But rather, when you're in a medium like radio or TV, you go with the most instantly recognized clip. So cue up a sound bite from "The Graduate," or the famous shot of Dustin Hoffman framed by her legs. Too bad the studio that brought "The Miracle Worker" to Hollywood didn't think to get a catchy theme song for it.
So the lesson for actors is: look over your resume. The most popular theme song from your movies is going to be playing from your tombstone. Even if you didn't sing it.
But anyway, there's a trash bin not too far from my new desk here plenty of stuff has been disposed of following moves by many personnel. Last week, what should I find in there but a Zip drive and Jaz drive and many disks to go with them!
It's no surprise to most of you that most Iomega products are pretty much out the door. We used to get Zip disks from our clients, so our Macs were made to order with Zip drives in 'em already. But no one's sent us a Zip in years. Of course it's now a CD-R, or a big file drop to our FTP server. Zip drives were an indespensible part of the computer landscape for probably no more than five years.
The reason, of course, is that Zip disks NEVER went down in price. For as long as I've been aware of them, it was considered a bargain to get them in quantity at under $10 apiece. Compare that to CD-R's, which went from a coupla bucks to about a quarter each in spindles. and now even DVD+R disks are well under a buck. That's 45 Gb worth of storage for the price of one 100 mb Zip disk.
But of course the other thing mitigating against the two units I found in the trash was that they were also SCSI drives. Hey kids, remember SCSI?
But I'm not proud. No sense messing with the drives, but I still will need some quick backups. I promise I'll blank out those disks.
I was going to mention using Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge" in the Mitsubishi commercial, but it's hardly the first time they've leased out their tunes, and besides, more people are hearing their songs now than in their heyday. Still, there's an unpleasant attempt to sell one's irony back to the post-ironic consumer when we're told "When a problem comes along, you must Swiffer..."
And besides, when the Jeffersons recorded "Volunteers," they were recording for RCA Records, owned at the time by General Electric, the country's second biggest defense contractor. No conflict of interest here!
I went to my home town of Schaller, Iowa the first weekend of November. While visiting with the family, I went for a walk to see the uncommon phenomenon of a "bin-buster" harvest. Yes, this unappetizing-looking mess is the sign of a good harvest: so much corn there's room in the silo, so they have to pile it on the town streets. Here they're loading it for shipment as fast as trucks can line up for it. This is happening in towns across the Midwest, thanks to good weather through the spring and summer. Add to this is the fact that higher fuel prices mean it costs more to harvest, and to dry corn down at the farm, thus they leave the corn in the field longer so it dries a little more. That's why we have this scene as late as November 6. So next time someone emails that list to you of how many rat hairs can be found in a hamburger, show them where their corn flakes were before they got into the box.
"Are you sure your French Fries are homemade?"
"Homemade?"
"Right! Not frozen at any time."
I also considered the girl behing the counter. I've bought hummus from her before; she's Middle Eastern, possibly an immigrant for whom English was a second language. She may have been wondering why this customer would have expected her family to be scrubbing and slicing up potatoes at home in the morning, then lugging them to the Loop to serve for lunch. It could very well be they made the fries fresh in that cafe's kitchen, but that wasn't the question. If they were "home-making" anything, it might have been their stuffed grape leaves. Or rather, they may have developed their recipe at home. Health inspectors take a dim view of making food at home, then selling it these days.
Chris' "Superman: the Movie" was a great special effects explosion. The tagline "You will believe a man can fly!" was no idle boast. You did not have to suspend disbelief to see Chris in the air, while George was confounded with very uncomfortable stage harnesses, "took off" by obviously jumping on a springboard, and was surrounded by bold matte lines as he soared through the same batch of clouds.
There was a marked difference in the way each played Clark Kent. Chris couldn't quite flesh out Kent beyond the bumbling oaf who made feeble excuses to get away and pull open his shirt. For Chirs, Clark Kent was the mask that Superman wore. George's Kent was a hard-hitting reporter as imagined by Hollywood, who had no qualms about tracking down gangsters, and was the equal to the headstrong Lois Lane, especially the Noel Neill edition. While Lois kept referring to Clark's milquetoast personality, Clark wasn't playing along with her. That said, Chris' Superman had a much lighter touch. Just think back to Margot Kidder's famous line, "You've got me? Who's got you!?," you can just about hear Superman's chuckle in response. This was the real big blue Boy Scout, helping people for its own sake, not too busy to rescue a kitten from a tree.
I can't reference Dean Cain from "Lois and Clark" here. I liked the show quite a bit, as it advanced the idea of "real life" romantic entanglements that super heroes might face if they were, a theme that went over even better in Smallville. And while Dean Cain was immensely likeable and believable as Clark/Superman, I can't remember much about how he approached the role.
Anyhoo, Chris' Superman was the first Hollywood treatment of a comic book hero that gave the hero any kind of personal conflict. When Superman impulsively turned back time to prevent Lois from dying (and once and for all, he didn't do it by just circling the Earth so fast that it spun backward; that was a visual metaphor, okay? [and no matter how Lucas recuts that scene, Han shot first! Just wanted to get that out]), he went against the warnings of the holographic Marlon Brando and, in way, had to face the consequences of that act in "Superman II."
We ended up renewing with AT&T Wireless, even though signal coverage at our house was poor, because (i) we'd be upgrading to GSM phones, so presumably coverage would improve; (ii) with AT&T Wireless merging with Cingular, that should mean a combined network, thus more "towers" in urban areas, and (iii) when I browsed to their site from work, it sniffed out the corporate IP and offered me an employee discount, which, of course, no one at my office knew about.
We wanted a phone with no antenna this time, and decided we also wanted it to adapt to international use, in case we ever go overseas again. 
So now that I've become one of things I feared most, I want to publicly make these pledges about my phone use. I can't promise I won't talk on it while driving, but here are the next best things:
Been away so long I hardly knew my face...
Various events in our lives have necessitated my absence from this page, as once was documented in my companion blog, "Bringing Ivan Home." Always meant to come back here, though. As a stopgap, here's a fun link we can all enjoy.
Lileks.com is a treasure trove page maintained by a columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, whose office seems to be too close to the paper's morgue. He's scanned and posted tons of oddball print stuff like old comics, ads, postcards, matchbook covers, what have you. Why I'm writing about it today is this:
As a youth in the 1970's, I was a stamp collector (explains a few things, doesn't it?). My hobby involved sending away for First Day Covers; envelopes with a special cancellation signifying the date a new stamp was issued, available on that day only in the First Day of Issue Post Office. To get this cover, you would send that post office a self-addressed envelope and a money order to purchase said stamp. For collectors, though, a blank envelop just didn't have the right pizzazz. Instead, they bought envelopes printed with a fancy engraved design based on the topic of the stamp.
Usually you bought the covers from ArtCraft. You could get nicely engraved envelopes at 2 for 35 cents back in the day. But while the engraving and printing was very nice, sometimes the actual design was, say we say, not quite awe-inspiring. The actual part of the body that was moved was a little further south. Just click on the link above and you'll find out. Though philatelists sometimes complained that the US Post Office was slow to bring contemporary designs to its stamps in the 1960s, we can see that these guys were dadaists when the stamps were stuck to an ArtCraft cover.
And if you're curious, most collectors don't pay any more for "cacheted" first-day covers than they would for plain white envelopes. What counts most is that the stamp is placed nicely and the cancellation is complete and legible. And like many aspiring artists, I took to designing my own covers, which I'll try to remember to get scanned and posted.
