Well, I just seem to be puttering away here today, don’t I, posting up my little bits of nothing? Here’s some more, courtesy of Lileks:

[Back to the Future], which I still think is a perfect little thing, was made in 1985. Marty was sent back to 1955. If they made the movie today, he’d go back to 1977.

 

Think about that. 1977 would look like today, minus computers. Same clothes, same Pink Floyd tunes on the classic rock station, same smear of gimcrack commercial architecture interspersed with stalwarts from the 20s. Color TV, Star Wars, angry Iran. Marty could order a Pepsi Free in 1977, and they’d think it was a sugarless brand they hadn’t gotten yet.

How’s that for a scary thought? I, and I daresay most of the people reading this blog, are now the age of Marty McFly’s parents in Back to the Future, a movie that came out when we were about Marty’s age.

This actually parallels an equally scary thought I had the other day: in Back to the Future II, Marty travels 30 years ahead to what is, to him, the fairly distant future. That distant future was the year 2015… which is only eight years away from us now!

On the positive side, maybe this means that self-adjusting sneakers, hoverboards, Mr. Fusion, and the Cafe 80s aren’t very far away. That would be nice…

I’m not exactly what you’d call an “early adopter.” I don’t own an iPod or a TiVo, I’ve never seen the point of having a PDA when a good old notepad works just as well, I only upgrade my cellphone every four or five years, and I’ve wouldn’t begin to know how to BitTorrent a movie. However, I’m thinking I need to get one of these new-fangled iPhone gadgets. It was the condiment-dispensing feature that sold me:

Via.

I swiped this image from Danger Room. Why? I dunno… I just thought it was funny. Consider it my contribution to that lolcat thing that’s been sweeping the interwebs lately.

(If anyone would like to come up with a suitably bizarre and/or funny caption for this in order to make it a true lolcat, by all means, be my guest.)

Sometimes, it’s really hard for me to wrap my head around the truth of just how old I’m getting to be. Maybe that’s because I spend so much time writing about my younger days on this blog; keeping my memories stirred up all the time tricks me into feeling like the year 1987 isn’t all that far away.

At least it doesn’t seem very far away until I really start thinking about what was going on in 1987: Ronald Reagan was in the White House and Margaret Thatcher was living at Number 10 Downing Street; the Soviet Union still existed; the Berlin Wall divided east from west; Iran and Iraq were at war with each other; the names “Gary Hart,” “Donna Rice,” “Jim Bakker,” and “Jessica Hahn” were all over the tabloids; The Simpsons were just short interstitial segments on The Tracy Ullman Show; the Fox Network had just started operation, and 21 Jump Street was its most popular show; and Richard Marx and Tiffany were two of the biggest musical acts in the land. Viewed in that light, 1987 suddenly seems pretty damn distant, doesn’t it?

Here’s one final salvo to really drive the point home: I’ve gotten word that my 20-year high school reunion is coming up this fall. It’s going to be held at The Depot, a really nifty night club located in the old Union Pacific train station at The Gateway, on September 8th. There’s a website with all the details here; it includes a feature where you can leave some info about what you’ve been up to for the past two decades (it’s free, unlike that other reunion-type website you may have heard of).
I happen to know that a number of my fellow Bingham Miners read this blog, so if any of you are still in touch with any of our other classmates, spread the word, will you? And go let everybody know what you’ve been up to! (Besides reading my humble blog, of course…)

On Saturday, The Girlfriend and I attended a family reunion/celebration in honor of her maternal grandmother’s 90th birthday. The following items are just some things that occured to me as I sat in a public park on a sweltering hot day:

Continue Reading…

This is a little after-the-fact, but I just got the news this morning:

My old school chum Keith Jensen and his wife Danielle have welcomed their second child into the world. It’s another daughter, Cailee Brynne Jensen (nicely Celtic name there, guys), born May 22. The statistics are as follows, for those who are into that sort of thing (Anne, I’m thinking of you): 7 lbs., 6 oz., 20 inches long.

Mother and daughter are both fine. Congrats to the whole family, and I hope life in Jersey isn’t getting you too down…

Best headline of the week: FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

The article is actually about the Feds’ efforts to stop cybercriminals who hijack home computers to use in their nefarious activities (such computers are called zombies by those in the tech biz), but damn, for a second there, I was having visions of Elliot Ness in a George Romero scenario, and wouldn’t that be cool?

A couple of random factoids about my dog’s cancer treatment that I found amusing and/or interesting:

• In order to administer the chemo drugs, the vet, of course, needs to shave the injection site, which is located on the leg. The course of treatment will run long enough that the vet will need to use several different injection sites to avoid discomfort and/or problems for the dog, so all four legs will end up with shaved spots. Apparently, however, the fur won’t grow back at those spots. I don’t know if that’s a side effect of the drugs or something to do with dog physiology or what, but, assuming he survives the cancer, Shadow will have permanent “battle scars.” I have asked my folks to try and convince the vet to line up the shaved bits. It will drive me crazy if my dog ends up with asymmetical bald patches.
• The vet is obtaining the chemo drugs from the Huntsman Cancer Institute, one of the preeminent cancer research and treatment centers in the country, which is conveniently located at the University of Utah here in Salt Lake. Which means that the drugs used to treat dogs with cancer are the very same ones used on humans who have cancer; they just dial back the dosage to account for the differences in body size.
  I don’t know why that surprises me, but it does…

For anyone who cares, my dog Shadow had his first chemotherapy treatment this afternoon. According to my folks, he was a bit lethargic for a few hours afterwards, but otherwise has shown no sign of side effects from the drug. He’s eaten normally and drunk lots of water and became quite active towards evening, just the way he always does on a hot day.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that his treatment consists of two separate drugs, and the one he received today was the milder of the two. He’ll get the industrial-strength version on Saturday, so this weekend might be another story when it comes to side effects. But for now at least, my parents and I are all feeling much more optimistic about this process…

We’ve had a lot of dogs around the Bennion Compound over the years. At one point during my childhood, there was a pack of five roaming our back yard. They’ve been German shepherds mostly, or German-shepherd mixes, as well as a couple of random mutts. All of them have possessed unique personalities, and my parents and I have loved them all while they were here and mourned them all when they died.

But none of them have generated the strong sense of attachment we collectively feel for the dog you see in that photo above. That’s Shadow, the current canine member of the Bennion clan. He’s a full-breed border collie, a breed that is reputed to be only slightly removed from wolves, genetically speaking, and among the very smartest of all dogs.

Continue Reading…