Monthly Archives: August 2006

Aug312006

Quick, Mr. President, Name That Smell!

Being on the edge of what is essentially a dead sea, Salt Lake City is frequently subject to a phenomenon we locals call “lake stink.” It occurs when the wind blows across the Great Salt Lake from the northwest, churning up all the decaying gunk at the bottom of the lake and carrying the resulting odors straight into the city and its surrounding ‘burbs. I kind of like the smell myself, at least in small concentrations; it smells like home to me. But in higher concentrations, it can be rather… disconcerting.

I bring this up because last night, as a weather front moved through the area, there was an unusually powerful lake stink in the air, the strongest I’ve experienced in several years. As it so happens, President Bush was also in town last night, staying overnight in downtown SLC so he could speak to the American Legion convention this morning. I wonder if Dear Leader, safely ensconsed in the marble-floored penthouse of the fanciest hotel in town after his thrilling five-minute ride in from the airport, noticed the stench, and whether he thought someone was playing a prank on him…

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Aug312006

Pizza Challenge Update

Brian Greenberg reports today that our very own Chenopup has e-mailed him with the latest on that silly pizza stunt they’re trying to put together:

Just wanted to check in. I spoke to my ABC 4 contact yesterday. I will send her an email detailing what we’re doing and she will forward to Buena Vista contact for Regis / Kelly.

 

We may start some local press on this very soon.

I still can’t believe this is actually going to happen, let alone that there’s a possibility of national TV coverage. Crazy, man. I’ll keep you all posted as the story develops…

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Aug262006

Any Resemblance to Actual Persons…

You get a strange sensation when you see someone you know on the evening news. It’s a feeling of disconnection, like what you’re seeing isn’t really real. You recognize the face in the still-frame, the name pronounced by the anchor, but you’re certain this can’t be the person you know, the one who’s been to your house, stood in your driveway chatting with your dad, drank your dad’s beer. It’s all got to be, as the disclaimers in the movies always say, purely coincidental that this guy looks so much like the one you know, and that he shares the same name, because, well, that just can’t be the same guy.
This curious feeling is doubled if your acquaintence is on the news because he’s done something… bad.

Continue Reading…

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Aug242006

Which Nightmare Do Your Prefer?

Hmm… this is an interesting experiment: someone has created a mash-up that places video from both versions of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” side-by-side and sets it all to music by the band Pop Will Eat Itself. “Nightmare” is arguably the most famous Zone story; it’s the one where a nervous flyer, played by a pre-Star Trek William Shatner in the original television segment and by John Lithgow in the 1983 TZ feature film, sees a gremlin tearing apart the plane and tries desperately to get someone to believe him. It’s been parodied or referenced dozens of times, most notably in one of the The Simpsons‘ Halloween specials. I’m not sure what the intention of this video may have been, but it gives us movie-buffs a handy way to compare and contrast the two versions. You can probably guess which I prefer:

While I greatly admire John Lithgow and have always enjoyed his performance in Twilight Zone: The Movie, I think The Shat — long derided as an over-the-top cheeseball of an actor — actually delivers a more subtle performance than Lithgow in this role. In fact, I’ve long maintained that Shatner is — or at least used to be — a far better actor than most people believe. If you study his pre-Trek work in The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and other early television anthology series, or for that matter his performances in the first two seasons of Star Trek, you’ll see a talented and charismatic young man who was destined for stardom. My personal belief is that he got lazy along the way, simultaneously weighed down by the burden of having been Captain Kirk and puffed up by the adoration of the Trekkies, and from the mid-70s onward, it took a strong directorial hand to force him to deliver the goods. (Nicholas Meyer squeezed a good performance from him for The Wrath of Khan — not counting the “Khhhhhaaaaaaaaannnnnn!!!!” scene — and his old buddy Leonard Nimoy did the same for The Search for Spock. The scene in TSFS when Kirk learns over the radio that his son has just been knifed to death is absolutely heartwrenching.)

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Aug242006

The Latest on the Tapes

The search for the missing Apollo 11 tapes continues, with NASA’s Goddard Flight Center now conducting a formal, “full-scale look” (previously, the search was pretty much the province of one man, Richard Nafzger, working in his spare time). Details for those who are interested are here. There’s a PDF of a nifty flyer about the search here, and here is an official report from May that lays out in the most detail I’ve yet encountered exactly what this is all about. Especially interesting are the side-by-side photo comparisons on page 9, which demonstrate the difference between the original transmissions recorded on those missing tapes and what the public actually saw on their televisions. Also, the report brings up a critical time issue:

  • The Data Evaluation Lab (DEL) at the Goddard Space Flight Center is the only known place
    that has the equipment and expertise to playback the tapes and to recover the data.

  • The DEL is slated for closure in October 2006.
    …

  • It is vital that the DEL (or some elements of it) remain open and functional, otherwise none
    of the Apollo data tapes can ever be played back and the historic information recovered.

I hope they find those tapes in time. Meanwhile, in other news, we’re back down to eight planets in this system, and we didn’t even have to build a Death Star to do it. I know a lot of bloggers are expressing strong feelings on both sides of this whole Pluto “demotion” issue; me, I don’t care so much. My biggest complaint is that this decision has rendered obsolete all those episodes of classic Battlestar where characters make reverent mention of a semi-mythical system with nine planets…

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Aug232006

My 25 Favorite TV Characters Ever

According to Javi, there’s a meme circulating among television producers who have blogs (there are three of them that I’m aware of) which asks them to name their Top 25 Favorite TV Characters Ever. I’m not a TV producer — I don’t even play one on, er, I guess that one’s too obvious, isn’t it? — but I’m never one to let a good meme escape me. So read on to discover my picks…

Continue Reading…

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Aug232006

Logic? What Logic?

I get a kick out of UTA (that’s the Utah Transit Authority for you out-of-towners). After observing their actions on a more-or-less daily basis for just over a year — I’ve been riding Salt Lake’s light-rail system to work throughout that time — I can only conclude that some evil genius has used his psychotronic disassociation ray to reverse the polarity of the organization’s institutional brain, so that every decision it makes is exactly the opposite of what it ought to be. Case in point: all summer long, the trains have been running with four cars during the morning rush hour, and they’ve been far below capacity. Plenty of seating for all the downtown cubicle-monkeys like myself. Now, today, classes are back in session at the University of Utah and a whole bunch of new riders are using this nifty light-rail system to get to campus… and for some reason the trains have dropped one car. Which means all the unwashed masses were cozier than flakes of dolphin-free tuna in light oil this morning.

So, let’s review: summertime, fewer riders, lots of cars; schooltime, more riders, fewer cars. Can anyone explain the logic process here? Anyone? Anyone at all? Yeah, that’s what I thought…

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Aug202006

Rock of Ages

We weren’t even through the gates yet when we saw the fight. Two guys in baggy shorts and tent-sized white t-shirts seemed to fall inexorably into each other, as if drawn together by the gravitational force of their own beer-bellies. The three of us — myself, The Girlfriend, and our friend Amber — stood there in shock as the battle raged on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a battle. The word “battle” implies something epic, and this wasn’t even particularly exciting. It was just two guys bear-hugging each other, turning around and around like fat, drunken binary planets circling a common point in space, grunting and shouting unintelligibly at each other. One of them eventually got the better of his opponent. A nose was broken, blood and tears began to flow, security arrived, and it was over. Two grown men, fast approaching middle age, who were behaving like jackass teenagers and would probably never speak to each other again. It was pathetic. And I found myself wondering if I was, too, attending a Def Leppard concert at my age.

Continue Reading…

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