Thanks to an assist from one of you lovely readers out there, I’m now able to show you Gary Coleman as he appeared in the Buck Rogers episode “Cosmic Wiz Kid,” which first aired on November 15, 1979:
I’ve been googling around trying to find a photo of Gary Coleman as Heironymous Fox in that Buck Rogers episode I mentioned earlier. No luck on that front, but I did find this gem of an image:
So, the Girlfriend and I were at PetSmart yesterday, picking up a Christmas gift for her poodle, Rusty. (In case you’re wondering, we bought him a pleather aviator’s coat with a faux shearling lining, very dashing and manly. Hey, he’s a poodle, he needs all the external machofication he can get.)
I’d just picked up the bag containing the new dog-jacket from the cashier’s counter and was turning to leave when I nearly collided with another shopper. I drew up short and let him pass by without really seeing him. Just another guy in a hurry, I thought, trying to get in and out of the store on a busy day with a minimum of hassle. I’d taken several steps toward the exit before I managed to process my quick impressions into a complete picture:
African-American (obvious), probably about my age (crow’s-feet around the eyes), vertically challenged in a major way (he rose only to the level of my chest, and I’m only a hair over five-six), and there was something familiar about his face…
I stopped again and put my hand on Anne’s arm.
“That was Gary Coleman,” I said.
I’ve only recently become familiar with the TV series South Park, and I still haven’t decided exactly what I think of it. I find that for every joke that connects with me during any given episode, there are three more that leaving me sitting in stony silence, wondering why in the hell I’m wasting my time with this vulgar crap. Still, the jokes that do connect are brutally effective, and there’s also something oddly endearing about the look of the foul-mouthed main characters, crudely drawn and barely animated though they may be. Now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I know what I would look like if I were magically transmogrified into a South Park kid:
I just took the Tortured Artist Test, fully expecting to learn that I’m one shot of absinthe away from dying unloved and frustrated in a drafty garrett somewhere. As it turns out, though…
I have some artistic ability, but it is probably a hobby and doesn’t drive my life into a dark abysmal hole where I am alone and against the world.
A week or so back, I followed a link from Boing Boing to a wonderfully nostalgic LiveJournal entry in which the author recounts how he saved a beloved childhood toy from the junkheap. This particular toy was made for him by his father some time in the late ’60s; it’s a spaceship control console, probably inspired by Star Trek or Lost in Space, built of plywood and decked out with knobs, toggle switches, big ol’ throttle levers, and, best of all, working lights and motorized, spinning “scanner screens.” The entry includes several photographs of the console, and it’s truly a beautiful relic of a time that now seems impossibly remote, before Xboxes and iPods and all the other things that kids think they need these days to have a good time.
I just happened to drift past the ol’ blog here and I couldn’t help but notice that the turkey photo looks much better against this new background than it did last year against the old dark version of Simple Tricks. All that 70s-style brown and gold seems really warm and inviting now, whereas I remember it being kind of sickly last year. Hmmmm… maybe there’s something to this whole change thing after all.
You may recall seeing this silly photo here last year, but it makes me smile so I’m going to post it again. I’m thinking it just may become a Simple Tricks and Nonsense Thanksgiving Tradition™…
I don’t think I’ll be getting back to the blog today, so Happy Mass-Consumption Day, drive safely to Grandma’s house, and I’ll see you all on the other side!
You don’t hear much about space exploration on the nightly television news these days, but if you do a little googling, you’ll find that there’s actually a lot of activity going on Out There. Between the various US organizations, the ESA (European Space Agency), and the Japanese, our species has placed its mechanical proxies all over the solar system, everywhere from the very edge of interstellar space back to Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way inward to the sun. But the missions that seem to draw the most public attention are the ones focused on Mars, especially the rock stars of robotic space probes, those two intrepid little rovers. The first rover to land on the Red Planet, Spirit, has just celebrated its first year there — its first Martian year, that is, which is actually equivalent to about two Earth years. Not bad for a machine that was only supposed to last 90 days. The official press release puts this milestone into some perspective:
During Spirit’s martian year, the seasons have changed from summer to winter and back again. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars has returned to where it was when the rover first landed. Having survived seven times its expected lifetime and traveling over 3 miles (about 5,000 meters), Spirit is still going strong.
If you have a minute, give that entire press release a look; it’s an interesting recap of Spirit’s various discoveries as well as its arduous climb up the Columbia Hills, with several pictures and a map of the rover’s wanderings. You might also want to check out the “special effects” photos prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to commemorate the anniversary. Basically, they’ve combined a Hollywood-style digital model of the rover with actual images sent back from Mars to give us an external view of how Spirit might look in the Martian environment. My personal favorite of is this one. I like the romantically bittersweet feeling of the little probe all alone in the coming night of an alien world…
Josh Marshall responds to an interesting question from one of his readers with a few more interesting questions of his own:
…[November 22] did used to be a date for which there was always some build up and moments of commemoration [for the assassination of President Kennedy]. But now nothing. Is it just some critical mass in the passage of years? Forty-two years and it’s just definitively part of the past? Or is it some political or cultural inflection point the country’s passed through post-9/11?