While Knickers is a fine name, I’d have dyed him blue and named him Babe.
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Well actually, a steer, so incorrect on both counts.
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Just take proper care of him so he doesn’t get Bunyans.
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Stop knit-picking and look at that critter!
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No sooner said than done (plus a month or so).
The store is from another age, with wooden shelves and glass-fronted cabinets holding an eclectic collection of old printed material, much of it only of interest to collectors, although there are works on art, architecture, cooking, etc that don’t really go out of date.
At the back sat the famous Biblio-mat. Waiting.
The proprietor sat behind a large wooden desk that was covered in intricate carvings that seemed to writhe subtly in the dim light. I approached, purchased a token ($3.00), answered his questions three (“red”, “aluminum”, “not recently, no”) then, trembling with a mixture of anticipation and formless dread, approached the turquoise slab.
I inserted the token.
There was a loud sound, somewhere between a thud and a clunk. When I recovered, I noticed that the black rectangular opening near the bottom of the machine now held a small book.
Shaken but determined, I stuffed the book in my backpack and left.
The book is the reminiscences of Sarah Jane Full Hill, who lived through the American Civil War and followed her husband, an officer in the Corps of Engineers, in his travels.
The book itself is well bound and looks brand new. There’s no indication that anyone has ever opened it. I’m a bit disappointed that it isn’t something weirder, or else on a subject that I am more interested in, but that’s the hazard of buying random books.
Experience rating: 
Would visit again.
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Well, random relative to the set of available books. If only it were random relative to the set of ever-existing books!
“Get the recorder started”
“What?”
“Well, a lot of times it begins a recitation.”
“It… ah, I see.”
“Amazing thing, but you have to be ready. There are people just trying to identify some of the languages of some of these lost poems…”
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Well, it says right on the machine, “Collect all 112 million titles”. Merely pseudo-random, you may say, but it’s random enough for me.
What is your quotation from?
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I was just imagining one conversation if it were random relative to the set of ever-existing books.
You’d probably have various anthropologists and historians camped in front of it year-round, trying to recover as much as possible. You’d need specialists in ancient languages and/or historical linguistics to even identify many languages, and send the books to the appropriate overworked specialists…
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If you look closely, many of the ‘transit’ maps are really about major story plots, like Lord of the Rings and Hamilton:
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Scholars would be lined up out the door and along Bloor St. for a chance to rebuild the library of Alexandria from random selections, except that at $3.00 a pop, (even $CDN), they’d never get funding.
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This is interesting in three ways:
1 - An 8K TV channel. That’s a lot of Ks.
2 - Yay, “2001 A Space Odyssey!” 
3 - The still illustrating this article shows a scene that never appeared in the final edit of the movie.
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That is a lot of Ks. More than my eyes need.
I have a 4k TV and have watched a few 4k things on it, but since I don’t pay for the extra 4k Netflix as I just don’t get enough ooomph out of it.
At what resolution will there be no point in redigitizing film media as resolution n-1 already captured everything?
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I do not really know where this goes, but I HAVE to share.
This weekend I was digging up the furniture dealz for my new digs. I have a place that I’ve found via Craigslist (which fyi turned out to be a real dud of a place) that I am stalking. I have the GPS on but I cannot see it when Siri is saying, “Over there, thataways!” So I go past, then find a place to hang a U-Turn. It just so happens the place I am Uing through has a sign that says it has estate sales. Uh, that’s what I THOUGHT it said. And I can see by the window it’s got vintagey stuff. It doesn’t look like furniture is a big seller there, but it’s right there and why not? I pop in.
Two sweet older ladies greet me in the most pleasant way. They tell me they are twins! And to look around. I ask about furniture and they say they do not have much but point me over to the second room. The place is bigger than it appeared from outside. There’s at least 3 rooms.
And here’s where it goes all Twilight Zone.
“So,” I say as the twins approach, “You get this stuff from estate sales?” It’s all kind of QVC circa 1989 looking stuff - old microwave cookbooks, a LOT of porcelain figures in pastel shades, some hats.
“This is the result of a lifetime of our mother’s compulsive shopping,” the twins tell me, rather proudly. They show me a photo of their mom, young and lovely, in a gorgeous wedding gown. “Dad said that he’d be a millionaire if it weren’t for mom. She grew up in the Great Depression and had nothing. We never saw a garage that you could park a car in. Dad would tear up her credit cards and she’d just open up new accounts.”
It sounded like Dad was a successful business man and that he was able to care for her in old age, so I guess he had some separate accounts he hid from her.
They were super sweet ladies.
I needed to get to the other place before it closed but I told them I’d come back. I’m going to take my daughter. I didn’t even get to see the upholstery fabrics that were in the back room.
Seriously - an ENTIRE STORE that was just their mom’s crap.
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