*sigh*

A fifty foot robot that looks like Michael Jackson will walk around the desert outside of Las Vegas, shooting laser beams.

Perhaps another celebrity will create a fifty foot robot of themselves to walk out into the desert and fight with it.

Clocks are in the air.

The latest in the current wave of absurd alarm clocks - The Wake n' Bacon.

A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n' Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.

So you will be awakened by a combination of the alarm sound and the smell of cooking bacon.

Or in my case, a combination of the alarm sound, the smell of cooking bacon and my dog going completely insane.

Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 87

"Relaxing, stress-reducing lifestyle of Scandinavians."

Pardon me for a moment while I wipe the spit-take off my monitor screen.

Helo Sauna has branched out into Steam and Infrared rooms. Not using that closet or bathroom? Let these guys at it and you can pretend that it will raise the resale value of your house.


I'm not entirely sure what the Great Books Foundation is up to but they seem to have most of their energy focused on teachers.

What an adorable classified help wanted ad! It is so evocative of a bygone age. The New York Foundling Hospital is still looking for help. Here is their spiffy new web page so you can upload your resume data as a word or .pdf file. O Brave New World! (Hey! That's a great book!)

And next, "Good Used Books," not Great used books. This looks like some fellow who spent forty years selling books and happily typing up a list of what he had and mimeographing it and mailing it out to the folks on his address list. Now we have the internet and this bookseller is most likely out of business and probably dead. O Brave New World!

Onto other topics -- Bagels! In the eighties American gentiles discovered bagels. The problem was - we didn't know how to slice the damned things. The result of this (I am absolutely not kidding by the way) is that in the Midwest there was a huge upsurge in hand injuries as folks tried to slice a bagel without really knowing what they were doing. To solve this problem, the market was suddenly flooded with all sorts of bagel slicing contraptions. Like this one. You think I'm making this all up? Take a look at the address -- LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

I spent a good deal of time at the website for the Rancho de los Caballeros to try to figure out what might have changed in twenty years. What do I find? Birdwatching! They have a nice big list of all the birds that you might see here - with the most common birds in italics. Now amongst the italicised birds? The Loggerhead Shrike!

Oh, Wikipedia? Can you tell us about the Loggerhead Shrike?

These birds wait on a perch with open lines of sight and swoop down to capture prey. They mainly eat large insects, also rodents and small birds. Known in many parts as a "Butcher Bird," they impale their prey on thorns or barbed wire before eating it, since they do not have the talons of the larger birds of prey.

I'm sure that trees full of impaled rotting animals help make the golf course a lovely and evocative place.

Larry "Bud" Melman

Although I was aware that Calvert DeForest had passed away, but I decided to hold off posting about it until I had a chance to see the mention on The Late Show.

Here is the beginning of the very first Late Night with David Letterman - showing DeForest firmly in place in the Letterman pantheon.

This just cracks me up

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around

The Sweeney - "Ringer" - January 2, 1975

I wracked my brain for a while trying to come up with a decent follow-up to my Comic Strip Project. I wanted to find something that had the same breadth (I do enjoy the tangents). So far, I have been unable to find something that narrow. So I cast wider.

As I discussed one of the episodes of the Comic Strip, I talked for a bit about my relationship with British Action Television:

Billions of years ago when I was young I spent half a year saving up for a book called "The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure" by Dave Rogers. In those days before the internet, it cost $55 to get an import copy of a book that had a list price of £9.95. This book was close to 600 pages of wonders, television programs that I was quite familiar with (The Avengers, The Prisoner) shows that I had heard whispers of, but had no hope of ever seeing in my lifetime (Ace of Wands, Sapphire and Steel) and finally a huge number of programs that I had never heard of. It was like an entire other world was opening up. All of these things had been made and broadcast. Millions of people had watched them. And, of course, many of them had been deleted long ago. Lost forever before I had even a clue that they existed in the first place.

My heavens I poured over that book. I learned all about Man in a Suitcase and Special Branch, and when I, through the magic of videotape trading, was able to get blurry, washed out seventh generation copies of things like Kinvig and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, I jumped at them.

I've gotten some response from that post. Between helpful friends and strangers, Internet shopping opportunities and Digital Cable, I am filling in the gaps in my UK television experience. And from that comes this latest series of posts. I'm just going to see what I can find and post on what I can see.

So anyway. To start.

In a former life, as I was working toward my MA in Literature, I annoyed a professor by taking these lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

to presume that Mrs. Porter was being busted by the Flying Squad.

It's horrific the sort of havoc that a bit of useless pop culture flotsam can wreak upon a helpless eight to twelve page essay.

Anyway, the bit of pop culture flotsam that I was aware of was The Sweeney, which I had never seen until I was able to catch the first episode, a little while ago.

Considering that it was sort of odd to be actually watching something that I'd been tangentially hearing about for decades, I was thrown by two things:

1. Hey, that's the guy who plays Inspector Morse!
2. The bad guy in this episode is played by Brian Blessed. This made an impact for two reasons. First, he was not overacting. So much. Until the end. Second, I was watching without looking at any background, but I knew that Brian Blessed had been on a big important British cop show that I had never ever seen, so I watched with the presumption that this was it. So even though he was quite obviously the baddy, I was ready for the twist ending to the first episode to be that he was actually another member of The Sweeney who had infiltrated the bad guys and the episode would conclude with him saying something along the lines of "I'm Captain Fancy of The Sweeney and you're nicked!" These hopes were dashed when Regan shotgunned him over the side of a quarry, at which point I loaded up the IMDB and realized that I was mixed up with Z-Cars. Still, it made the ending seem a bit less cliched - It's the double bluff!

All in all, it was a so so bit of television, but it's nice to have that shoe finally drop, and a good a place as any to start this off.

Tell me about your day...

Here's a blog with a limited shelf-life - for Does Today Suck?, BoBo C. Tiberius is taking one of those "today in history" columns and ranking all the events in terms of coolness - yesterday was deemed "Cool" even though there were more historical events that he deemed "Bad." Luckily there were a lot of "awesome" birthdays to tip the scale back to Cool. (I've often wondered about these columns and how often they are rewritten - perhaps when he comes to the end of his run (he started about a month ago) he'll find that a day that was once Cool is Cool no longer. That would suck.)

Meantime I had a cool day yesterday. It was turn off your computer day, so I started off trying to write a quick silly post about how it was turn off your computer day and... whoops! Egg on my face. I had to turn the computer on to write it! Ha ha! I am a comedy genius!

I then realized that there would probably be thousands of posts saying the exact same thing. Some of them for real. So I refrained.

To help put your day in perspective I also offer this site. It doesn't have the intended impact on the weekend, though.