Coit Tower mural by Bernard B. Zakheim, 1934.
New York’s traffic-halting astronomer
How LA Failed to Stop Landlords From Turning Low-Cost Housing Into Tourist Hotels
Saturday Linkages
Weekend Linkages: Let’s Get Tetrahedral
Fritoheimer’s Miscellany
When I’m having a spat with the Muses, I tend to write long, ponderous and negative blog posts that, mercifully, never leave unpublished draft status. Inspired by the literary form of the miscellany, a type of grab bag of short, random articles popular from the Middle Ages to 18th century, I hope to, periodically, drop some short anecdotes on this blog that, if I were hip and younger, I might make a TikTok about. In the hopes of better relations with the Muses, I’ll start with a shameless Oppenheimer tie-in in lieu of links.
I went with family this week to the always fun Balboa Theater that was showing both Barbie and Oppenheimer. A lot of people there were, in fact, doing a double feature Barbenheimer. To save you the trip to the theater, I thought Oppenheimer was confusing and pretentious but maybe I’d think otherwise had I done the Barbenheimer thing enhanced with a few beers and edibles like many of my theater companions.
During one of the Oppenheimer great-man-doing-physics-in-his-brain sequences, I remembered witnessing some cold war shenanigans on a Center for Land Use Interpretation tour of the perimeter of the Nellis Range in Nevada many years ago.
Towards the end of the tour we were on a freeway in sight of a very sensitive facility where nuclear weapons are stored in bunkers. Off in the distance we saw a Frito Lay delivery truck winding its way though those heavily secured bunkers. It was at that point when the entire busload of folks realized that, apparently, our government moves nukes in Fritos delivery trucks because I can guarantee you that there’s no Fritos vending machine or liquor store amongst those bunkers.
If you think about it this makes a certain amount of sense. I mean, you wouldn’t want to move nukes in a vehicle labeled “nukes”. But ever since, every time I see a Frito Lay truck, I think it might just have a very large bomb in it.
