not swimming in that pool.
People-watching: The Ramble attracts a lot of people from organized running clubs, who tend to show up in matching gear. I made the mistake of assuming that all these people are really fast.
(Now that I’ve said that, I’ll probably get low-bridged by a bunch of club runners the next time I toe a starting line. Still, when you see a dozen people in matching jerseys and the kinds of accessories real runners wear, it’s easy to assume that they’re a coordinated kill-force. The truth appears to be more that they’re all over the spectrum: Some are very fast, others are not. I wonder why I’ve never joined a running club? Maybe just b/c it requires you to be in a certain place at a certain time.)
One of the running clubs that had a tent set up was the Genesee Valley Harriers, who I’m pretty sure are from Rochester. I probably should have said hi, but didn’t. It appears from the results that the upstate NY contingent was there for the masters race, and they fared quite well.
In the starting-line crush, I found myself standing behind a 14-year-old kid, whose age I knew because he had thoughtfully written his name and personal info on the tag on his bib. It wasn’t all that far into the race that I saw him walking and passed him by.
As I pulled out of the parking lot to go home, I saw him walking next to somebody I assume was his dad; he looked pained. His dad was holding his hand, which I found really sweet.
I don’t remember the kid’s name or bib number, so I can’t find out whether he finished. I hope the kid didn’t get totally destroyed … or if he did, it was at least the productive kind of destruction that makes one say, “I’m gonna train harder and start marking the days on my calendar until I can come back here and own this race.”
I am off, anyway, to bake some bread for dinner and catch the last few innings of the Red Sox.
Say hey.
I promised to be insufferable when I got my first copy of a SABR book with my work in it … and today that time has come.
I got a contributor’s copy of Five Tools, a 300-page SABR tribute to the skills and genius of Willie Mays. It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
I am one of 51 contributors and my piece is the second-to-last one in the book.
(Five Tools starts with a bunch of essays about different aspects of Willie Mays’s career, then shifts to stories recapping some of his most noteworthy games. I happened to pick the game in which Mays hit his 660th and final home run, on August 17, 1973. Hence, I am next-to-last in the book, in front of only a story about one of Willie’s appearances in the ’73 World Series. My game was a pretty good one, actually. Hopefully I did it justice, and hopefully someone will make it to the back pages to read it.)
At some point this summer, not sure when, the book will go on sale in hard-copy and PDF form via SABR’s website, joining a whole host of previously issued SABR volumes on subjects ranging from “the Glorious Beaneaters of the 1890s” to “20-Game Losers” to the replacement players of World War II.
As for what’s next, I have a game story lined up for a book scheduled next year about Sandy Koufax, as well as non-game essays for two other books — one about minor-league baseball between 1946 and 1963, the other about Dodger Stadium. If I see other interesting book ideas arise I might stick my toes in; it’s kinda fun to be part of something reasonably permanent.
Now to eat a carrot, and thence to bed.
Specially delivered.
The envelope from Buffalo showed up and it was very pleasant.
It included one note apiece from grandparents on either side (my grandfather’s note begins with two paragraphs about that day’s Bills-Dolphins game) …
two letters from male peers but nothing that made me grind my teeth …
a letter from the youth minister at my childhood church, dated October 1986 (I don’t know how or why that got saved, but it’s gone now) …
and a double-sided statistical sheet distributed at the Rochester Red Wings-Toledo Mud Hens game of July 26, 1983.
I didn’t remember anything specific about attending that game, but might have to look it up and write up the game for SABR now.
Speaking of which, I agreed to write something else for another of SABR’s book projects. I forget how many of their books I’m contributing to now — four or five. I should have a promotional copy of the first book in my hands sooner than later, which will be a fun experience. The others are still many months away.
The Boston Marathon is dwindling down as I type this, which means the wave of 10-years-after-the-bombing retrospective pieces will be gone soon also, which is fine with me.
Tonight I will cook with gochujang for the first time.
Forty years ago today in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, an Apple IIe 64K is just $1,188 at Leon’s on Clinton Avenue, “your electronic office headquarters.” The nation’s three best-selling singles, according to “national sales figures compiled by leading industry publications,” are “Billie Jean,” “Come On Eileen,” and “Mr. Roboto.” David Crosby, Long John Baldry, the Chuck Mangione Quartet, Isaac Stern, and Engelbert Humperdinck are coming to Rochester — separately, alas. The Philadelphia Stars of the USFL beat the Oakland Invaders, 17-7. And ….
… oh, holy Jesus.
On May 9, 2011, in one of my first posts on the old Hope Street blog, I was writing about the arrival of spring. And I said:
After all, not everything that’s supposed to herald the arrival of spring actually does. April baseball, for instance, is a tease: It reminds you of warmth, but it’s often played in biting cold. (Engraved on my memory is a wire-service photo of Amos Otis, the excellent Kansas City centerfielder of the 1970s, standing impassive and baseball-ready as an early-season snowstorm swirls around him.)
And what should happen to be right in front of me, in the issue of the D&C I should just happen to look through on its 40th anniversary?
Yeah, I think I’ll stop there … I’m pretty well maxed out on unexpected deliveries from my past.
Special delivery.
This promises to be interesting …
I got a message from a woman in Buffalo the other day via my Bandcamp page. This in and of itself is noteworthy: No one visits my Bandcamp page, and the few people who do never send me messages through it. (Perhaps they contact their local authorities after they see it, but they don’t contact me. In fact, I’d forgotten I could be contacted that way. Thankfully, the messages go to my email inbox.)
The woman told me that she had bought a desk for her son at an estate sale, on the street my grandparents used to live on, in the mid-1990s. The desk had accompanied her family through several moves over many years.
Not long ago, she pulled out a drawer of the desk and a pile of letters addressed to me fell out. She kindly tracked me down online to offer to send them to me. I gratefully accepted.
(I will pause here to note that this was a most thoughtful thing for this person to do, and that I am on the lookout for some similar opportunity to pay it forward and do someone else a unique favor. These things can’t always be forced, so a truly appropriate opportunity might not come up for a while. But, I owe somebody something.)
So, at some point in the near future, an undigested chunk of my college-age past will land on my doorstep.
I am not totally sure what I think of this, as I have no special desire to be placed back into whatever shoes I wore when I was 20. But there could be some gold nuggets in there, as well.
Here’s how I handicap the potential contents of the batch of letters, in order of preference:
My grandparents: They wrote me at school from time to time. Of course they didn’t have a lot to report — usually some variation of “We went to Rod’s for dinner and it snowed” — but still.
Would I look forward to seeing these again? Absolutely.
Would I keep them? Yes, or a decent cross-section of them.
(Incidentally, my folks did set up an estate sale in the mid-1990s at the home of one set of grandparents. My theory is that my mom seized the opportunity to augment their furniture with a few pieces of ours that we wanted to get rid of, and that’s how my childhood desk ended up with the woman in Buffalo. My mom doesn’t remember, but says the theory sounds logical enough.)
My parents: They wrote with some regularity. Much of it was of the “We went to Keuka over the weekend and took the dock out of the water – cold!” variety. Would still be fun to see again, as their day-to-day lives bore some resemblance to my own, and the things they recounted would probably be things I did as well.
Would I look forward to seeing these again? Yup.
Would I keep them? Probably a reasonable cross-section.
My wife: She was my friend from college who wrote me letters first; then she was my girlfriend from college who wrote me letters.
Would I look forward to seeing these again? I’m not tremendously sentimental, but yeah.
Would I keep them? Not all of them, but probably one or two that made me smile or laugh.
Two or three male friends from HS: I can think of two or three I stayed in fairly regular touch with – at least a few letters over the course of a year. For the most part it was probably profane grumbling about our inability to get dates, interspersed with occasional beer-party anecdotes.
Would I look forward to seeing these again? Not hugely, as they would remind me of my own basic vacancy.
Would I keep them? Sorry, probably not.
My HS girlfriend: For about my first semester-and-a-half we were still writing. I am pretty sure I chucked all correspondence related to her many years ago, but I’ll throw her in in the spirit of never say never.
Would I look forward to seeing these again? Only in the sense that I don’t remember much about interacting with her. It would be weird but interesting to retrace that path, in much the same way that it would be a trip to wake up in my old high-school bedroom, find a 1980s Nissan Pulsar in the driveway, drive it to my high school, walk into the building and casually open up my locker. I wouldn’t want to spend the day there, though.
Would I keep them? I’m pretty sure I won’t have to make this decision … but, no.
I can think of a few other random people and places I corresponded with in those years, to specific ends, but I’ll leave them out of this narrative. If they show up in the pile I’ll be surprised. Even more surprised than I already am, I guess.
Nelson’s trashbox.
I should probably know who Ted Nelson was, and I can only apologize to both Mr. Nelson and my mythical readership for not having any idea what he did when he grew up.
Instead, I only know of him as a guy who, from the 1960s through the 1980s, tore out and sent in every single “send for more information” card he could get his hands on, and then took all the resulting material and saved it in boxes.
Today, the contents of Ted Nelson’s junk mail boxes are lovingly reproduced on the Internet Archive — more than 6,800 individual catalogs and inducements, for everything from minicomputers to Columbia House-type record clubs to sex manuals.
I couldn’t even get to the bottom of the box, so to speak: I got through 25 screens of material and had to give up. Here are some of the highlights:
–Not one but two 1970 issues of Americana, the promotional magazine of American Motors.
-An undated holiday gift catalog (almost certainly Sixties) from a New Jersey music store. Highlights include a golden bust of Beethoven … the “whimsical” musical figurines, one or two of which my folks used to have … the Fuzz Face distortion pedal … and a selection of Harmony electric guitars, which are cheesy except for the one or two that are really kinda sweet.
-A two-pager from 1980 for Alpha Syntauri, a device that allowed the user to play live music through their Apple computer. Record over 7000 notes in a single session, too!
(The freaking link embed feature isn’t working; here’s where you can go to learn more: https://archive.org/details/TNM_alphaSyntauri_live_music_on_Apple_computer_-__20180131_0046/mode/2up)
-A 1980 catalog for Bell & Howell’s Mailmobile office mail delivery robot. The office where I work had mailbots until the pandemic; I dunno why the pandemic killed them off but they weren’t there when we got back. Perhaps they are still in a storage room somewhere. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Mailmobile_office_mail_delivery_robot_1980_-__20171021_0159
-A 1981 pamphlet for Whizzard computer graphics. I don’t know the brand, but the design aesthetic on this one takes me right back to the early 1980s: https://archive.org/details/TNM_Whizzard_6200_family_of_raster_graphics_syste_20180202_0275/mode/2up
-Another brand that brings me back: Scott audio components. My parents had a set of Scott speakers, which later got handed down to me when they upgraded. The old Scott speakers also came in a pair of big rectangular cardboard boxes with a picture of a young woman on the side; the boxes were filled with out-of-season clothing. They’re not shown in this brief catalog, alas. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Audio_equipment_-_Scott_Stereo_20180304_0243/mode/2up
-A 1971 mailing from Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, with marketing materials for microfilming machines. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Various_film_processing_equipment_-_Eastman_K_20170925_0199/mode/2up
-An undated catalog for the Wisconsin Cheese Guild. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Cheese_catalog_-_Wisconsin_Cheese_Guild_20180329_0165/mode/2up
-I’m developing a weird romantic fondness for the Bell System that rivals the one I have for East Germany and the Montreal Expos. (The Expos, at least, were likeable.)
Here’s a catalog about data communications that’s awash in Bell atmosphere, as well as hints of the future (business machines talking to each other from miles apart!): https://archive.org/details/TNM_Data_communications_services_-_Bell_System_20171206_0133/mode/2up
-A 1984 catalog for Sharp portable computers. The up-and-coming young businessmen on this spread are only just starting to understand how much their personal lives will be subsumed to their jobs now that they can carry a computer with them: https://archive.org/details/TNM_Sharp_PC-5000_portable_computer_-_Sharp_Elect_20180303_0200/page/n5/mode/2up
-Childcraft 1969: Toys that teach! The smoked plastic squares on the front cover sure look familiar, as do a few of the other educational amusements scattered through this catalog. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Childcraft_learning_toy_catalog_1969_20180125_0266/mode/2up
-An undated catalog from Keystone Plastics of Media, Pennsylvania, advertising small plastic mouse cages for laboratory animals. Twenty-five pages’ worth, somehow. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Laboratory_rodent_cages_mouse_house_-_Keyston_20171025_0041/mode/2up
-There’s an awful lot of computer-related stuff in Ted Nelson’s junk mail box, including this undated pamphlet for Weismantel Associates minicomputers, from St. Paul, Minnesota. In an alternate universe, Cupertino is an undeveloped wasteland and we are all listening to music on our Weismantel WPods right now. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Weismantel_-_Waicom_16_20170703_0028/mode/2up
-Similarly, I enjoy this 1966 product pitch from Vermont Research just b/c I miss the days when a person or business with a technological itch might look to a place like North Springfield, Vermont, to scratch it. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Drum_memories_-_Vermont_Research_Corp_1966_20170826_0105/mode/2up
-Also a sucker for anything Digital Equipment Corp., such as this fall 1980 catalog for one of their computer lines. I wonder how much computing power was actually in one of those systems, and what hardware it would take to reproduce it now. https://archive.org/details/TNM_VAX-11-780_System_-_Digital_Equipment_Corp_19_20180218_0087/mode/2up
-Church announcement boards, guaranteed to stay lustrous, by A.C. Davenport & Son Co. of Palatine, Illinois. Today’s special: Fried lake smelts! https://archive.org/details/TNM_Church_announcement_boards_all_weather_-_DAV-_20171020_0131/page/n27/mode/2up
-RCA Corporation’s 1965 annual report, from the old days when it was a sign of weakness to include women, people of color, or people under 50 in your annual report. None of these men had ever heard of Jefferson Airplane; their sheltered bliss would last one more year. https://archive.org/details/TNM_RCA_Radio_Corporation_of_America_Annual_Report_1965_20170621_0322/mode/2up
-An undated marketing piece for a De Havilland military airplane. Who was this made for? Like, was somebody in the market to buy one of these for themselves? https://archive.org/details/TNM_De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-5_Buffalo_and_General_E_20171025_0093/mode/2up
-Finally, the Digital Equipment Corp. Users Symposium (I think) program for fall 1975. Computer privacy legislation is a hot topic. Whaddya know. https://archive.org/details/TNM_Impact_of_Computer_Privacy_Legislation_-_DECU_20170915_0403/mode/2up
Neck Pickup 