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Sentential Links #178

Time for linkage.

:: And, jam on fresh bread is a perfectly acceptable dinner.

:: Can you see what’s wrong with this book cover? I’d say it’s either that Loring picked the worst possible title for a novel about the horsey set or that whoever painted the art read neither the book nor its title.

:: Who knew sex is fun? Alert the media!

:: It’s not enough now to just be a lite version of a Rush Limbaugh clone. You have to now go full wingnut and parrot the paranoid talking points of a Glenn Beck to be considered credible among the Freepocracy. If ACORN, George Soros, and Birther crap don’t get a mention on any given day, you’ve abdicated your duties as a wingnut talk show host in 2009. (Mostly an account of one of the most prominent local blogger’s sudden flare-up with one of the local talk-radio windbags. I’ve never listened to Bauerle, but there’s always some crappy local Limbaugh wannabe, a-rantin’ away. Oh well.)

:: “OHHHHH YEAHHHHHH!”

:: He looked like my banner.

:: All you can do is try. And as my grandmother used to say to us: it is not worthy of humanity to give up. (Farewell, Hilzoy, and we thank you.)

More next week.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: OK, this may not be safe for work, owing to the subject matter; or maybe it is, owing to the fact that it pertains to the animal kingdom. But…well, you learn something everyday. It turns out that humans are far from the only creatures who — oh, how shall we put this — are not always the masters of their domain.

:: When I heard that Futurama was coming back, and that it was going to be on Comedy Central, I thought, “Great! Now FOX can’t screw with the show anymore! Yay!!!”

Unfortunately, it turns out that FOX still owns the damn show, and it further turns out that FOX doesn’t much want to give the voice actors on the show a raise, so they’ve issued a casting call for replacement voices.

I never tire of this quote, from Jon Lovitz (uttered on Letterman a decade ago when FOX canceled his animated show The Critic): “FOX — they should spell it with a ‘U’.”

:: If you’ve done a lot of Interstate Highway driving in your life, you remember ubiquitous “Rest Areas” — little places where you’d pull off to relieve yourself, maybe grab a can of pop from a vending machine, walk the dog if you had one, and generally just get out of the car for a few minutes. They were small affairs — a building with bathrooms and a place to grab pamphlets on local tourist attractions, and a grassy area with a few picnic benches behind it, and that was it. Certainly unlike today’s Rest Areas, with giant gas stations, gift shops, and buildings full of two or three fast food restaurants.

The old rest areas are disappearing into history. I’m not sure if that saddens me or not, but there it is.

More next week!

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Is there NOTHING it can’t do?!

One of the great inventions of the Industrial Age comes for sale in a little blue can and a red cap and a little straw attached to the side by a piece of tape. I’m talking, obviously, about WD-40, that amazing uber-lubricant that penetrates and displaces water and gets rusted-together parts to free up and move again. WD-40 saves my life on the job on a nearly weekly basis. (Well, not literally, but it ends up allowing me to fix things that would otherwise be unfixable. How awesome is WD-40? Well, here’s a contrast for you: when I tell people I’m a maintenance/handyman guy by trade, they will usually say something speculative about how often I use duct tape. In all honesty, I almost never use duct tape – I remember using it one time in the last six months – but I use WD almost weekly.

I used to always lose the little straw that came with it (I suspect that future alien archeologists, when digging up the remains of our civilization, will be baffled when they find thousands of WD-40 straws in the places where our cities used to lie), until I realized that WD’s cap now comes equipped with two little divots, not unlike the indentations in the side of an ash tray, into which one is supposed to snap the little straw. But even that’s no longer an issue because a while back the fine folks at WD redesigned their can so that the straw is now attached to a separate nozzle so it can’t come off; and what’s more, that nozzle can be flipped up into position to use the straw, or it can be flipped down so you get the “wide dispersal” spray pattern, if that’s what you want.

I’ve got WD-40 on the mind right now because I just got done fixing the hood latch on my car with it. At some point the latch trigger mechanism – the business end of the little cord that is tensioned when you pull on the hood release in the passenger compartment – became so rusty that it wouldn’t spring back into place when I opened the hood once, earlier in the year. So I was in the unenviable position of having my hood secured by nothing but the secondary latch, the one you reach under to open the hood the rest of the way after you’ve popped the hood release from inside. I tried coating that mechanism with WD, to no avail, but my problem there was that I needed fairly specific application of WD, and wouldn’t you know it – my WD can at home was missing the damned straw! So I made a mental note to pick up one of the new-fangled cans of the stuff (I have a few at work, but none at home) for fixing at some point, and in the meantime, I secured my hood with three bungee cords. Ouch. That’s how it went until I finally remembered to grab one of those nifty straw-forever-attached cans of WD; earlier today I got outside and liberally applied the stuff to the moving parts of my hood latch, and after letting it penetrate while I checked my oil (which was fine), I just reached in with a long screwdriver and presto change-o! got the hood latch moving again. I gave it a few opens and closes just to make sure it keeps working, and now I’m back to my hood staying shut the way it’s supposed to and not using the bungee cords. This is big, as I have actually had the experience of having my hood fly open while driving before. I don’t want to repeat that.

So anyway, the WD lore that always appeals to me is that its name simply comes from the fact that it was the 40th attempt at making a product that did what it was supposed to. And I end up thinking: well, geez! If WD-40 is so awesome, can you imagine what they might have had on their hands if they’d made a few more attempts? We’d have products like this:

WD-41: No mechanical effects, but when consumed counteracts the effects of alcohol in the human bloodstream.

WD-42: No mechanical effects, but when sprayed around the edges of a garden, leaves behind a residual odor undetectable by humans but which completely repels rabbits and groundhogs.

WD-43: No mechanical effects, but you know those beer commercials on teevee that show a humdrum suburban backyard morphing a tropical party paradise at the mere opening of one can of a certain brand of beer? WD-43 does that.

WD-44: Spray it into water, and it turns into wine cooler. (More research is needed on this one, obviously.)

WD-45: Spray it into water, and it turns into Zima. (This formulation was laughed out of the laboratory.)

WD-46: Spray it into wine, and it turns the wine into wine that tastes like it’s been sprayed with mechanical lubricant. (Not every formulation does something useful.)

WD-47: When sprayed onto human skin, skin becomes very sticky for about ten minutes or so, but when sprayed onto cloth, the cloth becomes extremely slippery. (This formulation is secretly used by NFL wide receivers for two seasons before the league catches on and outlaws it.)

WD-48: Its only effect is to make Fran Drescher’s voice sound like Kathleen Turner’s.

WD-49: Spritzed onto a book, it dissolves all but the good parts. (Copies of Twilight and Atlas Shrugged are, of course, completely destroyed.)

WD-50: Makes any man’s voice sound like Morgan Freeman’s.

WD-51: Brings boring blog posts to a screeching halt before the blogger can finish typing his sente

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For Mr. Cronkite

I don’t recall Walter Cronkite doing the news a whole lot from when I was a kid, but I do remember him. What I remember more, though, was his wonderful baritone voice showing up in all manner of documentary-type stuff over the years after his retirement from the anchor’s desk. He was once the voice of the ride at EPCOT that goes up inside the big geosphere-golfball thing; his voice was appropriate as that ride takes passengers through the history of communications. I loved his delivery of the vocal portion of that ride when I was in EPCOT in 1990, and I was disappointed to learn in 1998, when we returned, that Mr. Cronkite’s narration had been replaced by a new version voiced by Jeremy Irons. (Nothing against Jeremy Irons, of course — but he’s not Walter Cronkite, is he?)

My main memory of Cronkite, though, is watching him on the yearly New Year’s From Vienna concerts that are the major New Year’s Day tradition in my family. We’d watch the telecast every year on PBS, in which Cronkite would introduce the pieces and give brief vignettes about the history of Vienna around the time the Strauss Family was producing some of the most glittering dance-hall music in history. This past year, however, Cronkite was replaced by Julie Andrews. A fine choice, but I figured at the time that Cronkite must have finally become too old and frail to continue his duties as the host of New Year’s From Vienna.

I couldn’t find any YouTube clips that showed Cronkite actually executing his duties thereof, so this will have to do. For older people of that era, Cronkite’s reportage of the JFK assassination and Vietnam and Watergate are their key memories of him. For me, though, this work will always be associated, in part, with Walter Cronkite.

Here’s the most famous waltz ever written, Johann Strauss’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Cronkite.

(But why, oh why, couldn’t he at least have lived three more days to see the 40th anniversary of the moon landing? That’s just mean, Mr. Reaper.)

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Bad Joke Friday!

We’ll try this for a while, until I run out of bad jokes. (If you want to suggest bad jokes, send them in e-mail. Don’t leave them in comments, as then they will have already appeared on the blog.)

Our first bad joke:

“So a baby seal walks into a club….”

[rimshot]

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Something for Thursday

Last week we had a grand march from Verdi; this week, we’ll hear Richard Wagner’s approach to the grand march concept. Here’s the Entry of the Guests into the Wartburg, from Tannhauser.

Wagner didn’t care for Verdi, but in our time, we can have both. That makes me happy.

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“DANCING! Everything else is bullshit!”

It’s always fun to take trips down memory lane and investigate the objects of our nostalgia, isn’t it? Once in a great while we’ll look into something we deeply loved when we were young and find that it’s every bit as good as we remember it; much more frequently we find that the thing we loved is actually complete crap, and a kind of jaded disappointment sets in as we wonder how we could have ever been so naive as to think the item in question was any good at all.

But there’s a little-discussed third category, when we strongly suspect that the thing we loved back in the day is crap, and thus, when we find our suspicions confirmed, we’re not so much disappointed as rather elated in a strange way. I had one of these experiences last week, when I popped into my computer the DVD of a movie I hadn’t seen since I watched it at the tender age of eight in my own living room. The movie? A mostly-forgotten flick called Thank God It’s Friday.

How did I come to see this movie when I was eight? It was on HBO during the year when we actually subscribed to that service, the year we lived in Elkins, WV. I was in second grade. HBO was kind of cool — a channel with uncut movies! What could have been cooler than that? I vaguely remember being ordered out of the living room when my parents wanted to watch an R-rated movie on HBO, but I could be misremembering events. I don’t really remember how many movies I saw on that channel — the only ones that stand out are Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (I had an obsession about that flick and its later teevee show), The Poseidon Adventure, and Thank God It’s Friday.

So, what about this movie? Well, I noted some time ago that Saturday Night Fever has a camp reputation about it, mostly owing to the camp reputation that’s accrued around everything from the disco era these days. SNF‘s reputation, though, is unfair; the movie is cynical, bleak, and brilliant. People who haven’t seen SNF mock its dance moves and the disco clothes. The movie they should be mocking is Thank God It’s Friday, because this movie really portrays the reality that most people think of when thinking of the disco era: bad clothes, bad dance moves, drunken and drugged-out sexual escapades carried out on smoky dance floors under the eye of a hyperkinetic deejay.

TGIF is one of the campiest movies ever made. I’m reasonably confident in that statement, even though my sample size of movies seen is nowhere big enough to make that statement definitive. Seriously, this is one silly movie. Not one minute of it deserves to be taken seriously. However, I don’t hold that against the movie, because I don’t think that the movie takes itself seriously for one minute.

What is TGIF about? It’s one night, a Friday night (obviously), in the life of a Los Angeles disco. Into this disco wanders a motley cast of characters, whose misadventures on and around the dance floor we follow for the duration of the flick. There is the pair of underage girls who are breaking curfew in hopes of winning the disco’s dance contest. There is the Wonder-bread guy whose Wonder-bread wife wants to be more than Wonder-bread, and thus drags her accountant husband to the disco. There’s the naughty girl who drags her nice friend to the disco in hopes of finding her a man, and there’s the naughty boy who drags his nice friend to the disco in hopes of scoring with the ladies. (No points for guessing who the nice girl ends up with at the end of the movie.) There’s the full-of-himself disco owner (played by Jeff Goldblum), who pursues a married woman on a bet. There’s the deejay who is under pressure because The Commodores are coming for a live performance that may make or break his career as a radio deejay — but the guy bringing the equipment for the Commodores is nowhere to be found. And there’s the young lady singer who is desperate for her big break and thinks that this disco may be it. Oh, and don’t forget The Leatherman, the guy in leather who never stops dancing for one minute and works his catchphrase (which I’ve appropriated as the title of this post) into every conversation.

Thank God It’s Friday is goofy. It’s stupid. It’s clicheed. Yes, it depicts all of the bad aspects of the disco culture with none of those aspects’ bad effects. (Which is, by the way, why SNF is such a great film.) It just isn’t a good movie, by any conceivable standard.

Except that…geez, I had fun watching it again. I laughed at it, I laughed with it, I just plain laughed. And the music? Yeah, it’s disco — but really, not everything about disco was awful, and one of my favorite songs ever springs from the movie: “Last Dance” by Donna Summer (for which it won an Oscar, believe it or not).

This post is not a ringing recommendation that anybody watch this movie. But…watch this movie! You may find it so bad you love it.

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Still Trekkin’

SamuraiFrog has a nice post wherein he runs down his thoughts upon a re-viewing of the first six Star Trek movies, otherwise known as the “Original Cast” films. I’m in partial agreement with him on certain points, partial disagreement on others (my views can be found in my STAR TREK Redux series of posts from the early days of this blog; links are in the sidebar). I do have a few random thoughts:

:: TMP is a good movie, and I’ve never much disliked all the effects stuff in the film. Few of the Trek films take their time. Does this one take too much time? It’s possible, I guess. But I don’t mind it.

:: I did rewatch Wrath of Khan recently and I’m still of two minds on the movie. It’s very well-made, but it’s not as perfect as many think.

:: Search for Spock really is uneven — the inexperience of its director is evident, as is its small budget, and parts of its plot are terribly, terribly thin. But the last ten minutes make up for a lot, in my view.

:: Voyage Home is really good.

:: I like Final Frontier more than SamuraiFrog did. There is a ton of stuff wrong with that movie, but I still feel that it’s an ambitious failure. I don’t hate it at all. I also don’t agree that the film missteps in ‘resurrecting’ Spock’s inner turmoil at his father’s rejection of him; Sybok thinks he’s hit on Spock’s secret anguish, but he doesn’t know that this has been resolved for Spock through his death and resurrection and his father’s acceptance. Spock needs no prompting at all from Kirk to tell Sybok that no, he’s still not joining Sybok’s cause.

:: Undiscovered Country is not, for me, quite the “fan service” film that SamuraiFrog believes it to be. It only partly serves to bridge the Original Series and TNG, but that’s really only a tiny piece of the movie’s subtext, and only intense fans are going to recognize Michael Dorn as Worf’s grandfather. Any “fan service” subtext is more from the film’s clear intent to retire the original cast The film is topical to a higher degree than any Trek film before or since, though — it came out in 1991, hot on the heels of the end of the Cold War.

And the last ten minutes or so of Undiscovered Country is one of my favorite movie farewell scenes, ever.

So there!

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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