Old Video Shows Stupid Idea: Big Cleveland Balloonfest Of 1986

Zillions of balloons rain down on
Cleveland during a 1986 ill-fated
attempt at a Guiness Book of World
Record attempt

The Atlantic recently featured a short film about a long forgotten, failed attempt at a Guinness Book of World Record balloon launch.

The city of Cleveland launched 1.5 million helium filled balloons. It looked spectacular, but the end result was kind of like that famous Thanksgiving turkey scene from the 1970s show "WKRP In Cincinnati." (In that episode, the radio station inadvertently bombarded Cincinnati with turkeys, with hilariously messy results.

Cleveland should have known that kind of fiction would come to life with their balloon launch. And unlike the sitcom, the result was not hilarious at all.

Hundreds of thousands of balloons littered the city and nearby Lake Erie.  The balloons weren't biodegradable, so they made a mess and an environmental hazard.

Worse, all the balloons interfered with a search and rescue mission on Lake Erie for two missing fishermen. There's no way they could be found amid all those balloons floating in the water.

Here's the short film on the doomed Cleveland balloon fest:

Bonkers Adminstration: People Had To Follow Trump To Tape Together Shredded Documents

Donald Trump apparently rips up every document
he touches, so somebody has to tape them all
together for National Archive records. I should
have invested in 3M, makers of Scotch Tape

As is obvious to (almost) everyone, we live in bonkers Trump world now. One in which he basically wants to start a way with Canada of all places, yet thinks Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un  are pretty much A-OK.

These mega issues are overwhelming, so I sometimes seek out the smaller, but even weirder absurdities in Trump World.

Politico recently had a doozy on this score.

When Trump finishes with a paper document (remember, he tends not to read them) he tears them into tiny shreds. The problem is, he's not supposed to.

As Politico points out, under the Presidential Records Act, the White House is required to preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches. All the paperwork goes to the National Archives for safekeeping and to eventually become historical records.

So what they do with the shredded papers? For a period of time, it was the following, says Politico:

"Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape (Solomon) Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, 'like a jigsaw puzzle.' Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti."

Presumably, somebody is still taping the ripped documents together, or at least I think so. But Lartey, 54 and his colleague Reginald Young Jr., 48, were abruptly shitcanned from their job. They were stripped of their badges and hauled off the White House grounds by the Secret Service, Politico reports. 

Nobody, as far as we can tell, knows why they were fired. This includes Lartey and Young, who were not told why they were fired.

Politico tried to get ahold of the woman who fired them, but she didn't respond to their emails. Neither did a White House spokesman.

My theory, of course, is Lartey and Young were preserving documents that Trump doesn't want preserved. That just seems to be his M.O.

The insanity goes on........

Haunting Video Of Berlin, Germany, July, 1945

Berlin, Gernany, July, 1945

I found this video randomly, but it's worth sharing since it's so haunting.

It's street scenes in a devastated Berlin, Germany in July, 1945.

The city had fallen under a brutal Russian onslaught in late April and early May of 1945, killing many people in Berllin and laying the city to waste.

The video shows the post apocalyptic aftermath. Most striking about the video is the bitter, defeated look on peoples' faces as they're being filmed.

Watch:

Beavers Went Parachuting In Idaho In the 1940s and 1950s

A beaver gets out of its box after being parachuted
into a remote part of Idaho 50 or so years ago.  

The Internet is abuzz about some old footage from the 1940s and 1950s of beavers parachuting into Idaho.

Really!

Yes, about 50 years ago, Idaho would relocate "problem beavers" gnawing on peoples' trees were trapped, put on planes and dropped via parachute on other parts of Idaho, says Slate.

Seems they went to great lengths to move these beavers, but what the hell, the video they made of this back in is fun. It was recently dug up in Idaho state archives and shared on YouTube.

Watch:

YouTube's 10th Anniversary Is Surprising Trip Down Memory Lane

Possibly the most iconic YouTube video
Leave Britney Alone!  

It almost feels like YouTube has been around forever, but it's only ten years now

I'm a total addict with YouTube. I watch it more than television.

It's a great time waster when I don't feel like doing anything, or I want to procrastinate, or I just want to see how strange and wonderful and awful and gorgeous and creative and (rarely) bland the world and its humans are.

There's a tenth anniverary video of the highlights of YouTube over the past decade. Each snippet of the video lasts barely a second, but click on this hyperlink to see the entire list of the YouTube moments you liked or loathed. 

It's probably impossible to include all the best, most viral, most controversial videos out there, but they tried. I'm sure you can add yours.

Susan Boyle auditions for Britain's Got Talent,
setting off a YouTube viral frenzy about
five years ago. 

A number of them are music videos. MTV hasn't had music videos for years, so YouTube is now the go to place for popular music videos, or people who do covers of popular songs.

It reminds me of how quickly things change. One of my favorite videos, one that made this 10-year compilation, is Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance". It's weird and scary and wonderful and perplexing and crazy and odd. Which is perfect for me.

That video only came out about five years ago, but already, Lady Gaga has moved on to expertly singing torh songs, ballads and Broadway hits. At least for now.

The homeless guy with the golden radio voice
went viral on YouTube a few years ago. With all the
attention, he's certainly not homeless now.  

Then there's the world debut of Susan Boyle. That was just six years ago, when the dowdy, awkward woman stunned everybody with her vocal briliance. That video now has more than 65 million views.

Other rags to riches stories, or undiscovered talent came to us, and are in this compilation, too. Remember the homeless guy with the golden radio voice? He's there too. So is the amazing "Pumped Up Kicks/Dubstep" guy.     

Some of the videos are instant classics, something that everyone remembers, like in previous media eras, when the world instantly recalls, to cite both the frivolous and the devastating, the I Love Lucy chocolate factory episode, or Winston Churchill's "Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself" or the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center. 

The baby laughing gleefully as his
father rips up a job application rejection
letter is one of the best ultra-viral
YouTube videos of the past decade. 

Here, on YouTube, we have the silly, the interesting and the serious touchstones.

Perhaps the most famous is the wailing, distraught guy, mascara streaming down his face with his tears as he screamed at us to "Leave Britney Alone!," when the pop star was having a well-publicized meltdown.

Others were almost as famous, like  the VW Darth Vader ad, and the two baby twins seeming to have an intelligent conversation made of baby babble, and the baby laughing hysterically as his dad rips up a job application rejection letter. 

There was history, of course, like Obama's 2008 election and the 2011 Japanese tsunami, and the Boston Marathon bombing. 

I'm sure we'll have other viral videos taking over our lives any minute now. Or other media. Vine, those six-second video snippets, are already starting to becoming cultural icons.  

As Sonny and Cher once sang, back in the dinosaur age when anything online wasn't really even the stuff of science fiction yet, the beat goes on. 

Don't Bring Your Mother In Law! Buck's Furniture Is Closing

I've just heard the alarming news: Buck's Furniture, a Vermont institution because of its zany, shouty television ads, is closing forever.    

Part of the Buck's Furniture complex in Wolcott, Vermont  

For people outside Vermont and unfamiliar with Buck's Furniture, it's in a little Vermont town called Wolcott.

It consists of several buildings that pretty much make up the whole town of Wolcott. The furniture store has been there since 1957.

The furniture store is know for its ads with catch phrases like from this cash and carry ad: "Bring your truck! Bring your rope! Bring your mother-in-law to Buck's Furniture in Wolcott!!!

Where will we go to without Buck's Furniture alarming wordplay? For a Thanksgiving sale, Buck's informed us that their prices "stuff the competition" and implored us to come up to Wolcott to "gobble up the furniture."

During a mattress sale, Buck's urged us to run as fast as we can to Wolcott to get our bargains. The television ad was an LSD-trip visage of mattresses running back and forth across the screen. Buck's said we needed to buy the mattresses because they were "stacking 'em deep and selling 'em cheap."

What will we in Vermont do without the low-rent television ads that are disappearing from our television screens and radios. (Sorry, the car dealerships just aren't cutting it)

We also no longer hear on the radio from "Nina, the jewelry storah in Manchestah Vahmont." The low, gravely voice of "Ray, husband of Nina" sounded like Bernie Sanders if Sanders were a harsh right-wing capitalist.

A Buck's Furniture truck in Wolcott, Vermont.
I wonder if rope and someone's mother in law is in there.  

We still have the radio ads from Lamoille Valley Ford, but the guy who narrates the ad, presumably the owner, sounds too much like a way, way overenthusiastic member of the local Rotary Club, and I find myself turning off the radio station when I hear his voice. Sorry, guy.

So, I'll miss Buck's Furniture and they're ads. Too bad I only got married a couple years ago. I didn't have time to bring my mother in law to Buck's Furniture, like their ad suggested.

Then again, my mother in law, an extremely sweet, tasteful woman in South Dakota who is not prone to yelling like the people at Bucks, probably has no interest in Buck's Furniture anyway.  

You Won't Believe These Weird Tricks They Did With These 20th Century Historical Headlines.

These days it's all about clicks on a website. Everything, especially headlines is written in a style designed to make you click on to read when you're on line.

Of course, it sort of dumbs down what the subject matter is. You know, it's all listicles, and language that always seems to involve the words "weird tricks" or "the most heartbreaking" or "You won't believe."

I found a summary of headlines regarding major 20th century historical events as if they were written today, when ya gotta get those clicks

UPDATE: As you can see from the comments section of this post, I now know the source of this image. It's from xkcd.com which is "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language."  

The site looks pretty interesting, check it out.

Anyway, click on the image in this post to make it big enough to read

Ann Frank Continues To Give, So Does Her Tree

Ann Frank left us her famous diary, which,  if you want to boil it down to its essence, is really an instructional booklet on how to love each other and why any kind of hate is bad.

Her diary made many references to a chestnut tree growing outside of the place in Amsterdam where she was hiding from the Nazis. It was pretty much her only connection to nature.

The remains of the chestnut tree from Ann Frank's diary
after it toppled in a 2010 storm. 

Here's an excerpt from Frank's diary, as written on Feb. 23, 1944, regarding the tree:

"Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs....From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at tgeh seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind."

The tree toppled during a storm in 2010, the victim of old age.

But just as reading Frank's diary remains helpful to humans to this day, that chestnut tree will also continue to give.

According to Huffington Post and other news sources, when the tree toppled, experts grabbed seeds from the tree so that new chestnut trees could grow in places that promote peace and human rights. 

Saplings from those seeds have started to grow, and 11 of those saplings will be planted at spots in the United States that celebrate justice and human dignity.

One of the saplings will go to the Childrens Museum of Indianopolis, which gets one because personnel and children there took care of the saplings since 2009 during a required U.S. Department of Agriculture quarantine of the trees.

Another will be planted this fall at Central High School in Little Rock, scene of a landmark desegregation moment in 1957.

Among the other places to get the saplings, according to the Ann Frank Center, US., are the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, the White House, Liberty Park (site of the World Trade Center attack in New York), Boston Common, schools in New York and California, and Holocaust centers in Washington, Idaho and Michigan.

It's nice to see the tree's legacy give comfort to people now and in the future, just as Frank keeps providing us knowledge and compassion to this day.

9/11 Teacher Loves Trauma, Hates Nuance

I guess in some circles, the theory goes that  the best way to teach kids their history lesson is by traumatizing them.

If the report is right from earlier this month, on the anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy,  an El Paso teacher forced fourth graders to draw disturbing images of the 9/11 attack,

The teacher apparently told the students to make the artwork nice and graphic and disturbing.

One of the disturbing pics fourth graders in
El Paso were made to draw by their teacher
Image is from television station KFOX.

Hey, just draw pictures of buildings burning, people trapped, people leaping to their deaths, evil terrorists laughing at the carnage. A nice sober way to learn about the awful events of that day, right?

That'll teach them to remember the terrorist attack.  And develop a nice sense of incoherent hate, instead of targeting the anger against the world's dangerous terrorists.

Just put the youngsters in the shoes of the people who had to jump from the buildings as they were engulfed in flames, then fell.

And then tell them the kiddies this:    "The Afghans did this because they hate all of us and want to kill us all,"

A parent, Ivie Gremillion, said she can't understand why the fourth graders just couldn't have gotten a straight forward lesson on the day.

Television station KFOX reported a few days after the incident the unnamed teacher is now on paid administrative leave.

While Gremillion said she was outraged by the assignment, she certainly wants her daughter to learn everything she can about 9/11 as it was an important part of American history.  She just wants it all to be age appropriate, and put in perspective.

Gremillion especially wants kids to understand that while the terrorists who did this were pure evil, certainly not everyone in Afghanistan wants us dead. Like everywhere else, there are good people and bad people in Afghanistan.

Her attitude was pretty nuanced and healthy about the whole situation, which surely will bother the pundits, and probably the teacher,  who insist we all look at things as purely black or purely white. If one Afghan Muslin is a terrorist, they all are, I guess the thinking goes.

And the mother's attitude will surely annoy the wackos who insist that everything having anything to do with Islam is horrible and must die.

There's a lot of talk about how "indoctrinating" kids in schools with political agendas is a bad idea. Fine. Give 'em the facts, and the opposing viewpoints, as long as they make sense. And let the kids learn on their own what is right, what is true, and what is false and what is wrong.

But all that would make the kiddies think critically and ask questions. You know, get well-informed and intelligent.

Or are some groups and ideologues too scared to allow smart people to question their worldview?  

Twin Joys: Weather Porn and 1960 Cars

I found a video today that happily pushes at least two of my buttons. It offers weather porn and views of cars from the very late 1950s to around 1960.

Today is the anniversary of Hurricane Donna, a nasty one that swept the East Coast from Florida to Maine in 1960. The Web site Gothamist had a YouTube video, taken from a home video of flooding from Hurricane Donna in Rockaway, Queens. Then-16 year old Joseph Horton filmed the storm with an 8 mm camera.

The flooding is pretty interesting, at least from this weather geek's perspective. But I LOVE the cars. They are HUGE boats. Too bad they didn't float in the flood. The vehicles have these huge wings, enormous, stylized designs and are just so elaborate. Nothing streamlined and compact like the stuff we drive nowadays, no sir!

The video also plays to my affinity to anything connected to the early 1960s. Bad storm, big cars, the start of a big decade. I'm in heaven. Watch!

Nirvana Masterpiece 20 Y.O. Already!

Yep, I'm feeling old. Nirvana's landmark album, "Nevermind" came out 20 years ago this week.

I do consider it one of the finest albums made, so I guess I join a lot of critics in that regard.

The lead single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," is among my top ten favorite songs I can think of. True, you can barely understand what the lead singer, the late Kurt Cobain, is singing. And even if you did, some of the lyrics are pretty nonsensical.

"A mulatto, an albino!
A mosquito, my libido!"

But the rage in the song is so cathartic that you have to embrace it. Odd how such a chaotic song could have such great hooks.

So yeah, here's me, a 49 year old guy screaming along to Kurt Cobain. You can, too. Here's the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video. Enjoy