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This Is The Future, Right?

11 Nov

from May 12, 2007

This is the future, right? I mean, when we were little kids, the 21st century was it. IT. Flying cars, robots, atomic supermen, that sort of thing. Criswell said it best- “We are all interested in the future, for that is where we shall spend the rest of our lives.” And damn if he wasn’t right, ’cause I haven’t managed yet to live in the past, at least not for real.

I was reading an old Ray Bradbury story that was set in the far-off future year of 1978, and I hate to complain and pick on such a “legend,” but man, was he wrong. I’m sorry Mr. Sci-Fi Legend Guy, but I’m not living on a Mars colony. And my “atomic-powered short-wave radio” doesn’t exist. So what’s the deal?

I’m very well-read and I’ve seen tons of movies. I know what I’m talking about. I want my ray gun! I want my personal robot! I want my own jet pack, flying car, and combination space radio-slash-TV! My hat is supposed to protect me from atomic fallout and my food is supposed to be in pill form. I should commute to work by rocket and my personal computer should be about the size of my bedroom and have the computing power of thirteen abacuses.

But I know that old movies and TV shows can be somewhat unreliable when it comes to showing things as they are. You just have to be selective. For example, I don’t really take The Jetsons seriously. How can you? It is so phony. I think that show has the worst special effects I have ever seen. That car folding into a briefcase? I can see the CGI. And the actors? I don’t know who played George Jetson but he was so weird looking! He had a head that was about as big as his torso. I’ve tried reading the credits, but they don’t tell you who played any of the Jetsons. It may be for their safety- can you imagine how many stalkers Judy Jetson had? I must have written her thirty or forty letters when I was a kid and she never wrote back. I was so stupid back then- it took me until I was 23 to realize that she lives in the future! She hasn’t gotten the letters yet!

Movies do a little better job. I like Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. These two goofy delivery guys get mixed up for scientists and, somehow, end up piloting a ship to Mars, with two bumbling crooks along for the ride. Now it may sound silly, but the film has a rather complex inner-logic and the use of soft-focus cinematography is particularly effective, especially in the sublimely genius sequence when Costello is blasting people with his freeze ray. If any film could be held up as proof of the auteur theory of filmmaking, this is certainly it. Subtle in its satire and carefully nuanced in the use of pre-Marxist Soviet propaganda, my only problem is that how can these be the same guys who played janitors who met Frankenstein and Dracula in a previous film? That part I could never figure out- when did they change careers from janitors to delivery men?

At any rate, that future was clear- men would travel to Mars and meet a race of giant dogs, as well as mechanizing the Statue of Liberty so it can duck when a rocket flies too close overhead. We would all have freeze rays and we would wear spiffy space suits. I want my spiffy space suit!

So far the future is not all it was cracked up to be. I blame Congress. They keep holding up all those laws I want them to enact. Just last month I sent Congress my Bill For The Construction Of Lunar Radium Mines. And what did they do? Sent an FBI guy with a search warrant to my house. It’s like they don’t appreciate all my help.

I sent Congress my ideas for a Rocket-Man Brigade to protect us from Interstellar Plutonian Ice Hounds and all they did was pass some sort of dopey Iraq troop-funding bill.

So as I get older I’m resigning myself to the fact that maybe I won’t be getting that robot any time soon. I may not live on the moon or have a Martian space-dog as my pet, but at least I have my fifth-grade imagination. And maybe I don’t have a jet pack or own a space-yacht, but I know that I will someday. Flash Gordon said so!

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A Southern Sojourn

11 Nov

from February 9, 2007

Blog time! The happiest day in anyone’s life is when he reads a new Blog by the Master. Ahhh, blogging. Is there a greater pastime on God’s green Earth? I think not! And what greater satisfaction can there be than knowing that, just by typing, I can put a ray of sunshine into a poor reader’s otherwise wasted, wasteful, and wretched life. The power! The infinite satisfaction! The unbridled egomania I am currently experiencing! YES! THE POWER IN MY VEINS! I am a BLOGGING GOD!

But that’s all a  load of crap. (Or is it? Hmmmmmmm……OK, it’s not. I am an evil genius.) I am no more a master blogger than I am a master of square dancing.

THE DATE- June 30, 1993.

THE PLACE- Old Man Ferguson’s  Barn, Lexington Kentucky

THE EVENT- 48th National Square Dance Competition

ME- “It’s great here in Cincinnati. Which way to Riverfront Stadium?”

MAN IN OVERALLS- “Boy, you’s in the Kentucky Squaar Dancin’ competition.”

ME- “Huh?”

I didn’t do so well that night. I came in dead last. However, after the dancing there was a blueberry pie bake-off and I took the Blue Ribbon. My secret ingredient? Love.

But I digress. As I often do. If you know me you know I digress. If you don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself- My name is bmj2k and I digress.

Square dancing is a very Southern thing. Specifically, it is a very white southern thing. Now I have nothing against any race (ha ha, I love it when I bullshit!) but let’s just say that the last time I was down South (like you’d catch me down South) I didn’t see Jay-Z square dancing. I’m just saying.

But I kid because I love. I love the South. It has given us so much. Moonshine. The Dukes of Hazzard. The Cannonball Run and the Cannonball Run 2. (Not three.) There is even some culture down there. (I’ll let you know when I find some.) The finest breakfast I ever had was in West Virginia.

I was about eleven years old and we (the family, that is. Not the Manson Family, the Jacobs Family, which has it’s own very peculiar kind of indoctrination. But I digress. [Told you I do that.]) decided to go to Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Gardens. Colonial Williamsburg is cool if you are a grandmother or really easily entertained. It is an old colonial (d’uh) town and has old colonial buildings and old colonial people walking around. Yes, the people are colonial. Some of them are nearly 250 years old. However, it has the distinction of having a real, honest-to-goodness haunted house. The Wyth House is supposedly haunted by the ghost of an old woman. I didn’t see any ghosts that day, but trust me- all of Williamsburg is haunted by the ghosts of lame past.

Busch Gardens is really a cool amusement park but was marred by two problems. First, instead of wearing a normal baseball cap on a sunny day, I wore a stupid tri-cornered Revolutionary War thing I begged Dad to buy me in Williamsburg. It was so geeky. I wore it the next day to the park and was so blinded by the sun that I begged Dad to buy me a baseball cap. He did, but the look he gave me will stay with me until the day I day. “Boy,” the look said, “this is it.” I knew at that moment that I had lost all respect from my Dad forever. Trust me- it was enough to make a more sensitive kid cry. But not me because I was (and am) a prick. The second problem involved my brother. We were walking through the park, which was only half crowded. Out of the blue a young couple came walking toward us and, I am sure this was on purpose, they spilled a whole grape drink on my brother, laughed, and kept on walking. It was the single biggest example of rotten behavior I had ever seen until I started doing rotten things to other people.

But I was going to tell you about the breakfast. (Thought I forgot? Well did you? Huh?) It was buffet-style, meaning you can get as much as you want as long as you take another plate. It was the first time I discovered that you can have eggs, fried chicken, and a well done sirloin steak for breakfast. (It was also the place where my mother, in a near-duplicate of something my grandmother did decades earlier, committed petty larceny. So evil, going back at least two generations, runs in my genes.)

(Quick aside- are there two men more fey than Spence and Danny on The King of Queens? I ask because these two allegedly straight men are sharing a bedroom, despite the fact that they live in a two-bedroom apartment. And their beds are no more than three inches apart, effectively meaning that they sleep in the same bed.)

But, ahhh, the South. Smells like a urinal.

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Want more blogs? GOOD NEWS! Transcripts of this and any of my blogs are available from me at the nominal fee of $9.95 each. CD’s are $14.95 with a bonus commentary by Sir Ian McKellan, and a DVD of Sean Connery reading my blog aloud while sitting in a comfy high-backed leather chair don’t yet exist but I will gladly send you a DVD of me cashing your check for only $24.95.

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