A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

We were in Florida the Thursday before Christmas, walking barefoot on grass in 80*+ temperatures, and headed off on our holiday pilgrimage to Wisconsin only
to step out of the car 24 hours later into 12″+ of snow and
negative-degree weather by Saturday. We spent 1 entire hour in a mall
parking lot Saturday night in a minor storm, and I was only trying to
get to a restaurant on the far side of it. We ended up walking at
least a quarter mile from a parking spot we pulled into just to get
out of the gridlock.

The only pair of shoes I brought ("Who
needs the weather channel?” I often sneer), soaked from shoveling,
froze to crispy solidity in an enclosed entryway where we were staying overnight. My
eyebrows often freeze to my glasses during said shoveling.

Safety tip: The windshield-wiper fluid that they sell you down south,
while full of bug-guts-removing goodness, has no anti-freeze in it and
will ice up your entire windshield, wipers, tank, and hoses, and kill
you if you dare venture north of the last Waffle Hut you can see from
the interstate.

Instead of heading to Michigan for the second half of the trip on Christmas eve as we planned, we were frightened into heading back the night before by threats of more snowstorms. Reminding me again why all weathermen must die, it never did snow any more, and it warmed up nicely the next day. My overnight white-knuckle drive on black ice with a squealing front wheel was for naught. Big three networks, I’ll come back to the first one of you who does a TV show featuring TV and radio meteorologists being assassinated. It can be a drama, comedy, reality show, I don’t care. There’s got to be a large demographic eager to see it.

The noise from the front wheels didn’t get better (it wasn’t merely ice build-up around the tires, as I’d hoped) and turned out to be bad wheel bearings. Sure, buy American cars– parts are supposed to last 100,000 miles, but if they don’t, hey, you can pay about 10% of the remaining value of your degrading investment to fix any little thing. I’d be against bailing out US automakers, but at least they employ and produce things, unlike the pachinko-parlor attendants in New York we threw billions of dollars at. We need another 9/11 to thin their ranks out a little, to paraphrase Bart Simpson.

After getting soaked for parts and labor by a chain that ought to be reputable, I got a call claiming that my rear wheel bearings may be bad, and I “should get those changed too because the ABS light is on on the dashboard and it might be a bad sensor but there’s no way to change it without changing the bearing.” Which makes no sense. After refusing, I was told “Hey, it might just be gummed up or something and it’ll clear out with a little driving.” Which makes me wonder how it became “gummed up.” Sure enough, it blinked on a few times then stayed out. Jerks.

Anyway, Christmas was fun in both states, and the drive back uneventful. I got a day of rest, then set out for 3 days of Scrabble in Tampa…

If the kids today stick to the “write what you know” philosophy, perhaps all that our future songsmiths will have to croon about is videogames, myspace, and bad super-hero movies. Actually, this kid is pretty funny, though, and if you follow this back to Youtube you have to admire the technology that enables this and other goofballs to cover each others songs and post new ones that are broadcast the world over.

And it’s an excuse to post my Wii Mario Kart code:

3566-2241-4484

I’ve only got 4 people on my list, c’mon, I know a lot of you have it by now…

I mentioned Yo Gabba Gabba last post, which probably isn’t familiar to anyone without a two-year-old running around the house. It’s probably the equivalent of what The Electric Company was to the ’70s, a “hip” learning show for kids with trendy design and a nod to pop culture.
The main part of the show features the guy in orange bringing out his boom-box case that holds little art-vinyl toy versions of the monster characters which he places in a miniature table-top environment where they come to life in Banana Splits fashion and have little sing-song adventures with some sort of moral or social lesson attached. Other segments are cartoons (with one by Evan Dorkin of Milk & Cheese fame), visits by rappers, indie bands, or hipster movie stars, and a guy from Devo teaches kids to draw.
It’s all pretty fun and the kid loves it, but mainly just the costumed monster parts. I liked the design of the sets and the characters with the urban pop-art kind of feel to it, and thought that they had something pretty original and strange until I came across this video from a 1960s or early ’70s Japanese kid’s show, translated as “Gimme Gimme Octopus.” Take a look:

Holy Christmas! Yo Gabba Gabba is lifted from this pretty much wholesale, albeit in a watered-down sense. But all the design elements are there. This particular episode is said to be one of the strangest– where did the baby octopus come from? Why does the walrus have it? Why are they fighting over it and abusing it? What happens to it at the end? Apparently the only weirder episode is an infamous lost reel where the rest of the animals beat the adult octopus to the point of brain damage.
Like anything else obscure, infantile, and/or Japanese, there’s plenty of info on the web if you search for Kure Kure Takora, including nerdish rundowns on the characters and what they represent, and plenty of video of other episodes.

Long Before Peter Frampton and Jim Henson, big band leader Alvino Ray mastered the talking guitar effect and well as the super creepy puppet. This clip is another of of those things that makes me yearn to wear a bad sports coat and giant Gatsby cap with a bow tie and pretend the last 60 years never happened. To live in an age free of irony– today, you couldn’t imagine anything like this being produced without an ironic smirk– the suits, the production, the monogrammed bandstands, the expertly-crafted and animated puppet, they were all intended to entertain with the best level of showmanship they could muster. All we get today is half-witted hipster stars doing a lame dance number on Yo Gabba Gabba in a sweatshirt. The pikers.

Alvino Ray is all but forgotten now, but he must’ve had some lasting influence since some beatnik villains on the ’60s Batman TV show shot everybody up with an “Alvino ray gun” that turned them into cardboard cutouts.

I know, of course, that the past wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t want to go back, really. I yearn for the pop culture and the design of the mid-20th century, but others, and I think mainly a religious-right part of society, really think life was better in the past. Or, at least, they think we’re morally worse off today, but they water the argument down to Victoria’s Secret commercials and videogames. Are those the signs that we’re going down the tubes?

They’ve forgotten a world dominated by blatant racism and sexism, where our PC “domestic violence” was a routine staple of situation comedies, where teenage sex and pregnancy were really the norm (my parents would’ve been a headline on FARK today, besides possibly being jailed or labeled sex offenders for life), alcoholism was another comic standard (and you were a putz if you were afraid to drive home drunk), doctors advised patients to smoke more, wars of imperialism were still being fought, our government experimented on unknowing subjects with drugs and diseases, nuclear weapons were tested in the open, regularly…

I found this article fascinating, about how the pop-culture image of the ’50s was really an invention of the late ’60s by some college kids who became Sha-na-na and created the whole American Graffiti/Grease/Happy Days fad. They popularized a decade devoid of things like polio and communist scares, the beat poets (and beatniks), and wholesale segregation. Sure, the one black guy in all of Milwaukee happened to show up on Happy Days. Real enlightened.

I like to think George Orwell was right in 1984 to some degree, but he didn’t foresee that it wouldn’t be the government that controlled the truth and our history, but that it would be the media. It’s inherent in most people to want that revisionism on some level, to make life bearable personally (I can forget about 50 bad golf shots after 3 good ones) or on a collective social level (let’s ignore those lynchings and pretend the south is really like The Andy Griffith Show), so it works without any real manipulation. When George Bush said “Oh, it’s never been Stay the Course!” after we’d heard him say “Stay the course!” a dozen times previously, the Newspeak wasn’t his fault. He probably had to go back and correct that at some point, explain what he meant, but the news outlets all played the clip and millions believe that it’s never really been “stay the course.” It doesn’t even involve partisanship, and I’m not even sure what it means, but it just happens, and it changed some people’s view of history in a small way.

Next: more cheap youtube posts that I hope won’t ramble on so badly. Enjoy the clip, though, I think it’s great.

Most of the playgrounds down here (and probably everywhere now) have these plastic slides that act like Van de Graaff generators, building up a static charge that will give small shocks and make a few strands of hair stand up. This particular park has an astro-turf surface that intensifies the whole experience, making audible pops and crackles every time a kid (or adult) touches something. And on this relatively cold and dry day, in combination with the nylon jacket, the effect was in full force. You can feel the charge pull all your body hair when you walk within a foot of the slides on days like this, like they were made of balloons that a thousand clowns rubbed in their wigs.
It looks like she’s sliding down (nonchalantly) at high speed, but actually I made her pose on the end of the slide before she stepped off and grounded herself, ruining the effect…