Buying the New Yorker 1996 - Back cover

This ad gets some points for the creative asterisks. The first one is placed at the end of the sentence, so you would think that they were clarifying their definition of a perpetual motion machine to show how the Camry "is probably as close as anyone has ever come to building" one. Nope, it's clarifying the proof that there are "over two million [Camrys] on the road." I'm no advertising guy, but I would think that the asterisk should be put after the word "road."

The other one just tells us that the "Best Car Built in America" award was from three years earlier and "most Camrys are built in America." And on that definitive note, we put 1996 in our rearview mirror.

Next up, 1986.

Buying the New Yorker 1996 - Interior back cover

Let's look for the subtext:


My interpretation: "Because we are technically part of the USA, we can't look down on you for being American. And we speak English, so you don't have to spend your time flipping through a cheap phrasebook like a frightened bunny."

Added bonus: you can snorkel!

Buying the New Yorker 1996 - page 83

Books on tape is a division of Random House. Back in the day, you could rent the full-length tape set from them, but now they've discontinued that (oddly it is because of competition from public libraries, and not from naughty old file swappers). You can still purchase tapes, CDs and download Real Audio files. The Horse Whisperer is not in stock, but there are other Nicholas Evans books available. He wrote a book about smoke jumping! I had no idea! It's a love triangle, with smoke jumping. Nothing perks up a love triangle like smoke jumping.

An octopus pot is a type of fishing trap. You lower the pot to the sea bed, and octopuses/octopi/octopodes climb in. I imagine that the folks ordering one from the back of the New Yorker were probably just going to stick it on a bookshelf and perhaps keep the spare set of house keys in it. Clayton's International Trading Co seems to have gone out of business. Sleep easy, octopuses/octopi/octopodes!

Google went nuts on me when I tried to figure out who Roger Nichols was. Turns out that in addition to his jewelry business, he's the guy who wrote the music (generally teamed with lyricist Paul Williams) to a bunch of Carpenters hits. Here is his website. Furthermore, he is different from this Roger Nichols. That Roger Nichols is the sound engineer who won a big pile of Grammys for producing Steely Dan albums (He also seems to have done a fair amount of work with John Denver, meaning that both of these Roger Nichols' are one degree of separation from the Muppets). I'd like to say that the ad shows up twice to honor both of them, but it's really because I wasn't paying close enough attention with my screen grabs.

Remember back when we saw the website for London flat rentals that took us to a site about Park City, Utah? Here's that same domain again. And this time the ad really was for Park City, Utah! It all works out.

You know, we've seen so many Canadian river raft holiday package tours that I am now completely unable to say anything new about this one. Moose! Bears! Ice Beer! Hockey! I'm just flailing randomly now.

Cuba on the other hand, we have yet to see. Near as I can tell, this bunch folded up around 2004. It is a pity, because I think the idea of a "cigar adventure" could easily be melded on to any one of the other package tours that we've looked at here. (I have visions of the bike trip from Paris to London - a bunch of cigars will make that fly! And for the adventure, you can be chased by gangsters! With cigars!) I managed to find some old articles about Wings on the World. Here's one and here's another. My favorite thing about the ad: They're open Sunday! They might be tying themselves up in legal knots to sidestep all sorts of travel embargos and tariff restrictions so they can fly rich people to some slum for smokes, but they laugh in the face of blue laws. Always good to be able to pick your battles.

The Comic Strip - Interlude - Another opportunity for sightseeing

Here's someone who thought that it would be fun to work out all the locations for Mr Jolly Lives Next Door.

Particularly the pubs.

Here's the Flickr set where he is getting it all put together.

Check your listings!

I've just seen the first episode of (the British version of) Life on Mars on BBCAmerica. I think it will be repeated at least two more times before the week is over.

This is the best thing I've seen in ages. The only thing that could make it better would be to get rid of the BBCAmerica logo in the upper left corner and the little cartoon ads along the bottom. And perhaps the ads for Footballers Wives every four minutes. And I'll wager that the show was originally in widescreen -- if it wasn't for all the other things, I'd complain about that as well.

Anyway. David E. Kelley is supposed to be making the American version. So watch this one.

Buying the New Yorker 1996 - page 82

There's tons of Gorham Chantilly in stock at Beverly Bremer Silver Shop. There's tons of flatware, period. They say "We have gifts for the Grad and gifts for Dad, gifts to make Mom's day and that something special for Baby." Of the four, I am surprised that all but one are demographics that would be interested in antique flatware, but who am I to rain on someone else's parade?

Take courses over the internet? The deuce you say! How can you take courses over that e-mail without cheating? In 1996, this was pretty incredible stuff. Of course in the mid-nineties there was some conversation about how The New School should change its name, as it was over seventy-five years old. Nowadays distance learning is commonplace, the New School is ten years older, and there's no sign of it changing its name. In the meantime, check out the funky retro computer font.

Press has gone out of business. They are no longer accepting manuscripts. Sorry. This was their website. It's gone now. Sorry.

"And they called it Paradise." Apparently they still do. Windjammer Landing is so secure in their status as a paradise destination that as soon as you go to their website, it resolves to an address that includes their toll-free 800 number. This shows their confidence. You can rent a hobie cat or sail boat. Paradise.

I'm pretty sure that the London Theatre News is out of business as it was based out of New York. The internet pretty much killed these little newsletters, but hell, you can go here. Look! One click and we see that The Globe is putting on something called "Under the Black Flag" and it has these reviews: "Uneven production " (Evening Standard); "Confusing play" (The Times). Heck, book me a flight. I'm up for it.

The Comic Strip, Part 38 - You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer

"Gregory: Diary of a Nutcase" - May 13, 1993

I remember seeing The Silence of the Lambs in the theater back in 1991. The reason for this is because we decided to see the 11:30 pm showing. And then walk home. Through the park. At 2:00 am. In Milwaukee. I think I remember the walk home better than I remember the movie.

I suspect that it the folks who put this episode together are in the same camp. It feels to me like the costume designers and set designers worked overtime to get everything exactly right. The direction is note perfect. The actors, likewise. Everything is falling into place.

Except the script. The script feels like everyone sat down to show their prep work and the writers went "oooh," slapped their heads and ran off to the corner of the room and tried to chug out dialogue ahead of whatever set piece was next on the clipboard.

So on the whole, not a bad episode, just one that loses nothing if you were to watch it with the sound off.

Sometimes warding off evil is more trouble than it is worth

News report here.

The more I think about it, the more improbable the phrase "anatomically correct gargoyle" becomes.

Thoughts on The Cameraman - The march of progress

Last night the 95 degree heat and equally oppressive humidity caused a household retreat into the bedroom, where we decided to watch a DVD on the laptop. I selected a Buster Keaton silent (Spite Marriage (US UK)) - so we wouldn't have to worry about the volume being heard over the noise of the air conditioner.

This reminded me that a while ago I started taking notes for a series of posts that I wanted to do on Buster Keaton's The Cameraman.

One of the sight gags that runs through the film is the obvious inadequacy of Keaton's camera:


Throughout the film the other cameramen snicker at the thing, and you can tell from Keaton's possessiveness over the thing that he is aware that it is comparatively outdated. The thing is, to the contemporary viewer, they are all antiquated. That's one of the neat aspects to watching old movies - you get the chance to see how things were done. How things worked. What things were like.

A third of the way through the film, we see a breakneck fire engine ride through the streets of New York.


Many of the buildings that we pass by are gone. The cars on the street have probably all been recycled (most likely in World War Two) or are at the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Except for perhaps some of the children, everyone we whiz by on the sidewalk is now dead.

Of course, that's not to say that I didn't enjoy the film. I certainly didn't sit there for the whole thing going "He's dead. She's dead. So's he. Dead." It's just that every once in a while, I felt a little pang. Of course, I also realize that a century from now someone is going to be thinking the same thing while watching Plane Full of Snakes or something. For some reason this makes me smile.

My audio stream of consciousness leads to the hospital

A recent post on the WFMU Beware of the Blog helped me to learn about Hospital Radio Stations. Hospital Radio seems to be a mostly UK phenomenon where, as the name suggests, a hospital will have its own in-house volunteer radio station.

I was curious, so I started poking around. What do they play on these things?

The first thing that I discovered was that they don't have audio feeds. I can't sit here at work and pretend that I'm in Hospital. The next thing is that they don't publish their playlists. You can get some idea from the schedules. The most popular format is "requests" followed by umpteen variations of titles using the words "smooth" "laid back" "soft" "old favourites" and "mellow." The most frightening show title that I have been able to find comes from Hospital Radio Chelmsford which from 14:00 to 15:00 presents something called "The Meltdown." I would have thought that "The Meltdown" would be some sort of speed-metal thing, but it is really this: "Make the most of an afternoon siesta with the Meltdown. Relaxing sounds, smooth tunes and meditation." Equally frightening, but easier to parse, is Kingston Hospital Radio's Monday night 22:00-22:30 slot: "Ssssh! THEY PLAY CLIFF!"

So another tangent emerges while I poke around the site for Kingston Hospital Radio. I've seen this place! It was probably used as a location for something, but I can't think of what.

That's going to drive me nuts for a while.

My new favorite baseball name

Now batting for the New England Riptide, Number 24, the shortstop, Destiny Frankenstein!

A moment of self-evaluation.

The Gematriculator is a site that analyzes websites or text samples to find out how numerologically good or evil it is. (It has something to do with divisibility by seven.)

So how evil am I?



Ah.

Of course, by adding this text, I am changing the numerological profile, so by the time you read this, I may have a different percentage of evil (the banner is constant - if it recalculated every time I posted, then I'd think about putting it in the sidebar.)

Meantime, I decided to see if I could find a sort of evil baseline, so I went to a church website and found the page that explains what they believe:

We believe the Bible to be the Word of God and the only perfect rule for our faith, doctrine and conduct. The Word of God is spirit and life and therefore requires of each of us a spiritual and living response. This response involves a personal commitment to Jesus Christ and to following him. We seek to transcend theological differences through Christian fellowship, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit. We observe the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. We believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is for the whole person and the whole world. This concern for wholeness finds expression in evangelism, Christian education, caring for persons in need and the missionary task. We welcome into membership all who confess Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

That paragraph is 53% evil.

The Introduction and Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence -- 32% evil.

The lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven" -- 27% evil (same as me!).

The lyrics to "Don't Fence Me In" -- 1% evil (for the version with "hovels" -- the version with "hobbles" is 6% evil).

The phrase "Devil bunnies! I snort the nose, Lucifer! Banana, banana!" -- 1% evil.

Buying the New Yorker 1996 - page 77 & 81

I'm sure I laughed my way through 1996. So we're cool on this one.

I also have a dog and a cat. I'm sure these dinky little compilations are quite jolly. I'll bet they made excellent Christmas stocking stuffers, which is why there are enough left-overs in January for the New Yorker marketing juggernaut to be advertising them now.

I have an idea - sell the old day-by-day calendars to the nostalgia market - I already admitted that I laughed my way through 1996. Why shouldn't I want to do it again? I'm doing this, after all.

+++++++Update++++++

The other day, someone pointed out that I seemed to be getting tired of the "Buying the New Yorker." I think I'm just a little tired of 1996 - when I was making my comment above I started looking around for what happened then so I could indulge in a bit of nostalgic list-making.

1996 was an astonishingly dull year.

One of the highlights of 1996 for me was a confluence of events that allows me to say this sentence in complete truthfulness:

After I cleared customs at Heathrow, the first thing I heard was the brand new Beatles single playing on a cleaning lady's transistor radio.

So one of the best moments of the year was one where I could momentarily infer that I was in a different year altogether. It still seems a strange and wonderful little detail. I love the little details.

A few years later, also coming into Heathrow, we got into a minicab just as the radio was announcing that the next song would be the brand new single from S Club 7. My wife looked at me and almost fell out of the cab laughing.

The Comic Strip, Addendum - I can't look at hobbles either

The title of a recent post comes from the lyrics to the Cole Porter song "Don't Fence Me In."

I was unsure of the lyric, so I took to the web, and found the song written out in at least four different places. Two sites took the lyric to be "I can't look at hovels," another used "hobbles" and the fourth used "hovels" the first time the chorus came around and "hobbles" the second time. So, as the word "hobbles" made less sense to me and "hovels" had the most votes for usage, I went with "hovels."

I am now informed that "hobbles" are "short straps tied between the legs of unfenced horses, allowing them to wander short distances but preventing them from running off." So while both words are lyrically coherent, I am inclined to think that "hobbles" is the correct lyric.

See, kids! The internet is for learning!

Buying the New Yorker 1996 - page 76

Butterfield & Robinson puts together tour packages where you start in one place and then go to another, either by foot (for example: Krakow to Budapest) or on a bike (Paris to London (they cheat! You get to fly over the channel! Cheaters!)) They offer what they call a description of "a typical day" in which we see:

• 9:34 am Take in mountain views that surely the gods themselves crafted. Remind yourself how fortunate you are.
• 1:11 pm Salvatore's salcissia, bocconcini and pane rustico next to a tiny stone hut. Doze off under lemon tree.

Sounds good? Wait. There's also this:

• Noon-ish Practice yodeling.

There's always a catch.

The first thing you see when you go to the Structure House website is a banner saying "Structure House helps [I've removed her name, sorry Google] lose half her weight. Click here to watch." No thanks. At least they don't make her yodel.

Remember when I said that the best way to search for these ten year old companies was to use their phone numbers? Here's a strange thing: The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida is just off Interstate 275. I think that's good enough. It looks like a cool museum.

J.H. Breakell is still chugging out the jewelry based on the little candy treats that are also still being chugged out. The silver ones are now $40 and the gold ones are now $250. The candy treats now come with all sorts of text message things on them. OMG!

You can still Canoe Canada's Arctic, in fact nowadays I understand that there's more water up there to canoe on. This is one of those hardcore bunches - no yodelling practice here, you have to be quiet to slip past the grizzly bears. (They say that white wolves are "their specialty." I want to know what that means.) Make sure you have a look at their photo gallery - it does look like an adventure.

Buying the New Yorker 1996 - page 74

This is one of those deals where you get a list of all the advertisers in the magazine, or at least all of the advertisers that were willing to throw some extra bucks to be included in a special list. There was probably one of those business reply cards where you write your address and circle a bunch of numbers and then you get a ton of junk mail.

Like hell I'm going to deconstuct all of these.

I add value to this blog

I've been wrestling for some time with the idea of using my blog as a source of income. On the one hand, I'm perfectly happy to earn a bit of extra cash. On the other, well, I find that ads tend to accumulate and make a site look a bit cluttered.

I recently signed on with Amazon's web associates thing (both the US and UK versions) and have been tinkering with how to make the advertising links as unobtrusive as possible, so here's what I've come up with.

When I mention an item that you might want to purchase, I'll put a little parenthetical after it that looks like this: (USA UK).

So for example, a couple of posts earlier, I mentioned a song by The Be Good Tanyas, called "Littlest Birds." You can find it on their Blue Horse (USA UK) CD. It's a different version than the one in the video, by the way.

The Beasthouse is reborn

One of the sites that I've been meaning to link to is Lawrence Miles' Beasthouse.

Miles is one of those rare people that I have to call a "pop culture genius." unfortunately, as is frequently the situation with genius, he tends to have his output in fits of non-regularity. I've been waiting for him to post to his site since April of 2005.

Have a (comparatively) small taste:

"The Hounds of Love", The Futureheads

Some would say that doing a karaoke-rock version of "The Hounds of Love", stripping away everything that made the Kate Bush version worthwhile and replacing it with a bunch of generic guitar noises calculated to get it classified as "alternative", is in itself a major offence (q.v. No Doubt's version of "It's My Life", which I know I keep mentioning but it's still winding me up). I'd argue that it's not as offensive as the idea that after doing this, the people responsible can still comfortably go by the name of "The Futureheads" without anyone punching their stupid faces in. To be honest, I still blame Nirvana for a lot of this guitars-equal-alternative nonsense: the modern generation, i.e. those who were too small to angst in 1991, have been brought up to believe that Nirvana were world-shaping revolutionaries and that (as one particularly poor music journalist put it) 'everyone can remember where they were the first time they heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'. For the sake of any readers under the age of twenty, I feel I should point out that this is almost on a "no-cock revolution" level of wrongness. We liked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" because it was a fantastic noisy pop record, not because we'd never heard anybody hitting their guitars really, really hard before. As "alternative" music goes, it was hardly dangerous or radical; final and damning proof of this only turned up last month, when my 74-year-old mother asked me 'what's the name of that song that goes "hello, hello, hello, hello"?', and thereafter bought Nirvana's From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah in a sale at HMV. Bear this in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that Kurt Cobain expressed the anxiety and self-destructive urges of his generation. Someone who draws a pension and watches every edition of Changing Rooms probably isn't likely to blow her own head off in response to the emptiness of modern life.

He's recently restarted the Beasthouse here, and is posting edited highlights of his brilliant "Top 40 Countdown" in a semi-separate blog.

Clear some time off your calendar and dive in.

you pass through places and places they pass through you

I while ago, I picked up the album "Blue Horse" by The Be Good Tanyas, because I'd heard that they had a song which they constructed using what was described as either a lost Syd Barrett lyric, or even, some sources believed, a fragment of newly written Syd Barrett work. Sure enough, the first song was credited to "Parton/Holland/Syd Barrett."

So finally I decided to put it all together.

The song in question, "Littlest Birds" has a chunk of lyrics from the song "Jugband Blues," from "A Saucerful of Secrets." It makes sense that I didn't notice it, as that is an album that I don't listen to all that much.

Anyway, here's the Pink Floyd song:



and the Be Good Tanyas:

dreaming of god as an x-ray beam

Word comes of the death of Syd Barrett, which makes me feel quite sad.

I had been thinking about a post on the 150th birthday of Nicola Tesla, which was in fact yesterday, but I only got around to noticing this morning.

It was odd to see that it was a Tesla anniversary, as I had been listening to a song from the new Handsome Family album called "Tesla's Hotel Room."

Playing the song again somehow makes me think of Syd Barrett - the lost forgotten genius fading away while his former collaborators find success and glory.

You can hear the song as a real audio file here (scroll down quite a ways), if you are so inclined.

The Comic Strip, Part 37 - I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences

"Queen of the Wild Frontier" - May 6, 1993

At the beginning of one of my undergraduate terms, I was having a conversation with a group of exchange students. One of them, a girl from the UK, wanted to talk to me, as she had heard that I had a car that was quite good for road trips. Turns out that the only reason that she took the exchange was so she could take a particular trip.

Me: "Where do you want to go?"
She: "Montana."
Me: "Where in Montana?"
She: "Just Montana."

The reason why she wanted to go to Montana was because she had hooked up for a weekend with some guy who said he was from Montana. As the guy was skipping town, he told her that all she needed to do to find him again was to come to America, go to Montana and ask for him, because everyone in Montana knew him.

Me: "What's his name?"
She: "Bill."
Me: "Bill what?"
She: "He told me to just go to Montana and ask for Bill."

Quick fun statistic to help put this story into perspective:

• Total approximate land area of the United Kingdom - 245,000 km¬≤
• Total approximate land area of Montana - 381,000 km¬≤

I don't think she caught up with Bill. If she did, I hope that she kicked the shit out of him. I bring this story up because the lead character in this episode sort of reminds me of her. I've met a handful of British women that were made from this mold, all seemed to be headed out to the wilderness to work the land and wear flannel. Their only regret seemed to be the inaccessibility of HP Sauce in the Badlands.


I love the look of this episode - it could not only very easily be a film, it could very easily be a very good film. It feels even more different than these episodes generally do, because the cast is almost entirely new - Peter Richardson turns up for about three minutes as a yuppie neighbor, and Alexei Sayle shows up to almost steal the show as a police chief. The episode was broadcast a few months before the Harrison Ford version of The Fugitive was released, but it's hard to watch Sayle giving instructions to his search party without thinking that they're doing a goof on Tommy Lee Jones. It's a hilarious moment, and it doesn't detract from the tone of the episode as a whole, which is quite a neat trick.

The Comic Strip, part 36 - Long journeys wear me out, Oh God we won't live without it

"Space Virgins from Planet Sex" - April 29, 1993

First a bit of history. One of the dominant images in the history of British Science Fiction television is the introduction to the second Quatermass serial. It begins with a couple of army guys looking at a radar screen showing strange objects coming from outer space.

This quickly became a part of the science fiction iconography as the situation was so easy to reference. It was used multiple times in Doctor Who, for example.

So, when they do it here, even though it is a cliche, I would like to think that in the back of their minds the folks making this episode know the cultural weight of this throwaway scene.

I enjoy crappy dumb science fiction films. A lot of people do. Round about the seventies, studios decided to start making crappy dumb science fiction films on purpose because they thought that it would be more fun. But for the most part, those films tend to not be very good. This is because it's one thing to try to make something well and fail because you are inept, but if you try to make something that looks inept and fail at that.... well then you're just stupid. So now, after many years of poor attempts to look inept, we have quality, well thought out, high budgeted productions that still embrace the tones that the old inept science fiction films were trying for, but try to justify it with a load of post-modernism.

Which might be what's going on here. There seems to be some attempt to unpack the films that this episode was based on, but it's hard to do that, because once you start getting more complicated you then start to jettison the tone that you're trying to capture in the first place. And the mainstream source material is already starting to take a look at things in the same way. At the time this was broadcast, the last few actual James Bond films were trying to address (half-heartedly, but still...) how the concept of James Bond no longer fits in with the sexual mores of contemporary society. Why do you need "James Blonde" doing the same thing?

It is fun to see Peter Richardson doing a pretty good Sean Connery impression though.

In the end, I think this episode succeeds in getting the look right, and putting together an entertaining episode. It does seem at times like many of the people involved aren't really agreeing on what sort of thing they're doing (Dawn French and Miranda Richardson put in good performances as always, but they both seem to be on auto-pilot).

And as a side note, if anyone needs to mimic John Kerry, get Robbie Coltrane to use his "Emperor Zarran" voice. It is quite perfect for that.

Check these out.

Contemporary films re-imagined as antique Russian folk-tale illustrations:

This is not a remake of The Birds

Currently being filmed: The Birds.

The producers would like to make it perfectly clear that they are not making a remake of the Hitchcock film, but a film based on the short story by Daphne Du Maurier. Just like the Hitchcock film was.

Just so we're clear.

Having The Birds in the front of my brain at lunchtime has led me to do a quick search for that song that the schoolchildren sing while all the crows are gathering on the jungle gym. For ages, I've been told that it was a nonsense song created especially for the film.

Nope.

It's an old Scottish song called "Risselty-Rosselty" or "The Wee Cooper O'Fife." You can see one version of the lyrics here, and listen to Pete Seeger forcing a group of 50s era New York hipsters to sing it with him here.