The longest lovehatethings podcast ever! Concerning fond remembrances of the toys of my childhood, recollections of a youthful musical evolution, pulp espionage gets juiced in my twenties AND... a hamburger on a doughnut. 'Nuff said.
I have some friends who love console gaming, and I have to admit there was a period in time where I thought such pursuits were cool. I first owned the Hanimex system which morphed into Leisurevision; both were essentially cheap rip-offs of the Intellivision system which outdistanced the Atari 2600 for playability at the time. The PacMan clone on the Leisurevision system was lightyears ahead of the 2600. I eventually evolved to Colecovision and the cutting edge graphics carried me well into my Commodore 64 days. All this said, I don't think any of the games had the replay value of some of the board games I grew up with. I wish I had some of these around the house right now... of course then I wouldn't be writing.
Rebound kicked the llama's ass! How cool was it that with a plastic disc, some ball bearings, a piece of molded plastic and two elastics, one could have hours of fun. Kind of like the mini version of shuffleboard or crokinole, Rebound provided awesome replay value even in single player mode. I can't speak much to the fight mechanic except for the time I punched my friend in the nads for knocking out three of my pieces with his last shot. He didn't even try to fight back; must've been a "special" attack.
Here's the thing about Mousetrap. I owned this for years growing up and remember having a blast with it. The thing is, I don't know I ever actually played the game. The Rube Goldberg aspect alone was enough to keep me fascinated. I mean c'mon - it's a bowling ball in a bathtub! I don't know about polygons and refresh rates, but I do know how to build the coolest mousetrap in the world - if a mouse ever gets into the house, I'll need to visit the lumber yard.
Okay, I'll accept that the single player mode of Rock'em Sock'em Robots was pretty lame, but here's a game where the aforementioned fight mechanic shone. Who could resist fighting robots in glorious plastic opulence? We used to have to tape the ring down to the table due to our abuse of the light plastic form. This was an experience not be missed. It was also one of those games whereby 2 out of 3s rapidly became 4 out of 7s and eventually we lost count. We even created modifications whereby you got extra points for winner while throwing the fewest punches. At age 8 we were precision training to strike death blows on future Terminators after Skynet took control.
Again, a game where single-player mode was just as cool as head-to-head. Kerplunk required foresight, precision, planning and benefited the experienced player. It's a game where one could start to actually see patterns in the stack of marbles as they teetered on the point of collapse. Kerplunk became a metaphor for the tenuous nature of young boy's childhood during post-war Vietnam and the impending evolution of disco... but seriously - Kerplunk was also cool because you could always find replacements for any lost pieces. Marbles were never hard to find and you could always use kebab sticks if the fancy-colored plastic ones disappeared under the couch.
Alright! I'm Canadian. Deal with it! Some called it "rod hockey". Some called it "table hockey". No matter what you called it, I called it one of the greatest games ever. The magnetic seizure-inspiring vibrating football was pretty useless. The table baseball games were uninspired at best. I do have to give it up for Foosball which is great in its own right, but spinning a plastic Bobby Orr, dropping a plastic puck through a fake scoreboard for a faceoff, or slamming down on the goal light in frustration to pop the puck back out of the net are memories I'll never forget. If there's one thing I often consider buying a couple of decades later, it's one of the full-size arcade versions of this classic. I dropped many a quarter later in life on high school lunch hours at the local mall arcade. I'll take this over any video game at any time.
So there it is. I have not bought a video game console much less a board game in years, but there's something to be said in replayability, boss battles that involved going up against friends' skills instead of jacked up animated freaks, powerups that involved running to the kitchen for a couple Oreos and a glass of chocolate milk, and cut scenes that involved everyone getting called home for dinner.
via telegraph.co.uk
In a follow-up to the 2700 calorie UK cheeseburger stack of last week, I have found something that has less calories, yet somehow seems more disgusting. When I think of burgers, I don't often think of a "glazed" bun. Apparently US attendees at a Massachusetts fair loved it before they fell over from coronaries in the parking lot on the way out:
"Organisers of the Big E, which finished on Sunday, said visitors bought around 1,000 Craz-E burgers each day of the fair's 17-day run."
With regards to the glaze that I could not imagine enjoying, some of the PR for the glazed "midway heart attack" was sold as follows:
"The glaze smooths over the burger and oozes into a foreign but delicious combination with the crisp of the bacon."
And if you thought that wasn't enough - just in case you wanted your meat fix in lips, hoof, and ass tubes - another treat was on the menu:
"The restaurant also serves a hamdog, a hotdog wrapped in a beef patty and deep-fried."
After all is said and done, perhaps the best fun fact about this Aorta Buster Supreme is that back in Decatur, GA the burger is named the Luther Burger after food fan, the late Luther Vandross.
Okay, right off, if you don't know who Pete Frame is, let me drop some science on you (I feel so lame saying that!)
I first discovered Pete Frame through my love of 70's progressive rock. Frame became known for laying out elaborate family trees of musicians and bands to throughout different lineups and generations. 60's and 70's music was almost incestuous in nature. The concept of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon as it relates to film, could almost be distilled down to the Two or Three Degrees of Bill Bruford or John Wetton when it comes to progressive rock. But Frame laid out every type of pop music: folk, rock, funk, metal, etc..
The great thing about rock family trees is they told a story. If you had a favorite guitar player or drummer and wanted to find out where they came from, you could go to a family tree and track their career back to bands you'd never heard of before. Such a journey opened up the possibilities to music you never knew existed but were willing to take a chance on buying a cassette or album due to the tenuous links set out before you on paper. The ink link had become a recommendation engine that was based on career tracking of musicians.
I'll never forget when the first Asia album came out and the geek in me fell hypnotized to the Roger Dean fantasy dragon on the cover and hearing about this supergroup of musicians I had never heard of before. I had no older siblings and never was initiated into much of the music of the early 70s. My formative years were spent listening to AM radio and top 40 hits. But when that Asia album broke, and it was the biggest selling album of 1982, I fell in love with it and started to research this supergroup's origins. With no world wide web or older siblings to turn to, I happened upon Pete Frame's book of Rock Family Trees.
I learned that Asia was comprised of Steve Howe from Yes, Carl Palmer from Emerson Lake and Palmer, Geoff Downes from the Buggles [remember Video Killed the Radio Star?] and John Wetton from almost every other 70's group combined. I also learned that Yes had a ridiculous amount of lineup changes from the early to late 70s which included Bill Bruford who went on to play drums for King Crimson with John Wetton. Geoff Downes was in the Buggles with Trevor Horn (who would soon produce Frankie Goes to Hollywood), but before that they joined Steve Howe in Yes for a single album. Carl Palmer had played with crazy psychedelic outfits like The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster before joining Emerson Lake and Palmer. ELP's Greg Lake came originally from King Crimson which, after he left, counted John Wetton and Bill Bruford among its members (this surrounding a short stint Bruford did with Genesis). Lake ended up touring with Asia on a Japanese tour in 1983 for an ailing Wetton. Wetton also played with Roxy Music and Uriah Heep. Keith Emerson played with a band called The Nice before ELP and The Nice's Davy O'List joined a band called Refugee with Patrick Moraz (who also played with Yes for an album). Rick Wakeman of Yes also played with The Strawbs, and Alan White, who took over on drums for Bill Bruford, played with John Lennon, Eric Clapton and friends in the Plastic Ono Band.
Before wikipedia or the worldwide web, I had an incredible two page resource that distilled down the stories of dozens of musicians into a digestible format. I went on a spending spree buying up all the used albums I could find. Pete Frame had unwittingly become the Digg of the early 80s. If music companies want a tool that would be great to take digital music into the future, they should join together to allow users to generate their own family trees. One could track their favorite band back through time, or sideways through side projects to discover new artists. I suppose one of the biggest problems with modern music is that we'd have to eliminate the "feat." appearances from many modern recordings lest the connections become too unwieldy. And I also fear that most teenagers today have lost the ability and desire to commit to a band's infrastructure, much less an entire CD or discography. And I know that iTunes has a Genius and Amazon has a "people who've bought this have also bought" section at the bottom of every page, but these systems don't tell a story. They don't give a musician's evolution. I would always prefer discovering something on my own (or at least have the illusion of it) than buying related goods just because other people have.
Wherefore art thou Pete Frame. Music needs you again.
via youtube.com
You know what? I've given up on Saturday Night Live for my parody and satire. I'm turning to Sesame Street from now on. Sure it may be skewed to children, but at least I expect it. SNL, who should be trying to skew towards me, ends up hitting the lowest common denominator which is far below children and, most often, insulting. If you're a fan of Mad Men - enjoy!
"Nick Carter first appeared in a dime novel entitled The Old Detective's Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square on September 18, 1886. This novel was written by John R. Coryell from a story by Ormond G. Smith, the son of one of the founders of Street & Smith. In 1915, Nick Carter Weekly became Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. In the 1930s, due to the success of The Shadow and Doc Savage, Street & Smith revised Nick Carter as a hero pulp that ran from 1933 to 1936. Novels featuring Carter continued to appear through the 1950s, by which time there was also a popular radio show, Nick Carter, Master Detective, which aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System network from 1943 to 1955."
I, however, was not a fan of Nick Carter the Detective. Instead, I became a fan of Nick Carter, secret agent N3 of AXE (not the body spray, but an underground US government agency). Reborn through the explosion of Fleming's Bond books and films in the 60s, the 261 Killmaster novels ran from Run Spy Run in 1964 to Dragon Slay in 1990. With most plots inspired by Cold War paranoia, Carter took on the Soviets, the Chinese, and any other maniacal mastermind who was a threat to the United States. The stories always involved plenty of violence, mostly perpetrated by Carter himself, using his three main weapons: "Wilhelmina, is a stripped down German Luger. The knife, Hugo, is a pearl handled stiletto. The blade retracts into the handle, and the whole thing is worn on a special sheath on the wrist, designed to release the knife into the user's hand with a simple muscle contraction. The third member of the triad, Pierre, the poison gas bomb, is a small egg shaped device, normally carried as a "third testicle" at his scrotum. Activated with a simple twist, it would, within seconds, kill anybody, or anything, that breathed its odorless and colourless gas." Oh yeah! Good times! Testicular gas bomb!
Oh, and by the way, there was also plenty of gratuitous sex with foreign and friendly agents alike, that was all characterized by writing better suited for Penthouse Forum than a fine piece of literature like Killmaster.
I happened upon a few of the books by accident in used book stores because, as the cover price was so cheap due to quality and age, and used book stores often based prices on a small percentage of the cover price for pulp fiction, I could buy scads of them each month for only a few dollars. They were a hell of a lot cheaper than comic books once The Dark Knight blew the lid off that era and everything went "arty". Almost as soon as I'd given up ever finding more of them in my local bookstores, eBay came on the scene, and I could buy boxes of 50 titles for $20. That's some low-budget entertainment! Considering it only takes a few hours to get through a Killmaster offering, I found myself bringing them on planes and for short hotel stays. I could get through an entire novel with time to spare during a flight to Vegas.
I'm certainly not claiming that the Killmaster series should be placed in Eliot's Canon, but there is something to be said for the guilty pleasure read. It's why, as much as might like to snicker and look down on adults who read Harry Potter or Twilight novels, I do have to pull back and admit some perspective is necessary. The Reader Response theory approach to writing was never so evident with a revisiting of retro pulp novels. Why should I like them? Why do I like them? What do I bring to the reading experience that allows me to generate meaning from the hackneyed plotlines and one-dimensional characters? I suppose once cheap, available, action-spy-sex romp is put to the side and all you're left with is the text - who could pass up a testicular gas bomb named Pierre? Wait a sec! Pee... Air... Oh Killmaster, you slay me.
Okay... he's not slimy... just listen to the podcast.
Of the wizards who wait for the Apple Store Genius Bar, how to construct 2700 calories of burger, and what I maintain is the worst toy of all-time.
In celebrating 60 years of Communist rule, China trotted out all the flags and formed satellite art for the world to see. Impressive and scary at the same time. Of course I'm the type person that, when asked to march in a straight line, curls up on the sidewalk and goes to sleep until the nightmare ends. I guess they're trying to redefine what the world thinks when the name Tiananmen Square comes to mind. 39 pics in total here.
via tvo.org
A great little three minute video clip by Jesse Brown, whose "Search Engine" podcast, now hosted at TVO.org, talks about such things on a weekly basis. Had the pleasure of interviewing Jesse for my DyscultureD podcast several months ago. He really has his finger on the pulse of where the net and old models collide. Check it out!