Tag Archives: television
No News Is Good News
Let me tell you one of the ways my beloved mother drove me up the wall when I was growing up.
She watched the 5 O’Clock News every day.
I grew up in Jersey, part of the Tri-State Area, which includes New York, where I was born. In 1972. Otherwise known as The Year Everything Went Straight To Hell. Continue reading
Comments Off on No News Is Good News
Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Eatable Things, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Worst Of All
Digital Diaspora
diaspora: a scattered population with a common origin in a smaller geographic locale. Diaspora can also refer to the movement of the population from its original homeland.
There’s a chance, being that you are using the Internet, that you are experiencing an intangible emptiness, a desire to fulfill a need you didn’t know you had.
You are far from alone. This is normal.
Many of us used the Internet around the year 2000 because it supplied things we couldn’t find elsewhere. Easy and plentiful pornography, hurtful humor, forums and blogs brimming with lolcows; all the schadenfreude one could stand.
Comments Off on Digital Diaspora
Filed under Don't Know Don't Care, Idiot's Delight, Site Stuff, Uncategorized
Fear Of Darkness, Boat Of Love
Recently my editor at Stomp & Stammer asked me how much of BIUL is embellished, and how much is actually true.
Believe it or not, it’s almost entirely truthful. I condense and streamline experiences for space constraints, and add a punchline here and there, but it’s all based in truth. In fact, there are anecdotes that I haven’t used, because I figure that readers will doubt their veracity.
For example, how I conquered my childhood fear of the dark with the help of The Love Boat.
Comments Off on Fear Of Darkness, Boat Of Love
Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Girls of BIUL, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions
Pure Evel
I don’t know why people are sad about the Great Deathwave of 2016. It’s a remarkable opportunity to make a stranger’s life all about yourself.
When a celebrity dies, you now own them. You can take the life’s work of someone you never encountered and reduce it to a personal inspiration. You can interpret their efforts as empowerment for your own agendas. Oh, and you can cherry-pick the qualities of their persona that you agree with, and ignore everything else. A corpse will never call your bluff. Continue reading
Comments Off on Pure Evel
Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Worst Of All
The Mute Button
Now that everyone has a smartphone, no one cares about remote control.
The remote control used to be a powerful object. Couples fought over it. Some televisions would not operate without one, necessitating a trip to the local Radio Shack for another “universal remote”. Dads would exact a stranglehold over the remote, and moms would hide it on purpose, feigning ignorance while secretly enjoying the resultant frustration.
Comments Off on The Mute Button
Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions
Artifacts of Early Gaming
Earlier today, I suffered a terrible tumble from my high horse. During yet another lament about the endless saturation of smartphones, my rose-colored recollection of my own childhood was shattered when I realized that in grade school 35 years ago, my generation was gazing at little electronic rectangles too.
They weren’t easy to get, either; I only ever saw them in the windows of weird electronics stores in NYC, the kind of places you’d expect to have a mogwai for sale. Most of the games didn’t take regular batteries, but instead used the teeny watch kind that you had to ask your grandma for (grandmas always had them). Typically, the sound consisted of high-pitched beeps, and could not be turned off, so play was often halted by grown-ups with more hearing than patience.
Comments Off on Artifacts of Early Gaming
Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions
You must be logged in to post a comment.