Archive for January, 2008

The Flu

Posted on January 15, 2008

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Saturday night I had some coughing. By Sunday afternoon my brains were basting themselves with 102.6 degree blood.
I spent yesterday in bed, but am working under the influence of powerful medicines today. Off to the bouillabaisse!

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I added Stuff

Posted on January 11, 2008

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SafeT! Train your eyeballs on the sidebar and you’ll see I’ve subtly altered my environment here. I’ve added a quotes module and a random posts module. WordPress has EVERYTHING.

Off to the arcade, people. These dancey games aren’t going to play themselves!

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Early Adopter

Posted on January 9, 2008

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An Early American Cable Box
    Cable came to our house before just about anyone else’s.
    It was 1980 and the technology was primitive. So much so that the “remote” control provided by our cable company (MacLeod, I think) was made up of a bank of buttons and a three-position switch tethered to your television with a long cord. The switch selected which of the three channels each button would represent when depressed, providing the techno-shocked and amazed subscriber with access to as many as 37 stations.
    I hadn’t thought much about it in the last few years but whilst touring the amazing Henry Ford Museum, I came upon my youth under glass as shown above. My memories of early cable TV:

A&E, which actually stood for “Arts and Entertainment,” routinely broadcast opera and ballet.
Nickelodeon, with promo spots showing a roller skating mime hand-cranking an honest-to-god nickelodeon, was so desperate for programming that they actually aired a show made up entirely of a man reading comic books out loud. Slowly the camera would pan across each page of the featured comic-book while the narrator simply read the word balloons. The rest of Nickelodeon’s schedule was made up of warmed-over British kids TV such as:
- The Tomorrow People- Featuring psi-enhanced teenagers, my favorite memory of this show involved a scheme to clone Hitler–who was actually a rat-eating space alien–multiple times. As the cloning creches (which looked suspiciously like old Frigidairs) opened they each revealed a fully formed Adolf complete with his distinctive moustache and Nazi uniform. I suppose the uniform was clonable as well, but how did the cloning cabinets trim the Fuhrer’s facial hair?
- The Third Eye- Made up of several sci-fi miniseries from New Zealand and England, the only part I remember is “Children of the Stones”, in which creepy choral arrangements surrounded dramatic shots of stone-henge like rocks throughout a small town. I think–but am not certain anymore–that people or critters were turning into these stones somehow.
- Danger Mouse- a cartoon in which a secret agent mouse and his hampster side-kick Penfold had ridiculous adventures. Their primary adversary was a toad and his crow side-kick and they lived in the top of one of those crazy British letterboxes.
TBS was just some UHF channel from Atlanta which was owned by Ted Turner. It somehow ended up as a national cable station chock full of typical UHF programming and local Atlanta advertising.
- Incidentally, Atlanta’s roofers universally refused to visit my house. This was excusable considering the distance they’d have had to travel and the fact that the voice ordering up the free estimate was obviously an 8 year old boy.
- I liked this station because it usually had old Warner Brothers cartoons on.
Showtime filled in the time between movies with independent short films and nearly pornographic “aerobic exercise” videos.
- I only remember three of the short films. In one, a black fellow–possibly a film student–is attacked and ultimately consumed by a huge mass of unspooled videotape.
- In another, a POV piece, a monstrous woman attempted to use cash in public. In the end she is killed when a lynch mob burns a credit card into her forehead.
- In the last one I remember, we spend five minutes watching a man working in his basement crafting something out of wood while we hear his wife upstairs nagging him non-stop.
  BY using very close camera angles the filmmaker hides what the fellow is actually making until the final shot, in which the cuckolded man sets off the finely crafted and massively scaled mouse trap, breaking his own back.
- The aerobic “exercise” videos were preceded by a disclaimer stating that you should consult your physician before attempting to play along.
  The viewer would then be treated to several minutes of porno music and tight, slow-panning shots of beautiful women wearing unitards and leg warmers, pumping the floor slowly while coated in a light sheen of sweat.
  
  Usually there was more than one lady, sometimes criss-crossing each other as if playing Twister or working out back-to-back or face-to-face.
  
  Considering the creative camera movements and dramatic lighting, there would be no conceivable way a viewer could emulate the girls and actually get some exercize.
  
  What possible use could these little routines have been? Too bad I was pre-pubescent at the time; I simply found the confounding videos to be a boring and unnecessary delay between repeat airings of “Moonraker”.
HBO- At first, they were just like Showtime. But it was only a year or so before they brought Fraggles to the American masses. That alone made cable worthwhile to me… ‘Course, I wasn’t paying for it anyway…
MTV… well, they actually showed music videos, ‘natch. I had no interest, though; I was too young and too square to get into pop music at the time.

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Mojo and the Cat

Posted on January 3, 2008

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My New Years resolution is two-fold:

1 – Eat less crap
2 – Write more crap

In service to the second resolution: The picture you see here is the last known photograph of my cat, Odo. He passed away a year ago this past Thanksgiving, and his clownish antics and dog-like loyalty have been sorely missed. By perusing my voluminous output from before that time period and my meager mediocrity afterwards, I have no choice but to conclude that he was my muse.

Even though I have no shortage of other joys in my life, many of which were greater than anything a cat may provide, somehow this cat had embodied a vital part of my mojo and his passing reduced me immeasurably.

I have another cat now, one whose name is Sisco. We adopted him as a kitten from a rescue agency in the beginning of the year, but despite his presence in the house my creative spark remained very small. I despaired quietly that it would be gone forever more, and that a cat is not enough–or had nothing to do with it in the first place.

The spark seems to be returning of late, however. I was initially at pains to explain it, but have come upon a new working theory.

My new theory is that I require an adult, male, neutered cat in order to write worth a damn. Sisco wasn’t providing the mojo because he was too young. Perhaps he could’ve fueled some potty-humor or nursery rhymes, but I didn’t try to produce any of that in the intervening year.

But he’s all grown-up, now, and is radiating the necessary element, I think. With his adult feline presence shedding hair and purring at my side 2008 is going to be a productive year, I think.

Here’s a picture of Sisco watching Meercat Manor: