Category: What the…?

I remember flipping through the pre-Christmas Sears catalogs of my youth looking at all of the toys I knew we couldn’t afford. My world of impossibilities was limited, despite the thickness of the book, stuffed as it was with other, less attractive (to me) holiday gifts: dishwashers, towels, bathrobes, etc. I wonder how the child Darrel would have fared in the current wide-open world of the Internet. Could I have attained the things I craved on eBay or craigslist, used or “hot” off the shelves? Or would my desires merely have swollen when facing the river of goods from Amazon.com?

Saturday’s the last day of the Holiday Toy Wish Book sale at Fred Meyer, where the cover is a Star Wars Turbo Tank Vehicle that hearkens back to the Major Matt Mason items I lusted for in the ’60s. What caught my eye first, though, was this.

Now, I’ve got nothing against shooting games, even games where you’re shooting defenseless animals instead of brain-eating zombies. But did the juxtaposition of that image and the game’s title — “Big Buck” — give anyone pause for a second? I hope it did. I hope they decided the multiculturalism of having an African-American kid in the photo for a hunting game was more important. I hope they’re right.

The Bella and Edward dolls from Barbie’s Twilight edition. Now with bloodsucking action. Or something….

Again, no problem with toy guns — I played with many a toy gun and was known to use a stick if toy guns were not available — but 5 seems a little young to be adding in the bayonet action to your “Peacekeeper”. And seriously, the toy gun with the rubber cutty, pokey thing on the front is for kids a year younger than the vampire dolls?

A significant event that went right over my head this summer was the twentieth anniversary of the day I bought my first Mac. I’ve been clearing some old boxes of stuff out of the office (a pair of 5.25″ diskette drives for a TRS-80 Model I computer now grace my bookshelves) and there’s been a treasure trove of goodies, including long-forgotten projects (more of those later), correspondence, industrial espionage, and financial documents, including this receipt from August 1989. It was the start of my final year at Reed, I had to write my thesis, and while I had access to Macs at the college I was also working full-time at Powell’s Books. While I’d put together the proposal for Powell’s to buy a Mac II and, indeed, that was available to me at work, I knew that if I was going to get the deed done I’d need to be able to utilize every possible moment even if I didn’t actually do so. So off I went to the Reed College Bookstore to buy my Mac Plus (at the student discount price) and a 30MB external hard drive on the computer loan program offered through the college. I got Microsoft Word, MacPaint, and Hypercard bundled along with the computer.

I’ve lost track of the number of Macs — much less the number of computers — I’ve owned in the past two decades. In addition to the Plus, there’s been a IIvx, a Powerbook 100, a Powerbook 180, a Quadra 610, a 7100, a Powerbook 1400, a couple of teardrop iMacs, a blue G3, a Mini, a mirror door G4, an aluminum MacBook, and probably some others I’m forgetting.

I’m so screwed. Today’s fortune from the Fu Jin:

The stock market may be your ticket to success.

Credit: BILL HEFTON/AP Photo

A couple of things struck me in this article about a vehicle/animal collision in Oklahoma:

“Didn’t have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road,” driver Bill Carpenter said Thursday. “At the very last second I said ‘elephant!'”

Elephant? “Blended in with the road”? Really? How old was this guy?

Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his SUV at the last second and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female elephant on U.S. 81 in Enid, about 80 miles north of Oklahoma City.

So not that old. But apparently, this was one elephant that really had a talent for camouflage:

Enid veterinarian Dr. Dwight Olson said the elephant was hiding in some bushes just off the highway when he arrived shortly after the accident. Handlers from the circus were able to calm it down, and Olson cleaned the leg wound and gave it some pain killer.

Dr. Olson said the elephant escaped major injury.

The unnamed elephant’s powers to cloud the mind extended even beyond its immediate surroundings:

A booking agent for the circus, Rachael Bellman, said she was unaware the incident, and a telephone message left with circus officials wasn’t immediately returned.

Your client’s elephant escapes, and gets hit by an SUV? Yeah, I wouldn’t admit to knowing anything about it either.

It gets hard to rebel when you work for yourself, though!

We were walking past the River Park Square in downtown Spokane this evening and through the windows was a throng of children watching other kids just inside the windows, many of whom were wearing fairy wings and other kinds of costumes in some sort of ceremony. It was packed enough that we decided our entry through the doors on either side of the ceremony would only be distracting; rather than walk through the mall we went around, so we didn’t figure out exactly what was going on.

In one of those completely odd juxtapositions of circumstance, the speakers on the outside of the mall were blasting Arthur Brown’s classic “Fire.”

My new iPhone wallpaper: “El Diablo Makes the Call.” Taken last February during the afternoon Carnaval parade in Mazatlan.

Early in the week I predicted Andy Richter would win the Celebrity JEOPARDY! match on Thursday, as he was up against actress Dana Delaney and lunkhead CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. I didn’t know just how right I would be.

I didn’t have a particular read on Delaney — as I said Monday, the law of averages would make her at least smarter than Blitzer who is, as mentioned above, a lunkhead — but Richter, like any good comedian, has seemed pretty sharp, which generally means he’s got an accumulation of trivia and otherwise useless information floating around in his head. He put it to good use in the match aired Thursday, racking up more than $32,000 by the end of Double Jeopardy! Delaney had a respectable four-digit score, but Blitzer ended the round with -$4,600, losing nearly a third of that by answering “crash” to a question about mid-19th century financial troubles that used the word “crash” in the clue (the J! Archive should have details in a couple of days). It was almost difficult to watch I was laughing so hard.

In fact, Blitzer mostly seemed versed on food-related subjects, correctly answering “What is Kobe beef?”, identifying “pullet” as chicken, and almost getting Julia Child’s name right before judges came back and yanked his points back for saying “Childs.”

Was it an aberration? Was the series of clues (capital of China, leader of the “Long March,” Chinese city whose name also meant impression of sailors) just out of Blitzer’s experience? Were Delaney and Richter just too damn fast on the button for him to be saved from humiliation?

Richter ran the clip below on The Tonight Show. It’s some behind-the-scenes footage from before the contest, including the practice game where Blitzer muffs a pretty easy Final Jeopardy!, and shows his progress up to that point.

I thought I was already there. Fom today’s Fu Jin fortune:

You will attain the highest levels of intelligence.

Twenty years ago or so, at the Starry Night in Portland (now Roseland), while he was singing this song and clambering on a stack of speakers to reach some of us on the balcony.

I am a passenger
And I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the skies
Yeah, the bright and hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight

I am a passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright
I see the stars come out tonight
I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the city’s ripped backside
And everything looks good tonight

Sing: la la la la la la la la,
la la la la la la la la
la la la la la la la la la la lah

Get into the car
We’ll be the passenger
We’ll ride through the city at night
We’ll see the city’s ripped backsides
We’ll see the bright and hollow sky
We’ll see the stars that shine so bright
The sky’s made for us tonight

Oh the passenger
How, how he rides
Oh the passenger
And he rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city’s ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drives
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
So this just belongs to you and me
So let’s take a ride and see what’s mine

Sing: la la la la la la la la,
la la la la la la la la
la la la la la la la la la la lah

Oh the passenger
And he rides and he rides
He sees things from under glass
He looks through his window and sighs
He sees the things that he knows are his
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the city asleep at night
He sees the stars are out tonight
And all of it is yours and mine
And all of it is yours and mine
So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride

Sing: la la la la la la la la,
la la la la la la la la
la la la la la la la la la la lah

Iggy Pop, “The Passenger”