Blog: Barely Awake In Frog Pajamas

Everytime I channel surf the past few weeks, there's Ralph Macchio sulking, being oblivious or - most often - getting his ass kicked by every living soul whose path he crosses in one of the three Karate Kid flicks. I was roughly the age of high school student and social pariah Daniel-san, the character Macchio was playing, when The Karate Kid opened in theaters in the summer of 1984. (Macchio was, at the time, already in his forties) The movie was, as I recall, an unexpected hit. I saw [...]

I was watching Pardon The Interruption the other morning before work when I heard Mike Wilbon mention something that - by his reference and my recognition - dated both of us. The clicker. The first people that I knew who were capable of dictating commands to the television by merely lifting their fingers would have been my grandparents. My brother and I were gobsmacked. We couldn't wait to get our hands on The Clicker for a spin through the dial. With half a dozen channels, it [...]

(rebroadcast from February, 2010, now with added calcium) I read the news most days. But, unlike my parents and their generation, I don't make a point to watch a news broadcast each day, merely pausing on the news channels if something catches my attention. The other night, as I was watching some basketball, there was a commercial for the local news. It was some perky chick yammering about a murder suspect possibly being loose - or, in the parlance of our legal system, on the lam - in [...]

As a kid watching television in the '70s, it was understood that the future might involve dealing with intelligent apes, urban overcrowding and pollution, or a noctunal clan of mutant cultists. It was also understood from the regular airings of Planet Of The Apes , Soylent Green , and The Omega Man after school or on late-night television that the one man with the skills to survive in these various dystopian futures - at least until the final reel - was Charlton Heston. Heston was teaching us about survival [...]

(reimagined from a post from February, 2011) I commute. I do so relunctantly and under silent protest and, on good evenings, I can block out Sting howling the lyrics to Synchronicity II , which plays on a loop in my head during the drive. “ Another working day has ended Only the rush hour hell to face Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes Contestants in a suicidal race ” The morning trek, though, is typically Zen. The [...]

Paloma has, on more than one occasion, wandered into the living room of our treehouse to find me watching an episode of Finding Bigfoot . Her usual response is to shake her head. She doesn't share my fascination at the possibility of an unknown species of giant hominids living in the most remote forests on the planet. (but I still think she's swell) I have no expectations that, if the sasquatch does exist, the intrepid quartet of Finding Bigfoot will actually do so during the course of the hour. [...]

I'm not going to gild the lily here, partly because I'm a straight shooter, but mostly because I am neither a metallurgist nor a botanist. For the past year or so, we've been receiving an increasing amount of traffic here with each month attracting more hits than ever before. It seemed as though the good times would never end. However, something has happened in the last week. Traffic here has plummeted to less than half of what it had been over the last six months. In the corporate world, this situation would [...]

(rebroadcast from February, 2009) Here, it is often said that if you don’t like the weather, wait twenty-four hours. Actually, I’ve been trying to inject new blood into that maxim by saying, if you don’t like the weather, move ten feet to the right. It hasn’t caught on, yet. The reason I’m even considering the weather is that after a couple days of warmth, tonight it’s cold again and I’m trying to remember the last place I lived that didn’t have a draft. [...]

I got sucked into The A-Team on cable. Three hours later, I had watched about an hour and a half more of the exploits of Hannibal Smith and friends in movie form than I had ever watched of the television series. As I was a kid at the time The A-Team initially aired, I was well aware of it. It was enormously popular for awhile and I imagine I undoubtedly checked it out for ten or fifteen minutes on a Tuesday night. (with five, six channels and no cable, [...]

(a couple days late, but...our annual tribute to one of our favorites...) That’s right. If it hadn’t been for a miserable little tumor, Warren Zevon might be having cake and wearing a silly hat today. Unfortunately, Mr. Bad Example couldn’t be with us. My interest in Zevon began with his 1987 album Sentimental Hygiene . I was in college and the fact that the members of R.E.M. served as Zevon’s backing band legally mandated my curiosity. The album left me slightly underwhelmed but intrigued enough [...]

It's supposed to be the coldest night of the year tonight. It was cold during the winter of '81/'82. Or maybe it wasn't and I merely recollect it as so. I do know for certain that it was during that winter that time I might have previously spent sprawled out in the family room watching television was being spent sprawled out in my bedroom, listening to the radio. Music had become an increasing curiosity in my world over the previous year or so as I realized that the subject was being broached as [...]

(a rebroadcast from January, 2011...) The first time that I ever participated in a store inventory was in college. It was a small record store - a dozen of us, max - and it lasted until about two o'clock in the morning. It was a drag. Several years later, working in a record store so large that we had a staff of sixty or so to cover the fifteen hours we were open each day, I gained a dose of perspective. This store took inventory two times a [...]

Growing up in a basketball mad state should have made my friends and I rabid about the NBA franchise a mere two hours north of us. We weren't. No one was. Yes, it was a basketball mad state, but that fervor was stoked by the high school teams dotting the hinterlands and the in-state college programs, several of which were national powers. Our NBA team during those childhood years was mediocre at best and abysmal at worst. And boring. Yet we were NBA fans and fans [...]

To your left, you will note Pat Benatar as she appeared in the video for Promises In The Dark , a Top 40 single for her in the autumn of 1981 from the album Precious Time . I was a thirteen-year old boy that summer when Precious Time was released. You don't have to work for NASA to calculate the appeal. Of course, I dug the music, too. Everybody dug Pat Benatar. Even though I was listening to little radio, I was well familiar with [...]

(reconstituted and reheated from January 2009) I’ve never really been one of those music fans who take offense to artists who license their songs for use in commercials. I wouldn’t consider myself such a purist, believing Melt With You helping to entice me to want a burger devalues the song. I’ve also been blessed with a superhuman ability to, for the most part, tune out commercials. (working in record stores during one’s formative years will nurture skills in selective listening). [...]

I have no idea when I became aware that new albums and cassettes didn't simply sprout randomly in the bins and racks of record stores but, rather, arrived on a (theoretically) predetermined date - the street date. As I became a music consumer in the early '80s, this information wasn't at your fingertips and was as much rumor and speculation as actionable intel. At the time, I was frequenting record stores like mall staples like Camelot and Record Bar, cooler chains like Peaches , and a few smaller independent stores like Globe . All [...]

Now that I've wasted so much time here establishing a few traditions, I'd be remiss to honor not them... Almost every artist in the history of mankind has at least one title in their catalog that is a compilation, a stopgap collection meant to maintain interest between releases (often to boost holiday sales) or to fulfill a contractual obligation. This is the former, a chance to make use, one more time, of a lot of wasted time over the past twelve months. Four years ago, I reflected on the annual, childhood tradition of [...]

(originally appeared in December, 2009) I haven't really been all that enamored with The Cleveland Show , the latest spin-off from Family Guy . I am still holding out on a final decision, though, as it did take me awhile to warm up to American Dad . (though I dug Roger, the incorrigible alien, from the start) The other night they made a reference to Peabo Bryson which was amusing because, musical considerations aside, Peabo is a fun word to say and it is a [...]

(remixed from Christmases past, but the sentiments remain true) Though it was warm enough this morning to have a window open, the forecast tonight is for cold and the central heat is keeping the chill of the outside world at bay with a steady, soothing hum. The only light radiating – other than that from the television’s glow – is from the lights of the Christmas tree which Paloma has trimmed with care. (and, astoundingly, Ravi has not attempted to scale...yet) On the television screen is [...]

Dela, dela ngyanya dela... Love, Me Johnny Clegg & Savuka - Dela (I Know Why the Dog Howls at the Moon) from Cruel, Crazy Beautiful World (1989)