So Rodge,  WTF is that?  Aha!  That friends, is today's money saving treat from your host ...  if you haven't already figured it out.  It's the cheap way to copy your 35mm slides to disk.  We have about 2 million 35mm  slides (a popular method of image capturing in the old times) that we haven't seen in the 40 years or so ... since I accidentally sold the slide projector at a yard sale.  I tried  putting a slide on the scanner bed in the usual fashion, but nada,  So I Googled for help. 

As you can see, there are evidently suckers out there willing to pay big bucks for doing this, so who knows?  Maybe you can quit your job and get rich at home using the el-cheapo method.  This site I linked is really dedicated to some method you actually have to read how to do, so I went to their link on fluorescent light scanning.  They talked about using a fluorescent flashlight, which I didn't have, so I ran up to Lowes and found one for just about $20, and then another $8 for 4 D cell lithium batteries.  Short story, it didn't work because the light tube is only half the width of a slide.  But wait!   My wife has one of those under the cabinet fluorescent lights in the kitchen (about $10 I think)...  and since she's down at her mother's  I ripped it off and VOILA!  So here's the deal ...

In Figure 1 I laid down 6 slides on the scanner bed.  In Figure 2 I laid the light over them, and scanned at 700 dpi.  It worked!  But.  If you look at the samples down in Figure 4, you can see a band on the side of each copy.  That's where the bulb did not quite cover the slide.  Figure 3 shows the solution, a tent of aluminum foil  that diffuses the light and gives a perfect copy.

One more thing, since our slides have been stored in the cellar for eons, some of them had mold spots, and all had lint, finger prints, etc.  See that Windex bottle in picture #2?  You don't want to do that, AWK!.  Use a cotton Q-Tip and breath condensation.