Nostalgia

Yesterday was the first time in a long while that there was an MST3K Turkey Day Marathon.  Of course this one was online and what with this crazy modern world of ours included thousands all watching at the same time and tweeting live along with it all, expanding the horizons of the fanbase and creating connections across seas and such. Add the fact that the creator himself hosted with new bumpers culminating in him sitting down for dinner with the bots and you've got something very special, a modern outgrowth of a show I've loved for twenty five years.

I figured that I'd take it all back to the beginning for me with this post.  I'd seen Joel on SNL and some good friends of mine had gone to watch him perform standup on Halloween of '87 and they were determined to bring me along for the same in '88. I was attending the U of M for what was to be the first brief foray into my scattered post-secondary education.  The show was at a two drink minimum comedy club that no one remembers, and I was 18 when 18 was no longer the age of imbibing.  Not only was I nervous about being busted, but I ineptly went about trying to look casual by making my first drink non-alcoholic. When I found out that the stiff ones cost the same as the non, my second ended up being a screwdriver.  That seems like the drink of an experienced drinker, right?

I'm pretty sure that both Trace and Josh were also in the lineup that night.  While Joel was on he went into a balloon animal routine and asked for suggestions from the crowd.  I said snake and then someone else yelled snake and Joel brought that person up for a little nun puppet boxing to put him in his place.  That could have been me.  I cannot imagine that Joel would not have called me out if it were, being so obviously not of age.  I consider it a dodged bullet.

Less than a month later I was watching the first episode of MST3K on snowy UHF down in Cannon Falls.  I sat through as many episodes as I could catch which featured Gamera and the Thunderbirds puppets among others.  Then the show moved on to the Comedy Channel, which the shitty cable company in Madison never carried, so I didn't get to see it again until Sci Fi picked it up late in the game.  Since then I've recorded many episodes and bought many tapes and disks.  I also re-upped in the fanclub, though I had joined way back in the day, being member sixty something.  (I actually called in to the club to try to reclaim my original standing but it seems someone else was in my place.  I have only my memory and faded card to prove how I was robbed.)  For a brief time there was even an intern in the credits with my name.  I just assume that it was a me from another dimension doing what it was our destiny to do.

After the show's demise I was still hanging on, visiting the Timmy Bighands site and following the other outgrowths with The Film Crew, RiffTrax, and Cinematic Titanic.  In previous posts I've mentioned seeing a total of six CT shows over time, and that will be it since they are calling it quits.  I always catch the RT shows when they do their thing.  

And now, hopefully, this T-day thing keeps happening and none of it ever ends.

So That's What Those Do

After going back over all of my previous posts and adding labels where I could, my pageviews for that day shot up to over two thousand.  They were all the regular bots, but still, wow.  Now the graph has this one giant peak and a nearly flat line for everything before and after, including my previous peak of over 90.

I've been waiting on a friend to upload some pics that I could steal for a post on last week's Meat Puppets show, but that doesn't seem to be happening so I should just go ahead and say it was awesome.  They played really well and for a really long time and it was one of the best I'd seen from them.  I just wish they'd come through here more often.

Tomorrow is T-day, but I've got this cold that's keeping me from straying too far, so most likely I'll spend most of it at www.mst3kturkeyday.com

The Evil One Had A Plan

When he was handed the keys to the Kingdom of the Dead, he decided to lie to all of the resident specters.  He would convince them that they were actually alive and existed in a world without hope, without love, and one that would randomly punish all with horror and chaos.  They would come to believe that there was nothing else to being beyond a universe with rules that could not be fathomed and would always be cruel.

It was a wicked plan.

Doitcherself

Since I couldn't find a decent image out there, I made my own, and damned if I'm not going to put some labels on it too!

The Evil One Had A Plan

He would appear to the inhabitants of this chaotic and dark reality and lie to them.  He would tell them that it is not evil and death that rule but something called love.  He would tell them to share this love with each other, especially those among them who had little and were weak.  

By doing this he would convince them to struggle against the very ugly truth that they could never escape, that no matter the trials in their existence they would receive their just rewards when it was over, and that the one who gave them life also looked upon them with this love that had been invented.

It was a wicked plan.

The Evil One Had A Plan

While his masters were busy with their usual business of sowing their genetic material about the denizens of the planet, he would choose a species to infect with his own questionable donation mixed with those of other troublemakers that had been collected over time.

The intent was that when they returned well into the future and saw the results of the progression of these beings infused with what they would call abnormalities and what he would term wisdom, and not knowing that their original efforts had been tampered with, they must then finally question the validity of their endeavors, which they had never bothered to do before.

It was a good plan.

The Evil One Had A Plan

He would appear before his master's creations and tell them that the universe was a dark madhouse of nightmare where love was alien and that to survive while pleasing their creator they would need to reflect such within themselves, loathing and killing each other, envying and abusing, attacking the world upon which they were born until it was a bleak cesspool landscape that also mirrored the heartless void in which they found themselves.

His hope was that when the creator again turned their attentions to this world and saw what had happened that they would then doubt themselves, being as how this was born from them, and wonder if they should have ever endeavored in the first place.

It was a good plan.

Cobwebs

Cobwebs across the sky.  

It was a Hopi prophecy about the end times.

Throughout history many attempts had been made to correlate modern phenomena with this phrase to foreshadow our impending doom.  Some had even gone so far as to say it referred to the Internet, the Worldwide Web.  But visions of the future like this tend to be truly visions. Nostradamus was said to have looked into a cauldron to behold what he then wrote down for predictions about the future, for this seer did indeed see.

Now, looking up nearly every day he could see what seemed the more likely answer to the riddle: planes leaving behind ropes of white that stretched from one horizon to the other.  Not the type that dissipated a few lengths behind but that remained, blown by the winds, perhaps spreading until an oily haze covered the once clear sky.

When he first began to notice he saw many things that just didn't make any sense.  Once on the way back from lunch he looked up to see many ovals in a row, with the plane in the process of drawing more.  It was so early in his experience that he did not bother to take a picture or even tell anyone else that it was happening, and of course it never did again.  Still, he did see some other shenanigans, like arcs seemingly drawn around the sun, one earlier in the day and then another in the same spot hours later, many Xs in the sky that he feared were a target of some kind.  One instance of the "Eye of the Sun" even ended up as a picture on the front page of the local paper only to be explained away with frivolity.

There were many ideas as to what was going on up there, from the benign description of simple ice crystals to weather modification and radar accentuation, to more diabolical, life threatening ones.  His own pet theory which he did not take seriously was cribbed from some scifi movie or book, that we had all already been poisoned and that those planes were actually spraying the antidote.  If there were ever a true threat posed by the populace those in charge could simply stop the delivery of life and end us all.  Or perhaps on a whim they could experiment with the statistics of placement and volume and watch the numbers as we suffer and possibly die from our malady.

The reality was that it was just another of many attempts at controlling the minds of the people exposed, in this case an attempt to sow apathy all about to keep anyone from caring where the world was being taken.

This one was working, since no one really seemed to give a fuck.

Hilarious! ??????

A while back I had realized that my laptop was underperforming and went through a lot to get it back up to speed.  One issue was that for some reason Windows will cut your CPU performance in half if your power setting is set to laptop.  Lesson learned again:  you must lie to Windows.

However, since through work I had access to the right tools, I decided to go to zero and work my way back up.  I made a straight dupe of my hard drive and then wiped the original and installed XP on it again, though I held off on certain updates that I knew were subpar.  I had since signed up with Comcast for internet service and went ahead and installed their free Norton Security Suite, which was by no means sweet.

When I went to reinstall any software with a USB interface Windows could not figure out the drivers.  This led me to buy a newer mp3 player even though my previous one was fine.  However, I could not ever get my Mbox with ProTools back until I started thinking about what was different this time than the other times I had installed this in the past.  The difference was that Norton shit.  I uninstalled it and suddenly everything was able to work right again.  Not only that but my performance ramped up noticeably, startup and shutdown went faster...everything told me that Norton was a mistake.

At some point I looked for some free antivirus software, but when I installed that it hung up the first time, then when I uninstalled it there were tons of files left behind.  I had to find their uninstall patch that they had to come up with because everyone was complaining about the same thing.

I mention all of this now because recently I had some suspicious stuff going on like performance lags and a file on my digital camera going corrupt that ended with my having to reformat the memory stick.  I feared a virus so I went back to Comcast for the Norton stuff.  I was then able to verify that I had no virus, but half the other shit in that software just didn't work, would hang my system up, and sucked all the life from my laptop. On top of that any time I plugged in a USB device the whole thing dove in a major fashion.  So once again I had to uninstall it.

If I ever do have an issue I can once again spend hours downloading the crap, running a scan and then uninstalling it, but it really seems to cause more trouble than it even comes near solving.

Meat Puppets!

I seem to have run out of time to write anything else, so I will write this.

The Experiment

It was so long ago, before we knew all that we now know about ourselves and this wondrous universe that we find ourselves in.  Many forget that it was both our failures and successes that led us to this knowledge that we may now take for granted. This instance was one of those unfortunate failures that was integral to our discovery of the realities of our existence, unfortunate but fundamentally necessary.

Almost as soon as a planet was found on the far end of the galaxy that would sustain life as we knew it, the momentum began to build which would result in an attempt at colonization.  There were those with vague warnings who resisted, but the majority were all for the adventure.  Though the preparation did take a great deal of time and effort, we never faltered and the expedition was on its way.  

Logistically the endeavor was a success on most levels, the planet was indeed suitable to our form of life with few minor differences to be overcome, the voyagers arrived alive and ready, and they had all that they needed to create a safe haven there on that foreign soil.

Communications were unfortunately sluggish so that what then happened was only communicated at first in vagaries that barely registered, only to be eclipsed by more seemingly sudden shifts in tone, and finally silence.  The problems began as sudden flashes to some of a feeling of being lost, unsure, and mostly afraid.  These momentary dips began to then be felt by more and more of the crew, be sustained for longer bouts, and began to be much more overwhelming.

What we did not know then but would learn from this very situation was key to our understanding of the flow and nature of our universe, about things then hidden to us about the way energy and other seemingly invisible forces played with the celestial forms and their inhabitants.  It was only after it was all over that we found there were other ramifications to be faced by living beings attempting to move from their origins to another location.  It seems that because of these hidden realities the consequences for leaving the place of beginning were dire and caused a fundamental un-mooring in our understanding of who we are and where we reside.

It took a long time to piece together what had happened, how the colony fell to dire results after these effects took hold, how it turned upon itself and eventually obliterated all that was left to remind it of where it had come from.  And it can be very hard to describe to those who have never experienced it just what was happening in the minds of those colonists....

...to be seemingly out of tune with the universe, to feel no known link to your surroundings or situation, to have no understanding of your fate or purpose, to fear what could be a total lack of any purpose at all, to look around you at the other beings on that planet and see that they do not have the same doubts, that they instinctively know themselves and their world and therefore to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with yourself and your kind that is alien, and the never ending dread and despair that results from such a schism, such a dark floating from any solid station in this large, beautiful, terrifying place...

But I don't really have to tell you all of this, do I?

I was going to write something.

In fact, I was about half way through it all when someone started pounding on my door.  It turned out to be my haggard future self who told me that I needed to stop immediately and also delete everything that I had written up to that point.  It seems that after doing what I was in the process of doing certain people assumed that I knew things that I didn't, and in their opinion shouldn't.  From this critical moment on they went about making my life a miserable hell.  Looking at the person before me I decided that anything I could do to avoid becoming him would be wise, so here I am with this instead.

He's still around somewhere doing who knows what, since he has no way to get back to the future beyond the same slow way that we all will. And besides, it won't be the same anyway since I'm not writing what I had wrote and therefore it will all be different than what he knew.  He might be attempting to exact revenge on those who would have done this to him, though now they won't, revenge for something that they never did.

And me, I have to remember everything that I was going to write, being as he had no idea what specifically brought about their cruel wrath, so that I can be sure to never write it.  

Ever.

The Cable Munchers

Some time after midnight last evening, as I was contemplating watching yet another episode of my latest time wasting obsession, the cable feed itself froze and then died altogether, replaced by a bouncing apology in its absence.  I then noticed that my modem had fewer lights on than usual, so I knew that it was a total outage.  I was concerned about an online auction that I had bid on and had intended to rise early the next morning to monitor.  Would this all be resolved in time?

As I busied myself with this and that throughout the rest of the evening, I kept looking back to those lights to see if the problem had gone away but they never changed, and since it was late enough to call it quits, I did.

What I did not know was that out in the dark, cold, dampness of the evening many glistening globules were about, munching away at all of the cable all about the town.  These near formless masses were a greenish gray, slimy, and looked somewhat like pulsing brains.  Across the eons of time they had arisen from their unfathomable depths beneath the earth every handful of centuries, almost always failing to find something to feast on, so that they would usually simply dry up and be blown or washed away by the weather.  But this one time they had found something to nourish them, something to give them the sustenance to live beyond the night.

When I rose early this morning I saw that the status of my connection had not changed as the modem lights remained the same.  It was on a whim that I happened to look out my front door to see multitudes of the now massive blobs.  They were everywhere and the size of buses.  One had partially crushed the back end of my car.  Another had apparently crashed through the roof of my neighbors' house.  I couldn't understand why the air was not full of screams and chaos but then I saw that most people were just standing around, stunned and silent.

I wonder if my bid held up.

Alright....

Tuesday I go in for an interview with a temp agency to try to get some money flowing in the door.

I guess that's something.

Wednesday?

TACOS!!!

One Or The Other

I tend to drift towards the East when it comes to spiritual views, yet there is one concept I've never been able to fully embrace:  The idea that All is One.

I mean, on the surface it works for me, I can grok the idea that everything is from the same source, that all of the pieces make up a whole in the macro sense as it does in the micro.  The idea that a little bow to another is to acknowledge the divine spark that is universal, that's neat.  I even do more than my share of projecting characteristics on objects both sentient and non.

However, I've never really felt it.  I haven't had the experience that made it all real to me.  I've put my mind in those places where one might expect it to happen, but it just hasn't.  The part of me that sees everything that isn't me as completely separate just wins out in this.

So there you go.

Good show!

We had a good one this time for sure.  There was some last minute shenanigans that tried to mess with our heads, but we made the right call and avoided the weird.

Great crowd, great friends on the bill, great response, talk of future gigs due to how well we killed.

A nice way to round out our sudden spurt of activity.

Now, into the studio for some mixing so we can get us some product!

New Old Addition

Trip to the barcade reacquainted me with Future Spa.  The greasy 70's porn vibe is all over this one:

It even outdid the Playboy game, which had orgasmic moaning.

Tonight:  gig.

Well, waddayaknow...

So here's how it went down:

I got online and created a trouble ticket.  When I then checked the status it told me they would get to it around 4:20 (?!?) and be done by 6pm.  That's some specific speculation, but OK.  I had given them my cell number to call and for the first time in a while had it on all day.  They did not call. After the specified time I checked that ticket online and it was cancelled.  Oh?  Why?  I assumed that something happened and I was unreachable at the time I was needed, though I was right here, waiting.

Turns out it was all over.  I called my phone and it rang more than twice.  They fixed the problem without ever coming to my place.  Which is kinda cool, but still...if they could be aware of these things going wrong without the customer finding it out for them, that would be even better.  Also, if there was some way of knowing that we weren't needed for the repair.

Oh well, annoying phone calls are back, and with a vengeance!

Today I'm thinking pinball.

Why not?

Funny...

While paying the bill for my landline recently, I was struck by how stupidly high it was.  I don't know why I can't let go and move on, but I still have it.  I mostly get calls from the groups that I already give money to asking me for more.

Yesterday I noticed that it was ringing about one and a half times and then stopping.  If the answering machine is on that second ring might be enough to get you to the message, but otherwise it will either ring and ring or the call will be dropped.

Is this the final straw?  Do I cut myself loose from this old contraption and put all my needs on a cell?

Why am I asking you?

It's all good

We got some stand-up peeps to fill in:

Finally

Stole some pics of me on Halloween:

And now it seems our gig this Saturday has fallen into chaos, as the two other bands have bailed on us and we are scrambling to fill the gaps.  Such a fine poster wasted....

The woods are full of them, you know.

I went for a stroll in the woods yesterday and found the slopes fully populated with many varieties of fungi.  It's been a little dry this year, so I think that perhaps they didn't get to do their usual thing and now just before it gets too cold they are going for it, a mad dash for the finish line.

Some of these get pretty tempting to an unknowing animal.  This particular one had what looked to be a candy/jelly glaze on top that I'm sure would be really nasty to ingest.

Also, in the stagnant pond nearby, I spotted many little gold fishies lazing about.  I thought that they may be young salamanders of the type I had seen there earlier in the year, doing like the mushrooms and getting in one last blast of life before winter, but then I saw this much larger fish slowly appearing and disappearing at the bottom of the sludge as it made its way through hidden chasms in the depths.  Where do they go when it gets really, really cold?

Well....

It wasn't quite as amazing as I'd hoped but the show went well.  I brought a camera to the stage, but wasn't inspired to take many pics beyond this one well after it was over:

Plane ol' Charlie

In hindsight we should have taken the second slot instead of the wrapup since apparently few can last past midnight on a weekday Halloween.

I have to say, though, that the fans of Wups are indeed fanatics in the true sense.  They may be fewer in number than other bands, but they are unbelievably loving and loyal.  In my book that counts for a hell of a lot.

So thanks to the Wups fans for being the best!