You'll get to Bethlehem faster if you don't slouch

It took a while but I finally tracked down an image of the pencil box that Mr. Beagles described.  I could picture it perfectly, with it's sliding ruler on the top and that little sharpener on the end.  I wasn't sure if it was called a pencil box, though; I thought it might have had a different name.   Anyhow, the ruler was okay, a little too short to measure much but the included metric rule caught my eye. "What is this?," I wondered.  Very neat and tidy increments with those little millimeters; maybe someday it will catch on.

As far as I can tell there was just one company that made those pencil boxes, mostly as an advertising and promotional item.  Since they've been out of production for many years they are now collectibles, fetching up to twenty dollars or so on Ebay.   What is cool is the version with the sliding scale that lets you do multiplication, kind of like a rudimentary slide rule.  I never saw that type before; it would have come in handy in the first or second grade.  Why memorize those times tables when you have a spiffy gadget at hand?

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So, Uncle Ken likes Facebook and so do a lot of other people.  I get that; the Kool-Aid must be mighty tasty but it's not for me.  Facebook exists solely as an instrument to suck your data and sell it to advertisers.  But in all fairness, I did look into setting up an anonymous account but it would be more trouble than it's worth, requiring a new dedicated email account.  And since Facebook requires that you use your real name the use of a phony name is a violation of its terms of service, resulting in a permanent ban.  I don't think I'm missing much by not signing up.  Perhaps Uncle Ken can share some of the great insights he has gained.  I've read that pictures of kitty cats are quite popular.

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Damon Knight wrote a short story back in the fifties titled "What Rough Beast."  I'll have to dig and see if I can find it online to compare it to Yeats.  And I'll have to ponder the notion of a Second Coming (or some other kind of cataclysmic change).  Seems to me that the idea gets more popular when folks are fed up, at the end of their rope, and decide WTF!  Time to blow everything up and start over, kind of what Steve Bannon has in mind.  Where's an asteroid when you need it?

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Did you ever wonder what you had to do in order to drink beer all day and still function?  I have, and found some good info from the experts.  Enjoy.

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For a final word on Facebook, John Oliver had an amusing rant on his latest program.  It pretty much mirrors my sentiments.