Monthly Archives: July 2009

Jul142009

Bad Headline of the Day

One more for tonight…

The Salt Lake Tribune really needs to have a chat with its headline writer:

Skateboard attacks man over alleged fake-drug sale

Treacherous skateboards! When are the police going to do something about them! When I was a boy, you could walk down the streets without fearing that some skateboard was going to leap out and mug you, but now everything’s gone to hell in a mop-bucket!

(What actually happened, of course, is that some guy attacked another guy with a skateboard. But sloppy editing gives a very different impression, doesn’t it? Anytime anyone around my place of employment wonders why they need pedantic guys like me slowing down the process when they’re on deadline, I’ll just point them to this example…)

(Incidentally, the headline has been fixed since I first saw it this morning — it now reads “Skateboarder attacks man…” — but still, I think my point was made. Proofreaders… if you deal in words at all, we’re your most valuable resource!)

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Jul142009

How Things Change

Somewhat related to the previous entry (well, they both involve music, nostalgia, and grumpy old man-ism, at least), Lileks related a story today about his encounter at his local coffee house with one of those Damn Kids™ I’m always grumbling about. Here’s his comment about the young lady’s ignorance of “99 Luftballons,” the infectious ’80s classic about an accidental nuclear exchange (ah, the Cold War… those were the days!):

Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their ability to make music that [went] on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.

Lileks’ real point here is, of course, less about the kids of today than his own resentment toward the ’60s — he strikes me as a man who is convinced that everything went Horribly Wrong long about 1967 and it’s only gotten worse since then; come to think of it, that’s not entirely incorrect, depending on how you look at it — but he touches on something I’ve considered myself from time to time, which is the way Boomer culture has always dominated the conversation and how people my age dealt with it, and more importantly (to me, anyhow) how that’s different from the way kids these days deal with my generation’s culture.

Continue Reading…

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Jul142009

This Makes Me Irrationally Happy

My buddy Mike sent word this morning that the new Cheap Trick album, appropriately titled The Latest, will be available soon in multiple formats, including — are you ready for this? — 8-track tape.

cheap-trick_the-latest_on-8-track.JPG

Yes, 8-track, that clunky lo-fi audio technology of the early 1970s that never sounded especially good even by the standards of the day. I’m sure everyone of, ahem, a certain age remembers how 8-tracks always tended to interrupt the songs (usually in the middle of the bridge or a cool guitar solo) with a harsh click-clack sound as the head changed from track to the next, and the way those brick-like cartridges got hotter than a microwaved Kwik-e-Mart burrito after only a couple of plays. I can’t imagine anyone feeling nostalgic for these things, unless it’s simply for the objects themselves, as artifacts of a simpler time; I’m definitely not aware of any kind of 8-track-o-phile community that actually enjoys the sound of 8-tracks, like the vinyl true believers who still prefer records to CDs. And yet this Cheap Trick offering is apparently not a joke. You can pre-order The Latest on 8-track here. (You can also get the album on LP or CD, depending on your preference. Oh, and I suppose there’ll be a downloadable version for the Damn Kids™, not that any of them would be listening to an old band like Cheap Trick anyhow.)

I’ve noted before that I’m not really a fan of Cheap Trick’s music, but I must admit this little stunt has greatly increased my respect for the band. It’s just so charmingly counterintuitive to offer a 2009 release on a 1973 format…

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Jul112009

There Can Be Only One… Martian Tripod?

I’m not a big fan of either animation or steampunk,* but I am intrigued by this:

wotw-goliath_poster.jpg

That’s the poster for a straight-to-DVD film project currently in production and scheduled to be released in 2010. The premise is that 14 years after the events of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, the Martians try again. Only this time, humanity is ready for them, armed with weapons and fighting machines that were reverse-engineered from the alien technology left behind following the first invasion.

That all sounds amusing enough, but what really caught my eye was the cast and crew credits on that poster. It appears that War of the Worlds: Goliath is going to be something of a Highlander reunion! Peter Wingfield, Elizabeth Gracen, Jim Byrnes, and Adrian Paul all starred on my favorite obsession of the mid-90s, Highlander: The Series, and the writer of this film, David Abramowitz, is a Highlander alum as well. (Credited as both Supervising Producer and Creative Consultant on the series, Abramowitz is widely held to be the guy who changed Highlander from a cheesy villain-of-the-week syndicated action show — think Lorenzo Lamas’ Renegade, only with swords and Quickenings — into something that actually asked questions about the human condition. I didn’t always like Abramowitz’s ideas, but the show definitely improved under his guidance.)

If the Highlander angle isn’t enough, Goliath‘s other listed star, Adam Baldwin (no relation to Alec, William, et. al.) played Jayne in the cult favorite Firefly, and executive producer Kevin Eastman is the dude who created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That’s a seriously geeky pedigree there!

I hope this turns out to be good. Adrian Paul, in particular, could use an artistic success, if (most likely) not a financial one. I find him a very appealing actor, but since Highlander wrapped, he’s unfortunately been trapped in a creative ghetto, churning out one low-budget crapfest after another (and yes, I count the last Highlander movie, The Suck, er, Source, among those). Interestingly, this isn’t Adrian’s first encounter with Wells’ Martians; he also starred in the second season of that War of the Worlds TV series way back in the late ’80s. Not that anybody remembers him from that… I don’t, except as a point of trivia.

Anyhow, if you’re interested in this at all, the official site for War of the Worlds: Goliath is here. It includes a production blog (which hasn’t been updated since April, hopefully not a bad sign), and a gallery of concept art. I particularly like the look the Martian tripod machine. Very creepy…

* Steampunk, if you don’t know the term, is a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy that’s set in the Victorian Age or early 20th Century, but includes technology that’s somehow analogous to late-20th Century levels. It’s also a design aesthetic that seems to be very popular among DIYers and in certain corners of the InterWebs.

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Jul112009

The Call of Sigmund

I still want to address the passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, but given the big subject matter earlier this week, I am hesitant to turn this into the “all obituaries, all the time” blog. Besides, I’m not really in the mood right now to talk about losing more of the familiar trappings of my youth. So instead, I’m going to offer up another item I’ve been meaning to post for a while, an image I spotted at Michael May’s Adventureblog some time ago. It’s probably a bit advanced for laypeople and casual geeks, but it certainly made me smile:

Sid and Marty Lovekrofft's Call of Sigmund

If you don’t get it, start here, then proceed here. And if you still don’t think this is funny after doing your research, well, then, I can’t help you.

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Jul092009

A Little Pick-Me-Up

After last night’s grim entry, I figure we could use something a little more uplifting this morning. At least I could. So here’s a music video I’ve be meaning to post for a few days, a nifty version of one of my favorite songs, the old Leiber and Stoller chestnut “Stand by Me” as recorded by Jon Bon Jovi and an Iranian singer named Andy Madadian. I first spotted this over on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but it’s been making its way around the Interwebs, and I’m proud to do my part to spread it farther. There’s an intro on the clip by producer Don Was that explains what it’s all about; you can also listen to an NPR interview with Andy that gives a little more background.

And now for the music:

As Don Was says, the song isn’t available for sale anywhere, but if you like it, you can download a free MP3 here. I like it a lot myself; I’m frankly astounded by the flexibility of this song, how it can be performed in Farsi of all things and yet still work as well as when Ben E. King laid down the original version all the way back in 1961. They don’t call them classics for nothing, kids.

Hope we’re all feeling better now…

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Jul082009

And Then There Was One

Ever since she was a little girl, my mom wanted to own a horse ranch with a white board fence. Life, of course, doesn’t work out the way we imagine it will when we’re young — that’s a truth I’ve been struggling with myself lately — but she did manage to get an approximation of her dream, at least. There’ve always been horses around the Bennion Compound, even before I came along. When I was a kid, she dabbled a little with breeding her mares. (I learned the facts of life by watching three foals enter the world, and one, sadly, that didn’t quite make it.) And yes, she even got her white board fence, across the front of a hay pasture she and Dad bought from one of the neighbors. It wasn’t Southfork by any means, but it was pretty good for our circumstances.

At its largest point, our little herd numbered five head, three of which were papered Arabians. But that was long ago, and time and entropy have taken their toll. This morning, my parents had to make the difficult decision to have one of Mom’s two remaining horses put down. Her registered name was Misty Dawn, a derivation of her mother’s name — Desert Mist, or more familiarly, Misty — and her sire’s, Dantu (that’s pronounced Dawn-Too, for the record). But we’ve always just called her Dawn, naturally.

Continue Reading…

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Jul062009

Blarg… Mondays…

Have you ever experienced one of those early morning moments when you’re lightly dozing but conscious enough to realize that, somehow, during the night, everything about your environment has become magically perfect? The house is at just the right temperature and ambient light level; the sheets have been washed enough times to have achieved optimal softness, and they’re draping around you wonderfully, neither constricting nor exposing anything; and even the pillow — that accursed crap pillow you’ve never managed to beat into quite the right shape — has morphed into something that actually cradles your head instead of twisting it off on some awkward angle that leaves your neck stiff and achy all freaking day. It’s at those moments that you feel most restful and content. Even better, you know that if you let yourself drop back into full sleep, you’ll easily go for two more hours and awake fully refreshed for the first time in days or even weeks…

And then that damn cheap alarm clock starts up with its insistent, shrill beeping and you know it’s not going to stop bugging you no matter how many times you hit the snooze button and now your bladder is calling for attention, too, and you’ve got to get up because it’s Monday and you’ve got to get to the office and start the whole Sisyphean struggle all over again and the whole time you really want nothing more than to sleep and maybe do some blogging sometime after lunch…

I hate Mondays.

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Jul012009

So Where’s Bennion, Anyway?

I’ve had a couple inquiries from Loyal Readers as to my whereabouts and condition; apparently, the lack of tributes for the plethora of recently departed celebrities (which, as you all know, are usually like catnip for your humble host) has them worried about me. Your concern is much appreciated, folks, but rest assured that I’m alive and doing fine… mostly. I seem to have entered into another of those periods when I’m insanely busy at work, constantly chasing around on the weekends, and too damn exhausted in the evenings to accomplish anything more thought-intensive than shoveling food in the general direction of my mouth. This has been the pattern of my life for several years now — somehow, I’ve managed to land myself in an industry that booms in the summertime, right when most people are finding ways to take it easy — but I still haven’t gotten used to it, and I honestly don’t think I ever will. I’m easily distracted and inclined toward procrastination at the best of times, and when things get like this… well, blogging isn’t the only thing I haven’t managed to keep up with. And I’m feeling pretty damn frustrated about it, too. This isn’t how I used to imagine my life was going to be. It was supposed to look a lot more like this:

Space babe with a cocktail

Glamorous space babes offering me cocktails while I pursue galactic adventures aboard my somewhat phallic-looking rocketship? Yeah, wouldn’t that be lovely… anyhow, I’m taking a mental-health day tomorrow, and among all the other items on my to-do list, I hope to get a couple of those tributes written. Keep your fingers crossed for me…

(Incidentally, more images like the one above can be found here. If you’re into this sort of thing. Which obviously, I am.)

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