(2022) A lovely tool for a long vanished Mesopotamian technology, to impress cuneiform signatures onto clay cylinder seals, typically to authenticate legal documents such as contracts, receipts (as in a receipt for a shipment), deeds, wills and like that. Which is how far back paperwork goes, to the dawn of civilization. Except that it wasn’t […]
Franklin and Vine, 1890s, just a couple blocks north of Hollywood and Vine. Hollywood Blvd—then called Prospect Avenue, a graded dirt road—was already there, but nothing else made it past the 1920s, when Hollywood’s Arcadian past disappeared under studio lots and pavement. This view looking south was all city in a generation or two, the […]
Brick's Politics 
As you did, no doubt, I got this postcard in the mail with the government’s advice on dealing with this thing. Pretty basic stuff; wash your hands, etc. Fine. What infuriated me, much more so than more important things, was the fact that it was called PRESIDENT TRUMP’S advice to Americans (or some such wording; I forget the exact phrase, and we tore the damn thing to shreds as soon as we got it.) Not the CDC’s advice, which was exactly what it was, but PRESIDENT TRUMP’S, as if he had come up with all this stuff out of his very stable genius mind all by himself. I can just picture the CDC being told to make sure his name was in big letters on the front of the postcard. It was this act of petty egoism that really got under my skin.
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