No time like the future

Runnin on not much sleep and here is why. Trying to draw my plan for Starkville 2028. I have had it with ink for a while, plan to spend the coming two weeks in Photoshop.

Just ahead...

I'm watching the Today show and, as usual, they come out of commercial breaks and tease three or four stories for a couple of minutes before reporting anything, to the degree that they spend about as much time teasing the news as they do reporting it. But it is a little different today because they are teasing a piece about "things that drive you crazy." Matt Lauer and Al Roker chime in with their pet peeves, and they wander up to the masses assembled in Rockefeller center and garner responses such as spam email and waiting for the doctor. Coming up we will be talking with some experts that will share with us their tips on how to deal with these things that drive us all crazy. At first I just add "teasing the news" to my little list, then I wonder if they are aware of the self referential joke, and realize that of course they are. They are smart people who still aspire at times to be serious newsmen, and I don't doubt that they hate the teasing just as much as anyone does. But their producers know that teasing the news works, it keeps viewers from changing the channel, and of course it costs a lot less to tease the news that is coming than it does to actually go out and do real stories to fill in that time. Watching Matt Lauer, I think he is really getting into this meta joke, this bit of ironic theater. Coming up, what REALLY drives you absolutely CRAZY?
One thing that really drives me crazy is men who get to be my age and realize that they are going bald and so they just shave off all their hair, as if to say, OK, I MEANT TO DO THIS. I myself am losing some hair up top, but I continue to cut and comb my hair the way I always have and it still looks about the same in the mirror. But I do have an issue with the mirror of late. I have always thought that men who part their hair on the left are dorks and never understood why they did it. It looks totally stupid. So I part my hair on the right and always have, and I like the way it looks in the mirror: normal. It wasn't until I turned 40 that I realised, THE IMAGE IN THE MIRROR IS REVERSED. That guy I am looking at, even though I part my hair on the right, his is parted on the left! So it is parting your hair on the left that looks normal, on the right looks dorky. That was a tough day, when I figured that out. For the last twenty-five years, I have been making a total ass of myself.

Busy busy busy

Stats and Design II are taking all my time. Not much time for blogging. Nevertheless, I have stumbled upon two more great ways to waste time on the web: moistworks, a blog where young and intelligent people punctuate anecdotes about their lives with obscure mp3s, and lines and colors, a blog about graphic art and illustration. I put them in my fritters list, just to the right on your computer screen there. I call them fritters because it is through them that I "fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way."

Newlywed Game

As a child in the seventies, I really enjoyed watching the Newlywed Game. I was too young to really get the point of the show, which was to try to get newlyweds to reveal details about the more salacious aspects of their lives using suggestive and cheesy code words with questions like “when your husband goes to the supermarket, what item is he most likely to squeeze?” Sometimes the symbolism was cheesy in ways that were moronic or simply absurd, such as “what’s your husband’s favorite condiment?” The game show had a scripted doppelganger in the hit “Three’s Company,” which stretched innuendo to the outer limits of stupidity every week, and got a lot of mileage out of creating confusion over whether the symbol or the thing symbolized was the matter at hand. A clever contestant on the Newlywed Game (a rare bird indeed) could read the code and respond in code, keeping the joke alive. More often, the participant would take the question at face value and try to answer honestly, or jump over to the sexual act referenced and discuss that in some sort of new code, or be totally confused as to which way to go, and in any case, we would get the host Bob Eubanks’ deadpan reaction and, if it was funny enough, the audience would squeal.
As a ten-year-old, I saw something completely different. I saw the game as a competitive exercise in observational acuity, like the Encyclopedia Brown stories. I wondered how well I would do at it, say, if it were me and my sister up there. Does our toilet paper dispenser have a little spring in it or not? What is on top of the refrigerator right now? I imagined the couples prepping each other in the car on the way to the studio. Quick, honey, what color is mother’s car? What is my bra size? If you could trade any part of my body with that of another woman, which part would you choose and with whom?