The Rest of October
Nov. 3rd, 2023 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreAfter getting home from Boston, I had a couple of my usual activities.
Standing Meetings: Our Brothers Grimm discussion was about “The Blue Light,” which I was unfamiliar with until getting ready for our meeting. We had our usual good discussion about the relationships to other stories and the implications of different versions. I’m not sure if it’s a story I would tell or not.
My needles and crafts group was having one of our in-person meetings and I drove to darkest Maryland for that. There was the usual annoying roadwork on the Beltway, which made it take twice as long as it should have. On the plus side, there was lots of fall color in Bethesda.
Another plus was getting to meet our hostess’s new kitten, who is adorable. And so soft.
Museum of Failure: On Saturday, Cindy and I went to the Museum of Failure, which is a temporary installation in Georgetown. Cindy had a bit of a failure finding the entrance to the building and had to call me for directions.
There are several sections to the museum, but the exhibits all raise the question of just what makes something a failure. Some of the things they show were actually good products, but did not win out over their rivals commercially. For example, most experts would say the Betamax was technically superior to VHS, but it was more expensive and didn’t capture the market share.
Another example is this device, which was wildly successful in France. It was called the Minitel and was a terminal that enabled people to do things like check stock prices, make travel reservations, do their banking, and search for porn before the world wide web. It was very popular - and kept the French from getting onto the internet for about a decade.
One I would argue wasn’t a failure was the Iridium phone. This was the first system that was truly world-wide, enabling telephone access at latitudes out of reach of geosynchronous satellites. (Molniya orbits do allow northern polar access, but not southern.) I once volunteered on an archaeological dig in Fiji and one of the people on our team used his iridium phone all the time to call his family. Besides, they had the coolest ads ever, with a San tribesman in the Kalahari, dressed in a loincloth, and carrying his bow and a quiver of arrows in one hand and his iridium phone in the other.
There were lots of transportation related failures - the Edsel, the Delorian, the Segway (which is used a lot for tours and security staff), and grass skis. The reel of commercials for these things was a lot of fun.
Another section had lots of toys. We talked about ones we or our neighbors had had, like lawn darts. I also remember “growing up Skipper,” who grew boobs when you turned her arm. Which brings me to the porno room that included things like this magazine cover:
There was a whole section on food and drink. In addition to things like a wall of odd oreo flavors, there were familiar things like New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.
Other exhibits had to do with Donald Trump and with Washington, D.C. (including the failure of the Metro to have a station in Georgetown and the failures of the Washington Football Team.) There were also medical failures, e.g. thalidomide. Both of us also remembered Ayds candy (a diet aid), which was pretty successful until the AIDS epidemic.
My absolute favorite item was the hula chair. This was intended for you to be able to get exercise while sitting at work. You probably have to click through to flickr to watch the panic on my face as I try to figure out how to turn the damn thing off.
Overall, I thought it was a pretty entertaining morning.
Avenue Q: On Sunday I drove to Reston to see the Reston Community Players production of Avenue Q. A woman I know from storytelling circles was playing one of the Bad Idea Bears. Anyway, it’s a show I’ve seen before, and, while some aspects are a bit dated, it’s still very funny.
Halloween Show: Our spooky story show was Monday night and went well. My contribution was a Russian vampire story, collected by Aleksandr Afanasyev in the Tambov Oblast. Overall, there was a wide range of stories from the different tellers and, wow, there’s a lot of creepy stuff out there.
The Borscht Belt: On Tuesday, I went to a zoom lecture about the Jewish Catskills. What I hadn’t actually known was that what I think of as the Catskills were actually another mountain range called the Shawangunk Mountains. I also learned that the Hudson River actually flows for another 100 miles under the Atlantic after reaching New York City. There was a lot of somewhat random information about the development of the Jewish resorts, which were mostly founded in reaction to the segregated policies of the other existing resorts in the “real” Catskills. I was also reminded of the term “populuxe” for the style of architecture of the resorts. It was an interesting talk, but there were a lot of digressions from the primary subject and, while it had been advertised as an hour and a half, it ended up being almost two and a half hours.
Did You Know?: If you eat a Reese’s White Chocolate Peanut Butter Ghost while drinking coffee, your coffee will taste like marshmallow. This was an accidental discovery yesterday morning and it took me a minute to realize what had happened since it was coffee from a different roaster the my usual one. I assume this works with non-ghost shaped white chocolate peanut butter cups, too. (I had the ghost shaped ones because I’d bought them for Halloween, but didn’t get any trick or treaters. So, obviously, I had no choice but to eat them myself.) Not that I’m sure why one would want one’s coffee to taste like marshmallow. One of my biggest rules in life is that coffee IS a flavor and should, therefore, not come in flavors.
Standing Meetings: Our Brothers Grimm discussion was about “The Blue Light,” which I was unfamiliar with until getting ready for our meeting. We had our usual good discussion about the relationships to other stories and the implications of different versions. I’m not sure if it’s a story I would tell or not.
My needles and crafts group was having one of our in-person meetings and I drove to darkest Maryland for that. There was the usual annoying roadwork on the Beltway, which made it take twice as long as it should have. On the plus side, there was lots of fall color in Bethesda.
Another plus was getting to meet our hostess’s new kitten, who is adorable. And so soft.
Museum of Failure: On Saturday, Cindy and I went to the Museum of Failure, which is a temporary installation in Georgetown. Cindy had a bit of a failure finding the entrance to the building and had to call me for directions.
There are several sections to the museum, but the exhibits all raise the question of just what makes something a failure. Some of the things they show were actually good products, but did not win out over their rivals commercially. For example, most experts would say the Betamax was technically superior to VHS, but it was more expensive and didn’t capture the market share.
Another example is this device, which was wildly successful in France. It was called the Minitel and was a terminal that enabled people to do things like check stock prices, make travel reservations, do their banking, and search for porn before the world wide web. It was very popular - and kept the French from getting onto the internet for about a decade.
One I would argue wasn’t a failure was the Iridium phone. This was the first system that was truly world-wide, enabling telephone access at latitudes out of reach of geosynchronous satellites. (Molniya orbits do allow northern polar access, but not southern.) I once volunteered on an archaeological dig in Fiji and one of the people on our team used his iridium phone all the time to call his family. Besides, they had the coolest ads ever, with a San tribesman in the Kalahari, dressed in a loincloth, and carrying his bow and a quiver of arrows in one hand and his iridium phone in the other.
There were lots of transportation related failures - the Edsel, the Delorian, the Segway (which is used a lot for tours and security staff), and grass skis. The reel of commercials for these things was a lot of fun.
Another section had lots of toys. We talked about ones we or our neighbors had had, like lawn darts. I also remember “growing up Skipper,” who grew boobs when you turned her arm. Which brings me to the porno room that included things like this magazine cover:
There was a whole section on food and drink. In addition to things like a wall of odd oreo flavors, there were familiar things like New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.
Other exhibits had to do with Donald Trump and with Washington, D.C. (including the failure of the Metro to have a station in Georgetown and the failures of the Washington Football Team.) There were also medical failures, e.g. thalidomide. Both of us also remembered Ayds candy (a diet aid), which was pretty successful until the AIDS epidemic.
My absolute favorite item was the hula chair. This was intended for you to be able to get exercise while sitting at work. You probably have to click through to flickr to watch the panic on my face as I try to figure out how to turn the damn thing off.
Overall, I thought it was a pretty entertaining morning.
Avenue Q: On Sunday I drove to Reston to see the Reston Community Players production of Avenue Q. A woman I know from storytelling circles was playing one of the Bad Idea Bears. Anyway, it’s a show I’ve seen before, and, while some aspects are a bit dated, it’s still very funny.
Halloween Show: Our spooky story show was Monday night and went well. My contribution was a Russian vampire story, collected by Aleksandr Afanasyev in the Tambov Oblast. Overall, there was a wide range of stories from the different tellers and, wow, there’s a lot of creepy stuff out there.
The Borscht Belt: On Tuesday, I went to a zoom lecture about the Jewish Catskills. What I hadn’t actually known was that what I think of as the Catskills were actually another mountain range called the Shawangunk Mountains. I also learned that the Hudson River actually flows for another 100 miles under the Atlantic after reaching New York City. There was a lot of somewhat random information about the development of the Jewish resorts, which were mostly founded in reaction to the segregated policies of the other existing resorts in the “real” Catskills. I was also reminded of the term “populuxe” for the style of architecture of the resorts. It was an interesting talk, but there were a lot of digressions from the primary subject and, while it had been advertised as an hour and a half, it ended up being almost two and a half hours.
Did You Know?: If you eat a Reese’s White Chocolate Peanut Butter Ghost while drinking coffee, your coffee will taste like marshmallow. This was an accidental discovery yesterday morning and it took me a minute to realize what had happened since it was coffee from a different roaster the my usual one. I assume this works with non-ghost shaped white chocolate peanut butter cups, too. (I had the ghost shaped ones because I’d bought them for Halloween, but didn’t get any trick or treaters. So, obviously, I had no choice but to eat them myself.) Not that I’m sure why one would want one’s coffee to taste like marshmallow. One of my biggest rules in life is that coffee IS a flavor and should, therefore, not come in flavors.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-03 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-03 08:16 pm (UTC)I think it had been in New York (Brooklyn) before coming here. It's also been in Vienna, Amsterdam, Jeddah, London, Copenhagen, Milan, Paris, and Los Angeles.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-05 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-04 10:05 am (UTC)I know about the Minitel, our French family all had it, and my husband used to laugh about the "backward" French, who used that while the whole world already had the Internet.
Is Crystal Pepsi just soda water? 👀
Very interesting about the Catskills, about which I know only from Mrs Maisel...
no subject
Date: 2023-11-04 11:48 am (UTC)Re: the Catskills, my parents used to go to various of the hotels for the weekend and sometimes took me and my brother. I remember hanging out at the pinball room with other kids as a teenager and rowing on the lake at the Homowack. We had a neighbor who was a comedian who played some of the hotels and I got a little thrill out of my parents knowing the headliner.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-04 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-06 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-06 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-06 10:54 am (UTC)