Tuesday, July 14
At the coffee house. Haven’t been here in a while. Less a house than a store, really. The music playlist today is 80s. From the speaker poured that famous piece of mid-80s German fatuity, “99 Luftalloons.”
Said to nice young clerk: ”Nothing like 99 Red Balloons in the original German!”
Pity smile. Pause. “I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s the song – it was a hit in the 80s. This is the German version. It’s better because you don’t have to understand the lyrics.”
“Oh! Well, I wasn’t around.” Smile. Pause. “What can I get you?”
Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their abilty to make music that on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.
To be honest, I did listen to a lot of Zeppelin, but at least they were still alive, still producing, still touring. The first three albums seemed to come from another era.
I’m in the EVIL SUBURBS again. Came out here to get anti-itching spray for the dog and a fishing rod for daughter. You know, the average trip. Both are needed right away, which is why – to repeat myself for the 9348503rd time – I’m glad I live now, because getting on a streetcar to go downtown for these things wouldn’t be an option. And I doubt they had anti-itch dog spray in those days. Your dog itched, you let him scratch. Didn’t get her a licensed or endorse rod – the options for kids were Hannah Montana, which holds no interest, Barbie, which is SO little-kid-and-long-ago (she had to use a Barbie one today, and complained bitterly about it. I reminded her of the hours she spent on the Barbie games, and we had a happy conversation on the way home about the merits of each. Game nostalgia: it’s one of those things we have. I suspect more dads have game nostalgia in common with their kids than Moms. BECAUSE MOMS ARE BUSY DOING THINGS. Okay, okay, Betty F., take a Miltown.) There was a Transformer rod, which I wouldn’t get lest it turn itself into an animate, self-aware Cuisinart, and a Spider-Man rod. No. I got something else, but it seemed too big – so just to make sure she was equipped, I went to the Sports Authority, a place whose name sounds like all your purchases are legally binding. Found a kid’s rod she may or may not like – it could be construed as Too Kid, but she could think it’s cool. I will not reveal the existence of the backup rod until the other, cheaper rod fails.
Got the dog spray. Hope it works. He’s miserable. Hasn’t moved much all day, since the slightest motion seems to set off twitchy itching. Just touching a flank leads to twitchery.
Off to home; I’ll report back to see how the brightly-colored rod went over.
LATER
And it’s a go! Good.
Now outside, enjoying a Reyka on the rocks – I drink this vodka because I feel bad for Iceland, and want to do my part for their evaporated economy. Unless they raise the price again. I’m having internet contrusions again, and the despair, she is great. The same damned problem; pages load a bit, then stall. Everything loads a bit, then stalls. File transfers start out “robustly,” to use the word people like to throw around when they’re talking about the internet, and the transfer rate trickles down to nothing. Three ISPs. Two different routers. Three different modems. New cabling on everything. COVAD techs to the house to check out the wiring. No one knows anything. No one has any idea. It’s making my job impossible and I do not know what to do.
And now, for no good reason except that it’s something I’m vaguely interested in this month: the Faces of The Price is Right, part 4. You can learn more from game shows and magazines than history books and pre-fab dramas. This is what people actually looked like.
Trust me. I was there.
The modified Purple Conductor’s Hat. All above the Groovy Railroad:
It’s always nice when Miss Garland drops by, dead or alive:
On to the contestants:
They were reacting to A NEW . . . sailboat. As you can tell, Lady Jumpsuit on the left is doing a quick grim calculation; the lass on the right, wearing one of those sternum-high bosom-accentuation devices so popular in 1974. is just stunned by the beauty and majesty of the moment.
The winner was:
Panathea. Here’s where it gets interesting. Of the PiR shows I’ve seen in this series, it’s white, white, white – one fellow of Japanese ancestry, and he was a gardener by trade. Panathea was Black, and a delightful contestant , just the sort of happy extrovert the producers look for when they’re vetting the people queued up to watch the taping.
I do wonder if the producers, or anyone in the booth, worried about this:
A fridge full of watermelons. But that was the prize for the next round, and I’m sure the producer was happy Panathea won the sailboat. Still, I wonder if anyone thought “uh oh” when Panathea came on down, given the fridge-full-of-watermelons to come, or – quite possibly – perhaps people gave no thought to the matter? You can make the argument that they should have been concerned, because it would look bad. C’mon, the African-American contestant wins a sailboat, and we give her watermelons. Yeah, that’ll play well. Or you can say Who Cares? The only color on this show is Green. Well, also orange, lots of orange, but mostly green.
Lady Jumpsuit seems to have strolled out of a country-western song, no?
Miss Gwenny Paltry, come on down:
This woman ran down with confident obvious athleticism:
Bob noted she was very good at running. She’d gotten a lot of practice being chased by boys? She said, well, no. Oh, then you got a lot of practice running after the boys? She said, well, no, Bob. I felt bad for her; most people don’t expect to end up on national television interrogated about the frequency with which they pursue the opposite sex on foot.
The prizes. We have to discuss the prizes. This was a luxury premium box in those days.
Burnt orange AND avocado green. Win win.
This was an acceptable car in those days. My. God.
When it came to the showcase, it was Lady Jumpsuit against Panathea. Keep in mind they get a Black contestant once every two months, or so it seemed. What’s her showcase? A trip to fabulous . . .
Immediate cutaway:
Gracious, she was. But she passed to Lady Jumpsuit. And now, here’s your fabulous showcase!
Riding lessons! Immediate cutaway:
I’m not trying to make a big deal of race and culture here, but it does illustrate the assumptions the show made. You can’t get any WASPier than sailing, horseback lessons and a trip to Norway.
One more thing: kids, do you know what Janet’s holding?
State of the art high-tech c. 1973. An answering machine.
LATER: Comics up around 11 or so; Miscreant Roundup at buzz.mn for your noontime reading pleasure.
81 Responses to “Tuesday, July 14”
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- This entire day has felt like trying to assemble Ikea furniture in the dark with a flat-bladed screwdriver. 4 hours ago
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What, no mention of Nena’s Euro underarm hair?? Any bonus points for knowing all of the Yardbird’s history too (who begat who when)?
I enjoyed the alt-text for the PiR pictures. Maybe in your spare time you could design another site: ALT-GEN:ALT-TEXT. Pictures of 70’s game shows would be displayed with your special flavor of alt-text, and your loyal readers could add their own alt-texts in the comments. Kind of like the “lolcatz” thing that was big for a few minutes. After it catches on you could branch out to old talk shows (Mike Douglass, Dick Cavett) once they offer that on cable, if they haven’t started already.
[I'm a TV-by-antenna kind of guy.]
Good goshamighty, those fingernails could murder someone! Makes me wonder if the red is polish or remnants of vital fluid from her last victim.
Knew I shoulda Googled my spelling. I have enough trouble spelling in English.
Poor itchy Jasper. Check with your vet to see if it’s ok to give him benadryl. My goldie has always itched, and the vet prescribed one milligram per pound twice a day, taken with one fish oil capsule twice a day. That helps a lot. Switching her to corn and wheat free food also helped a lot. I know the dose sounds high, but dogs are not people, and react differently to medications.
Re: the Gremlin – when we first started dating, my ex had a Gremlin (orange, I think). It did have a deceptively powerful engine. He took off from a stop at full speed to show off for me and broke a motor mount because of the torque. It was our first date, and the sudden takeoff caused the glove compartment to fall open and all the contents to spill into my lap. There was nothing unusual in there, just the usual stuff, but he was still completely mortified.
James – your download problem may be related to a bug in Safari related to a corrupted preferences file, if Safari is what you’re using.
Go to home>library>Preferences>Safari and find “Downloads.plist”. Move it to the desktop, and restart Safari. Try a download. If it works better, then trash the file you moved (it’ll make another one anyway). If Safari doesn’t seem to work right, put the file back. Warning: Your Mileage May Vary.
I hate it when Preferences starts taking bribes and hiring its relatives. Perhaps if you paid it protection?
Does anybody else think that Lady Jumpsuit looks like Geddy Lee circa about 1974?
James, I know the answer to your internet problem. One word – Apple.
The apple computer does not want to be contaminated by any contact with PCs, however indirect it may be. So you can connect and receive data at the normal rate for a short time then the Apple computer begins to resent this intrusion by PCs from the internet. The data transfer rate decreases and eventually stops to keep the Apple pure and unsullied.
I know I am being sarcastic but I truly believe that if you use a PC to connect to the internet you will not have this problem.
FreeState: was your professor a German named Dr. Preis? (der Preis is right?)
I really like that maxi-blue Gremlin – the color looks a lot nicer in person than it does on TV. Gremlins are very cool, especially when they have a 304 V-8 engine under the hood, with quite a lot of power for a relatively light car.
We enjoyed watching “Let’s Make a Deal” on GSN (it’s not currently being aired), in part for some of the awful cars they gave away (not one but TWO Chevy Vegas!), with the occasional gem tossed in (Malibu SS, Corvette, etc.). What’s amusing is that back in the mid ’70s, a Cadillac Coupe de Ville or Eldorado is still considered super-upscale and desirable.
But LMAD is noteworthy to me because it’s completely color-blind. There are contestants of every race and it’s never an issue at all.
If it’s 1973, she’s likely to have been “Afro-American.” Never quite stuck, so was short-lived.
Many people’s definition of “racist” is too wide. Assuming you’re going to get WASPs in that era was just a cultural norm; I don’t see anything overtly racist about it. And let’s watch our assumptions: that woman may have had relatives in Oslo, for all we know (okay, the facial expressions say “No,” but we shouldn’t presume). She may have even been Republican. She’s middle-class enough to be appearing on TPiR, remember?
It’s too touchy to be uncomfortable with the acronym WASP. It’s just a neutral description of the salient elements of the dominant (easy, now) culture. Appearance, cultural ancestry, religious tradition. It’s not as much a street term as it is an academic one. If you want to put a spin on that, you’ll want to put a spin on everything. Not every label is libel.
Now, if the backstage crew saw that the black woman was “coming on down” to be a contestant, and quickly re-stocked the fridge w/ watermelons, THAT would be racist.
Growing up, my dad had almost that exact same Gremlin – a ‘72, yellow, with black stripes.
It was oddly proportioned, but it was solid – he kept the car until 1989, when he traded it in for a Plymouth Voyager for my mom and inherited her ‘86 Renault. The Gremlin still ran, but had a tragic and fatal case of rust.
Spud Says:
July 14th, 2009 at 11:28 am
After it catches on you could branch out to old talk shows (Mike Douglass, Dick Cavett) once they offer that on cable, if they haven’t started already.
[I'm a TV-by-antenna kind of guy.]
Merv. Griffin.
Super!
MadAnthony Says:
July 14th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Growing up, my dad had almost that exact same Gremlin – a ‘72, yellow, with black stripes.
It was oddly proportioned, but it was solid – he kept the car until 1989, when he traded it in for a Plymouth Voyager for my mom and inherited her ‘86 Renault. The Gremlin still ran, but had a tragic and fatal case of rust.
AMC.
Renault.
Plymouth.
Your Dad was a glutton for punishment…
Well, not really. AMC and Plymouth both had their moments. But a Renault? Please.
Wow, primo Lee Press-on Nails, Janet. You can see where the tips are attached and painted over.
The thing that I hated, hated, hated about 99 Luftballons was the shoddy translation of the titular lyric to “99 red balloons”.
If they had done it instead as “99 hot-air balloons” they would have kept the scansion intact. The syllable count and stresses are identical. But oh no. They had to add a useless modifier instead.
After all it wasn’t the color of the things that showed up on radar and got the superpowers panicked into a nuke exchange.
Janet?? Its Janice.. and Anitra was the hotter model. I would taker her riding lessons.
Do you have any kind of booster on your modem? We hooked one up to bounce signal into the den from the office where the cable originates. Worked great for 6 months then x-fer rates started going downhill slowly over a few weeks to the point where pages took 5 minutes to load. It still said I had a strong signal (all green bars) the whole time. Unplugged the damn thing, moved the laptop closer to the office modem and problem solved.
Did you try another computer to see if it’s your computer or if it’s the signal coming in? Did you try going wired (not wireless) to see if it helps? Somebody,somewhere ought to be able to troubleshoot this for you. How frustrating!
I still remember the James Bond movie “The Man with the Golden Gun”, where all of the cars were provided by AMC.
My own experiences with that brand of vehicle were also in the 70’s, where they comprised almost the entirety of the University Transportation Services daily rental fleet. Not slow, by any means, but through the mists of time is seems that I remember you had to turn the steering wheel through several complete revolutions in order to make a shallow right hand turn. Not very maneuverable, as my glancing collisions with a couple of telephone poles (sort of like the Titanic and that iceberg) would subsequently attest.
jeischen Says:
You’re right, teens of the ’70s were required to be up on their knowledge of ’60s bands or perhaps more accurately, late-’60s bands. Our elders (FM DJ’s) taught us all about the history and trivia of the members and the albums of The Doors, The Who, The Stones, The Beatles, Clapton, Hendrix and, of course, my personal heros, Led Zeppelin. They had been to Kashmir, to the Misty Mountaintop, to California with an achin’ in her heart. Jimmy Page was a guitar god. After their first six masterful albums I can’t tell you the huge letdown I got from “Presence.” “In Through the Out Door” was a disappointment. By the time “Coda” came along, I had moved on. I can’t imagine me trying to get my kids to appreciate the intricacies of Page’s guitar solo on “Stairway to Heaven” but I did notice my oldest daughter had TIVO’ed a special on Green Day, so maybe the rawk gene still survives in my family.
I think what has made these gods of rock what they are is that they managed to hold on to the very end, from decade all the way into the next. Some are still going strong today, even though their music may not sound as good as it did 30 to 40 years ago.
Bands today can’t do that. One will become popular one day, and then three months down the road, they’re forgotten. They end up in the discount rack like another can of beans. Even if a band from the 90s has made it past 1998, they’re still not as good as they were in their earlier years, and will never, ever be as good as any of the bands from the 60s and 70s. Case closed. End of story.
As for your daughter TiVOing Green Day, you need to have a serious talk with her about rock music. This talk should be just as important as THE TALK, the one every parent dreads.
Green Day’s got nothing on Zep, The Stones, The Dead, The Doors, The Eagles, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, CCR, BTO, ELO, or any other band from that era, and any solo artist. Green Day just needs to pack up their instruments and go back to practicing the recorder in 4th grade music class, or better yet, tapping on the rhythm sticks in Kindergarten. Same with any group that’s popular today. They need to put down their instruments, sit down inside a soundproof booth, and take daily required classes of classic rock, each consisting of eight consecutive hours of nothing but listening to the greater than greats. Listen to the music. Feel it. Absorb it. Make it become a part of you. Become a part of the music. Become one with the music. Let the music overpower you. Become one with the music. Drink it in. Let it fill you. Whoa-oh-oh, listen to the music all the time.
Of course, AMC offered the “Levi’s” option, complete with denim seats
_@_v – can’t help wondering how 99 balloons luft or red managed to match the radar signature of a nuclear missile launch to the point that fighter were scrambled… and where were these balloon launched? north dakota? outside of the af base at rhein-main?
and what is it with the vitriolic hatred people have for the amc gremlin? was anybody under the delusion they were buying a ferrari when they bought onea them? it’s a freakin’ compact car. nothing more, nothing less. not like you hear people bleating about the chevette…
James,
That brought tears to my eyes. I haven’t laughed that hard in months. Thank you so much.
DFK
The young Bob Barker, good picture. One of my many claims to fame is that I appeared, as a kid, on the original Truth or Consequences show in the early 60s which Bob hosted. Courtesy of my Mom, who grew up in Spirngfield Mo, with Bob Barker and his wife Dorothy Jo. The thing I remember most is meeting Glen Glenn, the sound guy who did most of the early TV shows including I Love Lucy. Ah the memories…!
“…If all a person knew about Germany was that 99 Red Balloons came from there, I’d say that person knew quite a lot.”
And you’d be a fool. Please try to remember, people, that assuming Nena=Germany(or Austria, et al.) is like the rest of the world taking one of our musical celebutards as completely representative of the USA. Despite the impression you get on, say, BBC America, there vast stretches of the country that want nothing to do with the Greens, the EU, etc. I mean, 16 years of Helmut Kohl running the place–not exactly a leftie, kids. Ask me sometime what my sister-in-law’s cousin–the Austrian policeman–and his neighbors think about all this. You’d swear the GOP picked up another state & just clean forgot about it…
Good advice above on the dog itching. He’s probably too old to develop ragweed allergies now but that’s what my fog had. Pollen allergies in dogs express themselves as itchy skin. We had her on little pink pills that contained steroids and antihistamines, every August through November. It’s called “Vanectyl” up here.
I’m having internet contrusions again, and the despair, she is great.
I second the Downloads.plist possibility. When plists go bad, much gnashing of teeth ensues.
However, if something similar were to happen on Windows, you’d probably have to re-format and re-install your whole system to solve it. Resolving most issues on a Mac is pretty simple. It’s knowing where the preferences are and how they can get munged that’s the problematic part for novices.
Have you talked to a Genius at the Apple Store? He/she might have some insights, if Downloads.plist isn’t the issue.
The thread that won’t die…but why should it? These TPiR images are great, maybe even better than today’s, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t reappear on this site in 2045. (I enjoy thinking about what this site will be like when today is a candidate for nostalgia.) Well, Ross, I will allow as how my flip pseudo-insight into Germany was…underinformed. But not foolish. I just don’t know much about Germany and Austria, but on Portugal and Slovenia I think I’m fair-to-good (read about ‘em on my site), and I do believe that when those Europeans Vote Weenie, they really mean it.
“I think what has made these gods of rock what they are is that they managed to hold on to the very end, from decade all the way into the next. Some are still going strong today, even though their music may not sound as good as it did 30 to 40 years ago.
Bands today can’t do that. One will become popular one day, and then three months down the road, they’re forgotten. They end up in the discount rack like another can of beans. Even if a band from the 90s has made it past 1998, they’re still not as good as they were in their earlier years, and will never, ever be as good as any of the bands from the 60s and 70s. Case closed. End of story.”
You’re comparing the high points of one generation’s counter-culture to the entirety of this generation’s mainstream culture. Apples and oranges.
The best music of this generation doesn’t get played on the radio because it’s not mainstream enough.
I dunno, but my high school students show up to my class wearing AC/DC and Led Zeppelin t-shirts. And they know the music on my iTunes pretty well. They say it’s more “authentic” than today’s music.
Who knew?
Wife and I are so happy to have seen TPiR in person about four years ago. Bob Barker is in his waning days, but we know him like you see here. Before the show, pre-taping warmup comedian guy warned us that by gosh, Bob is old. If you happen to be called to “come on down” and win your bidding game, “Don’t hurt Bob! He’s delicate!” Something to that effect.
Drew Carey’s growing on us. I hope thirty years hence someone else (another Lileks?) reprises this theme.
Not to whine too much but could you put the comments link at the bottom of the blog entry? I know most of the time that I’ll want to read them but having it right there when I finish the article would be better in my opinion.
Am I being too obnoxious, telling someone how to organize his webpage?