"In the admittedly brief time that I have had this coloring book, it has filled a particular activity niche for me..."

"... which is 'something to do with my hands while I watch Netflix.' Other activities in this niche include: knitting, painting my nails, texting, putting candy in my mouth. End of list."

Writes Julie Beck in "The Zen of Adult Coloring Books/I get it now."

Why do I need to do two things at once? Why can’t I just sit quietly and enjoy a TV show? In part, it’s because I feel a little less lazy if I’m making something while I wile away the hours with Friday Night Lights. But also, I’m watching TV in the first place to relax, to quiet my mind, and often my mind is loud enough that it shouts over Coach Taylor. I really do think that a lifetime of multitasking has left me occasionally incapable of subduing the entirety of my mind with one activity. If the front of my mind is occupied by the show, and the back is focused on picking colors and staying in the lines, there’s not room for much else. It’s a sort of mindfulness that’s more like mind-fullness....

Now, I actually understand this.
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Imagine! The "perfect jewel"!

That's an ad from page 67 of the September 18, 1960 issue of The New York Times — an issue I was reading yesterday, for my "Moscow Suspicious of Hillary" post.

I love paging through all the old ads. There's one in that issue for "Fantastic, magical: typewriter correction tape — "Type-Out" —  to "save hours of costly re-typing." And there's one for "Daylight Blue" TV that "Adds a Tint of Blue" to improve the clarity of black-and-white TV. The TV is "big... like a movie screen" when it's only 23". And I love that the elimination of glare is attributed to something called "Ultra-Vision Glarejector."

What got me thinking back the transistor radio I'd seen was this Tech Times article Meade just texted me:

Electrical engineers from the University of Wisconsin have developed a flexible silicon phototransistor, which to date is the fastest and most responsive ever created... Just like mammalian eyes, phototransistors collect light and then transform this into an electrical impulse. In mammals, this pulse is transported by the brain's nerves but in digital devices, the electrical charge becomes a binary code that software converts into a digital image. Many phototransistors are flat because they are fabricated on rigid surface but the new phototransistor is flexible so it can easily mimic the behavior of the eyes of mammals....

Maybe you don't remember "I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster," but I do.

"Onscreen, the sandpaper-voiced [Marty] Ingels was best known for his role in the short-lived sitcom 'I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster,' broadcast on ABC in the 1962-63 season. Mr. Ingels (as Fenster) starred opposite John Astin (as Dickens), as one of a pair of jovial carpenters. Off screen, Mr. Ingels — who began his professional life as a talking peanut and was later a booker of celebrities on television commercials, a frequent TV guest star and a voice-over artist whose credits include Pac-Man in the animated series of the 1980s — was by all accounts highly voluble, genially combustible, energetically litigious and unmistakably larger than life."

I'm sorry to see him go, this man most famous for being the husband of Shirley Jones. As for litigious, I remember when Shirley Jones sued The National Enquirer for an article that — as the U.S. Supreme Court decorously put it — "alleged that respondent drank so heavily as to prevent her from fulfilling her professional obligations."  I taught that case, Calder v. Jones, in Civil Procedure class many times.

But I loved "I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster." 1962-63. That was during the JFK administration. Before we knew John Astin as Gomez on "The Addams Family," which didn't start until 1964, the highly transformative year that followed the Kennedy assassination, the year of The Beatles, the Civil Rights Act, and much else. 1962, that was a different time, and John Astin and Marty Ingels were carpenters. (Shirley Jones was Marian the librarian in "The Music Man" in 1962, long before "The Partridge Family.") Do you think it was funny? He's a segment all about "It's not funny":



ADDED: I made an "I'm Dickens He's Fenster" tag, because I've written about this TV show before. Twice. Both times were back in 2004, the first year of this blog. April 17, 2004:

Why isn't TV more like the Internet? Why can't I just watch any old episode of, say, Dobie Gillis or I'm Dickens, He's Fenster whenever I want? Why can't I sit down any night and call up, say, "The Dalton Girls"? (Althouse trivia experts should know that was the first movie I ever saw in the theater. According to an IMDB user summary it's "Just another 'B' western, except the outlaws are babes." I see the plot was "After the Dalton boys are killed by the law, one of the Dalton girls is forced to kill a lecherous mortician who tries to rape her...)

Maybe I need to make a "Dalton Girls" tag...

AND: Weirdly, that April 17, 2004 post has Donald Trump in it. I'd just watched an HBO on Demand documentary called "Born Rich" — "a nice documentary, made by a born-rich guy who had access to other born-rich kids, because (as I learned in the documentary), born-rich people are an inbred subculture": "There's a nice variety of rich kids to react in different ways to. And I must say one of the nicest ones was Ivanka Trump, which has to remove a layer of loathsomeness from Donald Trump."

"It's one thing to say you're going to let go. It's another to actually do it. To loosen your grip, to let yourself fall."

"So when I walked into the haircutting place, I was taking a leap. But I wasn't doing it for a guy or because of some list. I was doing it for me."

"It feels to me like a lot of people talking and nobody listening. It’s just a little quippy for me."

Says Aaron Sorkin, about Twitter, after Ana Marie Cox prompts him to think about Twitter as a "shared experience" similar to the traditional function of television (that "national hearth").