NOT ANNOYING LINKS

John Seiffer is the reader who pointed out that a pound of gold weighs less than a pound of feathers.  (Because precious metals are traditionally measured in Troy ounces, of which there are only 12 to the pound.)  Well, just for the record, I weigh MY gold on the same bathroom scale I weigh my feathers, and a pound is a pound is a pound.  Except that the feathers tend to fall off the scale – it’s hard to keep them all on there at once – but that doesn’t mean a pound of them doesn’t weigh a pound.

So John, I noted, was just being annoying.

“To redeem myself,” he now writes, “I offer a couple of links you might enjoy.  One serious – about a breakthrough in lighting.  (The video is more understandable than the text.)  One not – did you see the Old Spice SuperBowl ad?  ‘I’m on a horse!’  This shows how it was made.”

☞  Now I’m annoyed that I just spent 19 minutes watching the making of an Old Spice ad!  Well, not really.  As the son of a 1950s/1960s-era Mad Man* . . . how could I not love it?

*You know “Man, Oh, Manischewitz”? – my dad wrote that . . . “Man, oh, Manischewitz, what a wine!” . . . and an astronaut actually spoke it, spontaneously, on the moon – “Man, oh, Manischewitz – will you get a load of that crater!”**

**Or words to that effect.  Can you imagine Mr. Manischewitz, whose real name I forget, an old man home in Brooklyn with his wife, watching the moon walk live, with two billion other people, and suddenly he hears his slogan, free, from the moon?***

***I actually know people – personally – who are certain no one ever did walk on the moon; that the whole thing was faked in a TV studio.  Perhaps Manischewitz was one of the sponsors, and this was the original “product placement.”  But if so, Dad never let on.

DEBT CLOCK

Sites like this one just get more and more comprehensive – and nerve-wracking.  The average savings per U.S. citizen is only $1,042?  It’s the lone number on this array that’s small. 

MYM-DOS MAC

Dan Critchett:  “Did you know you can run MYM-DOS on a Mac?  All you have to do, as I did, is load DOS Box and off you go.”