Another Class Reunion

I started this blog with a post from my 25th high school reunion back in 2002. So I went back last month for my 30th.

Schaller, Iowa is in a typical rural area where female 4-H members still aspire to be named Pork Queen at the county fair each summer. Yet each year it becomes more of a promotional thing as family farms are swallowed up by giant hog raising factories. The various county pork producers associations will still be out there at local events, but their presentation is kind of indicative of the perceived blandness of Midwestern life. They'll serve "porkburgers," faux McRib, maybe even a pork chop sandwich. But if you want to "promote" pork in, say, the South or the west, you have a whole hog getting smoked up in a barbecue. Or at least some kind of 'cue, not just another fried patty. At least some sausage, perhaps?

But I found one outfit that went about it in a much more appropriate way. During the saturday afternoon Pop Corn Days parade, the kids in our family group were treated to fire companies, churches and various other floats all throwing out candy, mostly Tootsie Rolls. But toward the end of a parade was a horse-drawn wagon from a metal fabrication shop in nearby Galva. One of things they were showing off on the wagon was a smoker. As the wagon passed our location, for some reason the riders gestured to me to come up to the wagon. As I did, they handed me a delicious slice of smoked pork loin on a piece of bread. Mmmm… parade meat!

For all the images of bucolia I'm conjuring up, the Schaller area also happens to be one of the leading areas in the development of wind energy. Seems it's along the "continental divide" between the Missouri and Mississippi River basin, and thus a high point which gets plenty of steady winds. So now over 100 turbine windmills are spread around the area. Looks an awful lot like the Martian tripods standing along the landscape.

Cicadas R Gone

(A quick catch-up)

What was more amazing about the cicadas than their appearance was how fast they disappeared. A few news stories about the mess their dead bodies were leaving behind, and then—gone. Guess those birds and other bug-eating critters did a very efficient job, not to mention the fact that dead insects dry out pretty quickly. Many of 'em probably just disintegrated.

Interestingly, the biggest nuisance I found with the cicadas was in a downtown area: along Dixie Highway in Homewood. Seems they had a nice avenue of trees planted some time ago, and the traffic noise along that street keeps the birds away. That made a haven for the bugs, which swarmed around all day, getting into hair, flying into stores, and just bumping into things in general. You just had to remember that adult cicadas have no jaws to bite you with, and just be glad that hornets don't operate this way.

Still waiting to see the damaged twigs and gooey masses they say we'll have as the cicada nymphs drop to the ground.

Cicada Time!

As of this week, the li'l bugs are swarming. This is some video (actually audio) taken during lunchtime from work.

At home, we don't have as many, but we have lots more fat, happy birds. In nearby Homewood, where Dixie Highway has several trees planted along its downtown stretch, the constant traffic apparently keeps the birds, so the bugs are swarming like sparks at a campfire. In our area, we have a lot more seagulls, attracted by wide expanses of empty parking lots with plenty of garbage to eat, and they compete with local birds for the cicadas.

Not Stampworthy

Ranting about Star Wars stamps as I did below made me think about the topic of who has and who hasn't been honored on a U.S. Postage Stamp. What group of people is guaranteed to be placed on a stamp?

Only deceased U.S. Presidents. Gerald Ford gets one in July. Clinton, Carter and the Bushes each get one after their time on Earth is done. It's tradition, so no kvelling about the appropriateness of honoring any certain president.

Few other national office-holders are according a commemoration. The most under-represented group in this regard is U.S. Vice presidents.
By my count, there are 31 deceased people who served as Vice President without later becoming President. Of these, only one has been singled out for stampage:

• Hubert H. Humphrey (under LBJ). Humphrey's stamp wasn't even a commemorative; it was a regular issue 52-cent stamp for heavier letters.

• Elbridge Gerry, who served under James Madison, was depicted, but not named, as he was one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence and was thus shown in the John Trumbull painting, itself printed on a few stamps, …
  
• …which was not of the actual signing of the Declaration, but its presentation by the drafting committee to the Contintal Congress; Trumbull just stuck in as many of the signers as he could. But I digress…
  

So for a Veep, getting honored isn't a slam dunk. Otherwise we'd be collecting stamps of scalawags like Aaron Burr or Spiro Agnew. Still one has to wonder why the Postal Service hasn't thought to just put out a sheet of all the Veeps. They've gone through all the Presidents more than a few times.

Many other historical people may be long overdue. I only count four Supreme Court justices, although several Supreme Court rulings have been commemorated. Only eight Cabinet Secretaries and nine U.S. Senators. There's still a lot of history to be explored.

What I Learned Today #2: Herbie Flowers

This comes from the fine radio show "Mint," which, regrettably, is being pulled from the BBC 6 schedule:

Herbie Flowers is someone you've heard, if you've heard classic rock at all. He's a session bass player who started out playing tuba on cruise ship bands in the early 60's, and began to pick up the jazz bass. During a stopover in New York he discovers the new trend of electric jazz, and starts out with the electric bass, which leads to a career as a session musician. Result: He created the two coolest bass lines of all 70's rock: David Essex' "Rock On" and Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." He's also on David Bowie's "Space Oddity," though I suspect most people don't associate that song as much with its bass line. And on Jeff Wayne's double prog LP "War of the Worlds."

Just as extra filler for this space, we was in the classical pops group Sky, with guitarist John Williams.

Your nugget of stuff you never knew was connected for today.

I vote for "Old" Vader

Before I was a comics, Star Trek and beer geek, I was a stamp collector. So I still keep up with new issues and buy cool ones to address my mail. And I know some of the rules about who can be honored on a stamp.

The primary rule has been that no living person is honored on a US stamp. Traditionally, they waited until someone had been dead for ten years before putting out a stamp, except for U.S. Presidents. There have been exceptions: Walt Disney's portrait was postified in 1968, two years after he died. Gemini astronaut Ed White's 1965 space walk was commemorated in 1967, a few months after he died in the Apollo 1 fire. And there've been several stamps showing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon, despite Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still being very much with us.

In some cases, the 10-year rule was more strictly enforced, leading to interesting omissions. In 1989, a block was issued honoring four of the five Best Picture nominees for 1939. They showed John Wayne from "Stagecoach," Gary Cooper from "Beau Geste," Judy Garland from "The Wizard of Oz," and Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh from "Gone With the Wind." All of these actors passed the "10 years gone" test, but the fifth nominee, "The Philadelphia Story," was not honored since their stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, were still around. There's a lot more excruciating minutiae I could go into, but I'll just note that recently the official window was reduced to five years.

Now that whole rule seems to fly out the window in 2007 with the issuance of a sheet commemorating "Star Wars'" 30th anniversary, It's a good profit maker for the Postal Service after all: every stamp sold to collectors and not used to mail something is a 39¢ profit. But let's take a look: over a dozen characters from the six movies, most of them portrayed by actors who are very much among us.

I suppose we're seeing a new rule at work here. The stamp design is actually paintings of the characters, not photographs of the actors. That just might open the door to a whole new range of subjects for future issues.
Meantime, the post office is also taking votes on which of the ten stamps from the sheet will be issued later as an individual stamp. Absent one Jar Jar Binks on this sheet, we must throw our support to "old" Darth Vader. Emperor Palpatine will get his due with the passing of his acolyte, Darth W. Bush.

Creepiest Johnny Cash soundtrack

Click here, while the link is active, for the raw footage of the overserved Chicago cop beating up a bartender:

http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=83968

(c) 2007, WMAQ. All rights reserved.

Without the voiceover of a news reader narrating the story, we find out that the beating ends just as the jukebox finishes playing Johnny Cash' "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

Somehow eerily appropriate.

Strange Dreams

If I have dreams all the time, like some say, I don't remember 99% of them. But last night was the exception.

I dreamed I was surfing the Web and I stumbled upon a new web site. It started installing software that kept asking me for personal information. My address, my Soc., my phone number, passwords, names of my family, all that. Somehow I realized this was the Devil's personal web address, and he was using data mining to make it easier to tempt souls. The more I tried to ditch the malware (how aptly named!) and restart, reboot or reinstall, the more each file or web page I tried to open creating pop-ups nagging me for personal information.

I was losing the battle to save my online soul.

And then I woke up, wondering what that was all about. A manifestation of our general paranoia about privacy on the internet? A warning to stop surfing the net at work?

I remembered the alleged evil web address, so I checked it out. Seems like a harmless personal site. I won't put up the name here, since in real life they had nothing to do with my dream.

But does anyone has apocalyptic visions about the internet?

What I Learned Today #1: Loulie Jean Norman

I want to try and start a little feature that I may be able to update more often than I am now (my Super Bowl rant is still coming, trust me). In the course of wandering the internet, I pick up lots of halfway interesting facts. Some are answers to questions that have been in the back of my mind for years. I call this

What I Learned Today

Back in 1959, the inestimable Spike Jones produced an album called Spike Jones in Stereo--of course there was a mono version titled "Spike Jones in Hi-Fi." Subtitled "A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound!", it was a cute riff on monster movies that had become popular on TV at the time. Of course voice artist Paul Frees is there, reprising his rendition of "My Old Flame," and employing his stock voice cast of monster characters and mad scientists. He's joined by others in Spike repertoire company, plus Thurl Ravenscroft and a female character referred to only as "Vampira." Long had I wondered, after first hearing the album back in 1980; could this have been the legendary Vampira, one of the first TV monster movie hosts back in 1955, and later a star of the cult classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space?"

I was finally moved to look it up. The album's listing on allmusic.com shows the only female vocals are by one Loulie Jean Norman. As I suspected: "Vampira" was just an easy and generic name for a monster-based comedy bit.

But who was Loulie Jean Norman? Of course, she had a Wikipedia entry, where we find she was a coloratura soprano who had dubbed the singing voice of Diahann Carroll in the movie version of "Porgy and Bess," including the song "Summertime."

But, and here's the payoff: she also sang the vocalese in the opening theme for the original series of "Star Trek" back in 1966. Yes, there are lyrics that Gene Roddenberry wrote to get in on the music publishing royalties, but for most of the world, the only words to that theme are Loulie's "Aaah-AAAAAH-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahh!"

Now you know. Go read a book.

My First Cancer Scare

or; Up Mine!

Okay, this is the kind of information may save your life, etc., but when it first happens to you, it's a bit unsettling.

I have suspected my doctor just likes to order tests and push pills on me for every least little thing. Yes, I am carrying about 100 lbs. more than I should, and I'm flirting with diabetes and a heart condition, but it seems that every time I see him, I have to add another pill to my regimen, or go for another test that my insurance decides is not a test because if it was they would cover it 100%. I'm still paying off a $4,000 bill for running on a treadmill after being injected with isotopes. And I didn't even come close to "Hulking out."

That test was ordered along with a slightly less expensive one: a hemocult screening based on feces samples. Six months later, I'm back for another checkup. The doctor tells me they found blood in my stool, so I need to go in for a colonoscopy. Seems blood in your sample can be a symptom of cancer. So at the age of 47 I get my first cancer scare; yay!

So August 28 I'm scheduled to visit the hospital and get a probe stuck so far up my wazoo that I can taste it. My concern about how this procedure will go down is unsettling, as it would seem to involve pain in areas of myself known for generating great pains before. My only reference to fictional characters that have had colonoscopies is from "King of the Hill." I have to prepare for this thing by taking yet another day off work to consult with the doctor who'll be doing the procedure, and he gives me a little lecture that lasts all of ten minutes. For which I had to burn another vacation day.

Day of the procedure, I go through all the usual preliminaries. Check in, show Blue Cross cards, show cards again, get into a room, don the famous "breezy bottoms" hospital gown Get wheeled into the room where I am shown how to lie on my side and see the monitor they'll using to view my insides.

The only part that really had me worried (aside, again from the possibility of finding a gut full of tumors) was the anesthesiologist. He started an IV drip on me with a mild sedative and cheerily informed me that he was ready to increase the dosage if I felt any pain. I usually take that to mean I should expect a lot of pain.
And I probably would end up not remembering any of this visit.

Turned out, though, to be no problem at all. Really. No more discomfort than a prostate exam. I seem to recall lying on my side for about ten minutes, so maybe I lost a little time, but it sure seemed like I was up for the whole deal. And best of all, they collected a few polyps from inside of me and later told me there was nothing wrong with them.

So a lot of fears over very little. I'm feeling happy and healthy. The next day I go back to work, and on my way home, my car gets sideswiped by a semi.

Love Network

Considering we only caught the last half hour of the MDA telethon, why do I want to comment on it? Especially, why am I pushing off other posts I wanted to write in order to do this? Partly, I guess, because of the great comments on the telethon that Mark Evanier provides. My comment is that what with Jerry having mellowed out considerably in his autumn years, there's one thing that consistently annoys me about the presentation, and it's on the local cutaways.

I suspect most of the nation now can only see the telethon on the WGN Superstation feed, but I'd sure like to know if any other stations do this: during the local cutaway segment, where we go to your local studio and see the Boy scouts and firemen answering phones, the 'GN folks announced the match challenge period from one of their big sponsors. As in, "Every pledge we receive during the next three minutes will be matched by our sponsor! $25 becomes $50! $50 becomes $100!"

All fine and dandy, but they demark this match challenge by shrinking the live picture into a corner so there's room for the sponsor's logo and a three-minute countdown clock and then...

• The live picture becomes jumpy and stuttery, like the picture-in-picture function on a TV set. But I'm sure this a special effect chosen by the production crew, because:
  
• Most of the live feed is now shown by the should-mounted news cameras, whose operators keep zooming in and out, tilting back and forth, panning way too fast, like a bunch of 13 year olds playing with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision. Maybe they think this effect will hypnotize us into calling in a pledge.
  
• Once the three minute countdown gets to about five seconds, they fade the clock off the screen for a few seconds, then fade it back in, and presto! It's starting again from three minutes. The same cheap trick they use on infomercials urging us to "call within the next ten minutes" for a "special offer" that's really being extended to anybody, anytime.
  
• To really get us in the mood to send in our money, during this match period they run a music bed that for the past 16 years has featured "Gonna make You Sweat" by C+C Music Factory played over… and over… and over. Does this 1990 chestnut stir anything in anybody's breast besides extreme ennui these days?

In the interest of disclosure, I have to admit that we did not phone in to pledge, so in some regards, we really don't have the right carp about it. We did, of course, throw some change in the fireman's boot here and there, but finances have kept us pretty tight these days. But the MDA telethon is after all, a landmark of our culture, and very soon that'll be gone, too.

I Spell My Name… Danger!

Catchup time. Should have written this a month back because I actually have a Mickey Spillane story. Rather, it's a story that Spillane told a lot, but it hasn't had much currency on the web yet. So here it is.

I saw Spillane at the 1995 Chicago Comics Convention (or as it's now known, WizardWorld Chicago. What was he doing at a comics convention? Well, it's well documented that Spillane got his start in comics (I believe it was Les Daniels' 1971 book "Comix" that reprinted one of his text filler stories from a 1940's Atlas comic). And it's known that his Mike Hammer character started out as an unsold comic called "Mike Danger." Well, that year, "Mike Danger" was seeing publication as a 40's gumshoe thrown into the future, courtesy of Tekno Comix, an imprint that was big on sci-fi comics "created" by big names (Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy, Isaac Asimov, John Jakes and Neil Gaiman) but scripted by others.

So to promote his comic, he was doing the convetion circuit. I saw him at a panel with Harlan Ellison. No doubt there was a third writer on the panel, but anybody sharing a panel with Harlan and Spillane is relegated to the "third Tenor" role. Whatever the title of the panel was, it should have been "An hour in a room with liquored-up Harlan Ellison and Mickey Spillane." I think you see where I'm leading.

So these old pros are regaling the audience with tales about writing cheap fiction back in the 1950's. Harlan goes on about a certain editor who wouldn't pay him for a published story until he hoisted a 50-pound office typewriter and threatened to cave said editor's head in. The crowd is heeding the warning in the convention program not to ask Harlan what the hell happened to "The Last Dangerous Visions." Following was Spillane's story. No way is this remembered monolgue verbatim, but the story only works told in the first person:

I'm in my editor's office and we're talking about mystery writing. At some point in the conversation, he wondered if it was possible to write a mystery novel that made no sense without the last paragraph. I said "I can write that." And I did.

So next the editor says "I'll bet a thousand dollars you can't write a mystery where the whole climax depends on the last word. I said, "You're on." I start the book, and a few weeks later, I mail him with manuscript, but I leave out the last word. A few days later, he calls me yelling "What was the word? What was the word?" I said, "Gimme my thousand bucks, you sonuvabitch!"

Hey, I may spoil a lot of things, but I won't spoil this one. If you don't know already, it's one of the Hammer books. I may read it myself if I ever have time for a whole novel.