LILEKS (James) :: the Bleat

Everything is back to normal. The computer is up and stocked, and I have rebuilt all my workflows and shortcuts, with a few improvements. There's nothing like the blank slate of an empty hard drive to make you think twice about larding the drive with every geegaw you accumulated over the last few years. All those little toys that looked cool, were used twice, and left to sit alone, ignored, ever after.

I will not forget that I came quite close to losing all my data, though. By "this close" I mean I was down to three backups for most of the critical data. You laugh! You scoff! Or you weep, thinking "I have but one; surely suffering awaits" in which case yes, it does. But when I had two hard drives fail at the same time, it's a reminder that your precious memories (they're always precious memories in this instance, never just casual or ordinary memories) are stored on tin whirring disks that have been spinning for a very long time, and corruption is inevitable. Because I spray everything in four different locations and have monthly cold-storage archive sessions on drives that do not spin, AND back up to the cloud, there's hardly anything I can lose.

Pictures weren't rare when I was growing up, but the idea that you'd come back from a vacation with 400 photos was unheard of. Kids got photographed ten, fifteen times a year, at most, and those were holiday shots - Easter suit, summer in the wading pool, birthday, first day of school, halloween, Christmas. No one had scores of candids, which are the things that really matter: random moments that suggest life as it was actually lived, My daughter has a million of them, as teen girls are wont to have, but she doesn't sort or edit or arrange them.

She has no idea that i filed away the video she took on an old Flip camera one summer, for example. Neighborhood kids, a social group that fractured on contact with middle school. Goofing around in the yards and living rooms of houses up the street. The songs, the clothes, the sense of endless July - it's just one part of the collection of her writings and paintings and animations and videos that sit, waiting for her 18th birthday. Here, hon: your autobiography.

The dishwasher is back. As i mentioned yesterday, they brought one with a white finish, which was wrong. Today they brought one with the proper aluminum finish.

"Hey," I said when they brought it in. "I asked for that in white."

The installer, a giant of a fellow, turned around, put out his hands as if to choke me, then put them around my neck.

So we're getting along just fine. Two man team; one of them read the column. And liked it! Double bonus. The dishwasher is fine, but I don't love it; the rack is ill-equipped to deal with bowls, but I've never had one that wasn't. Apparently these models come from countries where people just lap up their cereal from shallow plates. I was informed that using the Gel was a bad idea. ("Especially Seventh Generation brand," said the crew chief, "or Hippie Soap, as I call it.") I was henceforth commanded to use the nodules. Very good then.

Picked up daughter from school and drove to Lund's to get dinner materials, as well as some detergent nodules.

"They look so tasty," she said. "You just want to eat them."

"Didn't you hear about the kid who ate one and ended up in the hospital?" She looked at me wit that mixture of wariness - Dad could be BSing again, or it could be a Real Thing. "It was in the news. All across the country kids are eating these things."

"No they're not."

"Yes they are."

(When we got home I showed her a Wall Street Journal story from this very day about the rise in Kids Eating These Things, but sometimes there's nothing worse than a newspaper article that proves your point. You just think that because you read an article. Well, yes.)

There was much free cheese, and we sampled heartily. Daughter likes good cheese. I found the basket of odd-sized cheese, the parts left over after they'd carved up a rind to order. I balk at paying nine dollars for a piece of cheese, but I am perfectly content to pay two dollars for a small ration. It's one of those things that makes you realize how life would be different if you won the lottery. $14.64 for a wedge of cheese? Throw a couple in the basket.

Sometimes I think my entire sense of the price of things is based on the days when cigarette were 65 cents a pack.

We studied the ice cream flavors. Went to the books section and laughed at the bad prose. (Daughter found a book that was NOT a joke: "The Vampire with the Dragon Tattoo.") We marveled at the conundrum of the publishing world: so many bad books consumed by people who love to read, but have no taste or ability to discern quality prose. There's probably a cheese analogy in there somewhere.

Outside in the dusk; the lights on the Brain Tree had lit up. It looks like the vascular system of a brain, and the shape of the limbs and twigs suggests a cranium. I said that each light represented the soul of a customer who had died shopping. She sad it was creepy without thinking that. The tree has always been there. I don't think it was ever smaller. Or bigger. It just is. It always was. So many years ago I used to drive past the store on my way to Southdale, thinking that this was the land of the high-hat cake-eaters, the place where people shopped at Lunds and bought fine cheese. The very sign was an aspiration. Now I'm here and I know better; the neighborhood isn't hoity, let alone toity, but the Lunds remains as a beacon of quality produce and maddening BOGO signs. (It's not BOGO. It's BOGOF. Drives me NUTS.)

Next door to the Lunds is an Aldi, and for fun I took Daughter inside and told her to study the brands. It's a parallel world where Betty Crocker is Baker's Corner, and Lucky Charms is Marshmallows and Shapes Cereal with a wizard mascot. All the frozen foods are in boxes behind the glass, which makes the freezers look like jails, somehow. It's probably all the same stuff you get at Trader Joe's - but the packaging and store decor doesn't flatter your sense of your class identity, so forget that.

Went home, cooked a good dinner, got to work, enjoyed some media, wrote, and now will finish edits on a piece about Vodka before a brief bit of novel revision. It was a good day: I decided not to worry and did not. I had a great time talking with the installers. I did my favorite thing in the world, which was grocery shopping with Daughter, chatting and discussing goods and product design. (We had a productive discussion about this, and why it stood out.) Things feel normal.

It's been a while.

Well, that narrows it down:

When last we met our heroes, they were in danger from PLATINITE, a radioactive liquid metal that Vultura finally decided he would get around to using to conquer the Earth. As the episode ended, some of the stuff was going towards the Ranger's head.

As cliffhangers go, it was pretty lame. Captain Video just picked him up and took him outside and gave him an anti-radiation pill. Because such things instantly counteract the effect of PLATINITE. Which would render Vultura's plan meaningless.

Anyway, CapVid recommends that the entire area be "Blasted out," since aerosolized dispersal of deadly radioactive substances is the best way to be sure it doesn't escape from the now-unmanned cave where it was stored. Crack troops from Stock Footage of the Future are on the job!

Back at Dr. Tobor's lab, the evil scientist and sidekick Skaggs are 14% crestfallen to learn that Captain Video has escaped their trap

Again; there's no mention of how Vultura will probably call them back to the other planet and roast their livers and eat them with a nice chianti, perhaps because they suspect Vultura has no short-term memory and will assign them another task almost immediately.

Five minutes into this, all we've had are some bombs. Captain Video has an exciting conversation with a bureaucrat, and lays out his suspicions about Tobor. When did you get suspicious, Captain Video? Well . . .

No, no no, he's looking up - that can only mean . . . flashback!

And so it is. For the next five minutes he recaps the plot. Eleven minutes in, he asks the bureaucrat if he can use the super-strong telescope to spy on Atoma. It's so powerful it can see people. I'll bet you it can see them straight on, too. We'll find out. You may wonder why he hasn't used this device before, since -

Hold on, who's this?

A janitor?

A janitor who goes straight to the door hinges? He's an agent of Vultura of Atoma! It's a recording device! Tobor plays it back in an audio amplifier, which goes by the disappointingly banal name of Audio Amplifier.

Gadget of the week:

At this point you realize that nearly every other plot point is achieved or advanced by overhearing something someone else said. But then Tobor says the stupidest thing ever:

The next day, crack government agents with a full security detail drive their heavily-armored transport to the secret facility to get the world's most powerful telescopic monitoring device:

At least they throw a blanket over the lens and tie it down. But no! They're not agents fo the government at all! They just said they were! A medium-speed chase ensues, and one of the henchmen turns the mirrored lens on Captain Video! It's blinding him!

And it's making his car smoke, too. Captain Video is so confused he drives off the road . . .

Frame-by-frame analysis reveals that the car really doesn't blow up.

But someone rolls a tire into the scene so you think he was blown up. Everyone knows he jumped out. No one thinks he was really blown up. Let alone by a mirror.

I got a note this week - pardon my absentmindnedless, but I can't recall who; show yourself in comments! - and while it said the Captain Video entries were fun, wasn't I being too hard on people who managed to provide so much entertainment for a budget of $1.98?

I think so. I should give them credit for what they did with so little. I mean, at least .37 of that went to the scriptwriter.

Next!