The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Obviously, Atomic Deathray no longer occupies a lot of my attention, but I’m not quite willing to let the old girl go just yet. Facebook has bled off a lot of the urgency I used to feel about getting a post written, of course, but there are other reasons I’ve neglected the site.

There have been a lot of changes in my life over the past year (and by a lot, I mean pretty much everything). It’s been an overwhelming time, and while this is essentially an autobiographical site, there are things I didn’t feel up to discussing in such a public forum.

I need to rethink some things, and Atomic Deathray will be part of that process. I’ll get back to you in 2012. In the meantime, Vaya con Dios, mi Amigos.

This is my first piece of supremely shitty animation from Xtranormal’s movie maker. You may know Xtranormal from the Geiko commercials that “took fifteen minutes to make.” They weren’t kidding.

For a few months, my daughter and I have been eating at a local Chinese Buffet. The prices are cheap, and the food is usually pretty good, although today I think they let the good cooks have the day off. There was the infamous “Steamed Phoenix Talons” incident a few months ago (let’s just say that “Phoenix” is a euphemism, I shrieked like a little girl, and move on), but overall I like the place.

The staff is unusually off-putting, though. One does not expect to encounter the snotty attitude of a pretentious Beverly Hills Maître D at an $8.99 all you can eat Chinese joint.

Then I started noticing the fortune cookies, and gradually came to realize that I had stumbled onto a Chinese plot to demoralize America.

I swear that each one of these is a scan of a real fortune from that restaurant.

The first one was innocuous enough:

“Goals are dreams with deadlines.” Okay, not exactly “Good things will come to you in time,” but nothing too unpleasant. The mention of the word “deadlines” did bring my mood down a notch, though.

The next one was borderline insulting:

“Try to learn to do something new.” Not the upbeat and practical “Learn to do something new.” No, try to learn to do something new. The implication of probable failure is clear. I felt a vague malaise for the rest of the afternoon.

The gloves came off on the next visit:

Yes. “What the boss says goes.” It doesn’t matter that you are right and your boss is a drooling imbecile that can barely tie his shoelaces without asphyxiating himself whose plan is guaranteed to go full Hindenburg if implemented, what he says goes. Toe the line, Yank! Submit!

Being reminded of my workplace environment, I became so depressed that I had to go home and lay down for a few hours. Then I ate some White Castles, which made me feel even worse.

My daughter got this one last week:

“You can’t win them all.” What the hell kind of defeatist crap is that to put in a fortune cookie? Yes, it’s true, but do you have to rub our noses in it? It’s like opening a children’s book and a hospital bed pops up with a doctor grinning maliciously, saying “You’re gonna die someday, kid!” Prepare for defeat, American Pig-Dogs! I had to take a tranquilizer before I could even pay the bill.

And then today, this is what I found:

Whoa. “Make my day.” There is no mistaking this one. The line from Dirty Harry is a death threat. There is no other interpretation possible.

Our government has been worried about a war with China for as long as I’ve been alive. I now believe that the first shots have been fired, and they consist of little slips of paper folded into pastry. The Chinese are trying to sap our will to live, and they do it by pulling fortune cookies out of a special box reserved for round eyes.

Oh, and those little numbers on the fortunes? I’m pretty sure those are nuclear launch codes.

This one’s gonna ramble, so get ready.

Back in ye olden days, when the World Wide Web was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye and pteranodons ruled the skies, I got into computers in a big way. I didn’t just dive into the digital revolution, I cannonballed into it. I played Flight Simulator when it was amber-on-black vector graphics. I discovered that just anybody could log onto some pretty heavy BBS’s (I won’t be more specific because I enjoy my freedom), you could program computers to draw pictures, and there was free porn all over the place if you knew where to look. I dreamed of the day when I could have all the worlds’ information at my fingertips instantly. I knew it was coming; it was inevitable.

And yet, now that it’s here, something disquieting has been nagging at me. That something is the unfortunate historical period known as the Dark Ages. A little hun-based library-torching here, a little faith-based manuscript burning there, and before you knew it almost the entire accumulated knowledge of millennia of civilization was gone. Poof! Just like that. We are only beginning to understand the full extent of what was lost. Our understanding of the ancient world comes from the small glimpses afforded by the surviving fragments, backed up by modern archaeology.

I had assumed, when I used to dream of what life would be like in the 21st Century (before Bush and Cheney took a huge steaming dump all over the whole damned thing), that print and digital works would exist side-by-side.

Today, I read this story: The Oxford English Dictionary’s next edition may only be published in digital form.

Is this wise? Think about it: many of the data tapes from the Apollo moon missions are unreadable just forty years later, and the meager progress that’s been made on them is only because someone thought to save one of the old tape readers in a garage somewhere.

Think of all the information stored on vinyl records and cassette tapes and videocassettes. Yes, devices to play those data formats exist, but how many of you still own any of them? Could you play a 5 1/4″ floppy disc if you needed to? I know I couldn’t.

And it’s not just the format information is stored in. There is deterioration. Tape gets brittle. Hard drives crash. Discs get demagnetized.

Here’s an interesting story that you probably don’t know. There are several periods throughout the 1800s where many, many official documents have faded to the point where they cannot be read without specialized modern equipment. Documents immediately prior to these periods and following them are perfectly legible. Why? Because the dyes used in those inks faded over time, or in some cases actually ate through the paper.

The permanent ink was generally iron gall ink, which actually changes the chemical composition of the paper. The ink fades, but the paper underneath is permanently altered, having a brown color. After the disastrous ink problems, the government realized that something had to be done, and so an official permanent ink formula was created to be used on legal documents. You can read an account of this here.

I fear that something will happen to our glittering digital utopia. A solar flare that wreaks havoc with electromagnetic storage systems, religious fanaticism and rampant anti-intellectualism decreasing the number of people able to maintain the infrastructure, or some other damn thing. Cultures, governments and religions collapse. Machinery decays. It happens all the time; hell, we can’t even keep our bridges from falling apart anymore. What is to keep the internet from suffering the same fate?

Where is the backup for our time? If the internet is destroyed and the information it stored has not been durably printed, what do we do then?

Something very similar to this actually took place in the late 1800s. The French were the first to attempt to dig the Panama Canal. At the time, they were one of the most technologically advanced countries on the planet. They sent the cream of their engineers to Panama, where they promptly died of malaria and yellow fever, the causes of which were still unknown. They sent the second-tier engineers, and they croaked also. Between 1881 and 1889 over 22,000 men died there — an entire generation of engineers and all they knew was lost. Furthermore, since much practical engineering knowledge was passed on by word of mouth, France lost the knowledge of the engineers that came before them. It was decades before they recovered.

Reference works, at the very least, should be required by law to be printed. The internet will not last forever. We are risking another Dark Age.

Special Extra-Pedantic Note: The use of the word “ye” as in “ye olde shoppe” is a misnomer. (”Ye” as in “Ye are a comely wench” is perfectly acceptable, although it’s likely to get you slapped or worse under most circumstances.) The digraph “th” was originally a single letter, called thorn. It looked like this: þ. In time it became almost indistinguishable from a “y”, and since the typefaces printers used were often purchased in Germany or Italy (neither of which used thorn), a “y” was usually substituted. So “ye olde shoppe” is actually pronounced “the old shop.”

I am the father of a preteen girl who has been on vacation all summer, and I telecommute from home. Therefore I have been bombarded with a nonstop television diet of the Disney Channel. Thank God school starts tomorrow and I get to reclaim what torn, wretched scraps of my sanity as remain.

While horrible and soul-crushing, the past two agonizing months have taught me something important. I used to think that Republicans, and neocons in particular, were the biggest threat to society.

Nope. It’s Auto-Tune. Especially when it allows prepubescent no-talents to star in TV shows where they “sing.”

Was that note a half-octave off? No problem! So what if the kid ends up sounding like someone slathered Peter Frampton’s guitar with a tub of Crisco?

It should come as no surprise that Auto-Tune was invented by an oil company engineer.

Prologue
(Cool! Finally, I get a legitimate excuse to write a prologue!)

Looking back across the gulf of three decades, even the most vivid memories get wobbly, like a stretch of distant highway on a hot summer day. We’re usually unaware of it because the other people involved long ago went their own way, or died, or have become successful and will not return your calls. And so we go on, completely oblivious to the fact that big chunks of what we remember aren’t reliable.

Facebook has changed all that.

You see, I started writing this story one year ago tonight. Through Facebook I had recently gotten back in touch with my few surviving friends from way back when, and was very excited about detailing the spectacular events of July 4th, 1979. Unfortunately, I made the fatal mistake of checking a few details with the old gang first.

It turns out that the girlfriend I thought had been with me on the expedition had not, in fact, been present at all. Worse, the confusion ran deeper: I am still unclear as to precisely which girlfriend that I imagined had been there had not really been there. If reading that sentence gives you a headache, just think how I feel. Detail after well-remembered detail were gunned down without mercy.

As a result, my faith in one of my most pleasant memories was utterly shattered, and I never finished the story. (Not finishing stories is something I’m very good at, by the way. I’ve developed it into something of an art form. A shameful, self-destructive art form.)

Over the past year, however, I’ve noticed a trend in my friends’ recollections on Facebook: theirs are as messed up as mine. Locations are misplaced, events conflated, and some really embarrassing stuff mysteriously never happened.

That’s when I realized that memory is just like Silly Putty: it’s malleable but more or less holds its shape, it picks up really clear impressions that you can stretch, and it will get stuck in your hair if you fall asleep on the couch while playing with it and you have to cut it out with a pair of scissors while your mother yells at you. Okay, it’s not one of those prissy one-to-one analogies, but you get what I’m driving at.

So I decided to go ahead and tell you my recollections of that Fourth of July anyway. Some of it probably didn’t happen exactly this way, but some of it did. If you can do better, please, be my guest. As always, the names have been changed to protect the miscreants. Also as always, the pseudonyms will be lame.

The Story Proper: July 4th, 1979

It had been an amazing, incredible summer already. I lived in the mythical land of Hollywood and had a nice girlfriend and a fun job lording it over a bunch of Rocky Horror Picture Show freaks. For the first time in my life I was, if not exactly popular, at least not universally loathed. I had more friends than I’d ever had before, and some of them were so cool I still can’t figure out why they stooped to my level. That’s actually a pretty good description of my love life, come to think of it…

Anyway, the summer of ‘79 just flat-out kicked ass. I was 22, and was in that magical period between discovering drugs and finding myself rocking back and forth in the corner of a skid-row hotel room muttering about beetles and the military-industrial complex. LSD was my substance of choice; I’d even dropped acid to meet Timothy Leary at a book signing. For real. I actually shook Tim Leary’s hand while tripping. That’s the stoner’s equivalent of climbing Everest.

We had assembled at the Center of the Universe, Mary and Gerald’s apartment. Mary was my boss at the theater, and Gerald was her brilliant writer boyfriend who had built a mechanical television as a boy. My girlfriend Linda had to work that day, but everyone else was there: Stoner Bill Jr., Nina, and the adorable punk couple Britt and Tamara. (I’m not being sarcastic; they were cute as bugs.)

I’d managed to get hold of some el-cheapo LSD from a friend in San Diego. We called it “The Brown Bomb” for two excellent reasons. First, it came on brown paper that had obviously been cut out of grocery store bags. Second, it was not for the faint of heart. The first time I’d taken it I remember turning to Britt about an hour in, my face screwed up like I was trying to pull a fighter plane out of a death spiral, and chattering through clenched teeth, “I think this might have some speed in it.”

Britt, Tamara and I divied up the acid. Stoner Bill Jr. volunteered to be a designated driver. Nina, who always exuded an air of detached amusement/irritation at our antics, declined to partake. Gerald elected to stay home and write. Our plan was to go down to Santa Monica Beach to watch the ocean and people wearing skimpy swimsuits.

Piling into the cars, we headed west toward the Pacific.

It was insanely crowded. We had to park a good half-mile away and walk. The acid was starting to kick in, and things were getting very strange indeed. There was one storefront that made us stop and stare. It was a menswear place, and displayed shirts and jackets on headless gold-painted mannequins. Instead of the usual smooth edge, though, the mannequin manufacturers had chosen to end each neck stump with a ring of rounded surfaces surrounding a central bump. I guess it was supposed to resemble upholstery, but to us it looked more like someone had taken victims straight from the guillotine and gilded the corpses.

Santa Monica is on a cliff over the beach, and we began making our incapacitated way down the zigzagging walkway. Halfway down, we came across a group of Hell’s Angels lounging around in a rest area. Putting on our bravest faces, we walked past them, desperately hoping to avoid a confrontation. I brought up the rear, and just as I passed, one of them looked at me and said, “BOO!” Everyone cracked up laughing.

We crossed the pedestrian bridge to the beach itself. The beach was completely packed, and yet people were setting off fireworks everywhere. It was like trench warfare in World War I but with hot chicks in bikinis. We huddled together, jostled by the crowd, with firecrackers snapping at our feet and bottle rockets whistling just over our heads. A decision to bail was quickly arrived at. To our relief, the biker gang was gone when we made the trek back up the cliff.

I rode back with Stoner Bill, Jr. It was five o’clock as we pulled into a parking space on the hillside below Mary’s apartment. Deep Purple’s “Hush” came on the radio, and Bill turned it up loud. He grinned at me. “Classic psychedelia!” he said. I’d never heard it before. I never heard it that way again, either. If you’ve never heard “Hush” on LSD, let me tell you… oh, never mind. It’s like trying to explain an orgasm.

Back up in Mary’s place, a traditional Fourth of July party was in progress. In spite of the Brown Bomb’s jittery side effects, I managed to eat a hot dog. There were lots of laughs and more substance abuse.

Then Mary had an inspiration: we should all go to the concert at the Hollywood Bowl, because they were performing The 1812 Overture, complete with a real cannon! This, we all agreed, would be fantastic. The only problem was that we had no tickets, and the event sold out every year. And so a daring plan was hatched.

An hour later, I found myself with Mary and a couple of the more intrepid party-goers climbing the treacherous hills above the Hollywood Bowl in the dark. A few stars twinkled in the sky through the city’s warm glow. I sat down on a teeter-tottering slab of rock and, resting my elbows on my knees, put my chin in my hands. Below us lay the famous amphitheater, brightly lit, and the familiar strains of Tchaikovsky’s music drifted up. I have rarely known such contentment.

And then came the great crescendo: Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!! The cannon went off, the sound caroming around the valley. Fireworks launched from behind the band shell, exploding in time with the cannon. Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!! The heart-swelling music, the fireworks blossoming below and above us in fiery colors, the cannon belching flame and thunder… We were on our feet and cheering and whooping and generally acting like the happy idiots we were.

Sigh.

It’s all just fragments of memory now, after all these years. Those fragments are worth more to me than I can possibly say.

Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!!

Yeah. That was a Fourth of July.

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again: what is it with Florida?

Friday morning a man and woman were involved in a motorcycle crash in Jacksonville. Naked. Both are expected to recover everything but their dignity.

Normally, this is where I begin heaping scorn on the miscreants, but actually I’m filled with dumbstruck admiration. Here’s what he’s being charged with:

1. Driving while intoxicated — Well duh.
2. Driving without a license — C’mon, give him a pass on this one. Where was he going to put it?
3. License revoked — So apparently there have been other vehicular indiscretions in his past.
4. Expired inspection — There was plenty of inspection afterward, I’m sure.
5. No helmet — Because riding naked with a helmet is such a good look.
6. No insurance — I’m sensing a pattern of contempt for authority here…
7. Reckless driving — Nothing in the article says anything about who was where doing what, so this could have been the result of any number of scenarios. We have to calculate for seating order, hand placement, orientation (obviously heterosexual, but I was thinking more along the lines of pitch, roll and yaw), if he happened to become momentarily distracted, and whether or not his view was obstructed.

That, my friends, is the true American Dream.

The only thing that could have made this more awesome was if they’d been firing shotguns into the air while crashing through the doors of a crowded church. It’s enough to bring a tear to the late Hunter S. Thompson’s eye.

Oh, and did I mention that he’s a Marine gunnery sergeant specializing in bomb disposal? He blows things up for a living! Damn.

Don’t arrest this guy; give him a medal for sheer badassery. Hell, he’d probably let them pin it straight into his naked, glistening chest.

Love never dies, but loved ones do. I’m sorry you were in such pain. Goodbye.

Last night I was thinking about the first Earth Day. Well, specifically I was remembering an hour of it, and only vaguely. I don’t have any solid memories of what I did, but I know precisely where I was: in Mrs. R’s art class at Alamo Heights Junior High School in San Antonio, Texas.

Alamo Heights was a wealthy neighborhood, and while I didn’t quite live on the wrong side of the tracks, I was only a block or two away. It wasn’t a fun place to be. I got bullied a lot, although I have to admit I gave them lots of fodder: I was poor, socially inept, had crossed eyes, loved to read, and had yet to learn the simple fact that the things I find most fascinating irritate the hell out of muscular, slow-witted classmates.

The teachers there were pretty stodgy. San Antonio didn’t cotton to most of the shenanigans the rest of the country had been engaged in, and this was Alamo Heights, after all. Most of them were nice enough, although one was utterly horrifying. (The social studies teacher was a middle-aged man with some kind of skin condition, and once in a while when we were supposed to be reading we’d catch him chewing on the back of his hand. I believe that class is where I first heard the immortal phrase, “Ewwwwwww! Gross!”)

But there were two wonderful teachers there: Coach Ploetz, about whom I intend to write about in detail later, and Mrs. R. (I’m giving Coach Ploetz’s real name because he has since passed away. A wonderful man who may have saved my life.)

Mrs. R was young, and she wasn’t at all like the other teachers. She wore bright modern clothes, and laughed a lot, and treated you like a human being instead of an unpleasant duty. She did gorgeous psychedelic ink and watercolor drawings in class. She drove a really cool car, too, an old Rolls-Royce. She may have even gone barefoot in class once in a while. She was, dare I say it, almost a… a Hippie!!! We all had huge crushes on her, of course.

I’ve been in schools where the kids complained about having to go to art class. Not there, though. Everybody loved her classes. She was, therefore, in frequent trouble with the school authorities.

That first Earth Day was one of her biggest transgressions. I can’t remember any specifics across the gulf of forty years, but Mrs. R. led us on a march for Earth Day. Keep in mind that at this time environmentalists were considered roughly on par with a crazy uncle that suddenly starts barking at the milkman. The principal was not amused, and it took weeks for the hubbub to die down.

So last night I was thinking about Earth Day and Mrs. R, and I decided to see if I could find out what happened to her. I started googling her last name (I don’t think I ever knew her first name), but all that kept coming up was a famous author who wrote a series of fantasy novels that are my daughter’s favorite books of all time. One of them has been made into a very popular movie. I kept scrolling through, trying to find Mrs. R, when I ran across a reference to this author having been born in 1964 and graduated from a San Antonio high school.

Hmm, I thought. Nah, it couldn’t be. Still, it was just possible. I started googling for this author’s mother. I found her name, which did not begin with R, and googled her. She is a respected educator in Texas, with art being one of her many subjects. Okay, I thought, this is looking more and more likely. I found her Facebook page, and left a message asking if she was a teacher at Alamo Heights Junior Hgh in 1970 or 1971. This was at 2:30 in the morning.

When I woke up this morning and checked my email before beginning a massive debug (computer, not vermin), there was a reply. It was her! I had actually found Mrs. R! We caught up a bit, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Oh, and it turns out the car was an old Jaguar Mark X, not a Rolls. I’ll be asking about the march. Memory is a funny thing.

The best part of all this? Telling the story to my daughter and watching her eyes get very big and bright.

I’m not accustomed to recommending commercial services, and this may be the first time I’ve done so on this site. That said, the Newspaper Archive is an online service I’ve been waiting for since I first logged onto a BBS in 1986.

I’m an amateur historian, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time in public libraries perched on uncomfortable plastic chairs in front of circa 1975 microfilm readers, poring over old newspapers. REALLY old newspapers.

Now the same company that recorded many of those microfilms have finally made them available on the internet, accessible for a fee. Speaking for myself, I consider that fee to be more than reasonable, especially when you consider that a library Xerox of a newspaper story usually costs a minimum of ten cents a page.

Most people do not realize just how much information is contained in any given issue of a newspaper. There are the big front-page stories, of course, but further back, in the advertisements and classifieds, the society columns and sports pages and local stories, you find a real picture of the society. Addresses, names, dates, weather, crimes, desires, fears, needs and dreams; they are all there.

Beyond the sheer flood of data, for the perceptive reader there are also the intangibles: the sense of humor, the attitudes toward race, the genuine feel of the times. It’s something you simply cannot get from a history book.

And now I’ve got access to tens of thousands of papers. This calls for a maniacal laugh: Bwahahahahahaaaaaaaa!!!!

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’m not going to editorialize. Just read it and then read between the lines. It’s the entire contents of the “Personal” column of the Saturday morning edition of the San Antonio Daily Express from September 16, 1899. (Many papers had morning and evening editions, a custom that lasted well into the 20th century.) Some of the punctuation and small bits of text are speculative because of the poor quality of the reproduction. The monetary amount in the text is correct.

Personal

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THE treatment by a woman who best understands a woman’s ills, (especially one who has been there herself, Mme. Guillaume of Paris, France,) guarantees to successfully treat ladies suffering from suppressed menstruations with her French Regulating Pills. No matter how obstinate or delayed. Have never failed once in [10?] years. They succeed when others fail without injuring constitution or interfering with duties or money refunded. Price $2.50 sent sealed. Correspondence confidential. Write for advice, testimonials. P.O. Box 117, Galveston.

HOME for ladies during confinement. Good doctor and nurse. Infants adopted. Confidential. Address [126?] this office.

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Special Monetary Note: Determining the relative value of currency across time is difficult, and depends on many socioeconomic factors. A buck is not the same for a bank president as it is for a street vendor, which is why the only people arguing for a flat tax are rich assholes and deluded morons.

Assuming that a woman of moderate means suffering “suppressed menstruations” would have some sort of access to a sympathetic physician, and that the target audience of the advertisement would therefore have been members of the lower-middle class and below, $2.50 is equivalent to $313.00 in 2009 dollars for someone earning unskilled wages.