rollercoaster

There was a discussion earlier on a message board about people's favorite rollercoasters, then and now.
I haven't been on one in ages but it got me thinking about a particular childhood memory and the strangest, wildest, scariest rollercoaster ride I'd ever been on.
It was in Louisiana when I was about ten. Amusement parks back then would spring up in some empty field for a week or so and then disappear as quickly as they had appeared. They were hardly comparable to the Disney-type superparks we have now... these were fly-by-night operations, usually with an arcade of sorts, a ferris wheel, various carnival-type booths and stands, and of course some kind of rollercoaster. Rickety, wooden rollercoasters.
And this one that I remember had to be the most rickety, wooden-est rollercoaster of all time. I don't recall all the details... Jan and Kathy and I had been out with some of our cousins and it was late at night (for me anyway). I distinctly remember it was past ten and we were on our way home from somewhere and decided to make a late night stop at the amusement park. That in itself was kind of unusual and the fact we decided to take a ride on the rollercoaster even more so.
There were no bars or seat belts on this thing. You know the log ride at Six Flags where you would just straddle a bench-type seat? That's how this was. And we just grabbed what we could and held on for dear life.
How no one ever just went flying off of this thing, I don't know, but it was without a doubt the scariest damn ride I ever went on in my life. No, there was no loop de loop (I guess that would have been tempting fate a bit too much) but it was really fast and I thought more than once my young life would end any second. Just get me home, I thought, and I'll never complain about coming to Louisiana again. The fact that it was pitch black outside made the experience even more intense.
I wonder if Jan and Kathy remember this. Obviously, it was pre-Joe. But it's something that has stayed with me all these years and all this talk of rollercoasters today triggered it once again.

YouTube

I was afraid this was going to happen. When I first heard about YouTube, I thought, if this turns out to be what I think it will, I'm going to be hooked. And I am.
First there were chat rooms, then improved search engines, then blogs, then Wikipedia... with each one, I thought, ah, so THIS is what the internet was created for.
Well, I was wrong. Obviously, the internet was created for YouTube. This clearing house for video clips both famous and obscure is the greatest and most addictive thing to hit the internet since, um, Wikipedia. In fact, you could almost call it the Wikipedia of video clips.
The most apparent similarity is that YouTube depends on people like you and me to send in these clips and the response has been phenomenal. News clips, bloopers, music videos, political speeches... you name it.
Yesterday, for example, I had a blast searching out obscure songs, musical performances and videos I had only read about and had, for all intents and purposes, given up hope of ever actually seeing. There was only one I couldn't find on YouTube. That's pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.
The thing has always been, once a document of some sort has been created, we all know it exists somewhere, in some form, and that somebody somewhere has access to it. But how does the average schmuck like you or me get to see it? Enter YouTube. It's like a video Library of Congress on the internet, even better really. Do they even have a clip of the Monkees titled 'Listen to the Band- Pyschedelic Freak Out' in the Library of Congress? Somehow I doubt it.
I could spend hours going through this site and I'm sure I probably will. Hooray YouTube!

Mrs. Aaarslberg?

The folks asked me to type a letter to a lawyer today; no big deal, just a character reference really for an old friend.

As usual, Dad composed the letter, then spoke it out loud while Mom wrote it down. Then it was handed to me to type on the computer and print out. Happens all the time.

Mom's handwriting is always a bit tricky to understand and it appeared the lawyer had a middle name that I couldn't quite make out. So I called out, "What is this guy's middle name?" Mom called back, "Wine! W-I-N-E."
"Joseph Wine Gardner?" I asked.
"Yes!"

Okay, I thought. Then I heard Dad say, "His middle name is Wine?"
"Well, that's what you told me!" Mom said. "I wrote down what you said."
"His last name is Weingardner," Dad said.

By this time, I had already typed the body of the letter and then added the correct name at the top but failed to change the 'Dear Mr. Gardner' salutation and didn't realize it before I printed it and took it to Mom to proofread.

She began reading the letter to Dad and said, "Joseph Weingardner," then his address and then, "Dear Mr. Gardner..."
"His name's not Gardner!" Dad said.
"No, we're going to change that," she replied. "Dear Mr. Gardner... I mean, Weingardner..."

God, I have been laughing about this for the last four hours.

Beatles 'Love' cd review

The Beatles, Love Sunday November 12, 2006 The Observer Of all the possible posthumous incarnations for the Beatles, here's one of the most unlikely - as soundtrack to a Las Vegas circus. It isn't any old circus, admittedly, but Canada's arty, super-acrobatic Cirque du Soleil, whose current Las Vegas show, Love, is modelled on the story of the Beatles and characters from their songs: Eleanor Rigby, Sergeant Pepper et al. More importantly, Love the show - the result of George Harrison's friendship with Cirque founder Guy Laliberte - involved producer George Martin disinterring the group's master tapes from the Abbey Road vault for he and his son Giles to remix and remodel. The results blast Love audiences from a state-of-the-art surround-sound system that includes speakers in individual seats. And the first thing Love the album does, at least in its DVD surround-sound format, is to blow you away with sheer sonic wizardry. Set to a noisy dawn chorus, complete with fluttering wings, the three-part vocal harmonies of 'Because' arrive with the clarity of an ice blue sky. The chugging introduction to 'Get Back' hurtles out of the mix like a train. The pumping fairground organs of 'Mr Kite' reek of steam and sawdust. Hearing many of the familiar tracks is like viewing an old masterpiece after cleaning: the light is brighter, the shadows deeper. Here, the trebles tingle while the bass end booms. Some of this is painstaking technical restoration. After the Beatles swapped touring for the studio, they and Martin became experts at squeezing a quart of sound into a pint pot, extending the limits of four- and eight-track recordings by 'bouncing down' tracks. Today's technology has let the Martins reverse the process, giving instruments and voices more autonomy. Ever notice the pizzicato violins on the middle 8 of 'Something'? You will now. The ambitions of Love go beyond renovation, however. Its 26 tracks are set in an ambient flow of sound collages distilled from hours of Beatles tapes and containing fragments and echoes of 130 songs in all. Frequently the effect is ghostly, as the stalking strings of 'Glass Onion' and a snatch of 'Nowhere Man' drift like ectoplasm down a corridor. 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' - one of the few numbers from the moptop days - surfaces from a scratchy haze of screaming. The most ambitious songs emerge most improved. There is not, after all, much to be done with the rock'n'roll retro of 'Lady Madonna', whereas 'Strawberry Fields' and 'I am the Walrus' sound more than ever like avant-garde masterpieces. Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' (the slower version from Anthology 3) is given a sumptuous string setting by Sir George. Throughout, the McCartney/Starr rhythm section has never sounded so heavy, or the group's vocal harmonies so sharp and affecting. Love vindicates the Beatles' status as master musicians and conceptualists. Not only for the spirit of optimism they embodied but artistically, they remain the act to beat. On this evidence, no one else comes close.

'Storm Warning'

This 1951 Warner Bros. production is a very strange film. It stars Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day (in a very early role), and Steve Cochran.
In the movie, Rogers' character is a model who is visiting her sister (Day) in a small southern town as a break from a stressful tour. Shortly after she arrives, Rogers surreptitiously witnesses a murder by the Ku Klux Klan. Even more shocking is that she learns Day is married to the murderer (Cochran) and she soon finds herself torn between telling the crusading District Attorney (Reagan) what she knows and sparing her sister's feelings.
'Storm Warning' has been called a "feverish melodrama" and it is certainly that, but what is really odd about the film is the way it portrays the KKK. It wants to be an expose' of the hate group, and I suppose in a way it succeeds, but the movie's conception of the Klan is radically different from how most people today view them.
The KKK, as seen here, are essentially a corrupt men's club, an older bad boy's fraternity if you will, whose main crime seems to be spending their members' dues unwisely.
There are no black people in the film, not a hint of the Klan's intolerance of Jews or Catholics... not the slightest inference of all the things people normally associate with them. Yes, Cochran does kill the man (a newspaper reporter) at the beginning, but it's made to appear that he and the boys just got a little carried away. Basically, they're all a bunch of small town louts who don't know any better, except of course for their corrupt boss.
Reagan is pretty good as the laidback DA who's been trying to nail the KKK for something, and hasn't had much luck. The reason, not surprisingly, is that all the locals are scared and unwilling to testify.
Rogers wavers, saying at first she will identify them and then changing her mind because of her sister. It's only when Cochran shows his true colors, first by making passes at her (this is the 'feverish' part) and then beating up both her and Doris Day, that she decides to turn him and the rest in.
The final scene, finally, shows a typical Klan meeting out in the woods, everyone decked out in hoods and robes and a big burning cross. Rogers has been kidnapped and brought before the Klan leader, who demands she remain silent and leave town. She refuses, so she is bound and whipped with a bullwhip. (Maybe this is the 'feverish' part.)
Even here, the scene is not very believable... as the whip comes down, the Klan boss taunts Rogers by saying through a megaphone, "Busybody! Outsider! Troublemaker!" The Klan might not have been the sharpest knives in the silverware drawer, but I daresay they came up with more cutting remarks than that in real life.
Reagan and a couple of cops with rifles show up, everyone in the crowd is shamed for being there (One woman wearing a Klan robe has a little girl in similar garb; Reagan tells her, "She should be home in bed.") and the meeting breaks up. The end. Presumably, justice is done after the end credits roll.
Why did Warner Brothers want to tackle such a subject, and then hold back to the extent they did?
Perhaps they figured the shocking subject matter would be enough to sell the film, and there was no need to actually present the evidence. Perhaps in that more innocent time, it wasn't possible to in a mainstream movie.
'Storm Warning' remains a real curiosity.

could you do this?

I saw this today. According to the caption, some guy did it using the basic 'paint' program most computers come with... in this case, MS Paint. He said it took him 500 hours.

The actual pic is a little over twice this size.

Ray Bradbury and movies

The first novel I ever read was 'Dandelion Wine.' If there was ever a great first novel to read, to get you hooked on reading more, that was it.
I think I was about twelve when I read it. Of course, I'd read children's stories and comic books before that, but this was different. I started reading every Bradbury novel and short story compilation I could find. 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'The Golden Apples of the Sun,' 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'... these are just a few that pop into my head. He was a very prolific writer for a long time.
Bradbury started off writing short stories for the sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1940's. A lot of the stories had to do with humans travelling to Mars and Venus. Considering what he had to go on in terms of what was generally known about space and the planets, much of what he wrote is astonishingly prescient.
His writing style is difficult to describe. It can be very florid at times, almost excessively so. Much of the time, the passages in his work seem to be there for no other reason than to evoke something wonderful or mysterious or foreboding, whether the circumstances necessary to explain those evocations have actually occurred or not. A young boy sees a cigar store Indian- does the Indian come to life or does the boy just imagine it? Two friends play in the grass and roll down a hill while 'something' magical is going on. Is anything really going on, or did they just roll down a hill? Bradbury's work is rife with these kinds of scenes; seemingly ordinary events painted by the author to be somehow mystical or enchanting.
But Bradbury's work is very difficult to translate to film. The very things that make his writing so entrancing in print just come across as vague and obscure in movies. After a while, they almost seem pointless.
The aforementioned 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' may be the best example. The dreamworld his characters typically inhabit comes across as meaningless and slightly annoying when shown on the big screen; you find yourself asking, 'Why are these people acting this way? Why don't they just say what they mean to say?' Many of the scenes are, in and of themselves, very well staged, but in the end they don't seem to add up to anything, and you're left with a slightly depressing feeling of 'so what?' It's like the whole thing was a dream, but misrepresented as a kind of reality.
It's too bad really; I can't help but feel that he's just never had the right kind of director or producer to bring his visions to fruition on the movie screen.