Did we expect otherwise?
I sure didn't.
In case you haven't seen it, here's my acknowledgment of the special day from 5 years ago.
http://outintospace.livejournal.com/176
I've recently introduced Zoe to the original Outer Limits (we bought the entire series on DVD), as well as the George Romero-produced Tales from the Dark Side. She's really enjoying them so far. I'm more of an Outer Limits fan than ...Dark Side but it depends on my mood. Outer Limits is sci-fi while ...Dark Side is horror. But anyway.
When I was a kid, I used to stay up late on weekends and watch these shows. Monsters came on before "USA Up All Night" and Tales from the Dark Side aired immediately after. It was tough staying up that late, but worth it. Ditto for MonsterVision, which was more of a 1990s thing so a bit easier to deal with.
These anthology series fell out of favor when stuff like X-Files and Buffy started airing, with episodic story arcs and recurring characters. The week-to-week approach was similar to the anthologies (specifically--and especially--Outer Limits), but when the anthology shows were revived yet again (Forest Whitaker hosted The New New Twilight Zone, which sucked), they just didn't get the ratings that the previous series received. The biggest reason for that was a lack of good writers. Rod Serling and Richard Matheson wrote the bulk of the original Twilight Zone, and the remake in the 1980s (known as The New Twilight Zone) used stories written by luminaries such as Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Harlan Ellison.
It is my hope that an anthology series debuts that captures the minds of disaffected nerdy teenage boys the same way those old shows did. Perhaps I will write and produce it myself.
Only in the Twilight Zone, of course.
Sometimes I miss the days of playing Skate or Die on my brother Jeff's Commodore 64. I'll never forget that loading music that played after I typed in LOAD "*",8,1. Several years later, I bought a used copy of Skate or Die for the NES and finally mastered all the half-pipe tricks. Nobody was there to see it, though.
I think, when we buy our house, I'll build a man-cave with a sweet setup for classic gaming. Maybe I'll get that MAME arcade cabinet I've always wanted.
I'd just put it in my garage and sit on it from time to time.
I had been wanting to buy a Mac Pro for quite some time, so today's events pushed me over the edge. Zoe went to the Apple Store, picked out my new Mac (dual Xeon quad-core, 6GB RAM, etc), paid for it, and here I am. In typical Mac fashion, I was up and running in minutes.
Finally, finally, I have a Mac that can be one and only do-it-all machine. Development in Mac OS X, development in Windows, all my games, and everything else, all on this single box. I think that's what I'm most excited about.
Oh yeah, it's also the fastest computer I've ever used in my LIFE.
Hated it!
It rained all day today and I must admit, I liked it. I love the sound of the rain pelting the skylight.
When I lived in Lansing and had DISH Network, I had a similar channel called, uh, Monstervision? Something like that. I can't remember. It was removed from the lineup along with the rest of VOOM (including the Kung Fu Channel). It was very repetitive too. How many times a day do I really need to see CHUD 2: Bud the CHUD?
Today I watched an episode of the horror anthology "Monsters." It's pretty cheesy. I like anthologies, though. Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside, Twilight Zone (and it's 1985 redo), Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt, and Monsters are the ones that come to mind. Oh! And there was one on HBO back in the 1980s called The Hitchhiker that was really cool. It was more mystery than sci-fi/horror, but it had some of the same conceits.
I miss the days of staying up late on Friday and Saturday nights to watch old horror movies on USA Up All Night or one of the various local channels. In Dallas it was KTVT Channel 11 and KDFI 27; in Austin it was 39, but the station letters escape me, but I remember the jingle: "39 is miiiiiine." Channel 11 played kung fu movies on weekends and reruns of 1970s shows like CHiPS and Ironside on weekdays, mixed in with ads for truck driving schools and Sally Kellerman selling diplomas.
Did you grow up with channels like that? Do you wish you could recapture some of those memories?
I watched wrestling in the 80s. I was a fan of guys like Robin "Randy The Ram" Raminski. A commenter on a review site had this to say about the movie.
The character Randy "The Ram" was once a superstar in the "Big Leagues" of wrestling. 20 Years Later he's been used and abused and forgotten, now working bingo halls and high-school gyms for little money.
This is exactly what the WWE does, they chew the wrestlers up and spit them out. No union, no pension. There is a reason guy like Roddy Piper, Ric Flair, Terry Funk and Mick Foley had such a strong reaction to the movie...it's very real. Just count the number of pro-wrestlers that have died before their 40th b-day.
Of course, Vince McMahon will never have to work a high-school gym, but he'll make sure there are plenty of pro-wrestlers who have to.
It's a fantastic film from which I left with an unsettled sadness.
She listens for a good 30 seconds or so before she'll say, "That's not how it goes!"
I might lose my job, but that's not unfamiliar to anyone.
There are a slew of good movies coming out soon that I can't wait to see. The Wrestler, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, and some others whose titles escape me are all on my short list. I still need to see Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, as well as ...Benjamin Button.
If any of you Des Moines folks are up for going to the Fleur or elsewhere to see one or more of these movies, let me know.
Everyone around us milled about in their usual ways, a weekend dance orchestrated week-in and week-out with no visible variance or even a desire for change. Such as it was and would be, and as far as ruts go, it was certainly a satisfying one. We didn't judge the other patrons; they were there for the same reasons we were there; their "there" was our there, and they're there as we are there. That was a joke we made that night. One of many.
Another joke we made was a stream-of-conciousness scenario where we dressed as Roman gladiators and invaded a local goth bar. That joke was better as it was written and shared. It lost and loses its luster as time goes by. That's the way most jokes are, at least the ones that are based on a specific observation at a specific time.
After we left the bar, and it may have been a different time and even with different people, or it may have never happened at all, my friend couldn't find his car. The memory of that one movie with a title about the inability to find one's car was still fresh in our minds, and whether it was the beer or a sense of foreboding about our surroundings, I'm not sure, the reference was made. We laughed.
We got in my friend's car and he threw his trash on the ground. We laughed again. See, this friend is a tree-hugging liberal and he rebels by doing things that are contrary to his political leanings. Like littering. He once threw a Crystal's cup, no wait, he lunged it, over the roof of his car as we drove down a dark street in suburban Dallas.
His name is JL and we laugh a lot. We laughed a lot, I mean. I don't see him anymore because I moved away a few times.
Before we left the bar and that story about the movie title happened, and before he threw his trash on the ground and chunked his cup of soda out of his car, we talked about how hard it was to make friends, especially friends who understand the way we think and the things we say. "People are intimidated by you," he might have said. Others have said it, anyway. I don't know why, I said. I mean, I don't know why people are intimidated by me, not why others have said it. But you know what I mean. I should have put that in quotes. "I don't know why," I said.
Joy Division had long given way to New Order, the irony of which we noted, and we remarked about how much we liked the bar because of its old-school 'waver scene. I said I wanted to sleeve my arms in tattoos and I was serious. I knew I was too old for that, but it didn't change the fact that I wanted to stay young. I wasn't 30 yet. Remember, I said this was several years ago. Several severals, it seems.
"So what difference does it make?" the jukebox asked. Jumping in front of flying bullets, it seems, makes no difference at all.
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outintospace- Stranger in a strange land
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