Archives

spacer

Halloween Meme

I know, I know… I really ought to be working on that recap of my recent road-trip vacation, not to mention a couple of other topics that are growing less timely by the second. But Halloween is fast approaching and I’m having trouble focusing on those other entries, so I’m going to give myself a break and do a quick meme that’s been going around. I first spotted it at SamuraiFrog’s Electronic Cerebrectomy.

spacer

You Just Gotta Deal with the Heat, Man

I’m not a sports guy, so I’m only dimly aware of who LeBron James even is. And I think Nike’s advertising has become increasingly pretentious and unappealing over the last decade or so. Which means this TV spot is nearly insufferable to me, clocking in at a patience-straining minute-and-a-half in length, nearly all of it consisting of James asking variations of the rhetorical headscratcher, “What should I do?” (I know he recently ditched his old team for a new one in what I gather was a very uncool fashion that made a lot of people very unhappy, so the ad actually comes across — in my eyes, at least — as a childish “screw you” to his former fans, which doesn’t seem like an effective way to sell overpriced sneakers. But as I said, I’m not a sports guy, I really don’t understand LeBron’s situation, and I’m not the target demo for this ad, so what the hell do I know?)

However, there are ten seconds in this drawn-out pile of hokum that are actually really cool, from about 0:56 to 1:06. Take a look:

It always brings a smile to my face to see one of my old fictional friends, and I thought this little cameo was exceptionally well done, recapturing exactly the right tone and world-weary nobility in only a few quick brush strokes. Of course, music helps immeasurably. For the record, that is the authentic, original series music playing in the background. Just in case y’all aren’t enough of a fan to know…

spacer

Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall Were Married to Merle Haggard?!

Well, that’s what you may think reading the following photo caption from a story about the legendary country singer Haggard:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

You see the problem there? The way the second sentence is punctuated, it appears that Merle’s ex-wives are named Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. Anything’s possible, of course, and I’m certainly an open-minded guy about such things, but I tend to think it’s more likely the caption writer meant that the documentarians interviewed two ex-wives, as well as Kristofferson and Duvall, for a total of four people interviewed. But that writer is apparently one of the type of people I bicker with almost daily, the ones who think the serial comma is an outmoded and overly fussy affectation favored only by grammar snobs and professional pedants. I wish I could just let such arguments go and say that it’s their business if they want to live dangerously. But I’m afraid such things are actually my business. I’m a proofreader, you see, and I’m all about preventing misunderstandings that conflate two innocent women with two grizzled celebrities. Behold, and see the difference a simple little comma can make:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson, and Robert Duvall.

Now, was that so difficult? There really is no excuse for putting up with a major case of ambiguity simply because you don’t like the look of an extra punctuation mark in your sentence, or because you’re too lazy to punch that key one more time, or whatever the reason is. I’ve heard them all, and none of them fly when it comes to plain old-fashioned clarity.
Serial commas, people. They were invented for a good reason.

Via Jeff Weintraub, who agrees with me that serial commas rock.

spacer

And Now, For No Particular Reason…

It’s the legendary character actor Peter Lorre… with cats!

Peter Lorre and friends

I don’t have much to say about this, it just warmed my heart. I can almost hear him saying in his distinctive voice and cadence, “Yes, that’s a good kitty, you don’t despise me, do you? Not like that nasty Mr. Bogart…”

I pulled this from here, an excellent photo blog that comes up with a lot of wonderful and rare images of all sorts of mid-20th century subjects. If it’s a dark and rainy Saturday morning where you are, as it is here, and you’re looking for something to do for an hour or three, give it a look…

spacer

Janice

Loyal Readers may remember a lengthy two-part entry I did a couple years ago about a neighbor I had when I was a kid, a cantankerous woman who was justly infamous in our neighborhood for her unpredictable temper, and who carried on a territorial pissing match with my parents — well, mostly with my dad, if you want to get technical about it — more or less continuously for a couple of decades. More recently, my folks and I watched as she fell increasingly under the vile grip of Alzheimer’s Disease before finally being institutionalized by her children. I wrote at the time:

She’s not The Crazy Lady anymore. She doesn’t seem to have any memory of the feud, or all the screaming, or all the threats. She doesn’t remember throwing garbage over our fence into the pasture, or having my dad throw it right back. She doesn’t remember playing petty games with the irrigation water, or recall my dad turning her in to the city council as a nuisance because of the way her goats smelled. She’s a different kind of Crazy Lady now, a sweetly confused old woman with skin tough and leathery from years of working under a hot sun, who believes my father’s ’56 Chevy Nomad is her first husband’s station wagon and that I am a high-school senior with my whole life ahead of me. My parents and I have all had trouble wrapping our minds around this change of paradigm, but Dad has done the best with it, I think.

I never would’ve have wished this fate on anyone, not even my father’s mortal enemy, but it’s hard to know how to feel about this development. I spent so many years fearing and disliking The Crazy Lady that it’s hard to now see her as an object of pity. It’s like the sudden deflation that came with learning that Darth Vader, the scariest creature in the galaxy, was just a crippled old man.

My feelings haven’t changed much since I wrote that. To be perfectly blunt, the woman was a royal bitch throughout my childhood and teen years. Everyone on the street feared her and did what they could to avoid her. I didn’t like her one bit. But nobody deserves what happened to her. Nobody.

I learned yesterday that my neighborhood Crazy Lady — Janice was her name — passed away the day before, Tuesday, October 19. My parents have heard that, in the end, she didn’t recognize anyone, not even her own children. Her mental dissolution was complete. It’s an image that fills me with existential horror, and a great deal of compassion for a fellow human being that lost one tiny piece of herself at a time until there was simply nothing left. There are very few fates lying in wait for we fragile creatures that are more unjust, more terrible, more frightening, or more pathetic than that.

But then I read in her obituary that “She did everything she could to help in the correct development of her children,” and my bleeding heart scabs over as I imagine the scene my parents have often described for me: Janice chasing those same children around the front lawn, in full view of the whole damn neighborhood, wailing on them with a broom handle. I was only an infant when that happened, too little to recall it personally, but I have my own memories of her kids down on their hands and knees, plucking weeds from the lawn on the hottest day of the year while their mother stands above them, hands on her hips, like a stereotypical southern prison guard lording it over a chain gang in a bad exploitation flick. And it’s such a creepy phrase, isn’t it? “The correct development of her children.” Sounds like something a vicious schoolmaster might say in one of those plucky-underdog coming-of-age stories. Only Janice’s kids didn’t turn out to be David Copperfield or Harry Potter. In fact, I happen to know that at least two of her daughters worked as strippers for a time. Which makes me wonder which of the children wrote that frankly bizarre bit of spin and how they could do it with any kind of straight face. Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps?

I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead or of her survivors, but my feelings toward this woman remain so very muddled. Perhaps the best thing to focus on is something else I wrote in that entry two years ago, the larger position the woman I used to call the Crazy Lady occupied in my little universe, and the most important thing — to me — that her death really signifies:

The Crazy Lady is the last of the neighbors from my childhood. To the north, Mac, the nice old town doctor’s widow who lived next door to us, who knitted me Christmas stockings when I was little and who was the other victim of Alzheimer’s I mentioned, has been gone for years; Mr. Stephensen, the grandfather of my old buddy Kurt and who claimed to have known Butch Cassidy as a boy, has been gone for years longer; and both of their houses were bulldozed a decade ago. To the south, Jack and Rae are both long dead, too.

 

I don’t expect to ever see The Crazy Lady again, certainly not alive. And when she’s gone, a big part of the town I knew growing up will go with her. There isn’t much of that town left, these days…

And just like that, an era comes to a final, definitive end. For whatever it’s worth, I do sincerely hope my former neighbor — and her long-suffering children, as well — have at last found some sort of peace. They certainly didn’t have it when I was a kid.

spacer

Too Bad I Already Have a Halloween Costume

I’m still settling back into my non-traveling routine — i.e., the one that does not involve sitting behind the wheel of a rented Chrysler 300 for hours at a stretch while a never-ending montage of Midwestern novelty unspools on the other side of the windshield — and a proper recap of my trip is going to take a while to compose. But I worry my Loyal Readers may suffer if they have to wait too long without any Simple Tricks and Nonsense to occupy their minds, so here’s a little tidbit I ran across just before I left… allow me to present the ultimate Halloween accessory, the Rick Springfield Costume Wig!

The Rick Springfield wig -- the perfect Halloween get-up!

Available from EveryCostume.com, the Rick Springfield wig is described thusly:

Knock’ em dead and show Jessie’s girl that you’re the one she wants. The Rick Springfield Costume Wig features black, wavy hair with messy bangs. This 80s singer shag is chin length and features thick, full hair. Made of synthetic hair fiber, this men’s costume wig is ideal for your 80’s character or rockband singer costume. One size fits most adults.

I guess your place in pop-cultural history is secure when ironic hipsters can buy a cheap nylon copy of your signature hair style, eh?

spacer

And We’re Back

Comments returning in three… two… one…

Blogging to resume after I do some laundry and pick up some bread that doesn’t have green fur growing on it. See you all soon.

spacer

Hitting the Road

Well, The Girlfriend are off on another adventure in the morning… we’re going to Cleveland!

Seriously, we’re flying to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we’ll rent a car and then drive for a week through southwestern PA and into Ohio, finishing up in Cleveland and flying home from there. It seems like a strange vacation itinerary, I’ll admit, but maybe it will make more sense if I explain how it came about.

One of the gifts I received for Christmas last year was a DVD compilation of performances from the induction ceremonies for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 25 years of awesome jam sessions in which all the greats of the genre — The Rolling Stones, U2, Tina Turner, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Roy Orbison, and on and on and on — play each other’s music together. It’s a great set if you like classic rock music, just insanely entertaining. Anyway, the DVD includes a brief featurette about the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the museum itself, which is located in Cleveland, OH. One night, after watching this little five-minute feature, I turned to Anne and remarked that we ought to pick a weekend and go see that place. She wasn’t opposed to the idea, but thought it was a little silly to spend two days on airplanes just for a single afternoon at a museum, so we started looking into what else was in the area.

At some point during our research, Anne mentioned how she’d envied me seeing Gettysburg with my buddy Robert a couple years ago, and I remembered from that trip that the Lincoln Highway, the precursor to Route 66 and very first nationwide highway, ran through the area, so now our museum weekend was a road trip with Gettysburg on one end and the Rock Hall on the other. In short order, we learned that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was nearby, and most of the sites where one of our favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, was filmed, and there was a lot of nifty stuff in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. And suddenly it all came together, the Great Pennsylvania-Ohio Lincoln Highway Road Trip of 2010. And, as an added bonus, we’re going to be there right in the middle of the fall colors. We didn’t plan it that way, but we’re really looking forward to seeing it, especially as fall can be sort of a mixed bag here in Utah. Some years are gorgeous, others rather drab. This year is trending toward drab, unless you’re up at the top of one of the canyons.

Anyhow, we have an early flight tomorrow morning so I’d better wrap this up and get to bed. One quick administrative note: I’ve recently been deleting something on the order of 20 pages of spam comments per day, so rather than deal with an entire week’s worth of accumulated garbage, I’m just going to shut off the commenting feature while we’re gone. If you have something really important to tell me that can’t wait until after the 16th, feel free to send an email to jason(at)jasonbennion.com.

Finally, credit where credit is due: that excellent graphic up there at the top comes from a t-shirt I ran across a while back; you can view and purchase it here, if you’ve a mind to. I thought seriously about getting myself one for this trip, but Anne and several other people discouraged it, and I reluctantly agreed it was probably just borrowing trouble to wear something like that to the airport. Man, would I love to do it, though! All the intrusive, inconvenient, and ultimately pointless nonsense we have to go through now just to go to fly to Cleveland, and the fact that we’re all so thoroughly cowed by a bunch of minimum-wage-earning TSA rent-a-cops that we self-censor our t-shirts, utterly disgusts me. In a very real sense, the terrorists have won, and I don’t say that to be a smart-ass or a self-loathing, America-hatin’ liberal. I really mean it. We’ve changed our behavior, as a society, because of them. We’re less free because of them. And isn’t that what they were after all along?

I’ll see you all in a week. Be excellent to each other while I’m gone…

spacer

Homemade Lamborghini for Sale — Cheap!

One of the dirty little secrets of the car-collecting world is that a sizable percentage of the antique and exotic automobiles you see running around are not, in fact, the real thing. They’re reproductions, “kit cars” consisting of a replica body made of fiberglass or, in some cases, aluminum, which is then mounted to a frame from a much more common vehicle. For example, fake Ferraris are usually Corvettes beneath their flashy exteriors. The reason for kit cars is obvious: either the originals cost too much for average mortals who nevertheless want to own one, or there just aren’t enough of the originals around to meet the demand. That’s the case for the Shelby Cobra, which was manufactured in very small numbers, as well as for the early-1930s Ford coupes that are still favored by hot-rod builders (think ZZ Top’s Eliminator car), but which are pretty hard to find these days because of time and attrition.

Unfortunately, the kits can be pretty expensive, too. So imagine you’re a guy living in a small town in northern Utah for whom even a kit car is out of the question, but who still desperately wants to own a Lamborghini Countach. Maybe you’re a big fan of The Cannonball Run, or maybe your secret fantasy was always to be a 1980s coke dealer in a baggy Armani suit with a skinny neon tie. Who knows? What would you do to realize your desire?

Well, if you had access to a welder and a stack of sheet metal, you might try building your own. And if you did, the result might end up looking something like this:

spacer