Several people have asked me in the past few days how Shadow, the Bennion Family Dog, is doing with his cancer treatments. It sounds kind of stiff to say it like this, but I want to thank you all for your concern and interest. It really means a lot to me and my folks. The short answer is, he’s doing surprisingly well.

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Just some things that have occurred to me in the past couple of days:

1. When you go shopping for pillows, they come in three categories, for those who sleep on the backs, those who sleep on their stomachs, and those who sleep on their sides. What are you supposed to buy if you tend to sleep somewhere in between two categories?
2. Why is Pat Benatar’s most enduring song (based on how often I hear it on the radio compared with her other hits) “Love is a Battlefield”? If we’re talking kick-ass songs about feminine empowerment in the face of male ass-hattery, I much prefer “Treat Me Right.” If we’re talking just plain kick-ass songs, then “Shadows of the Night” is my vote. And if it’s that mushy, mid-80s, proto-new-agey vibe, then I’d rather hear — god help me — “We Belong.” But “Love is a Battlefield”? Really?
3. Finally, why do Jedi dress like Tatooine moisture farmers? Or is it that Tatooine moisture farmers are a bunch of backwoods posers who dress like Jedi in hopes of seeming slightly more sophisticated? (The real-world answer, of course, is that Ben, Luke, and Owen all dress like the feudal Japanese characters in the Kurosawa movies that G. Lucas wanted to reference, and the look was retained in the prequels for the sake of continuity. But who’s interested in talking about the real world?)

That is all. Discuss amongst yourselves and get back to me…

Driving home from The Girlfriend’s tonight, I could see a pair of wildfires burning on the mountain ahead, the one which separates the Salt Lake Valley from Utah Valley to the south. It’s a sight I’ve seen just about every summer for as long as I can remember — hot weather combined with a careless cigarette butt or a dry lightning strike is a simple equation — but it never loses its eerie, unworldly quality. That particular mountainside hasn’t been developed yet, you see, so there are no street or house lights up there; it’s effectively invisible at night, except when there’s a fire. Then there’s a glowing orange smudge that seems to float in the sky, or sometimes it backlights the hulking shape of the mountain itself. Geek that I am, I can’t help but think of Lord of the Rings whenever I see this effect. All the image needs is a psychic vision of a flaming eyeball and a creepy, growling voice telling me that it sees me…

Of course, I was listening to “Every Breath You Take” tonight, so maybe that’s close enough to the Voice of Sauron to count. That always seemed like such a nice romantic tune back in the Awesome ’80s, before we all noticed the unnerving stalkerish overtones that linger underneath the catchy bass line like the stink of burning sagebrush…

Well, I just seem to be puttering away here today, don’t I, posting up my little bits of nothing? Here’s some more, courtesy of Lileks:

[Back to the Future], which I still think is a perfect little thing, was made in 1985. Marty was sent back to 1955. If they made the movie today, he’d go back to 1977.

 

Think about that. 1977 would look like today, minus computers. Same clothes, same Pink Floyd tunes on the classic rock station, same smear of gimcrack commercial architecture interspersed with stalwarts from the 20s. Color TV, Star Wars, angry Iran. Marty could order a Pepsi Free in 1977, and they’d think it was a sugarless brand they hadn’t gotten yet.

How’s that for a scary thought? I, and I daresay most of the people reading this blog, are now the age of Marty McFly’s parents in Back to the Future, a movie that came out when we were about Marty’s age.

This actually parallels an equally scary thought I had the other day: in Back to the Future II, Marty travels 30 years ahead to what is, to him, the fairly distant future. That distant future was the year 2015… which is only eight years away from us now!

On the positive side, maybe this means that self-adjusting sneakers, hoverboards, Mr. Fusion, and the Cafe 80s aren’t very far away. That would be nice…

I’m not exactly what you’d call an “early adopter.” I don’t own an iPod or a TiVo, I’ve never seen the point of having a PDA when a good old notepad works just as well, I only upgrade my cellphone every four or five years, and I’ve wouldn’t begin to know how to BitTorrent a movie. However, I’m thinking I need to get one of these new-fangled iPhone gadgets. It was the condiment-dispensing feature that sold me:

Via.