The Pixels of Dorian Gray

Great googly moogly! I was idly googly-mooglying Barb and my past lives as Late Night Monster Movie Hosties, when hoot toot and a hit, we now live forever on YouTube! It seems a citizen and taxpayer has treasured his 22-year old Millie tapes, and is digitizing them and posting them on the Millie channel! Not only that, but he has the uncommon good taste to start with one of the better shows, leastways as far as I remember them. I remember that particular show; and looking at the cuts from the show, I can honestly say that I only remember remember the infamous cold open. I don't remember any of the other inserts at all, but yep that's the show and that's Barb in the glasses and me with my hand up a puppet's hinder.

I expect I ought to make it a summer project to write down as much as I can remember of the life and times of those shows; except that of course we've long since tossed our treasure trove of memorajunquilia hauled around from storage to storage through the moves. We haven't looked at the tapes in 20 years; I assembled a few minutes of material for Barb's thesis show, as a humorous cold walk-in; and the learned toads evaluating said show were pretty darn aghast at the temerity of it all, probly woulda yanked that degree right outta her hands if it didn't make for bad form in academe. From a performance standpoint, I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the thing holds up (at least given the internal terms of the show itself): no air, pacing is good (well, not mine), all the pieces mix together, lighting stunk but we never changed the basic rig and some of the things we tried worked OK given they never tried this stuff before ... plus, it's entertaining and funny. That's the mark we were trying to hit -- be entertaining and funny, be worth staying up until 3AM Sunday morning.

I also can see now, which I couldn't see then, the huge influence of the Rabb on the show. The only time that Keith the Director and I had a serious Artistic Difference was when he accused me of writing a radio show and not a television show, to which I replied "You're the director, making it a television show is your job." Sure enough, the next week it started becoming more of a television show, and the more confident he got about videography stuff the more opportunities I wrote in. But peace and blessings be upon Al Gore for inventing the Internet, I found some air checks of the true Johnny Rabbitt, to whom I and many another Midwest teen wasted the hours of 7PM to 10PM every night between '64 and '68; and be damned if I can't see the Rabb in the show.

That's the real point for this meminiscence: Rabb n Bruno took the kids seriously, entertained on his terms and assumed we'd keep up with him, worked hard for the money and did Good Work. That got imprinted in whatever part of my brain drives the work; and every piece of art and work that I've made since then has got a piece of the Rabb in it. Unconsciously, that's all through those Millie clips: we had a lot of fun doing those shows, and even though we chose to make it look cheesy, we put a lot of work into the limited time and resources that we had available to us. And as a result, at least one teen in midKentucky held onto his tapes, because he got the message -- work hard, be smart, have fun. I am just floored and humbled by that thought, and will never again wonder if it's worth it.

I shall write our fan, and tell him the truth: we surely read his letter, and I hope we read it on the air -- usually the few we didn't read, we showed so that they could see that we got 'em. We taped every letter to the set, so that we'd see them every week. And I shall thank him, from the bottom of both of our hearts, for remembering and reminding.

Nom nom nom

Not only did I do a less-than-stellar job of Giving Up Something For Lent, I seem to be doing an excellent job of binging on the always available sugar products carefully placed in my path thereafter. Eat, eat, manga manga the devils urge as I stride forth purposefully from my secure hundredsquarefeet to the water cooler or, saints preserve cosset protect and defend me, the coffee pot. Looky looky Girl Scout Cookies the devils rejoice as I dump my tasty n scientific lunch all over my tastefully dented desk, has it been five years since we took them out the boxes (oh yes it has). Daddy I has made dessert Nan pronounces as I enter Chez Nous, fagged out from another day in the data mines searching for low-hanging bacon to bring home. Ach du lieber, mein head she's a buzzin from the sugar rush; while I go under the digital hood to stare balefully at the nonfunctioning modem stack and perfunctorily poke at it with a cyberstick to try to urge it, me and us back on line. So that I can do my taxes. Nom nom nom indeed, chortles Leviathan; I'm getting rolled in sugar for something, or else I'm getting rolled, and no sir, I don't like it.

Are we having fun yet?

Traveling to Las Vegas last week-plus, clearly located in the sub-basement of hell as evidenced by being in a valley below the desert floor, the young wahinis in the back of the plane began woo-hooing for the benefit of the rest of us stuck in the airborne tube. This followed by cha-chaing up and down the aisle, hooting "Viva Las Vegas", shimmying somewhat like someone's sister Kate, and generally confirming that some people do in fact have no shame. Can't say for the rest of my fellow Americans, a good number of which were not my fellow Americans but Germans in plastic cowboy hats traveling for a Swinging Bachelor Party with pockets full of euros and a banjo on their knees. I'm having enough trouble with the five hours from Dulles; seems to me that spending the better part of a day leapfrogging from world airport to world airport to get to Las Vegas is ... well, I hear Paul Scofield in my head chastising his on-screen son-in-law, "It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?" I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the plane making that connection; the Deutschers are yammering a mile a minute in Deutsch, the Young Wahinis would surely be classified a near occasion of sin were it not for the collective several hundred extra pounds unevenly distributed among the lot of them, the plane is yes orbiting, not descending -- that or the Luxor has been put on wheels sometime in the last couple of years and is being towed around the valley, and the pilot feels constrained to repeatedly crack wise about, wait for it, Lost Wages, nyuck nyuck nyuck ... if you just let me please get off this plane and go about my business I promise I'll wander the city in sackcloth n ashes buttonholing lawyers and advising repentance, or perhaps prance about flicking my tail and demanding that way be made for my master, the Marquis of Calabash, one ... Fortunately my reverie into 50s Let's Make a Deal Catholicism is interrupted by the plane finally landing, the cabin door popping open, and the promise of stepping into the perpetual cloud of nicotene glory that shrouds The Garden. Fi-na-ly.

Hello, what's this? We are not greeted by the perpetual cloud of nicotene glory and the asynchronous gonging of the airport slots that hold down the center of the D concourse. That's because no one's dispiritedly dropping quarter after quarter into the airport slots that hold down the center of the D concourse; and if no one's there to drop quarters then no one's there to fog up the biosphere with burning pipeweed either. In fact, the airport sounds remarkably like ... the Charlotte airport at eleven PM on a Thursday night. Except this is The Garden's airport, and it's seven PM on a Thursday night, and quite frankly downtown DC was a lot livelier. Something seems to be amiss here.

Continuing to my next milemarker on La Tour D'Enfer, I hike to the baggage carousel (I figure that if the only thing my airfare buys anymore is luggage check, we're going for it; besides, there's no room in the overhead bins as they seem to be full of, um, luggage and as I'm not a big fan of being klunked in the chin with steamer trunks swung out of the overhead bins I figure that the person behind me will appreciate me all the more for not klunking him or her in the chin with my steamer trunk), which me trusty pedometer tells me is a couple of miles from the jetway, and the cab stand snake line another half-mile or so beyond that. The snake line is about three hundred feet long and snakes back and forth on itself five times ... and there's no one in it. The line is still set up, I guess on the off-chance that a few thousand people might suddenly deplane, embaggage, and crave immediate transport to The Strip or adjacency. The Garden is the epicenter of wishful thinking. The Deutschers and I serpentine back and forth with teutonic determinism, the Deutschers because they cannot but follow the rules and me because I'm now hearing Peter Falk in my head urging me to "serpentine, Shelly, serpentine." Fortunately I have a driver who doesn't speak English, doesn't know where I'm going, doesn't have a map, doesn't have a GPS, insists on confusing "Carpenter's Training Center" for "Corporate Center", but does have a friend with a computer who can get on Mapquest and give him directions in any of several polyglot Arabic languages. All I know is we seem to be going back and forth a lot on the same nondescript industrial access road, the meter seems to be spinning like I'm buying gas (which come to think of it I am), and frankly none of us are getting any younger or prettier. I'm seriously considering breaking out into "Viva Las Vegas" my own damn self, but the irony is about as appealing as the gelatinous glop that's likely to be what remains for dinner tonight. Finally and quite by we stumble across my lodgings, right about the time the hack is berating me (this time in English) for not staying on the Strip in some whitened sepulchre he's familiar with.

This is going to be one productive week, ho ho. Can't hardly wait to get to work and hobnob with my brother wizards n such.

Now, one of these things is not like the other.
This
is not much like this
although both probly represent about the same investment of human and financial capital, adjusted for the time. Perhaps one day I shall do the math and confirm this, for no reason other than sheer cussedness. But one is nobler -- visibly so. Besides the WPA deco touchs (I particularly like the clocks on the intake stations, that tell me that it's Nevada Time on the left and Arizona Time on the right), I was touched by the dedication inscription: an Exact Representation of the stars in the night sky the evening of the dedication. This done in the certainty that someday Mankind would Journey to the Stars, exploring Strange New Worlds and New Civilizations, and generally Boldly Go Where No One has Gone Before; and when they did, and brought back snapshots, Learned Scientists would compare those pictures with the Night Sky Plaque and learn Something New. I'm OK with that.

I'm just having a hard time getting all deconstructivist with Phake Noo Yawk; I can barely work up enthusiam to get all deconstructivist with Real Noo Yawk.

Google me, I'm Irish

Things I do not like include the increasing certainty that I am not merely not on the leading edge of The Curve, not merely behind The Curve, but rapidly falling far enough back in the pack to not even know that there's an Ahead with a Curve somewhere in it. Apparently it's a wiki world, and me not even a wikiterial , sakes. I thin I'm somewhere still in the gawrsh it sure is cool not being dependent on The Man's mainframe, hyuk hyuk. Maybe it's because I dare to write on a Dell machine, which as Our Andrew never fails to point out is hardly the textbook def of y. Our Andrew is not a Mac bigot; he's been agitating for Alienware ever since the fabled Tector was a fabled pup, and we do take the opportunity to point out that Alienware has been oh how should we put it assimilated by Dell. But I think it's because I have resisted being assimilated entirely into the Googleplex.

I dunno: I like Word. I'm kinda fond of Excel. I like my files where I can find them. I'm not convinced of the wisdom of hanging my so-called intellectual property (which it's the equivalent of a Balmer rowhouse) out in a server farm in Oregon and trusting Larry Page and Sergey Brin to remain warm n fuzzy n Wozlike, and not morph overnight into dare I say it Bill Gates (insert scary Elmer Bernstein music here). Other than it seeming kinda incomprehensible that given power corrupts and absolute power corrupting absolutely how is it different that Gates' inherent evility stems from selling out to The Man with MS-DOS whereas Page n Blin are magically incorrupt even after The Biggest IPO Ever (insert Those Were The Days cue here, o so long ago in the fabled days of yore when disposable incomes strewed daffodils across the land and mortgage companies showered us with monopoly registered trademark money), I should very much like to know? Ah well, mebbe I should just retire to my detached garage and push globs of Turtle Wax into my T while I'm at it, or fahgeddabout this furshlugginger keyboard and just scribble all over the screen with my vaguely sharp crow quill and let the ink kinda ooze into the Aether.

Say, what is that giant rock heading our way out of the sky? Not to worry, it's just a commercial airliner. Although I'll grant that when TSA gains access control over everything, which will likely be in about a week or ten days given today's news, there might be advantages to having all of one's work stored in a server farm in Oregon, since the only place we'll be able to go in and out of without a biochip ID will be our living rooms. Well, I've always wanted to be a sim.

Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncey ...

It's hard to be a pedestrian in the city. But how else would I get to see the Wonder of the Age, the solar-powered trashcan.

You laugh. Behold the Big Belly, the pride of Seahorse Industries and the new secret weapon of Our Nation's Cities in the war against ism or litter, one:

This was even better than the forlorn Hillary supporters vainly trying to elicit any signifier of interest from commuters escaping from the subway tonight. Poor fools! Don't you know better than to get in the way of Very Important Suburbanites heading for their townhouses, so as to fire up their computers immediately upon entering and check their feeds for any updates more recent than when they left downtown an hour earlier?

See, you throw your trash into the belly of the beast; and then the solar-powered compactor solarly compacts your trash, carbonless footie-prints and all! Scoff scoff, I scoff at the PJM grid! By tossing my trash into this technological triumph, I strike a blow against the empire woo hoo!

Only thing is, it doesn't seem to work worth a patoot after dark. Maybe if I stood over it with a lit candle ...

Back to the future

Trying fecklessly to keep to a schedule with 2/3 of the boys down with the ague, laboring under the foolish assumption that a Nice Night of Family Television would be just the ticket, what should we discover but a TCM offering of 2001, uncut and remastered just like it was on the premiere roadshow engagement of spring 1968? Well, here's a teaching moment to show at least budding cineaste Andrew th' source of more movie cliches in the last forty years than I don't know what. We decided to play the "They ripped that off from (insert more contemporary pop reference here)", although I'm not entirely sure that the notion of backwards-compatible ery was chronologically sound ("I think the point is to establish that the earlier image shows who came first." "I saw my image first, so it came first." "No, it came second." "I'm not talking about who came second." "Who came first." "I dunno." "He came third, we're not talking about him.")

On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.

On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."

Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.

Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.

Kahn! K-A-A-A-A-A-HN!

Professionally, I get to spend some time thinking about the Unthinkable. The problem is you can't really think about the Unthinkable, because it's well unthinkable. This is not a Cheap Laff; we forget how to think about the Unthinkable as we learn self-preservation as a useful life skill. So we content ourselves with thinking about the probably not-able, and pretend that's an acceptable substitute for the Unthinkable.

A few years ago I got to manage company preparations for Y2K. Who remembers Y2K, the most expensive Unthinkable non-event in human history? For those of us who can't remember such pretend-disasters, Y2K was supposed to potentially be the end of civilization as we knew it because unprescient early computer programmers economizing on coding, on account of a criminal lack of memory available in prehistoric steam-driven computing machines, left off the "19" in writing date/time codes. The programmers assumed that somebody would come around and patch the code long before the turn of the century. If it wasn't fixed, then at 00:00:00 on 1/1/2000, the computing machine would think that it was 00:00:00 on 1/1/1900 and be unable to access any date-certain file until 85 to 95 years later, which would be inconvenient when applied to things like power transmission systems, or the world's monetary system, or setting your VCR to record Walker, Texas Ranger. Problem was, that hadn't been done with bet-your-life certainty by 1998; and thanks to the well unthinkable explosion of computing machines integrated into many if not most electromechanical conveniences of modern society, no one could say with any degree of certainty that every single device that could be affected by the rollover had been identified and properly patched. And it became sadly apparent that because there was potentially a computing machine in every single electromechanical device, in order to be fully prepared one had to audit every single electromechanical device in a business/personal inventory and verify that it was patched. In this regard, IT departments busily checked the obvious computers that were part of the business' normal IT inventory; but their scope, interest, professional concern stopped at the limits of their inventories. All those other devices were Somebody Else's Problem. For most American businesses, the Somebody Else was the facilities department; and the luck of the ticketpunch put me in that particular hot seat in 1999.

So we had to check and test everything that was digitally controlled in any way. Now if the computing machine head end was fairly obvious, like say an HVAC or building system controller, you could check with the vendor for a patch, which was usually available for a hefty fee since it was not considered to be a routine upgrade. But if the computing machine head end was not obvious, like say the timer in a coffeemaker or the thermostat in a refrigerator, that was a little trickier to verify. It meant conducting a pre-forensic audit of every mechanical thing that you owned; and the audit not only had to account for the presence of the thing, it had to account for a field test that verified either that the device was unaffected and would function properly, or was affected and patched, or was affected and unpatched but a patch had been identified and was on order and would be installed well before The Day, or was affected and unpatched and no patch was available so the device had to be taken offline and either replaced or junked with a patched device. This was an incredibly tedious, time-consuming and expensive process.

At one point we were checking emergency building systems; and because the Worst Case Scenario was that Y2K would shut down the PJM Interconnection, which is the entire east coast power transmission network, we needed to verify that the emergency generator would in fact function properly in case of a full power grid failure. Once I actually spoke these words I experienced the full pushback of the entire maintenance operation, because a full grid failure was, well, Unthinkable. Had never happened in Our Nation's Capital, not since the grid was turned on back in ought-whenever. The closest thing anybody could think of was the occasional power failure caused by summer storms, which never lasted more than a day. Or a week. And happened every summer. But had never happened downtown, we being on the same grid as the White House dontcha know and the White House will never be affected by the same reality that affects you and me and Bobby McGee. It seemed to me that that being the case, it was likely that the emergency systems had never been tested since they were commissioned, which was almost twenty years previously: there were certainly no records of testing, not even of turning the generator over to make sure that it still kicked on. In which case it seemed unwise to test the generator involuntarily at 00:00:00 on 01/01/00; we probably wouldn't be able to get a repair guy in until well after the Apocalypse. So I proposed that we simulate a total grid failure, take the entire building completely off line just to see what happened. This provoked Son of Pushback; as I recall, it took the better part of two weeks and the expenditure of every erg of clout and the call-in of every chit I had out there, plus a couple of well-placed threats of termination for insubordination and the payout of a bunch of overtime, to put a fake blackout in play. Because such a thing had never happened, could never happen, and preparing for it was the dumbest thing said by a white boy since the Greaseman ran his mouth on the air. Just, well, Unthinkable.

So we pulled the plug on a mid-week night in early August. Nights in August in Our Nation's Capital are hazy, humid, hot and horrible. Pulling the plug showed us two things: the 800,000 square foot building did not hold temperature worth a poop as it quickly equalized to outside temperature in about 15 minutes; and the emergency generator spun up as soon as the last power leg was taken off line, and just as quickly shut itself off and took all the life safety equipment down with it. Huh. Unthinkable. And great was the embarassment across the land. Turns out that the generator's power sensors had been miswired from the get-go; and instead of monitoring the normal building power feeds for proper power flow, it monitored its own output. So as soon as the generator kicked on, it measured power flowing (well yeah, that's what a generator does -- it generates power, dontcha see) and it shut itself down again. Which it would have done every time it was turned on and tested. Which meant that it had never been tested or exercised since commissioning; and that it had been commissioned without testing. Which was extremely embarassing to the maintenance department, many members of which had been around since the system was commissioned.

Me, I thought it was a great test because everything failed miserably. That meant we didn't have to assume anything worked, so we might as well fix the whole thing. It also occurred to me that there was a pretty good chance that somebody knew that everything would fail miserably, hence the pushback; but I couldn't prove it, so that battle would have to be fought another day.

But what does this have to do with thinking about the Unthinkable? Even I wasn't prepared to think this one all the way to its logical conclusion, which would have been to arrange for backups and transfer systems sufficient to provide 11.7 kilovolts continuous service for up to four weeks. Basically, this would be generators the size of locomotives, transfer switches the size of bedrooms, and a supertanker full of diesel. Would have been kind of a tough sell to the Board of Directors, would probably have required the entire organization budget for the year, and would probably not have been available as a minority set-aside government procurement -- and all for a "just in case the world ends we can maintain normal business operations for a month" scenario. Because that's Unthinkable.

We had a few more adventures like this, and at 11:55:00 on 12/31/99 four of us hanging around at work with nothing better to do at the turn of the century decided that we might as well mosey on up to the security command center and peep over the operators' shoulders as the computer terminals rolled over from 11:59:59 12/31/99 to 00:00:01 01/01/00, just in case. Which they did. Kept right on going, too, Lights didn't go out or nothing. All that plywood we bought to board up the windows in case Our Nation's Capital went blip and concerned citizens decided to throw a few celebratory trashcans through said windows, for naught. Sighs of relief and toasts of Diet Coke all around (we were on duty and on the public's dime, you know) and home we went, accompanied by the happily tipsy revelers in their dumb paper party hats and horns tooting the Millenium and their fabulous lives.

1.75 years later some guys flew some planes into some buildings. Didn't see that one coming, either. Unthinkable.

Tomorrow I am going in for crowd control duty. For seven hours I will do my best to direct 30,000 people one at a time to two ticket will call windows or two credit card terminals. I don't want to think about what would happen if we had to get all those people out of the building because a fire alarm goes off, or some young person thinks another young person looked at him/her in a less than wholly respectful way and decides that a few disciplinary rounds from their personal peacemaker, or a scientifically applied whack from their personal machete, is in order; or a student of a variant sect decides that another wakeup call for the Great Satan is in order and detonates himself in a field vest filled with C-4 and nails. Because that stuff is, well, Unthinkable.