Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

Suellen Hoy Has All the Dirt on the American Pursuit of Cleanliness

Chasing Dirt The American Pursuit of Cleanliness

Are we as clean today as our parents were? As our grandparents? What about our great grandparents? Probably not. Are we healthier? I don’t know.

I can answer the first questions, though, because I just finished reading Suellen Hoy’s Chasing Dirt, which “is about us as a people, a people who developed and nurtured over a century and a half a love affair with cleanliness. This book is, in fact, the first general history of cleanliness in the United States.”

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Twenty Twenty-Two In Review

Twenty Twenty-Two. No jetpacks, no faster-than-light traveling, no flying cars (at least not mass produced and widely available or reliable). In short, this isn’t the Jetsons future we thought it might be.

Why does that matter? Because by any metric for arguably anyone born on the other side of Y2K, 2022 was the future. Well, the future is now, and it’s not living up to expectations, I can tell you that. So let’s look back on the year as it was, and ignore the things it would or should have been.

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Spoiler Free Review

Prey Highlights Man’s Folly in the Face of Technology

Prey Highlights Man’s Folly in the Face of Technology

Michael Crichton’s Prey is a parable for technological advancement gone amok. It starts with an introduction to “Artificial Evolution in the Twenty-first Century,” which allows Crichton to weave a better story and set the stage for Prey to read more like a play than a novel.

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First Season of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Scores for Good Sport, Entertainment Value

Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a Welsh football club, or soccer team if you prefer the American lexicon. It just so happens to be the third oldest professional football club in the world, Wrexham AFC. Why Wrexham? Why Rob and Ryan? Those two questions and many more can be answered, to some degree, in Welcome to Wrexham.

The series Welcome to Wrexham is part business documentary, part travel documentary, part history documentary, and part sports documentary with a throughline of the human condition.

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Track by Track

Aerosmith Nine Lives Track by Track

Track by Track: Aerosmith – Nine Lives

Released on March 18, 1997 Nine Lives was the first studio album released by Aerosmith since 1993’s Get a Grip and the first on Columbia Records since 1982. Since that time, Aerosmith had revived their career on Geffen, and this four-year period was their longest album drought since the creation of the band at that point.

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