Dream Preview

I suppose this is properly speaking a dream. But it’s a cryptic note from the dream world. It was mostly just a “graphitic content” warning for the dream to come. I’m excited by what that means. My guess is some of those neat charcoal-sketch animation like you see in Disney cartoons from back in the 70s that nobody cares about, or cared about when they were making them. I like the aesthetic.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index popped up seven points today as some leftover chocolates were found and the whole trading floor agreed that things just don’t get better than this.

377

No, The Space Whale Probe Can Hold Off, Too

Remember back when the world was young and Star Trek IV: The One With The Whales first came out in theaters? Me too. There’s this scene where Kirk and Spock are riding a bus because it’s the mid-80s, and there’s this young punk playing annoying music too loud. So Spock neck-pinches him, and he falls over, knocking his boombox off. Everyone on the bus applauds because, hey, so far as they can tell this man wearing a bathrobe in public has choked a kid to death for being snotty! And everyone watching the scene chuckles too because, hey, don’t we all want to choke the youth to death? Yes.

What’s haunted me, as an annoying Star Trek fan, is the lyrics for the punk’s music. They run like this:

Just where is the future, the things we’ve done and said
Let’s just push the button, we’d be better off dead

‘Cause I hate you, and I berate you
And I can’t wait to get to you too

The sins of all the fathers been dumped on us, the sons,
The only choice we’re given is how many megatons?

Thing is, in the universe of Star Trek, that kid on the bus is less than a decade away from the Third World War. So is whatever British Punk Band That Works “Berate” Into Its Chorus that recorded the song. (In the full version they let “eschew” into the verse. My music tastes run more towards “sounds like that theremin’s calving”, but I can appreciate solid punk writing when I hear it.) And I keep thinking: what did that kid, and what did that band, think later on when The Bombs were falling?

(Yes, yes, I am very aware that as this was an Original Series movie the Third World War that bus punk would experience was explicitly non-nuclear. It was conventional warfare that killed 37 million people and that’s better I guess? It wasn’t until the more optimistic and utopian Next Generation that they rescheduled the Third World War to the mid-21st-century and killed over a half billion people.)

We’ve been thinking about a civilization-wrecking nuclear war for a long time. Or at least we’ve been thinking we’re thinking about it. We don’t really picture nuclear destruction, though. We don’t even picture ordinary destruction. What we imagine is a tense half-hour listening to news anchors trying to keep it together while the camera keeps drifting off-center, and the newsroom is weirdly quiet apart from off-camera voices sometimes shouting. Also taking phone calls from estranged friends with last-minute repentances for wronging us. Good luck those getting through. Even if the phone lines weren’t jammed apparently we’d all be having consequence-free sex with people we’d never see again anyway? Or so you all might. I’d be busy trying to download my Twitter archive so I could re-read some choice digs I got in on someone back in May.

We’ve got vague thoughts about what happens after, too. Post-apocalypse planning works out to be thinking we’ll get to pick the best stuff out of the landscape. Maybe go into business as a local warlord, trading supplies and shelter with trustworthy-looking stragglers. This from people who can’t handle there not being a dividing bar on the checkout conveyor belt at the farmer’s market. What if the guy ahead of us gets my two bunches of curly parsley? These aren’t the thoughts of someone up for handling the thirtieth day in a row of eating cream-of-celery soup. It was the only thing left that better scavengers didn’t get to first at the Neighborhood Market that mostly sold cell phone cards and lottery tickets. It’s reconstituted using water from where the now-former paint factory is leaking toluene into the aquifer. And it’s cold.

We’d need help, that’s all there is to it. And I don’t know what to do. On my bookshelf alone I have enough World War II books to teach how to win the war, except for how to fight. But they all end with lots of people in rubble-strewn cities. Even the ones about the postwar situation skim over what there is to do in it. There’s dramatic photos and talk about people clearing away rubble. Then it’s 1948 (for Europe) or 1950 (for Japan) and the United States decides the rubble cities should have an economy again. That’s over three years of people clearing away rubble. They had a lot of rubble, yes. But they also had to agree on where to put the rubble. And that takes social organization. And I don’t know where that comes from either.

This may be controversial, but I say ending civilization and destroying the world is a bad move. We should tough out our problems as they are and try fixing what we can. Thanks to YouTube you’ve seen all the footage of news anchors trying not to lose it that you could possibly need, and it’s about the same every time. Trust your estranged friends when they drop hints that they’d take an apology happily. Drop your estranged friends a hint that you’d take an apology happily. Stop looking for consequence-free stuff to do with or to people. For me, I’m going on TrekBBS to yell that they do not build the whale tank out of transparent aluminum. They build it out of the six-inch-thick plexiglass they traded the transparent aluminum formula for. Come on, people, watch the movie you’re watching. We can at least get that right.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell eleven points today as traders started getting all giddy thinking about how they used to be at, like, 80 points and now they’re up so way high nobody can even see 100 or even 200 anymore, which doesn’t sound at all like the sort of hubristic declaration that leads to incredible pain.

370

In Which I’m Afraid I Just Let You All Down, But Argue It’s The Local News’s Fault

I’m going to get my review of what was popular and why around here in June soon. I’m just thrown off my game yet again, this time by the local noon news. Yesterday during the weather reports they tossed in mentions of the ultraviolet index and then some reports about what to expect for people “going to mid-Michigan beaches” and now I’m stuck pondering that. I mean, there are some right fine beaches, fully equipped with large bodies of water and sand that’s too hot to actually be comfortable on and, in select cases, carousels to ride that are accessible from mid-Michigan. But they’re, like, on Lake Michigan, which is mid-Michigan in about the same way that Ocean City, Maryland, is in South Jersey. At least so it seems to me. But after the multi-part fiasco that was my just talking about Michigan’s Secretary of State offices when I got my license plate tags last year maybe I shouldn’t say anything with too much certainty. I could end up looking quite the fool again.

Here’s some more comic strips talked about on my mathematics blog. That’s the last of that until next week, or should be.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose eleven points despite investor anger at seeing a DVD of Bambi in the store with a note on it that Rotten Tomatoes certifies the movie Fresh. “What the flipping heck,” they would cry out, not in unison. “Bambi gets a Rotten Tomatoes sticker like it’s flipping Monster Trucks or something? What is wrong with the world like this?!” It’s hard to know what to say.

212

Statistics Saturday: E.T. Fitted Into The Titles Of The Air Bud Cinematic Universe

• E.T. The Extraterrestrial
• E.T. Golden Receiver
• E.T. World Pup
• E.T. Seventh Inning Fetch
• E.T. Spikes Back
• Air E.T.s
• Snow E.T.s
• Space E.T.s
• Santa E.T.s
• Spooky E.T.s
• Treasure E.T.s
• Super E.T.s
• The Search For Santa E.T.
• Santa E.T. 2: The E.T. Pups

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose four points today as traders got caught up on watching Conan O’Brien on the DVR.

198

Last Notes About The Cold

First, a note about my mathematics blog: it’s a thing that exists. Gads, I hate writing all this hype.

So my cold that’s been dominating my whole program of breathing the past week seems to actually be bronchitis and that seems like it’s on the way out. Friday I gave in to the fact I hadn’t finished a sentence since Monday without a coughing fit and went to the urgent care clinic. Their best guess was bronchitis, and prescribed some antibiotics and some cough syrup. The antibiotics were for an ear infection that had caused everything to sound like it was a woodcutter’s axe driven into my brain by a picric acid explosion. The cough syrup was your usual stuff, given in a bottle with instructions to take three times a day for five days, and which after the first day looked already half empty. I’m on day three or four now, depending on whether you count Friday, and it’s still only half empty. I do not know how this works and can only sit there, watching and pondering the bottle’s description of its contents: “a(n) clear, yellow, orange-pineapple-flavored syrup. (Pineapple menthol aroma)” May cause dizziness. I can’t say it’s wrong, just that it reads like they started thinking of words that could describe syrups and didn’t know how to stop. I’m impressed they didn’t end up “a(n) clear, yellow, orange-pineapple-flavored, viscous, revelatory, non-partisan, trouserless, analogue, costumed nighttime, obedient voiceless wet syrup”. Maybe the label was too small.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped over 23 points today on the discovery that the local movie theater was doing a Saturday midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show which would be great to go see except the audience will be full of people who’ll go to a Saturday midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

183

I Will Say The Bus Looks Neat Though

I’m running late on stuff this week. I always am, which raises questions about the use of “late” as a concept. Never mind. For this week I blame that I got to reading an article about the 70s Disaster Movie genre. And that lead me to the 1976 spoof of the 70s Disaster Movie genre, The Big Bus. There’s many shocking things about this, starting with the idea that 70s Disaster Movies were somehow not already their parodies. The difference between The Towering Inferno and SCTV’s spoof of The Towering Inferno is mostly that the SCTV version opens with fewer scenes of the violently 1970s lobby of the doomed building. I mean, the Towering Inferno lobby looks great in a 1974 way. It’s only hard to watch because of thinking how it would look if it were a real building. I can’t see it without imaginaing what soul-destroying monstrosity it would have decayed by 1988, before its mid-90s renovation into something too lacking in personality even to be ugly.

Also startling: I remember nothing of this movie (The Big Bus) even though it seems like it should have been filling space whenever channels needed to have a movie throughout the early 80s. Yes, yes, Airplane! seems to have been as much spoof as the whole 70s Disaster Movie genre ever needed, in case we were taking it seriously, but between Airplane! and Airplane II! that’s only like four hours of programming. Even the rudimentary cable channels of the 80s needed as much as six hours before going over to “weird foreign cartoons” and “public domain Three Stooges shorts”.

Wikipedia describes the movie in fascinating detail. The plot summary makes it sound like the movie was trying about three times too hard and on all the wrong subjects. It comes out sounding whimsical in the way a gigantic iron woolly mammoth in a potato sack race across a field strewn with creme pies is: my metaphor is trying way too hard to cram in funny-flavored stuff.

Also, per Wikipedia: look at that movie poster. That’s your classic style, the kind of poster they don’t make anymore. Back then, movies were still mysterious things and we audiences just wouldn’t go to it if we didn’t have some proof that there were actors in the movie, as demonstrated by passport photos or, better, caricatured illustrations of the principal actors. Today movie poster style has moved on to showing abstract patterns of shadow and light, possibly featuring ruins where the villain blew up the plot. And that’s fine and stylish as far as it goes, but then you get surprises like last year where Star Trek Beyond turned out to be 105 minutes of kaleidoscope patterns and then a four-minute scene of Spock and McCoy trash-talking each other. Not saying it wasn’t good. I’m saying, back in the day, we’d get a big old grid of Actor Face staring out at us.

Then where I get permanently hung up by the Wikipedia article is in the sections about the movie’s production. Specifically this:

According to articles in 1976 issues of both Motor Trend magazine and the now defunct Bus World magazine

I’m sorry, I can’t finish that sentence or anything else, really. I’m assuming that Bus World was a trade publication for the large-person-road-transport industry. But it would be only eight percent stranger if it weren’t. What if it was a fan magazine? Don’t tell me there aren’t bus fans. There are fans of everything, including fandoms. What kind of journal was Bus World, though?

The difference between a trade journal and a fan magazine is in how they spin the articles. The point of a fan magazine is to follow up every bit of news with the question, “Will the industry ever manage to be more awesome than this?” The answer is, “No way, but we’re looking forward to them trying”. The point of a trade journal is to follow up every bit of news with the question, “Will the industry be able to recover from this?”. The answer is, “Conceivably, but likely not”. I don’t know that there are fan magazines for trade journals, but I hope there are. Also I hope there are trade journals for the fan magazine business, because the politics involved in everything would be awesome.

What do I hope the reality of the now-defunct Bus World was? I don’t know, and I’m too busy pondering that.

In short: Bus World.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped another five points today which we’re willing to blame on that Access World/London Metals Exchange/zinc warehousing scandal. It’s probably good for another couple of points off the Another Blog, Meanwhile index. Just you wait and see.

116

In Which I Ask You To Check My Love’s And My Conclusions

If you’re like my wife and I you respond to a pretty snappy troll about the movie Blank Check by thinking of mid-90s monkey-based movie product Dunston Checks In. Naturally we looked it up on Wikipedia and found this under the “Reception” section:

The film had received overwhelming negative reviews from critics, and holds a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite this, the film received positive reviews from several professional film reviewers, Desson Howe and Rita Kempley of The Washington Post referred to the film by saying “It ain’t half bad,” and “Plucky, prank-filled family farce” respectively.^[1] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times stated that ‘Dunston Checks In’ “is a delightful and funny family film of exceptional high style.”, “as light as a souffle and just as delicious.”, and “plays like a tribute to the resourceful, unpretentious studio productions of the past.” giving the film five out of five stars.^[2] According to an article published in the Chicago Tribune, “The cast is talented, the hide-and-seek action is silly, and the bond between a sweet little boy and the adorable ape is touching.”^[3] Faye Dunaway’s performance in the film and in The Chamber earned her a Stinkers Bad Movie Award nomination and a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actress. The film was also nominated at the 18th Youth in Film Awards (Young Artist Awards) for Best Family Feature Film: Musical or Comedy, and Eric Lloyd for Best Performance in a Feature Film – Actor Age Ten or Under. The film was successful at the box office in India, where it was dubbed as Ek Bandar Hotel Ke Andar.^[4]

Are we correct to read this, especially that copy-editing mess that is the Kevin Thomas statement, as the syntactically-scarred battleground of an edit war between factions who insist Dunston Checks In was critically acclaimed and ones who insist Dunston Checks In was not? Also, either Wikipedia doesn’t mention it or else Dunston Checks In has somehow not spawned a complicated cinematic universe of like twelve direct-to-DVD sequels you never heard of but get tangled up with the universes of Air Bud or Alpha and Omega or something like that. Is that a relief or somehow a weird shame? Didn’t The Land Before Time get so many sequels the last one was about the dinosaurs at the Battle of Manzikert or something? Please show your work.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile slid sideways four points today, but since we haven’t any way of measuring that it remains at the same old 116 as last time.

116

Meanwhile In No; A Dream Report

So you know that extreme ping-pong sport where the competitors and table are all suspended from a beam extended from a skyscraper, far above ground? Sure, we’re all interested in that. OK, so apparently the dream world wants me to see a documentary about the crews that set up and test the harness and frames to make the game safe and playable. Including some daring footage of how they lasso a steel beam to get the first elements installed. And I’m not all that bothered by heights, but you want to see people tossing cables out to grab a steel beam 400 feet up some North Korean(?) skyscraper and I’m starting to get nervous.

The dream also included some relevant segments from one of those odd little 20-minute making-of documentaries narrated by that deep-voiced guy which they used to make for 60s and 70s films so that … decades in the future Turner Classic Movies would have some filler. I don’t know what their business model was. Anyway, they included clips from that because a lot of the fundamental technology for skyscraper-suspended ping-pong was developed for the famous(?) zipline sequence of John Wayne’s Chisum, a movie that I will now go my entire life without seeing, thank you very much.

I understand it might be odd to make a life choice, including a small one like whether to ever see Chisum, on the basis of a dream like that. But it was a documentary in my dream and therefore must be accurate.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose twelve points today out of fears that — wait, no, it doesn’t rise on fears. It rises on hopes. Must have got something caught in the copy filter. Let’s try again. The index rose twelve points today out of hopes that there were grasshoppers in the basement and getting up higher would avoid the issue. Ah, yes, I see where the ‘fears’ comes in then. Some people are just afraid of grasshoppers, is all. That’s normal-ish. Carry on.

130

What To Do For Valentine’s Day

With the upcoming Valentine’s Day it’s worth reviewing some proper romantic gestures. Before attempting a romantic gesture check with your physician and stretch all major muscle groups. Also have your otolith examined. While there are few ear bones whose health is really necessary for romantic gesturing how often have you ever called off work because of an otolith appointment? Exactly and now you’ll never be happy again until you have. I’m sorry. Check on some minor muscle groups if that helps you feel better.

And to preface the rest of this: don’t listen to me for romantic gesture advice. I’m the sort of person who checks book stores to see if they have a new history of the containerized cargo industry because then I might own three books about it. I once gave my love a video game file for a present. In my defense, it was for Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, a game my love describes as “as good as we can hope for since they never ported Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 to the Mac”. It was a pretty good roller coaster too.

Romantic gestures are fundamentally simple. Think of the person you want to gesture at. Don’t wave! You haven’t checked that they’re not in a spot where you might hit them in the face by accident. There’s not a good time to hit a romantic partner in the face, but the immediate run-up to Valentine’s Day is a bad one. It sends the mixed messages of “I like how your body feels and wish to feel it more often and, indeed, right now” with “swiftly, and without your even suspecting my intentions”. Why so swift? “Because I have to get back to reading this thing on the Internet”? Your partner knows better. The Internet is the place we spend all our time and attention reading things, none of which is important.

Anyway, think of your partner. Now think of a thing your partner enjoys. Now think of a way to do a lot of that thing. Not too much! Having some restraint is important, especially if you’re, like me, a guy. The normal failure mode for guy thinking is to take something pleasant and then do so much of it that somebody weeps. That’s fine if we’re talking about contests where you drink mustard until someone’s tongue shrivels up and falls off. It’s not all right if we’re talking about giving your partner so many roses that it explodes, scattering the faint scent of good wishes over the entire Eastside. This will leave the roads all slick and make the evening commute an impossible mess. So if you do want to go ahead and destroy a loved one’s house with excessively many roses do it when Valentine’s Day in on a weekend so the evening rush doesn’t take the brunt of the chaos.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, think of a movie you and your loved one have seen together. Then get that on some shiny disc. This lets you remember how you enjoyed being together watching a movie like this. And since you’ve already seen the movie you aren’t going to have to make the time to watch the shiny disc. Which is good since nobody’s had the time to watch a movie since 2009. The bookshelves are starting to groan under the weight of still-wrapped copies of The Tale of Desperaux and whatever else you have fond unchecked memories of. The point when they collapse will be excessive and someone may weep, so I guess that satisfies the need to do something guy-ish with the holiday after all.

Warning! One time I tried this, picking a bunch of used DVDs for movies we’d seen. My concept was that since these were experiences my love and I had already had it was only fitting that they be used discs. Do you get it? I had to explain this in a two-hour presentation using charts and a guest speaker and it got from my love the romantic statement that my argument that this was a romantic gesture was logically valid without making any statement about whether it was sound. It would’ve had greater impact if I had made pretend roller coasters out of them.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped nine points, nine points mind you, because everybody realized they forgot it was open-mike poetry night and got a little panicky while trying to work out a reaction.

93

In Your Houses Late At Night Sit Down Cozy, Kill That Light

What’s on TV when I’m feeling a little lonely and drifting between channels as they in turn disappoint me.

Oh No, The Contractors Sent The Wrong Kitchen Cabinets. As seen in the lounge at the Toyota dealership waiting for the mysterious tire-pressure problem to be diagnosed as “mysterious” and “something to do with the beads”. Charmingly white couple buy a house and then demolish all its interior surfaces. Then they wait for the contractors to do something wrong, usually with the kitchen cabinets. Sometimes it’s simple: they send cabinets too big for the house, ones that overflow the kitchen, the dining area, the living room, and reach out into the street, proving a hazard to taller traffic. Sometimes it’s also simple: they send cabinets too small. These wrong cabinets could fit one of those old-style coffee mugs grandma had, the ones that are smaller than the teaspoons you’d stir sugar into them in. Most often they’re the wrong shade of white, shades of white that the TV show host says he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. He seems in earnest. They’re going to have to make severe cuts in their $625,000 renovation budget, which means they use a cheaper tile for the splash area behind the kitchen counter.

That’s A Lot Of Informercial About Some Collapsible Ladder Thing. And it’s on like half the channels? What even is this?

Rebooted Season Of A Cartoon I Liked In The 90s. Oh, it’s Flash-animated now. And they redesigned the characters so they all look like they were caught in an airport baggage carousel and squashed flat by one of those weird huge cardboard boxes taped shut that someone has on every flight somehow. Also they changed two of the voice actors. And they can say “poop” now, or maybe have to. And everybody’s a lot meaner than they were before. Raises questions about whether the original was quite this obviously gender-essentialist too. Or was it just obliviously sexist? Were we that awful in the 90s? A quick check. YouTube has an episode of the original, only the proportions are weird and there’s some unearthly station logo in two corners. Yeah, the original kinda was. Should not have checked.

Two Guys Laughing At How They Totally Said A Thing. They’ve got a great show tonight and their first guest will be Seth Rogan, they say, evincing a confidence in the inevitability of events that doesn’t seem less obnoxious to me just because it was true, since they taped the episode this evening and now know how things turned out.

Old Timey Movie With Actors I Kind Of Recognize From Bugs Bunny Cartoons. Black and white. Something about a man and a woman who live in San Francisco and have a wonderful time even though they go to bed wearing more clothes than we use today to venture to Antarctica. Features numerous montages during which they walk though multiple-exposure scenes and don’t make eye contact with anything, especially not each other. Also even the driver gets into the car from the passenger’s side. I think maybe one of them is trying to kill the other, possibly because the other thinks the first is trying to kill them and it seems like a violation of trust not to reciprocate. Worth watching for how well everybody articulates in the middle of a heated life-or-death fight.

Simpsons Episode All About A Character I Never Saw Before. I guess he got to be important after I kind of forgot to watch regularly again? Also did Homer always get battered like this in the old days? And deserve even more injury?

History Explored By Wide-Eyed Astonished Guys. Might be about the fabled “Money Pit” of Oak Island. Might be about that World War II plan to make icebergs into aircraft carriers. Might be about the shooting of President Garfield. Doesn’t matter. A couple of guys have eager interviews to do with experts who’ve heard there’s an artifact related to it somewhere in the area. And when they ask another expert they hear about how it’s totally the case that artifacts are things that exist after historical events. Someone at the historical society confirms that historical events happened and some of them even involved other places than the historical society building. The hunt for the artifact drives them to hold up grainy old photographs in front of new buildings and then go inside. The building is being renovated. The floors are all torn up. None of the people working on it know anything about the historical event but they say they didn’t see anything suspicious, just some water-damaged old floorboards. There’s a subbasement they can crawl into if they like, though, and the wide-eyed astonished guys think that’s even more awesome than their old tree fort. I bet the contractors are about to deliver the wrong cabinets. It would be just like them.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Traders brought the Another Blog, Meanwhile index up nine points today when they settled on that old-timey movie as the thing to watch. There’s this surprisingly tense scene where a wind-up toy dog is walking off towards the woman hiding in the closet and they don’t make movies like that anymore.

110

Fibber McGee and Molly Leaving for Hollywood

I’m still in an old-time radio mood. So here’s a 1941 installment of Fibber McGee and Molly. The show’s got great name recognition, if allusions to it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 are any guide. Granted, by that standard, Averell Harriman still has great name recognition.

But it’s of historical importance. The show was one of those that created the situation-comedy genre. As often the case with those that create a form it doesn’t have the form quite right. The show tends to have very loose plots, to the extent it has plots at all. There’s typically just a gimmick for the episode and then riffing around that. The bunch of wacky neighbors and friends come on, usually one at a time, to add their riffs, and then after 25 minutes of this, two musical numbers, and a minute spent praising Johnson’s Wax, something ends the situation. It hardly seems like the same sort of entertainment as, say, Arrested Development.

But I think it’s of more than just historic importance, at least in some episodes. The one I’ve picked here, “Leaving for Hollywood” and originally run the 24th of June, 1941, closed out the broadcast season. It’s built on the McGees closing up their house and saying goodbye to everyone because they’re off to Hollywood for the summer … to make one of the movies based on the Fibber McGee and Molly show. The movie, Look Who’s Laughing (mentioned in the show as the Old-Timer worries about the title) featured most of the radio program’s cast in a story that intersects with Lucille Ball and Edgar-Bergen-and-Charlie-McCarthy and some story about the town’s airstrip.

And there is something almost strikingly modern. We have the fictional conceit that we’re listening to the stuff happening to the McGees and their acquaintances. And yes, it breaks the fourth wall a couple times each episode for the needs of commerce or just to let Jim Jordan get in a good side crack. But here’s a story all about winding up the “real” affairs of the McGees for long enough to let them make a movie about themselves. It’s a weird blending of layers of fiction. I don’t think the 1941 audience was confused or blown away by this; it just feels too natural that the listeners are in on the artifice of the show. (Note the biggest laugh of the episode is one that subverts the show’s best-remembered joke. And its next-most-famous running gag appears just to be mocked too.) I imagine someone listening to the show for the first time would find nothing surprising about the structure, except maybe for the conceit that perfectly good half-hour radio comedies should be adapted into 80-minute movies with far too much plot and nothing happening. It’s only weird if you stop and point it out, which I hope you see now that I have.

Minor note: the second musical number within the show, about 19:30 in, is the Kingsmen singing “The Reluctant Dragon”, based on the Disney partly-animated Robert Benchley vehicle and that’s fun.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

So here we are, trying out reporting just the breakaway alternate Another Blog, Meanwhile Index and that’s up two points from where it was yesterday. And I don’t want to say anything to the traders who are trying to work out why it is there’s been no divergence in the indices since they split off all that while ago. But I will say that based on what I have they’re in for a nasty surprise regarding today’s mainstream index returns.

104

Oscar-Winning Movies Of The 40s For Bunnies

• Rebecca For Bunnies
• How Green Was My Valley For Bunnies
• Mrs Miniver For Bunnies
• Casablanca For Bunnies
• Going My Way For Bunnies
• The Lost Weekend For Bunnies
• The Best Years Of Our Lives For Bunnies
• Gentleman’s Agreement For Bunnies
• Hamlet For Bunnies
• All The King’s Men For Bunnies

I don’t know. I got nothing.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped three points back to 100, which it’s been seeing a lot. However, the mainstream traders explained they figured dropping by three would finally shake off the copycat alternate traders. The alternate traders, meanwhile, had the same idea and their Another Blog, Meanwhile index also dropped by three points. You’d think this would help encourage talk of reconciliation between the groups but so far that’s not getting anywhere.

100

Movie Madness From The Old Days

So let’s say it’s a 1930s cartoon. Is it actually legally required to include an Al Jolsen “Mammy” hook? Let’s find out.

The cartoon is from Ub Iwerks’s Flip the Frog series. Iwerks was one of those great cartoonists and inventors to orbit Walt Disney. With Disney he was able to create Mickey Mouse as well as some of the lesser characters like Clarabelle Cow. And he had a knack for technical innovation, with the live-action/animation effects of Song of the South his doing. Outside Disney’s orbit, Iwerks … well, you can see. The cartoon’s from his own studio. And it’s technically proficient, smooth and competent in a way not common in 1931 except from Disney studios. And there’s fun in it, but it is slow-paced. Could use stronger editing. I imagine if it ran five minutes this could be a really solid cartoon.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Well, the index dropped another eight points over the day and isn’t that just like it? There’s no sense of gratitude, of loyalty in this business anymore. Many traders say it’s a different world from the one they started in. They don’t see where the old mores even fit in anymore.

106

Thinking About TV Movies

That bit about The Kinks’ Arthur the other day got me thinking about TV movies. I don’t see them anymore. But I grew up occasionally watching TV movies when my parents didn’t want to change the channel after the real shows were done for the night. I knew it as a genre in which over the course of two hours we’d get to meet a generically pleasant cast of characters and discover the wife was murdered by Mike Farrell. I suppose they did things differently in 1969 Britain, when The Kinks were making their not-made TV movie. I’m not sure they had even invented Mike Farrell by then, and the wife had to be murdered by Wayne Rogers instead. If anyone’s got definite word please let me know.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Another Blog, Meanwhile index traders agree that it’s just five points, it’s just another five points lost since yesterday, it’s not even a full five percent and there’s no reason we can’t see just as big a rebound as the last week saw declines and how can it be so long since we were in the 140s when it was just Wednesday for crying out loud? What makes this happen to good little indices?

108

The Unmaking

A friend was amused by something I said that alluded to The Kinks’ album Arthur. I went on to explain the album to him, something he consented to by not chewing his own tail off to make good his escape. I was kind. I just wanted to explain how the definitely best song in it was “Some Mother’s Son”, unless the best song was “Shangri-La”. In any case the most cheerily catchy song on it is clearly “Victoria” unless it’s “She’s Bought A Hat like Princess Marina”. Look, just listen to it, all right?

I started to explain whether it’s a rock opera before my friend tore my leg off and whacked me over the head with it. It’s a contentious issue. If you ask Ray Davies about it, he’ll explain that it was totally the first rock opera except for the ones that snuck out between when he had the idea and when he finished it. Also that of course it wasn’t an rock opera and he doesn’t know why critics call it that. Also that people only say it’s a rock opera to stir up trouble. Also that Dave Davies should get over here so he can punch him. Also that who cares about writing rock operas. I’m happy to let Ray Davies have whatever view on Arthur he wishes, in accord with my life goal of getting through it without being punched by him. So far, successful for 16,089 days running!

Thing is I’ll go along with saying Arthur wasn’t the first rock opera, or even a rock opera at all, especially if Ray Davies is looking for someone to punch. Unless he really wants it to be a rock opera because, again, 16,089 days and counting. It was created to be the soundtrack for an unmade TV movie. And that’s what’s caught my imagination. Not calling it a TV movie. I’m used to that idea.

What’s got me is the phrase “unmade movie”. They want to express it was a never-made movie. But it’s got me thinking of what it would take to un-make a movie. You’d have to start with a made movie, sure. Let’s say something like 2006’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which was as slightly made a movie as has been the least mediocre choice of in-flight entertainment since the Disney Radio channel was still doing the Hamster Dance song somehow. I should be clear, I didn’t hate the movie or anything, it was just on and a little annoying up to the point that the in-flight entertainment system crashed and couldn’t be brought back up. Could be any movie.

You’d start, I guess, by taking any prints of the film and rinsing them clean, bringing them back to a faint silver-tinged cloud of colloidal particulate matter. And I don’t care if that isn’t what unexposed film is like. It’s too much fun to write “faint silver-tinged cloud of colloidal particulate matter”. Go ahead. Try coming up with a better phrase that seems like it ought to have something to do with film stock.

I don’t know if it existed in digital form any, but I suppose we can write new stuff, I’m thinking saved games of Civilization II, onto whatever they came from. I’m thinking USB Flash drives. Very large ones, to be able to hold films. Like, they’re on keychains, but for those novelty-size Keys to the City. Really big ones. Have to play a lot of Civ II to fill those up, but I can do that.

Unmaking the movie would go farther, sure. I suppose you’d bring all the cast and crew back together so everyone could go through the scenes backwards, undoing it all. I’m not sure if you’d have to undo the alternate takes or unused scenes. I guess it depends how busy the people are. Unmaking the movie can’t be their whole job. Probably it’s not necessary to unbuild the sets, since they do that anyway.

There might be some outfits that could be unstitched and turned back to pieces of cloth. I don’t imagine that we’d take, like, any bits of wool and restore them to the original sheep, as most film companies don’t keep records in sufficient detail for this. Similarly there’s no sense at all restoring any cotton used in the outfits to the original sheep, because sheep only produce cotton if they’re looking for a little extra income as poorly-paid farm workers. There’s limits to how much you’d have to do to fully un-make a film, is all I’m saying.

Again, I don’t want the people whose lives brought them to the point of making My Super Ex-Girlfriend to think I’m picking on them. It’s just a movie I’m holding up as an example of something we could unmake if we really tried. If we needed some different unmade movie I’ll take suggestions. Thank you for your time considering the problem.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Um. All right. Traders aren’t looking to panic or anything here but what the flipping heck, guys? Fourteen points in one flipping day? Where did that come from? Where did they go? When are they coming back? Analysts disagree about why the sudden drop happened except for that one who’s being all smug about how she knew this was inevitable. We don’t need that stuff just now.

131

Stray Thoughts About The Puppet Master

I realize that it’s just a programming convention. But when you stop and notice it, it’s kind of weird that the Muppets name all their stuff Muppet stuff. Imagine the reverse; would you watch The Human Show? Well, I guess I would, but I’d be expecting some faintly punk British-produced angry comedy along the lines of The Young Ones. Special case. But then how about, say, Human Treasure Island or Human Wizard of Oz or Humans From Space? … All right, again, that’s starting out interesting. The Humans Take Manhattan? … Saying that out loud I guess I see why the Muppets do that. All right, but let’s imagine a reporter for the local news introduced himself, “Hi ho, this is Kermit the White Guy with a Human News Flash.” OK, this is getting compelling. Forget that I was doing something like grousing.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index drifted four points lower over the day. Analysis credit this to the trading community commissioning an illustration of them as Crystal Gems and now they’re all worried about what if they have to ask the artist for something to be changed, like their vests aren’t the right length or something? And some are saying that of course they can check that at the first-sketch stage and asking for a minor change like that is nothing, artists are fine with that as long as you’re clear as early as possible about what you do and don’t want, while others just feel like they’d die if they had to say anything wasn’t exactly right. A nasty fight broke out when someone brought up the time in 1999 they tried getting a drawing of themselves as Powerpuff Girls and they never did get the finished picture, although the artist for that recently e-mailed to say he knows he’s late but he’s been going through some drama and he’s hoping to get the commission backlog done as soon as he has a free weekend to knock them out.

141

What I’ve Picked Up From The 1953 Movie _The Neanderthal Man_

So, Professor Clifford Groves (Robert Shayne, who also played the assistant to the Secretary of Defense in 1963’s Son of Flubber and a refinery executive in 1971’s The Million Dollar Duck) has a meeting with the Council of Jerkface Movie Scientists and it isn’t going well:

“This is my cross. The penalty of being born into an era of little men, who are small even in their spites. You’re creatures of paper, bred of an artificial culture, whose dearest possessions is your prejudices, and important only in the hollowness of your smirking vanities. Hypocrisy is your Bible; stupidity is the cornerstone of your existence; and dishonesty your human essence.”

Groves’s meeting went downhill from there, yes, and he would go on to use an experimental formula that turned his housekeeper and himself into half-ape monstrosities and he gets killed and turns their pet into a saber-toothed tiger and his fiancee breaks up with him (not in that order), but I still think I’m going to work that up into a gif so I can deploy it in some Twitter arguments I only stopped answering because it was too much bother to go back and win them. Also I’m really uncomfortable with the subject/verb number agreement there, although Professor Graves sounds so compelling I don’t want to argue it, especially since he might maul me.

Also I really love how everyone talks with more syllables than they need to for every sentence, including when they’re apologizing for entering their room uninvited.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped one point in ordinary trading, and made it two points after tipping the bartender.

132

Why does turning into an ape-man monstrosity in the movies always mean you have to climb out windows instead of using the door, anyway? It wasn’t even locked.

Statistics Saturday: TV Shows I Remember In Too Much Detail

I am embarrassed to say I do not remember Supertrain in enough detail to include it in this list, but I kind of wish I did.

In my defense, Automan is the coolest show in the world if it is 1984 and you are eleven and don’t see enough TV shows with Chuck Wagner in them.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose nearly nine points, and then topped it off because it seemed like a waste not to take the full ninth point, following intense speculation that one of the traders might win a date with Tad Hamilton! He’s the dreamiest!

127

Caption This: The Consultant’s Review

Yes yes I know the woman is Vash and she’s Captain Picard’s slightly out-of-character lightly-romantic entanglement from that Indiana Jones ripoff episode that we all thought was pretty swell at the time but haven’t looked back on, and this still is from that Robin Hood ripoff episode that I certainly thought was one of the worst things they had done not featuring The Outrageous Okona but haven’t looked back on, even if I admit Worf had two good lines only one of which was ripped off from Animal House which I haven’t seen either and don’t judge me.

Woman: “All right, I’ve seen enough. Well. While this may look bad, I don’t think you have reason to worry. I have helped people with even more severe difficulties in high-fiving. And, as they say, the mere fact that you realize you need help indicates that you’re not too far gone.”

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And I enjoy when people have their own ideas, so here’s some space for that:

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As usual for Sundays I reviewed comic strips over on my other blog. Includes two comics to look at directly instead of just clicking links to read later on! Which for some reason I don’t do for every comic strip I talk about. I don’t know either.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose slightly when analysts remembered this Dave Barry crack about employment figures being eaten by a goat. In context it makes sense and you can see why analysts would be thinking about goats eating things.

116

How I Spent Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary

While I didn’t actually watch any of the shows or movies or anything I did stop in on TrekBBS for the first time in like forever. And there I found: everybody complaining that their personal favorite show didn’t get referenced anywhere near enough in Star Trek Beyond. Ah, it’s all so sweet and charming. The Deep Space Nine folks have a point though. Also good heavens they’re still arguing whether the navigational deflectors would brush off the Death Star’s planet-explodey superlaser and I only just realized the Death Star is not a star and does not kill stars and this is going to bug me. Good grief, you’re a Star Trek fan, why are you spelling their names “Ryker” and “Troy”? Why? WHY?