Man…I’m getting too cynical on the blog! I need to start coming up with something fun or positive! Here…here’s an internet smiley until I can come up with a happy fun post!
I b’journal’d a few weeks ago about those nekkid body scanners for airports. I also talked about how laughable it was that the government was assuring us that they could be trusted with nekkid X-ray pictures of us, because they had policies.
They also said that the images couldn’t be stored, even though their own bids required the ability to store images…and they showed pictures in the article which were obviously stored.
So along comes this little issue of schools spying on kids in their bedrooms with laptop cameras. You get a free laptop from school, and they install spying software to “recover stolen laptops”. That’s the intent and policy at least.
This spy software was used to take pictures of kids and confront them about suspected drug use. Which I guess is an undocumented feature. They also gave access to police. Which is an unconstitutional feature. But you know…living document…war on drugs…”Federal interest”….yadda yadda. We’re all just making this stuff up as we go along anyway so a few eggs are going to get cracked in this omelette.
Anyway, just goes to show you how far you can trust the absolute power of the government when it seeps into the circuits of digital cameras.
This country just plows on like a runaway ice cream truck, dispensing goodies to some and running over others. We just kind of look on…eating our ice cream and wondering what happened. Just how crazy is this country going to have to get?
In the last b’journal entry I mentioned “black box”. The term “black box” has several meanings but one definition is a “closed system with little understanding of what happens inside”. You feed something into these systems and something comes back out. You don’t know how it works, it just does it.
Our economic system has become a black box. The grand economic theory behind the whole thing is to shove a bunch of borrowed money into the black box, and then um….”when things return to normal” and “when the economy improves”.
Part of this is because the system is so complex. The other part is that it’s been tremendously successful and we just didn’t have a reason to try and understand it anymore, particularly when it’s so profitable to squabble over the output.
So how did this happen over the last few decades? Here’s my take.
Since the 40’s, nukes have freaked everyone out. Anyone who could do serious damage was too afraid to do it. Mutually assured destruction kept everyone relatively calm. The losses and pain of WWII left everyone with no appetite for another global conflict (this time with nukes), and Vietnam convinced people that regional conflicts aren’t all that nice either. Until fairly recently, if conflict was necessary people got in…got out…and moved on.
This provided a great economic environment where even military spending built stuff.
Energy was amazingly cheap. I’ve blogged about this before, but oil is awesome. There is no source of energy like it. It contains huge amounts of energy in an easily accessible form. No matter what people say, nothing can compare. For 2-5 dollars in production cost you can pull it out of the ground and turn it into many thousands of dollars in value. Thus, the more oil you burn the more wealth your society creates. And in the last 50-100 years we really got our oil burnin’ on. People think that burning oil is a symptom of economic growth, but I think it’s a huge, huge cause of it.
As a result of these 2 factors, the industrial age hit full swing. We all got used to it’s luxuries. Then two additional things happened.
First, we had several generations who (in the aggregate) grew up in this new world and never knew what it was like to live in poverty, fear, and/or scarcity. Wanna go to the beach? That’s 2 hours in the Chevy. Wanna live in a house? That’s a 20 minute commute and security is not a concern. Go to Highschool or College and employment is assured. Every year our economy will grow and that means a cost of living adjustment and a raise. Invest enough money and this growth will provide a relaxing retirement for you and your spouse. And if you’re going to murder someone just don’t do it in the front yard because that’s a violation of the neighborhood covenant.
As we got used to this setup, we forgot the economic mechanism of our prosperity. (Spiritually, we decided we didn’t need God because hey…this setup showed alot of promise.) We saw the future of plenty, and they don’t have God or price tags in Star Trek.
Second, we got greedy. Capitalism became about giving stuff to large, established businesses. Populism became government jobs and benefits. We sold off our manufacturing, then mortgaged everything else with personal, corporate, and government debt. When that ran out we changed the rules to allow for risky numbers games called “finance”. When that collapsed we went to the last hope…government debt. This debt is now growing at unsustainable levels which are only possible because there’s no other “safe” place to put money.
So here we are…a few hundred million people used to a world of constant economic growth, cheap energy, and easy money. All three of these are very much at risk, and the loss of just one would be catastrophic to this world view. The only thing keeping this going is government debt, and that’s not going to last.
If we look very closely at our assumptions about the world, we’ll find that they are based not on any understanding of the way it works. Almost all of them are based on how the world has affected us–extrapolated into the future. We better pop the hood on this thing, and quick. Sooner or later the phrase “when things return to normal” might not have that same zing to it.
So last week I was at a conference in Biloxi, which is still present despite God’s attempt to stamp out parimutuel wagering with a Cat 5 hurricane. The newer, land based casinos seem to look out at the old pilings like notes in the key of C major. They skillfully riff like a game show theme song and hook like the lapping of the waves.
So like any corporate, Christian dude in a casino I asked myself “Should I even be here?” I found the answer to be obvious…but the question to be highly irrelevant.
Gambling is an inherently dishonest activity. It implies that you’ll be a winner but in reality the odds are completely against that. Then again, all of marketing is built around that concept. You’ll be a winner if you just wear these clothes, have this electronic device, etc. The odds of me looking like one of those models in an ad are much lower than my chances of winning 50 bucks in a slot machine. But I’ll spend 50 bucks on a pair of jeans. No problem.
Gambling is also entertainment. I see little difference between some of the cutesy slot machines and the games at Chuck E. Cheese. Ever seen a kid proudly walk out with a 50 cent toy…for which he paid $20.00 to get the tickets necessary for the trade? It’s a scam if you try to justify the cheap toy, but it’s alot of entertainment and alot of fun.
Gambling as a good tax source is just plain bad policy. The stories of how it negatively impacts the areas in which it thrives are many. Ask anyone who runs a community financial institution before and after about the negative impact.
But Gambling does employ people. You can’t shut down every textile mill in the south, preach about a “service economy” and not expect them to see a casino as an excellent employment opportunity. Would Jesus be for free trade with China? What kind of question is that?
It tends to affect the poor in the hardest way and very negatively. This makes any benefit to education seem a little morbid. It feels like the kind of thing that’s illegal to import but just fine as long as it originates here.
Gambling doesn’t create wealth. Instead, it tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. But didn’t our recent mortgage bubble do the same? Doesn’t the stock market have many of the same characteristics? I’ve heard many investment professionals point to a graph of the Dow and say “The stock market has always gone up over the long haul”. Isn’t that like saying “everyone leaves a winner!!!” while the finance industry hauls off a huge rake?
What’s the difference in a dog track owner and a fella in the Hamptons checking on his 3 million dollar bonus? Does it make us any more uncomfortable that the bonus came almost directly from the Federally guaranteed labor of our kids? Do we preach about that in the pulpit?
We assume that the property 3 exits out will be valuable one day. Things are always growing…things are always going up, up, up!
Isn’t our current neo-capitalist world–where we think the world is a black box, and if we put enough money in that black box we’ll all be able to chill out at the lake with sweet tea and a golden retriever–isn’t that inherently dishonest?
Gambling is very easy to be against. It’s very sad to see someone falling asleep at a slot machine at 2 am. It’s sad to see people wandering around a smoke filled room with an oxygen tank. I can think of a thousand reasons to outlaw it. But that’s only due to perspective.
Is it really smart to have huge chunks of political capital flowing around the question “Should gambling be legal” Isn’t it really missing the point to ask “Should Christians gamble?”. Isn’t asking these questions, by definition, too late? Shouldn’t we see the bigger picture here?
I think we should look at our world as a whole. I think we’d find we’re all sitting at a table doubling down. If we’re any more honest than a casino billboard we’ll admit that we’re all trying to beat the house. I think we’re all feeding time and money into a system that has become something very different than we originally thought. Do we have time enough for countin’?
This has been Mike’s Kenny Rogers moment for the week.
I recently read this post on another blog about mixed martial arts groups forming at church. And as usual people some people have an (albeit mild) problem with this. Generally you can state the problem as this:
“oh sure, that’s a gathering…but it’s not a Christian gathering”.
It bothers me to see this constant distinction between “getting together” and “church”. I don’t see how this distinction is Biblical. The activity is clearly different whether you are getting together to eat, or to watch a game or movie, or go to a worship service or a Bible study. However, the community and continuity of our Christian lives, both together and individually, should not be.
To me, this gathering-vs-christian-gathering dichotomy reinforces the whole “this is my church life but this is my regular life” problem. We act one way at church building–in the language we use, the way we dress, the music we listen to, and the way we think. Then we flip a switch when we leave. Those of us who have been members of large churches know that this change often happens before you leave the crowded parking lot!
A big part of the problem is the ministry and program concepts where we route activity through process and procedure, sign everything in triplicate, put things on the calendar and wait for final approval from committee. Obviously we have to be organized in some form to be the proverbial good stewards of what we’ve been given. But it’s easy to overthink things and displace the original intents and goals with the little-g god of policy.
To atheists, agnostics, unbelievers, non-church-goers, etc. These false dichotomies are obvious, and they translate into hypocrisy. They also translate into gimmick, like God and/or The Christians wants to trick you into coming to church.
I think that if we can start getting away from our industrialized model of church factories and move into a model of church communities, these problems will take care of themselves. However that change must be real, it can’t just be form only. We have to get to the point where our lives as followers and believers of Christ have continuity of purpose. And this must happen both individually, as groups within the church, and the church itself.
OK, when I tell people I bought a police car, I always get the same question: “why?” Unless they’re on Facebook, since I documented the experience there. However, Facebook people always say “man…I thought you were joking!”
So here’s why I did it.
16+ years of information technology work and management has finally impacted my mindset to a point where it affects my life decisions. To me, a tech purchase (including a car) is about functionality, reliability, and “industrial strength elegance”.
I look at a Sony desktop with all it’s bells and whistles and immediately think of things that I don’t need. I am appalled at how fragile Macbooks are. I consistently find places in cellphones and PDA’s of all brands where I’d rather have a shortcut than a pretty looking interface (the original Blackberrys excelled in this area). Little plastic parts make me nervous.
Our desire for fancy-pants technology is working against us in terms of quality experience. I had a rear projection TV for 10 years with no problems (in fact, it’s still in use at our church), but my Vizio lasted 16 months before developing flickers and lines. What good is high def if the picture goes bad?
In short, our throwaway high-tech world has become expensively annoying.
The automotive world has started to look the same way. All these fun little bells and whistles on today’s cars are pretty much just one more thing to break. When my Saturn died, all the ‘cheap’ and/or ‘high value’ options were questionable. I needed something that would “just work”, and be cheap and easy to fix when it didn’t.
If you’ve been in IT long enough, you eventually get asked “What is a server anyway”. And the answer is very similar to why I bought this car. A server is a computer with the best components, solid physical construction, high performance, and built in resiliency. There is no ’sizzle’ in a server to draw your eye in a display at Best Buy. It’s about getting the job done for days, months, and years on end….with no planned downtime. And despite what you might think, servers look pretty cool too.
Ford’s Police Interceptor is the server of cars. It has a basic and heavy duty drive train; high performance brakes; A durable, tight suspension; A rugged and kid-proof interior. The body is modular and easy to fix (the way cars used to be). There are tons of these vehicles out there and they are all standard. The car is well documented and you can get to all the parts if you want to fix or modify something. Like I said: “industrial strength elegance”.
It was cheap too. A comparable normal car would be tens of thousands of dollars, and I found this one for four digits. Even with the added fuel expense, I’m anticipating this vehicle to be much cheaper over the next few years. I guess we’ll see!
Here are some pics of the new ride:
Still looks like a police car, and people are on their best behavior until they realize you’re just some dude in a white car.
Also looks like a grandpa car, but that’s ok. I can’t be defined by my car. Don’t label me man!
Nope, I won’t be putting spinners or 19 inch rims on it. The nice thing about ‘normal’ tires is that I can buy high performance, long life tires for 100 bucks each.
Yep, the spotlight is still attached. And it’s bright! I can blind the cat from across the yard.
The engine on this baby is immaculate. Very well taken care of. It looks brand new.
Steel brake lines. You won’t find that on cars that cost 4 or 5 times as much.
The back seat of patrol cars is modular. They rip out the original seats and install the plastic and the cages. This one had an original stock seat installed after it was de-commissioned. The back door latches are still disabled though, so I have to fix that. In the meantime it’s the ultimate child safety feature!
Also note that the floor is a rubberized plastic floor. I’ll get some decent floormats, but it’s nice to know you can scrub it out if the kids track in mud or something.
Another minor project. The police install department specific electronics in the middle. I’ll have to get a 3rd party armrest. There are some really nice ones for under $100.
In many ways, this car is more of a traditional sports car than most official “sports cars”. Today a sports car is more of a touring automobile. This no frills, basic instrumentation is more in line with days of old. The only problem is it’s missing a tachometer, which would usually be considered standard issue.
Full size spare, and I could fit my old car in this trunk.
The vehicle is a hackers dream….power everywhere, all sorts of little connections and settings. There are several modification guides that show you how to how to customize the car to a wide range of specs. Different departments and agencies do different things to them.
So there you have it!
(BTW, people joke about me wanting to look like a police officer…but that ain’t it. It is amusing to watch people suddenly obey the law because the car looks like a law enforcement vehicle. But I don’t really have any desire to be shot at because someone thinks I’m something I’m not. Plus, I know and respect many people in various areas of law enforcement and I would never disrespect them by trivializing their calling in such a way.)
Here’s a great interview of Isaac Yeffet, a former head of security for Isreal’s airline. It’s some excellent commentary.
My take: Security is a process, but it’s not a procedure. In the U.S. we try to package things into procedures instead of really addressing the problem in an organic and adaptable way. This is particularly true of Government.
You have to laugh at these assurances of privacy as the Gubmint tries to explain to us that it’s ok take naked pictures of the population before they can get on an airplane.
First of all, they tell us that the images “can’t be stored” as the news reports show video of the scans. Duh. If someone wanted to store the pictures, all they need is an iphone. Snap a picture of the monitor and you’re done. If you’re really fancy and run a porn website called “hotbabesattheairport.com” then you’ll probably need a nicer camera. But you get the picture (and they will too).
Second of all, there’s no way they’re going to buy devices that won’t store images. That’s like saying “we’re going to watch security cameras, but not save the video”. If they’re going to prosecute or tackle someone with a bomb, they’re gonna save the picture that led them to do that.
And we’re talking about an agency that’s had plenty of issues with honesty by it’s employees. So if there’s way to store images from the machines themselves, they will.
Of course nobody’s perfect. That’s why we don’t trust them with naked pictures of us. (Unless you’re a celebrity who needs a PR boost).
It’s laughable. The government thinks we’re stupid. And they’re probably right. We’ll be unhappy about it, but then get used to it, and mumble something about “well if it saves one life it’s worth it”.
Just to re-boil this down to what it is: We’re trusting government people in staff level positions to look at naked pictures of the population. Just wait….as these scanners become more common the pictures will end up on the internet.
When some fella (after twittering about it for a few days) successfully makes it onto a plane with a bomb hidden from even these scanners (use your imagination), what else will we be asked to give up?
It’s amazing to me that in these airline attacks the intelligence fails again and again with information we *do* have. But every time they claim they need more info to protect us. And everytime it’s the privacy of normal people that goes away.
Until 5th grade, my school years were spent in Iowa. Iowa has a much different angle on snow than they do here at Alabama. It had to be pretty bad to cancel school….either snow or temperature. They did it, but it was not very common.
I do remember one time they canceled school due to cold weather. It was -50F wind chill. more than a minute or two and your face started to freeze. That’s considered a bad learning environment anywhere.
It’s funny the things you remember . For instance, when the temperature is in the teens the exhaust from your car tends to condense in the air much longer. It’s been like that this week. And the way the dusting snow drifts back and forth on the interstate in little waves when it’s very cold.
When I was little we would pretend that the taillights on the cars were spaceship engines, and the exhaust condensation was the smoke from some advanced propulsion technology. When it was snowing, the snow looked like the stars of hyperspace in Star Wars. Like many kids of the 70’s and 80’s, much of my daydreaming time was spent pretending I lived in the Star Wars universe.
(Some of our generation still live there. Just go to the back room of any comic shop.)
Some concepts were borrowed from other shows…like the bridge on the way into town was the Stargate from Buck Rogers. And generally the enemies were more Cylon-like (Battlestar Galactica).
So this morning we drove to school in a heavy snow flurry, and I decided to educate my children on space flight. They were in the back seat, so naturally I designated them gunners.
Dad: “when I make this turn were launching right into the heart of the fleet!”
Daughter: “what?”
Son: “OK!”
Dad: “Canon, there are 5 on our left, you get them….Melodi, there are 10 on our right…take ‘em out!”
Son: [laser noises...cool ones] Got ‘em dad!
Daughter: [laser noises...girl version]
Dad: “We’re hit…lost our left engine…diverting power…..I think we’re still going to make it to school”
Daughter: [giggles]
Son: [laser noises]
My son continued to make laser noises for the rest of the trip, taking out any minivan, honda, or SUV that came into the port zone. My daughter moved on to discuss some topics of Meteorology.
Driving my kids to school every morning is one of my favorite things in the world to do. I only have a few more months before they go to different schools and everything changes. I hope to savor every remaining minute of it. Unless we need to put some heat on a Chrysler-borne Cylon. First things first, you know.
All of the gifts we wanted as kids (and grown up kids) all had the same type of promise. “If I have this, then things will be better than they are now.” And for the most part it was true. To varying degrees the presents delivered on their promise.
But it was temporary. Toys broke. They became obsolete. The ‘new’ wore off. And we eventually had to go back to school anyway! However, the original Christmas gift delivers on it’s promise…and has a very long warranty.
The best part of Christmas is that it is part of the Good News (Gospel) of Jesus of Christ–that the God of the Bible is not a distant god. He became one of us and showed us how it’s done. He then went on offer himself as the ultimate sacrifice for our sin and imperfection.
We give gifts to each other to symbolize this wonderous act of love and giving. It’s a great tradition and it has the ability to bring out some of the best in us. But it all points to this most miraculous gift ever.
The birth of Jesus Christ was an amazing gift. It shows how deep the father’s love runs. It was just what humanity needed!
A laser tank that I could program and control? You had me at laser, Milton Bradley.
This was a biggie. For months I longed for a Big Trak. A friend had told me about it, and did such a good job that he should have gotten commission. It was over 30 dollars of pure electronic goodness. And then there was the box….I mean just look at it:
You wanted this thing on your side. So when I saw a present appear under the tree that was the same size as that box, it was all I could do not to carefully open it and verify the contents. A true test of will. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated present of my childhood.
The Big Trak was one of the few toys that actually delivered. Id did everything it said it would. It looked amazing. The sounds were cool. It moved like a tank.
The programming was reliable and challenging. I spent hours making it drive courses around the house….shooting certain things, people, and animals with it’s flashlight laser. And the Big Trak lasted for years.
Eventually I convinced my mom to buy me the transport attachment, which completed the set but didn’t add too much. The connector broke a year or two later.
One day one of the axles on the main unit broke, and I tried everything to fix it. Different epoxies, glues, and fasteners. I even made a crude fiberglass-like axle to try and replace it. All to no avail. The Big Trak was history.
It may be floating around somewhere in my parents attic, and I can’t decide if it would be a good or bad thing to see it. It lives in my memory as one of the coolest toys ever.
In looking up all these old things we wanted back in the 70’s and 80’s, I’m struck by the profound advancement in the coolness of toys over the years. What our kids get would have seemed like pure magic when we were their age.
(Yeah, I know…my granddad talks about getting fruit for Christmas and loving it. I’m not complaining. I’m just pointing out how vast the differences are between what’s available to generations.)
Few things illustrate this difference better than the Starbird.
This was a spaceship toy that was downright awesome. And I don’t mean the trying-to-relate-to-a-younger-generation “awesome”. It was the real deal. It looked awesome (still does) and it had awesome electronics in it.
Touchscreens? No. Wifi connections to a worldwide network? No. Uber-cool features du jour with the latest firmware? No. But just look at this advertisement (I think this one is from England…audio is very low…not because it’s from England….that’s just FYI.):
If you tilted it back, it’s engine sound would go up. And if you tilted it down the engine sound would go down. And it had an unprecedented laser sound. Yay technology! Of course we had to have one.
Oh, and that whole front part was a detachable ship–a concept which was strangely central to a certain very popular Scifi show that came just a few years later.
Here’s another recent Youtube video, which is slightly disturbing given that the guy is a grown man. I expect Chris Hanson to bust in at any minute:
We also got the “Intruder” model and eventually the command base:
In some ways the command base was the coolest, because it had plenty of open-ended play opportunities. This made it more fun than even our Star Wars toys because lacking a complete backstory we made up our own adventures.
Which led to the real reason this toy was great. It also provided great sound effects for our cassette tape recordings. I would sit around with a cassette deck and record adventures of my all of my toys, stuffed animals, action figures, etc. This is pre-computer days, remember. (I still have some of these cassettes.)
The Starbird was an excellent toy for making the sound effects in these epic audio masterpieces.
So I’m seeing all these statuses on Facebook about blocking Google from indexing you.
I see these things and I have to chuckle. In the U.S., a great deal of our personal data is completely available to everyone. In some cases for just a few bucks.
Have you ever wondered what happens to all of that information you give when you use the discount and membership cards? Ever wonder how they knew you’d need those coupons for Pedialyte or Mighty Dog? Ever wonder what they can legally sell about this information? The answer is everything.
Any law against indexing your purchasing habits by your credit card? Any laws against selling it? Nope. And if there are it’s probably an opt-out plan…fully disclosed in the fine print.
I shudder to think of what the phone companies (particularly cell/wireless) can legally sell. We already know they’re immune from any liability in giving anything and everything to the Federal government. Both Republicans and Obama set us up for that one.
And honestly, if they are doing something “illegal” who’s going to sue them? When the information on millions can be stored in a $50 thumb drive…where’s it all going?
It got this way because nobody pays attention to the actual laws that are passing. We read a bumper sticker, get happy and vote for “our guys”. Meanwhile, every company and trade group in the world ensures that they can do whatever they want with this information. I’m sure it was tucked in to the various “What’s Awesome for America Omnibus act of 200X” bills that always come up (for the children, of course).
The time to worry about our digital privacy was about 13 years ago, and it would have required laws that our Congress is, quite frankly, incapable of passing. That time has come and gone. No sense worrying about it anymore. Just relax and enjoy the fact that most corporations are too incompetent to really bother us all that much.
(BTW, if you have used a credit card online, it HAS been stolen. It just has. Don’t worry about it, but don’t ever use a debit card online.)
Who didn’t own an Atari in the 70’s or 80’s? We didn’t!
We had Sears “Tele-games”, which was the Sears Toughskin version of the Atari VCS (later called the 2600). It was effectively identical, but we had only ever seen the Sears version
Youtube has tons of Atari ads out there. But here’s one from Sears.
Note how the word “Atari” was never mentioned….and it was “sold only at Sears”. Just goes to show you at Sears was a retail mafia back then. “Yeah we’ll sell your stuff, but we have to call it our own name. You’re getting paid, so just hope we don’t alter the deal!”
I shudder to think of the suits and facial hair of the Sears execs who brokered that deal.
So why did we want Tele-Games for Christmas instead of “Atari” ? Well, Before 24 hour news, it was perfectly acceptable for kids to chill at the Tele-Games demo booth while mom went to shop for polyester and dad went to wander the Craftsman section. OK maybe it wasn’t acceptable, but we got to do it! I’m wondering now exactly what that meant…..
So we logged many hours at the Sears tele-games demo. It was a great place to meet the other aficionados and try out the latest/greatest.
It was there at that booth that we’d decide on the next target for our allowance and yard-work cash. This was an important phase, and one I use to this day. There was technology available but limited resources…which direction would we go?
A big score was Pitfall. That one was awesome. I remember it took awhile for the Activision games to show up since they weren’t official Atari games.
The two worst? Pac-man and E.T.
E.T. took the epic story of a boy befriending a stranded alien and replaced it with the pixelated storyline of stepping in gum on the way to the library. Yee-haw. We’re lucky things like “V” came along to restore proper perspective.
Pac-man was even worse because we labored for a couple weeks digging gravel out of our yard to earn the money to buy it. Our rural road was made of gravel and tar, and that year the snow plows got a bit aggressive and deposited a few cubic yards of the gravel in the front lawn. Dad paid us something like 50 cents a bucket.
Remember all those kids working for Mola Ram in Indiana Jones 2? Just like that. Except those kids got an ancient Sankara Stone and we were stuck with an awful reminder that you weren’t in an arcade.
Somehow we had convinced ourselves that Pac-Man was going to be good even when we saw for ourselves that it wasn’t. I mean, it was pac-man right? Another early lesson in tech.
Back to Tele-games….Just to show you how random my memory is, the record section was right across from this area in Sears, and occasionally when waiting my turn I’d wander over to look at album covers. I always ended up at this one, which I found fascinating:
I could just tell nobody messed with this guy while he was walking home from the school bus. Years later my social studies teacher was a Mrs. Nugent, and we always asked her to say hi to her son Ted for us. I’m not sure she got it but I bet she did.
Then along came Intellivision, which split the neighborhood and turned friend against friend in the struggle of public opinion of which is best. Which means this one is to be continued….
From about ages 8-12, Showbiz Pizza held fun of near mythical proportions. Back then Showbiz had one of the best collections of videogames, and the nature of the visit meant you were going to be playing for hours. Chuck E. Cheese is a shadow of that culture–primarily focused on younger kids and ticket-producing games.
This was where the famed “Dragon’s Lair” game eventually showed up.
To this day I could walk into that building and point to right were the game was, probably to within a few inches. That’s even with the Chuck E. remodelling job.
Dragon’s Lair utilized the combination of laserdisc tech and normal video games to create a very unique gaming experience. Here’s a modern screen cap on Youtube:
I wanted this game in the middle of 6th grade. I’m talking the full size, arcade style version of the game. Ran about $3000. At some point I was probably delusional enough that I thought I’d get it. But there was a reasoning behind all this. And it had to do with grades.
For some reason people always just assumed I got good grades, this was not the case.
From K-6th grade, I was in no less than 5 different schools, and each of them had a completely different philosophy. This included the practical rural mid-west school, the in-town Montessori-ish school, and what I call the “brutal ABC’s” approach in the South. By the time I was in 6th grade, I really had no idea why I was in school or what I was supposed to be doing. It was just someplace you went to get lost in the shuffle.
What I figured out pretty quickly was that I was supposed to get good grades. I didn’t know what that meant but I knew that my parents seemed to have limitless resources when describing the rewards for such an achievement. Thus, I was able to work out a deal: Straight A’s = my very own Dragon’s Lair game.
Turns out it was a safe bet on my parent’s part. I never even came close to straight A’s in middle school. I did figure things out by my freshman year in HS but by then the Dragon’s Lair deal was history. So, no…I never got this! No chance!
Now you can download the whole thing on PC (probably for iphone too). But back then it was the unachievable awesome thing I wanted for Christmas.
93% of all male children in the 70’s had at least one Kenner Star Wars toy….
…..of those, 60% had parents that said “hold on to those, they’ll be collectors items one day”.
….which lasted about 15 minutes. So from here the breakdown is:
Note that this chart is completely bogus, as I gave up on the gag once I achieved the “pac-man eating pizza” effect. That’s some fancy Excel-fu right there.
So I got this, and I was thrilled at the LED/buzzing laser action. My parents were thrilled to have to align those stickers.
I wasn’t thrilled that the R2 was fixed in the toy, as I didn’t have my own R2 yet. Also, the fact that I only had the desert version of Luke (vs. a pilot) was a bit troubling. But it didn’t matter.
We went on a trip shortly after that and I remember lovingly transporting the X-wing around. Come to think of it, that may have been a birthday gift. Oh well…I spent way too much time on this post to go back now!
From the time we had an Apple II in our school, I wanted a computer. I would build cardboard computers at home to pretend I had a computer. Around 5th grade, I guess good ol’ dad got a little too worried about his son staring at cardboard. He decided to take action.
We moved during Christmas 1982 from Iowa to Alabama, so technically I didn’t get it then. Instead I got it a couple months later for my birthday. But it was still something I wanted for Christmas.
Back then, the choice of a computer was much different. You had the upper tiers of IBM and Apple. In the middle range you had Radio Shack and Commodore. Then there were the Atari models and the TI. At least in my world this was the spectrum.
I didn’t really care about that though. The real question was: “What did Ricky Schroeder use to hack into the pentagon”? (go to about 3:30).
No, I’m not kidding. This is why I liked the TRS-80 Color Computer.
Plus, radio shack was a staple visit in any trip to the mall. So there was constant exposure to that machine.
As luck would have it, TRS-80 knowledge would come in handy later on. In the 80’s it was a symbol of educational advancement to have a room full of computers at your school. Never mind that very few of the teachers knew anything about them or what they could do, much less how to educate with them. But they needed a room full of computers and our middle school was not going to be caught without such a room.
Most people have no idea how Radio Shack is even in business. Their business model seems to be overcharging for batteries then selling you a 3 year service plan with them. So how they convinced our school buy 15 or so TRS-80’s for their educational showroom…I have no idea. But they did, and by the time we had lab time a handful of us knew more about them than anyone….especially the teachers.
In lab time, we basically had an online multiple choice quiz. At then end of the quiz, it would print out the score for the teacher to view. We edited the program to do all sorts of things…from displaying a random message (that would quickly disappear)…to automatically giving us a good grade on the quiz. It was never a perfect grade. It would pick a random number and subtract it from the perfect score, so as not to arouse suspicion.
We probably learned more through the hackage than we did from the quiz. However these days I’m sure we would have been kicked out and charged with federal computer terrorism or something. Such is life.
Technically I’m a member of Generation X, which was the first generation to really realize just how much time you could waste while trying to make Microsoft products work.
The love of such futility didn’t come from nowhere. We had plenty of practice as children the 70’s and 80’s drinking deep from the unsatisfying fountain of a rapidly maturing consumer culture. And as it is now, the spigot on this thing was opened wide during Christmas.
Now that there have been billions and billions of dollars invested in the internet, we can stream commercials from that ancient era on a whim. So I’m going to do some posts outlining the various trinkets I wanted for Christmas as I grew up.
Up first: Tobor!
This little robot was actually just a motor with a swiveling wheel and the ancestral technology used in The Clapper. The ‘remote’ was a clicker that made a loud noise to activate said clapper brain, so really anything could set it off…a hand clap, firecrackers, the sound of your little brother banging on your door….
And if you ended up with two of them click-clacking away in the same room. Let’s just say skynet was still a few years off.
Really, this robot was about as “remote control” as a cat–inasmuch as you can yell insanely at a cat and make it run for it’s furry life.
But even then, there were only two actions. Go in circles, and go in a straight line. The commercial tries to make this sound awesome. “To circle. To proceed forward. To circle. Or to pick up the service module….” Yeah, and picking up that small plastic “service module” was about as likely as getting a girl to play with this thing. (Both of which happened in the commercial).
So was the Tobor a bad toy? Of course. But we knew it’d just be a few years before real robots were doing all our household chores while we got in our flying cars to go to the mall and buy more stuff.
In other words, it didn’t stop us from wanting it. And that was the name of the game for 70’s and 80’s toys.
Adam Wright (Act of Congress) wrote the music to this, and I did the lyrics. Adam’s also BGV’ing and playing guitar somewhere in there. Jacob’s got all the other guitars, except the slide which is Michael Swann. Jamie Rogan is on drums. And Jason Elgin made it all worth listening to.
Lyrics to the Act of Congress song “In the Middle” (off the album “Declaration”). I highly recommend their work….
Are we so different you and I?
Are we having trouble seeing eye to eye?
I guess everybody’s got excuses and dreams
and agendas it seems these days.
What kind of person do you see
when peaking into this heart that brutally
beaten down with failures taunts and insecurities?
I am cynical it seems these days…
So what’s the point? where do we go from here?
Throwing bricks to get our fix and missing the heart of the issue.
I’d like to say there’s a better way, so let’s change
cause love remains in the middle.
What penance is there left to pay?
Have we disengaged and thrown it all away?
I just want peace of mind and coffee with my cream
But I’m still cynical it seems these days?
So what’s the point? where do we go from here?
Throwing bricks to get our fix and missing the heart of the issue.
I’d like to say there’s a better way, so let’s change
cause love remains in the middle.
Hearts of stone will never get it
Love will find us if we let it
Hearts of stone will never get it
Love will find us if we let it
Hearts of stone will never get it
Love will find us if we let it
What’s the point? Where do we go from here?
Throwing bricks to get our fix and missing the heart of the issue.
I’d like to say there’s a better way, so let’s change
’cause love remains
love remains
love remains in the middle.
Love remains in the middle.
Love remains in the middle.
This one is a few years old, but a favorite by many.
Interesting tidbit: There are NO electric instruments in this song at all, with the exception of bass guitar. It’s all acoustic guitar, mandolin, bosouki…I think maybe there’s a banjo in there too. Pretty cool….
This is a song written for a church series a while back. The theme words were “grow, relate, belong”.
