Tag Archives: television

Tales From Salted Earth

Gather ’round, children. Don’t you wonder why we live in the cold and poisoned world that we do? Looking back, around a decade ago, everything got too salty. 

We used to come home from work and watch TV, enjoying longtime creature comforts. Television shows were devoted to entertaining us, with characters we could identify with. That’s how it was in the 1990s.

The troubles began with Friends.

Future historians will note this couch as the Beginning Of The End.

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Filed under Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Worst Of All

Shitting Monsters

From BIUL #2.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Worst Of All

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.

Bum bum BUM bum BUM!

Bum bum BUM bum BUM!

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

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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.

Spoiler: they hatefuck.

Spoiler: they hatefuck.

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.

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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.

loveboat1

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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.

Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, 1942-2016. A multifarious and complex personality that's tough to categorize, not a prop for your opinions.

Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, 1942-2016. A multifarious and complex personality that’s tough to categorize (especially for a pugilist), not a prop for your opinions.

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

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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.

mute3

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.

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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.

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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.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions