Monthly Archives: June 2010

Jun292010

This Makes Me Happy…

…and brother, could I use a little boost these days.

It’s not the greatest rendition of the song, but everyone involved looks to be having fun:

You know, I’ve never been much of a Poison fan beyond their three or four biggest hits, and I’ve never had an opinion about Bret Michaels one way or the other, but for some reason, I find that I was really rooting for him during his recent health crisis, and I’m very pleased he pulled through. Possibly because Bret himself seems to be so damn grateful to be alive. His grin and his good cheer are infectious.

Having a highly public near-death experience certainly seems to have given his career a shot in the arm… he’s turning up everywhere, from American Idol to a duet with Mylie Cyrus on Good Morning, America to a Jimmy Buffett concert. A hair-metal vocalist and Mr. Margaritaville? Or Hannah Montana? Who would’ve ever predicted that?! He’s even scheduled to do a double-bill with my main man, Rick Springfield, on July 31st in Pala, California. Again, that’s not a pairing I ever would’ve imagined, but who knows, maybe it’s one of those “so crazy it just might work” things. Certainly the ladies in attendance will enjoy the male eye candy, or so The Girlfriend informs me. (She likes Bret’s eyes and Rick’s… well, pretty much everything.)

What was it Fitzgerald said about Americans not getting second acts? Wonder what he would’ve made of this one?

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Jun232010

How Do You Know You’ve Done Too Much Proofreading?

You know you’ve been doing too much proofreading when you’re on your own time, outside the office, enjoying a fun little escapist novel about vampires, werewolves, fairies, and beautiful Southern girls who can read minds, and you come across the following sentence:

Since I was very nervous with Sam’s Blackberry, he entered the totals while I counted…

And you find yourself thinking that “Blackberry” should have an intercap B and a registered trademark, like so: BlackBerry®.
I couldn’t have had adamantium claws or the ability to fly or something cool; no, my superpower has to be “attention to detail.” Sigh…

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Jun192010

Friday Evening Videos: “After Midnight — the Michelob Version”

I’ve really dropped the ball with these video entries, and for that I apologize. But just lately I seem to be dropping all kinds of balls, so why should this feature be any different?

Anyhow, what I’m posting this week isn’t a video exactly; it’s a TV spot for Michelob beer that aired in the late ’80s, but it looks like a music video, and it features the guitar god Eric Clapton and a (then) updated version of his classic “After Midnight.” Michelob had a number of similar ads around this same time featuring popular music and an MTV visual style. I have the impression (but no actual knowledge) that it was a successful campaign for them. Certainly, I liked these ads, all of them that as I can recall seeing, anyway, but this was my favorite… it sounded and looked cool, and I just knew that the atmospheric mood of the clip was a prediction of what weekend nights were going to be like when I came of age. Yet another adolescent fantasy that didn’t quite work out, considering I’m currently sitting at home by myself on a Friday night/Saturday morning writing about a 20-year-old beer ad instead of out listening to blues music in a smokey dive somewhere. Sigh… anyway, here’s the ad. Enjoy:

For the record, I know there was also a one-minute version of this ad, but it’s the 30-second spot that I remember seeing the most. There were also Michelob ads featuring Genesis, Phil Collins, and Steve Winwood (I wasn’t able to find a link to that one).

And now, considering that it’s well after midnight, I think I’m going to call it a week…

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Jun182010

Damn Californicators!

Several of the blogs I follow have been commenting on an interactive map doohickey that lets you chart the people moving into and out of any part of the US you may be interested in. Naturally, I selected my home county, and this was the result I got:

As usual, click the image to enlarge it. If it’s not clear what you’re looking at, black lines indicate people moving into the area, while the red lines are folks who got the hell out of Dodge the same year. The heavier-weighted lines represent the number of people moving between any two destinations. One caveat: the statistics used are all two years old.
Notice where most of those black lines — the inbound lines — seem to originate. That’s right, the newcomers to the Salt Lake Valley are coming in the largest numbers from Southern California, thus appearing to validate one of the most enduring memes of Utah folk wisdom over the past couple of decades: the “Californicator.”

Continue Reading…

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Jun112010

Mad Men Indeed

You gotta love the summer season around the old ad agency.

You see, my Corporate Overlords provide us downtrodden minions with a generous boon called “summer Fridays,” i.e., four Fridays off with pay, which you can take at your own discretion, anytime between Memorial Day and Labor Day, workflow allowing. These days don’t count against your vacation time, either; they’re essentially bonus holidays. This particular perk is, no surprise, a very popular institution, but it tends to generate some strange side-effects for those of us who are left at work while everyone else is off, um, summer Fridaying.

For one thing, the office is eerily quiet, because roughly one-third to one-half of the 400-some-odd staffers are out. The building gets pretty chilly, too, without the extra bodies and running computers to warm the place up, and as the day wears on and the daylight outside begins to soften with the onset of evening, the basement cube-farm of this century-old brick pile starts to feel like a set piece from the latest zombie-apocalypse movie.

Then there are toddlers and pets who occasionally make appearances because their folks have to work and are unable to make other arrangements. This can happen anytime, of course, but it seems to happen more in the summer, and especially on summer Fridays, I guess because there are fewer management types around to care. These special guest stars aren’t really a problem, but they have a tendency to wander off on their own, lured by the irresistible mysteries of a post-zombie-apocalypse cube farm. Which means that while I’m sitting here typing this, I can see a tiny Boston terrier/pug mix named after a Cimmerian deity wandering around at the edges of my peripheral vision.

And then of course there are the mental effects caused by the oppressive isolation and loneliness of this depopulated environment. Basically, summer Fridays make those poor devils who are left behind quite insane. A harsh accusation I know, but let me provide my evidence: You occasionally hear maniacal laughter echoing from the other side of the basement. You see random notes in the break room offering free cupcakes, but there is no evidence that a cupcake has even passed within sensor-range of that room for weeks. Assistant creative directors (the actual creative directors are always out of the office on Fridays, both summer and otherwise) putt golf balls down the aisles between the cubicles. And some account supervisors think that a 15,000-word document delivered to proofreading at 4 PM can be finished by 6, or “quitting time,” as we like to call it. Fifteen thousand words, for you lay-people who don’t deal in such things for a living is about 50 pages. Fifty brand-new, error-ridden pages that have never been seen by an editorial eye, and they want it in only two hours…

I just heard another peal of maniacal laughter.

Oh, wait… that was me.

And I just scared the dog away. Sorry, little guy…

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Jun102010

Staggering Insecurity

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Rick Springfield’s upcoming memoir, has posted one of its “Author Revealed” interviews with my main man. It’s pretty meme-ish and inconsequential, but Rick’s answers to three particular questions are indeed revealing:

Q. What’s your greatest flaw?
A. Staggering insecurity
Q. What’s your best quality?
A. Wow, I don’t know if I have one (see above)
Q. If you could be any person or thing, who or what would it be?
A. A better version of me

Not exactly what you’d expect from a rock star who looks as good for his age as he does and who still has women throwing themselves at his feet every night. But that, quite honestly, is part of the reason why I like the guy so much. When I was a kid and “Jessie’s Girl” was on the radio every five minutes, I liked him because I thought he was cool and he recorded music I liked and he was on TV and the girls all thought he was cute. Years later, after I’d rediscovered him and learned where he’d been throughout the ’90s, I liked him because — surprise! — he was a human being with some major frailties, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about them or work them into his music. Moreover, he shared many of the same frailties as yours truly; that “staggering insecurity” thing strikes very close to home for me.

In a weird kind of way, learning that my boyhood idol struggles with his ego and with depression, the same way I do, has been kind of like what happens as you grow up and come to understand your parents as real people instead of omnipotent lords of the household. There is a certain sense that something has been diminished, and that sense is tinged with sadness (at least for me), but your relationship with them is ultimately richer for the discovery of their flaws. You identify more with them because they have been diminished, if that makes sense.

Wow. Did I just say that Rick Springfield is a father figure for me? I don’t think I did, but it certainly sounds that way, doesn’t it?

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Jun102010

I’m Going Down, Down, Down

This morning, Jaquandor points us toward a fascinating graphic illustrating the contrast between the highest and lowest points of our globe — and where British Petroleum’s busted oil well lies in relation to those extremes.

As you scroll downward, you’ll see lots of fascinating trivia, such as the fact that Mount Everest and its companion peak K2 stand well above those wispy, feathery cirrus clouds you see on dry summer afternoons… that Tibet is higher than the puffy cumulus clouds that roll across the sky like bolls of cotton, and that the Saturn V rocket that sent men to the Moon is about the same height as the Statue of Liberty. But notice in particular Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America at a height of 20,320 feet, and the city of Denver at an elevation of 5,280 feet. Keep those figures in mind as we plunge below the waves and follow the “riser,” the pipe that connected the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to the well on the ocean floor before the accident.

The riser quickly descends past the limits of human divers (the “atmospheric diving suit,” or ADS, is essentially a wearable submarine that lets a person descend safely to about 2,000 feet). At 3,000 feet, there is no longer any sunlight penetrating from the surface, but the riser keeps going down. It passes the level of the deepest-diving combat submarines, which is roughly 3,500 feet, and keeps going… down to the failed blowout preventer at 5,000 feet below the surface. The leaking wellhead is as far down as the city of Denver is high. The pressure at those depths is 150 times greater than the atmosphere at sea level. Not that I feel the slightest amount of sympathy for BP — I am heartsick and outraged by what we stupid humans have done to the Gulf of Mexico, and if there’s any justice in the world, BP will go bankrupt cleaning it up — but this graphic provides some invaluable perspective on why they’ve had such a difficult time stopping the leak. Imagine trying to do anything by remote control, in the endless dark and unimaginable pressure. I almost think building a space station is an easier task.

But the amazing thing is that the well itself, the hole drilled by the Deepwater Horizon, goes much, much deeper yet. Deeper than the Grand Canyon, deeper than the range of the deepest-diving whale, deeper than the wreck of RMS Titanic, almost as deep into the crust of the planet as Mount McKinley rises above it. I don’t know about you, but my mind completely boggles at the thought. And there is a part of me — the same part that marvels at the Moon shots and Hoover Dam, the machine-loving part of my DNA — that finds it really unbelievably cool that we silly apes can do something like this, something so gobsmackingly big. If only the risks weren’t so equally gobsmacking, as we’ve now learned…

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Jun092010

Simply Because It’s So Awesome…

Here’s a pic of Kurt Russell and John Carpenter taken while they were filming Big Trouble in Little China:
Kurt and John on the set of Big Trouble

I must confess that I didn’t get Big Trouble when it first came out back in 1986. I’m not sure anyone at the time really did. I remember thinking it was weird and stupid and I couldn’t decide what the hell kind of movie it was supposed to be. I don’t think I understood the plot, as hard as that is to admit.

But then about ten years later, I was introduced to the work of Jackie Chan and suddenly I figured it out. Big Trouble wasn’t stupid at all, at least not in the way I’d believed it was. It was merely ahead of its time. Carpenter had made a Hong Kong martial-arts action-comedy before we folks in flyover country had ever seen one. No, that’s not entirely correct… what he’d done was melded the sensibilities of those HK flicks with his own, specifically by dropping an American action hero and tropes of the American Western, along with a tongue-in-cheek irreverence toward both, into a martial-arts action-comedy to create something wholly unique, a synthesis of two very different — and yet both supremely entertaining — filmmaking cultures. In short, I re-evaluated the movie and realized it was pretty damn cool.

Russell and Carpenter… two of my favorites Hollywood artists. Sadly, both have been in decline for years. But during the ’80s, man, what a combination they made… no less than a latter-day John Ford and John Wayne, in my humble opinion. It’d be awesome if they managed to make one final good movie together; hey, I can dream, can’t I?

The picture came from here, incidentally, a really awesome photoblog that manages to dig up lots of stuff along these lines. Check it out!

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Jun092010

Insidiously Clever

So, I just took a phone call from someone who identified himself as a freshman in the College of Humanities at my alma mater, the University of Utah. I knew instantly that it was a plea for money; I’ve fended off quite a few of them over the years, and I can recognize the signs before the caller even finishes identifying themselves. Yes, I’m one of those bad alumni who don’t give back. I rarely have any spare cubits to give, and, depending on what kind of mood I’m in at the moment they call, I tend to have a somewhat jaundiced opinion of my college education, and of the expectation that I ought to provide the place with any more funding than I already gave during my five years as a student there.

Continue Reading…

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Jun042010

Maybe the Future Will Look Like This…

A few hours ago, the familiar roar of a rocket motor boomed through the humid air of Florida’s Cape Canaveral, but it wasn’t a space shuttle or a military Atlas launch. It was instead a privately owned rocket called the Falcon 9. After an aborted launch attempt earlier this morning, this gleaming debutante lifted off from its pad and streaked skyward without any obvious problems, carrying at its nose a mock-up spacecraft that may shortly replace the retiring shuttles. Behold:
(Stay with it until the end — the stage separation seen from the onboard camera is really neat!)

The Falcon 9 and its Apollo-style counterpart, the Dragon capsule, are designed, built, and operated by a company called SpaceX, which was founded by Elon Musk. You may not know his name, but you’ve likely heard of his other businesses: PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric sports-car builder. Musk’s vision for the Falcon/Dragon combination is essentially to fulfill the promise made by the shuttle development team 30 years ago: a “space taxi” that will offer reliable, relatively cheap access to Earth orbit. Unlike NASA’s various spacecraft that are pieced together from contributions made by many subcontractors, SpaceX keeps everything in-house. The launch vehicle, the spacecraft, and the rocket motors are built by SpaceX itself. And the company is striving for design simplicity by using the same rocket motor — the Merlin, it’s called — on all its launch vehicles, including the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9, and a future heavy-lift vehicle. In the same spirit of keeping things simple, SpaceX plans for the Dragon to carry either cargo or passengers, depending on the craft’s internal configuration, rather than designing separate vehicles for different jobs. Moreover, the boosters and the Dragons are all intended to be reusable.

It all sounds good on paper, at least. And even though I’m sorry to see the shuttle program winding down, I have to admit I am excited about SpaceX’s plans. Musk’s vision sounds workable to me, and I like that someone in the private enterprise sector is thinking about practical spaceflight applications. By contrast, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, as nifty as the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnight technology is, really strikes me as more of a rich man’s playground that won’t lead to much. I hope I’m wrong about that — I’d love to see a sky filled with many different kinds of spacecraft doing all sorts of activities, including recreational ones — but it’s just my hunch at the moment. And anyway, the SpaceShipTwo vehicles Branson has commissioned are only suborbital cruise ships. To truly replace the shuttle, we need something that will aim a bit higher.

SpaceX already has a contract with NASA to send cargo to the International Space Station in 2011; several more test flights are planned through the rest of this year. And there are other private entities looking to fill the gap left by the shuttles, as well, including a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin called the United Launch Alliance and a supersecret venture funded by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. We’re not living in the space-faring 21st century I used to imagine, but maybe there’s a chance we’ll get some version of it after all…

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