Hopefully, you caught yesterday's episode of the Simpsons, which contained some of the best TV parodies that I've ever seen on the small screen. We saw The Big Easy and Miami Vice revisited as Chief Wiggum, PI. We saw My Mother, The Car reinvented as Grampa Simpson, The Love Tester in Moe's Tavern (complete with laugh track). And The Simpsons Variety Hour lampooned Laugh-In and one singularly heinous show from 1977: The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, featuring Replacement Jan (kudos to Eve Plumb, who wanted no part of this atrocity). I actually own a copy of the first Brady Bunch Variety Hour (thank you, Eric), and I have read more than one review describing it as the worst sixty minutes of television that have ever aired. Although you've probably heard this story from me (or someone equally as goofy), I will tell it again...
In 1977, a full four years after the Brady Bunch was cancelled due to slumping ratings, some producer thought it would be a good idea to bring them back. They contacted the producers of the Donny and Marie show, who were kicking ratings butt at the time. The D&M producers agreed to throw something together, and throw something together they did. The result was the worst costuming, dance routines, special guests, scripts, and singing that have ever graced the small screen, and it shocks and horrifies to this very day. The parody that Matt Groening's crew did on the Simpsons was 100% dead nuts accurate, down to the blatant misuse of special guest stars (Tim Conway in the Simpsons, Tony Randall in the BBVH) and the odd use of animal costumes. I only wish that more people had seen the original Brady Bunch Variety Hour. (Come on over and we'll fire up the VCR.) I'm in the process of transferring the soundtrack to the first BBVH onto CD, so you can sleep soundly tonight knowing that I'm using my magical superpowers for good, not evil.
Naturally, this will all appear in this week's Crap From The Past.
Later,
Ron "Next week is the season finale" G
Monday, May 12, 1997
Friday, April 18, 1997
Ron's Big Life Update - April 1997
Yo, sez I.
Nothing crucial to report on from Rah-chester, just a howdy-do.
I don't suppose any of you caught...
Just wanted y'all to know that we're still alive and it's still 40 degrees in Rah-chester...
Stay warm,
Ron "one guy named Tony was Kung Fu Fighting" Gerber
Nothing crucial to report on from Rah-chester, just a howdy-do.
I don't suppose any of you caught...
- An outrageous dance routine on the Drew Carey Show set to the Tower of Power's "What is Hip?",
- The closing credits of the Simpsons, set to Bob Marley's "Jammin'",
- The Average White Band concert, which I attended last night (these guys had hits in 1975 with "Pick Up The Pieces" and "Cut The Cake" and are probably the funkiest white guys on the planet),
- Either the upcoming Bruce Cockburn show or the George Clinton show, neither of which has occurred yet (quite a month for concerts in Rah-chester),
- The movie "Grosse Pointe Blank", which I thought stunk, despite having seen it for free.
Just wanted y'all to know that we're still alive and it's still 40 degrees in Rah-chester...
Stay warm,
Ron "one guy named Tony was Kung Fu Fighting" Gerber
Thursday, March 13, 1997
Ron's Big Life Update - March 1997
"Only when things are no longer there do you realize where they once were." - my brother, Ken Gerber, 1997.
Hello. Contrary to popular demand, I have not fallen off the face of the world, try as I might. I was recently approved to work overtime, and I have been putting in 50-55 hour weeks at work for the last month or two. It's not a lot of fun. To make matters worse, my boss just accepted a position at Seagate in Minneapolis. (Seagate makes hard drives, and is starting up a program to get into optical drives.) No successor has been named yet and the rest of my group and I are scrambling to absorb all of my boss's responsibilities, which are many. My life is not too good right now.
Margaret, on the other hand, is fine and says HI.
If you've sent me e-mail in the last two weeks, it bounced and I never received it. We upgraded one of the Kodak servers and wrought havoc on the e-mail accounts of anyone who had punctuation in his ID. Feel free to forward me some of your junk e-mail, since I've been doing without for about two weeks.
More later, once I've gotten some more sleep. (I think I'll break 60 hours at work this week...)
Ron "Life sux" G
Hello. Contrary to popular demand, I have not fallen off the face of the world, try as I might. I was recently approved to work overtime, and I have been putting in 50-55 hour weeks at work for the last month or two. It's not a lot of fun. To make matters worse, my boss just accepted a position at Seagate in Minneapolis. (Seagate makes hard drives, and is starting up a program to get into optical drives.) No successor has been named yet and the rest of my group and I are scrambling to absorb all of my boss's responsibilities, which are many. My life is not too good right now.
Margaret, on the other hand, is fine and says HI.
If you've sent me e-mail in the last two weeks, it bounced and I never received it. We upgraded one of the Kodak servers and wrought havoc on the e-mail accounts of anyone who had punctuation in his ID. Feel free to forward me some of your junk e-mail, since I've been doing without for about two weeks.
More later, once I've gotten some more sleep. (I think I'll break 60 hours at work this week...)
Ron "Life sux" G
Friday, February 14, 1997
Ron's Big Life Update - February 1997
Hi, all.
Sorry I haven't written lately, but work has been keeping me busy. I've just been granted permission to work overtime, and I've been putting in 50- to 55- hour weeks for the last month or so. You'd think that since I'm at my computer a lot more now, I'd be writing more often. That's actually not the case, because the time that I'd normally spend doing interesting things is now being spent at work. Such is life.
We found out that our landlord is being transferred to California and will be selling the house in the spring. This is not good, since the new owners would either (a) kick us out, or (b) double the rent. Either option is pretty sucky, if you ask me. Our lease expires in June, which gives us plenty of time to move somewhere else.
So we've been looking into buying a house. I don't know if you've priced these things lately, but houses are expensive. Ever more than a car. And WAY more expensive than CD's. (Boy, I could get 10,000 CD's for what a house costs...) Margaret and I have been looking, and we've already seen about ten houses. We're getting the hang of being able to distinguish between good and awful, and eventually we'll probably end up buying one. Once we're unpacked, you're all invited over...
So "Star Wars" is kicking butt once again, and is on its way to becoming the most profitable movie ever. Actually, it's no surprise that "Star Wars" is kicking butt; do you know what it's competing against? That awful Fran Drescher movie, or that swful Rodney Dangerfield movie, or that awful Eddie Murphy 48-Hours rehash, or that awful Chris Farley ninja movie, or "The Pest". I hear that there are plans to bring "The Godfather" back to big screens nationally, which would be o-tay by me.
Margaret says hi.
I might have mentioned that "Crap From The Past" has expanded from a weekly radio show into a weekly radio show plus a weekly club gig. I spin at a local club on Fridays from 11:30 to 1:30 (prime time), and we regularly get about 100-150 people there. Booty is shaken.
And congratulations to The Simpsons. They just had their 167th episode, making them the longest-running animated prime time show ever. (They passed the Flintstones, which were a worthless Hanna-Barbera knockoff of the Honeymooners anyway.) As Entertainment Weekly put it, "Yabba-dabba-Doh!"
Oh, and happy Valentine's Day,
Ron "Crap. Once a week." G
Sorry I haven't written lately, but work has been keeping me busy. I've just been granted permission to work overtime, and I've been putting in 50- to 55- hour weeks for the last month or so. You'd think that since I'm at my computer a lot more now, I'd be writing more often. That's actually not the case, because the time that I'd normally spend doing interesting things is now being spent at work. Such is life.
We found out that our landlord is being transferred to California and will be selling the house in the spring. This is not good, since the new owners would either (a) kick us out, or (b) double the rent. Either option is pretty sucky, if you ask me. Our lease expires in June, which gives us plenty of time to move somewhere else.
So we've been looking into buying a house. I don't know if you've priced these things lately, but houses are expensive. Ever more than a car. And WAY more expensive than CD's. (Boy, I could get 10,000 CD's for what a house costs...) Margaret and I have been looking, and we've already seen about ten houses. We're getting the hang of being able to distinguish between good and awful, and eventually we'll probably end up buying one. Once we're unpacked, you're all invited over...
So "Star Wars" is kicking butt once again, and is on its way to becoming the most profitable movie ever. Actually, it's no surprise that "Star Wars" is kicking butt; do you know what it's competing against? That awful Fran Drescher movie, or that swful Rodney Dangerfield movie, or that awful Eddie Murphy 48-Hours rehash, or that awful Chris Farley ninja movie, or "The Pest". I hear that there are plans to bring "The Godfather" back to big screens nationally, which would be o-tay by me.
Margaret says hi.
I might have mentioned that "Crap From The Past" has expanded from a weekly radio show into a weekly radio show plus a weekly club gig. I spin at a local club on Fridays from 11:30 to 1:30 (prime time), and we regularly get about 100-150 people there. Booty is shaken.
And congratulations to The Simpsons. They just had their 167th episode, making them the longest-running animated prime time show ever. (They passed the Flintstones, which were a worthless Hanna-Barbera knockoff of the Honeymooners anyway.) As Entertainment Weekly put it, "Yabba-dabba-Doh!"
Oh, and happy Valentine's Day,
Ron "Crap. Once a week." G
Wednesday, January 8, 1997
Ron's Big Life Update - January 1997
"You have 39 new mail messages" - the result of my first vacation since I started work last year.
Well, from those of you who haven't heard from me in a while, hello and happy holidays. I just survived a two week vacation with the in-laws, and I have never been so happy to see the pearly Kodak gates in my life...
Margaret and I spent the last two weeks in Colorado. No skiing, mind you, just Colorado. We shuttled back and forth between Denver (a cool city) and Yuma (a horrendously remote farm town three hours east of Denver, where Margaret's mom still lives), spending about a week at each place. The big news for us was that Margaret's brother and his wife are now proud parents of a baby boy: Benjamin James weighed in at 6 pounds (or something like that) on Dec. 18th. There was a period when they hadn't settled on a name, and my vote of Jesus was quickly overridden. The baby doesn't do much yet, and you all know my feelings toward little 'uns, so I wasn't terribly impressed. Being an uncle ain't so great yet.
The new parents live in Denver, and we got to see as much of Denver as we could while staying out of their way. I saw the capital building, including the exact step at which the elevation is 5280 feet. (Aside: can you join the "mile high" club just by club just by doing it in Denver?) And downtown, which was neat. And some of the mountains to the west, which were very neat. And Golden, which was less neat than the mountains, but neat nonetheless.
The week I spent in Yuma wasn't exactly torture, ... well, actually it was. Seven days is WAY too long to spend in a remote farming town with nothing to do. Somehow, we managed to get record high temperatures during that week and I was able to wander around outside in Colorado in January in just a T-shirt. It hit 72 degrees once! No complaints. We drove into Nebraska and Kansas just so I could get pictures of us in short sleeves standing next to the "Welcome To Nebraska" and "Welcome To Kansas" signs on the highway.
I went to a farm auction in Yuma. That's where somebody decides that he doesn't want to be a farmer anymore and auctions off his equipment and his land. So I got to see lots of farm equipment up close and personal, and if I had a few thousand dollars to spare, I could have even bought some of it. (A fat lot of good that would do me in Rochester...) And the 1/4-square-mile of land went for $250,000. No animals at this auction, fortunately.
It's hard to describe Yuma if you've never been there. It's flat. Completely totally flat. And trees don't naturally grow out there unless they're planted; the natural shrubbery is sort of a wheat-like grass that stands only a few inches tall. It's weird. In the northeast, we get used to trees and green things. In the southwest, we get used to cacti and sand. In Yuma, just weird short grass. Bleh.
The locals aren't much more interesting. I got a laugh out of Margaret's description of a few of her classmates. Apparently, when one particular set of new parents wanted to name their new baby after Earl, the proud daddy, they were undeterred by the fact that the baby was a girl. She has since gone through life with the name Earla, and I can't imagine that she's achieved too much success with it. Likewise for Lloydine.
The big holiday score was an old Risk set, with wooden pieces. Margaret's sister got an even bigger score, with an old Monopoly set. You knew that the old sets also had wooden houses and hotels, but this set was so old that the word "Hotel" was painted on each little red wooden hotel. Amazing.
During my incarceration in Yuma, we decided to see the movie that was playing at the local theater. (Note: "the" movie. One.) We saw "Jingle All The Way" featuring Ah-nold and Sinbad. It was unquestionably the worst movie of the year, and makes "Krull" look like "Citizen Kane" in comparison. Doesn't Arnold bother to READ THE SCRIPTS before he agrees to do a movie??? And toward the end of our stay in Denver, we were reading on the couch with "My Stepmother Is An Alien" (with Kim Basinger and Dan Akroyd) playing on cable on the TV. "My Stepmother Is An Alien" makes "Jingle All The Way" look like "Citizen Kane" in camparison.
Well, 1996 ended, and tradition dictates that I proclaim my favorite song of the past year. Usually, I come up with about twenty, but this past year was a stinker and my list is exceptionally short:
The newspapers say that 1996 was bad because there are no dominant innovative styles right now. They say that alternative, gangsta rap, and hip hop are all burnt out, and since nobody's really sure what will replace them, nobody's jumping on any bandwagon, leaving just stagnation. The articles claimed that people were sick of everything, and cited poor-selling albums by Hootie and the Blowfish, the Gin Blossoms, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, REM, Presidents of the USA, and a few others. Since people were sick of all the latest trends, nothing really dominated and stagnation ruled. And since Celine Dion had the biggest selling album of the year (behind whiny Alanis Morrisette, which came out in '95), I agree that blandness dominated the year.
I think the explanation is much simpler. I think that the music industry is so obsessed with trendy product and sales numbers, that they forgot how to write songs. "In The Meantime" contained, in my opinion, the only worthwhile melody of 1996. 365 days; only one good song. Pretty stinky indeed. I don't feel too optimistic about 1997 either, despite upcoming albums by U2 and, heaven help us, Aerosmith.
I see all this as a sign that "Crap From The Past" must become the dominant force in the universe. The timing is right, I have a small but devoted following on a non-commercial station that doesn't interfere with my programming, I have a commercial sponsor (a local club at which I occasionally DJ), and I have the Ethel Merman Disco Album on CD. Yep - I am the god of hellfire and I bring you...
...1997.
Happy new year to all of you from Uncle Margaret and myself. May you claw your own eyes out before you suffer through "Jingle All The Way". And to all a good night... (and feel free to write back).
Ron "Did you see the Simpsons last week? With the hallucinogenic chili? I'm still laughing..." G
Well, from those of you who haven't heard from me in a while, hello and happy holidays. I just survived a two week vacation with the in-laws, and I have never been so happy to see the pearly Kodak gates in my life...
Margaret and I spent the last two weeks in Colorado. No skiing, mind you, just Colorado. We shuttled back and forth between Denver (a cool city) and Yuma (a horrendously remote farm town three hours east of Denver, where Margaret's mom still lives), spending about a week at each place. The big news for us was that Margaret's brother and his wife are now proud parents of a baby boy: Benjamin James weighed in at 6 pounds (or something like that) on Dec. 18th. There was a period when they hadn't settled on a name, and my vote of Jesus was quickly overridden. The baby doesn't do much yet, and you all know my feelings toward little 'uns, so I wasn't terribly impressed. Being an uncle ain't so great yet.
The new parents live in Denver, and we got to see as much of Denver as we could while staying out of their way. I saw the capital building, including the exact step at which the elevation is 5280 feet. (Aside: can you join the "mile high" club just by club just by doing it in Denver?) And downtown, which was neat. And some of the mountains to the west, which were very neat. And Golden, which was less neat than the mountains, but neat nonetheless.
The week I spent in Yuma wasn't exactly torture, ... well, actually it was. Seven days is WAY too long to spend in a remote farming town with nothing to do. Somehow, we managed to get record high temperatures during that week and I was able to wander around outside in Colorado in January in just a T-shirt. It hit 72 degrees once! No complaints. We drove into Nebraska and Kansas just so I could get pictures of us in short sleeves standing next to the "Welcome To Nebraska" and "Welcome To Kansas" signs on the highway.
I went to a farm auction in Yuma. That's where somebody decides that he doesn't want to be a farmer anymore and auctions off his equipment and his land. So I got to see lots of farm equipment up close and personal, and if I had a few thousand dollars to spare, I could have even bought some of it. (A fat lot of good that would do me in Rochester...) And the 1/4-square-mile of land went for $250,000. No animals at this auction, fortunately.
It's hard to describe Yuma if you've never been there. It's flat. Completely totally flat. And trees don't naturally grow out there unless they're planted; the natural shrubbery is sort of a wheat-like grass that stands only a few inches tall. It's weird. In the northeast, we get used to trees and green things. In the southwest, we get used to cacti and sand. In Yuma, just weird short grass. Bleh.
The locals aren't much more interesting. I got a laugh out of Margaret's description of a few of her classmates. Apparently, when one particular set of new parents wanted to name their new baby after Earl, the proud daddy, they were undeterred by the fact that the baby was a girl. She has since gone through life with the name Earla, and I can't imagine that she's achieved too much success with it. Likewise for Lloydine.
The big holiday score was an old Risk set, with wooden pieces. Margaret's sister got an even bigger score, with an old Monopoly set. You knew that the old sets also had wooden houses and hotels, but this set was so old that the word "Hotel" was painted on each little red wooden hotel. Amazing.
During my incarceration in Yuma, we decided to see the movie that was playing at the local theater. (Note: "the" movie. One.) We saw "Jingle All The Way" featuring Ah-nold and Sinbad. It was unquestionably the worst movie of the year, and makes "Krull" look like "Citizen Kane" in comparison. Doesn't Arnold bother to READ THE SCRIPTS before he agrees to do a movie??? And toward the end of our stay in Denver, we were reading on the couch with "My Stepmother Is An Alien" (with Kim Basinger and Dan Akroyd) playing on cable on the TV. "My Stepmother Is An Alien" makes "Jingle All The Way" look like "Citizen Kane" in camparison.
Well, 1996 ended, and tradition dictates that I proclaim my favorite song of the past year. Usually, I come up with about twenty, but this past year was a stinker and my list is exceptionally short:
- "In The Meantime" by Spacehog.
The newspapers say that 1996 was bad because there are no dominant innovative styles right now. They say that alternative, gangsta rap, and hip hop are all burnt out, and since nobody's really sure what will replace them, nobody's jumping on any bandwagon, leaving just stagnation. The articles claimed that people were sick of everything, and cited poor-selling albums by Hootie and the Blowfish, the Gin Blossoms, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, REM, Presidents of the USA, and a few others. Since people were sick of all the latest trends, nothing really dominated and stagnation ruled. And since Celine Dion had the biggest selling album of the year (behind whiny Alanis Morrisette, which came out in '95), I agree that blandness dominated the year.
I think the explanation is much simpler. I think that the music industry is so obsessed with trendy product and sales numbers, that they forgot how to write songs. "In The Meantime" contained, in my opinion, the only worthwhile melody of 1996. 365 days; only one good song. Pretty stinky indeed. I don't feel too optimistic about 1997 either, despite upcoming albums by U2 and, heaven help us, Aerosmith.
I see all this as a sign that "Crap From The Past" must become the dominant force in the universe. The timing is right, I have a small but devoted following on a non-commercial station that doesn't interfere with my programming, I have a commercial sponsor (a local club at which I occasionally DJ), and I have the Ethel Merman Disco Album on CD. Yep - I am the god of hellfire and I bring you...
...1997.
Happy new year to all of you from Uncle Margaret and myself. May you claw your own eyes out before you suffer through "Jingle All The Way". And to all a good night... (and feel free to write back).
Ron "Did you see the Simpsons last week? With the hallucinogenic chili? I'm still laughing..." G
Wednesday, December 4, 1996
Ron's Big Life Update - December 1996
Happy Hanukah? Happy Thanksgiving? Happy Halloween? Whatever...
Rochester is still here. Last Tuesday, we did in fact get about a foot of snow ("one inch" according to forecasts. Ha!) It has since disappeared due to unseasonably warm weather and a lot of rain, so you're not missing much. No catastrophic ice storms or anything good like that.
We spent a chaotic weekend with the 'rents in Nanuet. I had my radio show from 6-8 on Wednesday, so we hit the road for NY starting at 9 PM and got to Nanuet around 2:30 AM. On the plus side, there was absolutely no traffic at all on the highways, despite last Wednesday being the most heavily traveled day of the year. Thursday we Thanksgivinged (Thanksgave?) - just Margaret, my brother, my folks, and me. Food was a-plenty. Friday and Saturday we ran around Rockland and visited family. Saturday night was my high school 10th-year reunion, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, the people I really wanted to see weren't there (sounds just like the college reunion), but it was still fun. It was an unintentional hoot to see some of the people who stayed in Rockland after graduation. I noticed quite a few Jewish girls who were wearing way entirely too much make-up, and it is a very easy stretch of the imagination to connect these girls with the stereotype of the New York Jewish women, who also wear way entirely too much make-up. There was also a disproportionately high number of lawyers among my former classmates, which I don't claim to understand. And most of them are married with a kid or two. One had a set of twins, which seems like a great deal - have one kid, get one free. You're confining yourself to misery for a few years anyway, so what's another set of diapers to change? Sunday we drove back up here. Not a fun drive at all, due to heavy rain for most of the trip. Bleh.
I drove past the site where Rockland County has planned the largest (or 2nd largest?) mall in the country, rivaling the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. (Have I ever mentioned that the Mall of America, despite being large enough to house a mini-amusement park, has a gang problem? That's how big this mall is...) Why oh why is Rockland County building this monstrosity? Traffic is worse there than ever before, and we HAVE A FEW MALLS ALREADY thank you... Stupid suburbs...
So now I'm back in town for a little while. We made Christmas plans in Colorado again this year, so I spend 12 consecutive days with the in-laws. This is the last time I let Margaret pick the travel days...
We saw Ransom, and it was better than I expected.
Has anyone else noticed that aside from the always-excellent Simpsons, the quality of everything else on TV has being fluctuating wildly? The X-Files even stooped low enough to have David Duchovny (Muldar) cry on screen. What is this world coming to? It seems like the only sure-fire things on TV are the Simpsons, and Newman. "Newman...Newman...Newman..."
My brother, by the way, is still wearing the socks that I handed down to him when I was in high school. He hasn't cut his hair since 1994 and his car is held together by duct tape. He has taken the concept of "grunge" to a distant world only imagined by the population of Seattle. Kenny IS grunge.
Not much else going on out here. I found some good records, including another copy of Bryan Adams's "Let Me Take You Dancing", an obscure disco track released only on a Canadian 12" single, and worth lots of $. (I paid $1 because the woman selling it had no idea what it was.) I also found an album by La Flavour, a disco album from 1980 featuring the song "Mondolay" and featuring production and background vocals from Donnie Iris (who had recorded "The Rapper" with Jaggerz in 1970, had recorded "Play That Funky Music" with Wild Cherry in 1976, and who would later sing "Ah Leah" and "Love Is Like A Rock"). Mondo bizarro.
Happy Hanukah to all of you. I'm hoping that this e-mail will appease all of you until I write proper holiday cards; it should be a few more years until that kicks in.
I'm going to work now. There is undiscovered crap out there, and one of them has my name on it...
Stay warm and fuzzy,
Ron "The crap is out there..." G
Rochester is still here. Last Tuesday, we did in fact get about a foot of snow ("one inch" according to forecasts. Ha!) It has since disappeared due to unseasonably warm weather and a lot of rain, so you're not missing much. No catastrophic ice storms or anything good like that.
We spent a chaotic weekend with the 'rents in Nanuet. I had my radio show from 6-8 on Wednesday, so we hit the road for NY starting at 9 PM and got to Nanuet around 2:30 AM. On the plus side, there was absolutely no traffic at all on the highways, despite last Wednesday being the most heavily traveled day of the year. Thursday we Thanksgivinged (Thanksgave?) - just Margaret, my brother, my folks, and me. Food was a-plenty. Friday and Saturday we ran around Rockland and visited family. Saturday night was my high school 10th-year reunion, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, the people I really wanted to see weren't there (sounds just like the college reunion), but it was still fun. It was an unintentional hoot to see some of the people who stayed in Rockland after graduation. I noticed quite a few Jewish girls who were wearing way entirely too much make-up, and it is a very easy stretch of the imagination to connect these girls with the stereotype of the New York Jewish women, who also wear way entirely too much make-up. There was also a disproportionately high number of lawyers among my former classmates, which I don't claim to understand. And most of them are married with a kid or two. One had a set of twins, which seems like a great deal - have one kid, get one free. You're confining yourself to misery for a few years anyway, so what's another set of diapers to change? Sunday we drove back up here. Not a fun drive at all, due to heavy rain for most of the trip. Bleh.
I drove past the site where Rockland County has planned the largest (or 2nd largest?) mall in the country, rivaling the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. (Have I ever mentioned that the Mall of America, despite being large enough to house a mini-amusement park, has a gang problem? That's how big this mall is...) Why oh why is Rockland County building this monstrosity? Traffic is worse there than ever before, and we HAVE A FEW MALLS ALREADY thank you... Stupid suburbs...
So now I'm back in town for a little while. We made Christmas plans in Colorado again this year, so I spend 12 consecutive days with the in-laws. This is the last time I let Margaret pick the travel days...
We saw Ransom, and it was better than I expected.
Has anyone else noticed that aside from the always-excellent Simpsons, the quality of everything else on TV has being fluctuating wildly? The X-Files even stooped low enough to have David Duchovny (Muldar) cry on screen. What is this world coming to? It seems like the only sure-fire things on TV are the Simpsons, and Newman. "Newman...Newman...Newman..."
My brother, by the way, is still wearing the socks that I handed down to him when I was in high school. He hasn't cut his hair since 1994 and his car is held together by duct tape. He has taken the concept of "grunge" to a distant world only imagined by the population of Seattle. Kenny IS grunge.
Not much else going on out here. I found some good records, including another copy of Bryan Adams's "Let Me Take You Dancing", an obscure disco track released only on a Canadian 12" single, and worth lots of $. (I paid $1 because the woman selling it had no idea what it was.) I also found an album by La Flavour, a disco album from 1980 featuring the song "Mondolay" and featuring production and background vocals from Donnie Iris (who had recorded "The Rapper" with Jaggerz in 1970, had recorded "Play That Funky Music" with Wild Cherry in 1976, and who would later sing "Ah Leah" and "Love Is Like A Rock"). Mondo bizarro.
Happy Hanukah to all of you. I'm hoping that this e-mail will appease all of you until I write proper holiday cards; it should be a few more years until that kicks in.
I'm going to work now. There is undiscovered crap out there, and one of them has my name on it...
Stay warm and fuzzy,
Ron "The crap is out there..." G
Monday, November 4, 1996
Ron's Big Life Update - November 1996
I've heard it said that Minnesota has two seasons: eleven months of winter, and one month of bad skating. Rochester probably isn't that far behind.
Yep, we got one whole inch of snow over the weekend. It didn't do much damage, but it served as a nasty reminder that winter is here and we better prepare for utter misery for the next six months. A rude awakening for those who thought that it might not really snow this year.
One of the sure signs of the Apocalypse (sp?): Journey has released a new album - their first in ten years. This is not good.
Not much else is going on up here. Margaret and I bought a new mattress last week. ("Newlyweds...") And we firmed up plans for the Xmas holidays - I'll be spending two full weeks in Denver with the other side of the family. Oy vey. (I didn't want to stay out there that long, but plane tickets were hard to come by.) My Thanksgiving plans worked out well - FOOD with the parents, then my high school 10th-year reunion two days after that in Rockland County. How convenient! Anyone need a ride to and from Rockland County from Rah-chester?
For you music buffs, stay tuned for my picks of the best of '96. (I'll do the best of '95 too, since I'm finally getting around to it.) Same Crap time, same Crap channel.
Go vote,
Ron "Snow? Whoda thunk?" G
Yep, we got one whole inch of snow over the weekend. It didn't do much damage, but it served as a nasty reminder that winter is here and we better prepare for utter misery for the next six months. A rude awakening for those who thought that it might not really snow this year.
One of the sure signs of the Apocalypse (sp?): Journey has released a new album - their first in ten years. This is not good.
Not much else is going on up here. Margaret and I bought a new mattress last week. ("Newlyweds...") And we firmed up plans for the Xmas holidays - I'll be spending two full weeks in Denver with the other side of the family. Oy vey. (I didn't want to stay out there that long, but plane tickets were hard to come by.) My Thanksgiving plans worked out well - FOOD with the parents, then my high school 10th-year reunion two days after that in Rockland County. How convenient! Anyone need a ride to and from Rockland County from Rah-chester?
For you music buffs, stay tuned for my picks of the best of '96. (I'll do the best of '95 too, since I'm finally getting around to it.) Same Crap time, same Crap channel.
Go vote,
Ron "Snow? Whoda thunk?" G
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
