Monthly Archives: March 2009

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Mar072009

Passing the Time on a Saturday Afternoon

You know, there’s something curiously satisfying about listening to dusty old CDs while you do long-neglected household chores…

Here’s one of my rediscoveries, Bonnie Raitt performing “Angel from Montgomery,” a beautiful, sad, authentic song I loved back around 1990 or so and then somehow forgot about until today:

It’s a huge cliche, of course, but they really don’t write ’em like this anymore. At least, not that I ever hear.

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Mar072009

Proofreading Blues

A health-related PSA seen on a placard on the train last night:

Breathe Easier
Get Screened
Their is a good chance it will save your life.

Their is a chance? I can’t tell you how much that hurts…

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Mar052009

I Have Seen the Future

This is kind of incongruous, coming as it does on the heels of yesterday’s remark that I really don’t like living here in the future, but I was somewhat excited this morning to have my first in-the-wild encounter with one of those Kindle electronic-book gadgets everybody’s been talking about. It was in the hands of a well-dressed older woman sitting a few rows ahead of me on the train.

And why, you may be asking, would a self-confessed semi-Luddite late-adopter like myself be thrilled to glimpse a device that signifies yet another step away from my precious Way Things Used to Be? Well, partly it was just the novelty of actually seeing an object that I’ve heard so much about but which has been, up until now, only an abstraction. That whole experience of “oh, there’s one of those things!” That’s always fun. But what really pushed my buttons was a fleeting sense that I’d somehow stumbled into a Star Trek episode. Seriously. Even though I’ve seen plenty of photos of the Kindle (obviously, since I identified it easily enough; I even recognized it as a Kindle 2 instead of the earlier model), I’ll be damned if my first thought wasn’t, “Hey, that woman is looking at one of those thingies Picard was always using on Next Gen!” I’ve been saying for years that the world seems to be inevitably becoming more like Star Trek; here we have another piece of evidence in support of that theory.

So, to review, I don’t like living in the future because I’m a nostalgic bastard who prefers the past, but I was excited to see a futuristic device because it resembled a prop seen on a 20-year-old television show that was set… in the future.

Yeah, I’m confused, too. Welcome inside my head.

Continue Reading…

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Mar012009

Missing from the Roster

Mark Evanier lists those who were not included in this year’s “in memoriam” video at the Oscars:

Patrick McGoohan was in some pretty good movies and George Carlin was in more than you might think…but neither was included. Nor was Eartha Kitt. Nor was composer Neal Hefti. Nor were Harvey Korman, Earle Hagen, Mel Ferrer, Alexander Courage, John Phillip Law, Irving Brecher, George Furth, Beverly Garland or Guy McElwaine. There were several studio execs and one publicist included but not Bernie Brillstein.

 

But the startling omission, of course, was Don LaFontaine, who not only became a superstar of movie trailers but also served as the announcer of the Oscars several years.

I noticed LaFontaine’s absence myself and thought that was deeply weird; I honestly did not remember that many of the others Mark mentions had died in ’08. I wonder why people get left out of these things? I imagine there are time constraints that prevent the listing of everybody who passes on during any given year, but what determines whether someone is worthy of inclusion? It can’t be because the missing stars aren’t big enough. Lots of people would know Patrick McGoohan, George Carlin, and Harvey Korman, surely…

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Mar012009

Pin-Up Therapy

Sometimes, when everything is grim and the world is going to hell around you, the best thing to do is just try and regress back in your mind to the age of about fifteen or so. I find that looking at pretty girls helps (specifically, non-trashy-douchebag-loving girls). If there aren’t any real, live pretty girls in the vicinity (or if they all happen to be of the TBL variety that was infesting the mall yesterday), I tend to prefer some old-fashioned pin-up art, the sort of thing that goes by the name of cheesecake or “good girl art.” Here’s a nice example I picked up in my blog-reading:

Valkyrie by Gene Gonzales

I have no idea who this character is — she apparently comes from a comic-book called Airboy, which I am totally unfamiliar with (although it sounds like the sort of thing I’d probably groove on) — but I like the drape of her jodhpurs. This sketch is by Gene Gonzales, via Michael May. Gene’s got a lot of other fun pieces over at his blog, including a nifty refutation of George Lucas’ odd notion that there aren’t any foundational undergarments in his far, far away galaxy…

Ah, girls. I feel better now…

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