Nostalgia...

Last night's Svengoolie double feature had the classic Jim Henson flick The Dark Crystal, and I'd forgotten what a fun romp that was.

Combined that with last week's Labyrinth and you have a bangin' GenX Nostalgia Machine...

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Nostalgia…

Ah, the Nineties...

The time from the rise of always-on broadband to the fall of the towers was truly a golden age in ‘Murrica. 3D graphics cards were invented, premium unleaded was ninety cents a gallon, and Zuckerberg and Musk were just teenage dorks you’d never heard of. God, we had no idea how good we had it.  

RETVRN

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Fernandomania...

I mentioned the other day that the Yankees and Dodgers hadn't met in the Fall Classic since 1981. That year the Yankees won the first two games before a twenty-year-old rookie phenom from Mexico pitched a W in a complete game, turning the series around. 

The Dodgers won four in a row and the Series, the pitcher won the NL Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young, the first and only time a player has taken both awards in the same season.

That pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, has left the building.

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This was cool...

I actually got the Powerbook 540c to boot!

These things were so baller for their day. They had built in stereo speakers with 16 bit sound, 640x480 active matrix color display, 33mhz 040 CPU, dual battery bays... it was one of the first laptops that could also work as a hoss of a desktop machine. 

Of course, they were originally something like five grand, which'd buy you a pretty nice used car back in 1995. They had product placement in movies, of course, since they looked so cool.

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Has it been that long?

The World Series was between the Yankees and the Dodgers when I was 9, 10, and 13 years old. Those are formative years when it comes to remembering things, I guess. The baseball history books I read were full of storied World Series between the two teams.

It's hard to believe that this year will be their first October matchup since I was in middle school.

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Tab Clearing...

• We "dial" and "hang up" phones, have web "pages", and "roll up" the windows in our cars.


• Russian hackers breach Verizon's PTT network.


• "Hey, buddy, do you have the time?" On distracting questions.

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I'd forgotten about that dude...

Jay J. Armes has left the building.

I remember seeing this dude on daytime talk shows in the early Seventies. One of the kids in my neighborhood had the J.J. Armes action figure, even, and we all thought he was cool. Supposedly J.J. even knew kung fu and had a pistol built into one of his hands.

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Automotif DXXVI...

The car that eventually became known as just the Supra started out as a zhuzhed-up Celica with a snout stretched to accommodate an inline six. In Japan it was the Celica XX, but export models were sold as the Celica Supra.

For the 1982 model year a whole new generation of Celica Supra debuted, the A60. In the North American market these came in two flavors, the P-type and L-type, for Performance and Luxury. The fender flares, rear spoiler above the hatchback, and wide wheels indicate that this Dark Blue Metallic 1983 Celica Supra is a P-type.

For 1983, power would be provided by Toyota's 5M-GE 2.8 liter inline six. A DOHC motor with two valves per cylinder, for 1983 it was rated at 150 SAE net horsepower and 159 lb-ft of torque in U.S. trim.

While not threatening the Corvette on American streets, this generation of Supra was able to give the late Malaise Era Mustangs and Camaros a run for their money, at least in their lower-spec versions. Car and Driver got 0-60 times in the mid 8-second range and clocked a top speed of 115mph, which is pretty comparable to what my 1984 Pontiac Trans Am would do. Unsurprising since that Trans Am had the sluggish carbureted 150hp LG4 305 V-8 and weighed something like 300 pounds more than the Toyota.

The A60 was one of a number of Japanese performance cars in the early Eighties that announced that the era of cars from Japan being viewed as cut-rate econoboxes was well and truly over. Heck, my orthodontist at the time drove a black A60 Celica Supra.

These photos were taken in July of 2024 with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and a Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

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Star War

So, I watched original gangsta Star Wars and Empire on Tuesday night. Then I watched Return of the Jedi yesterday afternoon. I tried watching The Phantom Menace last night and fell asleep. That's the third time that's happened when trying to watch it.

This morning I cued up Phantom Menace again over breakfast and finally managed to watch it to the end.

If you had asked me to bet everything I owned on the length of Episode I versus the original, I’d have lost it all. The original feels like a brisk 90-minuter while Ep.1 feels like a three hour slog, but Wikipedia says they’re a bit over 120 and 130 minutes, respectively.

When the Boomers have all died off and the GenX-versus-Millennial war kicks off in earnest, the Star Wars prequels are going to be the Fort Sumter of the conflict.

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Meme Dump...

"This was your father's weapon. I took it after I chopped his legs off and left him in a volcano."

...and fruit flies like a banana.

Reminder to my fellow GenX'ers: Reminiscing about the Eighties and Nineties today is like our parents and grandparents reminiscing about the Forties and Fifties back in the Eighties.

"If Back to the Future was set today, Marty would go back to 1994. The kids in the past would be listening to Nirvana. Marty would amaze and confuse them with White Stripes and Radiohead songs, and intimidate his dad by pretending to be Neo from The Matrix. He'd be baffled by the lack of wifi."

If they re-shot Christine today, the demon car would be a 1999 Chrysler 300M and its radio would randomly play Kenny Chesney tunes.

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Time flies like a jet fighter...

I was really not ready for all these fighter planes that were the New Hotness in the mid-late Seventies to be celebrating a half century of flight.

This time it's the Tornado, still in service with the Luftwaffe. I was six when the first prototype flew, and in middle school when they went operational with the Jerries.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The best Monster Truck Rally story I've read.


• I had completely forgotten about Screaming Yellow Zonkers.


• How much do shooting skills degrade over time if you don't practice?

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Why you need a quarter (to call someone who cares.)

Ubiquitous (adj.) : existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered : WIDESPREAD

Sam Waterston just appeared on his final episode of Law & Order last Thursday night. Do you know how long he'd been playing the character of Jack McCoy? Well, when he first appeared on the show in the mid-Nineties, detectives Briscoe and Logan still had to pull over and use pay phones to call the precinct.

Pay phones were everywhere, just a part of the landscape. There were banks of them at the airport, and you'd use them to call home to let them know your flight had arrived and you needed a ride. If you were broke and had a bit of larceny in your heart, you'd place a person-to-person collect call to "Homer" and they'd know you were ready to be picked up, saving you that crucial twenty-five cents.

The neighborhood weed dealer would be loitering by the pay phone out in front of the Majik Market waiting for calls from customers so he wouldn't have to talk about that stuff on his own phone line.

Once, when out for a late night walk with a friend, we were drawn to one whose kiosk was glowing hypnotically blue in the muggy Georgia summer night. On jiggling the coin return handle experimentally, it disgorged several bucks worth of silver like a slot machine that had just come up jackpot. We bought sodas and Slim Jims with our windfall and continued our stroll.

Nowadays? They're practically gone. It's an oddity to see a free-standing payphone these days. It's probably safe to say that the majority of Americans under thirty have never used one. I can't remember the last time I did, but it was almost certainly before I finally gave in and got my first cell phone in '03.

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Generation Gap

Sitting next to me at the bar yesterday was a dude out with his parents celebrating his 21st birthday.

Guy was a student at IU in Bloomington... twenty-one years old would be, what? Junior year of undergrad? ...and was mentioning to his parents how he'd recently found not having a driver's license to be inconvenient a few times.

My mind was blown.

I knew the trend of getting driver's licenses later had started with the younger end of the Millennial Generation, but Zoomers are taking it to extremes that seem unimaginable to this GenX'er. My social life was positively stunted by my folks holding off on letting me get my driver's license until early in my senior year of high school, bare months shy of me turning 18 and presenting them with a fait accompli by getting it on my own stick. By the time I was twenty-one I'd owned probably five cars...and two motorcycles.

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When Japan First Challenged Germany

In 1985, Road & Track magazine tested a top-of-the-line Honda Accord SE-i versus the entry-level Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3. The premise being that Japanese build quality had gotten to the point where it was challenging the Germans, a then-startling claim. (Honda was still a year or so out from launching its Acura brand in the U.S., but it was on the horizon.)

Option-wise, the Accord SE-i was loaded. It had power windows, door locks, and outside mirrors, leather upholstery, and even a few features the Benz lacked, like remote trunk and fuel filler door releases.

The 190E, on the other hand, had features the Accord didn't offer, such as power seats and antilock brakes.

Interestingly, the Mercedes and Honda both had 5-speed manuals. When's the last time M-B offered a row-your-own transmission on this side of the pond?

Both cars had fuel injected SOHC four cylinders. The Honda's was a 101bhp 1.8L driving the front wheels, while the RWD Benzo's 2.3L motor was rated at 120 horsepower.

The cars' 0-60 times were almost identical: 9.8 seconds for the Accord versus 9.9 for the Mercedes. The Honda also edged the 190E on the skidpad, at .79g to .77g. The Mercedes, at 114 mph, was a bit faster on the top end, and its ABS let it outbrake the Accord from sixty mph by ten feet.

The big difference was in the prices as tested, where the thirteen thousand dollar Honda was over ten grand cheaper than the M-B.

1985 was basically about the dawn of the modern car era: Computer-controlled fuel injection, power doodads becoming increasingly common, expected automotive lifespans increasing...

But it's pretty wild to see how far we've come since then.

I remember reading this article in my senior year, in the back row of my AP U.S. Government class.

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Artsy Fartsy

Once upon a time, taking pictures on film was just photography. It's how you made pictures.

Now it's "film photography", the province of hobbyists, some die-hard holdouts in the art photography world, and also hipsters who have injected a lot of hand-wavery and woo into what was just a fairly straightforward and scientifically understood process. Kind of like tube amps used to be just "amps" and now there's... but that's a whole different thing, and one on which I'm not at all qualified to comment.

I am, however, qualified to talk about how minilabs worked, back in the days when they were still wet-printing with light shone through a negative onto photo paper.

Basically, you'd have different "channels" on your printer for different film types. To calibrate the channels, you'd shoot prints of these test negatives (called "Noras" for reasons that should be obvious) and then check the grayscale target with your densitometer, which would let you know if the calibration had drifted.

You needed the different channels because films handle color differently, and even have different tinges to their substrates. (Normie Fuji negative film, for example, has a more magenta tint to the negative as opposed to the familiar orange of normie Kodak Gold.)

You'd then twiddle things into calibration and be off to the races.

As long as your processor was running right and your channels were properly calibrated, gray would be gray, no matter what film you put through it.

That was the science part of it.

The art part was that lab tech sitting there squinting into the glowing window and looking at the negative and... if they were good and they cared ...making on-the-fly corrections as needed. If you have old prints from that era and look on the back of the photo, you might see a string of dot-matrix printed digits something like "N +1 N N", which indicate what adjustments had been made from the default channel setting.

I considered myself pretty good, and the paper waste numbers on my shifts backed me up. See, you'd weigh the contents of the shredder at the end of a shift. Having to reprint a whole 36 exposure roll of 4x6's put a fair amount of paper in there, and that Kodak paper wasn't free.

There was nothing more cringe for me than going to pick up some prints from a 1hr lab and finding the color off. It told me the staff just didn't care.

It was harder to notice in normie color photos unless there was a lot of sky, or people wearing white, or whatever. One place it was hard to hide, though, was if you'd had some of the C41 process monochrome film printed: Kodak BW400CN or Ilford XP2. This was black and white film that was designed to be processed in color chemistry. It's hard to hide your colors being out of calibration on your channel when there shouldn't be any color in there in the first place.

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Did you know...?

That's the building we used to jokingly call "Broad Ripple's skyscraper", before the neighborhood sprouted a jungle of 4- and 5-story "mixed use" residential/retail spaces.

It was a professional building, with dentist's offices and whatnot on each floor. Now it's owned by the bohemian Hotel Broad Ripple.

Hence the big peace symbol.

Back during the Cold War, conservative Boomers and Silents called that "the footprint of the American chicken". 

GenX and Millennials mostly knew it from the button on Private Joker's helmet cover, next to the scrawled "BORN TO KILL" slogan. Occasionally, on posters or fliers touting a Sixties hippie-themed school function, a clueless X'er or Millennial would hilariously get it mixed up with the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star logo.

I once heard a fundie preacher... I've mentioned that I grew up in a Baptist concentration camp, right? ...tell the congregation that it was actually a secret satanic symbol; an inverted cross with the arms broken. I guess when you're looking for the devil behind every bush, you get a lot of false positives.

In actuality, as I learned while reading P.J. O'Rourke's essay "Among the Euroweenies" in Holidays in Hell, it originated in 1958 as the logo of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It's a combination of the semaphore signals for "N" and "D".

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I'm sure you've seen it but...

...it's still the best music video ever...

Truly an Age of Wonders

RX: "...and the box even had a picture of a clown on the front."

Me: "Yeah, I remember that box. It was a lot of kids first introduction to c... clownophobia."

RX: "There's actually a word for that: 'coulrophobia'."

Me: "Oh, I know the word, but I suddenly realized I had no idea how to pronounce it."

Before the internet, I would have had to go to the bookshelf with the big dictionary, look this up, and decipher what the the good people of Oxford meant by "kälrəˈfōbēə".

Now I can turn to Google...

...or just say out loud "Alexa, how do you pronounce the word for a fear of clowns?"

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