Flashback Friday: Mr. Machine

~ LobaBlanca

mr_machine

I’m quite surprised that I haven’t posted this one before. I also have very little to say about this particular toy, beyond the fact that I always thought it was one of the most interesting toys I can remember from my childhood. I never owned my own Mr. Machine. One of my aunts had one, and I remember she would sometimes take it out and let it run up and down the apartment hallway, much to my wee delight.

Here is one of the original commercials for Mr. Machine:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8WHQI5iKYfM

After watching this, I’m almost 100 percent positive that my aunt had one of the reissued 1970s versions, because her version didn’t ring or come apart. It did, however, whistle a jaunty little tune (a most appropriate description for any tune from a toy in a top hat) while wheeling about.

Fun times.

And now that I know that the original version of Mr. Machine came apart, I feel this irresistible need to find my own. I must know what it looks like inside!

BookBin2013: Ether

~ lobablanca

ether

My final read from our recent journey was Ben Ehrenreich’s Ether, another City Lights acquisition. Here, first, is the description from the back cover:

A bearded man in a badly soiled suit known only as The Stranger wanders an apocalyptic landscape on the fringes of a dying metropolis, looking for a way to “get back on top.” Thwarted and rejected at every turn by old friends and strangers alike

BookBin2013: Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened

~ lobablanca

ldtiwimhh

Continuing with the books I finished during those long flights to and from Hawaii, I decided that I also wanted to whittle away a bit at the collection of books I have picked up from City Lights Bookstore the last two times I’ve been to San Francisco (ironically, we had a long enough layover in San Francisco during our journey to the islands that I could have gone back to City Lights for some more perusing…but then we wouldn’t have gotten to do anything else. Because bookstores require HOURS.).

I admit that I chose Hal Niedzviecki’s short story collection Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened because it’s a nice slim paperback that fit nicely into my backpack, in between my DSLR bag and my Kindle. I also admit that sadly one of the first things I noticed about this book was the fact that the Table of Contents listed the wrong pages for every single story (at least in my copy). For someone who spends a soul-crushing amount of time QCing minutia just like this, I was not happy to find such a glaring error during my leisure time. To me, this speaks to a lack of quality in the preparation that could have indicated a lack of quality in the product.

Luckily, this was not the case. Niedzviecki’s stories are captivating oddities, populated by strange and slightly indecipherable (and sometimes utterly unnerving) characters. His language is sparse and understated. His concepts are quirky and often complex…or at the very least complicated. One could imagine his characters populating a world conceived by Charlie Kaufman or perhaps even Robert Altman…actually, I detected a bit of Raymond Carver in these stories (Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was the inspiration for Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts). Niedzviecki isn’t quite as intensely restrained in his prose as Carver was, but he wields a similar precision in the selection of words to convey his tales. He also embraces the ambiguity of open endings that I sometimes really enjoy.

Final Verdict: I enjoy having short story collections on call into which I can dive quickly for a tale or two, so I do believe I shall be keeping this one.

Flashback Friday: Mac Tonight

~ LobaBlanca

Time to revisit Loba’s obsession with bizarre company mascots from her youth, thanks to a lovely reminder from one of my favorite ImagiFriendsTM (although we’re friends IRL, so I guess I can’t really refer to him in this way…but I love the classification so very much).

In addition to Spuds MacKenzie trying to convince me that I should like his diluted horse pee beer and Chester Cheetah coercing me to have perpetually stained fingers, or all those kooky kids’ cereal mascots luring me toward their sugary dentally damaging delights, there was this, er, lunatic:

mactonight

Get it? Lun…never mind. Denizens, may I introduce you to Mac Tonight, from that ever-trippy corps of crazy McDonald’s ad campaigns. As I remember it (and that wonderful oracle of truth Wikipedia kind of confirms), our silver sliver-headed songster came about as a means to let us all know that McDonald’s was a really swingin’ dinner-time kinda of lounge, hep cats. Apparently, Ronald was a little too garish for that evening rush that McDonald’s was hoping to drum up. The Golden Arches wanted less red, more blue. Less clown, more…moon?

I get it…night time is the right time (to clog your arteries and succumb to grease-induced zit attacks), so when the Man in the Moon starts to serenade you about when it’s time to head for golden lights, you listen, you dig? Especially when he’s twirling around on a cloud that’s strangely solid enough to hold the weight of a baby grand piano and him, but still light enough to float through the city streets to spread his snappy tune.

[Loba Tangent: Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to notice how silly it was to have a cloud holding up a piano…TPTB quickly replaced the cloud with…a twirling Big Mac. You know, for the realism.]

I snark now about Mac Tonight, but the truth is that I loved this guy when he debuted. That’s the whole point of these wacky mascots, right? Be so ___________ that impressionable people can’t get enough of you or the product you’re shilling? Sadly, though, he wasn’t cool enough to convince me that I should eat Big Macs, which are actually my least favorite McDonald’s offering of all. I’d even choose one of those mystery fish cinder-block burgers before I would order a Big Mac with that disgusting “special sauce” (there is nothing “special” about ruining mayonnaise with ketchup and relish, dammit).

However, he was cool enough to earn his own amazing cavalcade of merchandise, including T-shirts, cups, jackets, belt buckles, toys, hats…I even remember getting my pudgy little paws on a pair of Mac Tonight sunglasses, exactly like this pair:

mtglasses

I loved these sunglasses and wore them for years…long after the little Mac Tonight logo wore off and there was no evidence that they were anything more than a pair of Ray Charles-esque RayBan ripoffs. But that’s okay, considering that Mac Tonight was nothing more than a corporate ripoff of a Bobby Darrin song called “Mac the Knife.” Get it? Yeah, Mac Tonight’s themes were even nothing more than (marginally) reworked lyrics set to the same Darrin tune. It was so blatant (and so very unapproved) that Darrin’s family finally sued McDonald’s, thus bringing an end to Mac Tonight’s night-time TV ad reign…at least here in the States. Apparently, Mac was revived (and CGIed) in 2007 for new commercials for overseas markets in several Asian countries and South Africa. Here’s what the computer-rendered Mac Tonight looks like:

mtcgi

Gone is the Darrin ripoff song and the baby grand. Now, he plays a saxophone and sings a nondescript tune, like this:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mOlLIP9-vlQ

Meh. Not nearly as groovy as the live action Mac…who was consequently played by Doug Jones. Name not ringing a bell? Don’t worry, denizens, his real face wouldn’t probably ring a bell either. He’s made quite a name for himself in Hollywood, however, for playing amazingly intricate prosthetically disguised characters, including this freakishly disturbing character from Pan’s Labyrinth:

pans-labyrinth

He was also the faun in this movie as well as Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies. He was also one of the Gentlemen in one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

buffygentleman

Ah, “Hush.” The episode that introduced Tara Maclay into the Buffyverse. Also, one of the most unnerving hours of television ever filmed.

How the hell did I get from a singing moon to Tara Maclay? It’s a good time for the great taste of the healthy helping of WTFery always ready to be served here at the lair, denizens.

I leave you now with this compilation of Mac Tonight commercials that prompted this whole Flashback. Check the Simpsons cameo. You know you’ve hit the big times when the Simpsons dredge you up! Or, conversely, you know you’ve been on air too long when you have to dredge so deep to the bottom of the pop culture barrel that you reference Mac Tonight (types the wolf who just wrote an entire Flashback Friday on said character…).

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IrIg18Uby4E

BookBin2013: Double Dealer

~ LobaBlanca

doubledealer

Lest I end the evening (or the month) with a negative review, let’s talk about that other television franchise over which I’m thoroughly gaga: CSI!

I may have mentioned this at some point here at the lair, but a while ago I found a great eBay auction on a large lot of CSI novels (I think I ended up with the first 10 novels; I could be wrong on that count, but I’m too lazy to get up and check) for a relatively low price. It was low enough, in fact, that I decided that even if I hated every single novel, it was still worth the cost.

Of course, we all know the deal by now: I bought them, received them, stacked them, and promptly moved on to other books. However, I decided one of these novels would be the perfect length for at least one leg of our recent Hawaii adventure…and I was right! I was able to finish this one during the flight from the islands to LAX. Perfect timing!

So Double Dealer, written by Max Allan Collins, is the first of the Las Vegas CSI novels. I’ve mentioned Collins here before; he was the author of three of the CSI graphic novels I’ve reviewed here. From what I wrote previously, I found his writing skills to be mostly entertaining, but I found that his stories didn’t really push the boundaries of the CSI fictional world in ways similar to how the Trek novel writers often pushed that franchise’s “accepted” boundaries. Of this, I wrote:

One thing that I

BookBin2013: A Hard Rain

~ lobablanca

ahardrain

I always view long flights as the perfect excuse to tune out the entirety of existence for a nice dive into a book or two…or more, depending on just how far I happen to be flying. Recently, I flew to Hawaii. Lots of time for lots of reading (and sleeping, but mostly reading).

I didn’t want to take a lot of thick, heavy books (I wanted to save ample space for important things like all the booze and coffee that I may or may not have bought while there), but I also wanted to take enough books to cover my bases and provide a nice variety of choices.

Thank goodness for Kindle! I loaded mine up with lots of selections, including several TNG books that I have had on my reading list for quite a while. Top choice was Dean Wesley Smith’s “Dixon Hill” novel A Hard Rain. I actually referenced this book in a Doctober post as one of the few TNG novels to actually feature Dr. Crusher on the cover. It was also the only book from this admittedly short list that I had not yet read.

I wish I had left it as unread.

I’ve never read anything else by Smith, but he wrote the novel adaptation of The Core. Do with that what you will (and I already suspect what many of my nerdier denizens will do with it). I got the impression from this story (and its blatantly open ending) that perhaps Pocket Books had planned on making Dixon Hill novels a spinoff to the mainstream TNG novels. I think A Hard Rain was the only one actually written, and I can understand why the idea was abandoned (if it ever existed).

With A Hard Rain, Smith has written a rather chaotic and muddled…tribute? parody?…to the detective novel, using the world of Dixon Hill as his foundation. Perhaps it’s a great novel to detective fans. It’s not a great TNG novel, I can attest to that.

Then again, it’s been years since I last read my TNG novels. Perhaps I have simply outgrown the storytelling parameters of Trek literature? I feel once again that I need to revisit these books, if only to finally put this question to rest. However, I fear that what I will find is that all the books I once loved will now just make me sad. And slightly appalled.

Anyway, I’m still not wild about detective novels, so that aspect didn’t really appeal to me. I’m also not a fan of Smith’s writing style for this particular book (again, I’m assuming that he doesn’t typically write like this and was probably striving to mimic popular detective novel styles). Additionally, I wasn’t all that crazy about the way the Dixon Hill story overlapped the TNG storyline in a rather non-linear and subsequently nonsensical way. Actually, the “real” storyline was more absurd than the Dixon Hill one…although the denouement was ridiculous for both stories. I didn’t like other things about this novel, but at this point I feel like I’m unnecessarily phasering a dead targh. I will say this, however: I never again want to read the phrase “Luscious Bev.”

Final Verdict: I have deleted A Hard Rain from my Kindle. I still have the master file saved elsewhere, but I doubt I will ever revisit it.

Unleashing the Writer: Velocirapture

~ lobablanca

“Let’s watch Jurassic Park.”

Eyelids narrow, dark lashes forming a latticework of suspicion around sable irises. “You hate that movie.”

There was no point in denying her response. I do, indeed, despise Jurassic Park. It’s a troubling truth to most, but to none more so than to me. I should love this movie. I would love this movie if it didn’t come covered in a sickening glaze of Spielbergian schmaltz. As much as I loathe remakes, this is one movie I would love to see redone. I ask only for two things: more dinosaur-induced terror and no kids.

Still, I have my reasons.

Shrugging one shoulder, I head to the DVD shelf and slip the disc into the player. The truth was that it had been fewer than two days since we’d returned from Hawaii and I was already feeling a strangling sense of homesickness…for the beauty, for the freedom, for the unadulterated aloha of it all.

Our time off was steadily slipping away, like sand and warm water sifting and shifting around our legs, between our toes as we stood on random beaches, too beautiful to pass, too bountiful to stop at each one.

I needed to put out of my mind that soon enough we would be back to that mind-numbing regimentation of workweek predictability, broken only by two days in which to dream of the paradise that not even Milton could have sufficiently described.

And so I hit play on the DVD and did the only thing I could think of at the moment: lost myself to the world of Jurassic Park, filmed almost entirely on location on the beautiful island of Kaua’i, so breathtaking as we flew above the volcanic spikes and valleys, nothing more than black bands and silver buckles keeping us from shifting forward into the unrelenting rush of wind and soaring, if only for a few moments of unearthly perfection, above its verdant desolation.

We immediately began pointing at portions of the scenery as the Jurassic helicopter swooped into sun-dappled chasms, alighting atop a landing pad in front of falls we viewed a few days prior, smiling from the memory, laughing at the ridiculous joy of recognition.

All too soon, night descended on the cinematic landscape and nothing more was left to see beyond an imperfect plot, replete with forced sentimentality that I found as tasteless and unappealing as my first scoop of pasty purple poi.

Daybreak ascends once more, clever girl, and we catch a few more fleeting glimpses of that beautiful landscape as the Jurassic helicopter sweeps our heroes once again to safety.

Credits scroll, the only light reflecting in her dark gaze, as she queries, “So, did you like it this time?”

Another one-shoulder shrug. “I liked the scenery. I’m still waiting for it to end differently.”

An eye roll, barely visible in the semidarkness. “No matter how many times you watch it, those kids are never going to be eaten by the velociraptors.”

“One can dream,” I sigh, as we flick off the television and begin toward the stairs, to dream again of soaring above cerulean tides and emerald cliffs spearing the azure of heaven.

jurassicfalls

fourfalls

watercliffs2

watercliffs

sandbar

cliffsclouds

darknesslight

waimea

emeraldclouds

chiseledfalls

skywater

BookBin2013: Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective

~ LobaBlanca

sumitup

What more could I possibly write about Tennessee Lady Vols Coach Pat Summitt? I first blogged about her right after she announced her diagnosis of early dementia, Alzheimer’s type. This heartbreaking news inspired me to revisit Summitt’s book Raise the Roof, all about her team’s 39-0 championship season in 1997-98. I enjoyed re-reading this book so much that I sought out and read her book Reach for the Summit, which I described as “equal parts business-minded motivational pep talkery, behind-the-scenes glimpses of Summitt

Flashback Friday: 9 to 5

~ lobablanca

Ever wonder what you would get the sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot who has everything? A copy of this movie, of course!

9to5dvd

Two movies immediately spring to mind when I think about my very young years: 9 to 5 and The Wizard of Oz. I don’t really know what you can do with that statement, but it is what it is. CBS owned the rights to both at the time and played both annually. Both, therefore, became an annual ritual for my mom and me. We’d pop a big bowl of popcorn (using an honest-to-goodness hot air corn popper that had a little tray on the top where you could stick butter to be melted by the hot air as it fed through the machine), pour some Pepsi, and settle in for a Friday evening full of either melty wicked witches or bondage-bound bosses.

Memories, eh?

Of course, being only 6 or 7 years old the first time I ever saw 9 to 5, I failed to understand the meaning of a lot of what was going on in the movie. Actually, I don’t think I really understood 90 percent of the movie the first few times I saw it. “Edited-for-television” standards at the time didn’t really help much. It was years before I understood why smoking that “cigarette” made them all giggly and victim to a raging case of the munchies.

[Loba Tangent: Honestly, though, I still don’t understand what else had to be in that cigarette to inspire the hallucinations these women had while high. I guess I just don’t understand Mary Jane at all…]

That being said, I still loved it. I loved the catchy theme song. I loved the silliness. I loved the incredible slapstick elements. Something that I don’t think many people consider or appreciate is the fact that all four of the leads in this movie are amazing physical comedians. Yes, even Dolly Parton. Honestly, I think this might be Parton’s best movie performance. Sorry to all you Straight Talk fans out there…

This is probably also my favorite Jane Fonda role. I’ve admittedly not seen many of her films. It’s not that I hold any contempt toward her for any past political statements she might have made. I just kind of find her…annoying most of the time. However, as Judy Bernly, she perfectly captured the fear and loathing of someone entering a world completely foreign and frightening to her.

And, of course, this was the moment I fell in love with Lily Tomlin. Well before I ever saw any of her comedy routines or Laugh-In or before I saw anything from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, I met her as Violet Newstead. Perhaps it was because her pot party plot against the Boss Man was so Disneyesque as to be one of the few things I could truly understand as such a little one. Or maybe it’s because she was hilarious in the hospital scenes. Or maybe I just “got” her incredible comedic timing and general grooviness, even at so young an age.

And lest he feel even more abused than he must have felt during the filming of this movie, poor Dabney Coleman. I have to admit, he played the office dick quite well. I’m sure he’s probably a lovely human being, but it was years before I could see him as anything other than Franklin M. Hart, Jr, the “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” who inspired three women to step out from the shadow of the boss man and step up the challenge of showing corporate America that women were more than ready to take their place right by the men in the daily 9-to-5 grind…

Actually, that brings me to a personal gripe about this movie’s title. At what point between 1980 and 19mumblemumble when I joined the workforce did corporate America decide that they needed to tack on an extra 45 minutes to the work day, to make up for that lunch break they “give” employees? Imagine my confusion and irritation when I made it into my first Big Girl gig only to find out that 9 to 5 was a long-forgotten myth among the corporati with whom I now mingled. It’s enough to drive a girl to Skinny and Sweet, I tell ya!

This is another movie from my childhood that I still don’t own on DVD, but I did recently discover that it’s available as a Watch Instantly option on Netflix here in the States. Of course, this needed to happen ASAP. It still makes me laugh, even all these years since the last time I ever watched it with my mom. Honestly, it makes me laugh even more, now that I get so many more of the jokes. I love revisiting movies from my childhood and having whole new layers revealed to me.

While searching YouTube for some clips to post, I actually found this clip of outtakes, which must be from the special edition DVD they released for the 20th anniversary. Good stuff here. Also, I swear that the three actresses really were high during the pot scene, and the outtake of Tomlin kind of supports this theory…oh, and listen closely and you’ll catch Parton telling one of my favorite dirty jokes. It involved Muppets. That’s all I’m saying.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/G37d7TJ74nw

And, because you know you now have this song already stuck in your head ever since the moment you saw the heading of this post, I give you what you’ve been waiting for. It’s a rich man’s game, denizens. Same as it ever was…

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/xAQ2SiSAt-A

You’d Lose Your Head If It Weren’t Attached

~ lobablanca

That was one of my mother’s favorite things to say. She had other preferred idioms, but none of those quite fit with the point of this post. Yes, this is one of those rare moments when I do actually have a point.

This is quite a familiar topic here at the lair…and quite possibly one of my favorite topics in all the world: Dr. Crusher. Remember Doctober? I don’t know why I even bother asking…of course you do! It was AWESOME. Also? I bring it up all the time. Because it was AWESOME.

Talking in circles? You’re so ouroboring, Loba.

On Doctober 2, I wrote a post called Losing Her Head, in which I blathered on a bit about Beverly Crusher action figures and gave fair warning that I would be making more action figure entries throughout the month. I also paid tribute to one of the earliest Dr. Crusher-centric Web sites I ever found when I first hit teh Interwebz: BevHeads. I also lamented the fact that I couldn’t remember the name of the person who ran the site.

Until he found me…through my post about his site. AND HE WROTE ABOUT MY POST IN HIS POST ON BEVHEADS.

[Insert “Circle of Life” in 3…2…1…]

Seriously, it’s moments like this that make me love these silly interconnected tubes all the more. Thank you, Mr. Thiel, for reaching out to fill in the blanks on your groovy site and for the equally awesome shout-out. I happily return the favor.

I would also like to take this moment to let you all know that Gates McFadden is now on Twitter! Even better? (Could there be anything even better, you wonder!) She has a wonderful Tumblr blog for the Ensemble Studio Los Angeles (of which she is the director), through which she shares the “exploits” of a Dr. Crusher action figure.

Sometimes I forget about the beauty within the world. And then things like this happen:

tumblr_mkn3iwhEpf1s4nhnmo3_1280

Click the photo to embiggen it and you’ll be able to see Ms. McFadden’s reflection in the wine bottle as she takes this shot.

Yes. Yes, I did study this photo that closely. You know you’re not surprised…