I can’t let this long and hectic day end without attending to one final duty, albeit a pleasurable one, and that’s wishing the unsurpassable Leonard Nimoy a very happy 83rd birthday. (He is unsurpassed, in my opinion, despite a new generation thinking his signature character — the logical Mr. Spock — now belongs to a kid named Zachary Quinto. Despite all the fuss people have made of Quinto’s performance as in the Abrams-Trek movies, I can’t see that he’s doing anything more than an impression of Nimoy’s Spock. And Chevy Chase did that much in that old SNL sketch some 40 years ago!)
Sadly, Leonard is not quite as hale and hearty as his castmate, Bill Shatner. “Grandpa,” as Nimoy has taken to calling himself on Twitter, has lately been seen in public toting around an oxygen tank, the consequence of a lifetime of smoking. It saddens me to think of time and unhealthy choices catching up with my childhood heroes, and I sincerely hope he’s not in too much discomfort…
(I also hope there’s a chance he might show up at the Salt Lake Comic Con FanX convention next month, as I suspect I may be running out of chances to meet him…)
I seem to be extra surly today, owing to too much work for the allotted number of hours in my day, and a threatening headache that’s lurking just on the fringes of my perception. Apologies to anyone who’s found out the hard way.
It’s become kind of a silly little tradition — admittedly observed somewhat sporadically — for me to honor the birthdays of two of the greatest pop-cultural icons of my generation who, by a strange coincidence, were born within days of one another. I’m referring of course to the actors William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, best known even after all these years as Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek series… shipmates, colleagues, and, most of all, friends, as these men apparently are in real life as well.
Shatner preceded Nimoy into the world by just a few days, and today he is 83 years old. Eighty-three! So stop whatever you’re doing, pour yourself a cordial glass of Saurian brandy (the captain’s real favorite, before somebody dreamed up that silly Romulan ale stuff for the movies!), and raise a toast to the One True Kirk…
One of the reasons why the character of Superman has endured for 75 years, in my humble opinion, is that he embodies a huge dose of wish fulfillment. All superheroes do, of course, but the Last Son of Krypton is a special case, because he was the first of these characters, and probably remains the most well-known outside the hardcore comic-book community, even with all the superhero movies of recent years. He’s also a special case, I believe, because his defining powers — flight, strength, speed, and invulnerability — are both the most basic and the most universally desired extraordinary abilities that human beings fantasize about having. Who hasn’t imagined being able to stop a bullet or lift a car? Or fly, the ability we all enjoy in our sleeping dreams and envy the birds? Don’t we all want to know what it would be like to fly like Superman?
Well, there’s a very fun little viral video burning up the InterWebs today that will give you a taste of precisely that. The premise of this mini-epic is simple: Supes has gotten hold of a GoPro, one of those tiny, wearable, high-definition video cameras that have taken the extreme sports world by storm in recent years, and is recording his daily activities. I have a couple of little quibbles with the video (don’t I always?): I don’t care for the song that’s been laid over the action, and I prefer the Chris Reeve style of magical, weightless take-offs and landings over crater-generating ka-booms like we see in Man of Steel… but hey, at least this Kal-El is wearing his traditional, brightly colored outfit instead of that drab wetsuit-looking thingie…
Oh, and for the record, I love the idea of Superman doing something like this… he may be god-like, but he’s still, in his way, one of us… and that too is a big part of his appeal…
You probably wouldn’t guess this from my constant prattle about Rick Springfield and all things 1980s, but I’m a big fan of rock and roll’s early period, i.e., the decade between the genre’s emergence in 1954 with “Rock Around the Clock” up until the Beatles arrived in America in ’64 and kicked off the British Invasion. In particular, I enjoy the music of the late, great Buddy Holly.
I think it’s a real shame that Holly is probably better remembered these days for his untimely death in a plane crash — which also took the lives of two other musicians, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens, along with their pilot, Roger Peterson — than for his music. There was so much more to him than his misfortune of becoming one of rock’s very first fallen heroes. In only a year and a half between 1957 and that fatal February day in 1959, Holly charted 12 singles (both as a solo act and with his band, the Crickets), and recorded many, many more, quite a few of which became posthumous classics. That’s an almost astounding level of output for such a short timeframe. In addition, he wrote much of his own material, which was very unusual for that period (Elvis, for example, never wrote any of his own stuff). And Holly was involved in producing his own music, too (another rarity for the ’50s), and was fooling around with ahead-of-their-time methods such as multi-track recording, which wouldn’t really attain fruition until The Beatles’ landmark Sgt. Pepper album. He was an impressive talent, and fans like me have long wondered where he might have gone had he lived beyond the tender age of 22.
So naturally I couldn’t resist the challenge posed by science-fiction writer David Gerrold on his Facebook page yesterday:
Assume you have access to alternate timelines. (The divergences begin anywhere after the mid fifties.) In those alternate timelines Heinlein wrote different books, the Beatles recorded different albums, Disney made different movies.
What are some of the titles of alternate Heinlein books, Beatles albums, and other great works you might find in alternate timelines? What if Buddy Holly had lived? What other artists’ albums or books or movies would you go looking for?
Emphasis mine, as that was the segment that caught my eye. Given my enthusiasm for Buddy, I couldn’t resist replying to that. Originally my intention was just to dash off one or two smart-alecky lines and call it good, but once I started in, the words really started rolling and, well, I ended up with something I’m kind of proud of… just for fun, here’s my alternate history of the life and career of Charles Hardin Holley (slightly revised from the off-the-cuff Facebook version):
After miraculously surviving the plane crash that killed several others, Buddy Holly largely disappeared from public view for an eight-year period of self-reflection, only to re-emerge for a brief on-stage appearance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Backed by the Rolling Stones (long-time fans of Buddy’s), he performed “Peggy Sue” and a new composition dedicated to his late friends, Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson.
Stunned by the overwhelmingly positive reception, he immediately set to work on an album of new material that was widely hailed as a masterful updating of his signature sound. Holly would become one of rock music’s most inventive artists, continually evolving and experimenting. His next project, a collaboration with Ray Charles and other black artists from the world of soul and gospel music, fulfilled his longtime dream of bridging the race gap through music.
Following that, his album of classic pop standards, “All of Me,” liberated him from the rock genre and enabled him to record pretty much anything he wanted.
In the 1970s, he enjoyed a successful run at the Las Vegas Hilton, as well as occasional appearances on television game shows and series such as “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.” The arrival of MTV made Holly nervous — in his words, “Who’d want to look at an old guy in nerdy glasses like me?” — but he became something of a cult phenomenon in the network’s early days. Later in the ’80s, Holly recorded “The Travelin’ Wilburys, Vol 5” with his contemporary Roy Orbison and, with Bruce Springsteen and Willie Nelson, co-wrote a rock opera exploring the plight of the American farmer. His on-stage reunion with The Crickets at Live Aid was one of the highlights of that event.
By the 1990s, when most of his contemporaries were long since retired, Holly was still going strong, writing new music that would be recorded by acts as varied as Madonna, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Sting. As of this writing, Holly, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis are headlining one of the most lucrative concert tours of all time…
Isn’t this just like me? Only last night I was waxing pretentious about writing more substantive pieces and saving the silly stuff for Facebook, so what do I decide to post as my very next entry? A video of a ukulele-playing gamine extolling the awesomeness of beards.
What can I say? As a proud member of the Clan of the Beard for over 25 years now (save that one terrible, ego-crushing week back around 1995 or thereabouts, when I thought I’d “try something new,” like a colossal dumb ass), and as someone who has frequently had to defend my hirsuteness as a perfectly acceptable fashion choice in a highly conservative culture that frowns on too much individual expression (that would be Utah, kids), I can’t help but support the cause whenever I see an opportunity. So, in that spirit, allow me to present to you Molly Lewis and… “The Year of the Beard.” (Keep your eyes peeled for appearances by fellow beardites John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, from whom I ganked this clip in the first place… )
Hey, kids. Sorry to be such a tease, making a big announcement that I’m back in business and then leaving you hanging for several weeks. Evidently it’s going to take me a while to get back into the swing of this blogging thing.
On a somewhat related note, I had hoped to get things put back together around here in time to begin posting new content again by February 14th. That was the tenth anniversary of my very first post, you see, and I liked the idea of my re-entry into the world of blogging taking place on that momentous date. Alas, as you may have noticed, I missed the deadline. I’m just not very good with those things. As the late, great Douglas Adams once quipped, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Still… ten years. Can you believe that? Well, ten years, more or less. There is that little matter of the eight-month vacation I’ve just concluded. But considering that the break wasn’t my idea, I’m willing to call it an even decade if you are. And a decade spent on the same continuous project really demands to be acknowledged, whether you get around to doing it on the proper date or not.
Looking back at a decade of Simple Tricks and Nonsense, I’m painfully aware of its shortcomings. I’ve never achieved the same level as John Scalzi or James Lileks — both of whom were very much my blogging role models in the early days — in terms of either quantity or, to be honest, quality. Those guys have a knack for really saying something in nearly everything they post, and they post a lot. Especially Lileks, whose Daily Bleat comprises 1,000 or more words per day. My own meager output doesn’t begin to compare, even with my occasional “tl;dr” pieces. (That’s “too long, didn’t read,” if you’re not hip to the lingo.)
Of course, those guys have the advantage of blogging in a semi-professional capacity, i.e., their blogs can be considered a facet of their careers (especially in the case of Scalzi, who got his big break as a novelist because of his blog, and who now uses his online presence to promote his fiction). That means they have time to devote to their blogs, and they can easily justify taking that time to do things the way they ought to be done. I, on the other hand, am merely a hobbyist, as much as I wish I could say otherwise, and I have to fit this thing in whenever I can, in between the obligations that come with working for The Man. And as I’m sure my Loyal Readers are aware (based on all my grumbling about it), fitting Simple Tricks into my day has become considerably more difficult in recent years. (It doesn’t help that it takes me so damn long these days to finish whatever I’m writing. I suspect Scalzi and Lileks are pretty fast at putting their thoughts together in some kind of coherent and entertaining fashion, whereas I agonize over every… bloody… word. Years of tapping my abilities for the day job have taken some of the wind from my sails. That may sound melodramatic, but it has been my experience.)
If you’re interested in the numbers, I’ve published 2,385 entries in my decade of blogging. And I suppose that’s not too bad, considering I initially had no idea what the hell I was going to do with this thing, if I was going to find anything to say or anyone who would want to read it, or even whether I’d stick with it beyond the first few days or weeks. Some of those entries are even pretty good, if I do say so myself. A few, anyhow. There have been a lot of dumb time-wasters too. But one thing I noticed as I was working my way back through the archives during my recent troubleshooting: many of the silly activities that used to be such a big part of blogging — quizzes to determine what sort of pasta you are, for example — seem to have migrated over to Facebook, as has much of the social aspect of this medium. (Of course, in my particular case, it hasn’t helped that the commenting feature was out of action for so very long). Linking to articles and items of interest have gone there too, or to Tumblr. In fact, in many ways, blogs seem to have become passe’, that there are other, more efficient ways of doing what they used to be primarily used for. Many of the folks I used to read and interact with have curtailed their blogging activities, or gotten offline altogether. And there has been a lot of chatter lately to the effect that blogging is over, that people no longer have the interest or attention span to read longer pieces (reference the tl;dr slang I mentioned above). It almost seems like there’s little point in starting it up again.
And yet, here I am. Why?
Partly it’s just a habit. Simple Tricks has been part of my identity and my leisure life for a very long time. Being without it for so long was… weird. But also, to be honest, I like writing and reading longer pieces in which I can really spread my wings and tell a story, or think about an idea that’s bothering me. Facebook and Twitter have their place, and I enjoy them greatly for what they are, but they don’t encourage anything of any real substance like the best blog writing. Now, whether or not anybody out there still likes reading these longer pieces… well, I guess I’ll find out. Ideally, I’d like to keep doing this for another 10 years… and I’d like to keep striving toward the goal I feel like I’ve rarely attained, to actually say something with this thing. Or rather, to do it more consistently than I have previously.
I’m thinking I may post less frequently than I did before, and I hope that’s all right with my Loyal Readers. That’s just the reality of the demands on my time these days. But hopefully you’ll be getting something a little more worth your time in return. As for what I plan to post about… well, in some ways it feels like I really am starting all over again. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing in this reborn Simple Tricks and Nonsense. I would still like to take a stab at that recurring feature I suggested so long ago, i.e., reviewing the entire oeuvre of my main man, Rick Springfield. And I have a couple of other ideas for regular features, too. But really I guess I need to do what I did way back in 2004, which was to just jump in with both feet and see what happens…
As I said in the previous entry, I was pretty upset when I realized these pieces were gone, as several of them represented some of my favorite writing for the year in which they were posted. I could maybe reconstruct a couple of them — The Girl with the Gray Eyes and the Ebert obituary, perhaps, and of course the memes — but they wouldn’t be the same, would they? They wouldn’t use the same language, and likely wouldn’t have the same energy as the originals. And I no longer have any idea what I said about my 43rd birthday, or about the impending demise of 35mm film projection, or about that road rage incident. Losing those posts really bothers me because they were essentially diary entries, capturing what I was feeling about those subjects in real time. And my annual Media Wrap-Up for that year is gone because I didn’t save my paper list (Why should I? I had recorded it here!) I’ve got a record of what movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read stretching back over a decade… except for this one year.
It sounds silly to say this about a few blog entries, but I feel a keen sense of loss and not a little despair over this, even now a couple months after discovering what had happened. I can only imagine what poor Hemingway must’ve felt when Hadley told him the suitcase containing all of his early work had gone missing on a train.
And of course I feel like a colossal jackass for not better protecting my work to start with. If I hadn’t gotten lazy about the backups, I’d still have this stuff.
Hello? Anybody out there? It’s good to see you all again. It’s been far too long. You’re probably wondering just what the hell happened and where I’ve been, and why it’s taken so long to get this place back in business again. At least… I hope you’re invested enough to be curious about all that.
The short version is: the old server crashed, data was lost, and it’s taken time to reconstruct everything.
To flesh that out a bit, let me first remind my Loyal Readers that Simple Tricks is hosted by my good friend Jack on his personal server, as a favor to me. About a year ago, Jack warned me that the server was on its last legs and would need to be replaced soon, but he was going to try and keep it running just a little longer, until he was in a better place to deal with it. A little while later, with the server becoming more and more unstable, he decided to lock me and the other bloggers he hosts out of the back-end, to prevent our tinkering from inadvertently hastening the inevitable. That meant we couldn’t post new entries or edit existing ones, or much of anything else, which is why activity seemed to freeze on June 4, 2013, for several weeks. Despite what you may have heard, I didn’t lose interest in writing, guys!
Even with that precaution in place, though, entropy finally won out and the server failed. And naturally it did so before Jack was quite ready with the new machine, which meant none of our precious data had been transferred yet. It’s a cold, cold feeling you get in your gut when you’re told that all of your work for the past several years might be permanently lost in space. Sure enough, when Jack spun up the old server’s hard drive to see what could be recovered, he couldn’t find anything more recent than 2010. Three years’ worth of my blog entries had evaporated when the server died. (I don’t know about the other bloggers who shared the server, but I imagine they were in a similar place.)
But Bennion, you say, surely you had a backup? After all, that’s the very first thing they teach you when you start messing about with this intangible digital stuff, that you always make a backup. Or six. And you’re reasonably savvy about this tech stuff, even with that self-deprecating “analog guy” thing you wear like a badge of honor, right? Right?
Um, yeah. Well, you see… I did have backups, but the truth is… I’d gotten kind of lazy about running and exporting them — it was a manual process I had to think about performing — so the most recent one I had was months old. Which meant that even after Jack had recovered what he could from the old machine and supplemented that with my inadequate backup, we were still missing a year or so of content, everything from March 11, 2012 (“The Best John Carter Quote I Saw This Weekend“), forward.
Lesser men would’ve just shrugged and said “c’est la vie” at that point, but I am, if nothing else, one stubborn bastarddedicated, and I wasn’t yet willing to give up on my precious word-babies. Fortunately, the Internet provides. There’s this website called archive.org, which stores copies of… well, pretty much everything on the web. And it had a snapshot of my lonely little blog as it existed just before it died. Perfect. I was elated.
Then I discovered that archive.org doesn’t provide any easy way to export content so you can just plug it back into, for example, a blogging platform. I was going to have to laboriously copy and paste every… single… entry… one at a time.
And if that wasn’t disheartening enough, I also learned to my absolute horror that some of the archive.org copies were incomplete. In a number of my longer entries, the ones where you have to click “continue reading” to see the whole thing, the “front page” was there — usually just an introductory paragraph or two — but everything that should’ve been “below the fold,” as they say, was missing. And naturally, these were my favorite entries from the year I was reconstructing, the ones in which I felt like I really had something to say and told some good stories. Entries like my rumination about that road rage incident with a guy my father’s age, or my reminiscence about that girl I knew back in college, the one with the gray eyes. My tribute to Roger Ebert, and to the fading magic of motion pictures on 35mm film. The good stuff — or at least the stuff that meant the most to me — all gone, with no further hope of getting it back. And no good idea what happened to it, either. Jack was as baffled as I was. The best theory he had was that something about our server’s particular method of dying had interfered with archive.org’s capture process.
Anyhow, once I reposted everything I could salvage, I had to repair a bunch of formatting that somehow got borked during the transition — spacing between paragraphs, bullet lists, that sort of thing. If you go roaming back through the archives for any reason, you may notice that there aren’t any italics on anything anymore, but I fixed all the big appearance issues at least. You may also encounter some dead links here or there, but the internal-facing ones, i.e., the ones that point back at my own blog, ought to be working.
I still need to see if I can re-upload a bunch of photographs.
But for the most, we’re back. And with any luck at all, we ought to be even better. The blog is running on shiny new hardware with multiple redundancies, and we’re on a whole new blogging platform too — WordPress instead of Movable Type — which apparently causes more headache for Jack, but is much easier on yours truly.
And here’s the big announcement of the night: we have comments again! I invite everyone reading this to drop me a line right now, just to see if the system is working, if nothing else. I’ve really missed the feedback and sense of community that used to exist around this place. Facebook took up some of the slack, but it wasn’t the same as having a conversation right here, attached to the entries that inspired it. I’m looking forward to having those conversations again…
This is a test of the dlvr.it service. This is only a test. Had this been an actual blog entry, this copy would’ve been a lot more interesting to read.
