Friday Ephemera (804)
Coming through. || Rocking and bobbing. || Revealed at last, why women take so long in the bathroom. || Lube. || Concerning lung balsam. || Defend yourself with jazz chords. || On Medieval cats. || Moving house, 1965. || I’m tempting you with art. || I’m sure you’re feeling at ease now. || A series of events. || “What’s up whit-choo?” she asks. || Not for chewing, amazingly. || You want one and you know it. || He’s helping the world, you see, with induced meat allergies. || Question asked, taser deployed. || The application of quite nippy pressurised gas. || The secret history of British radar. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || He built a machine that makes rock spheres. || Can you make a jetpack out of rifles? || Hydraulic and hefty. || Fear not, I’ve ordered you a pair. || And finally, on the finding out part.
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Ooh. Leftover cherry pie. And leftover custard.
Recall Terry Pratchett’s description of an Ankh Morpork dumpling:
Snow white: they chose a very unattractive snow white actress for one thing. Have not seen it but ewww.
A wardrobe? An upright fridge-freezer? A Portaloo?
While a wardrobe can fit the criteria, is distinctly British, it might attract as much attention as a Police Box nowadays. As an American, I have a hard time picturing a wardrobe as anything substantial enough for an adult to enter/exit out of – I’ve always pictured them as fine furniture of the easily breakable variety, and not large enough to actually walk into. But I guess they were commonly standalone walk-in closets back in the day, because a closet counted as a room and therefore separately taxable? Like windows were taxed individually?
A Portaloo would be the modern, universally-recognized version of the Police Box. Probably just as universally ignored, unless the person who stumbles across it is in great need, although it is fairly common for them to be locked to limit access. Phone booth would have been similar to Police Box at one time, but there aren’t any more of those, either.
The secret about why women take so much time in the ladies room was revealed way back in the 70s by National Lampoon. A quick peek through the door, revealing chaise longues, massage tables, “toys”, and other things that my adolescent mind could not quite grasp.
(And to think that Nat Lamp started out life as the HARVARD Lampoon!)
The Typing of the Dead is a typing tutor program based on the House of the Dead engine, an old arcade lightgun game. I learned to type from it. There’s something simultaneously aggravating and absurd about being faced with a conga line of zombies with placards around their necks reading, in order, “rat”, “cat”, “bat”, “fat”, “rhinoceros”.
That’s the thing. When you start to explore the premise – objects that a TARDIS would appear as – you may think that throwing together a list of possibilities would be easy. But…
Another politician at the grill, WTAF she is grilling is a mystery, nor why the piece of whatever at about 3 o’clock appears still to have a tendon attached.