Wasteland Wrap-up #24

Winter weather, the new Dylan film, thoughts on folk music...

The holidays here have been relatively quiet, which is nice. I managed to get all my last-minute grading done, and work on my various other projects. It has snowed a bit here, which I guess is attractive, although as a West Coaster by birth, I am not such a big fan of it nor the grimy quality it takes on after a day or so out here. Lyndon enjoys poking around in it, but also likes to get snuggled under a big blanket after coming back inside and getting toweled off:

Snuggled in a blanket on one of his several beds.

On Christmas Day, I took Lyndon to the local park, where we were greeted by a much-larger-than-usual flock of pigeons. It was like they were having a convention, or something. Lyndon enjoyed spooking them, and watching them fly around in a large, slow arc.

The birds. This is about 4-5X the normal amount of park pigeons.

Confronted by a mighty beast, they took to the skies.

The artist surveying his handiwork.

We live near a number of 99¢ stores, and I could not restrain myself from looking for a grip of little gifts for Ellen in them. The most amusing offering (which I did not buy, because even for $4.99, the quality was too low to imagine it being used) was this bag:

San Francisco! Washington, DC!. And of course, everyone’s favorite, “GENERIC NEW YORK ARCHITECTURE.” One can imagine exactly the manufacturing process/translation error that led to this (“and add some generic New York architecture to it”).

ICYMI: on Doomsday Machines, I managed to get a post out yesterday that I thought was fun, on the very striking (and strange) 1980s nuclear cartography of “Wild Bill” Bunge: “The battlefield is everywhere.”

I’ve been thinking about Bunge’s book, on and off, ever since I first saw it, back when I was a student, a bit over 20 years ago. So whatever one might say about it, I have to say that it stuck in my mind, and that’s something. The scans from the post were made by me back when I lived in DC, in 2012, at the Library of Congress — so it’s nice to finally have found some public use for them!

I’ve sometimes imagined adding a secret “Bunge mode” to NUKEMAP, where the little “sick” and “insane” icons would appear, along with “marauding zombies” and so on. But I’ve never acted on the idea, both because I feel it would potentially undermine the effectiveness of NUKEMAP, and also because I have too many other things on my docket at the moment. But who knows. Maybe for April Fools.