Dimland Radio

dimland radio 3-7-20 show notes

Fun With Customer Service

I start the show with a riveting tales of changing my PIN with my bank over the phone. It started with me checking if I could do it online. I couldn’t. So, let’s go to the phones. Several calls to the automated phone systems, which required speaking to someone in customer service three times. Eventually I succeeded in changing the PIN

There’s got to be a better way.

Ugh! This Coronavirus Thing

First of all, it’s called COVID-19. It’s a strain of the coronavirus, but the new media and the general public insist on calling it coronavirus. Sigh. It’s a fruitless battle for this pedant, so I surrender. Call it whatever you want.

There is more information coming out about this latest end of the world panic and it should help calm fears. Assuming people will actually pay attention. I will link to those items below:

First, there is Dr. Paul Offit who is a real doctor and has appeared on the television letting people know the we are seeing the mortality rate going down.

Next is the excellent podcast Science Vs giving an update on the status of the dread disease.

And then there’s John Oliver giving good information with a heaping helping of humor.

But What Of The Conspiracy Theorists?

Hey! Have you heard that this whole coronavirus infection is a plot by George Soros to do something nefarious… I guess.

That’s what I heard from a conspiracy theorist who shared a meme similar to the one you see here. They seem to think the Lysol was privy to the existence of coronavirus long before there was a coronavirus. I tried to explain the coronavirus has been around for a long time, that SARS and MERS were strains of it, and that the current strain is called COVID-19. But, nope, George Soros, New World Order, THEM!!!!

If only there was a vaccine for conspiracy theory.

Hang On, They’re Doing What Now?

The shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes is temporarily closing the healing pools to prevent pilgrims seeking miraculous cures for their diseases, ailments, illnesses from getting infection by the coronavirus.

Closing the healing pools to prevent the spread of a virus. Healing pools.

Hmmm.

And speaking of the religious preying on the gullible, televangelist Jim Bakker has been given a cease and desist order from the New York Attorney General’s Office. Bakker has been selling some snake oil product called Silver Solutions as a cure for COVID-19.

A televangelist scamming their viewers?! The world is coming to an end!

They Were Told There Would Be No Math

On a recent edition of MSNBC’s 11th Hour hosted by Brian Williams, he and his guest Mara Gay, an member of the New York Times editorial board, showed the world they couldn’t do math. They, in a manner that showed them to be very pleased with themselves, shared a Tweet that was pointing out the staggering amount of money Mike Bloomberg spent on advertising in his bid to become the Democrat nominee for president.

But, oh boy, did they all get the math wrong.

To his credit, after a commercial break Williams noted the mistake and apologized.

Three Cool Things

Cool Thing #1: My second favorite band XTC has had a 49 track tribute album drop just this week. I haven’t listened to all the tracks yet, but those I have are pretty cool!

Cool Thing #2: Two videos of animals crossing a creek using a fallen tree bridge are so much fun. The first video is here, the second is here.

Cool thing #3: This photograph is of the surface on Mars, taken from the surface of Mars! Do I have to say it?

Music heard on the show…

Dimland Radio opening theme song: Ram by The Yoleus

First ad break bumpers: Peek A Boo by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Uniforms (Corp D’Esprit) by Pete Townshend

Second ad break bumpers: Traveling Man by The Woodentops and Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads

Closing song: Angler’s Treble Hook by $5 Fiddle

That’s it! See you next Saturday night for Dimland Radio 11 Central, midnight Eastern on www.ztalkradio.com you can also download my show from the z talk show archives page. You can email your questions and comments to drdim@dimland.com

Please subscribe on iTunes! Just search for Dimland Radio in the podcast section. And if you could leave a good rating and a positive review it would be awesome.

Subscribe to Dimland Radio on PodBean!

You can also go to my CafePress store and buy stuff with my artwork on it and have me do a portrait for you if you’d like.

Images used under Fair Use.

dimland radio 2-25-2020 show notes

New Dimland Website Is Coming

My wife is putting together a new website for me. It may take some time, so bear with us.

This should improve the blog situation for me. We will switch over to WordPress for the blog. I am currently using Blogger and Blogger sucks.

Holding The Snark At Bay

I told the tale of a recent visit to the supermarket and my use of the express lane when I was pushing it on the number of items. I was admonished by the cashier. I apologized to her. She was right, mostly. However…

There was no one behind me in line.

Another Python Has Died

I talked a little bit about Monty Python member Terry Jones’ illness and death. The illness he had was a form of dementia that robs people of their ability to communicate. My father-in-law had the same thing. I talked about how it affected him.

I also blogged about Terry Jones this past week.

Islamophobia Slinks Around The Internets

A couple of my Facebook friends, one of whom is a cousin of mine, shared the above image. It’s bullshit. The McCarran-Walter Act (not McCarran Warner Act) of 1952 had to do with immigration to the United States. It did not ban Muslims from holding political office.

If it had, it would have been unconstitutional. There is no religious requirement to hold office. I pointed that out on both of my FB friends’ posts. My cousin responded that his Facebook had been hacked and he didn’t post that image. He removed it and changed his password.

My Old Art School Is Now A Boutique Hotel

It’s gone from a yearly tuition of about three grand when I attended school in 1983 to about 20 grand a year when it stopped being an art school. Now that it’s a boutique hotel it’s a mere $249 to $449 a night.

Click here to see some of the rooms that are available. I can place a couple of the rooms, but the renovations make it difficult.

And It’s Not Haunted!

Well, probably not. It was rumored that a servant who worked for the rich family who owned the mansion turned art school turned boutique hotel hanged herself in the main stairwell. Which of course means her ghost haunts the place.

I never encountered anything ghostly in my years there. That doesn’t mean it’s not haunted, but it’s not haunted.

And These Places Aren’t Haunted!

The claim of the old art school being haunted got me thinking of something I saw on social media. It’s a video that was shared by noted skeptic Sharon Hill. The video is a ten minute discussion of a live event edition of the Ghost Adventures show and its shortcomings due to not being able to edit. Its host Zak Bagans has done very well financially NOT finding ghosts.

And I thought of another video that was part of an attempt to bring a skeptical ghost and other paranormal claims investigation show to cable television. The attempt was called The Skeptologists and it didn’t fly. The cable networks prefer mystery-mongering shows to science-based skepticism.

Well, that crew was investigating an allegedly haunted ship, when their producer played a little trick on them.

Cool Thing: Bluntnose Sixgill Shark

Scientists captured video of a huge fish! It’s a bluntnose sixgill shark and it’s big! It’s way cool.

Music heard on the show…

Dimland Radio opening theme song: Ram by The Yoleus
First ad break bumpers: U Got The Look by Prince and Tony’s Theme by Pixies

Second ad break bumpers: Houses In Motion by Talking Heads and C’est Comme Ca by Les Rita Mitsouko

Closing song: Angler’s Treble Hook by $5 Fiddle

Please subscribe on iTunes! Just search for Dimland Radio in the podcast section. And if you could leave a great rating and a positive review that would be awesome.

Subscribe to Dimland on PodBean !

You can also go to my CafePress store and buy stuff with my artwork on it and have me do a portrait for you if you’d like.

Images used under Fair Use.

dimland radio 2-8-20 show notes

Our Long National Nightmare Continues…

We knew it was going to happen. Some of the people involved told us it was going to happen. The impeachment process has been completed and Pres. Donald J. Trump has been given permission by the US Senate to enlist foreign nations to interfere in our elections. This along with the permission to lie under oath, granted by an earlier Senate.

Well, OK, not exactly. Both Trump and Pres. Bill Clinton were impeached, respectively, for those little oopies. So their permanent records will at least have those red marks.

I sent the first segment giving my observations on the process and, once again, I predicted that our illustrious leader will be re-elected.

I also gave kudos the Sen. Mitt Romney for being the only Republican senator to actually take his oath seriously, something no senator has done in the two impeachment trials to take place in my lifetime. Oh, they raised their hands and promised to weigh the evidence impartially and they signed a book reiterating that same oath, but they’d all made up their minds before the House managers presented their case.

His verdict made Romney the only senator to find against a president from the same party in the history of the three impeachment trials to have occurred in American history. Before you say Republicans voted against Pres. Andrew Johnson, you should know Johnson was a Democrat. They did things differently back in the 1860s.

Here is Sen. Romney’s speech on how he was going to vote in the trial.

Andy Gill Died

Boy, the celebrities are dropping like flies (not in 3s) these days. He may not have been as big a celebrity musician as Neal Peart, who died last month, but I would argue Andy Gill’s impact on music was almost as significant.

Gill was a founding and, as of his death, last remaining original member of the seminal post-punk band from the UK Gang Of Four. Gang Of Four influence was far reaching in alternative music from UK’s Au Pairs to America’s Red Hot Chilli Peppers. The latter had Gill produce their first album.

I first laid eyes and ears on Gang Of Four through the excellent concert movie Urgh: A Music War. That band’s contribution was mesmerizing. Check it out here.

Andy Gill was 64 when he died February 1, 2020. Cause of death was pneumonia.

A Crotchtatsic Halftime Show

I know. I’m a middle-aged white guy. Who needs to know what I think of the halftime entertainment provided by two middle-aged Latina women at this year’s Super Bowl?

Well, I’m telling you anyway. I was bemused. I don’t want to shame anyone. I just found all the crotch shots and the stripper pole confusing. Was it female exploitation or female empowerment? I don’t know.

I did a comparison of past halftime entertainments. Lady Gaga’s, Madonna’s, and Prince’s. I also took the opportunity to talk about the “Wardrobe Malfunction” incident of 2004. Wardrobe malfunction? As though seeing Janet Jackson’s bra instead of her bejeweled nipple would have made the fact Justin Timberlake tore her top off more palatable.

I know. OK, old man.

One Ad The Drew The Skeptical Eyeroll

The Super Bowl is almost as legendary for its ads as for the games. A sizeable portion of the audience watch it for the ads more than for the game. Weirdos.

One ad got under the skin of this skeptic. Michelob, a company that brews a product that resembles beer, is pushing for more organic farming. There are organic farming proponents that claim organic farming alone could feed the world’s 7.5 billion people. But the world’s population would need to go vegetarian and end 50% of food waste. Tall orders.

And organic proponents tend to be GMO opponents. We’re going to need GM crops if we are to feed the 9.8 billion expected by 2050.

Cool Things! Cool Things! Cool Things!

Cool Thing #1: Skeptic and actual doctor Steven Novella, host of the excellent Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, wrote a blog sticking up for science and for women by criticizing a New York Times op-ed defending the pseudoscience of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. Steve is so cool.

Cool Thing #2: NASA, from a distance of 11.5 BILLION miles, was able to fix the ailing Voyager 2 spacecraft. Voyager 2 had shut down because of a possible overuse of power. If NASA would have been unable to fix the problem, we would have lost out on another approximately five years of information about interstellar space. But fix it, they did. Cool!

Cool Thing #3: There is a cleaned-up version of the famous Lumiere Brothers film: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. I marveled at of how, despite the clothing style, contemporary the images look. Those people catching or disembarking a train on an ordinary day in 1895 look current. In other films from antiquity, there’s a feel of old, but this clean up makes those people look more now than then. And they are all dead! Even the little kids. How cool is that?

Music heard on the show…

Dimland Radio opening theme song: Ram by The Yoleus
First ad break bumpers: We’re So Cool by Au Pairs and Natural’s Not In It by Gang Of Four

Second ad break bumpers: Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time and Paralyzed by Gang Of Four

Closing song: Angler’s Treble Hook by $5 Fiddle

Please subscribe on iTunes! Just search for Dimland Radio in the podcast section. And if you could leave a good rating and a positive review it would be awesome.

Subscribe to Dimland on PodBean!

You can also go to my CafePress store and buy stuff with my artwork on it and have me do a portrait for you if you’d like.

Images used under Fair Use.

dimland radio 2-15-20 show notes

Nature Encroaches

I live in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. (Cartographers, put your maps away.) I’m not in the downtown area, but I’m also not exactly in a rural area. Even so, we get a fair amount of wildlife creeping around. Oh, sure, there are the squirrels, rabbits, and assorted birds, but every now and again something more “exotic” makes its presence known.

There have been deer in the neighbors’ yards, turkeys by my office. Why we even had a nesting pair of Merlins in a tree across the street. Merlins aren’t very common in this area.

I retold the tale of a close encounter I had with a raccoon. It had been a few years since the visit, so my memory may not have been entirely accurate. It happened during a lunar eclipse and while the Cubs were playing the Pirates.

I brought up the whole wildlife encroachment thing, because another unusual animal made its presence known some weeks ago. It was a Great Horned Howl. I didn’t see it, but I heard its call. The damn thing actually goes, “Who-who whoooo.”

What’s next? Coyotes? Wolves? Great White Sharks?

Toot

A little mystery has arisen at the comic book store for which I work. Nostalgia Zone in Minneapolis has loads and loads of old comic books. (Check out our website!) We are always buying old comics from folks and, we’re not sure when, we bought a collection that had a curiosity. Someone had written “Toot” on the covers of the books.

We didn’t notice them at the time, but the Toots soon became apparent. We don’t know what it means. Is it a nickname? Was someone making a cryptic comment? Is it code?

It’s a mystery. I blogged about it for Nostalgia Zone’s official blog: Warehouse Find.

A Dimland Radio Pedantic Moment: A Twofer About Tailgating And Brakes

Allstate Insurance has been running a series of auto insurance ads featuring a character name Mayhem for a few years now. In one of the more recent ads, Mayhem is tailgating another driver, the driver isn’t paying enough attention to the car in front of them because of the tailgater behind them. And, soon enough, crash! The driver runs into the car in front. And Mayhem drives away unscathed.

Here’s the problem: There is no way Mayhem could have avoided banging into the car he was tailgating and get away undamaged. He was way too close. Even if he had smart brakes in his car. (During the show, I underestimated how close Mayhem was tailgating. I thought it was about a foot. Nope! More like three inches! Even more impossible to drive away from untouched.)

And, speaking of smart brakes, Subaru is running an ad touting that technology in their cars. In their ad they show a family out for a drive. Dad, who is driving, is spending too much time looking at his family and not enough at the road, when the cars in front of him suddenly stop. He sees, but it’s too late to stop. He takes a last look at his family as his life flashes before his eyes. Fortunately, the car has those smart brakes and stopped itself in time. Phew!

But, when in a sudden stop situation, no one takes the time to look around. They lock eyes on whatever it is that has forced them to do a quick stop.

And is the daughter eating a cup full of coffee beans?

Hang on. America Is Great Now?

Our glorious president, who is looking more and more as though he will be re-elected, has unveiled a new slogan to replace Make America Great Again. It is now:

Keep America Great

Apparently, America became great sometime in the last three years.

It doesn’t look like the 1950s again to me.

Remember When MTV Played Music Videos?

Remember when The History Channel had shows about history?

Remember when The Learning Channel had shows that weren’t learning us bullshit?

Remember when The Science Channel did science?

Oh, those were the days.

I complained about a new mystery-mongering show on The Science Channel. It’s called Curse of the Bermuda Triangle. The show follows four Duck Dynasty-like “explorers” as they don’t solve the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.

There’s no mystery really. The area gets lots of traffic. Ships sink, planes crash, divers drown. There’s nothing particularly special about the area, other than it is conveniently expanded when mystery-mongers want to include other weird happenings or disappearances that don’t quite fall into the area of the Devil’s Triangle.

The first episode is of the disappearance of Flight 19, a military training flight. They went off course, ran out of fuel, and ditched in the water. Wow! What a mystery?! I sure hope the fellows can get to the bottom of it.

And I have a friend who is involved. I talked a bit about this friend. Sigh.

Music heard on the show…

Dimland Radio opening theme song: Ram by The Yoleus

First ad break bumpers: Love Is For Lovers by The dB’s and Love Is Stronger Than Pride by Sade

Second ad break bumpers: Love At First Sight by XTC and Love Is The Law by The Suburbs

Closing song: Angler’s Treble Hook by $5 Fiddle

Please subscribe on iTunes! Just search for Dimland Radio in the podcast section. And if you could leave a good rating and a positive review it would be awesome.

Subscribe to Dimland Radio on PodBean!

You can also go to my CafePress store and buy stuff with my artwork on it and have me do a portrait for you if you’d like.

Images used under Fair Use.

dimland radio 2-22-20 show notes

The SGU’s Experiment

The long-running podcast The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe did an intriguing experiment for the show number 762. It was recorded in front of a live audience in Australia, with the experiment being they did the show as though it was the year 2035. They made no mention of doing something usual, they just did it.

They talked about climate change, asteroid/earth collisions, new technologies and current state of social media. And they did it really well. Especially well, when, from what I learn from George Hrab on his Geologic Podcast, you consider they didn’t do loads of prep before recording.

I did not that the group seemed a little amped up. The show mostly flowed as normal, but there was just an increased intensity.

The Dream

As long as I was talking podcasts, I thought I’d recommend this excellent show to my listener. It’s called The Dream and it is in its second season.

The first season had them investigating multilevel marketing scams (MLM for short and don’t call them pyramids). The idea of these business opportunities is to recruit people to sell product (which those people have to but a certain amount to sell) and recruit other people to sell that product and recruit more people and so on. It ultimately doesn’t work. Virtually every person recruited loses money and eventually cuts their losses and quits. Some then get caught up in another MLM.

Season two tackles the wellness industry. They look into diet fads, supplements, alternative medicine, anti-vaccination, and everyone’s favorite vagina-owner Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop.

Both seasons are informative and infuriating.

Expert?! Since When?!

Last week I talked about the “Science” Channel’s new program Curse Of The Bermuda Triangle.

There isn’t any mystery about the particular chunk of the Caribbean. It gets lots of traffic and is prone to rough seas. Ships sink, planes crash, divers drown. Sometimes they are never found. It’s a big area. And it doesn’t suffer more such incidences than other comparable areas of the world’s oceans. There’s no mystery.

Well, there’s one mystery.

I mentioned that I have a friend who is involved in the show. He is introduced as an author and an expert on the Bermuda Triangle. There’s the mystery. He has written a few books. But expert on the Bermuda Triangle? Since when?!

Well, I watched the first episode which focuses on Flight 19, the naval training flight mission which, in December 1945, went off course, got lost, ran out of fuel, and ditched in the ocean. The planes and the men were never found.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected.

When my friend was consulted and he listed the silly… er… I mean paranormal explanations for Flight 19’s disappearance (aliens, “electronic fog”), the fellows weren’t buying it.

Music heard on the show…

Dimland Radio opening theme song: Ram by The Yoleus

First ad break bumpers: Radio Free Europe by REM and One Step Ahead by Split Enz

Second ad break bumpers: Straight To Hell by The Clash and Stigmata Martyr by Bauhaus

Closing song: Angler’s Treble Hook by $5 Fiddle

Please subscribe on iTunes! Just search for Dimland Radio in the podcast section. And if you could leave a good rating and a positive review it would be awesome.

Subscribe to Dimland Radio on PodBean!

You can also go to my CafePress store and buy stuff with my artwork on it and have me do a portrait for you if you’d like.

Images used under Fair Use.