Jeff

While taking a shower this morning, something popped into my tiny Duke head from way out in left field.  Something to do with the 3 Stooges.  Go figure.

In an episode I saw a year or so ago, Moe, Larry and Curly (or was it Shemp?) were running some kind of store.  I think it was a general store, where they sold a little of everything.  And apparently they owned it, which triggers a lot of unrelated questions…

Anyway, a woman came in and said she needed to purchase a light bulb.  And the thing was shockingly expensive; I can’t remember the price, but it was way more than they cost now, without even taking inflation into account. 

And before she paid, um, Moe, he screwed the thing into a light socket built into the top of the checkout counter, just to make sure it worked. 

None of this was part of the comedy, it was apparently just the reality of light bulb-buying in the ’30s and ’40s.  I guess they were so unreliable, and expensive, stores provided a place where you could test them in advance.

It’s one of those things that people probably didn’t even question or contemplate, which have become extinct over time.

So, while working the shampoo into a lather, careful not to disturb the wasp-built skin raisin on the back of my head, I tried to come up with things that were common when I was but an ugly youngster, which have now gone away. 

And here’s what I came up with:

Taking your Coke bottles back for a deposit.  That’s what we called it: Coke.  It didn’t matter if it was Dr. Pepper or 7UP, and this led people to say things like, “Mountain Dew is my favorite kind of Coke.”

But I’m already getting off the subject…

Every grocery store had a sticky playpen-type thing right inside the front door, where people would put their “empties.”  Some of the more fancy-pants places had an empties steward, who would issue you a receipt, but usually it was just done on the honor system.

When you purchased more sodas, in heavy-ass glass eight-packs, the cashier would say, “Did you bring in your bottles?”  Then they’d knock forty cents, or whatever, off the price of your new “Cokes.” 

And if you didn’t bring your empties, you’d have to pay a deposit on the reusable bottles.

Since empty bottles were worth a nickel each, which was a lot of money to a kid in 1972, we all scavenged for them.  Put in a little effort, and you could keep yourself in bubble gum through bottle deposits alone.  Oh, it was a genuine cottage industry…

Neighbors sharing a party line.  My grandmother, who lived across the street from us, shared a line with two or three other houses when I was young.  Can you imagine? 

I remember picking up the receiver once, to call my mother at her job, and a fat teenager from two doors down was on there yammering to one of her friends.  My grandmother said, “Oh, she usually doesn’t stay on very long.  Just try it again in a few minutes.” 

The whole thing seems bizarre to me now.

Letting the TV warm-up.  Back when televisions had big ol’ tubes in them, we’d have to allow time for them to “warm up.”  This was part of the TV-watching experience:  “Jeff, if you want to watch Rat Patrol tonight, you’d better turn the TV on, so it can start warming up…”  Heh.

Also, when you turned it off, there was a tiny white dot in the middle of the screen for a minute or so.  My brother and I would put our thumb over it, then take it away to see if the dot had disappeared yet.  And my mother or grandmother would yell at us, “Quit getting fingerprints all over the TV screen!  Who cares about the dot?!  Just don’t worry about that dot!”

Adjusting the aerial.  Every house in the ’60s and ’70s had an eyesore conglomeration of aluminum attached to its roof, which was designed to improve TV reception during that pre-cable era.

My grandfather, never satisfied with the picture, was all the time leaning a ladder against the house and climbing onto the roof to adjust the antennae.  Or, as he called it, the “aerial.”

This always made me nervous, because my grandfather wasn’t a young man, and I didn’t see why a person would risk their life just so they could get Flipper crystal-clear.  But whatever.

Price stickers in stores.  As weird as it now seems, stores used to put prices right on their merchandise.  Indeed, when I worked at a grocery store after high school, we’d have to hit everything with a price gun before putting it on the shelf. 

There were no scanners, just small pieces of paper stuck to the side of everything, with the cost printed on them. Crazy.

I hate to admit it, but we used to switch stickers at a local discount store, on LPs.  I remember buying a copy of Exile On Main Street, a double album, with a sticker off a bottle of Body on Tap or something.  The key, you see, was to identify a cashier who either a) didn’t have a clue, or b) didn’t give a single dingle.

One time Rocky and I were trying that particular scam, at the same store, and some Baby Huey dancing bear poofter brought the hammer down on us.  We had to make a run for it.  Not my proudest moment…

Would you like your carbons?  Back in the day, before fancy-pants approval systems were perfected, credit cards were a huge pain in the ass.  You’d have to take the customer’s card, attach it to an apparatus, lay a form across it and slide a big handle back and forth to make a rubbing of the numbers.

Ka-chunk!

Then you’d have to pull out a booklet, which was updated every couple of weeks, and check to make sure the card hadn’t been stolen or the person’s account wasn’t closed.  Or, as we did at Peaches Records, we’d have to call the credit card company and get an approval code over the phone.

The whole process could take five minutes or more.  It was a real ball-masher.

Plus, the form had carbon paper in the middle of it, and paranoid customers always wanted to take it with them.  You know, so someone couldn’t dig the carbons out of a dumpster, and create a duplicate card with it.

I instantly disliked people who requested their carbons, because they were all doucheketeers.  They usually acted like they were a little smarter than everybody else; there was a certain smugness to the carbon-folk.

Making soda tab chains.  When I was a youngling the tabs off a can of soda, or beer I suppose, would actually pull all the way off.  Consequently, the entire Earth was littered with pull-tabs.

So, kids used to collect them, and link them together to make a chain.  I remember camping somewhere, probably Myrtle Beach, and some people we didn’t know made the world’s longest soda tab chain.  I mean, that shit stretched an entire city block!

But, of course, that was all ruined when do-gooders forced soda and beer manufacturers to start using the current style of tabs, which stay attached to the can.  Wotta rip-off.

And speaking of littering…  Is my mind playing tricks on me, or did everyone just throw their trash out car windows during the ’60 and ’70s?  I can remember people driving down Dunbar Avenue and, without thinking twice about it, slinging a whole sack of saucy Dairy Queen garbage through the passenger-side window.

What the hell?  How was that ever acceptable?  It makes me laugh, just thinking about it.

And now it’s your turn…  I need to go to work, so you guys can take it from here.  What things were once common parts of our everyday lives, and are now completely gone?  Use the comments link.

And I’ll see ya tomorrow.

Now playing in the bunker.

I’m very concerned about High-Neck and Vanelli.  Well, concerned might not be the accurate word; nosy is more like it. 

They live in the neighborhood, and our kids briefly played with theirs.  The mother, High-Neck, is part-giraffe, I think,  and for one entire summer had complicated medical scaffolding surrounding her head.  She’s also known by the names Tower-Neck and Factory Chimney.

And the father looks something like this.

One of their kids (all of them?) has a severe allergy, and will supposedly blow up like Mrs. Puff if someone so much as drives past their house and yells, “Peanut brittle!”  High-Neck raises nine varieties of hell if the school serves snacks manufactured in the same town a peanut is rumored to reside, and always seems ready to throw herself on a sandwich while screaming “NOOOOOOO!”

Anyway, their yard used to be a thing of beauty.  In fact, it was featured in the newspaper a couple of years ago, after winning some sort of excellence-in-landscaping award.  But you should see it now…

I don’t know what’s going on down there, but the High-Neck/Vanelli home is in a disturbing state of disrepair.  The grass is uncut and unkempt, their screen door is hanging open and curved like a potato chip, one of their front windows is broken, and the wooden archway that used to cross their sidewalk is now lying on its side, in pieces.

The hell, man?  Toney says she hasn’t seen the kids or ol’ Periscope Throat all summer, and we’re wondering if there’s some kind of marital difficulty going on.

But we don’t know for sure… and it’s driving us (me) crazy.  Toney really needs to tap into her vast network of Aunt Bees and Clara Edwardses, to get the official gossip line on this deal.  I mean, seriously.

We need closure on the chip-door.

And speaking of things marital, Toney and I will be celebrating our fifteenth wedding anniversary tomorrow.  Fifteen years!  It’s hard to believe it’s been so long.

We were married in Atlanta by a judge who hosted (hosts?) a local radio show, had a party that night at Swissotel (a kick-ass party, I might add), then spent a week in San Francisco.

And now it’s fifteen years later and we have a couple of great kids, a neurotic border collie, and a home in the suburbs of, um, Scranton.  I have a feeling the Jeff & Toney of 1993 wouldn’t have too big of a problem with any of it…

I’m just glad the Jeff of 2008 remembered the date.  ‘Cause I don’t have a very good track record in that department; not very good, at all.

Over the weekend I added a few more complete catalogs to the Big iPod:  My Morning Jacket, Drive-By Truckers, You Am I, Kings of Leon, The Shins, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Let’s Active, Luna, and Dramarama.

Yeah, I know a few of those bands only have two or three albums.  What of it?  I still added their entire catalogs.

I also bought the Fleet Foxes CD at Best Buy on Sunday.  It was on sale for $7.99, so I took ’em up on it.  And yeah… I’ve only listened to it a couple of times, but do you think I could get my money back?  Holy shitknuckles.  It sounds like Crosby, Stills, and Nash – if they’d been born during the Rennaissance period.

But maybe it’ll grow on me?  We’ll see.

Circuit Shitty advertised “All CDs $9.99!” on Sunday and Monday, and I told the Secrets we should go over there and buy a couple Beatles albums we don’t already have.  Since, you know, they’re getting all Beatles-fanatic on me.

So we went, and it was a complete mess.  The rock section of their CD department is one half-aisle, and everything was trashed.  Don’t they ever straighten that shit?  Well, I think I know the answer to that question, and the answer is NO.

The only Beatles albums we could find were novelty items like Love, and Let It Be…Naked.  No thanks.  Call me a radical, but I was thinking more along the lines of Abbey Road. 

Disgusted, I began the process of storming out in a huff, when the older Secret found a copy of Magical Mystery Tour, mixed into the Led Zeppelin section (why hadn’t I thought to look there?!), so we bought it.

But I still can’t stand that store.  On account of the suckin’.

And speaking of stores that suck so hard it hurts, why has Wal-Mart decided to make their new logo a cartoon rendering of a butthole?  I don’t understand the logic of such a move.

Sure, I’ve sometimes remarked, while navigating the aisles of a Wal-Mart, that we’d somehow wandered into America’s unwiped ass.  But to create an advertising campaign around it?  It seems bizarre.

Plus, where’s the hyphen?  That kind of thing bothers me, as well.

And just so we’re clear, I don’t have a problem with Wal-Mart on some high-horse anti-capitalistic basis; I have no issue with their success.  No, I just can’t handle the clientele. 

Big fat mamas walking around in stretched-out Flashdance shirts… Bobby Hill children with tails at the base of their buzzcuts… skeletal men in wife-beaters and filthy baseball caps…  It’s too much for me.

Where we live there’s a Target located next-door to the Wal-Mart, and I go to Target every time.  I don’t care if I have to pay an extra dollar per item, it’s worth it to me.  Toney shops at Wal-Mart, but not when I’m with her.  She knows I’ll only complain and bitch at length, and plans accordingly.

I used to work with a woman who bought everything from Wal-Mart: groceries, clothes, household items, oil changes, tires, eyeglasses, contact lenses, haircuts…  You name it, she purchased it from the Walton family.

She was telling me all this, seemingly proud of her accomplishment, and I half-heartedly told her I prefer Target.  And man, she acted like I’d just called one her kids ugly.  The woman flew off the handle, and started getting all passionate with it…  Fukkin crazy.

Another store I can’t stand, ironically enough, is Party City.  For some reason that place makes me sad, and I do whatever I can to avoid it.  The Secrets like going there around Halloween, because they have the insane decorations and whatnot, but it always leaves me feeling melancholy.

What chain stores do you hate, on a primal level like that?  Tell us about it, won’t you?

And I’m going to leave you now with a bunch of fresh Smoking Fish pics, here and here.  Thanks, as always!  And keep ’em coming.  Our logo, man, he gets around…

Plus, I have special treat for you folks today:  the return of lakrfool!  It’s been almost a year, but he’s back and funny as ever.  Check it out.  Great stuff.

And I’ll see ya tomorrow.

Even though I’m obsessing about this crap, I try not to write about it too much.  ‘Cause I know you guys don’t really give a tiny cashew-shaped shitlet – and rightly so.  But this new site is giving me a case of the recta-hives.

Well, not the new site, exactly…  More specifically, the way the new site works with the old one.  My idea was to integrate the two, take advantage of the superior WordPress attributes for the daily updates, but still use FrontPage for the Smoking Fish gallery, and things like this.  Even though FP sucks overall, it does do a few things well.

But I couldn’t get them to work together.  I don’t know if it’s jealousy, or paranoia, or what, but they just don’t like each other.  I hope not too many of you saw it, but last week the bunker cam threw a hissy-fit and turned into nothing but a HUGE collection of random letters and numbers and lightning bolts.  Wotta mess.

Also, I had two homepages for a while, and it confused (or as one of my Little League coaches used to say, cornfused) Google.  The old page was still receiving a lot of traffic, because of the “home” links at the bottom of every freakin’ update, and my stats were being split and diluted. 

Consequently, our Google overlords demoted the Surf Report from a PageRank of five, down to a three.  Which means we’re less “reliable” now, and will be listed lower in search results.  And I can’t have that.

But, I’m working on all this stuff, and will get the bugs hammered out of it soon.  In fact, I think I’ve finally unlocked the mystery of the FrontPage situation, and it’s working at the moment.  If it continues to cooperate, I’ll have a metric shitload of great new Smoking Fish sightings to share with you on Monday.

Also, I’m using the old bunker cam page again, for sentimental reasons.  What do you think, this or this?  Is there a preference?

Over the weekend I’m planning to build an easy index that can be used to navigate the FrontPage archives, which are pretty much hidden at this point.  And someday soon I’m confident I’ll be able to devote my full attention to The Ridiculousness again.

Thanks for your patience.

Yesterday I invested 12 British pounds ($22.03) in six months worth of access to the Clive Bull show archives.  Since I started my “new” job (coming up on a year already), I haven’t been able to listen to Clive, and really miss it.

So, I paid the money, downloaded his show from Wednesday night, and listened to the whole thing at work yesterday.  It was great.

I love radio and music, much more than TV and movies.  Give me a bunch of old Jack Benny mp3s, some Jean Shepherd, Phil Hendrie, and Singles Going Steady, and I’m one satisfied sumbitch.  But put me in front of a TV and I start to wince & fidget within thirty minutes…

And so it goes.

Have you ever paid cash-money for access to a radio show archive?  Or the members-only section of a website?  I used to pay Phil Hendrie $6.95 per month, but he stopped adding the material I wanted, so I quit.  What about you?  Is there anything worth it?

Last night I found myself locked into some kind of perpetual pee-loop with another man at work.  Are you familiar with this phenomenon?  You get into a pee-pattern that directly corresponds with someone else’s?  I don’t care for it.

In fact, I tried to break out of it by ingesting large amounts of liquids.  I thought I’d be able to force myself into a new sequence, and away from my accidental piss-partner.

But it didn’t work.  Either he had the same idea, or his bladder sensed the adjustment I’d made, and took action.

It was disturbing.  And since he was always the first to enter the bathroom (the cycles were off by roughly thirty seconds), I worried he might believe I was stalking him, and trying to catch a glimpse or something.

No, as far as I can tell, nothing good can come from a case of pissronicity.  I was glad when they let us go home, where I could whizz freely and without fear of generating whispered rumors at the Kit Kat machine.

And something very strange just happened to me.  Between the pee piece and now, Toney and I went to Scranton to get the propane tank filled, and stopped at a local yuppie bar on our way home. 

And not that it has anything to do with the story, but we had two pints of Sierra Nevada each – and the tab was only ten bucks.  Man, that’s simply excellent…  Must’ve been happy hour.

Anyway, when we got home I went inside and dropped my keys and crap, and returned to the car for the tank.  And while I was walking toward the front door some kind of insect swooped from the sky, and stung me on the back of the head! 

What the hell, man??  It slammed into my noggin, hitting it with great force.  And almost immediately I felt the old familiar pain, a memory from childhood.  I’d been stung by something predatory, with a big ol’ chip on its waspy shoulder. 

Shit, I’d been minding my own business; I wasn’t bothering anyone.  It’s a wonder I didn’t go cascading down the stairs.

As I entered the house I was squealing like a retard at a roller derby, and Toney asked what was wrong.  When I told her, her face contorted with the effort of trying to hold back laughter.  And this is funny, a man innocently walking down a sidewalk, and being poisoned from the sky?  This is what passes for comedy now??

Toney gave me an ice pack from the freezer, and I held it to the back of my head.  But she kept going into the kitchen, where I think she was secretly using a loaf of French bread as a laugh-muffler.  Unbelievable.

Now I’ve got a big ol’ knot on the back of my head, and I don’t feel quite right.  I suspect I’ve been infected with something, and will eventually end up like this.

What would just dive from the sky, stinger-first, aiming at the back of someone’s head?  I’ve never even heard of such a thing.  What is this, Africa??

I bet hair will start falling out of the knot, by midnight.  And then where will I be?  I probably won’t even be able to go to Sam’s Club for my Saturday hotdog feed.

How long has it been since you’ve been stung by an insect?  I think I was sixteen the last time it happened to me.  And maybe someday I’ll tell that story as well…  It was also traumatic. 

And I’ll leave you now with a question from the Stealing Clive Bull’s Topics desk:  what do you think is the ugliest car, currently in production?  What’s your opinion on that one? 

I’d give you mine, but I’m getting a little woozy here.  You know, from the bat-bite, or whatever.

See ya soon, hopefully.

Now playing in the bunker

On Saturday night we had our allotment of Fuller’s ESB, and were planning to cook burgers on the grill.  I went out there and fired-up that bastard, and came back inside to (heh) prepare the meat.  And when I returned to the deck, to begin the process, everything was shut-down.  The grill was completely cold, and refused to re-light.

Grrr…  It seemed like I’d only recently filled the propane tank, but Toney (who has some kind of crazy ability to remember when things actually happened) informed me it had been last summer, late in the season.  If she’d put forth a little more effort, I feel confident she could have come up with the exact date…   

So, we were out of gas, and I had several beers sloshing around in my great belly.  No way was I driving somewhere to get the tank filled, and risking a stay at a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

I asked Toney if she wanted to cook the burgers indoors, and that never really works for us.  They turn out tasteless, we make an ungodly mess, and the house becomes dominated by a heavy clinging funk.  There wasn’t much enthusiasm for that particular solution… 

So we decided to drag the charcoal grill out of the garage, and cook them old-school.  But the charcoal was apparently past its expiration date, and wouldn’t light.  It was like trying to make a pile of rocks catch fire.

What the hell, man??  If it hadn’t been for the beer, I probably would’ve flown off the handle, completely.  But, under the circumstances, I was only waving my hands around, and making exaggerated WTF? gestures.

We finally opted to pool our cash, and do a quick run to the Burger King drive-thru, a couple of blocks from our house.  So, we had corn on the cob, deviled eggs, baked beans… and Whoppers.  And, to tell you the truth, is wasn’t half-bad.

But whenever we’re forced deal with such a situation, at least once per summer, I think about a guy I knew in California.  The dude did everything by the book, and had a completely ordered life.  You know the type…

His garage, I shit you not, had a painted floor, and little squares of carpet upon which the tires of his two anal-retentive showroom-spotless cars rested at night.  And on the walls were photographs of various hotrods and whatnot – in frames.  He had framed art in his garage!

His clothes always seemed painfully pressed and neat, and his house looked like a drawing, not something from the real world.  It was amazing; every blade of grass on his lawn was exactly the same length, color, and thickness.  Or so I suspect.

And he had two propane tanks for his grill – just in case.

Needless to say, I mocked the man behind his back.  I called him Ol’ Two Tanks, and we made fun of his carpet squares on a semi-regular basis.  I mean, seriously; I’m only flesh and blood here.

But every time I run out of gas, with a plate of meat in one hand, and the other whipping through my Peter Brady hair… that guy gets the last laugh.  I can feel him sneering at me, from across the continent.  The smug prick.

And that leads me to the Question of the Day:  Ol’ Two Tanks is actually named Ed, and I was wondering… do you know any Eds?  If so, tell us about him, won’t you?  We need to get the lowdown on all these Eds, dammit.

And I’ll see ya next time.

Now playing in the bunker

For a few years Toney and I maintained a tradition of sorts, where we’d talk my parents into coming up here to watch the Secrets for a couple of days in early September, and the two of us would go somewhere for our anniversary.  I think we did it three years in a row, and then everything came off the tracks for some reason.
 
We were thinking about trying to resurrect it this year, by maybe attending a beer festival in the Poconos sometime in November.  We thought we could make a weekend of it, and rent a room at the resort, and the whole nine yards.
 
So Toney called the place a few days ago, to get the details.  And yeah, we won’t be going…
 
Anyone care to guess the package price for two nights in the so-called lodge, two dinners, two breakfasts, and passes to the festival?  Well, you don’t have to guess, ’cause it’s $800.
 
I’m sorry, but that ain’t gonna happen.  I had $350-$400 in my head, and I’m usually pretty good at predicting those kinds of things.  But this time the calibration was waaaay off. 
 
And what am I, Ted Turner here?  Screw it, we’ll just go to the Olive Barrel for dinner.
 
I have to work on Thursday, and Toney has to work on Friday, so our end-of-summer Knoebels extravaganza is also in jeopardy.  Our only option at this point is Saturday – at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend.
 
I love Knoebels, but you’ve got to do it smart.  And that means not going on weekends. 
 
On Saturdays and Sundays, for whatever reason, that place turns into a frothy sea of shitkickers, white trash, coal crackers, and fat little buzz-cut hicklets.  The whole place becomes overrun by the loudest, scraggliest, fattest, skinniest, back porch tattooed, cig-dangling, perpetually pissed-off gang of jescobillies this side of Boone County, WV.

And mister, nothing good can come from such a thing…
 
So, if it’s up to me, we won’t be going.  But, of course, it’s never up to me, so who the hell knows?  We’ll just have to see what happens.

I’ve been trying to convince the older Secret that the “panic” button on the back of my car remote controls an ejection seat.  I told him to be extra-careful not to accidentally push it, especially when I’m driving, because I’ll go rocketing through the roof and end up in the weeds behind Staples.

But he’s not buying it.

Our power bill for the month of July, when Sunshine & Mumbles were here, shot-up sixty dollars, then dropped back down to normal after they left.  Sixty bucks!  That’s a lotta extra juice.  Sunny’s lung-blower and that window-unit A/C they burned-up can apparently eat up some wattage.  Sweet Maria.

I have a powerful urge to buy some CDs; it’s been a long time (upwards of a month!) and I’m starting to get the shakes.  This weekend I plan to get myself right…  What do you think?  The new Hold Steady?  Fleet Foxes?  Randy Newman‘s latest?  Any guidance will be appreciated.

And speaking of music…  The Doors can flat-out ruin a good shuffle-play session.  Everything fits together nicely, even when the styles seemingly clash, but the Doors never fail to drag it all down with their mournful dirges and pseudo-poetry.  I think I might have to make a small adjustment to the Big iPod.

Surf Reporter Keith took the liberty of revising the Omen poster I included with yesterday’s post, to make it more relevant to the update.  Check it out.  He’s added Andy!

And I’ll leave you now with a Question that came to me only a few minutes ago, while having lunch and watching CNN.  Have you ever bought anything from an infomercial, or one of those ads they show on cable, for things like Aqua Globes or Mighty Putty or the Foot Egg, or whatever that hilarious thing is called? 

If so, tell us about it.  Did the item work as well as they said it would, or were you disappointed?  I have nothing to offer on this one, because I’ve never purchased any such products.  But what about you?  We’d like to know.

And I’ll see you guys tomorrow.