Monthly Archives: April 2008

Apr092008

It Is What It Is

This morning as I was driving over to the train station, I heard the song “Jessie’s Girl” by my main man Rick Springfield… on KODJ. That’s the local oldies station, if you don’t know.

Then, coming home on the train tonight, I was serenaded by a couple of sweaty, pubescent twelve-year-old boys with dumb haircuts who were wearing baggy jeans and way-oversized hoodies covered in skulls. They were singing “I’m Turning Japanese.”

I honestly don’t know which of these two events made me feel more over the hill.

At least the kids weren’t being mocking or ironic — they were, in fact, behaving like this moldy chestnut was a really cool and funny song. Which it is. And at least Rick’s back on the radio somewhere.

I’m rationalizing, aren’t I?

Sigh. I’m going to go put on a sweater and lay in a supply of rocks for chasing the damn kids off my lawn…

spacer
Apr082008

Deal or No Deal? How About If I Throw in a Bevy of Slave Leias?

Chewie and R2 were reduced to doing the game-show circuit after their manager embezzled all the royalties...

Oh, boy… what a conundrum…

You see, I loathe the “competitive reality show” phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it’s the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably — I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don’t know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous “the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip” music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin’s thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren’t betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It’s not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)

Needless to say, I don’t watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it — which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them — but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity… not to mention my prurient interests.

If you’ve never seen the show, part of Deal‘s schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they’re usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the “metal bikini.” Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we’ll find out…

(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late ’70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I’ve been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)

spacer
Apr072008

Night Photo of Sandy TRAX Station

Night photo of the Sandy Civic Center TRAX station

I had a little surprise waiting in my e-mail inbox this morning and thought I’d share it with my three loyal readers. The gorgeous photo above was taken by my friend, Mike Gillilan; it’s a panorama consisting of several overlapping images that have been digitally stitched together, then tweaked in the computer to produce a “high dynamic range image.” I’ll confess, I don’t fully understand the HDR stuff — hell, I don’t even own a digital camera — but as you can see, it produces some really striking results. Don’t forget to click the image for the larger version…

Incidentally, in case you don’t recognize this location, it’s the Sandy TRAX station, a.k.a., the “end of the line, as far as we go,” the southernmost terminus of the Salt Lake Valley’s light-rail system. This is the station where Gillilan and I both begin our daily commutes. For the record, it looks much cooler in this photo than in the real world…

spacer
Apr042008

It’s Not Cooper’s ‘Chute

Following up on the possibility that a new clue to the fate of hijacker D.B. Cooper had been found, Earl Cossey, the man who packed the four parachutes given to Cooper on that night in 1971, says the ‘chute discovered by some children in Washington state is definitely not one of Cooper’s. Cooper’s parachutes were made of nylon, and the mystery ‘chute is silk. (I’m guessing that would make it much older than Cooper’s, possibly even World War II-vintage.)

For the record, Cossey sounds like something of a dick. He apparently told some reporters that the ‘chute really was Cooper’s, just to yank their chains. I’m sure it must be tiresome being the go-to man whenever anyone turns up a rag that they think might be Cooper-related, but still… playing games like that strikes me as very uncool, especially when it might get somebody fired.

And for the other record, I still think Cooper survived his jump, made off with the bulk of the cash, and spent the rest of his days drinking margaritas in the sun… it makes for a better story that way.

spacer
Apr042008

Don’t Eat the Snow in Hawaii

To my knowledge, I’ve never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I’m beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.

And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of “nemesis”? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.

Sigh.

Continue Reading…

spacer
Apr032008

Ricin Story Update

There’s been a new development in that story about the guy who was playing with the deadly toxin ricin in a Vegas hotel room, which I first wrote about here. The short version: an indictment has been issued in the case, but surprisingly not for Roger von Bergendorff, the man who was apparently brewing the stuff for god-only-knows-why and who fell into a coma after handling it. The indictment was actually for his cousin Thomas Tholen, the man who owns the house here in my hometown of Riverton where von Bergendorff lived for a time. Tholen is alleged to have known that his cousin was making the shit but he failed to report it and, further, made an “untruthful statement” in order to conceal it.

Authorities still won’t say what they found in the Riverton house, or what von Bergendorff was planning to do with the ricin.
I understand, of course, that they have to remain mum until charges are brought — if there are charges forthcoming, of course — but I’m feeling very frustrated by the silence. After all, this was going on right in my own back yard; I’d like to know what was happening and why. The media seems to have all the details — not to mention a conviction, at least as far as public opinion is concerned — within hours of some perv killing a little kid, but when it comes to something that could have potentially sickened or killed half a damn town, nobody’s saying a word. (That’s not to say the death of a child is insignificant, only that there’s a real disparity in what the public hears about and what it doesn’t, and I don’t really understand why. It seems like somebody’s priorities are out of whack to me.)

I’ll continue to impatiently monitor the news feeds for any new details on this… I don’t really have much choice, do I?

spacer
Apr032008

Back in the Good Old Days…

This looks familiar...

Man oh man… this photo of an 1983-vintage home computer desk, which I just spotted over at Boing Boing, brings back a lot of memories. A lot of memories. I didn’t have exactly this same set-up — I had the Atari 800XL instead of the 800 model pictured here; my peripherals were a bit more spread out around my bedroom; and I never had a set of those groovy Burger King Jedi glasses — but there’s an extremely familiar vibe emanating from this image. I don’t even have to close my eyes to journey back, to once again hear Sammy Hagar blasting from my old Fisher cassette deck as I bang away at the clickety-clackety keyboard (sometimes I miss the weirdly satisfying noise and effort associated with that old keyboard; modern ones are so mushy in comparison…), working on one of my embarrassing early short stories that all seemed to be ripped-off Doctor Who plots infused with some good old-fashioned teenage angst. The hard copies of those stories disappeared long ago, but I think there might still be electronic ghosts of them around, locked away on the dozen or so ancient five-inch floppy discs I know I’ve got somewhere in the Bennion Archives. If only I had a working five-inch drive and the know-how to capture the data to my modern PC! Embarrassing or not, I’d like to see them again…

I never bothered to learn Atari BASIC, and that mysterious activity known as hacking held no appeal for me. I didn’t have any idea what you could do with a computer, really, beyond writing lousy adolescent fiction. It wasn’t much more than a sophisticated toy, so far as I could see. (That attitude probably wasn’t helped by the fact that you used an ordinary television for a monitor; if you got bored with whatever you were working on, you could just change the channel and watch Gilligan’s Island or whatever. Which I guess isn’t much different from hopping online and seeing what’s shaking at Boing Boing, when you think about it…) I was savvy enough to recognize that the Atari Writer word processing program was far more convenient than the old portable typewriter I’d been using in my pre-computer days. I saved reams of paper by editing and perfecting — well, rewriting, anyway — my work before printing it out. But if someone had told me then that our entire economy and a pretty sizable chunk of our culture would one day revolve around these toys… well, people did try to tell me all this was coming and I didn’t believe them. I thought computers would never amount to much more than fancy typewriters. Some would-be science-fiction writer I was, eh?

spacer
Apr022008

A Couple of Quiz Things

Normally, these Internet quizzes come about as close to describing “the real me” as my newspaper horoscope, i.e., they’re so ridiculously generalized that they could be about anybody, or they’re so far out in left field that they’re most assuredly not like me at all. But every once in a while…


What Your Pizza Reveals


People may tell you that you have a small appetite… but you aren’t under eating. You just aren’t a pig.You aren’t particularly picky about pizza. It’s so good… how could you be? You fit in best in the Western part of the US.

You like food that’s traditional and well crafted. You aren’t impressed with “gourmet” foods.

You are dependable, loyal, and conservative with your choices.

You are a flavorful and bold person. You should consider traveling to Spain.

The stereotype that best fits you is geek. You’re the type most likely to order pizza to avoid leaving your computer.

What do you think? Close?
Just for kicks, here’s another one:

Continue Reading…

spacer
Apr022008

Bob Clampett’s Barsoom

You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I’ve just learned they’re not the first animators to take a crack at ERB’s manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers’ famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).

According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios — unthinkable, I know! — but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:

I don’t know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the ’40s. The running thoat — the eight-legged animal — is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the “If Only” file…

(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)

spacer
Apr022008

Are You a Trekkie? What Do You Think?

chickentrekkie.jpg

For the record, I answered “yes” to items 1 and 3 only. And I can rationalize that I noticed the missing apostrophe because I’m a proofreader, right? Right?

(I suppose I shouldn’t mention that, while I don’t have a bat’leth, I do own a replica of Duncan MacLeod’s katana. No, I really shouldn’t mention that at all…)

Source via.

spacer