every few months I forget about this and then see it again and it is always one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
So this time I looked it up, I wondered how to get one and how much it cost. Turns out it was a bit hard to find, actually, and that’s because it’s no longer called the Ogo, it’s called the Omeo.
They are pretty advanced as a product now, in terms of accessories, color options, etc (they have an off road conversion kit and stuff!). They are kind of expensive, tho not necessarily when compared to other wheel chairs, which cost anywhere from a couple hundred bucks for a shitty one, to like 4k for a high end electric one. An Omeo will cost you just under 2k.
Do you ever know you should go to sleep, but you can’t, because you can’t stop thinking of 1982’s bizarre Steve Gutenberg vehicle, No Soap, Radio?
Oh, okay, I’m sorry, it’s just me? I’m the only one here up at night thinking about No Soap, Radio? Y’all are going to pretend you don’t find it completely mystifying?
I’m not even kidding, I spent like an hour thinking about it last night before I could fall asleep.
Okay, see, in 1982, not long after the runaway success of their movie Airplane! the comedy writing trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker brought their signature brand of sight gags and slapstick humor to Television.
Their show Police Squad brought back Airplane! co-star Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebbin, in a series that parodied the police procedurals of the 70s. Later on the show would be the inspiration for the successful Naked Gun series of films in which Nielsen played the same character he did in Police Squad!
Bet some of you never knew The Naked Gun wasbased on a TV show, huh? I certainly didn’t when I was a kid.
That’s because Police Squad! bombed and bombed hard. ABC cancelled it after four episodes, and only six episodes were ever produced. One of the creators, I forget which, said that the network’s reasoning was that you had to watch it to get it, meaning that since much of the humor was sight gags contrasting with the deadpan delivery of cop drama cliches. If you just listen to it while you do the dishes or fold your laundry, you miss a lot of the humor.
Anyway, with Police Squad out, the network needed a mid-season replacement. Thus, No Soap, Radio.
No Soap, Radio is a bizarre attempt to take Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers and sort of squish them together into one American show starring Steve Gutenberg.
Really, the Fawlty Towers comparison is mostly because the show takes place in a run-down hotel run by a hapless guy who has to deal with all sorts of weird guests and eccentric employees. Gutenberg plays the owner of the hotel, and they don’t really try to make him much like Basil Fawlty, since he’s not John Cleese, he’s Steve Gutenberg, so the character is more of a put upon but genial everyman than the kind of dickish Basil Fawlty.
But my gosh does No Soap, Radio want to be Monty Python with every fiber of its being.
Actually that’s one kind of interesting thing about No Soap, Radio, itbelongs to a sparsely populated offshoot of the sketch comedy evolutionary tree, it’s one of those shows where it’s definitely a sketch comedy show, but there’s also a group of main characters and ongoing plots. The premise isn’t so much a framing story as it is that, for a while the camera will follow the story of Steve Gutenberg’s hotel for a while, but then the camera will slowly lose track of them, deciding instead to focus on, say, a TV show in the background or something happening in a hotel room. The only other show I can think of off the top of my head that is structured like that is Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher’s show Snuff Box.
Anyway, as for the Monty Python connection, No Soap, Radio desperately wants to be Monty Python. The most obvious similarity is the transitions between sketches, where the end of one sketch will turn out to be a television advertisement that the characters in the next sketch are watching, but there’s also a more indefinable vibe. For example,
I really like the premise of that couple of sketches, but also, there’s something about the way the doctor delivers his speech before jumping out the window that just seems like the kind of gag that the Pythons would have done, and staged, shot and delivered pretty similarly to how they would have approached it. I don’t know it’s hard to put it into words.
It kind of reminds me of The Orville, inthat it’s a show that really really wants to be a different show, but not in a cynical rip-off way, more in a “The creators love that other show a whole lot and since they weren’t able to work on it they did the next best thing.”
Anyway, if Police Squad is a cult classic, No Soap, Radio is whatever the step beneath a cult classic is. The people who remember it remember it fondly, but boy there aren’t many people who remember it.
It’s kind of understandable, from what I’ve watched I’d call it an okay show, but it’s let down a little bit by the delivery. A lot of the comedy is delivered in a kind of broad, cheesey, over the top 70s style that hasn’t aged as well as the performances of the Pythons, and I think most of the premises are good, but sometimes it feels like they don’t build up that much, but instead kind of peter out, like this sketch about a job applicant trying to dance around the fact that the guy interviewing him is just a disembodied head:
It’s a good premise, but it feels like there should be more laugh lines, or that it should build to some kind of big twist, but it never quite gets there.
So, the big question for me is:
How in God’s name did this happen?
Going into the IMDb rabbit hole, I was expecting to find people who eventually went on to create some better known cult classic. There has to have been an auteur or a group of people with a vision behind this, no American television executive in 1982 was going, “You know what’s popular with the kids today? Monty Python! I want a Monty Python for my network!” They can’t possibly have been saying that, can they?
So someone or a few someones on staff just had to be huge fucking dorks who just really, really loved Monty Python and somehow convinced some exec to greenlight their baby, but I’m really not sure who. The crew seems to have been composed mostly of TV journeymen, people who toiled in the mines writing for late night talk shows, producing Bob Hope specials and directing made for tv movies you’ve never heard of.
The credits don’t really have a “created by” section, there’s just the writers, directors and producers.
The second question is, how on earth did this get chosen as the mid-season replacement for Police Squad! after they cancelled it for not being accessible enough to the average viewer?
That’s like saying, “Hmm, I’ve been booking Frank Zappa every night in my club, but the customers say he’s too weird, I better replace him with someone more accessible, like Captain Beefheart.”
How did this end up replacing Police Squad! when it’s probably the only network show in 1982 that was less accessable to the average viewer? It’s literally named after the punchline to a deliberately obtuse joke designed to confuse people and make them uncomfortable! And how did it replace Police Squad! when the audience overlap was 100%? Every single person who would like No Soap, Radio would also love Police Squad!
What was happening?
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about last night.
i love this because it’s such a simple concept but it answers things i didn’t even know how to ask
Looking out of people’s windows is such a peaceful way of travelling… I got a snowfall in Argentina, a nice sea view in Ukraine, a clothes line in the fog in Bangalore. Antonella from Tavernaro, I like your wooden bird.
Tags:
#interesting #(note: these are not live feeds) #(they’re recordings on ten-minute loops) #illness mention #covid19 #the wondrous variety of sapient life
I googled “how to become a fossil” because I’ve been reading about what archaeology and genetic analysis tells us about ancient humans from their remains, and I feel left out. I, too, wish to be dug up, admired, and analyzed by people unimaginably different from me. While looking into this I hit the motherlode of good science articles re: informativeness and tone on this topic. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180215-how-does-fossilisation-happen
However, if you want your remains to become a fossil that lasts for millions of years, then you really want minerals to seep through your bones and replace them with harder substances. This process, known as ‘permineralisation’, is what typically creates a fully-fledged fossil. It can take millions of years.
As a result, you might skip the coffin. Bones permineralise most rapidly when mineral-rich water can flow through them, imbuing them with things like iron and calcium. A coffin might keep the skeleton nicely together, but it would interfere with this process.
There is a way a coffin might work, though. Mike Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests burial in a concrete coffin filled with sand and with hundreds of 5mm holes drilled into the sides. This then needs to be buried deep enough that groundwater can pass through.
Archer even suggests getting buried with copper strips and nickel pellets if you fancy fossilised bones and teeth with a nice blue-green colour to them.
I love all the scientists interviewed for this piece.
5. Get discovered
Now you need to think about the potential for rediscovery.
If you want somebody to chance upon your carefully preserved fossil one day, you need to plan for burial in a spot that currently is low enough to accumulate the necessary sediments for deep burial – but that will eventually be pushed up again. In other words, you need a place with uplift where weathering and erosion will eventually scour off the surface layers, exposing you.
One good spot might be the Mediterranean Sea, Syme says; it’s getting shallower as Africa is pushed towards Europe. Other small, inland seas that will fill with sediment are good bets, too.
“Perhaps the Dead Sea,” she says. “The high salt would preserve and pickle you.”
Oh huh. when Horizon Zero Dawn PC came out it was very cheap, ZAR 236 (~USD 13), and I bought it quickly because I knew I wanted it and I assumed it was a mistake on steam’s part that I could take advantage of. They later tripled the price to ZAR 680 (~USD 40), which I thought was them fixing it.
Turns out what actually happened was that this was just steam’s regional pricing adjustment at work, but the adjustment was so steep (particularly in Argentina, which was only USD 7 equivalent) and for such a popular game that loads of people used VPN’s to buy the game at foreign pricing.
Lowering the effective price for other countries is a pretty sensible move on Steam’s part, and I hope they don’t stop doing it. The South African Rand is nowhere near the weakest currencies out there, but the amount of disposable income here is much lower (heck, South Africa only /got/ a legal minimum wage last year, and it’s about USD 1.3/hour after a 10% hike this year) and paying dollar prices is hells of expensive. 60 dollars is pricey in the USA, but paying ZAR 1000 in South Africa is hideously expensive for many people. It’s even worse in places like Kenya or Indonesia. There’s a reason why I’m considering moving my server infrastructure to Russian providers who work in Rubles.
dang that’s a low minimum wage. what’s rent / general expenses like
Big Mac index is about 50%, i.e. you pay half as much for a big mac here than in the USA in raw currency terms, and that calculation more or less carries to a lot of food products, cost of living and so on. As you can imagine, ½ USA expenses but ⅙th USA minimum wage means living on minimum wage Is Not Great.
If you work 40 hour weeks at minimum wage you make ~ZAR 3300 (USD 200), and the lowest rent 1 bedroom apartment you can get anywhere near a city is usually around ZAR 2000. Rural areas are cheaper but there’s actually an adjustment on minimum wage for farm workers that drops it to like ZAR 18 per hour, or about One Dollar. You can make up to 3-4× minimum wage without a degree in most cases if you manage to work up to like, store manager or whatever, but that’s kind of your cap without some kind of professional training. Food and other expenses eat the remaining money extremely fast.
If you’re on minimum wage and on your own it’s extremely hard to get by, and even with roommates or family it’s very rough, if you want to try renting. A lot of people live in multigenerational homes for historic, cultural and economic reasons. What “if you want to try renting” means is something I’ll get to under the cut, because unfortunately for this explanation, South Africa is less one economy as much as it is like three in a trench coat. We’ve already covered Low Income, but there’s also The Professional Class and Informal Economies.
the battle of the frogs and the mice! it’s an ancient greek parody of the iliad (some ancient sources even claim that homer himself wrote it, which is impossible but also incredibly charming to imagine)
the plot is that crumbsnatcher, the prince of the mice, stops for a drink of water and meets the king of the frogs, who offers him a tour of his kingdom. but when crumbsnatcher is riding the king’s back through the pond, a snake appears! the frog king goes under the water to avoid it, drowning crumbsnatcher in the process, so the mice declare war on the frogs
it features all the things you’d expect in an epic (epic language, scenes of putting on armor, and even an aristeia for the mice), and it has the most delightful conclusion when zeus prevents the mice from killing all the frogs by throwing a thunderbolt at them and, when that doesn’t work, sending crabs to scare them
sententia antiquae has a delightful translation of it here!
You might have noticed that the internet can be a difficult place to be right now between all the scary news and misinformation about said scary news. On one hand, it’s wise to stay informed, but being constantly bombarded with headlines is overwhelming for anyone. Especially for those of us who spend large chunks of time online. It probably goes without saying that all of us here working at Tumblr are extremely, painfully online now more than ever, just like many of you. Scouring the remote corners of the internet is our job, and if we’re being completely real, our lives. As anyone who is extremely online can tell you, nothing kicks up the anxiety like a particularly difficult news cycle, especially one that feels neverending.
We didn’t solve the broad-sweeping problems of the world, but we did figure out how to steal a few much-needed moments of bliss. We’ve been coping with rough times by taking time to enjoy the softer, gentler spaces on the internet—the ones overflowing with adorable animal GIFs, beautiful plants, and cute comics. We thought, maybe, you’d like to join us. So we made something for you. For us, too:
Think of this Tumblr as a weighted blanket for the soul. A corner of the internet that feels like a hug. Since we’re not ghouls, we’re not going to use it to promote a new feature or anything like that. We’ve just been coping by spending time down this cozy rabbit hole and wanted to extend the invite. The more the merrier, right? We could all use an escape every now and again. Especially now.
Remember: Don’t panic. Keep yourself informed, but definitely limit your news intake if it’s affecting your well-being. Don’t listen to unverified misinformation (you can see more about that on our post from last week). Take care of yourself. Practice physical distancing. Keep washing your hands. Keep in mind your mental health is just as important as your physical health.
If you want to share your moments of joy, use the tag #cozytumblr.
Tags:
#interesting #landscape #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #covid19
I think on this site, there are a lot of people who aren’t ready to buy a domain name, so I’ll mention Neocities. (And yes, it lets you export an archive of your site as many times as you like.)
Also, the line “completely alien technology like RSS” makes me sad.
Tags:
#interesting #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Riding a bike is one of those things that’s a very physical experience, so if you haven’t ridden, then there’s a lot you will naturally not be aware of. I love motorcycle scenes in stories, but over the years I’ve noticed that scenes written by non-riders almost always make the same mistakes. They’re ubiquitous in fact, to the point that if you haven’t been there to learn the contrary yourself, it’s natural to assume that’s how it actually works.
The first thing to know about motorcycles is that when driving, the motorcycle performs as an extension of you. It’s almost cybernetic, the way your mass and balance fuse with the machine’s, the way it transmutes your sense of your surroundings and the surface you’re driving on, and the sense of the bike itself and how it’s performing.
Most notably, the driver’s center of gravity becomes the central steering mechanism. At speeds faster than around 10 mph, the driver steers primarily through shifting their center of balance. If you want to turn left, you lean your body left. You’re actually tilting yourself and the motorcycle to take curves and corners.
When carrying a passenger, then, the passenger needs to shift their center of gravity along with the driver’s. It’s like taking the ‘follower’ position in partner dancing. You lean WITH them; not less, because then your weight counters theirs and they end up not turning (which can be highly bad if, say, the road does not go that way), and not more, because then the bike could tip right over.
Being a good passenger on a bike is not a huge learning curve for most people, but there is a learning curve. And some people have more of a knack for it than others. Some people are natural back-seat drivers, for whatever reason overly pushy, eager, demanding, or determined that they know better than you, and have a habit of making it hard on the driver. I’ve had people tell me they hate riding pillion even if they’re good at it, because they don’t like how out-of-control it feels. I detest it myself, in fact; I’d far rather be driving, and it’s a constant struggle for me to just follow along and behave myself.
This means, though, that carrying a passenger who weighs significantly more than you can be a tricky business. I weigh about 110, and when carrying a rider weighing significantly more than that, it’s awfully easy to crash if the passenger tries to back-seat steer. (A way to mitigate this, especially for new passengers, is to simply take 15 minutes or so to bump around quiet local roads at low speeds so that the driver and passenger can familiarize themselves a bit with minimal risk to themselves.)
Now, undoubtedly the #1 most-committed mistake I see from almost everybody who writes about motorcycles (and for that matter, a lot of unsuspecting new passengers try it in real life) is the ‘wrapping arms around the driver’s waist’ business. It’s so common that this line is practically required by law when somebody’s writing a motorcycle scene, but seriously: DON’T DO THAT. <–The all caps there is not for shaming; it’s for emphasizing the safety issues. It’s not only uncomfortable for the driver, it’s potentially dangerous. It makes it hard to steer, hard to breathe comfortably, and easy to get jerked off balance and into a crash.
In a similar vein, holding onto the driver via grabbing their clothing is ill-advised. This can lead to getting jerked off balance, having seams dig in painfully, and being choked by fabric.
What to do instead: The rider sitting pillion should brace their hands on either side of the driver’s waist.
I know, if you’re in it for the sexual tension, this sounds less sexy, but I’m here to tell you that’s a filthy lie. A passenger who’s sitting properly is basically molded onto the driver’s back. Riding with/being a passenger on a bike is a startlingly intimate experience. There’s a lot of trust and teamwork involved, which takes place at a kinesthetic level. It feels a lot like dancing, as I said before, or maybe partnered sports, where the collaboration is happening at a physical, bone-deep level that often skips right past the conscious intellect.
Now, sometimes (you may’ve seen this on the road) you’ll have passengers who prefer to hang onto a part of the bike–bits of the frame, maybe, or a ‘sissy bar’/seat back sticking up from the back. It’s not uncommon, but it’s a bad habit because the passenger is never quite as in-tune with the driver this way, and if something happens–a tire slips in a puddle, for example–their weight moving in the wrong direction can end up jerking the bike out of the driver’s control.
Another thing I see a lot of writers do in stories that doesn’t work in real life: unfortunately, helmets are NOT easily swappable. They’re designed to clasp the head; a well-fitted helmet should not move on your head at all, even if you shake your head hard (though it also shouldn’t be tight enough to exert uncomfortable pressure). A helmet that fits loosely is useless at best and dangerous at worst. One that’s too tight is either painful or doesn’t go on at all. It doesn’t take much difference in the size of two people’s heads for one person’s helmet to not fit the other person properly. (And even if they’re the same size, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be comfortable for more than short-term wear, but hey.)
Also, the stupid things are ridiculously expensive–especially the full-face models–so most bikers aren’t lucky enough to have a bunch of extras just laying around.
Another tip, both for writing and riding: riding pillion on a sports bike (those sleek ones where the driver’s crouched and leaning forward like a race jockey) is a miserable freaking experience. On a lot of models, you’re perched up there on something that barely counts as a seat and leaves you constantly feeling like you’re about to slide off the back; your legs are pushed up into a crouch; you’re hunched like a monkey over the driver; and possibly you’ve got a scalding-hot muffler pressed up against your calf.
(Pro tip: if anybody ever invites you for a ride on their bike and you’re wearing shorts, pay attention to where the muffler’s located in relation to the foot pegs.)
Now, what is it about motorcycles that makes some of us bikers go into a lathered-up frenzy at the idea of riding? It’s because it FEELS SO DAMN ALIVE.
Look. It’s like…life these days is, well, canned. We spend a lot of our time in pods–houses, cars, subway trains–breathing tinned air, walking around on pavement or carpet… But when I’m on a bike, it’s me and a 360 degree panorama of the world, and there’s nothing between me and it. Some people get off on the risk of that, but for me it’s a matter of immersion. When I ride, I can feel the cool humid air rolling down from under a forested hillside. I can smell the road dust, the oil, the exhaust, the herby scent of weeds and wildflowers on the roadside, the river I’m driving near, the shady scent of a forest, the roadside fruit stand…and I’m not talking in that wafty, broken-up way you get if you roll the car doors down. It’s like driving into a wall of scent, crashing through one bubble after another of temperature changes and smells and sounds and sights, and I have this bike underneath me that’s rumbling and vibrating and moving like it’s part of me, and it’s just the most powerful sense I’ve ever had of being in charge of my own life and not hiding from the world. I can see it, and it can see me, and yeah, that’s a bit dangerous, but it’s also real.
God, that last paragraph particularly gets to me, as someone with an [airborne environmental sensitivity NOS that is apparently not technically an allergy] [link].
I fucking *flinched* at the description of the scents of the outdoors, because to me those scents have come to mean “your mask seal has failed and you’re gonna be paying for it later”. I miss outdoor scents, but I’ve also grown to fear them.
That paragraph is even better at expressing the intertwining of realness and danger than OP intended.
Tags:
#interesting #the more you know #motorcycles #reply via reblog #tangents #allergies #(haven’t found a better tag yet)
Brinens and Things 