A Tale of Two T-Shirts
Once upon a time, I wore blue jeans and grubby sneakers and t-shirts with colorful slogans to work, like a proper artist/programmer. Then my company merged with our parent company and we took a turn for the corporate tight-ass. Black jeans replaced blue jeans, plain t-shirts replaced colorful slogans. I still wear grubby sneakers. Fuck ’em if they can’t appreciate a weasel in uniform.
So here are two relics of a bygone age. On the right, a t-shirt I picked up at my local Army surplus store. It says CORONER in official-looking script. This pleased me. Then I was walking across the parking lot of a restaurant with an early bird special — a magnet for wrinklies. A worried old lady tottered over to me, put a hand on my arm and quavered, “you’re not really from the coroner’s office, are you?”
Haven’t worn it since.
The one on the left is my cherished Lost in Space 30th Anniversary Cast Reunion t-shirt. Yes, I was there. Yes, I’m a fan. I liked the first season when it was serious-ish and science fiction-y and I liked the third season, which was cheap and silly and camp as a row of pink Judy Garlands. I was five when LiS first aired and that was four years before the moon landing.
Guy Williams — dad — died of an aneurysm (or a heart attack, I’ve read both) five years before, but the whole rest of the cast got together in December of 1995, in Boston. It takes some serious mojo to get a weasel into Boston, but you don’t say no to the call of history.
I didn’t pay to go through the autograph line, but I managed to stand on the sidelines and watch people go through and chat with the actors. I must say, they were all extremely gracious and managed to look genuinely pleased to be there. Huh. Maybe they actually were.
The whole cast held up very well. Bill Mumy is no bigger’n a fried fart. Mark Goddard had been teaching High School in Western Massachusetts for years. June Lockhart is still America’s mom. She wore white gloves the whole time. Arthritis, or a touch of the Howard Hughses? No matter, she shook all offered hands.
Jonathan Harris was older than god, but still had seven years worth of cartoon voice-overs left in him, in that distinctive faux-limey accent. I always thought that made him a peculiar choice to play an American military man (albeit a traitorous one). His obit said when someone asked him if he were English, he said, “Affected, my dear. Merely affected.” He was from Brooklyn and had a proper New York “dese and dose” accent, which he tried to fix by spending all his free time watching British films. What he ended up with isn’t really British at all except to American ears.
Heaven help me, I’m developing a touch of the Dr Smith accent myself. I’m fighting hard, but it’s apparently the tragic consequence of fraternizing with Brits. Oh, the pain!
So! The Robinson Family blasted off to Alpha Centauri…when? Care to guess what year Irwin Allen thought a plausible date for Americans to begin colonizing the stars?
August 15, 2007 — 5:10 am
Comments: 28
I found a cranky Victorian gentleman hiding in my basement
Look what I found. Man, I had totally forgotten this thing. It’s an egg cup. I made it in my twenties. It’s quite small. In fact, too small to hold a jumbo egg — all I have at the moment, which is why it’s shown here eggless.
I got a surprise when I turned it over: a slightly raised signature in three different colors of glaze. Yes, it’s an “S” and yes that’s really my first initial and yes that’s how I signed stuff in my twenties. I must’ve thought I was going to be so huge they’d call me by my first name, like Michelangelo or Leonardo. Or Cher. Or Madonna. Or Buckwheat.
I didn’t do much 3D work in school, but after I dropped out, I had a fling with bizarre porcelain tableware. The thing about hand-built clay sculpture is, nobody likes to fire it. If you goof up and get an air bubble in the clay or don’t dry it properly, your piece can explode violently in the kiln. Worst case, it ruins everything else in the kiln, and sometimes damages the kiln itself.
This is very bad mojo when you make your living firing slipcast pots painted by little old ladies. So I had a hard time finding someone who trusted me and my stuff.
When he retired and moved away, I was screwed. So I thought, what the heck? I’ll apply for an arts grant and buy my own damn kiln.
I hate public funding of the arts. I think it’s been a gigantic factor in the butt-uglification of modern art. But I was very, very poor and I had an idea for a whole series of sculptures I was itching to do, and, hey, I’d paid taxes into the system for years. So I sent away for the forms.
First requirement? Attach photographs of twenty examples of the sort of work you have in mind.
Hey geniuses: if I could produce twenty of the thing I have in mind, I wouldn’t need your stupid grant. Feh. First and last time I tried to stick my snout in the public trough.
About that time, someone (I think it was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) sponsored a sculpture competition. The idea was to make a mad tea seat for a mad tea party. My entry is below.
I convinced someone to fire it because these are mostly slipcast rather than sculpted (less likely to ‘splode). Alas, before I got to the final glazing, the competition was called off for lack of interest. And that was pretty much it for my pottery fling. Not long after, I got my first computer and disappeared up it for twenty years.
August 14, 2007 — 6:32 am
Comments: 28
Life and Death (now on 5 1/4″ floppies!)
Behold! One of the many ancient boxes of software that hit the junkpile this weekend: Life and Death for the IBM PC. This was a 1988 surgery simulator. Games of the era were always a disappointment; software boxes promised so much and computers were capable of so little. I had an instinct that it was all headed someplace good, and I kept hoping the next game I bought would keep its promises, but they were all bitterly stupid. Bitterly, expensively stupid.
L&D was no exception, but it was cleverer than most. It had some nice touches. They tucked a surgical mask and latex gloves in the box. The instructions included a pretty good history of surgery. The copy protection dealie was in the form of a little pager.
Gameplay didn’t entirely suck, either. Basically, you had two operations you were capable of performing: an appendectomy and some brain surgery thing I don’t remember very well. The game was in two parts. In the first, you examined patients until you found one who needed an operation you could perform. Then you did the operation.
It was a matter of memorizing the actual steps in the actual operation: grabbing the right loop of intestine, popping out the bit with the appendix in, propping it up with gauze, clamping it off…and so on. During which, the EKG would occasionally spike or the patient’s BP would drop and you’d have to shoot him up with the appropriate counteractant.
The flaw, as with so many computer programs, was that it wasn’t enough to know what you needed to do. You needed to know how to tell the computer you had the right answer; which precise, non-obvious clump of pixels you had to touch to activate a particular control. And it all happened in realtime. If you killed somebody (this happened a lot), they sent you to ‘tard medical school for a while before you could come back and try again.
I think I had a 286 at this point — a surplus, genuine IBM AT from work. Home computers of that era could make boops and beeps at various pitches, simulating music, but they absolutely could not deal with an analog signal, play recorded sounds or mimic speech.
So about two in the a.m., I use my simulated hand to palpate a virtual abdomen, and the patient screams, “ooo!” I think I screamed “ooo!” too! Hell-o? Computers cannot do that! I poked that poor virtual lady with the bum appendix over and over to make her squeal. It was a grinding, unnatural sound, like they’d overclocked a chip or thrown the transmission into reverse or something…but unmistakably a human voice. A female human voice. Amazing.
I bet it took one whole floppy disk to make it do that.
August 13, 2007 — 6:28 am
Comments: 28
Is there a Facebook for grownups?
This is a bleg. Jesus, I hate the word “bleg.”
Anyhow, I’m one of those sad, feckless people who dropped out of college and couldn’t think of anything better to do than stay in my college town. It was as good as anywhere, really. Every once in a while, someone from the distant past will give me a call. It always goes like this:
Me: “I’m still in the same old place.”
Them: “I figured you would be.”
Mmm. Thanks. Well, now I won’t be. I’m moving! To someplace else! Ha hah!
I’ve been extraordinarily careful since back in those freewheeling days when everybody posted under real names. Now a Google search of my real name and all reasonable variations thereof turns up nuffink. So I need to file a sort of cyber business card somewhere. I don’t want to update it or network or anything, I just want people who know me to find a contact email when they search my name.
Is there something out there like that? Because the ‘social networking’ sites all seem to be populated with infants.
Meanwhile, have you ever dreamed of teaching your cat to shit in a salad shooter? Sure, we all have. Well, now you can, with the Craptapulator! Yes, one look at this Byzantine torture device, and all kinds of crap will come flying out of your cat!
Gnus found this on Dan’s Blah Blah Blog. Charlotte shares with Dan’s cat the tendency to pee around rather than in the litterbox. In Charlotte’s case, it isn’t malicious. She’s just very, very stupid. I’ve watched her do it. She stands with all four feet planted surely in the litter, hangs her little pink bidness over the side and cuts loose. I don’t think she’d pee in the same zip code as this motorized gumball machine.
August 9, 2007 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 12
Today’s smart young weasel is on the move!
Dammit, nobody told me liquor stores will just give you cardboard boxes if you ask them. It’s taken me ten years to drink enough cheap booze to move house.
Yes, that’s right — after ten years of desperate scheming, Weasel is finally moving to England, land of socialized medicine, Benny Hill and Mr Brain’s Pork Faggots.
A dozen years ago, I and my Beloved (who is a Brit, but an otherwise unobjectionable person) worked out that we could combine our two unimpressive piles of crap into one huge, spectacular mountain of crap.
We never dreamed that happy day would be this long in coming, but everything is complicated when you’re older. You have to embezzle funds slowly or some nosey git in Accounting is bound to notice something. Plus, there are taxes to dodge and elderly parents to smother. Honestly, you have no idea.
I hadn’t mentioned it because we’ve come close before, only to have the deal fall through. Buying real estate in Britain is tricksy business. But I’ve decided if we don’t get this house, I’m going to fly over, rampage through the estate agent’s office with a tomahawk, burn the house to the ground and spend the rest of my life incarcerated, preferably in Broadmoor, where so many of my heroes have lived.
So, see, I’ll be moving to England in any case.
Join me, won’t you? It’ll be fun. In a “watching a train wreck” sort of way. This will be a fantastically complicated process, with the buying and selling and renting of properties, with visa applications and quarantines and immigration authorities, with packing, giving, throwing and otherwise getting rid of a lifetime’s accumulations (anybody need a quart of nitric acid?). Everything must be done in a specific order with military precision or tragedy ensues.
And I’m sure to need more boxes…
August 6, 2007 — 5:36 pm
Comments: 34