"The Mike Wallace Interview"

Most of my generation (and younger) don't remember The Mike Wallace Interview. We knew Mike Wallace as the keen, insightful lead on 60 Minutes, but we never got to watch him conduct amazing interviews with important figures of the 1950s.

There is a great link at BoingBoing today to video held by the University of Texas of the Mike Wallace Interview show from the 1950s. This is just great footage of a series of very well researched interviews with some of the most prominent people in the US at the time, including political and pop culture figures and important social icons.

You will find the archived video at the Harry Ransom center pages at UT-Austin.

Among those interviewed:

Margaret Sanger

Henry Kissinger

Frank Lloyd Wright

Eleanor Roosevelt

Nobel Prise winners of 1958 (including Linus Pauling)

Pearl Buck

The then-Grand Wizard of the KKK

Salvador Dali

Aldous Huxley

It's a real treasure trove, and I thought some of you would be interested in it.

"The Mike Wallace Interview"

Most of my generation (and younger) don't remember The Mike Wallace Interview. We knew Mike Wallace as the keen, insightful lead on 60 Minutes, but we never got to watch him conduct amazing interviews with important figures of the 1950s.

There is a great link at BoingBoing today to video held by the University of Texas of the Mike Wallace Interview show from the 1950s. This is just great footage of a series of very well researched interviews with some of the most prominent people in the US at the time, including political and pop culture figures and important social icons.

You will find the archived video at the Harry Ransom center pages at UT-Austin.

Among those interviewed:

Margaret Sanger

Henry Kissinger

Frank Lloyd Wright

Eleanor Roosevelt

Nobel Prise winners of 1958 (including Linus Pauling)

Pearl Buck

The then-Grand Wizard of the KKK

Salvador Dali

Aldous Huxley

It's a real treasure trove, and I thought some of you would be interested in it.

If you call it a delicacy...

...people will eat something that, otherwise, they would not bring near their mouths. And one of the things that is not going into my mouth unless I am starving (mostly because I *did* eat part of one once) is a cold pork pie.

But the lowly pork pie has now joined the EU elite, notes the UK Telegraph:

A list of fine European foods that includes Champagne, Parma ham and Whitstable oysters has a new member - the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie.

After a 10-year battle, the famous pie has been given EU recognition, which means it is an official delicacy that requires protection.

The Protected Geographical Status means only pork pie producers using a traditional recipe and in the vicinity of the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray will have the right to use the title.

Maybe my problem was that I tried to eat one of these things in Scotland, too far away from its native Leicestershire.

If you call it a delicacy...

...people will eat something that, otherwise, they would not bring near their mouths. And one of the things that is not going into my mouth unless I am starving (mostly because I *did* eat part of one once) is a cold pork pie.

But the lowly pork pie has now joined the EU elite, notes the UK Telegraph:

A list of fine European foods that includes Champagne, Parma ham and Whitstable oysters has a new member - the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie.

After a 10-year battle, the famous pie has been given EU recognition, which means it is an official delicacy that requires protection.

The Protected Geographical Status means only pork pie producers using a traditional recipe and in the vicinity of the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray will have the right to use the title.

Maybe my problem was that I tried to eat one of these things in Scotland, too far away from its native Leicestershire.

And these are the people who get first crack at my students

If you're a teacher and you can't pass a test after three attempts, you don't get licensed here in Massachusetts. I'm pretty good with that, thanks. ( Except that people want to change this requirement, because teachers can't be expected to take tests. What follows, not surprisingly, is my rant for the week. )

And these are the people who get first crack at my students

If you're a teacher and you can't pass a test after three attempts, you don't get licensed here in Massachusetts. I'm pretty good with that, thanks. ( Except that people want to change this requirement, because teachers can't be expected to take tests. What follows, not surprisingly, is my rant for the week. )

Our phones are back...

...and a net-checking Comcast representative even kindly replied to my earlier Live Journal entry. He and I exchanged some email, but Comcast never contacted us -- Mike called them after he'd found the key to the problem.

That key was not anything Comcast did, or anything we did. It was something a collection agency did. They called a number to try to resolve a bad debt. They got us. It turns out that our telephone circuits were linked to two different telephone numbers for 24+ hours.

Apparently, whoever owns the number that my line was connected to doesn't get many callers. But the owner of the one Mike's linked to owes somebody money.

We knew our numbers couldn't be called. We knew we could call out. It just never dawned on us to call our cell phones and find out that we were calling from numbers we'd never seen before.

That was the clue Comcast needed, and they gave us back our phone numbers. We should be grateful that we hadn't been cross-wired to a pizza shop or an escort service, because we would have gotten much more business. Of course, we also would have figured out the problem a whole lot more quickly, too.

Dunno if the collection agency ever tracked down their quarry.

Our phones are back...

...and a net-checking Comcast representative even kindly replied to my earlier Live Journal entry. He and I exchanged some email, but Comcast never contacted us -- Mike called them after he'd found the key to the problem.

That key was not anything Comcast did, or anything we did. It was something a collection agency did. They called a number to try to resolve a bad debt. They got us. It turns out that our telephone circuits were linked to two different telephone numbers for 24+ hours.

Apparently, whoever owns the number that my line was connected to doesn't get many callers. But the owner of the one Mike's linked to owes somebody money.

We knew our numbers couldn't be called. We knew we could call out. It just never dawned on us to call our cell phones and find out that we were calling from numbers we'd never seen before.

That was the clue Comcast needed, and they gave us back our phone numbers. We should be grateful that we hadn't been cross-wired to a pizza shop or an escort service, because we would have gotten much more business. Of course, we also would have figured out the problem a whole lot more quickly, too.

Dunno if the collection agency ever tracked down their quarry.

Psychedelic garden mushrooms

This Old House has a spread about "wackiest yard and garden products," of which these are but one entry. But they're not your average just-pretty mushrooms, oh, no:

Regular watering spikes are for squares—give your flowers some serious power with these hand-blown glass mushroom spikes, which deliver up to a cup of water to a plant's root zone during the day. At night, phosphorescent speckles inside the glass begin to glow, giving off up to 4 hours of trippy illumination.

$20 each, from Gardeners Supply Company.

Psychedelic garden mushrooms

This Old House has a spread about "wackiest yard and garden products," of which these are but one entry. But they're not your average just-pretty mushrooms, oh, no:

Regular watering spikes are for squares—give your flowers some serious power with these hand-blown glass mushroom spikes, which deliver up to a cup of water to a plant's root zone during the day. At night, phosphorescent speckles inside the glass begin to glow, giving off up to 4 hours of trippy illumination.

$20 each, from Gardeners Supply Company.

Seen on teh intertubes

The Contaminated has a set of bumber snickers, of which I liked ( these the best... )

Seen on teh intertubes

The Contaminated has a set of bumber snickers, of which I liked ( these the best... )