Category: What the…?

Missoula’s The Volumen:

Volumen – Snakes

Only three more days to Beatles Rock Band.

Like a horrible wreck, I had to take a look, even though I knew from first sight that it was going to be horrible, ugly, and — figuratively, at least — bloody. ABC’s Crash Course premiered last night and it’s the TV equivalent to having a piece of metal shoved through your frontal lobes at high velocity.

Two hosts — including the usually-palatable Orlando Jones — crack what passes for wise as five picked-for-stereotypical-behavior two-person teams (Team Married, the henpecked husband and bickering wife; Team Roommates, the over-the-top black guy and loudmouth female counterpart; Team Single Moms, two models/mothers; oh, who cares…) perform in elimination rounds of feats of driving skill near Detroit. There’s one where the drivers are towed onto a skid pad and try to stop with a designated wheel on numbers painted on the ground, Another where they try to drive up onto the back of a flatbed truck. An obstacle course. Another course where they try to knock over a series of cars that have been perched on one end.

The whole thing is just so lame and the jokes are so Henny Youngman-esque that perhaps it will find an audience for a time. I don’t know (or care) what ABC’s plans are for it, although I do see that it’s on the schedule again tonight (don’t watch it!). I have no idea if the teams are real or contrived, but they’ve certainly been encouraged to play up their individual schtick for the cameras, which only makes the show even more agonizing to watch. I mean, who would ever have guessed that the wacky, loudmouth Team Roommate guy was going to drive right into the bases of the cars standing on end and do a bunch of donuts when he was competing for $50,000?

What’s particularly sad about the whole thing is that I remember Full Metal Challenge, the short-lived UK/US venture with hosts Cathy (Junkyard Wars) Rogers and Henry (Black Flag) Rollins. The conceit of FMC wasn’t that the teams were a bunch of idiots there to be gawped at by you, another happy idiot, but that they were car enthusiasts and engineers brought together to build a vehicle and compete. Sure, the games were somewhat silly (a sumo match where cars tried to push each other out of the ring, giant bowling pin with the cars as balls, a deep-water driving course, and others) but the emphasis (as with Rogers’s other shows) was on talent and ingenuity.

That, of course, is why it only lasted one season. On The Learning Channel (which is now TLC, the channel of People Who Want to Watch People Who Have More Children Than Even Sitcoms Thought Was Funny and would never have anything like FMC on). And why Crash Course is on ABC.

The Romanes, The World’s Greatest Ramones Tribute Band, at Dante’s in Portland on 21 August, filmed by Phillip Kerman.

Squirrelized!

Today marks the Hindu holiday of Ganesh Chaturthi, the start of a ten-day festival celebrating the birth of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of wisdom and prosperity.

Coincidentally enough, it’s also the first birthday of Samudra, the Oregon Zoo’s latest addition to its colony of Asian elephants.

Barbara and I have long had a soft place in our hearts for Ganesha — particularly as he’s the Remover of Obstacles and the patron of letters and learning, things we love and need. So in honor of the day, we’d like to wish that everyone’s obstacles be removed and that they have a good year until the next Ganesh Chaturthi.

On the other hand, we probably didn’t get the party started off quite right by buying ten pounds of hamburger at Freddie’s this afternoon.

The smart hit the 15,000 mile mark on the trip back from the Bay Area, right about the time I made it to McMinnville. I kept forgetting to look down, even though I knew it was coming up, but just changed to catch it at exactly the 15,000 mark.

Still didn’t see any other smarts on the trip, although I did get a flash of something about the right color of yellow on Monday morning (I had to stop in Yreka about 12:30am or brave the rest of Siskiyous with glasses not really optimal for seeing at distance in the dark) in the Willamette Valley, on the other side of the freeway, heading south. Not as exciting as the trip south, although I could swear that I saw a large mound of dirt with dead sheep piled on it and a couple of large tractors in a field just off the freeway north of Albany.

They called them “no-see-ums” in the pre-event info sent out from the folks putting on iPhoneDevCamp 3 at the Yahoo! campus this weekend, but as this photo of the door between the parking garage and the building where the event was held, you can, indeed “see-um.” And, dude, there’s millions of them dead on the stairs.

It was a long drive down from Portland to Sunnyvale for iPhoneDevCamp 3 on Friday. Here a few random things I noticed:

• In nearly twelve hours (including stops) on the road Friday and in the couple extra hours I spent driving up to Annie & Eric’s in San Francisco tonight, I haven’t seen another smart car.
• Down around Roseburg there are a couple of large billboards along the hoighway with several panels morphing the face of a man into a chimpanzee and the header “Are They Making a Monkey Out of You?” apparently for an anti-evolution group. I guess they’ve been there for a while. It’s not even a particularly good morphing job, but I suppose that’s the point.



• Horses like to hang their heads out the window on hot days, just like dogs. It was unbearably hot in most of western Oregon Friday — even in the morning — and one driver had left the top flaps on his multi-horse trailer open. There were three or four horses sticking their heads out the side to catch the breeze. That would have been a great picture.
• I’ve been watching the old Patrick McGoohan spy series known in the US as Secret Agent Man. It was originally called Danger Man in the UK, and the DVDs use the Danger Man theme for each episode, which I’ve grown quite fond of. Johny Rivers’s iconic “Secret Agent Man,” is used for the menus, though. Johnny’s making an appearance later this month at the Seaven Feathers Casino in Canyonville, Oregon.
• They really mean it when they warn you of high winds on the freeway east of Vallejo. And I’m wondering if I can submit an invoice for some front tires to Gov. Schwarzenegger after driving on I680.
• Being at the scene of an ugly accident is a creepy thing. A couple of hours after I left home, I topped the smart car up in Albany. Just south of town the freeway arches over Midway Drive SE. About a quarter mile further south is an almost unnoticeable flat bridge that crosses Oak Creek, a short connector between the previously unknown to me Freeway Lakes. As I topped the first bridge, I saw traffic ahead of me in the fast lane was coming to a sharp stop, and as I slowed, I could see a small SUV out on the median going the same direction as me at a fairly fast clip, throwing up a dust cloud behind it. Vehicles ahead of me were pulling off to the left, and I did so, which was when I first noticed the bridge over Oak Creek as I crossed it. That was also when I realized why I couldn’t see where the SUV had gone, because the ravine under the bridge was several dozen feet deep, with steep banks on either side. The last I’d seen of the SUV it was north of the ravine, heading straight for it. When I next saw the car, it was upside down in the water, where it landed after driving straight into the ditch. Other, faster people had already stopped and ran down the bank and into the water, pulling the driver out and then flipping the car over to search for any possible passengers. I actually never even saw the woman they saved — apparently they got her out to the bank below where I was standing — and it didn’t appear that there was any real need for whatever I could offer, but since I’d witnessed a portion of the accident (although not the original collision) I stayed to give my contact info to the police. Thankfully, it wasn’t a harbinger of the rest of the trip.

How many times have you woken up
and prayed for the rain?

How many times have you seen the papers
apportion the blame?

Who gets to say who gets the work,
who gets to play?

I was always told at school,
everybody should get the same.

How many times have you been told
if you don’t ask you don’t get?

How many liars have taken your money,
your mother said you shouldn’t bet?

Who has the fun? Is it always the man with the gun?

Someone must have told him,
if you work too hard you can sweat.

There’s always the sun.

There’s always the sun.

Always, always, always the sun.

How many times have the weathermen
told you stories that made you laugh?

Y’know it’s not unlike the politicians and the leaders
when they do things by half.

Who gets the job of pushing the knob?

That sort of responsibility you draw straws for,
if you’re mad enough.

There’s always the sun.

There’s always the sun.

Always, always, always the sun.

The Stranglers, “Always the Sun”, Dreamtime