Living in the country is weird.
I’m out walking the dog early on a Sunday evening and I pass my neighbour from down the road standing by his truck.
I throw him a wave, hoping he’ll see I have headphones on and won’t try to start up a conversation.
It’s then that I realize that he can’t wave back – he’s loitering behind his truck to conceal the fact that both of his hands are busy keeping his pants dry while he relieves himself.
To bring back an ancient tradition:
It was the third day of Alfred and William’s thirty-first harvest as neighbours. Both hoped it would be their last – as they had for two decades.
Their time was split. Half was spent staring at the other, either in the eyes or in the back, droning along their rows of wheat. The other half was a blessed relief: their tractors carried them away to the furthest ends of their fields.
Unknown to either, they had each spent long hours prowling around the other’s home, shotgun in hand. In the end both men were too stubborn to surrender by being the one who pulled the final straw.
Without warning each man’s engine stalled.
At that same moment, in a small off-off-Broadway theater, the men’s ex-wives were holding hands and watching a terrible play. Despite the poor acting and pretentious script, they were smiling.
In the distance dogs and cows began to howl, in Alfred’s chicken coop his two dozen hens dropped dead.
Gouts of dirt began to erupt in each man’s field.
Hay bails, at least a hundred pounds a piece, were tossed into the air and became grassy bombs as they shattered on the earth.
This day, their last, both men would know the horror of Cthulhu.
Anything with the power and weight of religion, which can bring humanity to create great art, can also inspire the ridiculous. I’m still not sure how I label the Louvin Brothers.
Are you (are you) ready
For the great atomic power?
Will you rise and meet your Savior in the air?
Will you shout or will you cry
When the fire rains from on high?
Are you ready for the great atomic power?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6h6FWMxH8E]
Ira Louvin was a great example of the dual personality that seems to permeate rural religion:
Their songs were heavily influenced by their Baptist faith and warned against sin. Ira Louvin was notorious for his drinking and short temper. Married four times, his third wife shot him three times in the back after he tried to strangle her. – Wikipedia
I need another three or four hours of sleep, so this is going to be a pretty light day. I did want to be sure to once again publicly shame myself though, as it seems to be serving the useful purpose of keeping me on task.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94584UUw1Q]
Pink Panther, probably because of the lack of dialogue, animation, or sensical jokes, always had a laugh track that stood out.
No one uses canned laugh tracks anymore of course, but until recently I’d forgotten how many cartoons used to have one.
A recent viewing of teletoon retro – with a micro-midget in the crook of my arm – brought up some odd memories: as a kid huffing Scooby Doo it wasn’t long before I realized that not only were the laughers repeating themselves, they were also apparently heading over to Josie and the Pussycats and laughing at those jokes in pretty much the same way.
It was only once I’d asked wikipedia that I realized how prevalent the problem was:
Critics took note of the inferior sounding laugh track permeating Hanna-Barbera’s Saturday morning fare. The same prerecorded laugh can be heard after nearly every punchline, which does not go unnoticed by the astute viewer. The fact that the treble was mixed far too high for the soundtrack it accompanies only drew attention to the falsity of the practice. Several shows that are victim of the abridged laugh track are The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, Jabberjaw,Hong Kong Phooey, Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, The Flintstone Comedy Hour andHelp!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!. – Wikipedia
I think the modern/adult version of this is, unfortunately, the Letterman audience. I sometimes wonder if the crowd handlers are dressed like lion tamers with high voltage stun sticks.
I greatly enjoy the first half hour of The Late Show, but every quirky tick gets measured applause, every half-gag elicits a short homogeneous laugh – the quality of a joke can be judged by length, but not by intensity, there seems to be no exuberance or extremity permitted by the electro-rod carriers. It may not be the tinny guffawing of Scooby Doo, but the crowd response is so predictable I find it difficult to understand the difference.
Most interesting article I’ve read today:
Trees retaliate when their fig wasps don’t service them
Figs and fig wasps have evolved to help each other out: Fig wasps lay their eggs inside the fruit where the wasp larvae can safely develop, and in return, the wasps pollinate the figs.
But what happens when a wasp lays its eggs but fails to pollinate the fig?
The trees get even by dropping those figs to the ground, killing the baby wasps inside, reports a Cornell University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. – More at PhysOrg.com
I find “Year’s Funniest Commercials” shows pretty disturbing.
If broadcast TV wasn’t doomed we might have ended up accepting commercial creation as some sort of art form – I rather suspect we’ll still end up with some jerk at the MoMA presenting an exhibit of ancient commercials. (If it hasn’t already happened.)
I envision a huddled group of middle-aged future people, beer\wine in hand, maybe wearing a t-shirt with the Geico gecko on it, watching their 3rd generation low-res recordings of the “The King” B.K. commercials and reminiscing about their childhood.
I go through odd cycles of dream repetition: years after I’d moved I used to regularly dream that the town I grew up in was being leveled by a nuclear explosion. It would always start at a distance and then roll towards me from the horizon, with a crushing sense of inevitability.
More recently many of my dreams have forced me into having to board a futuristic plane.
(Sometimes it’s just for inter-city travel, sometimes it’s a shuttle that does local-system planet hopping, but it’s always the same craft.)
The machine is full of cream coloured plastic – the interior is likely my brain mashing together the planes and trains I’ve been in. Orange cloth shades cover the windows, which seem to be made of exceedingly thick plastic. The seats are blue with coloured flecks randomly distributed.
The plane body is similar to NASA’s shuttles, but its made of a gray metal, like a DC-3, and the wings, although swept back like the shuttle, are twice the size.
The plane takes flight from a long chromed-steel platform, with regularly spaced ribs that shorten as the strip continues.
The launch faces onto a huge bay, and every time we take flight we’re slammed with acceleration Gs – just before the left wing rips off, at which point we inevitably corkscrew into the water at an immense speed.
My lovely wife Jessica has posted some new music to the interweb.
You should check it out.
An oldish video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g]
Also:
The author initially conceived of the idea for the squeeze machine from her observations in animal science. Cattle being held in a squeeze chute, while waiting in line for veterinary attention, often appeared somewhat agitated during the waiting; some of the animals, however, seemed to relax once pressure was applied to large areas of their bodies… In working with children, we have found that 5 minutes of sustained use of the squeeze machine is the minimum typically required to obtain a readily detectable calming effect.
Is ours a future full of relaxed autistic people encased in squeezy robotic exoskeletons?