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Got a quarter for the juke box? Thanks. Pay you back when I get my change.
It’s cah-raaaazy, Daddy-O.
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James
We were with you the Queen Mary II crossing trip, (along with Dave M and Jean) and Linda also save a few of those little jelly jars as mementos.
The use of the jars seems so very pish posh and British, it would be a pity to open them. It will be something the kids will be wondering about when they purge the physical remnants of our (really just the wife’s) life time of squirreling things away after we pass on.
III
Back in the day, Snyder’s and Clancy’s Drug Store, at their lunch counters, used to charge 10cents more if you wanted your sandwich toasted. I wonder how many chose the untoasted version?
A great tune written by Robbie Robertson mentioning Spike Jones
“Now me and my mate were back at the shack
We had Spike Jones on the box
She said, “I can’t take the way he sings
But I love to hear him talk”
Now that just gave my heart a throb
To the bottom of my feet
And I swore and I took another pull
My Bessie can’t be beat”
An especially good visit. A snip-snappy cool cat jingle bookended with a walk-through memory of a small world. I love every minute of this.
I’ve been meaning to do a post about it, but this reminded me of a rabbit hole I leapt down a while ago about Milton Glaser. Among his many famous designs, he did the cover art for 1966’s The Baroque Inevitable. Baby Teeth font, technicolor instruments and spiral hair, and unlikely scripts combined for a work of art in its own right. The album was a sort of satirical pop-sound orchestra doing covers of a variety of tunes, from Sinatra to Dylan and Beatles. The producer, John Simon, has his own interesting story starting with The Cyrkle (Red Rubber Ball), Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and The Band.
Aluminum is one of my cause celebs. Aluminum is the most common metal yet scrap AL is about thirty times as expensive as the much less common iron. Why is this?
I haven’t listened to this episode yet, but I think I can answer the question. As I recall aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, but it is much more energy intensive and costly to refine than iron ore. The energy gap between melting down and refining existing pieces of aluminum vs refining aluminum ore is apparently much larger than the energy gap between melting and refining hunks of steel vs refining iron ore. It’s still very worthwhile to recycle iron and steel, but more so for aluminum.
I still have a few. ;)
That chunky anachronistic typeface and the Peter-Max graphics were endemic. This was the album you chose when the Columbia Record Club gave you 12 choices when you signed up, and you ran out of things you wanted.
I like Milton Glaser…(((shrugs shoulders and slinks home, Falling Up the Stairs still gripped tight through mittened hands)))
The foil atop your jelly coffin is made of plastic with an aluminum coating. You get the aluminum to stick to the plastic with a thing called sputter coating.
Start with a roll of plastic, printed on one side with the Schmucker’s Concorde Grape labelling. If you think of an old film reel you won’t be far off. Now thread this grape tape through a series of rollers, something like a giant Mickey Mouse head. Over the ear on the left, then under the ‘head’, then over the other ear. You want it to travel around as much of the surface of the drum (the head) as you can manage. Thread it so that the printed label portion is facing inwards.
Now here’s the fun part. Seal off as much of the area around the drum as you can from the atmosphere. Pump in a gas, let’s say argon. Start a plasma burning. Then strike your argon plasma against a solid block of aluminum. The excited gas molecules will hit with enough force to blast particles of aluminum off of the surface of the block. They’ll stick pretty much wherever they land, which conveniently includes our Schmucker’s Grape tape.
If you spin your grape tape through the contraption at a consistent speed you can fine-tune the thickness of aluminum that gets stuck to the bottom of it. If you build more plasma chambers around the giant drum you can have each of them sputter a layer on, which means you can run the tape through faster and faster. Coil it up in a big reel a the end and you can load that completed roll into the next machine in line, the one which seals it atop your jelly coffin.
Since I’ve got it on hand:
This is a plasma cleaner. It makes a plasma using the normal atmosphere, and strikes it against whatever we’ve got rolling around that drum there. Instead of sputtering stuff on it we’re hitting the surface directly so as to burn off any loose contaminants. It runs reel-to-reel like my hypothetical grape tape.
This is a desktop sputter coater, from an electron microscope lab. Electron microscopes only work if the surface of whatever you’re scoping is conductive. To look at things that aren’t conductive on their own you sputter a layer of metal on them. This one uses an iridium target because nothing else in the plant uses iridium, so we can be pretty sure that if the element analysis tells us there’s iridium in them thar hills that it’s the process of measuring it that’s to blame.
That’s great. Proof of my old adage: the Diner patrons contain the sum of human knowledge.
I’m sure I had something to say, but too many topics. Jelly, bad music, PDQ Bach, that horrid Silent Running. I don’t know. Maybe it was about cinnamon toothpicks?
It was an okay movie, but so many open questions. What kind of “commercial service” were those ships supposed to be doing? Carrying freight to/from Mars colonies?
When I brought my family with me to D.C. on my last work trip, our hotel had an upscale restaurant and we used the free breakfast coupons I got during check-in to enjoy breakfast on our last day. They had the little jelly jars and my daughter loved them. She too grabbed one of each as we left and has them one the kitchen counter. Probably won’t ever use them.
Thank you James for answering my question and especially for giving me the obvious answer first. I think that regardless of where people come down on the milkshake/malt question, all can agree that getting whichever remaining ice cream drink in a frosted over metal tin is the best part of a milkshake or malt.
Oh, you bring back high school days and mornings in the band room listening to the Professor and PDQ. Hoople will never be the same. Thank you.
Bingo! There are other minor reasons as well, but energy is the biggest reason.
So many topics, so many memories.
The talk about popcorn making and marketing reminded me of the ‘Chinese popcorn machines’ often encountered on the streets and in the markets of that country. The kernels are hand spun in a pressurized metal container heated over an open flame and the corn comes out fresh, fragrant, and fluffy. It’s often flavored by some added ingredient such as sugar. Since it’s made before your eyes the usual hesitations about Chinese street foods are minimized.
Except you don’t know where that corn has been…