the rix mix

Curious trash pile up the street, too dark to poke through it. I plucked off the top a small VTech Lesson One electronic learning toy from about 1980, looks like a little keyboard computer. I won't invest 6 C batteries in it, but if one of my 9V adapters fits, I'll see if the little view screen & speaker do anything. Google doesn't find much, so it isn't a collector's novelty. The Hong Kong company is still in business, turning a profit by staying one step behind innovation. VTech did manufacture a true collectible, the Laser 128, the only legal knockoff of the Apple IIc.
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Cold water in the bathroom was turned off for four days while a long section of pipe was replaced. To access the pipe on this floor, the plumber knocked a big hole through the wall inside the clothes closet, & I'm grateful he wasted no time repairing the wall on Sunday considering what crawls around in there. The lack of cold water coincided with the hot water turned back up to proper temp, which made showering difficult. I had to jump under the shower before the full stream of hot water came up from the basement & escape before I was lobsterized. Today's extra-long steamy shower felt good.

Nurse in Times Square war photo reunites with Navy

NEW YORK – A 90-year-old who says she's the woman being kissed by a sailor in Times Square in one of World War II's most famous photographs reunited in town with the Navy on Sunday — days before she is to serve as grand marshal of the city's Veterans Day parade.

His picture from V-J Day became one of the 20th century's most iconic images. But Eisenstaedt didn't get the names of either party, and efforts years later by Life to identify them produced a number of claimants, says Bobbi Baker Burrows, a Life editor with deep knowledge of the subject.

Cute. There's absolutely no evidence that she's the woman in the famous kissing photo. But if she proved she was a nurse in New York on V-J Day, she's as good a choice as anyone.
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While we're still angry at Mormons for pouring millions of dollars into the campaign to pass Prop 8:

NEW YORK – Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are making changes to their massive genealogical database to make it more difficult for names of Holocaust victims to be entered for posthumous baptism by proxy, a rite that has been a common Mormon practice for more than a century.

Of course, even voluntary conversion to the Latter Day Saints wouldn't have saved Jews from the death camps. Bizarrely, Adolph Hitler also received a posthumous proxy baptism.

Labels: potpourri