August 2007 Archives

Speaking of remakes, I've run across a potentially interesting LiveJournal that, aside from one entry on the new Flash Gordon series, seems to be predicated around a defense of the original Battlestar Galactica and a denunciation of the "reimagined" version that's attracted so much love the last couple years. So far, Countess Baltar (as the LJ author is calling herself) hasn't made an argument in her own words, preferring instead to let carefully selected quotations from Ron Moore, Glen Larson, and various literary critics make her points for her. It's an interesting approach, although I would like to hear more from the Countess herself as to what, specifically, she dislikes about the remake.

Despite giving the new series a grudging thumbs-up after seeing a few episodes, I have to admit that I've never warmed to it, and indeed I've never watched more than just those first few installments. I can't deny that the series appeared to be well-made and intelligent, but it simply didn't appeal to me. It wasn't my Battlestar, and those weren't my Apollo, Starbuck, and Adama. The reimagined versions of those characters may have shared the same names as characters played by Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Lorne Greene -- well, sort of, since these exotic monikers have been turned into "call signs" in the new show, rather than actual names -- but there was very little else about them I found familiar.

Whatever Countess Baltar's specific gripes -- and I look forward to finding out more about those -- I certainly echo her concise statement of opinion in the "about me" sidebar:

Battlestar Galactica (1978)?:
Yes

Battlestar Galactica (2003)?:
No

Starbuck (male)?:
Yes

Starbuck (female)?:
No

Baltar, Count?:
Yes

Baltar, Gaius?:
Hell, no!

Genre fans like myself have done a lot of groaning in recent days over the news that Hollywood -- which lately seems to be more interested in leveraging recognizable brands (i.e., churning out new versions of properties whose names are already familiar to movie-goers) than in filming original screenplays -- is forging ahead with a remake of Escape from New York and that Keanu will be playing Klaatu in a new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Actually, he'll probably be just fine in that role; he even has a passing resemblance to Michael Rennie. It's just the principle of remaking an undisputed classic like Day that bothers me.) So it came as a pleasant surprise to read about an interview with the eternally awesome Bruce Campbell in which the Brucester puts to rest a number of rumors that have been causing me some concern:

• Campbell will not be reprising his role as Old Elvis/Sebastian Haff in a sequel to the charmingly goofy Bubba Ho-Tep. (The sequel -- supposed to be called Bubba Nosferatu -- may still go ahead without him, but I don't see how anyone could hope to fill those porkchop sideburns the way Bruce did.)
• There will be no lame-ass mash-up of Freddy (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jason (the Friday the 13th series), and Bruce's signature character Ash (The Evil Dead trilogy).
• There will not be an Evil Dead 4. (Really, what could possibly be left to do after the utter silliness of Army of Darkness?)
• And finally -- saving the best for last -- there will be no remake of the original Evil Dead starring Ashton Kutcher as Ash. Said Campbell: "The feedback from the fans was 90 percent negative. It's going nowhere."

It's nice to hear that, occasionally, rarely, common sense prevails...

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that one of the descriptors I assign myself up there at the top of this page is "pack rat." As long as I can remember, I've had an almost existential dread of throwing away anything that might later prove to have some sentimental or historical value. That's why I still have a comic book my dad bought for me when I was six years old.

In addition to this natural tendency toward hoarding, I also picked up a collecting hobby in college. Tracking down, acquiring, and owning all manner of pop-culture memorabilia has proven to be immensely gratifying, for a number of reasons. But there's a big downside to being a collector, and that's the difficulty of storing and protecting all your possessions. This point was driven home rather forcefully a little over a year ago, when I experienced an event I like to think of as The Great Water-Filter Containment Failure and Basement Flood of 2006. Briefly, if you don't recall and/or don't want to follow the link, my water filter developed a major leak in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke up and noticed it, I had several inches of water throughout the entire basement. This would've been disastrous enough if the only possessions down there were my own, but I was also storing a lot of stuff my parents left behind when they built their new house. And most of that was sitting in stacks and heaps right there on the floor, right in the water.

Just scanning a couple of old photos for my upcoming high school reunion, and thought I'd share one that I've always particularly liked. Real tough guy, wasn't I? For the record, that's my first car I'm sitting on, a 1970 Thunderbird that was about the same size as the Starship Enterprise. Well, maybe not that big... maybe the size of the Reliant. Either way, I wish I still had it. And yes, I am wearing a ZZ Top muscle shirt. Hey, give me a break; it was the Awesome '80s, after all...

So, this afternoon, I've been rummaging through a folder of random crap that I've been meaning to blog about, looking to see if any of it still interests me, and I ran across the following image:

I ganked that picture from this site, which identifies the fancy red vest as "The Cosmoboy," a then-cutting-edge design from Pierre Cardin which was featured in the August 1967 issue of Cavalier magazine (which I believe was a nudie mag, ahem, gentleman's lifestyle periodical along the lines of Playboy).

Is it just me, or does that look really familiar? Maybe like... something from the 23rd Century?

My mom has always told me that if you hold onto an article of clothing long enough, it will eventually come back into style. Guess she was right...

As best I can recall, my introduction to the medium of comic books came when I was six years old. I was home from school, sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu or something. My dad went to the local drugstore to get some medicine, and when he returned, he also had with him a little treat that he hoped would cheer me up, or at least distract me in between puking sessions: a pair of what he called "funnybooks." Which confused me, because they weren't funny. But that's beside the point. One was a collection of stories about Superman and his various friends, cousins, and pets. The other (which I found much more appealing, probably due to the semi-lurid cover art) was an issue of a series called Marvel Team-Up.

As the title suggests, the premise of this series was to combine two or more characters who wouldn't have ordinarily crossed paths in their own titles, and then send them off on an adventure together. In the issue my dad got for me -- which somehow is the only one of this series I've ever read -- the action was played straight. Apparently, however, not every issue was so serious:

Spider-Man and the cast of Saturday Night Live? Wow, I've got to track that one down... that's got to be a hoot. Especially if you read it drunk, which is probably how it was written. Click the pic to go to the image source and a synopsis.

Incidentally, I understand that most issues of Marvel Team-Up were self-contained stories. Naturally, that lone issue my dad got me, the only one I've ever read -- which, to no one's surprise I'm sure, I still have -- was one of the rare two-parters. To this day, I have idea how Spidey manages to free the Scarlet Witch from Cotton Mather's foul mind-controlling cross-power...

The title line says it all: after nine weeks of chemotherapy, Shadow, the Bennion Family Dog, is cancer-free. His veterinarian checked several lymph nodes around his body today and found no sign of abnormalities. My parents' big gamble worked, and, needless to say, we're all breathing much easier tonight.

Moving forward, he will continue to receive chemo for several more weeks, just to be sure, but the vet assured my mom and dad that he's responded as well as any dog she's ever seen, and he's got several more years ahead of him. He passed through the whole ordeal with very few problems, aside from picking up a few pounds as a result of the prednisone that was used to shrink his swollen glands. (I suspect the vast amounts of ice cream my folks have been feeding him lately might've had something to do with it, too. Time for this border collie to go on a diet!)

My parents have been surprised and very, very humbled by the support they've received from their friends (and even a few people who aren't so friendly) in the local antique-car scene, and I myself would like to say thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a comment here on Simple Tricks or to e-mail me personally. Yes, Shadow is only a dog, but in our family, dogs are people, too, and your compassion has meant a great deal to me.

The pulp-fictional Shadow knew what evil lurks in the hearts of men; the Bennions know what good lies there as well...

Thirty years ago today, the Voyager 2 space probe was launched on a groundbreaking mission to explore the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, followed a couple of weeks later by its twin, Voyager 1. (I never have heard why number two went first...) Like those amazingly durable Mars rovers that appear to have survived even a planetary-scale dust storm, the Voyagers have far outlived their designed lifespan of five years and continue to send back useful data from beyond the orbit of Pluto as they coast toward interstellar space. Lots of interesting information can be had in this article, including the facts that Voyager 1 is currently the most distant human-made object, with a one-way radio message taking 14 hours to reach it, and both craft are getting by on a mere 300 watts of electricity -- equal to the output of just a couple of standard three-way lightbulbs -- which is provided by tiny nuclear powerplants because they're too far away for solar power.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built and operates the Voyagers, has a website devoted to the ongoing mission, and from there you can download a retrospective about those famous "golden records" afixed to the sides of the two spacecraft -- you know, the "message in a bottle" that invites the alien to Earth so he can become Jeff Bridges and have sex with Karen Allen in Starman...

Via Jaquandor, I found this weird Internet quiz that tells you which tarot card best represents you. I have little interest in tarot myself -- fortune-telling, ouija boards, and all that "occult" stuff that generated so much hysteria in these parts back in my high-school days have always struck me as eye-rollingly silly -- but I'm always up for a time-wasting Internet quiz-thing. So, here we go:

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild - or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I'm sure this result would come as to no surprise to the parents of several young ladies I used to date...

How do I know that the season is changing?

Well, for one thing, the temperature when I left the house this morning was delightfully cool, somewhere in the upper 60s, the first time it's been that low in several months and a welcome change for this curmudgeonly blogger, who has found this year's record-setting string of 100-plus days to be just about unbearable.

But the real tip-off was the legion of cute young co-eds commuting up to the U of U this morning for their first day of classes... which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the Utah Transit Authority's asinine annual ritual of shortening their light-rail trains just when a reasonable person would expect that they'd need more capacity. All summer long, the trains have been running with four cars and were mostly empty. Now, this morning, with all these new faces waiting on the platform, there were just two cars, and we ended up wedged in like cattle.

Morons.

Well, I've been been accomplishing nothing fast on this lovely Saturday afternoon. The Girlfriend is spending the weekend at her parents' place out in Tooele and I was planning to take care of all kinds of mundane jobs around the Compound that I keep putting off, but instead I've spent much of the day puttering around my office, surfing the web, IM'ing with some buddies, and listening to Pandora.com. (That's been a strange journey today. The algorithms that supposedly determine your tastes started me off with Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn"; now, three hours later, I'm listening to Ozzy Osbourne. That either says something about me, or about Pandora, and I haven't been able to decide which...)

You know what, though? I'm okay with not having done anything noteworthy today. It's felt damn good to just screw around, actually. I've been something of a stress-kitten lately, and I've been suffering for it (briefly, I carry my tension in my back and I also tend to sleep in awkward positions, and those two variables reached critical mass about a week ago and left me with a kinked neck that I couldn't turn to the left without yelping in pain). Well, I just realized that nothing hurts at the moment, for the first time in days. It's luxurious, and it goes a long way toward assuaging my conscience.

And if that's not enough, I've found some amusing stuff out there today, which I will share with you below the fold:

In hunting around YouTube for videos of this morning's implosion, I found a few clips that may be of interest to sentimental slobs such as myself who want to reminisce about the downtown malls. The first is an appropriately titled "last look" that's heavy on schmaltz (warning: Barbera Streisand's "Memories" ahead!) and includes a little too much footage of the parking garages for my tastes, but also nicely encapsulates what's going away in the name of progress:

At a little after 6.30 this morning, the Key Bank Tower, a 30-year-old high-rise office building in downtown Salt Lake, was imploded to make way for the new City Creek Center redevelopment project. It was the first such implosion in the downtown area since the old Hotel Newhouse was demolished back in '83 (which I didn't care about at the time, but in retrospect seems a deep shame, especially since the place where the hotel stood is now -- can you guess? -- a parking lot! Moreover, a parking lot that is rarely anywhere near capacity! That was really worth taking out a historically interesting and beautiful building, wasn't it?)

I haven't been able to find an embeddable video of the Key Bank's death to post up here, but if you go to KSL-TV's site, there are several nifty clips for your viewing pleasure. I especially like Angle #1, which has a couple of men in the foreground to provide some scale and drama, and Angle #4, which is a long-distance shot that includes the First Security Building I wrote about a while back. (Look for the red glow; that would be the big neon sign I like so well.) With the Key Bank's destruction, the so-called Crossroads Block -- named for the mall that used to wrap around the base of the tower -- is now clear. Meanwhile, across the street, the demolition of the ZCMI Center Mall continues. (Yes, you out-of-towners, Salt Lake used to have two malls right across the street from each other; it actually wasn't as insane as it sounds, as they had a different mix of retailers and catered to different demographics. As with so many other things about Salt Lake culture, it's a little complicated and it reflects the social schism between Mormons and non-Mormons...)

Sometimes we need to be reminded of the startingly obvious. Click the image and go read the rest of the strip. Funny and wise, a rare combination...

As long as we're talking music, here's an interesting trivia note: the compact disc was introduced 25 years ago today. There's a pretty detailed article about its development here... although I notice it failed to mention that the preliminary work in converting analog music to a digital file was done by a grad student at my very own alma mater, the University of Utah. Granted, the actual physical disc technology was developed later, by other people, but the ground work for the digital music revolution was done right here in my back yard.

So, if you weren't following along in the comments, the correct answer to yesterday's "pop quiz" -- i.e., what do the groups ZZ Top, The Pretenders, and The Stray Cats have in common? -- was provided by our esteemed webmaster Jack: those three bands all performed Wednesday night at West Valley City's Usana Amphitheater, and The Girlfriend and I were there for what seems to be turning into an annual tradition for us, namely, seeing one multiple-act, '80s-nostalgia outdoor concert per year. (Last year's entry in this category was Journey and Def Leppard, if you'll recall.)

I was pretty enthusiastic for this show, although it did strike me as a really strange line-up. When I first heard about it, the only thing I could think of that these bands had in common was that they all had hit songs in the year 1983. (That would be the three tunes whose videos I posted yesterday: "(She's) Sexy + 17" by The Stray Cats, "Back on the Chain Gang" by The Pretenders, and "Gimme All Your Lovin'" by ZZ Top.) The more I pondered it, though, the more I realized that it was actually brilliant programming; there was something for everyone! You had the good-time retro rockabilly of The Cats for the neo-swing hipster crowd; the punk-influenced "modern" sound of The Pretenders for the aging New Wavers-turned-suburbanites (easy to spot in their madras shorts and polo shirts); and down-and-dirty, bluesy Tex-Mex rock and roll of ZZ for the former (and current) mulletheads. Guess which category I fall into?

Before we begin, yes, that title up there is indeed a play on words, a pun, as it were. Groan if you feel the need. I'll wait...

Finished with that? Good, now let's begin. Tell me -- if you can -- what do the following three items have in common?

I'll provide the answer sometime tomorrow, after I've gotten some sleep...

Via Boing Boing this morning, I found an interesting New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik on the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick has long held a certain amount of fame for writing the novel on which the movie Blade Runner was based, but in recent years he's also become increasingly respected by the Keepers of the Literary Standard, as evidenced by the anthology reprints of his much of his oeuvre in the '90s and the recently published Library of America omnibus edition of his most significant novels. As Gopnik says, "Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three."

Now, I must be honest, all I really know of Dick's work is some of the movies that have been based on it. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired Blade Runner, but I was very young at the time, and it confused the hell out of me. I remember being baffled that it didn't follow the movie more closely, and Dick's tendency to invent words caused me no end of frustration. I've always intended to give the book another try, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

In any event, Gopnik's essay -- which covers Dick's fascinating and tumultuous life, and also offers some insightful criticism of his work -- is a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in the subject. However, the point I really want to address with this entry actually turns on a single paragraph:

I received an e-mail this morning from Jeff Farr, the president of Bingham High's Class of 1987 and organizer of our upcoming 20-year reunion. Sounds like he could use some help!

I've forwarded his message on to all my former classmates for whom I had e-mail addresses, but maybe there are some more of you lurking silently here that I don't know about. If you're one of those, please read on, and then do what you can to spread the word...

[Ed. note: Read the first part of this long story here.]

Fast-forward to just a couple years ago. Nearly three decades had passed since the Great Dirt-Pile Fracas. The Crazy Lady was now living alone after losing a second husband and seeing her kids move away -- far away, in a couple of cases. Both she and my father had mellowed somewhat, enough to speak to one another occasionally with some degree of civility, although both of them still tried to keep their distance. But even with such limited contact, it started becoming obvious that something strange was happening to The Crazy Lady. She was becoming... well, nice. Sickeningly sweet, in fact. If she saw my mother out in the front yard, she'd cross the street to complement her on her roses. If Dad was trying to repair that decrepit old whiteboard fence across the front of the pasture just well enough to get through one more summer, she'd come ask him if he wanted a cool drink.

This behavior was... unsettling. It was extremely out of character for her, and it put my parents on guard. They thought at first it must surely be some kind of Trojan horse gambit that would inevitably lead to another fight. But no, The Crazy Lady continued to be nice and no attack ever came. Someone -- Dad, perhaps, who has learned a great deal more compassion than he used to have -- suggested that maybe she was lonely, or that having her children all run as far away as they could get had taught her a lesson. All too soon, however, we started to see other symptoms. And we recognized them for what they were.

Once, when I was a kid, my father got into a years-long feud with one of our neighbors over -- I kid you not -- a pile of dirt.

The neighbor in question was a widow who lived across the street from us and had a reputation for being irrationally mean. My folks have told me many times how she used to chase her children around her front yard, beating them with a broom; obviously, this was in those bygone libertarian days before the government was empowered to send out its Welfaremobiles to collect unfortunate children. In any event, the grown-ups on my street did their best to avoid confrontations with her, and I -- who at some point had started thinking of her as "The Crazy Lady" -- avoided her altogether.

The Great Dirt-Pile Fracas actually began with a real-estate deal. There was an empty lot next door to The Crazy Lady's place, a lot which belonged, as best as I can recall, to one of her in-laws. The in-law had never done anything with the land, and The Crazy Lady had somehow, over the years, come to think of it as hers.

Then my father bought it, and all hell broke loose.

That obnoxious buzzing sound you hear? It's gotta be Satan's snowblower, because David Lee Roth is rejoining Van Halen for a concert tour.

(Naturally, the closest this tour is coming to my stupid little backwater is Glendale, Arizona. Sigh.)

The cynic in me gives Eddie and Diamond Dave maybe three performances before they're at each other's throats again and the whole enterprise is disintegrating under the weight of their respective egos. The romantic in me hopes that they somehow manage to hold it together, make a lot of money, and realize they could make even more money by adding additional performances to the roster... like, say, one in Salt Lake City. Hey, it's not so crazy... The Police Reunion Tour is still underway, isn't it? Of course, they passed over my hometown, too, the bastards...

Van Halen was never my favorite band, but they were pretty ubiquitous during my formative years ("Jump," "Panama," and "I'll Wait" are indelible tracks on the soundtrack of my life, and "Dance the Night Away" is simply a perfect little summertime parfait), and I just think it would be way cool to see Dave and Eddie on stage together, as they should be. Nothing against Sammy Hagar, whose stint with the band also generated a lot of good music, but David Lee, as big an ass as he appears to be, is the one true lead singer of this particular group, as far as I'm concerned. I won't travel to catch this tour, but if by some miracle they do add a Utah date, man, I'm so there...

Well, the Sci Fi Channel's new Flash Gordon series premiered over the weekend. I didn't see it myself -- I don't have cable, because I'm too cheap to pay a monthly fee for another hundred channels of The Same Old Crap™ just so I can catch the occasional novelty -- but from what I'm finding on the web this morning, I gather it wasn't good. One fellow is even calling for a "jihad against the Sci Fi Channel" before it can "reimagine" any other older properties. (Someone should've thought of that following the crappy Dune miniseries a few years ago -- arg! It still burns!)

I'm reserving final judgment on the show until I manage to see it for myself, but based on what I've been reading, I think it's pretty unlikely I'll approve of it any more than anyone I linked above. I can't say I'm surprised, given the Sci Fi Channel's spotty record and poor reputation among its target audience, but I am disappointed. While I tend to oppose remakes in general, I think Flash Gordon is a hero that can (and perhaps should) be revived and reinterpreted for each new generation, just as Batman and Superman have been revisited many times; as the premiere has inched closer, I've honestly been looking forward to a 21st Century take on what's been called "the original space adventure."

Perhaps the cheesiest episode ever of the old 70s-vintage Buck Rogers TV show -- which is saying a lot, considering how that entire series was one long block of yummy, yummy fromage -- was "Space Rockers," wherein evil Jerry Orbach wants to control the minds of the galaxy's youth via subliminal signals embedded in truly awful music. Actually, it probably wasn't such a bad idea for a story, at least not back then, when people still believed there were backmasked Satanic messages underlying "Stairway to Heaven." The way it was executed, however... oy. I thought it was embarrassing even when I was a kid and Buck was don't-miss-viewing.

Part of what made it so dippy was the appearance of the "rock" band Orbach was secretly using for his nefarious scheme. Leaving aside their cringe-inducing costumes -- which consisted of body stockings and rope lights -- their "playing" looked really, well, goofy. The series was set in the 25th Century, so everything had to be electronic and futuristic-looking, right? That meant that the "guitar" had no strings and Bonzo played his "drum kit" by tapping plastic rods with a pencil. But the most ridiculous item was the synthesizer/keyboard doohickey: it was just a table with colored circles on it, which was the musician "played" by passing his hands (or, in an over-the-top eruption of Velveeta, his leg) over them. Have a look at the video, if you dare.

Silly, right? Well, maybe not. Via Scalzi comes word of a new electronic musical instrument called the ReacTable, and I'll be damned if it isn't highly reminiscent of that old Buck Rogers prop:

Wired.com has an article about this new instrument here.

You know, if something from Buck Rogers had to developed out here in the real world, I think I'd have chosen those spandex jumpsuits that Erin Gray always wore. Maybe there's still hope for those...

This is kind of fun for people who are fully comfortable with the depths of their geekiness: it's a video compilation of the entire 36-year run of the original Doctor Who series (including the 1999 TV movie that aired on Fox) condensed into a little over five minutes.

(Via)

Fascinating to see how the visual tone of the series (not to mention the production values!) changes over the years...

You know, I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer, able to turn a decent phrase and evoke a mood when it suits me. But there are times when I run across something I wish I'd written, something that so perfectly crystallizes an idea, a moment in time, a cultural scene, that I can only doff my hat, hang my head, and think, "Damn, how does he do that?"

Case in point: John Scalzi's fever dream du jour:

I've mentioned before that there's a musician out there named Mike Scalzi (no relation) who is the leader of a band called Slough Feg, who play unreconstituted pre-hair band-era metal; really, you can taste the bong resin, see the black light Houses of the Holy poster and feel the conversion van plush carpet between your toes when you listen to these dudes.

[Listen to the latest Slough Feg album] and be transported to a land that time forgot: where Poison and Cinderella and Winger were all publicly executed for their crimes against humanity, where Vikings do roam the land, hoisting their mighty warhammers to battle the leather clad, GTO-driving survivors of the nuclear apocalypse, and where all the women look just like Julie Strain, and they're totally hot for you in your Music from "The Elder" t-shirt, and they've got a friend who looks like Little Queen-era Ann Wilson that they want to bring over to your garage loft for a special, special time. You know, before you all have to go out and kill some orcs. With your swords. That eat souls.

Good times, good times.

Good times indeed... and a good trick of exactly capturing the sticky zeitgeist shared by all early-teenage boys circa 1982 or so, back when our hormone-addled imaginations were fueled by endless reruns of John Carpenter movies on HBO, nascent music videos, Heavy Metal magazine, Robert E. Howard reprints, cheap pin-up posters won at state-fair midway games, and rounds of D&D played in our best friend's clammy basement bedroom, not to mention the occasional, furtive glimpse of our dad's Playboy stash and way, way too much sugar delivered by direct Slurpee infusion. God, I do miss those days, sometimes...

Courtesy of Eric D. Snider, a former Utahn who now snarks at movies for a living in Portland, Oregon, comes a manifesto written by this guy, a radio DJ from the Pacific Northwest. With only a few minor tweaks, it could've just as easily been written by myself:

What a geek believes
According to Rick Emerson

I believe that Han shot first. I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves. And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible. I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such. I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month. I believe that Belloch ate that fly, I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie,” and I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have.

So, did you catch all the references? If you're wondering about those tweaks I mentioned, they're after the fold:

Oh, boy... remember what I said earlier about disgust, embarassment, and lingering regrets? What combination of those emotions do you suppose these guys are feeling now that their 20-year-old homemade music video for a goofy novelty song has hit the InterWebs?

Incidentally, the purveyors of "Pac-Man Fever," Buckner and Garcia, have a web site. I'm shocked to discover that you can still get their 1982 album of video-game-themed ditties; download it from the usual sources or order the CD here. (I'd recommend you order the tangible artifact, personally; I've dealt with CD Baby before, and it's a great company, an indie record shop in Oregon that'll send you some of the most deliciously eccentric e-mail you've ever read...)

(My thanks to Scalzi for bringing this to the world's attention.)

Just a little PSA for any fellow Bingham High School alumni who may be reading: the Class of '87 Twenty-Year Reunion is now only one month away. Details here.

I know many people, perhaps even most people, look back on their high school days with a mixture of disgust, embarassment, unforgotten hurts, and lingering regrets, assuming that they look back at them at all and haven't long since dealt with it all in therapy and moved on with their lives like normal, well-adjusted grown-ups. I, however, am a sentimentalist and a nostalgic (in case you haven't noticed), and the twisted, incredible truth is that I enjoyed my time in high school. Oh, I had my fair share of teenage angst and difficulties -- trouble with girls and bullies and self-confidence and all the other crap you see in cynical, darkly funny movies written by tragically ironic hipster types who smoke too much -- but I also had good friends (most of whom I still see or hear from occasionally) and a cool car, and I emerged from the '80s with a lot of fond memories.

All of which means that, even though I have yet to formally decide whether or not I'm going to my reunion, the odds are very, very good that I'll be there on September 8th. How about you?

Proving that tourism boosters will find a way to appeal to just about any niche or hobby group, here's a poster promoting Tunisia, the North African desert country that, as any good fanboy or 'girl should know, was the real-world stand-in for the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars films (not to mention several key scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark):

According to this, these posters were being distributed at the Star Wars Celebration Europe convention last week. I'd love to have one for the Archives, and I wouldn't mind watching a sunset from the Hotel Sidi Driss, either. Guess those boosters know what they're doing after all...

[Update: Actually, a little bit of googling has turned up some trivia I didn't know, as shocking as that seems. The "double-sunset scene" in which Luke stands on the rim of the pit he and the Larses called home was actually shot at a place called Chott el Jerid, some distance away from the hotel that served as the interior locations of the Lars homestead.]

As you may have surmised from the title of this entry, today is The Girlfriend's birthday. Neither of us are all that keen on birthdays anymore, on account of having had a few too many of them for comfort, but, darling, I hope this will be a good one for you anyhow. I also hope you won't think your presents suck. You'll be receiving them in a few hours.

In the meantime, allow me to embarrass you with this classic image from your past:

When I think of you, baby, this is the image that often come to mind: you engaged in one of your favorite pastimes -- napping -- with a stuffed penguin...

Okay, last week I was obsessing over Flash Gordon, and now this week I keep going on about The Wonder Years. So I'm a fanboy, sue me. Well, no, on second thought, don't do that. I'll be nice...

If you're interested, Wired has just posted an interview with Danica McKellar about her new book and "why being a math whiz and a girly girl are not mutually exclusive." It's a pretty interesting read, and it even includes a link to McKellar's published proof, Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on Z2.

No, I don't know what that means. And neither do you, so stop trying to show off...

I mentioned The Wonder Years yesterday, so it seems appropriate to make that show's opening our TV Title Sequence for this week. My research -- okay, the two minutes I spent perusing YouTube -- indicates that the 30-second version of the opening I've been seeing on those nightly re-runs on the Ion channel is actually cut down from the original sequence, which I had forgotten ran much longer when the show first aired. Here's the full-length, one-minute version as it appeared in the show's first four seasons, circa 1988-1991:

Wil Wheaton on reports that Hollywood execs were using last week's Comic-Con as a focus group:

For those [Hollywood] executives [who almost always seem to screw up movie adaptations of the things fanboys love], I present a very brief, very simple primer in understanding geeks: We want this stuff to be done right because we’ve lived it for our entire lives and know it better than any of you ever will. We’ve played with the action figures and written the fan fiction and crammed fifteen of our friends into the hotel room so we could afford to go to the conventions where we buy T-shirts that say HAN SHOT FIRST because, goddammit, this stuff is our lives. Before we could talk to girls, there was Princess Leia. Before we had cars, there was the Batmobile. Before we could find escape from the horrors of modren life in a bottle, we escaped into the pages of comic books and science fiction magazines.

These stories that you buy and put on the big screen may just be numbers on a yearly accounting to you, but they are more than that to us. To us, they are something that brings us together and makes us part of an exclusive (and frequently stinky, unfortunately) club.

I concur. The whole essay is a passionate battle-cry that's worth reading if you've ever salivated at the thought of your favorite superhero coming to live-action life, only to be crushed when the movie turns out to be colossal dud like, well, 98% of the superhero movies that come out. Be warned, though -- Wil can get pretty potty-mouthed when he's worked up about something, and he's very worked up about the upcoming movie adaptation of Watchmen...

A few of the things that've grabbed my attention in the last couple days: