Duty Now For The Future

Following from my snark about the Buried Belvedere (which on second glance looks like it had been smothered in batter and deep-fried for fifty years), Jonson challenged me to pick out five items from today that I want to preserve for the citizens of 2057.

1) The logo for the London 2012 Olympic Games. People hate it! People (marginally) love it! And really now, would you feel better if it had freaking Big Ben on it or something? As usual, Peter Saville gets directly to the point.

“I find it a bit cheesy. Those rings don’t sit happily within that angular form and the typographic expression of London is a little insecure and apologetic. On the other hand, it’s incredibly noticable, brave and confrontational. Designs which are effective are abrasive on our sensibilities initially, that is how they work. It doesn’t have to be nice because they are familiar, while a great design forges a new aesthetic. It’s real job is to be a catalyst for awareness of the Olympics and it’s doing that already”.

The logo reminds me of stylized Kanji that you would see on a Tokyo neon sign. I like it. I’m including it in my time capsule on the odd chance that it doubles as an Elder Sign. Hey, you never know.

2) A Cyborg Fidel Castro. Communist revolutionary to pop culture joke icon in under fifty years. I believe it’s only fair that he gets to annoy people forever. See also: the robotic Richard Nixon in Futurama. If a cyborg Fidel isn’t available, then the real Fidel will be a adequate substitute.

3) A stainless steel tablet with “COOKBOOK IT IS LOLZ!” engraved on it.

4) Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts. Out of all the five items I’ve chosen, pop-tarts have the best chance of surviving fifty years of stasis. If the future is an all-natural blissful ecotopia, then pop-tarts are the exact Molotov Cocktail of bio-psychological corruption to bring those Eloi to the darkside of junk food. If the future is something else, then pop-tarts will provide the sugar boost necessary to escape the zombie hordes. Note: the pop-tarts must be brown sugar cinnamon, other flavors are not to be trusted.

5) Rheingold. Not the beer, but the band. It’s my dream that in the future everything will be 1980 Euro-synthpop and we’ll all have synthesizers made of red, yellow, and clear lucite.

At the very least, I want to leave 2057 a forty-five minute long version of “Dreiklangsdimensionen”.

Buried Belvedere

It looks like the big unveiling of the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere time capsule in Tulsa went awry today because of an accumulated 50 years of water damage. I’ll try to avoid making some obvious jokes at the expense of Tulsa, but when confronted with a quote like “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Miss Belvedere” from an event organizer you just gotta kick out some of that denial. I wonder if anyone back in 1957 thought that those hopes and dreams of the future would amount to nothing more than a pile of toxic mud and rust.

After looking at some photos of the burial site in front of the Tulsa courthouse, I wonder if the sprinkler system for that lawn was particularly zealous? Near home, there’s some sprinklers that run so often that the adjoining sidewalk never gets dry, even in summer.

Schrödinger’s Capo

(Sorry Erwin.)

A mobster is a Jersey diner at night with his family and a plate of onion rings. Also in the diner are potentially one or more Enemies. Over the course of dinner the mobster may recognize an Enemy, but with equal probability he may not recognize an Enemy or no Enemy may be present at all.

If the state of the mobster may not be determined from outside the diner without interfering with mobster/Enemy system then is the mobster in a superstate where he is both alive and dead?

It could explain why that cat was hanging around Satriale’s.

Thinking about the ending on the way to work today, I remembered John Sayles’ film Limbo and it’s very similar and jarring non-ending ending. The film just stops without any apparent conclusion until you suss out that the plot of the movie wasn’t necessarily the story. Family relationships are the story and once those relationships reach some kind of resolution there’s no reason to keep going. The series really ends when Tony visits A.J.’s therapist and revealed that he was still the same whiner he was seven years ago – blaming his mother for everything and taking responsibility for nothing despite all the subsequent death and horrible things he’s done. The family (both of them really) isn’t much better off, each acting as enablers for the others. The scenes that followed were just epilogue. Holsten’s isn’t too terribly different from the small-L limbo Tony encountered as Kevin Finnerty at the beginning of the season only he’s still afraid, paranoid, and waiting for something to happen.

Whaddya gonna do?

Countdown to when Paulie/LOLcat mashups appear in 5… 4… 3…

Grand Theft Auto: Hill Valley

gta_millvalley.jpg

Copy/pasting from the description page:

Back to the Future: Hill Valley is a full conversion Mod, being made for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. BTTF: Hill Valley will allow the player to re-experience all the great moments from the films. It’s the modders goal to not stray too far from the original story line; while still adding in new content to the game that enhances the game experience. You can relive one of the best movies of all time, in the outstanding game play of the Sandbox hit, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. This mod is sure to bring countless hours of fun to anybody who enjoyed the movies.

Some of the Features that will be in BTTF: Hill Valley are:

  • 5 different eras of Hill Valley: 1885, 1955, 1985, Alternative 1985, and 2015.
  • Played in Real Time
  • New Vehicles to correspond to the times.
  • New Pedestrians to correspond to the times
  • Instant and Realistic Speed Based Time Travel
  • New Effects and Graphics
  • Flying Hover mode for the Cars and Trains of the future.
  • Refueling feature for the plutonium chamber/Mr. Fusion unit on the Deloreans
  • Gas Stations
  • Custom Radio Stations
  • Reenactments of scenes, from the films
  • Remote Controlled Deloreans
  • Build-a-time-machine garage
  • Working calendar

The mod is only at Version 0.2b, but crimony the release of this could be the one thing that pushes me over the edge to pick up a console or whatever could play it.

Gluttony On The (Assisted) March

Countdown to when someone coins the term “douchebuggies” for these slugs in T minus 5, 4, 3…

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) — There’s lazy, and then there’s Las Vegas lazy.

In increasing numbers, Las Vegas tourists exhausted by the four miles of gluttony laid out before them are getting around on electric “mobility scooters.”

Don’t think trendy Vespa motorbikes. Think updated wheelchair.

Forking over about $40 a day and their pride, perfectly healthy tourists are cruising around Las Vegas casinos in transportation intended for the infirm.

You don’t have to take a step. You don’t even have to put your drink down.

“It was all the walking,” 27-year-old Simon Lezama said on his red Merits Pioneer 3. Lezama, a trim and fit-looking restaurant manager from Odessa, Texas, rented it on Day 3 of his five-day vacation, “and now I can drink and drive, be responsible and save my feet.”

The Las Vegas Strip is long past its easily walkable days. Casinos alone are nearly the size of two football fields. That doesn’t count the hotel rooms, shopping malls, spas, convention centers, bars and restaurants.

And that’s just inside. For tourists who plan to stroll from one big casino to another, there are crowds, construction sites and long stretches of sun-baked sidewalks between.

A tourist could accidentally get some exercise.

“We’re seeing more and more young people just for the fact that the Strip has gotten so big, the hotels are so large,” said Marcel Maritz, owner of Active Mobility, a scooter rental company whose inventory also includes wheelchairs, crutches and walkers.

Most of those using the scooters are obese, elderly or disabled. But many are young and seemingly fit.

The number of able-bodied renters has grown in the past few years to represent as much as 5 percent of Maritz’s business, he said. The company, which contracts with some casinos, has a fleet of about 300 scooters.

“It makes it a lot easier for people to see everything,” he said.

At full throttle the scooters open up to about 5 mph, though crowded sidewalks allow little opportunity for such speeds. They can go anywhere wheelchairs can — elevators, bars, craps tables — but are banned from streets. They come with a quick operating lesson, an instruction booklet, a horn and a basket.

“At first, I figured it was for handicapped people, but then I saw everybody was getting them. I figured I might as well, too,” Lezama said.

Las Vegas has other transportation options, although each has its problems. The Strip is regularly clogged with cabs and drive-in tourists. A double-decker bus system, dubbed the Deuce, often gets stuck in the mess. A $650 million monorail with stops at eight casinos has been plagued by poor ridership, perhaps because it runs behind the resorts, well off the Strip and out of sight.

Police and casino workers often use bicycles.

Some think it’s unethical

Some find the notion of using a device intended for disabled people unethical.

“It’s the same principle as parking in a handicap spot,” Mike Petillo, 64, a disabled tax accountant who recently visited from New York City.

Several hotel bell desk workers — who handle most of the rental requests from tourists — said they try to discourage people who do not appear to need the scooters from renting. But refusing the self-indulgent is not really an option.

“You can’t really discriminate against anybody,” said Tom Flynn, owner of Universal Mobility. “We don’t require a prescription or an explanation of why they need it.”

Michelle Bailey, a slender, apparently healthy 22-year-old, used a scooter to get around a recent pool tournament at the Riviera hotel-casino. “Four-inch heels,” she explained with a laugh, pointing to her lipstick-red pumps.

But Troy Burgess, a 21-year-old optician visiting from Detroit, said he considers it “immoral” for an able-bodied person to rent wheels. And not only that, but “you probably wouldn’t pick up too many chicks on that scooter.”

Nice to see that jackass use “drink and drive” and “be responsible” in the same sentence. Is it wrong for me to wish that he gets pasted by The Deuce bus while crossing The Strip?

[via Five Hundy By Midnight]

He Is Very Heavily Armed And Legged

williamswatson_twoforprice.pngI’ve run across three different mentions of Johnny Watson in the past twenty-four hours and I need no further signals to fish out Larry Williams & Johnny Watson’s 1967 album Two For The Price Of One and that absurdly amazing album cover. “Mercy Mercy Mercy” is the one song that most people know (though it’s probably the Buckinghams’ later cover), but the winner is the titanic “Too Late” – two minutes twenty of warp speed LA soul that gave those Wigan kids a kick in the head.

Office Naps posts Williams & Watson’s “Nobody” – one of the early psychedelic soul experiment and/or exploitation tracks that followed in the wake of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” Williams & Watson teamed up with none other than David Lindley and his fellow sitar and saz hippies in Kaleidoscope. I had no idea this record existed and my world is significantly better for it. Even odds says that Tarantino is going to mine this (or anything off of the Okeh label) for a future soundtrack. Hell, their story even sounds like a Tarantino movie. Copy/pasting from the Office Naps post:

Larry Williams’s career began in the early ‘50s as a session pianist at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans recording studios. He briefly joined Lloyd Price’s band, and thereafter earned a name for himself as an R&B shouter with late ‘50s hits like “Short Fat Fannie,” “Bony Moronie,” “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” on the great Specialty label. In the early ‘60s, Williams relocated to the West Coast, there working as a producer and A&R man for Okeh (Columbia Records’ R&B subsidiary) and a handful of other California labels. Never quite able to revive his early successes as a recording artist, Williams lived out the sort of disreputable life that you expect of the echt R&B musician, succumbing to a gunshot wound in 1980 that, depending on who you ask, was not necessarily self-inflicted.

When Williams’ friend, the multi-instrumentalist Johnny Watson, arrived in early ‘50s Los Angeles, he’d already gigged with Houston bluesmen like Johnny Copeland and Albert Collins. Still in his teens, Watson toiled in Los Angeles as a session guitarist and, a year or two later, he’d begin making – now as Johnny “Guitar” Watson – a string of gutsy R&B singles. These included, amongst many others, the stratospheric 1954 instrumental “Space Guitar,” his autobiographical “Gangster of Love” (re-recorded in 1963 and again in 1978), and his biggest ‘50s hit, the swamp pop-flavored “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.” Watson would continue recording and performing in the ‘60s in a more uptown, sophisticated soul style. It wouldn’t be until the ‘70s that Watson would finally find his enduring fame, however, with his funky Southern blues persona: the “Gangster of Love.”

In the mid-‘60s Williams and Watson joined briefly together for a few fine duet releases on the Okeh label. There were obvious similarities in their career trajectories up to this point. Both were hardened, Gulf Coast-born R&B musicians. Both maintained ties to the criminal underworld: as a musician, Watson earned money on the side as a pimp (or vice-versa, according to Peter Guralnick), and Williams had a criminal record for dealing drugs and extensive involvement, it was rumored, in prostitution.

While looking for information to post to the recently revived Watson thread on ILX, I ran across a Metafilter post listing some goodies on YouTube – the best being this unreal version of “Gangster Of Love” (the YouTube poster disabled embedding on this, so you might need to go to the page directly)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk31242CnkU[/youtube]

Do not try to apprehend – simply say “it’s cool.”

Watson died in 1996 while on stage in Japan. Apparently, he said that where he wanted to be when it happened.