I have two laser printers. One is an HP Laserjet 5MP made in 1995 or 1996 (!) that I bought used for $75 in the early (middle?) 2000s. It prints maybe 200-300 5-to-10%-cover pages a month (wall-to-wall 10-or-11-point Helvetica text) so total refill-toner-cartridge and on-sale paper cost is around $50 a year. (I figured it out before and got a different number; but this is right.) It's a brick, it works great, zero maintenance.
The other is a relatively new Brother I got, also used, for $25 a couple of years ago. Its rollers are fresh; I use it to print on the blank side of stacks of used paper, so paper's free for that one. It jammed once, I remember. I had to walk to it, open it and take the paper out.
I suppose I could just use a monitor and never need paper at all, but I do about eight hours of reading aloud into a microphone per week, and I like printed paper spread out all around me for that.

The latest UFO aliens needed the parts to repair their star drive or ansible or power-toilet, like The Doctor or the Star Trek people or E.T. every once in awhile needing something from a backwards civilization or an older time. Transparent aluminum, umbrella, subway motor bearings, nose-hair clipper, quartz boulder, peppermint oil, whatever.

That flower is a soldier from the future, flying through the air, aiming and firing an electric-ray rifle.

So they made a tiny video and then reversed the video. That's not running time backward, any more than in the 1940s Isaac Asimov's resublimated thiotimoline actually dissolved an instant before contact with water, leading to faster-than-light communication and winning horse-race bets, nor than I just caused time to go backward to the 1940s by remembering that.

Yet I've been having trouble finding a book from the 1980s (that's about halfway back in time to the 1940s) whose title and author I've forgotten, where the time-travel device is built into a VHS videocassette that you rewind and fast-forward to control. One of the characters is a black man who gets in trouble with the police in the past because of driving a car in a white place (New Jersey) with an attractive white female passenger and, having lost a component of the cassette (I'm fuzzy on that part), everyone gets back to their proper time by somehow using the trylon and perisphere of the New York world fair, which in the story is a secret giant Tesla coil. There's a chase through the World of the Future diorama. The book begins with a jet airplane trip (with a VHS deck in the cockpit), and there's a Russian spy/gangster involved. Hmm.

The best time-travel sound is in /Time Cop/. It's a deep, satisfying BHLOOMP, like a marble dropping into a toilet but slowed down by about eight times. That's very close to what real time travel sounds like. Maybe they really traveled back in time and recorded it. But it was probably the marble thing.

In the early 1980s I had a 1963 Rambler Classic --a beautiful car, full-width bench seat, 3-speed manual transmission, one-barrel carburetor the size of a 3-way lightbulb, four manual side windows and two cigaret-air flip vents, recent turquoise-aqua Earl Scheib paint job. Maybe 25 miles-per-gallon and a giant 20-plus-gallon gas tank, so a month between fillups, and all the critical rust was structural, none of it apparent unless you opened the hood or got underneath or hit a bump. The whole car was just $200, right off the lot. Among its charming features were the windshield wipers that had no electric motor but instead an air-piston like a tiny screen-door opener with a rubber hose that went to a valve on the dashboard and then to a nipple either on the intake manifold or on the very bottom of the carburetor. So when you pulled the valve open the wipers would wipe back and forth at a speed dependent on manifold vacuum. Idling was slowest, and you could speed the wipers up momentarily by gunning the motor, which you were doing anyway because if you turned the wipers on at idle the engine wanted to stall, and it was raining, so.

I drove it for a year until every essential part of it broke down. Even dead the car was beautiful. The neighbor offered me $500 for it. I said, "Are you sure?" "Yeah. Here." He pushed it next to his barn, and he and his wife would go out and sit in it and talk about things.

That's the thing about Ramblers. My current employer used to fly, so he kept cheap old cars with a fresh battery in them in all the little airports nearby the places he had to be. When for health reasons he stopped flying he sold the cars off, including a middle-sixties Rambler Ambassador. A man came all the way from Texas and bought that car and took it away on a trailer to fix up like new because it was identical to the car he and his wife first had sex in back when they were in high school. I just think that's so sweet.

Science has finally discovered why we especially like to eat food that we like. It turns out to have as much to do with how much we like the food as with it being food in the first place. Also, we tend to eat more food that we like, because we like it so much. But that's not just double rewards, is it? It's /four/ times the reward. Ah, the allure of food. So mysterious. And there's also smell involved, not to mention hearing the can opener, and being fueled to stay alive to eat again another day, so /seven or eight/ rewards, then. /Thousands/ of them, if you live long enough. No wonder we are addicted to eating food and suffer so in withdrawal when deprived of it. There's no way off this nightmare treadmill except to not get on in the first place. But it's too late for that now, fellow food-bitches. Hopelessly hooked.

It reminds me of Alex Bosworth's /Mister Sandman/. Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5km09Oav1E

And the One Note Man cartoon:
http://classic.tcj.com/history/worlds-greatest-cartoon/

1. It's Beren/stain/ Bears.

2. The Colored Fairy Books:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/lang.html

I see Grant Wood's /American Gothic/ in the arrangement of figures in that photo, except in the original the farmer is on the viewer's right.

I remember reading about them trying something like this on the planet Krypton. I'm interested to see how it turns out.

Compare to /Bugsy Malone/. It's a nice little bit.

I grew up in my grandparents' Italian restaurant. One of my earliest memories is helping my grandfather assemble the tree. It was made of wooden dowels painted white, and the branches were aluminum strips twisted in hard wires that jammed into holes in the dowels. All the branches were the same length, but the holes were at more and more vertical angles as you went up the dowels, to make the whole thing tree-shaped. The branches wouldn't go in unless you pointed them exactly the right direction, and that was somehow /great/. Every branch was like /yeah! that way!/ But the best part was a little spotlight that you put on the floor in the corner of the display window at the front of the restaurant and pointed at this space-age, shiny tree, and there was a four-color disk that turned on a rotisserie motor in front of the light, and I would sit there and stare at that light and watch the colors change, and listen to the motor grind and buzz, and I'd count the seconds it took to go all the way around to red again, because it sped up and slowed down seemingly at random. And I'd think about it and about what else you could point the light at, and wouldn't it be great if the light in the kitchen was like that? and the back porch light? and the car lights? That's Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I was in a store with Juanita and they had laser things that you'd put on the lawn and point at the house to make tiny dim points of red and green light jump around everywhere, and for some reason it /didn't even remind me of the rotisserie light thing at all/. I didn't think about it until just now. It's like so much of the modern world: frantic and fast and tiny and dim and cold and easy to look away from. I don't know-- maybe I'd like it more if it had a noisy motor struggling in it, or if it got hot enough to burn your hand, or if it required some assembly.

I think you were right to wish for a shiny artificial tree that can be put away in a small box and taken out year after year forever. It's prettier. It's not wasteful. I mean, /Helicopter logging of Christmas tree farms?/

Besides the problem of scale, ornament Enterprise is missing her warp nacelles.

"How should Gabi use this power?" For good and never for evil. How do ya think?

"Superman would literally crush Lois Lane's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout. " --from Larry Niven's breakdown of the problems of superhero sex, /Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex/. http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html

I too wonder what the ethnic slur was.