big hair on the small screen

I was cleaning out my DVR last night by watching a bunch of Twilight Zone episodes I recorded during a recent SyFy marathon. I selectively recorded ones I vaguely/fondly remembered from my youth, and ones with well-known actors before they were so well known (such as young Jack Klugman—playing his part like every other part of his career—or William Shatner). I was watching The Miniature, which I recorded because it starred Robert Duvall, and realized it was one I loved as a child, but really only the last five minutes for the magically payoff which is sort of the trademark of The Twilight Zone. This episode was from the season when the series was expanded from a half to a full hour.



I kept pondering the actress playing younger sister, and how she seemed so familiar. Knowing that many TZ actors later went on to immense popularity, I did and IMBD search and found the impressive resume of Barbara Barrie, perhaps most recently well known as Nana on the 90s Brooke Shields vehicle Suddenly Susan.

That search led me to clips from the two-half-seasons 80s froth Double Trouble, where Barbara played the twins Aunt in New York, and even Tucker's Witch, which I had been researching just last week.

Okay, I don't know what's going on but I have been all over bad 80s television nostalgia this month. Something led me to recall Tucker's Witch, a short lived but beloved series of the clever detective and his magically incompetent witch of a wife. Someone is selling recorded-off-TV-on-VHS-and-converted-to DVD-R disc sets online. The series, in the same sort of canned premise as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched featured a young and not yet so successful Tim Matheson and Catherine Hicks (the former I will always remember from Animal House and the latter screaming "I have got to help those whales!!"). Barbara Barrie played her non-witch mother, the magic having skipped a generation (as it does).

My computer is still in the shop so I was doing this all on the iPhone. The YouTube clips were pretty awesome. After viewing Double Trouble clips, YouTube suggested similar clips, which included scenes from Jennifer Slept Here, basically another magic-based 80s television show with the wonderful Ann Gillian. Those clips led me to clips from It's a Living, which I also loved as a kid and now realize I probably never really understood the joke. I do recall loving and trying to learn the theme song. And I can't believe the other talent on these shows—or that the first season of It's a Living featured a very young Crystal Bernard or that the show itself went on for a surprising seven seasons. And of course now I recognize the then super swank building as the Hotel Bonaventure.

How much do I love YouTube? And some of the comments on all these clips are priceless. I was amazed at the active fan base for all of these shows, and the clamor for DVD sets. Admittedly, I'd probably buy a lot of them too.









These shows certainly do not stand the test of time, but the clips are so entertaining for the sake of early 80s nostalgia. I'd love to see some of the ads too.

If I embarrass you at the Harry Potter flick

With all the ComiCon and fandom stuff going on, the opening of the new Harry Potter Flick, and the return of Midnight Mass, it's gotten me thinking I should dress up for the Harry Potter 3-D IMAX show. But I'm like Kevin—you know how Star Trek nerds go in gear to Renaissance Fair(e)s to pretend they've beamed down to a less advanced civilization? Kevin wants to go to a Star Trek convention in Renaissance costumes.

So I was thinking about dressing up like the die-hard fans for Harry Potter, but getting it all wrong. Like instead of wizards' robes and a broom, I'd show up in a bathrobe and a mop. Maybe I'd have a magic Wanda, but that would be pushing it.

Shilpa said no one would get it (which is not the point because I would still think it was funny, and I'd be doing it to amuse myself anyway).

She said she'd be mortified.

But if someone embarrasses you at a Harry Potter function, wouldn't you be Voldemortified?




(Oh Dark Lordy, there is a Magic Wanda.)

three words wrong

I'm always on the lookout, or hearout, for phrases never before uttered. There are only so many ways one can rearrange the words in the English language, so I pause and appreciate it when I hear a truly original phrase. (Tip of the hat for this notion to Jonathan Harwell when we were in high school.)

I have never heard these three words put together before, and I hope never to again: Snuggies for Dogs.

Take Back the Beep

You know when you call someone's mobile number, and you get their voicemail message, but then it's followed by a long and ridiculous recording telling you what to do when the beep comes, eventually, when the voice stops telling you about options, and numeric paging which no one ever does anymore, and what she had for lunch, and THEN the beep finally comes, but by then you've already arrived at the friend's place you were calling to say you were running late and just leaving the house?

Yeah, that additional 15/30 second recording telling you to leave a message at the tone because it's 2009 and you're using a mobile phone and so it's unlikely you've never encountered a freaking answering machine before and and are confused that this might be a real person talking to you and not a recording—the mobile carriers require it to add to the duration of the call so they can bilk more money out of you (in industry terms "ARPU–Average Revenue Per User").

Read the David Pogue's exposé/rant in the New York Times. His call to action: Take Back the Beep!

Related: Skip Annoyingly Long Voicemail Instructions For Every Cellphone Company

Any vintage models on eBay?

I can't find any old, period fangles anywhere. Everything is new fangled.

and the AT&T frustration grows

iPhone/Apple users tend to be creative souls. And the now universal hatred of AT&T (is that why it's called AT&T Universal?) is manifesting itself in creative ways beyond magazine and blog rants.



So great.

(By the way, if you don't recognize it, the music is from the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The track is called "Hell." Makes the Awesome.)

Schwarzenegger is the terminator for those with or at risk of HIV

Schwarzenegger's line item vetoes have pretty much guaranteed an increase in HIV infection rates and condemns some to a slow and painful death. I think the corporate tax breaks and luxury tax shelters need to be killed first.

Sad, scary, and tragic.

good advice. good hot, sweaty advice.

Got a clarification pep talk e-mail today chock full of good dating advice (and recap of last evening). He ended the e-mail with this final episode/advisory:

Then Kelly and I walked the quarter of a block to her place and got naked. :)

Regular sex helps.

Yes it does. Or, you know, would.

Meh.

stick me on a spur and dunk me in melted cheese

It's the Fondue Cowboy.

Coming soon to 1052 Folsom.

why you don't want to mess with a missionary man

OMG. These are sincere. From Daisy, in her post I Never Even Got to See His Secret Mormon Underwear:

Mormon boy pickup lines. Honestly. Seriously and for reals.

C'mon Out with A.C.T.

Randy, Marketing Man for the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) asked me for a quote or two about Out with A.C.T. for their marketing materials. I tried to give different tones and different lengths. Not my best work, but it was short notice and I think it get's the job done for a newsletter/brochure pull quote. Feel like joining Kevin and me?

My co-conspirator Kevin and I love the Out with A.C.T. nights. Like any house, the stage fare at A.C.T. can be hit or miss, but the hits are often out of the park, and sharing the experience with a gay-sensible audience sometimes puts a twist in the tale. Regardless of the content, Statler and Waldorf (that’s us) will have something to say about it, making the socials that much more fun. After our first season of post-performance socials we became subscribers. We’ve had great experiences with the cast members—company or visitors—and get so much more out of the event for their camaraderie at the after parties, and of course the other theater enthusiasts. It’s nice to have a set evening out, or Out as it were, with a crowd more tony than the usual Castro crowd. It’s also nice to have a date at a hosted wine party in a theater with guests more gay than gay-90s.

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Where else can you chat up tony mo’s with a hosted wine bar and share stage tales with stars of stage and screen? I got the true dish on Monroe from the Mother on Too Close for Comfort, talked character acting and Broadway development with Bree’s murdered husband, experienced the more dramatic side of Chakotay, and thanked JoBeth Williams for teaching me never to buy a house built on an old graveyard. All this while keeping an eye out for potential dates to the next show.

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We come to heckle. Stay for the bar. And love that the drama tends to stay on stage. (But also applaud when it doesn’t.)

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I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I’ve hooked up. And left all my drama on the stage.

The Davidson of the North Review

Some people refer to Davidson College as "the Princeton of the South." Many years ago, Davidson passed on the left and Princeton has often been called "The Davidson of the North." Admittedly, usually by southerners. (And hey, both educated Woodrow Wilson.)

The Princeton Review's Annual College Ratings are out. Davidson professors are ranked highest in the nation.

Alenda Lux!

Whoop Click!

I had a great time with Duck Friday night at James Judd's new show "Whoop Click!" I'll bust out photos and such when I get the laptop back from the shop.

Goldstar, through whom I ordered the tickets, asked for a short review and I'll paste mine below. I heartily recommend it for a fun night out. And if you can, heckle the opening act—it's Marylin Pittman from NPR being a angry and racy. Participating punches it up a bit and gets the audience wired for the show.

Also note that James' is giving away a case of assorted bottles from his winery. I sampled his label at AoF (photo) and it's tasty stuff. If you go and enter into the drawing, include my name and I can win a case too :)

Check it out: Whoop Click! at the Dark Room Theater in the Mission.

I hurt myself laughing at “7 Sins” and was excited to hear about “Whoop Click!” While this show is not yet as long or as polished as the long-running “7 Sins,” James Judd does not disappoint with his ribald and manic personal stories. He’s the life of the party and you get front row seats to his living room.

Perfect for dates or depression. Treats both.

What would Mrs. Slocombe say?

Looks like this is from an Italian blog. Cracks me up.

Hey, this KoolAid tastes a little sour.

Okay, I know I drank the Apple KoolAid a while back (although etymologically the correct reference is to FlavorAid), but Apple is thinking less different these days and more capricious, frustrating, and in some cases the evil they always claimed they weren't.

Their deal with the devil has repeatedly screwed the innovation and freedom the iPhone promised (and admittedly, largely delivers). The devil in this tale, as it usually is in iPhone discussion, is AT&T.

AT&T service is almost universally identified as the weakest if not crippling feature of the iPhone. Their "more bars in more places ads," usually filmed in SF, makes San Franciscans want to take to their PR and service departments with a sharpened axe. AT&T service is almost ubiquitously crap in San Francisco. Always has been. (Cingular was fine, until AT&T bought them and shut down their towers instead of combining coverage).

While Apple seems fine standing up to record labels and dictating terms for the iTunes Music Store, they appear to cover to the whim of AT&T in restricting what can and can't be on the iPhone.

The SlingPlayer works fine over 3G and Edge on other phones and other platforms using AT&Ts network. Reports agree that AT&T feared the popularity of the SlingPlayer for the iPhone and so required Apple to require SlingMedia to cripple it's player for the iPhone, making it work ONLY over WiFi. Large crowds of iPhone users have crashed AT&T voice and data services before, which to me does not say that Apple should hobble their own innovation, but that AT&T should improve their service to a reliable level or Apple should switch to someone who has (in my head I keep seeing Verizon's ads with their large and reliable network). SlingPlayer is allowed other smartphones on the AT&T network, just not iPhones.

Then iPhone 3.0 came out, but many of the nifty new innovations aren't available in the U.S., because AT&T can't get their shit together (what?! Still no MMS for the iPhone?).

Now it seem that Apple is screwing their own customers again because apps like Google Voice might be too much for AT&T's network (again, allowable on AT&T's network if you use any other smartphone) or compete with AT&T's inferior model or services.

So much so the DOJ is considering anti-competitive investigation.

Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core (Tech Crunch)
GV Mobile and Voice Central pulled from App Store (TUAW)
Apple Screws Google Over 'Latitude' iPhone App (Wired)
Could Apple's Google Voice Rejection Draw DOJ Scrutiny? (Channel Web)
Google Voice becomes persona non grata on App Store (Ars technica)

Perhaps the best take so far—and by that I mean clear and concise, is from LifeHacker: Bad Apple: An Argument Against Buying an iPhone

Apple just rejected the Google Voice iPhone application from App Store distribution, the most recent in a long line of questionable moves, and the message is clear: If you want a device that won't lock you out of innovation, skip the iPhone.

The more humorous/cathartic rant is at Gizmodo: Apple's Chickenshit Approval Process Has Gone Too Far

What happened to Think Different? (other than dropping the grammatically correct -ly)

computer update

As soon as I give Bryan Michaels such a hard time for his PC woes and how maintenance-free Mac's are, mine goes kablooey.

I took it to the Genius Bar yesterday, who diagnosed a kernel panic (I'm the one panicking, even though I had just backed up), and kept it for a free diagnostic.

The Apple tech working on my laptop just called me, and it's actually a friend of mine. Only in SF is your randomly assigned tech guy also a former "special" friend. He's awesome. He diagnosed a bad Nivia graphics chip which is messing everything up. But even though this machine is out of warranty, it's a known issue so Apple will be replacing it for free! And in house! Yipee!

Just four to five days till I get my other brain back. Here's hoping sooner.

crashed, burns pending

my computer went wonky over the weekend. scary wonky. posts will have to wait until I figure out wtf.

Caterwalling

Kevin called for a long overdue 80s night at the Cat Club last night. Shilpa, Kevin and I can make supper happy fun time out of a wet paper bag, so we had a good time last night, despite the recent changes at the Cat. The back room DJ has changed, and not for the better, which sort of killed our love for the bar. Crappy if-there-were-a-C-side tracks trying to be alternacool mixed in with poppy bits best played in the front room. The front room, however, started sliding dangerously into to 90s one too many times, to the extent that the crappy obvious poppy 80s selections were not given their usual forgiveness.

The crowd itself has skewed even more young and more Marina/Peninsula than memory serves. Some of the crowd was so young I would suspect fake IDs expect that the door man has been checking IDs at SF clubs since the early 80s, knows his stuff, and takes no shit. It may be the summer (yes, summer in San Francisco, with temps into 40s and fog so thick fish swim by), but there was also a LOT of euro student hostelers in the crowd.

One of whom was crazy with the pretty. Enough to make up for his wretched eastern European teen fashion. (He looked like something out of a 90s Bel Ami video.) I tried to get a couple of shots of him, but these don't come close to doing justice.

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He did look quite tasty.


Kevin remarked, "I didn't think they made skin that tight." There was some other incredibly young eye candy, which continued to entertain us. I was heartened to notice that while the crowd was predominately young, straight, and annoying, the lesbians represented—keeping a good gay cred in the mix. The baby gays less so, but there.

Top of our to do list though: the mirror and the tranny.

Kevin wanted to get there early enough to supplant the usual old guy stoned out of his gourd dancing with himself in the mirror in the front room. Sadly, he was absent last night.

Gladly, however, our favorite tranny was not. She's just awesome, and was rocking out in her sensible black sneakers.

I love this pic of the Shilpa and think she should crop it for her profile pic. I began to crop it myself, but stopped because Favorite Tranny could be seen in the field.


I was about to write that we were the oldest ones there, but I forgot about the couple on a date. It appeared that he took her out for dinner and "dancing." We gave him points. And from the touching and ultimate complete and extended groping on the dance floor, she was going to do the dude from the begining, but was just waiting/drinking long enough not to look easy.


And yeah, we are not afraid to take photos.

Like I said, even a lame night is super happy fun time with Kevin, and we had it.

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Because Kevin needed to get his high-school-goth-music dancing on.



Break it down.

What's was it like to grow up gay?

I would ask my family and friends back home to take a just a couple minutes to get an idea. Then imagine that all the freaking time.

sounds dirty but isn't

Shilpa is addicted to rimming. Specifically, the instant rimshot.

She's just asking for a punchline, but I don't want to leave a bruise.