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Rahko is a creature in Finnish mythology. This Rahko being is connected with the moon, but exactly how is a question. 

In one version, he is a thief who was bothered by moonlight, which can perhaps be a nuisance if you are a thief. He decided to paint the moon black with tar. This results in the new moon, and also the face you may see when looking up at the moon. 

In another version, spirits known as kapeet eat the moon, and the Rahko forges a new one out of cow hooves and fat. 

So in the aggregate, the Rahko is responsible for either the moon being there or for it not being there. Or perhaps both. After all, the phases of the moon are cyclical.

What the market will bear

Say what you want about this:

It does prove that the sixties were weird on a level you don't often hear about. Of course when people talk about the sixties, what they often mean is the early seventies, when bands in faded jeans were all over FM radio and All in the Family proved that hippies were just your annoying son-in-law.

But in 1967, it was apparently all about ad men and publicists going down Sunset Strip and trying to convince the freaks that commercials are a real happening, man. There's a bit of the put-on in all this, but it was also real. An actual agency commissioned these skits and songs. From the sounds of it, they even got Thurl Ravenscroft involved. It all adds up to a huge "What the hell am I listening to?"

Purple shoes to fill

Uh-oh.

A Broadway musical of Purple Rain. Huh.

I have affection for the movie, but the story is a little trite. What advantages does it have? Prince as a performer, obviously. Morris Day makes a good foil. There's a good rapport between Prince and the actors who play the Kid's band, the Revolution, who also happen to be Prince's actual band, the revolution. And Clarence Williams III is also an asset as the Kid's troubled father.

Most of these advantages are pretty much impossible to reproduce. Find a guy who looks sort of like Prince and can sing like him, and he still isn't the real thing. Maybe put him in a biopic.

Keys

Johnny Staccato is an odd duck in TV Land. It started in 1959, when Peter Gunn had been on the air for a year, and it seems to have given itself the challenge of out-Gunning Gunn. Thus while one show featured a private detective who hung out at a jazz club and dated the chanteuse, the other had a detective who actually sat in with the band. John Staccato, played by John Cassavetes, was the pianist at Waldo's, alternating with John Williams. Yes, that John Williams. And it was pretty vanguard jazz, aspiring to Dave Brubeck/Sonny Rollins levels of sophistication. 

Cassavetes apparently didn't like the show, which may be one reason why its only season ended in March rather than May. It probably doesn't say much about the quality of the show, since he doesn't strike me as someone who'd want to be tied down to any TV show. He did still direct several episodes.

The quality of the episodes varies, but it has a pretty good batting average. Cassavetes's twitchy intensity was well suited to playing an eccentric gumshoe, believe it or not. They could also pull in some impressive guest stars. The second episode is an entirely obvious murder mystery, but features Martin Landau in a key role, providing a cool to Cassavetes's hot. And yes, offscreen wife Gena Rowlands shows up, in an episode that really drives home how different air travel was during the Eisenhower era.

Digging that crazy sound

"Art of Noise" refers back to both a Futurist manifesto and a British electronic group most influential for the fact that they really weren't a band at all. Currently it's also an exhibition at New York's Cooper-Hewitt museum. Some of the old music players are quite striking, suggesting in a few instances a fictional history a la Steampunk or Dieselpunk. 

I read a review of this show in the hard copy edition of the New York Times. The article suggested that the era of owning music is ending. Could well be, but if you're able to resist this trend, you probably should. Consider that there are words that there are words artists or record companies could want to censor out, or feel pressured to do so. Or perhaps worse, feel a need to insert words that weren't there. Or, say, the single edit of a song is such a hit that the album version eventually disappears. A world of streaming-only music probably would be quite a bit smaller by comparison.

More scenes from the end of the Internet

I was recently locked out of my email account. It had happened a couple of times before and blown over after a couple of days. This time it was looking like more of a long-term thing, and in the event it lasted the better part of a week before I got in touch with the provider and restored usage.

Why did it happen? It seems to fall under the broad category of "suspicious activity." I've gotten a number of phishing emails, to be sure. Everybody has. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone else had gotten these phishing attempts but dummied up to look like they're from me.

But it also may have thrown the system out of whack if I logged in from something other than my home computer. The library, say. An increasing number of websites get paranoid if you log in from someplace other than your home computer. They might require you to log into your email and respond to something they just sent you. But your email provider might get a little freaked by that as well, and send a request to confirm your identity.

This can complicate things in terms of editing a wiki or commenting on a blog. It may, in fact, prevent you from doing these things at all. Luck of the draw. But people expect a certain amount of mobility in connection with the internet. Take that away and they might start losing interst.

Why do I keep this blog? This is why.

A bird, nesting, right over the doorway.

I first saw the bird in the nest a couple of days ago, above the door I generally use to get to the sidewalk. The bird didn't move, so I figured it must be artificial. Some kind of garden decoration somebody had planted up there either for a gag or because they just liked the way it looked. Although the nest was a little messy for that.

But today I came back and the building's Russian handyman pointed the bird―which looks like some kind of columbiform―out to me. It's real. She's real, and had a chick next to her. Maybe there's a daddy bird out there getting food for them? We don't know. 

Late afternoon, early evening, we had a thunderstorm. I went downstairs to look at the bird through the little window over the door. This time I did see her head move. And later on, at night, her head was turned so she could look inside. 

How could this not be a blessing?

You beat everything, you know that?

Here's another story from while I was out getting breakfast. A man―he was black, and that's a relevant detail for reasons I'll make clear―was sitting with a young woman and talking to her. From context I don't think she was his daughter, but I don't think they were an item either. Maybe a niece. He was telling her about The Andy Griffith Show, and he was a big fan. When he talked about Deputy Barney Fife I said "Don Knotts" and he was glad to have someone else who knew about the show. Which the waitress did as well. 

At this point it feels like anyone writing about The Andy Griffith Show for a magazine or a website would have to keep an arm's length from it. They'd call it out for its overly rosy portrayal of the Jim Crow South, or for its lack of characters of color. From what I understand Griffith was a desegregationist and didn't want the cast to be all white, but the network thought they understood the South better than he did and overruled him. Of course if Mayberry had been a friendly integrated town, someone would be complaining about that, too.

Anyway, my point is that while the internet is everywhere and seemingly in everything, people in real life are still different.

Well-nested

Matryoshka, those Russian nesting dolls. You ever think about them? Sure you do. Ever wonder if they're still made by hand? Well, someone has to ponder things like that.

Actually, the process, if this video is any guide, is still refreshingly physical. Of course these dolls are huge. Real statement dolls.

Proof

With the realization that I can be kind of a broken record on this topic, I'll keep it brief.

Do you remember "15 Days to Slow the Spread"? I do. In at least one business that was closing down for that period of time on government orders/strong suggestions, I remember saying "See you in a couple of weeks." Because as dismal as the idea of a central authority ordering all face to face social activity suspended was, at least they'd put a time limit on it.

Of course the fifteen days came and went. Without a word of explanation, the suspension was extended. Now there was no fixed endpoint, and no admission that there ever had been. Anyone who spoke or acted with the expectation of being allowed to return to their regular life was shamed into silence.

That's why, outside of some limited hangout, there will be no reckoning on the COVID era. Nothing actually went wrong. It was an experiment, and at root it had nothing to do with masks or vaccines, very little to do with COVID itself. The object was to see how much the population would tolerate gaslighting, Orwellian memory-holing, and leonine contracts. A lot, it turns out. Experiment successful.

Fool your friends

Have you heard of puzzle jugs? They were essentially joke shop fare, regardless of whether there were actual joke shops back then. The most popular tended to be something like a dribble glass. The unwary toper would lift them to take a drink, and then find himself drenched.  But there were other variations. According to Kovel's American Antiques (2004 edition):

One jug, the simplest of puzzles, had a frog on the bottom. When the unwary tippler drank his grog, the frog appeared―a startling, lifelike visitor. Many hard drinkers must have had a real fright from this jug.

The urge to prank goes back far, further than this entry might indicate. It's a healthy instinct, in the right context. One hopes that the wags have not been forever stilled.

Penned up

Out of curiosity, and looking around for ideas, I've been doing some research into inventions that either never caught on, or which had their day and then were forgotten. This search led me to the baby cage, which was an eye opener.

The theory behind it was that babies and very young children need fresh air, and needed to be exposed to the elements in order to give them a healthy metabolism. This is true. The developers also said that not all families have sufficient outdoor room as part of their homes. This was true then and is very much true now.

The solution was a small structure, enclosed but open to the air, aka a cage. And it was to be placed outside the window. It raises questions. How firmly is the cage attached to the building's facade? How much do you trust the structural integrity of the cage itself. These are important matters, given how high some of the cages were placed. 

In any case, enough parents had enough anxiety about dangling their babies out the window that the fad soon died out. In retrospect it seems like an imperfect and perhaps unworkable solution to an ongoing problem. In the real world there probably isn't one fix that will work for everyone.

Artist of the Second World

 

Aleksandr Gerasimov was not just a Russian artist, he was a Soviet artist. It's not a coincidental distinction. He was intimately tied to the regime during its most autocratic stage. Aside from some operatic depictions of Lenin, he also painted official portraits of Stalin, some of which could make one wonder whether Gerasimov had to paint them over to erase apparatchiks who had fallen out of favor.

But whatever his political role, he was still an artist. A very good one, too. "Boat Trip", seen above, has long been one of his most sought-after works. Several kinds of sensuality are at work here. The mist and spray that rise from the water feel real enough to make you think of the way flecks of cool water feel on the skin. There are also the Russian women relaxed in the sun, one extending her legs, the other leaning forward into the wind. They're mostly turned away from us, enrapt in a grand picture of their own. The man had a real feel for his subjects.

Message received

Now here's kind of a strange incident. Yesterday I was checking my email. I saw what was apparently an email sent by a friend of mine. It didn't really say anything, though. There was just a screenshot jpeg that I was apparently supposed to look at. Which I could only do by downloading it.

Said friend hadn't said that he was going to send me anything like this. (Like what? Exactly.) If he did mail me some kind of image he'd almost certainly give me a hint as to what it was, either saying so beforehand or putting something in the body of the email. The clincher was that the email had been sent at 11:30, when he'd be at work. There was just no way.

I deleted it, of course. There have been times before when spambots have poorly imitated people I knew. The "get me to download stuff" part was new, though. They must be getting older and assuming everyone is stupider.

Wise guys?

It's hard not to notice a certain pattern in the videos and―more importantly―the people that YouTube promotes to me.

Sam Harris: Uses fake erudition in the defense of the kind of bigotry you can practice just as well without literacy.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Undoubtedly an intelligent man in person, but never produces anything but thought terminating clichés.

Adam Conover: The show title "Adam Ruins Everythng" is the kind of self-deprecation you practice when you think highly of yourself.

I'd gotten used to classing them as the stupid person's idea of a smart person, but then it hit me: There's no other kind.

The purpose of smart people at this point is to keep you stupid. Intelligence is indeed not just the memorization of facts and figures. It starts with questioning things. It continues with being able to see those questions through. No one really wants a bunch of people who are smart by those criteria. The safest thing is just to give them a bunch of false idols.

...but a hero nonetheless

Doing a crossword today I came across the name of Jim Thorpe. It made me think of what I'd originally learned about Thorpe in school.

Thorpe had a distinguished athletic career in school and outside of it. This led to him competing in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, in the Pentathlon and Decathlon events. He won gold in both events, an impressive achievement by any standard. But when his past playing baseball in the Eastern Carolina League went public, the International Olympic Committee rescinded his medals.

I'd always learned of this as a racist institution dismissing the achievements of a Native American athlete. But there's a problem with this interpretation. The IOC was right. The ban on professional athletes in the Olympics exists, and it's there for a reason, the US's absurd decision more recently to populate its basketball teams entirely with NBA champs notwithstanding. To be fair to Thorpe, the sport he had professionally played in was not an exact match for the Olympic events in which he participated, so there was ambiguity on his end. But the decision was the right one.

What does this prove? Only that rushes to judgment can happen in any direction.

Headscratcher

"Fade In to Murder", the episode that kicked off Columbo's sixth season, is weird. You might know it as the one where a TV detective actor kills the producer of his show and plays at being his character for real as Columbo digs into him. What's weird about it is that it works when it shouldn't. Not to the point of being an all-time classic, but it's certainly enjoyable. Despite having many factors that could potentially sink it.

Despite what some might say, William Shatner's performance is not one of these potentially fatal flaws. He tones his trademark hamminess down enough to be a quite credible murderer. High marks also go to the other major players: Bert Remsen as Shatner's addled alibi; and Lola Albright, much icier than she had been on Peter Gunn as the murder victim.

What does present a problem is the lack of challenge. At the end of the day, Columbo is a cat and mouse game where the cat seems very dim but still catches the mouse. If the criminal doesn't seem up to it, there's no payoff. Case in point "The Most Dangerous Match", where Laurence Harvey's paranoid chess player is too off the wall crazy to get the job done right and the story drags as a result.

If Ward Fowler's (Shatner) crazy act is just an act, he is in fact very stupid. He stages the murder as a robbery but uses his own voice in front of both the victim and a witness. He also leaves his ski mask disguise lying around smeared with actor's makeup. If Columbo's near-constant laughter isn't lack of discipline on the part of Peter Falk, it might indicate that the Lieutenant can't even pretend to take this guy seriously.

There are other pitfalls. The parallels between Fowler's show and Columbo itself are clever but get used too much. And the evidence that finally allows Columbo to get his man is just dropped in at the end without being introduced beforehand.

So why does the episode work? It might be because the cast and crew had built up enough energy that they could coast for a while. Or it could be something else entirely. Art sometimes rises and falls on mysterious bases.

Big data

On first blush, so much obfuscation and frivolity in the media today seems to be descended from the substance-free electronic culture of the very late twentieth century. And that's true, but only up to a point. 

On June 12, 1994, former Buffalo Bills quarterback OJ Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a waiter Ron Goldman. The news traveled worldwide in hours if not minutes, and in the same span of time everyone across that wide world had an opinion on the case. I was on the opposite coast from Los Angeles and I certainly found out about it soon enough. But in material terms, the case had exactly as much of an effect on me as I had on it, which is none. The details were awful, but they were being conveyed to people who could get nothing out of them except for titillation.

Was this a first? In the underlying principles, far from it. So says Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourses in the Age of Show Business. Postman finds the onset of the process in the nineteenth century spread of telegraphy and photography, which may appear to be unlikely culprits from the perspective of 2026.

But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory. You may get a better sense of what I mean here if you imagine a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vermiform plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. And if you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with anything?" imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a photograph I want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on Aldononjes. "Ah yes," you might murmur, "now I see." It is true enough that the photograph provides a context for the sentence you have been given, and that the sentence provides a context of sorts for the photograph, and you may even believe for a day or so that you have learned something. But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it. You will, in fact, have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving a crossword puzzle, but nothing more.

Postman elaborates on the growth of newspapers in this time, which of course made their living on the reporting of news. But in order to fill their quota, they needed to create news to report. Or at any rate, to gather news only available via the use of these new technologies. The news would not have been found worthy of attention by anyone outside of the immediate vicinity of the events before this time.

From here, the development of our own rootless media product was natural enough, although it took time. And there are gratifications to it. I have no plans to give up crossword solving. But we should know that our knowledge is only considered knowledge because of a rather twisted history.

After these messages, and these

At breakfast today I saw the start of an infomercial. It was for some kind of dental-related practice. That's as specific as I can get right now, but it got me thinking. 

Infomercials are an annoyance when you're waiting for and expecting something else. Say, if it's 11:30 at night and you know The Twilight Zone is scheduled and it might be one you haven't seen before or not, but you like The Twilight Zone. Because infomercials get slotted in at the last moment, and the things they replace have some viewers, but not enough so that the station owners are worried about annoying them.

Conversely, these spots might strike you as funny. Groups of two or more people have been goofing on their canned awkwardness basically forever.

And a third reaction is just wonder. Some of these things are so odd that you can only ponder what unintended messages they might carry, how they reflect the unconscious of technological civilization. One might even find a kind of inspiration in them.

Infomercials aren't something I'd spend a lot of time looking at, but it's interesting to think about what they imply. In the streaming world they're probably doomed, as hardly anyone would be interested in ordering them in a service. But then streaming itself, at least its most heavily promoted side, shows signs of being a bubble. So who knows?

Exemplar

In Pawtucket, there's a mural on the side of a two-story building. In bright colors sure to draw the curious eye, it reassures the viewer of human things that it's okay to do. This is obviously a well-intentioned work, responsive, made by and for people who have been there. So what could be the problem?

I've thought about it for some time now, and I think Ashley Frawley might have stumbled on it. If everyone is always thinking about mental health, what else is there?

This is a microcosm of where the rest of the world is headed or has already gone. In England and Wales, where mental health promotion has been in overdrive for decades, working-age claimants of incapacity and disability benefits rose from 2.9 million in May 2019 to 4.5 million in August 2025, with mental-health conditions driving the increase. Meanwhile, in the United States, young people self-diagnose from TikTok reels whose creators doubtless feel they are doing a public service. After all, they are only echoing the common sense of our time: There is no shame in seeking help; “the more awareness, the better.”

That's about the size of it. There are vulnerable people out there taking drugs so strong that they'd have once gotten the dealer a life sentence, ceding control over who they talk to and how they live. Our society encourages this and will never stop, because it's a plainly virtuous and necessary mode of treatment. The whole cycle becomes self-justifying and self-perpetuating. The increased availability of resources for the mentally ill is a good thing. The outsized public focus on their maladies is not.