Simple Tricks and Nonsense

To Boldy Go... and Do...

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:48:40 -0700

Well, that was a fast mission... STS-133 is already winding down, just as I was getting used to the idea. Discovery undocked from the International Space Station early this morning and is now pulling away a little more with each orbit, heading for a planned Wednesday landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It leaves behind a completed ISS, the largest object mankind has ever put up there in the black. It's not exactly the elegant wheel-shaped space station of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, but it is nonetheless an incredible achievement. I suspect -- I hope -- that 75 years from now, the building of orbiting structures will have advanced enough and become common enough that people will marvel at the story of the ISS, amazed that we could have accomplished something so monumental using such primitive technology, just as we now look back and admire the men of the 1930s who constructed Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge with little more than sweat and sheer determination. Of course, that's assuming that the ISS isn't the last big thing we do up there before we run out of everything and descend into a new feudalism. But I'm trying to be positive.

Getting back to Discovery, I don't know if it's because this is her final mission, or if I'm just paying more attention because it's her final mission, but there is really an amazing plethora of videos -- or should that be a plethora of amazing videos? -- from STS-133 floating around the InterWebs. I think I mentioned the other day how really, shockingly different it is today than it was even just a few years ago, when amateur movie-makers had no efficient way to share their work and NASA only released a few minutes of their footage, which the news media promptly cut down to about 15 seconds because we had to get back to the day's sports scores or some damn thing. As much as I gripe about the 21st century, I have to admit that YouTube is a boon for geeks like me. And tonight I'm taking advantage of that boon to gather here on Simple Tricks a few of my favorite video clips from the past two weeks... enjoy!

Desert Empire

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 09:46:46 -0700

Here's another entry that probably won't be of much interest to anyone except me and possibly those readers who grew up in Utah or are otherwise familiar with the place, but I've been utterly enchanted by this find and want to share it with somebody. It's a 30-minute film called Desert Empire, which I stumbled across over on the Internet Archive -- a fascinating repository of all kinds of material that doesn't quite fit the YouTube paradigm, and isn't ever going to see a DVD release, but is still worth preserving in some fashion. The film is a 1948 travelogue in which two lovely ladies journey by train through my very own home state of Utah, stopping in such places as Arches National Park (then known as Arches National Monument), Provo City, Bingham Canyon, the original Saltair pavilion at the Great Salt Lake, and of course, Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The voiceover narration is pretty outrageous even by the charmingly effusive standards of the 1940s, but the visuals are incredible. It's fascinating to see very familiar places as they used to be, back when this state's entire population was probably less than the modern-day citizenry of metro Salt Lake, and it's even more fascinating to see how little some of these places have changed in 60 years.

Anyhow, if your curiosity is even remotely piqued, the film appears in three parts below the fold. I'll be providing a few little observations on the things that struck me about each segment...

2009 Media Wrap-Up

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:52:14 -0700

Yeah, I know, I'm a little late with this one. Usher, would you please show that heckler to the door? Thanks. I'll wait until he's... oh, okay, good now we can talk.

Last night, I was trying to look something up when I realized that I never got around to doing my customary overview of the books, movies, and home video I enjoyed in 2009. I've managed to hit every other year since 2005, but somehow '09 got away from me. Well, anyone who knows me knows I can't tolerate that sort of inconsistency! Luckily, I was able to find my handwritten notes for that year -- yes, I keep notes about these things -- so I've now been able to put together the official Simple Tricks and Nonsense 2009 Media Wrap-Up.

(I realize, of course, that this information is likely of very little interest to anyone but myself. I'm only going to the trouble of making a blog entry at this late date for my own records, and to satisfy my OCD. Thanks for your understanding. If you're vacillating about whether to read on, it might help you to know that I'm not going to bother with any commentary on this one, it'll just be lists of titles.)

AutoRama: How Far We've Come

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:38:39 -0700

During my glorious teenage years back in the Awesome '80s, the annual AutoRama car show was a must-attend event for every red-blooded young male in the valley. No, not because of the cars, although they were neat enough -- seeing ZZ Top's Eliminator hot rod in the flesh, er, steel was a real treat, for example -- but because the show afforded the opportunity to bask in the presence of honest-to-glory Playboy Playmates. Yes, for only the price of admission plus a small additional autograph fee, any pimple-faced, scrubby-mustached, mullet-wearing doofus could have the honor of standing in a line that sometimes stretched back for a couple of hours, all to experience less than 30 seconds of facetime with a paragon of feminine pulchritude you couldn't actually go out with in a million years. Oh, and you got a signed picture, too. And occasionally a Playmate who would pose for a photo with you, although the shot never seemed to turn out because your friend with the camera had shaky hands. But hey, you could at least point at the blurry, vaguely humanoid shape and tell people who it was, and remember the prickle of flopsweat blossoming under your arms as she slipped her arm across the top of your shoulders.

Yes, those were the days.

I haven't been to an AutoRama in decades, but there's one coming up this weekend, and just for kicks I thought I'd have a look at the schedule to see if anything -- or anyone -- interesting is going to be there. The results were... disappointing. No Playmates. Instead, we've got Jeanette McCurdy, a teenaged actress from a cable-TV kid's show called iCarly, and a fisherman from that reality series The Deadliest Catch.

Sigh. Is there any doubt America is a society in decline?

Five-by-Five TV Meme, Preceded by a Bit of Ranting

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 23:53:02 -0700

I struggled all last week to compose one of my occasional political cris de couer, this one motivated by the nonsense currently going on in Wisconsin. If you've been in a cave for the last month -- and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers whose circumstances could be described as such -- Wisconsin's Republican governor is using a budgetary crisis, which he seems to have engineered himself, as a pretense to try and force his state's public-sector labor unions into giving up their collective bargaining rights. In shorter words, he's union-busting. But he's not busting all the public-sector unions. No, he's only after the ones whose members tend to vote Democratic. The Republican-leaning police and firefighter unions are safe. Which means this whole exercise is transparently partisan and blatantly ideological. I'm not interested in debating the pros and cons of unions -- Kevin Drum pretty much sums up my opinion here, and says it better than I could anyhow -- but the more unsavory political truth of the Wisconsin deal makes me mad. It is only the most obvious example of how Republicans nationwide are trying to take advantage of a shaky economy to ram through a radical right-wing social agenda that they haven't managed to accomplish in decades of trying. In other words, they're trying to kill things Republicans hate on principle anyway, while saying they have to do it to get the economy going.

Bullshit.

Here's the thing: if you really care about cutting the deficit, then you've got to be willing to at least consider letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The tax rates during the Clinton years were hardly onerous -- they were lower than the taxes in the prosperous 1950s -- and they'd go a long ways toward balancing the books. And you also ought to be trying to find a way to convince the wealthy -- who seem to think they're above paying taxes -- that they are still part of this country, even if they live behind locked gates, and it's immoral of them not to contribute to the common good. Oh, and you'd get serious about making corporations pay their fair share too. And while I'm pipe-dreaming anyhow, how about re-regulating the financial industry that caused this mess anyhow? And sending a few CEOs to jail? Or at least taking their solid-gold parachutes away from them and giving the money to the employees who got laid off to bolster the stockholders' dividends last quarter... but noooo, that's class warfare and we can't have that. Not unless it's being waged on the middle-class people who actually do the work in this country and are fast on their way to becoming vassals of a new feudalism. The sad thing is, a lot of them seem to actually want that...

Yeah, anyhow that's the gist of what I've been trying to write, but the damn thing just hasn't wanted to come together in a satisfying way, so tonight I decided "Screw it, let's do a nice harmless meme." And as fate would have it, SamuraiFrog recently provided one...

Discovery's Final Flight Begins

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:12:51 -0700

With her solid rocket boosters burning a brilliant orange against a steel-blue late-afternoon sky, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off today on her final voyage before retirement. Discovery is the workhorse of the shuttle fleet with 38 prior missions to her credit, including the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, the final docking mission with the old Russian station Mir, and a return to space for Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Discovery was also the first shuttle to fly again after both the Challenger and Columbia disasters. I think it's fair to say that the good ship Discovery is something special among the shuttle fleet.

The current mission, designated STS-133 in NASA-speak, is yet another trip to the International Space Station where Discovery will deliver the inelegantly named Permanent Multipurpose Module and various supplies and spare parts. Also along for the ride is a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, which is intended to help engineers study how such robots function in space. Hopefully, R2 will someday assist the station's crew with repair work and scientific experiments. (R2 is actually pretty interesting; it has highly dexterous human-shaped hands and looks like something out of one of our favorite sci-fi movies. No, not Star Wars... actually this thing reminds me more of the sentry robots from The Black Hole, minus the double-barreled laser guns and the permanent bad attitudes.)

One interesting trivia note for this flight: one of the mission specialists, astronaut Steve Bowen, flew on Atlantis last May during the STS-132 mission, making him the first astronaut ever to fly back-to-back missions. (This wasn't exactly planned; it came about because he had to replace a guy who was injured in a bicycle accident.)

If anyone's interested, the official NASA video of this picture-perfect launch, from main-engine start to external fuel-tank separation, is below the fold:

In Case Anyone Needs a Priest...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:36:27 -0700

...I'm available.

Weddings, mitzvahs, whatever, man. Of course, whatever you want will have to wait until I finish my cocktail. Why don't you pull up a chair and have one with me? Just take it easy, man.

Dudeism. I finally found a religion I can hang with...

Friday Evening Videos: "Hold On"

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:26:19 -0700

Oh, what the hell... since I brought it up earlier, here's the video for Wilson Phillips' number-one smash hit, "Hold On":

Pretty silly stuff, I know... so sweet and earnest and self-helpy. So "just between us, girlfriend." So very 1990. (This will probably sound weird, but the music of the '90s sounds far more dated to my ear than the music of the Awesome '80s, which has achieved a sort of timeless quality, at least in my opinion). But like I said in the previous entry, it's harmless stuff, and this song in particular has a catchy melody. I always liked it back in the day.

A couple observations:

My god, these three girls all look so young. I don't remember them seeming all that young back in 1990. If you scrubbed off the make-up and put them in purple plastic aprons, they could've been working behind the candy counter at the theater...
I wonder if all the mountaintop helicopter footage was inspired at all by Sammy Hagar's "Give to Live" video, which has a similar sequence. Or maybe in the late '80s/early '90s, it just seemed like a mountaintop was the best place to discuss this heavy "change your attitude, change your life" stuff.
I remember how Carnie Wilson, the heavier of the two redheads, the one with the short, straight hair, took a lot of crap when Wilson Phillips was still extant for being "the fat one." She doesn't look all that big to me here; in fact, I think she's quite attractive. Weird how your perspective on such things changes over time. (Of course, it probably helps that she really did become fat in later years, and she did it all in the public eye, so I'm most likely comparing her 1990 self against what she later became.)
Chynna Phillips, the blond who's doing the lead in this video, looks so much like her mother that it's kinda spooky.
And finally, for the record, my favorite of the group was always Wendy Wilson, the one with the curly red hair. She's the prettiest in my eye, and that combination of a sundress with boots is still tres sexy...

And on that note, let's get this holiday weekend started, shall we?

Hold On for One More Day

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 09:57:06 -0700

I was flipping through CDs at the library the other night, about to give up on finding anything I actually recognized -- I am so out of touch with current music, and by current I mean "released in the last 15 years" -- when a familiar cover caught my eye. It was the self-titled debut album by Wilson Phillips, an all-girl singing trio consisting of Beach Boy Brian Wilson's two daughters and their childhood friend, the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips from The Mamas and the Papas. You may remember their monster hit from the summer of 1990, "Hold On." I remember it very well, because, for a couple months that year, the Wilson Phillips CD played constantly over the PA system of the movie theater where I worked. The theater had only a single-disc player, and the management was too busy (or too indifferent) to bother changing out the CDs once in a while. Which meant all us poor buggers down on the floor got incredibly sick of whatever the current music was, usually in a real big hurry. I remember several of those CDs meeting with rather ignominious ends. A couple of them sailed out across the parking lot like silvery frisbees. One was dashed into pieces with a mallet, reassembled with splicing tape, and hung on the inside of a circuit-breaker panel, to serve as a warning to other sugary middle-of-the-road pop albums that might wear out their welcomes. My personal favorite, though, was the incident in which a CD just happened to find itself on the floor of the projection booth, on which somebody -- I'm not saying who -- had sprinkled a little of the sand we used to fill the lobby ashcans. (Yes, it was a very different world a couple decades ago, what with socially acceptable smoking and single-disc CD players.) Did you know if you do The Twist on a CD laying in a sprinkling of sand atop a linoleum floor, that CD won't ever play right again? Sure looked pretty when the light hit it, though... all those concentric circular scratches...

Anyhow, I don't recall that Wilson Phillips got destroyed, and as endlessly looping lobby music went, it really wasn't bad. I retained enough good will toward it that when I saw this copy at the library, I got all nostalgic and checked it out. I thought it might be kind of nice to hear it again.

What it was, though, was weird.

Wherein I Am Kinda-Sorta Heroic... Maybe

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:16:21 -0700

After several days of unseasonably warm and springlike weather, winter came back tonight, riding on the back of an avenging wind that wanted to drive the breath from your lungs and teach you a lesson for having dared to believe that you'd seen the last of him for another year.

The snow was just starting as I stepped off the evening train; I flipped up the collar of my pea coat against the wet, spattering flakes that were coming in almost horizontally from the north. The temperatures had been relatively mild when I'd boarded a half-hour and 25 miles ago, and I gasped at the abrupt change for the worse. Then the sky brightened and shimmered in a truly weird display, lightning in the belly of a snowstorm, and I knew it was going to be one hell of a night.

That was when the old man reached out for my shoulder with a trembling, knobby hand that looked to have been warped by a serious case of arthritis.

"Pardon me, sir, but are you driving somewhere from here?

A Perfect Valentine

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:18:59 -0700

About a week before Valentine's Day, my darling Girlfriend and I were talking on the phone about how neither of us had a clue about what to get the other in honor of the annual February bacchanalia of hearts, chocolate, and the color pink. I don't know how truly stressed she was feeling about the lack of ideas, but I was an anxious wreck this year. V-Day has always felt like a trial to me, a minefield seemingly designed to trip up well-meaning but clueless guys who just don't have the ingenuity to measure up to the nebulous feminine concept that is "romance." Guys like me, in other words, at least when it comes to socially mandated displays of romance such as, say, a holiday dedicated to the idea. And those mines seem to get closer together with every passing year, too, increasing the chances that one of these Valentine's Days, inevitably, I will step in the wrong place and lose a leg. Every February 1st, I begin the month thinking, "Good lord, how am I supposed to top that one year when I actually managed to get everything right? And didn't I just go through all this with Christmas a few weeks ago?" You see, it was drilled into my head eons ago that V-Day is supposed to be a big deal to women, and god be with the man who gets it wrong.

So I was taken completely aback when I heard Anne saying, "Why don't we just forget Valentine's this year?"

"What?" I stammered. This was an unexpected development.

"No, I mean it. I enjoy the cute little teddy bears and the flowers and all, but really, what good are they? You display them for a couple days, then they go into a box or get thrown out. It's all really pretty silly."

"Ooooookay." I had all my antennae up at this point, scanning to see if the Bothans had gotten it wrong and the superlaser was, in fact, fully operational.

"I know you love me," she continued. "You show me all the time."

And just like that, all the tension evaporated. On the big day itself, while other men were spending half a week's pay on roses and fancy dinners that require reservations and clean shirts, Anne and I exchanged cards -- this holiday is largely an invention of the Hallmark company, after all -- and then we went to the mall for corn dogs.

Yep, I love that girl all right...

They Call Me Mister Vintage!

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:49:20 -0700

I have this friend at work, a guy about my age who shares my somewhat, ahem, old-fashioned tastes in entertainment, and we often have a good time discussing stuff no one remembers except us. A couple months ago, we were in the midst of one such conversation when we came to an unexpected epiphany. It seems a startling number of the TV shows we enjoyed as small boys -- think early to mid-1970s -- shared essentially the same premise. See if this sounds familiar: there's a guy roaming the countryside, sometimes with a sidekick or two but usually alone. Sometimes he's on a personal quest, sometimes he's on the run from something, and oftentimes it's both. Every week he arrives in some new location, where he finds the residents have a problem -- a corrupt sheriff ruling with an iron fist, an evil developer trying to strong-arm people into giving up their land, outlaws who terrorize the villagers every full moon... you get the idea. Our hero has unique skills or insight and is able to help the people out; then, at the end of every episode, he's compelled to move on before the adversary who is pursuing him can catch up. As a shorthand notation, my friend and I refer to this premise as "the guy wandering around helping people."

A Very Brady Episode of Vega$

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:43:55 -0700

So, I've continued to dip from time to time into Vega$, that late-70s TV show starring Robert Urich as a T-Bird-driving private eye which I briefly discussed last summer. I haven't made it through the first season yet, and honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother completing it. The show is entertaining in the bubbly, has-been-celebrity-watch fashion of many series from this era (Charlie's Angels, Fantasy Island, etc.), but it's ultimately pretty disposable. No, actually it's downright confounding, because you can see how this show could've been so much more. All the pieces were in place for it to be a groundbreaking peek at the grime beneath the glitz of one of America's greatest fantasy cities, with a compassionate hero who struggles with his own dark side even as he fights to ensure justice for the victims he encounters. In other words, it could've been very much like Miami Vice would turn out to be only a few years later. (Remember that Vega$ was created by Michael Mann, the producer of Vice; Mann didn't create Vice, but he was responsible for the show's look and tone, and I'm not surprised that his earlier work contains seeds that flowered on the later show). But Vega$ is what it is, sadly, and even if it were to be remade today in a grittier style, I think the horse has already bolted on the thematic territory I'm talking about. It's been done, and fans of the original Vega$ would no doubt gripe about how everything has to be "dark" these days, just I've done myself with remakes of old shows I like. C'est la vie.

Anyhow, one of the more amusing aspects of the show is the frequent guest appearances by old-timey entertainers and Hollywood B-listers trying to keep their careers going just a little longer. And the episode I watched the other night, "The Pageant," contained not just one, but two of these guest appearances by well-known faces that added up to a real doozy of a laugh. The plot was unusually serious for Vega$, involving a serial rapist preying on contestants in the "Miss Casino" beauty pageant. The first young lady to get attacked is the daughter of a state senator who hires our hero, Dan Tanna, to find and stop the perpetrator without the publicity attracted by regular police activity. The senator was ably played by none other than Robert Reed, better known as Mike Brady on the classic sitcom The Brady Bunch, seen here at the height of his mid-70s perm-and-mustache phase. And the senator's daughter? None other than... Maureen McCormick, a.k.a. Marsha Brady.

This casting was so startling and funny to me that I can't help but think it had to be intended as some kind of stunt. I can actually hear the voiceover in my head saying, "Tonight on Vega$: a Brady Bunch father-and-daughter reunion in the City of Sin!" I compared the dates of production and it turns out that only four years had elapsed since the end of The Brady Bunch in March 1974 and the airing of "The Pageant" in November 1978, so audiences of the day would surely have noticed the pairing of two such familiar faces. I wonder if anyone back in '78 found it unsettling to hear Mr. Brady discussing Marsha's rape with a two-fisted PI? Did the producers of Vega$ have some kind of perverse goal in casting actors so strongly associated with a squeaky-clean family comedy? Maybe they were trying to make the rape seem extra-tragic by having it happen to one of America's favorite TV daughters? Or is it actually possible that McCormick and Reed were cast independently, without anyone even considering the Brady Bunch angle? It's possible I suppose... but it still feels like a stunt to me.

The Doctor Who Infographic

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:00:24 -0700

It seems like I've been mentioning Doctor Who quite a bit lately, and even though I always try to include sufficient background information when I'm blathering about something I suspect my readers might not know about, I imagine this show remains pretty esoteric for a lot of you folks. So in the spirit of being a good blog host, I thought this charming image might be helpful (Who fans are welcome to peruse it as well... it's pretty fun!):

see more Lol Celebs

Ed. Note: Looks like in order to see it at full size, you'll have to click the image to jump to the source page, then click it again to enlarge. Sorry for the runaround... I didn't realize it would be that big a deal when I started this post!

An Update on My "Holy Grail" Movie List

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:36:36 -0700

A couple days ago, I had a random burst of inspiration and decided to google the movie Mother Lode, a nifty adventure flick from 1982 starring Charlton Heston and a very young Kim Basinger. I was curious to see if there were any rumors about it finally coming to DVD, even though I didn't really expect to find any. Mother Lode is one of those perennial "missing-in-action" titles; as far as I know, it only ever had a single home-video release, on VHS cassette back in the days when nobody could afford those except video-rental stores. I've never understood why a well-crafted, solidly entertaining movie like this one could fall into near-total obscurity while so many truly awful B- and Z-grade schlockers get 15 different editions in each new media format that comes along. Granted, not many people have even heard of Mother Lode, but every person I meet who's seen it thinks very highly of it. There is a following out there, even if it's not terribly organized or vocal.

Since the Warner Archive came along, I've been hoping it might finally surface as a manufacture-on-demand title, so I've been checking every few months as the thought occurs to me. And I've been disappointed every time, too... until this week. To my tremendous surprise and joy, Mother Lode is scheduled for release at the end of March... and not as an MOD title, either, but as a full-fledged, regular-production (or "pressed") DVD. I immediately pre-ordered my copy, and, as lame as it sounds, I've been walking on air ever since. It's just a DVD, but it's also the fulfillment of a very long quest to find something that didn't seem to be attainable. It's been a long time since I felt that kind of satisfaction that perhaps only collectors really know.

Anyhow, finding out about Mother Lode got me thinking about my other "holy grail" films, the ones that I want to own on DVD but which have remained stubbornly unavailable. I remembered that I actually blogged about them almost two years ago now, and I thought maybe I ought to revisit that list and see if the status has changed for any of the others...