Archive for the ‘Domestic Life’ Category

I am backstage at this place:

It’s around the corner from this tableau in my beloved Minneapolis:

It’s a trick – the two tall buildings in the middle-ground aren’t the same size, and the slender tower in the middle is taller than the buildings on the right. Yes, Sunday was another gig at Orchestra Hall, the thirty-somethingth time I’ve done this. En route I realized I’d forgotten to wear a belt. I took that as an omen.

Sure enough: the first time I mentioned a composer, it was the wrong one (script was wrong) and when it came time to introduce an actual living composer, he was nowhere to be found. We were supposed to have an interview on the stage. Much dead air. Huge, elephantine, loud, dead air. I went to Plan B, which consisted of “not interviewing the composer,” and on went the show. If this had happened the first few times I did this, I think I would have soiled myself, but long ago this just became loose and fun, and today was fun. Waiting now to take my bow.

Odd weekend; nothing was normal. Friday we had company over, so the usual pizza routine was SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, and roll-with-the-punches-guy I’m not, this was a trial. Yet I managed. Somehow I got everything done for the website, and ended up watching “The Wrestler” until that hour of the day F. Scott Fitzgerald postulated was the constant time in the dark night of the soul. Moral of the movie: save your money, and don’t try to date strippers. I liked it a lot, inasmuch as something this downbeat and grim can be enjoyed; mostly you marvel at the ravaged, putty-faced bulked-up actor, who took the name of the long-gone actor “Mickey Rourke” and made a stunning debut. (Unless you believe that was actually Mickey Rourke. Hah!)

Looking for the exact Fitzgerald quote, I found a page of epigrams. Such as:

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

I couldn’t disagree more. Well, I suppose it’s so for some, but for others they are the level plains from which we can see new ideas approach, and old ones recede.

Hmm: a bit clunky, but I get the point:

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

So many of his quotes sound like a drunkard’s regret, no? You can sense the man forcing his spiny sadness into the tiny lacquered box of a maxim. But he’s right; whenever we remember the past, we always forget to take something along: ourselves. We live each day with our own problems and hopes and doubts; why imagine it was different then?

On alkies:

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Well, he’d know. I remember once I was walking towards Times Square at night, and saw a young man in a tux leave a restaurant. He was heedless of all, gloriously smashed; he ranted and sang and yelled and staggered towards the bright lights, listing and tripping without ever planting his mug on the concrete. It was like watching a rocket out of control. Crowds parted. He may have ended up in the river; his last thought might have been ah jeez, I fell in the toilet.

This is the famous one:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

I don’t agree. The test of the first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, favor one, and not let it cloud your ability to understand the other.

This is the other famous one:

There are no second acts in American lives.

Tell that to Steve Jobs. Or Mickey Rourke.

Here’s the quote:

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

See, I like 3 o’clock in the morning. For one thing, it means I’m going to sleep, with much done or observed or thought or said. Granted, three o’clock in the morning is grim business if you’ve been drinking beer since noon. But if you’re working the overnight shift at the restaurant, it’s the hour when you have the place to yourself, the moment between the last mutterings of the previous day and the first stirrings of the next. To rule 3 AM is to rule the world – and at 3 AM the world is quite pliable, and amused by anyone who wants to take the scepter.

I like Fitzgerald – he’s a local boy, after all, and Gatsby was a North Dakotan. (Or so rumor had it.) I still think John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarra” is a better novel of the 20s – “Gatsby” floats over its era, “Samarra” walks alongside. Fitz is always seen as a Symbol of the Jazz Age, because he was glamorous, his wife went nuts, and he cracked up, dying a beer drunk. But O’Hara was more typical of the people of the era: he went on working as best as he could with the tools that he had.

In the end, Daisy Buchanan was a bore, and Gatsby was a fable. You can read all the Doomed Romantic Notions you want into it, but remember the scene where they drive through the hellish burning ash-mounds en route to Manhattan? Turns out it had a second act of its own. And a third.

Saturday night we went to the History Theater to see some theater about History. It was a Gala Event, a fundraiser for a local hospital, and through my wife’s job we nabbed two seats at a table stocked with High-Powered Lawyers. You know it’s not a normal event when there’s an iron lung in the theater lobby.

Those things terrified me when I was a kid – the idea of being stuck in a metal tube all your life, probably in the living room, pooping in bags and watching TV upside down through a mirror: shudder. I grew up after the great Polio Scare; all the symbols of the polio panic (March of Dimes PSAs, matchbooks that had pictures of little girls with crutches) had faded away, but the horrifying power of the Iron Lung remained.

The main event of the evening was a play, of course, but first: dinner. I found myself seated next to a smart couple – he was a lawyer, she taught religion at a local college – and halfway through the conversation came that moment every writer lives for, the ol’ Dawning Realization. Turns out they were Constant Readers, to use the King term. As is often the case, they had no idea there was also a website. (Hi, guys! Hope you have fun exploring.)

The play was quite good, even though it had 12 child actors. It was the life story of Sister Kenny, who turned standard ideas of polio-treatment on their heads. Don’t immobilize; move the limbs. I knew nothing of her, and had assumed she was a Mother-Theresa-type nun moving through the ward in a wimple, hunched with humble piety, her name attached to the hospital because she’d set up a place to succor the stiff and the lame. Whoa no. First of all, “Sister” was a rank in the Australian nurses corps, and second, she was one of those force-of-nature types who brooks no nonsense, rails against the establishment, et cetera. She was played by the best actress in town, Claudia Wilkins, and the play was so well-staged you didn’t care that there were 12 child actors. I mention that only because some people find child actors to be unbearable no matter how good they are; you have to overcome your initial instinctive dislike of kids who are so obviously good at lying.

The tricky part? Dealing with the movie version of Sister Kenny’s life, where Rosalind Russell played the tireless, tempest-toss’d scold of ossified medical theories, and lotsa romance was thrown in. The tagline for the movie: A woman made for love . . . but whose service to humanity became her destiny! Sorta kinda yeah, but no. The play more or less said SHE WAS A LESBIAN, OKAY? It broached the subject with a scene of recollection whose pathos was so sharp it managed to make its point despite the booming detonation of chestal coughs from three different locations in the theater.

And now the week begins; gird up, get ready. New glasses on Tuesday. Yes, I will post pictures. It’s a whole new look.

Finally, I’m starting to see again. Went to get my head examined, subset eyeballs, tonight; all is fine. No chancres in the macular area, no glaucoma, the latter fact proved by an ultrasound exam. Yes, they ultrasounded my eyes. I’m carrying twins! The amount of sheer Technology thrown at me this visit was surprising; last time it was the hated puff-of-air in the eye, followed by a slow, tendentious exam: better? Worse? Same? Is it safe? This time I had the breeziest eye doc ever, a fellow with a line of patter and figures of speech that flowed like water from a spring. He could have sold me a car while he was at it.

But like all eye exams, the diagnosis consisted of a contradiction of the previous diagnosis. It’s all subjective, it seems, an art form, and every time I get my eyes checked the doctor questions the previous prescription. By my estimates I haven’t had the proper prescription for a DECADE, and 10 years ago I was fitted with glasses that were supposedly too strong. Never quite noticed the downside there. Oh, folks appeared as walking skeletons, sure, but otherwise no problem.

Anyway: I did the eye exam. I got the drops. I had the ultrasound. I peered into a camera that scanned my eyeballs for something or other. I had pictures taken of my optic nerve, splashed up on a monitor for my entertainment: here’s your nerve, here’s the gutters that transfer the information to your brain, here’s your macular part. Bad news: high pressure in the eyeball, which could be a precursor to glaucoma. Gosh, doc, what are the symptoms? He said: not many symptoms, unfortunately. You just go along, la da dah, then uh oh. But that’s when he gave me the ultrasound, and said “ah,” and sat down to explain: I had thick eye-walls. Most people have eye-walls that are 500 to 550 microns thick; mine were 650 microns thick. This distorted the eyeball pressure readings.

“Is this peer-reviewed stuff,” I asked, “or something the salesmen for the ultrasound machine say?” He assured me it was actual science. Other things he told me: the eyeglass racket is concentrated mostly in Italy; they own most of the brands. I could get the frames online for cheaper, and there was an advantage – they’re cheaper! – but here I paid for fitting and measuring and guarantees and not having to mail things back, and so on. And so on. Here’s the thing: the guy liked his job. He liked his work. He liked people. Garrulous, funny, ironic, and knowledgeable. (When I mentioned the high price of frames, he said “The prescription’s the technical part,” he said; he jerked a thumb towards to the door, indicating the showroom beyond. “Out there, it’s the jewelry store.”) Got in right away. Flat fee for the job. High-tech diagnostics. Perfect. I’d be wearing my new glasses now, except that -

Well, he was going through the various options, and made a long involved analogy between anti-reflective coating and chrome rims on a car. “You can’t see them. They don’t make the car run faster.” He shrugged: whatever you want; some people like the chrome rims.

“I’m in TV broadcasting now,” I said, amending it to ward off hubris: “On the internet. But we have lots of light on the set.”

I went with the chrome rims.

The salesguy said the frames looked good on me! but I had to ask if he ever told anyone their choice looked stupid.

“Oh yes,” he said. “But not like that. Maybe, like, oh I think this might be a better look.” But if Madame wanted a push-up rhinestone spangled bra and Madame wanted to pay, he’d write up the order. He got out a little machine that fitted over my eyes and did something, and wrote down some numbers. Took my insurance: it had a 25% discount! But the store was having a 30% sale. He recommended the sale price. I said that would be fine.

In seven to ten days, a new look.

Wonder if anyone will notice.

Busy day all around; didn’t get to posting the Black and White World. It’s below. Column night; I also spent a lot of time just talking with my wife, which cut into evening work – and, I watched an old “American Experience” documentary (available on Netflix streaming) about the crash of ‘29, with interviews of old cackling men who were on the trading floor when it all ended. We never learn: every boom ends with the patter of shrapnel.

Bleatplus is up. Here’s a taste to get you, yes you, to contribute to the site and get your password:

I found this at the antique store last weekend, along with several other old labels, examples of commonplace commercial design, the way the world looked. Remember how I’ve lamented how the details of ordinary life are mostly lost – the scents, the signs, the slang, the sound? When I was in the store’s basement I passed a booth where the seller was arranging things, and caught a strong tang of a bygone aroma. Stopped: whoa: what? She winced and said she’d dropped a small sample bottle of men’s cologne. It broke; the scent escaped. It was like the ghost of Dads Past – piney, astringent. It had a brief moment in the air before the ventilation system inhaled it and sent it away. For a moment, there it was. That’s the curator’s curse: the past is in the bottles. But you can never bring yourself to crack the seal. It takes an accident to catch a whiff of the truth. And then it’s gone.

Tomorrow: Sears 1934, Comic Ads, a column . . . and a surprise. I think. See you then; have a grand dat!

Child had an early piano lesson this week; afterwards we went to Perkin’s to eat. I did not take my iPhone.

“GOOD,” she said. “You always have your head down in that thing and you don’t even look up to say hello when I get off the bus.”

“That,” I said, “is an exaggeration. It happened twice and you called me on it both times. How many times have I been smiling and waving when you get off the bus, and I get nothing? Bupkis?”

“What’s bupkis?”

“Nothing.”

“Well it’s like you’re obsessed with your iPhone.” She picked at her quesidilla. “I don’t think you should get an iPad.”

“What? Why?”

“Well it just looks like a big iPhone and you have one.” Takes a bite. “It’s a waste of money.”

“I will not have you speak about Apple that way.”

Rolls eyes.

“It’s just a computer and you don’t need another computer. You have, like, a dozen.”

Good Lord. I don’t even get this from my wife. We have an understanding: she does not complain about occasional technological upgrades (the last of which was 2 years ago) and I do not point out that her clothes and shoes occupy 79% of the closet and drawer space in the house.

“It’s not just a computer. It’s a different machine. When you’re grown up this is the only sort of computer you’ll know. Besides, it’s a book reader. Lets me carry books and things around.”

“I like real books,” she said.

“So do I. But I always – listen. Back when I was in college in the previous century I carried around a big bag, and it had everything I needed – a book, about ten copies of magazines all smushed in the bottom, fountain pens, my journal, and it was a pain to lug it around. I’m even tired of carrying my computer around and it weighs five pounds.”

“I think you’re just saying that because you want it.”

Couldn’t really argue with that. So we talked about cartoons we couldn’t stand but that she used to like, cartoons we always hated (Ed, Edd, and Eddy is back on TV, but Rolie Polie Ollie isn’t: the world has gone mad) and the problems of the Pokemon stories. I imitated Xx, who always sounds like the guy who voices Nelson Muntz trying not to be Nelson Muntz. “‘I’m walking in a forest to get to Sapphire City where we can go to a gym and train Pokemon! Meanwhile I’ll keep them squished in a dark cold ball until I let them out so they can fight other Pokemon until someone faints.’ And what does Brock do, anyway? Why doesn’t anyone have a job?”

A year ago she would have given me the hairy eyeball; now she grins and says “I know.”

She likes talking about these things, of course. It’s, er, validating, and we can Bond. I imagine if I’d talked with my dad about Tom Swift it would have been the same, but in those days Fathers occupied their own stratum of popular culture. We discussed the “Back to the Future” movies, which she’d recently seen. Loved the first, liked the third, hated the second. HATED it. But was interested by it. Bifftown was horrifying but fascinating to her, but Biff just wasn’t dumb and mean, he was EVIL, and that made the movie much different. Her favorite character was Marty. Who was yours?

Besides Jennifer #1, decked out in high-80s garb and hair? “Doc Brown,” I said. Great Scott! ONE POINT TWENNY ONE JIGAWATTS! “

“Yeah.” Grins. “But Marty’s mom in the past was kind of a pervert.”

Oh my look at the time. I picked up a triangular slice of quesadilla and hummed the Imperial March and said “It’s an Imperial Star Cruiser” and then attacked it with two french fries made into an X-wing fighter. PEW PEW PEW. Poured some salsa on it. “Oh look everyone on the bridge is dead.”

This sent her into stitches: salsa standing in for Imperial bridge crew in Dead Form. Got us off Mom-as-perv, anyway. That was possibly the best reaction to anything I did all day, and damn, it was full: did the Newsbreak in the morning, and since it was Groundhog Day I ended the show, then started it right over again with the same script, but with a vague sense of deja vu. I’m not an actor so the concept of “act like you’re having deja vu” is something you just have to . . . Do, and hope it works. Then we reset the studio and did an interview with two reporters who did a huge fantastic story on a Minnesota National Guard unit in Afghanistan. They’re on the sofa, I’m in the Host Chair, and once again, I get that Krusty-the-Klown-seriously-interviewing-Lane-Kirkland vibe, but what can you do. Then I ran upstairs, wrote the headlines, did the quick headlines intro for the Newsbreak. Lunch: a pathetic sandwich and a warm Coke. No time: have to finish the Ringo story.

See, Ringo wore a T-shirt on the Grammies, and it had a logo of a local record store. Shot the record-store part yesterday, as I said; today we interviewed his relative, the guy who sent him the shirt. He works in the building. Alas, the fellow decided at the last minute he didn’t want to do it, since he had not volunteered his role in the first place and was really not interested in getting this out there with his name and face and all. Quick huddle, quick rethink – did a walk-and-talk in the office, employing my favorite trick: walking backwards WHILE talking. Whoa! It’s here.

And that was that.

And this is this; more later, with Out of Context Ad Challenge coming your way around 10 or so, with Black and White World to follow.

Topic for discussion: cartoons today are better. Or worse. It’s hardly fair to compare everything to the golden age of Warner Bros., no? I grew up with Frankenstein Jr., and the rest of the crap-batch turned out by H-B. Better stuff since then? Oh yes.

I went to a “head shop” today, as they were once known. Did a story on a record store whose T-shirt had been worn by Ringo Starr on the Grammies. Now, Ringo + Grammies pretty much encompasses the sum total of Things About Which I Care Very Little, so I had some fun; in the stand-up introduction, I described Starr as “a percussionist for a popular ‘rock and roll’ emsemble” as though it was 1963 and I was addressing Rotarians in Peoria. The store was exactly like the stores of my youth – creaky wooden floor, bins thick with records making the soft wooph-wooph-wooph as you thumbed through the selection; a smell of colitas, rising up through the air. Or at least aromatic sticks designed to mask the smell. It was unnerving to see records again, to say nothing of records from the 70s and 80s. I don’t miss them. Arranging records in your collection was what we did before we got computers and could change the tags and album art in iTunes.

I did buy a T-shirt, though: a black number with the angry face of the RED OWL. Turns out the Red Owl fell out of copyright, and a local artist snatched it up; the reconstruction of a Red Owl store in town for the Cohen Bros’ latest movie was also involved, somehow. All I know is that I’m pleased to wear the Owl. He had a steely vengeance, that one; you could imagine him flying into a rage, landing on Piggly Wiggly’s face talons-first while Piggly squealed NOT THE EYES, NOT THE EYES, and all the Scottish supermarket mascots watched, leaning on their sticks. A fine haggis that’ll make one th’ owl’s done.

There were many Scottish supermarket mascots in the 60s – still one in Moorhead, which has the crappy CashWise Scotsman. Isn’t a bit like having a Jew as your mascot? Schlomo the Shekel-Pincher says “Oy, Such Bargains!” Oh, I forgot: Jews are cheap, but Scotsman are thrifty. Riiiight. Got it.

Wonder if there’s a flickr pool for Scottish supermarket mascots. Well, there’s this; give it time, and someone will ask if he wants to join the Scottish Supermarket Mascot Pool.

Anyway, it’s too fargin’ cold to wear a T-shirt.

The shoot was fine, but while I waited to set up I heard a cover of “Pump It Up,” and to my surprise a sad slow cover of “Up the Junction,” by Squeeze. About time, I suppose. They also had a counter of hip-because-it’s-like-old candy:

The Idaho Spud! Venerable. Also Chick-a-Stix, which I will always recall from Childhood as having a special place in my confectionary repertoire. Get this: because my dad ran a gas station, he had a candy machine, and because he had a candy machine he had to go to the warehouse to stock up. I remember it as Candy Valhalla, with crates stacked to the ceiling with every possible variety, from Milky Way to Zagnut to Zero bars to Seven-Ups. They gave me a Chick-O-Stix as a way to say hey, kid, just as the bank handed out five-count Life Savers to kids who came with their folks. It’s amazing the memories that can be welded in place with the solder of sugar, no?

That was half the video. The other half will be done tomorrow, when I interview the guy who gave Ringo the T-shirt. Works in the building. Is Ringo’s nephew.

Really.

I promised a few Hunt & Gather Antique Tableaus, and heaven forfend I welsh on that. Sorry: Indian-Giver on that. I don’t know if this is a preacher doll or a 1965 surgeon waiting for his gloves so he can get down to surgerifying:



He has a mate:




Maybe it’s a set; My First Phreneologist collection.

A big table with an ancient painted bread ad:



Bread-wise, it’s much derided, and often seen as an example of EVERYTHING that was wrong with post-war food – ersatz bread, pillow-soft, imperishable. But it was actually a 30s invention, and was a marvel of modern technology: Bread That Time Itself Could Not Spoil. No wonder they had an enormous building at the ‘39 World’s Fair.

Well, look what I found:



It’s this. Turns out it didn’t have a real keyboard, but a printed one. Criminey, what a rook.

Never underestimate the aesthetic power of a drunken cowboy and his oversized ceramic dog:



I know I’ve posted this one before, but they still haven’t sold it, and it makes me laugh. What all the internet thread-jackers who yank a thread left or right for their own obsessive needs are slathering on their hair today!



If you’re wondering whether the antique store has a wide variety of ceramic 50s letters used to spell out things like PERRY MASON, ATTORNEY AT LAW, well, yes:



Later today: things! Stop back.

Too many pictures today; sorry. But a good weekend always produces many pictures, and this was a good weekend. Ever have one of those weekends where you spend an evening color-correcting public-domain footage of the 1939 World’s Fair and applying motion stabilization, and then you think hey, why not edit it down and set it to music, and you get out the keyboard and then it’s 1:45 AM? Yes indeed. But we’ll get to that later this week.

Sunday I needed to get out of the house – anything to get away from the computer. Went to the Mall to see if Macy’s had shirts on sale; by some odd turn of events, they did. Standing at the register I heard the clerk tell a customer that he’d have to look up the UPC code. When it was my turn I said “UPC code is sort of like ATM machine, eh? I say it all the time myself.”

He laughed, then got a look that suggested I had actually said “frim-frammin at the joss-pot, wang-danging with the nibble-pincher, eh?” Perhaps I had. It’s cold out. Then I went to Eddie Bauer, where they had the first sure sign of spring: all winter coats SLASHED. Pity, because then the stuffing falls out. Hah! Hah! Oh, I’m a regular caution. When the coats are half off, the season has changed in our favor. The downside is the loss of summer clothes in July, which is a dagger to the heart. But that’s years away.

Then I found some new glasses at a store: finally. New frames. I can’t wait. Whole new look. (The brand name is “Titanium,” which makes me certain they’re plastic, but it could be that special plastic-metal the Soviets used for their civilian medals. And while I thank you for the offer, do not give me any suggestions for buying glasses online. I have enough trouble getting the proper fit and prescription with stores staffed by actual people, and the place I’m getting my eyes checked has a discount if you buy the frames there.) It’s a black frame without the old outdated hipster-thick aspect; they’re actually Ray-Bans, which for me still have residual retro cool from their 80s resurgence. Timeless as car fins. Or as car-fins ought to be; I’m still surprised no one ever thinks to bring back fins. It’s almost as if the designers think they’d be lectured for socially-inappropriate automotive designs. Oh, you want the Fifties back, do you? With racism and sexism and everyone smoking indoors and McCarthyism? Sigh. Yes, of course.

I don’t know why, but I watched “Back to the Future” Friday night. Four TB of media to consume, and I choose an old movie I’ve seen a half-dozen times. As I said on the Twitter feed, it makes one feel a bit . . . old to consider that Doc Brown was headed for the year 2010 before he was waylaid by LIBYANS, who were the gold standard for terrorists back then. At the end of the movie he says he’s heading 30 years into the future, so we still have five years to develop hovercars and Pepsi Perfect and self-drying jackets. It’s amusing to see the things the movie got wrong about the future.

Payphone banks. And . . .

Of course, we probably will have some newspapers in 2015, but it’s interesting how they assumed that OF COURSE there would be newspapers. (I recall thinking how cheesy the paper looked; it resembles a novelty paper they’d make for you at Coney Island. YOUTH JAILED – there’s a headline written by someone with lots of newspaper experience. It’s like a story about a bus crash with the headline BRAKES APPLIED.) There are also dot-matrix fax machines. They got the wide-screen TV right, but otherwise they missed the whole “computer” thing about the future.

Ah well. The one thing that really sticks out in the 1985 vision of Hill Valley? The main street movie theater is a porn house. Somehow in a town of that size with such a compact downtown . . . no. Don’t think so. At least downtown was thriving; usual, since it was apparently within jogging distance to the mall. In five years they could, and probably will, do a reboot, but it won’t be the same; the cultural divide between 2015 and 1985 is a crack in the sidewalk compared to the gap between ‘85 and 1955.

Also watched an unusual movie called “What A Way To Go,” part of the last gasp of pre-Boomer-uber-alles overculture. Mad-Men-era confection with boffo production values and a broad sense of comedy that looked very dated very quickly, but now looks charming and almost surreal. Shirley Maclaine, pre-insanity, plays a lovely young lady who marries poor men for their good heart, only to have each one transformed by her love into a go-getter who meets an untimely end and leaves her tons of money. She goes through Dick VanDyke (store owner), Paul Newman (arrogant, pretentious American painter in Paris) Robert Michum (ultra-suave industrialist) and finally Gene Kelly, who plays a dancer and a crooner. And there’s this guy:

Kelly handled the choreography, and achieves something quite clever: he sends up his own style.

What had been Powerful and Full of Yearning in “Singin’” and “American in Paris” was played for laughs here; Kelly overacts – overdances? – just enough to let you know he’s winking at the conventions this time. Somewhere in this routine is a young Teri Garr dancing in the background; she would have been about 16. (She’s 63 this year.) Maclaine’s really good, too. Anyway, after Gene Kelly’s character is offed, and she’s left with a mere $211 million, she consults with his attorney about building a mausoleum where “Pinky’s” movies will be played in perpetuity.

It’s a Vulcan Brothel! Somehow it makes me very happy to see the most banal manifestations of the International Style dyed pink. Miami Beach FTW!

God help me, I have a soft-spot for those 60s structures now. Plain as they were they have a certain technocratic charm; you can hear the IBM tape-drives whirring in the offices. They’ve aged better than anything from the 70s, and much of the overly “whimsical” post-modernism from the early 80s. (Although I have always loved the AT&T building, and I don’t care what the serious critics said. After 30 years of flat tops, that thing was necessary.)

Sunday I also went to Hunt and Gather, the greatest antique store in the world; bought many matches, and some 1920s can labels. It’s a museum as well as a store; there’s no end to the interesting kitsch-bits you find.

Mickey wears underpants! Who knew! Ah, but that’s tomorrow’s Bleat. Monday Matchbook later; see you soon. BTW: I believe I’m caught up on my Bleatplus mailings; if you have not gotten your codes – assuming you contributed, of course;) – email lileks at mac dot com with the subject line HEY DILLWEED. Thanks!

Everything was off-kilter this weekend. Pizza – on a Saturday! It just got worse from there. The naps were off. I had no modern movie to watch after labors were done. Didn’t have Taco Bell with the Giant Swede, but something else entirely. What’s more, Saturday errands did not stop at Walgreens, which meant I didn’t pick up the Totally Natural Urville Hackenbacher (compare to Orville Reddenbacher!) microwaved popcorn supply for the week. Of course, I already have enough stockpiled, but the point of having a stockpile is not to use the stockpile. So it was with great relief I had a reason to head to Walgreens Saturday night in the rain, listening to the most beautiful piece of music ever written. But we’ll get to that, too.

Why the drugstore? Because there was goop on the track in which Ace’s hamster wheel rests. He had the runs while, well, running, which meant that he was flinging it hither and yon. But the fact that he had the runs was DIRE, since this meant wet-tail. As I said in a tweet, all webpages about hamster ailments should just play a midi file of Chopin’s Funeral March when they load. Wet-tail is apparently caused by stress, and you might wonder what sort of stress a hamster has, aside from being taken away in a box and put in a cage tended by giants. There’s a medicine called “Dri-Tail,” and half the websites say it works and have the websites say it don’t. What is it? Xanax? A few sites said the dehydrating effects of blurtage were the contributing factor to hamster demise, so pedialyte would be good. That’s why I got in the car at 8:30 PM to go to Walgreens. Bought the house brand (Compare to Orville Reddenbacher!) and drove home. Lethargy, they said, was a bad sign.

Ace was not lethargic; he was running all over, and he greatly enjoyed the fruit-flavored nectar. If he makes it two days, then he’s in the clear. They say.

Enjoyed this bit of boingboingery on the culture of the past and the maroons who don’t care about the same things I care about. That’s not an entirely fair summation, but it often comes down to that.

There’s always something to disagree with, some line that seems a tad too . . . humid for the topic, and it’s this:

It isn’t their fault that they’re ignorant of the cultural riches of the 20th century. Big media has kept them in the dark so they can spoon feed them “pre-packaged, pasteurized entertainment product”.

Now, now.

Everyone has a bete noire they can shove, bleating, into this pen. It’s racism! Poor education! Politics! The Hippies! And so on. (For the record, I don’t blame racism. On the other hand, I blame Hippies for everything.) (Just kidding, but some days, yes.) In this case it’s Big Media Establishments – but obviously these works were put out by Big Media as well. In the days when the studios owned the movie houses you couldn’t get any more monolithic, and it’s not like the pop-culture magazines of the day were paragons of incisive cogitation.

But it is their fault; nothing keeps people from being curious. The past is never more than a click away nowadays.

This weekend I watched another 30s musical, “Hollywood Hotel” – details later in Black and White World, natch – and the final sequence had an orchestra playing a real orchestra number, not one of those “hey, let’s make the longhair stuff really swing” routines.

Many of the commenters get hung up making any sort of artistic distinction, as if it’s all good – except for the stuff they don’t like – and it’s deeply unfair to post-punk thrash-core Christian Crunk to say Benny Goodman was “better” than Sid Vicious. But fans of this stuff at the time weren’t equally respectful of the records of the early 20s, which sounded as timid and lame to their ears as Victorian music sounded to the ears of the Flappers. Here’s my theory: every musical genre moves towards complexity, requiring greater skill and talent to compose and perform, reaches an apogee of power, grace, and beauty and then it falls apart. Three guys with a lute and a saxebut morph over time into a Mahlerian symphony; then it’s atonality and serial music and the rest of the unlistenable shrieks of the early 20th century. (Yes, I’m being judgmental, but not one person in a thousand wants to listen to that stuff.)

Jazz: same thing, although here I step into murkier terrain; lots of smart jazz “buffs” who are “in the know” and would love to go back in time so they could sit in dim clubs wearing shades and smoking cigarettes while a talented heroin addict pushes his jagged psyche through a metal instrument, well, they find great aesthetic pleasure in the hard post-swing jazz forms. I don’t. I’ll admit it: part of the pleasure of art, for me, is inseparable from its pursuit of beauty. This doesn’t mean sweetness and light: some of the best of Bruckner or any other Romantic composer comes from its most despairing, terrible moments. (Often with hellish dissonance.)

Anyway. So I’m driving to Wallgreens to get juice for an illin’ hamster, and turn on the radio. It’s playing . . . The Blue Danube. Now. You may think: hardcore American jazz you don’t like, but the ultimate bucket of schmaltz, you do? Says it all. I understand. I see your point. But we hear this piece today and think of “2001,” or we just think of the first part, which has become a cliche. But listen again, and note how it keeps changing, how every new section fits perfectly with the last, and seems inevitable. Keep in mind it’s also dance music. I can’t hear it without imagining some fin de siecle ball full of Austrian royalty, spinning around a mirrored ballroom, a social order at its height, utterly doomed.

But then there’s this.

As for why there’s “pop culture amnesia,” I blame the Boomers. Every generation thinks they’re stuff is the new stuff and hence the best (and sometimes they’re right) and everything else is Herbert and L-7, but the Boomers’ boundless capacity for narcissism and self-aggrandizement, coupled with their eventual control of the reins of popular culture, added up to the idea that history began when they started to grow underarm hair and the Beatles formed. On the other hand, no one was expected to be literate on all these things before; it’s as if the availability of an easily-accessible archive of past pop-culture creates an obligation to be informed. It doesn’t. But it’s a lost opportunity if you don’t.

Anyway. Later: Monday Matchbook. Tomorrow: more website tweaking; still working on this template, which is Mine ALL MINE. Question: what’s the old-style pop-cult thing you think people should know about?

The doorknocker for Jasperwood is a commanding annunciator; even a Girl Scout sounds like the Gestapo. The sound penetrates the dog’s old ears and produces mad spasms of canine alarum: someone is here and it is not pizza. (He knows when it’s pizza, because the time for eating comes and goes and no preparations are made; when the checkbook is produced and a check laid on the radio by the door, he knows for certain, and paces, whining. At least that’s how it used to be; now, like everything else, I pay by plastic. One click on the website, and the quatloos are briskly whisked from my account. If no money seems to change hands these days, it has the overall effect of making it seem like there is no money.) When the door was knocked and the dog barked I was upstairs, listening to my daughter tell a story she’d read in school. It kinda creeped her out.

Basic guy-alone-in-a-place-with-mannequins story. Did – did I just see that one move? AIEEEE! (thump) “He’s dead. Looks like . . . a heart attack.” While she told the story I was reminded for a second of the dream I had this morning – a wretched tale with lots of perfidy, but one amusing wrinkle. I’d called directory assistance. The process was now entirely automated; no longer did a human come on for a second, say “here’s your number” and toss you to another robot lady. All robots all the time. But this robot was gruff, no-nonsense, like a 1940s cab dispatcher, and halfway through the number he said “hold on, there’s some guys here with guns.” Then there was the sound of a struggle, and gunshots; the robot voice came back and gave the last few numbers and the address in his dying voice. Then the phone went dead.

I thought: brilliant! Directory assistance as entertainment. Is there anything that can’t be turned into entertainment, really? If you try hard enough?

When I opened the door I saw a fellow from TPC. You know, TPC, the most insidious corporation ever:

Yes, TPC. The Phone Company. Overwrought movie, but the end sequence is clever, ad Pat Harrington’s quite fine.

Anyway, when I saw him, I thought: I’ll take the upgraded plot-driven directory assistance. But he said he was here to ask if I was interested in upgraded to fiber-optic.

“Do you use the internet a lot?” he said.

Hell yes, I’ve been downloading a torrent of Avatar all day – 260GB in Imax form. Sure could use a speed bump! Wish I’d said that, just to get a reaction, but I said I had occasion to use the internets from time to time and yes, sign me up.

It took a while, what with all the Federal regulations put in place when TPC was split and competition roiled the land, and people were slammed from one carrier to the other: a third party had to verify that I was who I was and I was doing this of my own free will. He called someone, somewhere, who read back my customer info (after asking permission to access it, of course), then said the salesperson did not have access to my personal data, and should not have mentioned it or asked for my social security number or credit card information, and had he done any of those things?

“Hell yes,” I said, “and he hit me up for fifty bucks.”

The salesman practically did a spit take, but it was laughter. The fellow on the other end of the line, who’d been repeating the same script all day, seemed to grab on to this moment of rare, dangerous levity like a galley slave who glimpses a patch of sun through the roof of the ship. But THIS CALL MAY BE MONITORED FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE, so we were back to business. While waiting for the order to take, I chatted with the salesguy: he was new here. Four months. Hated it: cold. His house had been broken into, over in West St. Paul. People were smiley up-front but it wasn’t genuine. (He was originally from Long Island.) I said I preferred insincere civility to honest jerkhood. Then we argued about pizza. New Yorkers and their pizza. Honestly. Give it up. You have the best of so many things; pizza is not one of them.

So now I have to wait a week, then it’s blazingly fast internet! That’s the new standard: blazing! It’s like any piece of software that has a nice design: it’s stunning! Yes, this interface is so nice you will be momentarily unable to access data from your various senses.

Ordinary day – did the NewsBreak, which is starting to get nice ratings. Blogged. Wrote. Now to write a column. While I’m busy, here’s the opening credits for The President’s Analyst – notable for a few reasons. One, the music: it’s Lalo Schiffren. He’s always cool but this is the sort of music that gives me hives; it’s so very, very sixties in its orchestration, it winky with-it mod WOW flavor. The flutes. Always with the flutes. the daba-daba voices, the harpsichord. In a way this is more typical of Sixties culture than a long bleary psychedelic album; few listened to that, but millions heard this style in movies, TV, commercials. It’s every style of the era in one opening sequence – goes from something like the Jonny Quest theme to an “Odd Couple” riff to fuzzed guitar in 20 seconds.

Two: the white building in the background says ALLIED CHEMICAL, and I wonder how many people under, say, 20, might know what it was. And is. It might be the largest, most famous empty building in New York.

Back. Damn: column blew up halfway through when I got a different idea. Well, we’re all the better for it. This week’s Black and White World is posted below. Technically it was posted on the day I said it would be posted, so LAY OFF. Also, because I forgot to call attention to it, some additions to the 1930s site, here: magazine covers. The World’s Fair site is in the pipeline and ready for its February unfurling. I’ve laid out the 1930s magazine ad site, and it rambles on for 50 pages, so that pushes back the 20s and 70s sites to mid year.

Made a vindaloo Tuesday night, and it got its aroma into every corner of the ground floor. The dog must be in awe of my ability to conjure such epic smells; it must be like living with a Zeus who periodically creates life or changes the channel on the TV with thunderbolts. A smaller Zeus, granted. He’s been quite frisky after supper, demanding walks – when the temps were 20 below, he’d go out, feel his nose freeze, drill a hole in the ice then pad carefully through his ruts to the back steps. Now that we have tropical temps tickling the roof of the 20s, he wants to go out and pee and smell and examine his world after dinner, and woe be those who do not jump and fetch the lease. A year ago he had trouble getting up the stairs at the end of the day; now he lopes up after dinner and stands in the bedroom yelling at us while we change from work clothes to slumpy home clothes: TAKE ME OUT. So one of us does.

Reminds me of my grandfather, in a way; he liked to go out and see the crops. On a summer Sunday when we went to the Farm, he’d drive out to see how the crops were doing, a trip that inevitably included the School Land and the Flax and the Barley. The last two are self-explanatory, of course. But the School Land? From what I’ve learned, they set aside land for schools when they laid out North Dakota, and whether or not a school was actually built on the plot, it was known as the School Land. The only school in the area was to the east of the Farm, across the river, by Harwood proper. My father went there until he had completed 7th grade, and then it was time to go to work, and then to war. I still wonder if today’s 7th grade dropouts know enough math to run a business and fill the back of a placemat at Perkins with tables of figures calculating what’s owed and what’s coming in.

Grandpa would invite me, and my cousins, to tour the crops. I had no standard of reference – couldn’t tell if they were stunted or average or high as an elephant’s eye, but I remember sitting in the back of the car, broiling on the plastic seats, bumping along the county road, Grandpa in the front seat with a fedora on his head and a grasshopper on his shoulder. The hopper only made one appearance, but I never forgot it and have since added it to all memories of Grandpa in rural driving mode. A big green hopper on his shoulder, motionless, along for the ride.

A plain, straightforward man, I think. Always had time to amuse the grandkids. Loved Jack Benny. Smoked Old Golds; had a favorite lighter and a favorite floor-stand ashtray. Stood at the window on Sunday nights and waved goodbye, just as my dad – his son-in-law – stands in the driveway now and waves goodbye when I leave. I suppose there’s a time when you turn away before the taillights disappear, and a day when you decide to wait until they’re completely out of sight. I don’t remember the last time I saw him, but I know where I was when I heard he’d fallen, and died. Had to drive home from college and get a funeral suit. The man who measured me had fitted all the men in the family.

Grandpa was the only man I ever knew who wore a hat.

The dog doesn’t, so that’s where the analogy falls apart.

Meanwhile, Ace the Hamster has learned how to get into his exercise wheel. Found his way up the ramp, then ran around for a few miles. Interesting creatures: every so often he’d stop to see if his exit route was still open. It was. I know the programming for these critters is rather basic, but he’s still smarter than my computer when it comes to threat detection or escape-route maintenance. I walk up to my computer with a rock and shout random gutteral utterances, it does nothing; if it’s been 15 minutes, it goes to sleep. A hamster knows to head for the corner of the cave and act like it’s dead and rotten and not tasty at all no sir.

Otherwise, elsewhere? Good day, although the idea of getting up when it’s dark and talking to cameras a few hours later still seems like I woke up in someone else’s life. After work I fixed my wife’s garage door, took my daughter to choir, went to the grocery store, and did not call 911 to report an elderly lady had fallen backwards. That happened last time. While at the self-checkout I heard some people make a sound that says “something’s wrong, and we are uttering phonemes instinctually.” I saw an old lady on the ground. She’d gone down and hit her head; blue around the mouth. There was an instant assumption of duties – another shopper bent down to see if she was okay, I hit 911 because I already had my phone in my hand, the manager got a roll of paper towels to cradle her neck, and a stockboy headed outside to flag the EMT. It rolled before I finished beeping and bagging my stuff and the paramedics were trotting in before I left. She was talking and smiling and – of course – apologizing for the fuss, dear. I hope she’s okay. Still amazed at the speed of the response; the sirens were drawing near as the light returned to her eyes and the color flowed back to her face.

/////

Otherwise, the following. First of all: I sent out all the BleatPlus emails Tuesday night. As far as I know, that is. If you contributed and didn’t get one, please email me, and use the subject line HEY DILLWEED so I can search for the term and fix the sitcheration.

Second: don’t be expecting too much right away from this BleatPlus thing; it’s not a super-hyper-premium extravaganza with streaming video or invitations to a buffet dinner; it’s just, well, stuff – some of the boundless ephemera destined for a place on the site some day, posted in advance. As I said: at least 35 updates per year, with the content remaining behind the paywall until 2011.

Spent the free time tonight writing a piece for pay, so this naturally suffers. But Wednesday will have a rich assortment of fun – Out of Context Ad Challenge around 10:30, after I’m done with the newscast, and B & W world in the afternoon.

Could I be ANYMORE stupid. I sent out a few hundred emails today with the BleatPlus codes, and forgot the URL. GAH.

It’s here. http://lileks.com/bleatpls10

This message will be repeated all week, because I am a MORON. Good thing I didn’t go into pharma-spamming.

I don’t drink soda with sugar, because it’s just a lot of calories I would rather absorb in alternate forms. But i do remember Mountain Dew’s AWESOME impact on society, long ago; it tasted like nothing else. It was like they had somehow combined Coke and 7-Up into something utterly unknown to humans heretofore. Alas, they used hillbilly-shills to push the stuff. Perhaps they wanted a Beverly Hillbillies cachet; perhaps they wanted to suggest, with sly winks, that it was a good mixer for your corn ’shine. Because the idea of barefoot rustics with one-holer crapshacks and inaccurate muskets didn’t really say “new and improved.”

But now it’s old and improved, temporarily – complete with hillbillies.

The stupid part: they used a 70s font for “throwback,” because it’s all retro ‘n’ stuff, and I guess anything prior to 1994 is now considered an undifferentiated pile of retro-mush.

Well, I believe in clear clean lines of demarcation, however artificial they may be. When I do a site on the 30s, by GOD it starts in 1930. One of the additions I’ll be adding over the weeks is a musical playlist, with hits from each year. If you’re curious: here.

Huzzah, hurrah: Didn’t have to go to the office today. I had the kind of day I used to have before I was retasked, as the horrid word would have it, to a new job. Holy crow, such multitasking. The scanning and the writing and the cleaning and the deep-down sorting. The house contains any number of ongoing miseries that need arranging or purging, and the opportunity for ruthless triage comes infrequently these days. It’s hard to tell yourself to attack the box of tangled AV cables deep in the basement when you could be scanning; goes double for cleaning a top shelf in the kitchen.

But: if you start each job, then do something else when you get bored, and rotate among them, you can get it all done. So I am the proud owner of a drawer of cables tied with wires, placed in labelled bags. And here’s the thing:

I will never need any of them. EVER.

Everything comes with cables, that’s the problem. You swap out one cheap old DVD player for a newer model, you use the old cables. Right? But you can’t throw away the old cables, because they might come in handy in some theoretical future where you have to set up six DVD players STAT. You can’t throw away old Firewire cables, even if they’re as thick as a garter snake, because the interface might stage a stunning comeback! (Garter snakes, by the way, were friendly okay snakes that didn’t kill you – when you saw one in the backyard as a kid someone would scream SNAKE and someone else would pshaw the panic, saying aww, it’s just a garter snake. We had no idea what a garter snake was, but it seemed to be the generic term for such creatures. Don’t see them anymore. Perhaps it was my Fargo neighborhood’s proximity to the end of town, but we had many more snakes and frogs. The latter was particularly plentiful – I’ll never forget jumping off my porch steps on a fine summer day, full of the joys of youthful freedom, and landing right on a frog. If you think stepping hard on a ketchup packet makes a mess – oy. They were squeegeeing that fellow off windshields up and down the block. He didn’t know what hit him, of course; frogs lack a frame of reference for such things, and I doubt they have an oral tradition passed down for millennia about the Sudden Judgment of the God Foot. The frog has two basic states:

Am

Not

But I miss the sound of frogs in the summer. As I said, we were close to the edge of town, maybe 12, 14 blocks. North Fargo did not wander out and fade into the fields – it stopped cold as if it hit a wall, then oozed along it on the river side. The presence of a smelltastic sewage treatment plant may have had something to do with that, but years later they’d push north and build a few apartment buildings, so apparently the aromas were not as flesh-flensing as we’d thought.

For my entire childhood the town just ended. I wonder how this affects the way you think, how you see the world. In big towns it’s just a long slow smear, and you’re twenty miles into the country before you realize you’ve finally left the bricks behind. There were signposts and demarcations and landmarks that said YOU ARE FINISHED AND DONE WITH FARGO and beyond here be barley.) So I tossed most of those.

The cords, remember? Then there’s the plugwarts, the big transformers for things I cannot remember using, but may possibly need tomorrow . . . or not. Out. In the end I had a trash bag of useless cords, but had saved innumerable thin white Apple-product cords, which will come in handy if I ever want to open a European bondage club for lab mice.

Halfway through the day my daughter came back from a sleepover with three friends, so I got to watch over the giggling trio while I cleaned and polished and sorted. It was a day that seemed to have been lifted whole from a year or two ago, and I relished every lovely minute; I welcomed back every old habit and tradition, felt a small amount of mastery over the cornucopia of Stuff, and . . .

Well. I shouldn’t say anything, because this project looks to be a mid-summer thing, but it’s big. It’s insane. It involves going back to parts of the site that haven’t been updated since 1997. BTW, the first batch of BleatPlus emails went out today, and I hope they work. Everyone will have been notified by the end of the week.

And now to watch “24.” Or not – usually there’s a Monday ep after the Sunday premier, right? Checking . . . ah. Yes. According to the previews, Starbucks is still showing up for work in a cocktail dress, and we do indeed have a low-level plot-flunky we all want dead, soon, painfully. I don’t know why I still watch, because experience has taught me it’ll be a shadowy cabal of fat-necked Amway distributors in Omaha who are behind the Sarin gas attack on the Saudi oilfields. At least we got the “arrest Jack Bauer!” moment out of the way early on; hope that’s the last of that. Really: at some point I fear there will be a moment when the President is asked to consider whether Jack has changed sides, even though his dossier says he has steadfastly pursued the miscreants without a moment’s thought to the cost of his own hide for the last eight cases, and has been accused of doing the rogue thang at least twice during every case. In a sane world they would give him a bag of guns and a million dollars and a fistful of uppers and say “You just go on now and do what you want.”

If someone wants a daunting project: spice together every Jack Bauer “dammit!” into one long sequence.

LATER today: Comic Sins, of course, and some stuff over at the StribBlog, and Newsbreak. Heck, just go to startribune.com and hit refresh every ten seconds. Have a grand day!

Saturday we got a hamster, and the woes began. Natalie had done all her homework, and written pages of note about care and feeding; she went through dozens of names, including Zelda, of all things. She said she would love it and pet it and feed it and pay for it all with her own money, and all the other things kids say when they are desperate to leverage every possible reason to sway the stony heart of a parent. But I’d surprised her right away. She’d expected the dreaded “we’ll see,” which means “probably not,” and said I was leaning towards yes, but of course we’d have to check with Mom.

Mom thought it would be a good lesson in responsibility too. So Saturday they came home with an enormous box – the cage – and a tiny box, with the hamster. She named him “Ace,” which met with my hearty approval. Good snappy American moniker, that. Ace. I set about assembling the cage while she watched him scamper around his box.

The cage had more tunnels than the Gaza border. It had a rooftop exercise wheel accessible by a ramp, which looks super-cool but is ill-suited for acrophobic hamsters. I made sure everything was sealed tight, because if Ace escaped it would be tears and wails, and it would be my fault – hold on, why the tears and the wails?

He bit me, she said. Actually, no wails, but a little bit of moist disappointment. She knew this might happen, but it was still contrary to the imagined sweet hamster-love the YouTube videos seemed to suggest. I told her that puppies bite all the time when you first get them, and kittens try to scratch your eyes out. They always bite. Wouldn’t you? Heck, you bit when we got you home.

Ace went into his cage, found the fluffy bedding the clerk had said was a waste of money, and arranged it into a comfy bed. So CUUUTE! He’s SO CUUUTE! And I’m thinking, it’s a Hot Pocket for predatory birds. Ah well.

He did not go up his ramp. He did not find his wheel. He did not go up the other tunnel to his rooftop deck. He did find his water, which was SO CUUUTE, and he accepted a piece of food from Natalie. This is the big thing: she wants to “bond” with her hamster, which we can define as “not stick its teeth into her flesh at every opportunity.” He bit her once again, and she got skittish: when she tried to give him some hard-boiled egg (research indicated they loved hard-boiled eggs) he twitched, she bumped the cage in anticipation of another nip, and the sound startled Ace. At this point she was gripped by fear that her hamster would hate her, and never bond with her, and whatever narrow window of opportunity existed to form a life-long arrangement had slammed shut and it was OVER. She was heartbroken.

It got better. But she soon learned something else: hamsters sleep a lot. But for the first night she was content to stand in the dark by his cage and look at him, hoping he would get used to her smell.

I know this is a bit of a trial for her, but the problems of childhood between toddler-time and tween-time do seem so sweet.

That was the big news of the weekend. Got up at a silly hour Sunday, headed downtown, shot a video on the tailgaters. Take one reporter who hasn’t had enough sleep or coffee, put him up against people who got up early and have been drinking since sunup, and: it’s here.

I didn’t drink, despite the fact that it looked like I did. Well, I sampled the chocolate-flavored red wine (yes. really.) just to say I had. It’s odd, what the job makes you do; in a million years I would not get up on top of a bus and dance like an idiot. It’s not that the cameras are rolling; it’s because they’re our cameras. Dignity is not a factor. If there is something ridiculous in which the host can participate, the host is obliged to jump in. That’s just how it works. Otherwise you find yourself explaining to your boss the next day why you didn’t get up on the balcony and lift up your sweater as if trolling for beads.

Friday night I watched “GI Joe: Rise of the Franchise,” because I’d put it in my Netflix Q one day after I had been huffing a sack of Testor’s glue. It’s hard to criticize a movie for being silly and unrealistic when the phrase “In Association with Hasbro” appears in the opening credits; it’s like being disappointed by the intercessional depth of “Hula: Hoop Force Nine” when the credits state it’s produced by Wham-O. I’ll say this: better than Transformers. If movies like this had been around when I was 14 I don’t think I would have left the theater without seeing it four times.

Ace just rolled into my room in his little exercise ball, the Segway of small rodent pet transportation. Gets you around but you feel silly doing it. He must be confused by it, since he can see where he should be able to go – i.e., under the door – but cannot, as though Sue Storm has encased him in a forcefield. Don’t worry, Ace! She can’t keep it up forever! Already – weakening – can’t – keep – it – in – place – for – long – unless – Reed – helps – with – field – amplifier – developed – on – second – page – of – comic – maybe – I – should – stop – talking – and – save – energy

Really, they used to do that in Marvel comics. Dashes indicated stress and difficulty. Elvis! Are you alright in there? Must – pass – fried – peanut – butter – sandwich It’s interesting how we understood these conventions right away; no one ever told me that a puffy cloud-like speech balloon with smoke-signal circles beneath it meant a thought, not speech; somehow we just knew it. (Yes, I know Scott McCloud wrote a book about it, just to save folks the bother in the comments.)

Now to watch “24” with no particular enthusiasm. Missed the Golden Globes, drat the consarned infernal luck. Even though so much of what I heard and saw of “Avatar” set my teeth on edge I’m glad Cameron won, if only because the fellow put so much time into it. I’ve been reading about it for years. Of the awards shows that occupy the empty cold months of the new year, I have no interest; they’re just Christmas Plus for the lipo / botox crowd.

Matchbook around noon! See you soon.