March 2006 Archives

I'm somewhat disappointed that the goofy music video I posted the other day didn't draw more of a response from my three loyal readers, but I guess that's the way it goes sometimes. Not every entry can be a winner.

Still, I thought the "Trapped in the Web of Love" clip was interesting enough to warrant some googling, to see if I could figure out what the heck that thing was supposed to be and where it came from. It turns out that my campy little curiosity has a pretty interesting history...

And now, as a public service to all those who don't have the time or inclination to wade through my long, self-indulgent ramblings about why I like the movies I like but who still harbor a certain voyeuristic curiosity about the subject, here are the titles only, in convenient list format:

Sorry I've been something of a tease with this whole movie-list thing. Inexcusable of me, I know; it's just that it's been one of those kinds of weeks, the only kind I ever seem to have anymore. But the task must be completed, so, without further delay, here is the rest of my personal Top Fifty:

[And if you don't know what all this list-talk is all about, read Part 1 and Part 2 before proceeding.]

Here's a little something for you history buffs who have plenty of disposable income: Via Boing Boing, I see that someone has what appears to be a genuine Enigma cipher machine up for auction on eBay.

The Enigma was, of course, the cryptographic device famously used by the Nazis during World War II to generate coded messages. It also happens to be a cool-looking artifact of the pre-electronic world; I'd love to have one of these things in my curio cabinet! (Hint hint, if there are any really generous and wealthy people reading my humble blog...)

I know you're all waiting on tenterhooks for the second half of my All-Time Favorite Movies list, but this was too good not to share immediately. For years, I heard whispered tales about Fred and Barney hawking Winston cigarettes back in the days when The Flintstones was running in primetime, but I'd never seen any actual evidence of it. When the news went out that the show would be released on DVD, there was much fanboy speculation about whether the legendary commercial would be included as an extra, and much disappointment when it was not. Some people even suggested that the whole thing was apocryphal, that it never happened.

But it did. And here's your proof:

I love weird little pop-culture artifacts like this...

[Ed. note: I found this clip courtesy of Mark Evanier; if you're interested, he offers a brief history of this commercial, The Flintstones, and some other primetime cartoons here.]

As the title suggests, I thought I'd take a quick break from the All-Time Favorite movie list to post this reassuring tidbit of news:

I am 16% Idiot.

I am not annoying at all. In fact most people come to me for advice. Of course they annoy the hell out of me. But what can I do? I am smarter than most people.

Take the
Idiot Test
@ FualiDotCom

If you haven't already, read Part 1 of this three-part entry. And now without further delay, here are my personal faves:

As I was thinking about what to say in my 500th entry, it occurred to me that there are several topics I've long wanted to write about, and in some cases have even started writing about, but, for one reason or another, they've never seen the light of day. Take, for example, the subject of my All-Time Favorite Movies, a fairly obvious bit of small-talk that I promised to share way back in my third entry, just over two years ago. If you've been sitting around waiting for this one to appear, you've had a long wait.

The latest blogging innovation seems to be embeddable video players, like the one you see below. (Evanier, in particular, has become very fond of this new gimmick in the last couple weeks.) I wouldn't want to miss out on a happening new Internet trend, so I thought I'd give the technology a try and share with you all this vintage music video that a friend sent to me this morning. The clip is more effective if you've got sound, but even if you don't, just sit back and bask in the surreal (and curiously sexy in a dopey kind of way) imagery. I especially like the scrawny little guy in the zebra-skin collar who is stirring his big, bubbling cauldron of luscious girl-singer stew. Freud would've loved that sequence...

Let me know how this player thingie works for you all and if you'd like to see more of this sort of thing here at Simple Tricks.

Another Internet quiz. Because I just love taking silly automated quizzes that ask a handful of random questions and then authoritatively declare that I'm just like a fictional character. Interestingly, my results this time indicate that I scored only a few points difference between one of the best-drawn characters of the Star Trek universe and a class of characters that are so ill-defined as to barely deserve the designation. What the heck does that say about me?

Your results:

You are Jean-Luc Picard

A lover of Shakespeare and other fine literature. You have a decisive mind and a firm hand in dealing with others.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

We've reached a milestone here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense. As you may have surmised from the title above, this is my 500th blog entry. Not too shabby considering that when my buddy Jack presented me with a website for a Christmas gift, my initial reaction was something to the effect of, "Cool! What the hell am I going to do with it?"

If you're looking for something to read during your Friday morning java break, there was a nice article in the LA Times a few days ago about the legendary pin-up model Bettie Page. Virtually forgotten for decades, she became a cult figure after comic artist and illustrator Dave Stevens included a very Bettie-like character in his classic Rocketeer stories. Her notoriety was further enhanced by cheesecake artist Olivia de Bernardis and the revival of interest in all things retro. Now, at the age of 82, she's probably the best-known model of her time (the late '40s and '50s), next to Marilyn Monroe.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about Bettie. In some photos and poses, I find her very attractive; in others, there's something odd about her appearance that leaves me wondering what all the fuss is about. (To her credit, Bettie herself would probably say the same thing.) But I do like vintage and retro-style pin-up art, and I also like a good story, and Bettie's life has definitely been one of those. It even has an effective ending, at least if you're a sentimental old schmuck like me:

Page had one request for this story -- that her face not be photographed.

"I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times... I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

But this much can be shared. Her face remains smooth and fresh, and one can still see the face of the young woman in the old. Her eyes, bright blue, still sparkle.

According to Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune, the old Avalon Theater in South Salt Lake is being converted into a live-music venue. I haven't been to the Avalon in years -- I think the last film I saw there was a documentary called Microcosmos about a decade back -- and I didn't even realize it had closed, which, apparently, it did some time ago. Still, I mourn its passing. If I'm not mistaken, the Avalon's repurposing leaves the Tower as the only single-screen theater still operating in the Salt Lake Valley. And I find that terribly sad.

It'll be four weeks this coming Friday since my basement flooded, and, believe it or not, I'm still working on cleaning up and putting my house back together. The ridiculous length of time it's taking me to finish this job is a sum of many factors: the sheer magnitude of the job, which I'll talk more about in another entry; my easy distractibility and tendency toward procrastination, which is a fancy way of saying I haven't been working on it steadily; a recent bout of the flu that left me not wanting to tote boxes up and down stairs; and the fact that I've actually been trying to save many of the things that got wet rather than just tossing them, especially a number of books that I've been reluctant to part with.

To go along with my previous entry, here's an amusing photo I've had kicking around in my files for a while:

Why is this amusing, you may wonder? Because it demonstrates how far we've come just in my relatively short lifetime: According to the e-mail in which I received this photo, the big object being wheeled around by the guy in the bunny suit is a 1975-vintage hard disk good for only about 500 KB of data. By contrast, even the smallest capacity digital-camera memory stick on the market these days -- which is physically smaller than a credit card, remember -- stores roughly sixteen times as much data (8000 KB, or 8 MB).

In the interest of full disclosure, however, I'm not sure how accurate my information on that photo is. I tried to verify the 500 KB figure, but I encountered a lot of dispute over whether or not the photo is even real. One confident-sounding person claimed this hard disk came from an old IBM storage system that would've had a capacity of between 5.4 and 11.2 MB. Which would still make this monster only equivalent to one of those low-end modern memory sticks, for all of its size. That's something, isn't it?

Once, a long, long time ago, I wrote on this blog that I remembered "when computers were large metal cabinets that contained spinning tape reels and lots of blinky lights." If you remember that, too, and want to reminisce, or if you're one of them youngish whippersnappers who can't imagine what those zinc-plated, vaccuum-tubed days of yore must've looked like, head on over to James Lileks' latest offering, a collection of vintage promotional computer photos enlightened by his wry (and unabashedly geeky) commentary.

I especially liked the commentary on this one, in which Jim manages to reference Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Terminator, Young Frankenstein, and Star Wars in less than 300 words. Gotta admire that.

For the record, I did not write the following. Somebody sent it to me via e-mail, along with the usual daily batch of unfunny joke-type spams. However, this certainly seems in the spirit of something I would write, and it amused Anne when I showed it to her, so I'm going to post it up here. I've done some minor editing to correct eccentric capitalization and such, so apologies to whoever originally wrote it:

Space journalist James Oberg comments on yesterday's news about the discovery of liquid water geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus and why it matters:

But why? Do improved science textbooks and even exciting news headlines offer rewards for the effort needed? If there are signs of life -- past, present, or even future -- on Enceladus, or Europa or Titan or even below the bitterly-cold ice shells of Pluto or the newly discovered Sedna, what does that benefit us?

The fundamental and potentially infinite benefit is that we, too, are "life," with our particular biochemical processes that allow us in a time-tested but slapdash fashion to grow, survive temporarily, replicate and occasionally stare at the stars. To understand this process that briefly keeps each of us alive, we study the examples we have -- ourselves and our cousins from the same creche -- and speculate. But examples from another creche could show the range of possibilities that was irreversibly narrowed here on Earth as this particular DNA-based "life form" spread and dominated.

How would another microorganism pass on blueprints for progeny, and how does this other process compare to the successes of "our" life, and how does it fail? How does it repair itself against environmental hazards? Do cells on Europa get cancer? Do they even have DNA-tagged "counters" that on Earth enforce cellular death after so many divisions? Do they allow some -- but not too much -- replication variation that enables environmentally-driven or behaviorally-driven evolution?

The answers to these and other questions will tell us about the potentialities and design limits of the life processes that comprise ourselves. And that, most definitely, we want to know, and take advantage of.

The "answer book" to all these questions isn't just lying out there at Enceladus already bound and decoded, for us to go out and pick up and read at our leisure -- but pages, or even paragraphs of it, could well be. And this lucky concurrence of watery geysers and of current space capabilities offers a rewarding strategy to do what humans have done, and benefited from, since they became humans: wonder, and then go find out.

Wonder, and then go find out... that'd make a pretty good motto, don't you think?

Saw something interesting on Lileks' Daily Bleat today. (Why, yes, things are kind of slow for me at work today; how can you tell?) If you click on over there and scroll down a-ways, you'll see that he's scanned a wonderful old newspaper photo of Times Square, circa 1952. But that photo isn't quite what it seems...

I've been wanting for some time now to vent my spleen about one of the more insidious political strategies currently in play by the right, namely the campaign to convince the average, not-too-well-informed and not-terribly-thoughtful voter that "activist judges" are wrecking the country, but naturally Scalzi has beaten me to the punch. His basic thesis is the same as my thinking on this subject, namely that those who use the term "activist judge" only seem to bring it out when a particular ruling doesn't go their way. It's sour grapes, in other words, but it's also a cynical (and, unfortunately, effective) effort to sway public opinion into thinking the right's agenda is the natural default setting for the country. It's also nonsense, since, as John points out,

This is kind of cool... remember a while back when I discovered those old British sea-forts left over from World War II? The ones that were used as pirate radio stations in the '60s? Well, just this morning, a gentleman by the name of John Vincent left a comment on one of my entries about those forts. To make sure his comment gets noticed, I'm reproducing it here:

Just let you know that Radio 390 is back online at
http://radio390.co.uk.tt
http://radio390.uk.tt
http://radio390.org

Thanks for the info, John!

I've just read that the final attempt to contact the Pioneer 10 spaceprobe has failed. The probe actually hasn't been heard from since the year 2000, but this month the Earth moved into a position more favorable for picking up a signal, if there was one, and the folks at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and operated the Pioneer and Voyager probes) were hopeful. Their failure to detect anything indicates that the little ship either doesn't have enough power left to run its transmitter, or its power systems have failed entirely. In any event, this was the last time any attempt at contact will be made.

You may recall that a couple of months back, I reported on the rumor that Warner Bros. was going to release the short-lived Bruce Campbell series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., on DVD. Well, Warner still hasn't made any kind of official announcement confirming the release, but the Web site TVShowsOnDVD.com is currently running a poll to determine which cover fans would most like to see on their Brisco discs. According to the site, this poll is sanctioned by Warner and the results will be taken into account by the studio. In addition, the two possible cover designs are said to be the real deal, actual mock-ups that have been approved by Warner, Bruce Campbell, and Brisco's producer, Carlton Cuse.

If you care about this show at all, run on over to TVShowsOnDVD and cast your vote now. It's a rare opportunity for consumers and fans to actually have a say in an upcoming product package, rather than just taking whatever stupid crap the marketing department comes up with. I think that's pretty cool. Oh, and in case you're wondering, my preferred cover is the less goofy one...

Why is it that this season of 24, which is the most cartoonish, over the top, and amoral of the show's entire run -- I think it must be in Kiefer Sutherland's contract that his character, the indestructible Jack Bauer, has to torture somebody at least once an episode -- is also the most compelling and exciting the show has been in several years? Possibly since the first or second season? Seriously, last night's double-episode "event" had me feeling something I've not experienced for a very long time while watching a TV show or movie, a tightness in my belly that was also kind of hollow and fluttery. Now what the heck do you suppose that could that have been? Oh, yeah, I remember what you call that feeling: suspense. Genuine, edge-of-your-seat suspense. And that's not all. I felt other emotions, too, strong ones, including actual sorrow at the end of the night's second episode. Enough to produce tears even. I'm amazed and a little bit baffled, considering I was ready to give up on this show only a couple weeks ago. Still, as effective as last night's segments may have been, the show is definitely starting to creak...

[Warning: Spoilers follow. Don't read on if you taped it and don't what to know what happens.]

It's Internet quiz time again! This time we're determining which science-fiction crew or ship I'd be best suited for. And here are my results:

So, in spite of my previous protest of indifference, I actually did end up watching the Oscars last night. Well, to be more precise, I had the show running in the background while I sorted books and various other tasks related to trying to put my basement back together. But I was paying some attention to the proceedings -- I just can't resist that whole Hollywood thing, I guess -- and naturally I have a few thoughts:

It was an absolutely beautiful day in the SLC today. An overnight storm had scoured the air until it seemed to sparkle, and the sky was tall and blue behind drifting rafts of silver clouds. The mountains always seem closer on days like this; a trick of the clean air, I imagine, some kind of optical lensing effect or something. They loomed close over my shoulder as I ran around the valley, gleaming white beneath their blankets of snow, and the temperatures were high enough that I could walk around without a jacket and drive with the windows down. Just beautiful.

One of my errands took me to Target, and there I impulse-bought a CD compilation of 80s-vintage guitar rock. Because this was the sort of day that called for a little Warrant on the car stereo.

I am such a dork...

Hm? What's that you say? Oscar's coming this weekend? How nice, where will he be staying? What? Oh, not Oscar like a person, the Oscars, the Academy Awards. Right, gotcha... yeah. Well, you see, I've been so busy at work and fretting over that whole flooded basement thing that I haven't even thought about the Oscars this year.

Everyone once in a while, something makes me realize how very grateful I am to have grown up in the 1970s. People who were adults during that period may remember it as a hellish time of political scandal, long gas lines, runaway inflation, and impractically wide lapels -- I believe Jimmy Carter described all of the above as "malaise," which sums up the historical circumstances of that decade about as well as any other single word -- but it was a great time to be a kid. It was before everyone got so paranoid, before anyone coined the term "play date," before you had to armor up just to go ride your bike. We had real sugar in our Coke, Slurpees came in flavors that weren't made by Coke, and candy cigarettes were actually called candy cigarettes and not candy sticks or whatever they're called these days (can you even still get those things?). And to top it off, we had the live-action kid-vid television shows of Sid and Marty Krofft.

Lileks articulates my greatest frustration... and fear:

I have a large project that needs to be done. It's the novel.... Part of me wants to give in to the Elves of Self-Doubt, who show up by the score and bang me over the head with small hammers until I realize there's no point to writing the damn thing, but I really like the idea. It's a matter of finding the time. This is where "not winning the lottery" is a major impediment, because I cannot stroll back to the Writing Hut at the edge of the Manor and type uninterrupted. Everything else I can do with constant interruption, both external and internal -- but it's hard to get into the groove when something else is always nipping at my heels. No matter how good the idea is, enthusiasm is evanescent, and I worry that this one will just evaporate with time.

It's been a rough couple of days for fans of classic (i.e., '60s and '70s vintage) TV. Over the weekend, we learned of the deaths of Don Knotts and Darren McGavin, and just yesterday afternoon I heard that Dennis Weaver has died as well.

Here's something cool for you all to look at, courtesy of The Planetary Society's Weblog: it's a photo taken by a guy named Ed Morana of the International Space Station transiting (i.e., crossing in front of) the Moon on February 13th.

According to the blog entry I nabbed this from, the image is composed of eight exposures from a video camera taken as the Station moved from right to left. Morana's site features movies, if you're into that whole motion thing...