Moonbase is Go

A good Monday, but I like Mondays. Back to duty. Fie to the formless meanderings of Sunday; hurrah to the brisk order of the workaday world. The most remarkable thing about the day was the weather; it was cold and damp until 4 PM, and then the sun just ARRIVED and the temps went up ten degrees, and it was warm and humid at 11 PM, which is to say, now. Reminded me how much I love warm nights, and how quickly I had simply told myself that they were over and done and that was that, let’s move along. A brisk cold onset to Fall is injurious to the local psyche; it is simply depressing to behold the beauty of Fall through the glass of your automobile window with the heater on.

To add to the absurdity: this morning the lawn fertilizer guy showed up and doused the veldt, and I wondered exactly what this was for: so I could have a verdant carpet under the inevitable layer of dead tree cells? We always talk of lawns browning in the summer, which they do, but they don’t quite go dun-hued in winter. They stay green. The snow comes. The snow covers. The snow melts, at first, and the green reasserts, one last stand before it’s smothered for the duration. But even then if you dig down, you find green. Maybe the guy wasn’t applying weed-killer. Maybe he was applying paint.

Hey! Let’s all participate in a contest. Use this link, enter the contest, and I get another chance to enter the contest. You can do the same. The prize is a year’s worth of groceries!

Which is great, right, but it’s not that great. It’s a check for $5200, which must be the average people spend. Hundred bucks a week. We probably spend a bit more, since there’s take-out Chinese on Thursday – cheap – and $15.00 worth of pizza on Fridays, but otherwise we’re pretty frugal, foodwise. My main indulgence a few weeks ago was some cheese and peppered salami. They’re like Burton and Taylor when they were really, really getting along. Tonight, for example: $1.24 for a box of rigatoni, $2.59 for sausage, $1.59 for sauce, and you have a meal and two lunches. I could have bought the boutique pasta with albino squid ink for $7.00, a specialty sauce for the same, and some ground lamb, but you just hate to think of lambs being ground. My lunches are pathetic, but inexpensive; I can feed myself for two weeks on burritos, cheese, jalapenos and hot sauce. No one wants to be around me, but that’s okay. No, we bring it in for under $100. So enter now!

I realized something else about Wii Fit: not only do I not have to turn on the Wii Fit to step up and down, I can move the step someplace else. Honestly, I’m such an idiot. I stopped turning on the unit, but still did it in the same place, just listening to old radio shows. But once I realized I could take it upstairs, a whole new world opened up. I can watch all those shows I have stored away on the computer! The minutes just melt away. And I can’t fast forward, so I have to enjoy every detail. Such as:

Yes, it’s UFO, that curious Gerry Anderson show with the greatest theme and the worst costumes. (His wife designed them.) Things I didn’t know until I googled: this guy . . .

. . . the straight-talking Yank via Derek-Jacobi-as-Claudius-via-David-Bowie who runs SHADO (an acronym I never forgot) was Ed Bishop, who also appeared as an astronaut in the opening sequence of “You Only Live Twice,” and was an astronaut on 2001 – he pilots the shuttle that goes to the monolith. And he did voice work for the animated Star Trek show, also known as “14 pieces of animation and three music cues reassembled into different shows.” I watched the first ep, which shows up one the key strategic mistakes in SHADO tactics. When a UFO is coming towards the moon, what do you do? Right: send up all three of your fighters, each of which has one missile, and fire them all at once, then let them sit there in a tight formation so the UFO can run into one of them.

By the way, in the future of 1980, spacecraft will be designed on the assumption that the cosmic void is actually an enormous, infinite koi pond:

Other fun facts: one of the moonbase crew members married Michael Caine in 1973 . . . and they’ve been married ever since.
Another show I started to watch, but found boring right away: Mod Squad. Man, is it dated, and tiresome – all those bored contemptuous youth-type figures preaching against The Man. Doesn’t matter that they’re faking it so they can be seen as real on the street; it’s just dull. But the opening sequence has some scenes from a Los Angeles burger joint:

Wonder where that was. Could it be this place?

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Your links today would be a gruesome installment on Comic Sins, HERE, and the usual ol’ Bittersweet Nostalgia over at North Dakota Small Towns on Google Street View, HERE. As always, or rather usually, your links can be found over at Flotsam, and that concludes the daily reminder to bookmark that site just in case.

See you at tumblr, PopCrush, twitter, and some other platform just invented yesterday I probably signed up for.