Next week, I'll be on vacation in Colorado and am planning on posting photos and videos of interesting sights in the eastern part of the state. I might even make it up to Cheyenne Frontier Days for half a day.

I had hoped to accomplish all this by remotely updating my new blog, Thrillarama.com, but so far I haven't been able to get TypePad's iPhone application to upload photos at the quality level I want. I've contacted the good folks at TypePad and am hoping there's something I've overlooked, since otherwise this is a pretty nifty application.

While I think that Zink technology has promise, the fact that Polaroid's PoGo won't work with iPhone speaks reams. That it's incompatible with a product that thousands of people are willing to stand in line for hours to buy shows how out of touch Polaroid has become.

But thank goodness that Polaroid's leash holder, Petters Group Worldwide, has taken the pulse of Young America. Follow the misadventures of Michael and Megan, those hip and crazy PoGo spokespeople who are on a "wild and wicked road trip across America."

Like, totally awesome, dude!

Slide rules, calculators and the new iPhone. I'm thinking about these things right now.

It all started because I needed to buy a new scrubber sponge. I'd grabbed the first sponge at hand the other day when more than a few areas of the bathroom needed some attention.

And then I tossed that sponge back into the kitchen sink. Last night, I stood there merrily scrubbing plates when I realized, damn, this is the same sponge that last night had biblical knowledge of the toilet rim.

The fascinating website Hidden Dangers Revealed has this to say about kitchen sponges and dishrags:

Some sponges have enough bacteria to cause serious gastro-intestinal distress. A bacteria filled dishrag used to dry dishes could actually be transmitting a host of bacteria to the dry dishes, which could make you sick the next time you use them.

Holy moly, huh? I can't begin to imagine what they'd say about using a toilet sponge to scrub pizza off your plates.

So, I set out this afternoon to buy a new sponge. First stop: The Ace Hardware store near Milwaukee and Lawrence avenues about two blocks from Chez ChicagoScope. To my chagrin, the store is closed -- and, apparently, has been for several months. I guess I never managed to figure this out because displays remain in the front windows and the place is still filled with inventory.

A major clue should have been the signs in the windows offering "space for lease," but I assumed that, like the Foot Locker situation that I'll get to in just a moment, that there was unused square footage that an independent locksmith or such might use.

Well, duh.

This building used to house the Jefferson Park Woolworth's, and ever since it shut down about 10 years ago, the space has been cursed. First, the space became a Foot Locker store, probably because Foot Locker is the surviving Woolworth vestige. Trouble is, the store always looked pathetic because they only utilized about a third of the available space. As a result, it gave the impression of a desperate retailer on its last legs, which isn't the case with Foot Locker at all, as the the operation is quite successful in other locations.

Then, a couple of years ago, Foot Locker pulled out and Ace Hardware moved in. I had high hopes when this happened, since I hoped that it signaled a revitalization of the entire Jefferson Park commercial district. But that didn't happen.

So, I walked up the street a block and bought the sponge at the CVS drugstore. By the way, there are two CVS drugstores within two blocks of my place. I can't imagine how this makes any market sense, but CVS has always done things that I can't comprehend. Not the least of these is the sucky design of their checkout stations.

Instead of designing their stores with separate checkout lanes, CVS puts all of their clerks behind one central counter at the front of the store. This might be OK if customers were steered into queues like at airline checkins or banks, but CVS actively discourages this by placing impulse-purchase merchandise at the checkout area -- including most candy. This only encourages jerks to jump ahead in line.

I've complained about this to several CVS managers and they confirm that the stores' checkout procedure is customers' No. 1 beef and they can't do anything about it.

But back to the sponge saga. To get to the housewares aisle at CVS, I had to walk past office supplies, and I paused to look at a display of electronic calculators. Most were made by Casio, and even the most expensive scientific model cost less than $20. This was sure a change from when I was in high school. In those distant times, you still wielded a slide rule unless you were one of the few kids whose family was wealthy enough to pop for one of the new electronic calculators -- which cost several hundred dollars at the time.

I had a pretty good slide rule, though. Dad drove me over to the University of Colorado at Denver's bookstore, where he bought me a circular slide rule. I was disappointed because it didn't look much like a "real" slide rule. My definition of a real slide rule, of course, was one of those higher-end Pickett models resplendent in bright yellow lacquer.

But the circular slide rule did have a major advantage: It didn't get knocked out of alignment if dropped, a big consideration during tests in math-heavy PSSC Physics. (This was the only class in which I ever earned an "F" -- but that's another story.)

I used my little circular slide rule for 20 years almost daily in my job. I didn't calculate engineering projects or check calculus results or anything like that. I simply used it to specify enlargement or reduction percentages for photos and graphics at newspapers.

Today, I perform such calculations within Photoshop or InDesign, or on the iPhone's nifty calculator. But I still have that circular slide rule tucked away in a closet somewhere around here. I wonder if I still know to use it.

I also wonder whether I managed to smear feces onto the plates used for last night's dinner -- and whether I'm going come down with food poisoning. I'll keep you posted.

Learn more about slide rules:

Eric's Slide Rule Site

The Oughtred Society

Vintage Instruments: Slide Rules and More

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Today at work I needed to fact-check a reference to lyrics from "As Time Goes By," best known from its use in the classic motion picture "Casablanca," and discovered something pretty profound: This song's introduction is actually about Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity. Check it out:

This day and age we're living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein's theory.

So we must get down to earth at times

Relax relieve the tension
And no matter what the progress

Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.

You just don't encounter a lot of song introductions these days. It wasn't until several years ago that I even heard the intro for "White Christmas," which is about being in Southern California is December -- which is why the singer is dreaming of a white Christmas.

Thanks to iTunes, I discovered another musical delight recently. I was searching for "El Paso," the classic Western ballad by Marty Robbins and, yeah, I also saw "El Paso City" -- but also for sale was an incredible song I'd never heard before: "Feleena (From El Paso)." This amazing song tells the "El Paso" saga from Feleena's viewpoint and is guaranteed to evoke an almost-operatic cascade of emotions from anyone like me who loves the original.

You surely know the tragic ending of the "El Paso" story, so I'll risk a spoiler by quoting my favorite set of lyrics from "Feleena (From El Paso)":

Feleena knelt near him,
To hold and to hear him
When she felt the warm blood
That flowed from the wound in his side.
He raised to kiss her and she heard him whisper,
"Never forget me, Feleena. It's over, goodbye."
Quickly she grabbed for the six-gun that he wore
And screaming in anger and placing the gun to her breast,
"Bury us both deep and maybe we'll find peace,"
Then pulling the trigger she fell cross the dead cowboy's chest.

Time is the reason you might not have heard "Feleena (From El Paso)." The song clocks in at 8 minutes, 19 seconds, so it doesn't get much airplay.

There's also an internal time problem in the "Feleena" song itself. In the original "El Paso," the young cowboy apparently spent some time in the badlands of New Mexico, yet in "Faleena," he tragically returns the next day.

Or maybe, as Einstein might say, it's all relative.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Michael "Klaatu" Rennie leads the way as his alien henchmen escort David Vincent toward a flying saucer that has conveniently landed in the back yard.

When I was a kid, I loved the outer-space adventures of the original "Star Trek" series, which I found entertaining and thought-provoking. But another series at that time managed to scare the living bejeezus out of me -- and still does.

That program is "The Invaders," introduced each week with an ominous opening sequence:

The Invaders: Alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: The Earth. Their purpose: To make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him it began one lost night on a lonely country road looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed, deserted diner and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow, he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.

The show's first season is now available on DVD and I've been watching "The Invaders" with new appreciation. Unlike a lot of series from that era, it sure holds up. The few effects are done well and the attention paid to lighting, music and art direction rivals that of many contemporary theatrical films.

Cloned from Quinn Martin Productions' "The Fugitive," this show follows "architect David Vincent" -- played by 29-year-old Roy Thinnes -- that's him then and now, at right. Although he gains allies in the second season, Vincent initially leads a desperate, one-man campaign to expose the vanguard of an alien invasion. The aliens themselves are among the reasons why the series proved so frightening to people. They're only shown in their human forms, which often aren't 100 percent perfect, and can be identified usually -- but not always -- by a misshapen pinkie finger.

To maintain their human shape, the invaders must periodically step into regeneration tubes. Only occasionally, a human gets to see one in its actual native form. Those who do often are driven to the point of madness.

And although within the context of the series these humans see the invaders, viewers never do. We see only the humans' terrified reaction to these aliens, which makes their presumed appearance all the more terrifying.

Almost as terrifying are the ways in which the invaders infiltrate human society. They're small-town sheriffs, government officials, leading scientists -- and in one notable episode even a stripper played by Suzanne Pleshette. It's a rich vein of paranoia later mined to similarly chilling effect by "The X-Files."

Although it's difficult to believe these invaders are here from "another galaxy," they've definitely come a long way to get here and their resources are being stretched to near the breaking point. Their most effective weapons are seldom a large scale effort, but rather treachery, brainwashing -- and a nasty little disk that when pressed to a human's neck induces death by cerebral hemorrhage.

But the biggest problem facing David Vincent is that it's next to impossible for him to prove that the invaders are here because when one is injured or shot, they just about always go up in a blaze of spontaneous combustion.

Most of the episodes in this set have been transferred in crisp color and with a rich soundtrack that allows Dominic Frontiere's chilling musical score to properly frost your spine. Roy Thinnes, now 70, introduces each episode and is also featured in a supplemental interview in which we learn that some of the show's crew thought UFOs were no laughing matter.

Series creator Larry Cohen narrates much of "The Innocent," which, although he didn't write it, is his favorite episode. Cohen offers up some interesting stories, but his narrative tends to wander. And he also gripes way too much about how his "Created by Larry Cohen" credit is at the end of each episode rather than at the beginning. Larry: If it's any consolation, I noticed and remembered it. So much so that when I saw "It's Alive," "Q" and "The Stuff" years later, I thought wow, this is by the guy who created "The Invaders"!

Genre fans will especially enjoy "The Innocent," which was originally telecast March 14, 1967. It's not hard to see why Cohen counts this episode among the best. In it, Vincent is abducted and taken aboard a flying saucer by one of the invaders' leaders -- played by Michael Rennie, famed for his portrayal of Klaatu in the seminal saucer movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

This episode illustrates how "The Invaders" sparingly used special effects to such advantage. Vincent is driven to a mission revival ranch house and taken to see Rennie -- and then he's escorted into the back yard where he's manhandled into the saucer. It all plays out so matter of factly that you'll think they were stuffing him into a Lincoln.

The saucer design itself no doubt tapped into its own wave of paranoia. Obviously inspired by the spacecraft reported by 1950s contactee George Adamski, it was in a way the series co-star, a character that all of us hoped to see more of than we did.

Perhaps the saucer's best appearance is in "The Mutant," which finds David Vincent tracking down reports of a crashed saucer in the Desert Southwest. The scene in which he stumbles upon aliens repairing their saucer does a great job of laying the early groundwork for vectoring the Roswell legend.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

I'm not easily offended -- and, in fact, I'm not offended by this AT&T commercial in which the fate of Amelia Earhart is milked for humor. However, I am disappointed that Bill Kurtis didn't think this commercial was in poor taste. I mean, regardless of how this courageous aviator died, it had to have been horrifying.

So, no, I'm not offended. I just wish that Kurtis, who has in many ways been a communications visionary, had communicated to AT&T's commercial jesters that this spot simply isn't funny.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Hot on the heels of taste-testing Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Crackers, I sampled another new product, Nabisco's Nilla Cakesters.

Nilla Cakesters feature a couple of soft vanilla wafer cakes with vanilla frosting or creme or whatever in the middle. What's interesting to me is that Nilla Cakesters are based on an eating activity that nobody likes to admit doing: Dipping Nabisco Vanilla Wafers into a can of pre-made vanilla frosting. It's sort of like dessert chips and salsa.

To me, this product doesn't measure up to the homemade version and it was all I could do eat one of the things. However, opinion at my workplace among colleagues cajoled into performing a taste test seemed evenly divided. But even those who really liked Nilla Cakesters agreed that they don't taste as good as good as Oreo Cakesters. (These treats apparently are the coming thing; check out the Cakesters website.)

The big surprise was when one co-worker refused my offer to try a Nilla Cakester. Turns out she loves the things and had already eaten three packs -- that's six Cakesters total!

Check out the how Nilla Cakesters fare in tests over at The Impulsive Buy, ColuMn and gen[M]ay.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

This weekend, I had planned on honing my Twitter skills in preparation for launching ChicagoScope2.com later this month -- but the darn thing seems to have imploded. Granted, Twitter is free and at some point you get what you pay for, but the question for me is whether the service is going to be reliable.

And by "reliable," I'll go ahead and show my age by suggesting that a great definiton of reliable is what the phone company gave us in, say, 1968. Even during the Colorado snowstorms of my youth that closed roads and schools and caused lights to flicker, our phone still worked.

Sadly, that's not the case now. In my Jefferson Park apartment building, landline phone service is dicey at best. Whenever it starts raining or snowing, calls bleed through to one another until the line apparently is saturated -- and then everything goes back to normal. When the line begins to dry out, there's a repeat performance.

Complaints about this problem issue invariably ignited a Yalta Conference about who owns the defective line, where it connects, whether the punchdown board is involved, etc., etc., etc.

I experienced similar problems issues with Vonage. It just wouldn't work reliably. The only positive from the experience was that when the digital line would cut out, the person talking on the other end often wouldn't realize they were talking to themselves until they came up for air -- in the case of one friend, that would be minutes.

Of course, much as I enjoy the Slowsky commercials, Comcast hasn't exactly been a paragon of reliability for me, either. I know more than a few people who are looking forward to bona fide competition.

Maybe that's what Twitter needs. When you have a free service, can uptime be anything other than a free-for-all?

By the way, does anybody know how Twitter makes money? The best guess I heard awhile back is that they get a cut of the SMS message fees that users' service providers charge, but I haven't read much about that theory lately.

I'd be more than willing to pay for a more-robust Twitter experience. An annual rate of $25 a year (that's what I pay for Flickr Pro) would be acceptable.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

(Recorded on a Canon PowerShot SD950 IS Digital Elph while standing under the eaves of that building at left in the above photo of Jefferson Park.)

Nope, we're not headed to the Taste of Chicago. The Taste can be kind of fun, but it's also a real headache to get to and you have to battle thousands of other people.

I'd say you need to embrace the hustle and bustle to fully appreciate the Taste. Sort of like how to tolerate alfresco dining, you need a high tolerance of carbon monoxide and pedestrian stares. That's a topic worthy of an entire podcast. I can understand how diners might enjoy having a meal in a secluded garden or a quiet courtyard -- but too often here in Chicago, alfresco dining means some eatery merely has jammed a dozen tables out on the sidewalk.

Bugs, carbon monoxide, allowing total strangers to waltz by and look at what you're stuffing in your pie hole. And this is a good thing? Mm-mm-good, huh?

Speaking of things that sound like a good thing but often aren't, let's talk about one of my favorite culinary topics: macaroni and cheese. I've always maintained that although Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner is the gold standard against which all other such dishes are judged, the amount of powdered cheese provided just isn't enough. In fact, ever since I was a kid, I've always added extra cheese when I cook up this favorite comfort food.

The other day while shopping in the Walgreens across my office, I noticed a new product: Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Crackers. I bought a box and gave it a try.

Verdict: Not cheesy enough. And a few others at work reached the same conclusion. Please note this was the regular version -- imagine how noncheesy the "mild" version is. One colleague even compared the crackers to Cheese Nips, another Kraft brand.

I'm a loyal consumer of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, but I can't get too excited about these cracker knockoffs.

In this podcast, I also talk about finding a really cool site while Googling for reviews of Carrara, an affordable CGI application. One link led me to a site promoting a proposed TV series called "Atomic City" featuring the adventures of Phil Velvet, an Elvis lookalike private eye in a kitschy, retro-future re-imagined Las Vegas.

I'm not sure just why I like the site, but I must have watched the video clip several dozen times now. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Finally, what with the ascendency of digital imaging, chemical analog photography seems destined for retro status. Yet, even as I embrace digital, I find myself clinging to film photography. In fact, some of the best work I've done of lately has been with the Holga -- which is just about as analog as you can get.

Whenever I want to reinvigorate my excitement for analog photography -- or for photography in general -- I like to check in at Filmwasters, which serves up galleries by its five founders, as well as links to other photo-related sites. But the highlight for me is the Filmwasters podcast.

Well, that's it for now. Look for some episodes next month from Colorado, plus a special podcast with Dick about geocaching.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Despite my sad devotion to that ancient religion of silver-based analog photography, I've found a nifty little digital camera that I've been carrying with me everywhere of late.

My new friend is the Canon PowerShot SD950 IS. It takes still images up to 12.1 megapixels in resolution and also records high-quality video that isn't too shabby.

I hadn't even intended to record a podcast that day. My goal was only to test the SD950 in macro mode on some flowers in Jefferson Park. (See the example at right.)

While playing with the menu, however, I discovered a feature that will come in handy for real run-and-gun podcasting: The SD950 can record reasonably good audio. So, I decided to use the camera's digital voice recorder to create this podcast.

I recorded the sound as I stood next to the flowering tree whose pink flowers I'd just photographed. (The background noise is from traffic on Lawrence Avenue.) We're not talking high-quality sound, but it's acceptable enough to get the job done.

That job involved a totally on-the-fly reminiscence about my grandfather's observation that "the vegetable kingdom does not waste time."

And, indeed, it does not.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.