While filming Citizen Kane, director and star Orson Welles likened making a movie to playing with a toy train set, and that playful inventive spirit shines all throughout the movie.

Fertility symbols and religion, going together like chocolate and peanut butter since… since at least before chocolate and peanut butter.

Judge:
Dudes: Whoa… epic!

I’ve always been into freeform radio stations that color outside the lines, college stations like WPRB from Princeton, WFMU from NY/New Jersey, KFJC near the Bay Area, etc., have discovered a ton and a half of stuff that’s way off the beaten path and has caught my ear.

Here’s a good example I picked up around twenty years ago from KFJC, it could have been any one from too many choices to count, but for some reason this was the first song to pop into my mind right now.

If memory serves, I believe it’s a field recording taken in the Sahara Desert, a nomadic people from around Morocco or Tunisia, and can only imagine the magical environment, close my eyes to try and visualize the crisp dry Saharan air at night, a large bonfire, the sky exploding with stars above, and this trance-inducing, mystical chanting.

Halima Chedli Ensemble - “Touhami Dikr”.

For a long time it was Huevos Rancheros, but that got nudged into the #2 spot when I discovered Eggs Benedict.

I’m afraid they might be a whole bunch of oldies but goodies:

2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Empire Strikes Back.
Miller’s Crossing (the third movie written and directed by the Coen brothers, from 1989).
A Bridge Too Far (from 1977, a sprawling, star-studded epic about the Allies and their costly, ill-advised and ultimately unsuccessful Operation Market-Garden in WWII).
A Bout De Soufflé. (Godard’s seminal French New Wave cannon blast).
From Russia With Love.
The Spy Who Loved Me.

Well that was a spectacular read in your link, keep calling attention to it, 'cause it’s gonna be a constant drip-drip-drip of people finding out. I didn’t know, but starting today, I’m gonna experiment with SearXNG as my primary search engine, see how that goes!

Diamonds, or any sort of gemstone, as trying to sell those things would probably be as risky as stealing them in the first place.

Instead of remaining parallel as we move through space in the arrow of time, we get closer to other mass because our paths bend, our clocks running at slightly different beats.

Time-bending is mind-bending stuff, man.

I still get all verklempt about it.

I’d be on a Toast, eating Boat… or wait… is that the other way around?

Toat Boast.

There, now that’s better.

It was in my mind, but I think Edison got away with some things that exceed the current crop of billionaires, by at least one length, as they say in horse racing. Especially during his no-holds-barred attack on Westinghouse/Tesla and their alternating current, while Edison pushed direct current, which included his inventions to create and deliver it. He had the whole goddamned infrastructure planned out, world domination for decades and decades was at stake here.

But even as Edison pushed every vicious tactic to discredit DC as unsafe, Nikolai Tesla came out the winner, and he did it with dignity and style. Remember the famous photos of Tesla by the arcing electric wires and stuff? Those were publicity shots to show the world (well… mostly NYC at the time, where the AC vs DC war was being fought) that DC was safe enough for even the inventor to sit there casually and read the newspaper.

The more you read about that shithead edison, the worse it gets. The asshole acted with an impunity that defies modern logic.
As it was, there was no social media and our current sensibilities back then, information took much more effort to spread, so way too many people have revered him as some sort of saintly hero. Word didn’t spread about how narcissistic and petty, how cruel to the point of savagery, he was.

That goes ditto for Marconi, his “billion-dollar innovation” consisted of stealing every academic research idea and design within reach, and patenting every single one as his own.

Mexicanos al grito de guerra
El acero aprestad y el bridón
Y retiemble en sus centros la tierra
Al sonoro rugir de el cañón

Ok, this happened in another school near my own, a catholic school run by priests strict to the point of unreasonable, asshole-level old school strict, they even applied corporal punishment every once in a while.

The story spread like wildfire, there were a ton and a half of cross-school friendships between that particular school and mine. This was “somewhere in Mexico”, to keep it anonymous.
Strap in, it’s a long story but it’s a doozy.

There was this really overweight kid, he wasn’t bullied or anything, he had friends and everything.
One day in the middle of class, he raised his hand - “May I be excused? I really need to go to the restroom”, and the dismally unsurprising response was - “Certainly NOT! Learn to hold it in! bE a MaN!” A few minutes later, a foul stench spread across the classroom. The kid didn’t say anything, he just got up and walked out, as everybody stared in a stunned silence.

Everyone in class stormed the windows from inside to see the kid as he walked across the school yard towards the restrooms, on its’ own building, and locked himself inside. One classmate suddenly yelled out - “The shitter!”, and within a few seconds the entire classroom joined in a loud chorus - “THE SHITTER! THE SHITTER!”

Par for the course with these sociopathic and incompetent priests, everyone knew there was no paper in the restrooms, a common occurrence.

This poor kid stayed locked inside the restroom as a teacher here and a priest there knocked on the door and attempted to negotiate. This went on for a couple of hours, until the kid’s brother arrived at school, walked across the yards, carrying a fresh change of clothes, knocked on the restroom door and was let inside.

By this point, everything in school was at a standstill, every single student in every single classroom was glued to the windows, staring in silence. You could hear a pin drop. Then the door opened, kid and his brother walked out, and headed for the school exit.

Then one kid shouted - “The shitter!”, and now the ENTIRE school, from every classroom window, joined in the chorus - “THE SHITTER! THE SHITTER!!!”

The poor kid never did return, he transferred to another school. On the one hand, surely out of shame, but on the other, because the casual, mindless and indifferent cruelty the goddamned priests imposed on children. In a more empathetic, humane school, this would have not happened.

Here’s the cool epilogue - when this kid attended high school some years later, nobody bothered him about the incident, he had his own band of friends, went to parties and everything. When the story was told, the emphasis was on the asshole priests. That’s a comforting thought.

Neither too far nor too near
The least wiggle

YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!?

Ah, I see somebody listens to the Blank Check podcast, the Special Features one on Patreon!

Also RIP Martin Mull.

It’s curious, but in my mind these types of mathematical or logical visualizations are the sheep I count, trying to sense the deeper flow and patterns where the emergent oddities even out.

That’s when I know I will soon fall fast asleep, when my mind starts getting abstract.

I don’t know what a KOA is,
and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.