The Magic Record

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Dog people might enjoy my waggish collection of vintage dogs.

His Master's Voice, 1967.

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.

Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

Elgar – 'Cello Concerto', Soloist: Jacqueline du Pré / 'Sea Picture', Soloist: Janet Baker, Contralto, with The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, Photography by David Farrell, ASD 655, His Master's Voice, 1965

Love Rock - The Strangers (Love Rock / Onye Ije, 1972)

  illustration: Bernard Villemot

via postercorner.com

Her Master's Voice.

[Baloyne] Secretly grieved (but this, I repeat, is my hypothesis) at his physical appearance as well as personality – he was a butterball and painfully timid – he assumed a manner that could be called circular irony. Everything he said, he said in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of someone playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles. Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words. This ironic quote-unquote became at last a part of him, and enabled him to utter things that no one else would have been forgiven. He could even ridicule himself at any length, since this trick, in principle very simple, through consistent application rendered him quite impossible to pin down or catch. With humor, with self-irony, he built up around his person such a system of invisible fortifications that even those – like me – who had known him for years could not predict how he would react. I think that he strove particularly for this, and that the things he did, which sometimes indeed bordered on the clownish, he did with secret design, though they seemed perfectly spontaneous.

[...] Did I say that Baloyne was a Renaissance figure? I loved his exasperating home, where there were always so many people that you could not talk to the host in private earlier than midnight. What I have so far said touches the fortifications Baloyne raised about his personality but not the personality itself. A special hypothesis is needed to divine what lives intra muros. It was, I think, fear. I do not know what he feared. Himself, perhaps. He must have had a great deal to hide, surrounding himself as he did with such a labored din; he always had so many ideas, plans, projects, and got himself into so many unnecessary things, was a member of all sorts of societies, conservatories, a professional respondent to academic questionnaires and polls of scientists; he overburdened himself intentionally, because in that way he would not have to be alone with himself – there would never be time. He dealt with the problems of others, and understood people so well, one naturally assumed he understood himself well, too. A mistaken assumption, I believe.

His Master's Voice, Stanisław Lem

masters of the air · part nine

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Funny spoofs of the vintage "His master's voice" ads featuring the Nipper dog and a gramophone.

Transformers Funnies [CBV Style]

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We agree finally that our bodies deteriorate with age — but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal — even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man.

Stanisław Lem, His Master's Voice

slay the princess swap aus are precious things to me cuz it's where i get blessed to see how the long quiet will be able to hold his voices and say his thoughts on them with the same tenderness and care the shifting mound shows to her vessels in game