EMPS: Measuring Time in Ages of Clocks

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #18: Watching The Clock, Carly (naturally enough wants to see some clocks. I think I've shown off all our clocks in this blog at one time or another, except maybe for the old nonfunctioning mantle clock, and I don't know where that is. But here we go anyway.

Wait a sec - could the mantle clock be in the library closet? It is!

His grandfather's clock's not too tall for the shelf.

From my Picasa album EMPS

Not exactly in a place of honor, is it? But at least it's survived our many purges of old stuff. This belonged to John's grandfather. I don't think there's any more to the story than that. It's a little banged up, and I doubt that it's in working order. But the main reason it's in a closet, aside from the fact that display space is at a premium here at the Museum of the Weird, is that it doesn't fit the MotW's midcentury modern aesthetic.

A 2005 photo of a vintage modern clock, never to run again.

Now here's a clock that suits John's enjoyment of all things retro moderne. Probably close to 50 years old, it's an eBay purchase from nearly a decade ago. Unfortunately it needs a new motor, which is unlikely to happen. But John likes the bright red plastic and the updated art deco look of it, and so this, too, has survived purging. Just last night John pulled it out of a box, thought about whether to keep it, and put it back in the box.

My clock radio celebrates a radio station that's long gone.

This next clock doesn't approach the age of the first two, but it dates back to the 1990s, which is impressive enough for a clock radio. I don't know about your experience in this area, but I find that the alarms on clock radios tend to stop working properly after a few years. This one still wakes me up, though, when I need such things. The stickers on it are for Cool 92.9, the oldies station where I once knew most of the disk jockeys personally, and contributed song lists for their My Three Songs and Top Five at Five features. Then my friend Rich "Brother" Robbin was canned by the soulless corporate overlords, and within a year the station was essentially gone, with no live disc jockeys and a nonsensical and unlistenable playlist. Cool and its oldies later came back on a low power AM frequency, but I couldn't get that on my radio and anyway, the magic was gone.

John's tres moderne clock from Denmark - at Christmas

Retaining a place of honor among the Christmas decorations is this modern teal green clock John bought in the Netherlands nearly a decade ago. (I'm pretty sure it was made in Denmark, though, making it Danish modern.) I've photographed it before, repeatedly, but not usually with such festive surroundings!

John's non-vintage but modern alarm clock.

Here is John's current alarm clock. It's from Target, I think, but he also has a vintage ball clock somewhere that doesn't work as reliably. I've never managed to figure out how to turn this clock's alarm off, which can be a problem if I'm in bed and he gets up before the alarm.

My Rumor, with two alerts from some Facebook malarkey.

Finally, here's the clock I actually use the most: my LG Rumor phone. I got this over the summer. The missed alerts on it were from a Facebook quiz thing. It was trying to sell me some texting game, so I deleted the alerts. The last time I sent and received texts, my cell bill doubled.

Carly also asks for a photo of a clock showing our favorite time of day. I'm not sure I have one right now. It's no secret I'm a night person, and historically I've gotten in most of my computer time between 9 PM and 5 AM. But since my becoming unemployed, my sleep schedule has become even more screwed up, if that's possible. I've been sleeping part of the night, blogging, and then going back to bed at midmorning. Go figure!

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis every Monday for the week's EMPS assignment, along with links to the previous week's entries. And while you're at it, how about joining in?

Karen

EMPS: Hey! You! Get Off of My Couch!

For this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, Carly wants us to photograph a comfy, well-loved (read worn) piece of furniture. As it happens, though, the best-loved piece of furniture here at the Museum of the Weird is also the newest. We'll get to that one in a moment. First let's start with two pieces of furniture that don't currently get much use, but meet the parameters in other ways:

I love the green thing; John loves the pink thing.

These two pieces of furniture in our front room are roughly my age. The chartreuse whatever-it-is, chaise longue I guess, is well-loved by me. I used to recline on it when it was in the den. It's covered with 50-year-old vinyl, though, which can get sticky against the skin and is split along the edge, as you can see here.

John, on the other hand, is not a fan of the chartreuse whatchamacallit. He prefers that pink chairlike thing next to it. The pink upholstery is unevenly faded, parts of the piece aren't quite the shape they used to be, and there's an area you can;t see here that has stuffing coming out. We stubbornly insist that these two pieces of vintage furniture will be fixed someday, rather than thrown away.

A glimpse of the actual new couch under the cheap cover.

The rest of this entry will be devoted to the couch in the den, with is in almost continual use by pne or more of the four Blochers (two humans, two canines). We bought it about two years about at La-Z-Boy, a designer couch with a more-or-less midcentury modern sensibility. But we didn't set it up in the den and start using it until the old orange couch that was there was well and truly on its last legs. To protect the new couch, we looked at a lot of furniture covers online, and chose this leopard print one for its large size, low cost and midcentury sensibility. But it's already faded and worn, and ragged at the bottom.

This is what we sit on when we watch tv, and it's what the dogs lie on when they're not in the bedroom or my office. It's big enough to accomodate two humans and a dog, or two dogs and a human, more or less. But there are times when the dogs are disinclined to share it, particularly with each other. By way of illustration, here is a series of photos from this evening, presented in the order taken. I offer them without further comment:










Be sure to check Ellipsis every Monday for the new Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot topic, and a roundup of the previous week's entries!

Karen

Refrigerator magnets do not equal Gracious Living

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Show off your refrigerator magnets. Because you know you have 'em.

You mean like this? Well, yes, we have them, just a minor exhibit at the Museum of the Weird, so minor that we don't even keep them on display any more. John took them down when we got our new refrigerator last year. Fortunately for tonight's entry, he happened to find them in a box on Sunday, so I was able to pull them out of the box and arrange them on the refrigerator. My favorite one is the cartoon of Sam and Al from Quantum Leap, as drawn by my friend Sherlock - the same artist who drew my Mâvarin characters for me.

I strongly suspected John would not want the magnets left up on the front of our nice new fridge, junking it up. So I thought I'd see whether I could get away with putting them on the side of it instead. If nothing else, it gives the photo a more contrasting background. But no, John doesn't want them on the side of the refrigerator, either, near the open flames of the adjacent gas stove. Can't blame him for that!


And really, the fridge does look better without them. As John said tonight, "Refrigerator magnets aren't really part of gracious living." "Gracious Living" is something of a running joke with us. It was a term used on the cover of a trading stamp redemption book when I was a little kid in the early 1960s. It was probably a little silly for the competition to the S&H Green Stamp people to promise they could bring graciousness to the new suburban homes of the generation that begat the baby boom, but it fit in with the optimistic consumerism of the era. The Museum of the Weird is full of that generation's cast-offs - and yes, we really do aspire to gracious living. We're not there yet, but we're working on it.

Still, I kind of wanted to keep at least some of these on display somewhere. But where? There aren't a lot of metal surfaces in this house that don't have electronics inside, which could be negatively affected by the magnets. Just for fun, I temporarily stuck them on this vintage lamp on time of my computer hutch. Clearly, that's not going to work, either. At the moment most of them are stuck to the pole part of the same desk lamp. Sam and Al are stuck to the old Altar Bread can. That'll do for tonight.

Karen