Monthly Archives: June 2008

Jun292008

Eat at the Diner and See a Drive-In Movie

Over the past couple of days, I’ve noticed some items in the Tribune that may be of interest to my local (or formerly local) readers.

The first is a feature story about the handful of drive-in theaters that still operate in Utah; it focuses primarily on the Motor Vu in Erda, which I briefly mentioned in an entry a couple weeks ago.

The other, somewhat more exciting news concerns the Road Island Diner in Oakley, Utah, which I first wrote about just over one year ago. This is the authentic 1940s-vintage prefab diner that was shipped cross-country from the east coast to a small town at the edge of the Uinta Mountains. To cut to the chase, the renovation is complete and it opened for business this weekend. Details are here. According to the linked article, it’s one of only about 1,200 diners left in the country.

I’ve also found an official website for the Road Island that includes an extensive photo gallery of the renovation. In classic-car terminology, it was a complete “frame off restoration,” i.e., it was stripped right down to the bare bones and rebuilt from the ground up. It looks fabulous now, like a time traveler from the Greatest Generation plopped down right here in the 21st Century. I’m very pleased to see that the new owner went for authenticity after all. (I heard a rumor a while back that he’d planned a huge, two-story addition that would’ve completely overshadowed the original structure, but that was either untrue, or someone talked him out of it.) Of course, it’s not entirely authentic. The Trib article notes that the there are flat-screen TVs, which I could’ve lived without (I realized today just how ubiquitous video displays have become in our society, and how distracting they frequently are; it’d be nice to escape them once in a while), and the tabletop jukeboxes are described as “remote controls for iPods in the back,” but I guess you can only go so far in recreating another time period.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a Utah attraction if there wasn’t some element of cheesiness to it: all the employees have been given “diner names.” Oy. What is it with this state anyway? It’s like people just can’t help but find some way of being cutesy.

Still, I’m pretty eager to try the place out, even with TVs and cutesy-ness. The Girlfriend and I plan to take a little road trip within the next couple of weeks…

One final note: if you’re interested in reading those articles, don’t hesitate: in only a few days, the Tribune will drop them behind a pay-wall… I really wish they’d follow the New York Times‘ example and quit doing that…

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Jun272008

Top 100 of the Last 25

Great, more lists. This time we’re looking at Entertainment Weekly‘s Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I’m not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren’t likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor‘s footsteps and bold the titles I’ve seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.

Continue Reading…

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Jun262008

This Is the Moment He Saw His Destiny…

No time today for a proper entry, alas, but I just spotted this over at Screen Rant and was sufficiently amused I had to share:

They'll notice me some day... some day I'll make EVERYONE notice me!

The look on the boy’s face is simply priceless… and heart-breaking, the poor kid…

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Jun242008

Just Because I’m Paranoid Doesn’t Mean…

So, the news this morning was the now-usual drumbeat of rising gas prices and calls to begin exploratory oil drilling in Alaska and protected coastal areas, and I was thinking of my dad’s irrational certainty that the high prices aren’t merely the result of supply and demand, that someone has just got to be behind the abrupt and seemingly unstoppable increases, and suddenly I had an epiphany. My idea was paranoid and sounded like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory cooked up by the lunatic fringe, but maybe, just maybe… well, consider this:

Continue Reading…

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Jun232008

In Memoriam: George Carlin

Carlin as I choose to remember him...

I don’t know if teenage boys still go through a phase where they’re obsessed with comedy albums — my guess would be “not,” since the “album” is an endangered species these days, and stand-up doesn’t appear to be quite the cultural force it used to be — but back in my increasingly far-off youth, it was almost as if every thirteen-year-old male in the country was issued one at the door as he left that infamously awkward, boys-only puberty lecture in seventh grade. You know, the one where red-faced PE coaches mumbled dire warnings about how we were going to start “noticing hair in new places” and we’d need to start showering every day if we wanted girls to like us. Maybe the comedy album was supposed to be a consolation prize for having just been made to feel impossibly icky about our own bodily functions. Here’s a record, kid; go listen to somebody making fun of the stuff you’ll be obsessing over for the next few years.

We all had our favorite comedians in the middle-school crucible of the 1980s. As I recall, my buddy Keith liked the absurdities of Steve Martin, while my neighbor Kurt Stephensen grooved on the earthy ‘n’ crude acts like Richard Pryor and the up-and-coming Eddie Murphy. I liked those guys just fine, but my comedy hero during those harrowing early-teen years was George Carlin.

Continue Reading…

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Jun232008

Wisdom for the Age

From a post over at Boing Boing that really has nothing to do with anything (at least nothing I’m more than momentarily interested in), I managed to glean the following:

…anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever, anything that turns up before you’re 30 is new and exciting, and anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed.

I like that. Reminds me of that great quote from Grandpa Simpson: “I used to be ‘with it.’ Once, I even knew what ‘it’ was. But then ‘it’ changed; it got weird and scary. And it’ll happen to you.” Or something like that. In any event, I increasingly understand the sentiment…

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Jun212008

Anyone Want to Buy Some Action Figures?

A couple of years ago, following that traumatic flood in my basement, I made up my mind to try and downsize the Bennion Archives a little. Well, the first batch of items I put up on eBay didn’t attract much attention, and disappointment and my natural tendency to procrastinate soon kicked in, and, well, long story short, I’m still storing a bunch of stuff I long ago decided to part with and I’m going to try again to sell some of it. There’s a batch of nifty Universal Monsters action figures up for sale right now. If you or someone you love appreciates the classics, just click here or use the link over there to the right called “My eBay Auctions” to have a look…

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Jun202008

Boom De Yada

This seems to be making its way around the InterWebs — I picked it up from Ilya — and it amused me enough to want to jump on the bandwagon:

As I wrote in comments over at Ilya’s, it isn’t often that a frickin’ commercial makes me smile like a little kid, but this one sure did. Of course, it probably helps that I start recognizing people about midway through. Kudos to whoever thought to include Stephen Hawking in there; his synthetic, monotype Cylon voice ironically seems to add an extra dose of humanity to this sort of thing…

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