Over at the Retroist, I’ve started a new video series titled “Looking Back with Flack”. In sticking with the site’s retro theme, in these videos I’ll be reviewing retro “things” — toys, video games, movies, shows, or whatever else I can come up with.
Here’s the first episode:
I hope to post 2 or 3 “Looking Back with Flack” videos each month. I’ll probably post them on Fridays over there, and then post links to them here on my blog a day or two later.
As I mentioned on Facebook a few weeks ago, a bird has built a nest in the corner of our front porch. Momma Bird stays there pretty much all of the time. Daddy Bird, when he’s there, stays perched on our front porch’s light fixture. I wouldn’t mind it so much, except it is now continually covered in bird poo.
When you open the front door, sometimes the birds scatter up to the gutter and sit there until you walk by before returning to their normal spots.
This morning when Susan and the kids came home from breakfast, they spotted this guy on top of our house.
Here’s a closer picture.
The pond in our backyard commonly hosts lots of geese, but this is the first one we’ve spotted hanging out on top of our house. It’s been an hour or so, and he’s still up there.
My entire roof is going to be white before this is all over, isn’t it?
The first iPhone I ever saw or touched belonged to my friend Justin. After having owned two phones in a row with physical keyboards (a Samsung Blackjack and a Palm Treo), my first reaction was, “How on earth do you type on a touchscreen?”
The answer is, you learn, slowly. I’ve found that by rapidly flailing my thumbs as quickly as possible, things usually turn out for the best. And when they don’t, they end up on DamnYouAutoCorrect.com (mostly not safe for work).
Yes, I had to dig a bit to find a PG-13 one.
The iPhone is small enough that, when cradled in your hands, you can type on using both thumbs. The iPad however, especially in landscape mode, is not. In portrait mode you can hit most of the keys, but it’s awkward enough that I find myself holding the tablet with my left hand while poking out messages using the index finger on my right. The newer versions of iOS for the iPad support a split keyboard which moves each half of the keyboard closer to the outside of the screen. Unfortunately not every application supports or recognizes this feature and adjusts itself accordingly — for example when using the split keyboard on Facebook, the keyboard ends up overlaying the area where your typed text is being displayed.
I thought, for a while, that the answer would be an external, physical keyboard. Last year for my birthday, I asked for (and received) an iPad case with a built in keyboard, just like this one:
I used it for a while, but have mostly abandoned it. Here’s why:
01. Most iPad keyboards use Bluetooth, which affects the battery life of the iPad. It’s not super-dramatically less, but it’s less.
02. The iPad keyboard requires separate charging, which I always forget to do.
03. The keyboard, at 3/4 scale, is simply too small for me to type proficiently on. Between hunting for certain keys and having to constantly fix mistakes, I can type more rapidly (and more accurately) using the touch screen keyboard.
04. I don’t type that much on the iPad. Mostly it’s used for watching videos, reading (and occasionally responding to) e-mail, reading eBooks, and engaging in social media (Facebook and Twitter). If I’m going to work on my book, I’ll do it on a laptop.
05. The iPad case with a keyboard built in is so thick that it makes it unable to hold the iPad with one hand. It makes one of the sleekest tech inventions of all time and makes it 5x as thick. With the case on, the iPad is barely smaller than my Acer netbook.
iPad keyboards are an attempt to turn something (the iPad) into something it isn’t (a laptop). Until something a little sleeker comes along, I think I’m going to shelve my iPad keyboard for the time being.
I was in 7th grade when I first heard the Beastie Boys’ major label debut Licensed to Ill. By the time the Beastie Boys hit the music scene I had already been listening to rap music for a couple of years. I was first exposed to rap through breakdancing (Breakin’ and Beat Street), and owned Fat Boys and Run DMC cassettes at least a year before Licensed to Ill was released. That being said, there were things that set the Beasties apart from those other acts — the main one being they were white, which helped get them radio play. As a kid growing up in the middle of Oklahoma, there wasn’t a lot of exposure to hip-hip culture (and “Yo! MTV Raps” wouldn’t air for a few more years). The Beastie Boys changed that with the release of the party anthem “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)”. Seemingly overnight the Beastie Boys were everywhere.
The Beastie Boys consisted of three guys from New York: Mike D (Michael Diamond), King Adrock (Adam Horowitz), and MCA (Adam Yauch). MCA was, in my eyes, the coolest of the three. At least in the early days, King Adrock seemed “too goofy” and Mike D always seemed to be trying too hard to be cool, but MCA’s gravelly, baritone voice and laid-back demeanor set him apart from the pack. Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate each of them individually, but I still see Mike D as the base on top of which the other two danced around.
Licensed to Ill became an instant classic (it’s on every list of top rap albums and many lists of the top albums of all time), but it’s not the best example of the Beasties’ personalities. The album is one brag after another; there are so many rhymes about the girls they get or the guns they’ve got that the guys’ personalities get buried. The talent was there, but the content wasn’t.
It eventually came, though. On Licensed to Ill rhymes are started and finished so rapidly that it’s tough to attribute lyrics to any single person, but as time went on the guys developed their own style. This is one of my favorite rhymes from MCA. I love the visual of being as cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce.
“Well I’m as cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce,
You’ve got the rhyme and reason but no cause,
Well if you’re hot to trot, you think you’re slicker than grease,
I’ve got news for you crews you’ll be sucking like a leech.”
You can hear the lyric at 2:51 in this clip:
I also think this lyric from MCA is great.
“If you can feel what I’m feeling then it’s a musical masterpiece,
If you can hear what I’m dealing well then that’s cool at least,
What’s running through my mind comes through in my walk,
True feelings are shown from the way that I talk.”
It’s the first section from this song:
MCA’s frequently pulled comparisons from pop culture.
“If you try to knock me you’ll get mocked,
I’ll stir fry you in my wok,
Your knees’ll start shaking and your fingers pop,
Like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock.”
(Most of these videos were also directed by MCA.)
In 1990, after hearing the Dali Lama speak and visiting Napal, MCA converted to Buddhism. MCA would go on to co-organize the Tibetan Freedom Concerts. Later in his career, MCA expressed regrets over some of the band’s earlier lyrics. From CNN:
“I didn’t realize how much harm I was doing back then and I think a lot of rap artists probably don’t realize it now,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “I said a lot of stuff fooling around back then, and I saw it do a lot of harm. I had kids coming up to me and saying, ‘Yo, I listen to your records while I’m smoking dust, man.’ And I’d say, ‘Hey, man, we’re just kidding. I don’t smoke dust.’ People need to be more aware of how they’re affecting people.”
MCA’s change of attitude was also reflected in his lyrics. From “Sure Shot”:
“I want to say something that’s long overdue,
the disrespect to women has got to be through,
To all the mothers and sisters and the wives and friends,
I want to offer my love and respect to the end.”
If you want to read more about the Beastie Boys or Adam Yauch, I highly recommend the following books, all three of which I have read:
Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies: This book has a lengthy chapter dedicated to the foundation of Grand Royale and the studio the Boys built for recording Check Your Head and Ill Communication.
Episode 115 of my podcast You Don’t Know Flack went online earlier today for some strange reason. I had actually scheduled the post to go live this Saturday, but something went wonky with WordPress and the post decided to go live on its own today. So, there you go.
Episode 115 is all about text adventures. This episode is unique in multiple ways. Not only does it feature the infamous Interactive Fiction author Robb Sherwin via Skype … but it features him for approximately two hours. What can I say? Robb and I got carried away talking about text adventures!
Here is the link to the current episode. If you’ve been dying to hear Robb Sherwin and myself swap old memories of text adventures and talk about what we like and dislike about current ones, boy did you just hit pay dirt!
Between my posts on The Retroist and Facebook some of you already know some of this story, but here’s the entire thing from beginning to end.
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered Etsy.com. To clarify, I’ve known about Etsy for a year or two, I’ve just never really checked it out. Etsy is a place where normal people can set up their own virtual online shops and hawk their goods. Think of it like an eBay Store, but focused more more on homemade arts and crafts.
Since I’ve been writing so much for the Retroist lately, I decided to check out Etsy and see what retro items they had for sale. While randomly throwing words into Etsy’s search box, I submitted “retro lunchbox” and found a store belonging to Walker Davis Designs. Walker Davis was not selling a retro lunchbox; Walker Davis was selling a painting of a retro lunchbox (a Gremlins one, to be specific) for $12.
Let me pause for a moment to point out that I am always on the lookout for a good story. I’ve already checked eBay. You can get a real Gremlins lunchbox for between $20-$40. But there were thousands upon thousands of Gremlins lunchboxes manufactured. A lot of people owned them. A lot of people still them. But how many people have an oil painting of a Gremlins lunchbox?
As far as I know, one. Me.
In real life the painting is smaller than this picture makes it look. It’s 8×10 (inches, not feet, although that would be grand).
As I recently mentioned, the weekend before last was Sun Valley Garage Sale Day. While searching garage sales I found two frames the perfect size for 50 cents each. I could have bought a frame at the store, but something prohibited me from paying more for the frame than I did for the painting.
Here’s one of the two frames I picked up. The frame was the wrong color — nothing a little spray paint wouldn’t solve.
Ah, much better. The painting was exactly the right size and fit snugly into the carved out opening of the frame. With the glass in place and a nail in the fall, the framing of the painting of a Gremlins lunch box was complete.
The painting is now proudly — proudly — hanging in my movie room, above our candy machine and next to my framed Empire Strikes Back poster.
So there you have it — a framed original painting of a Gremlins lunchbox.
The four of us came home yesterday to find a wounded bird on our front porch. The bird had wiggled itself up against the house and was hiding under a pile of leaves. When Susan brushed it out we saw that it had a broken leg and a broken wing. I told the kids to leave it alone and go inside.
About two hours later, we walked outside to find the bird lying on its back and screaming its head off. Other birds had gathered on our gutter and were perched there, watching the wounded bird scream. It was really weird. Eventually Susan said, “Well, there’s only one thing we can do,” and I was thinking so, do I should shoot it or just stomp on it? But actually what she meant was we should take it to the vet, so it’s a good thing for the bird that Susan lives here.
Susan called the local vet but they told us they don’t take injured wild animals there. Instead they referred us to Wild Care Oklahoma … which is in Norman, about an hour away. Before I could ask Mason if he had seen my pellet gun around, Susan and Morgan had loaded the bird onto a makeshift stretcher, fed it some water by dipping a leaf into some water, and loaded the bird into the van.
2 1/2 hours later they returned, sans bird. Wild Care said that they could set the bird’s broken wing and that it should be off and flying again in about two weeks — which, everyone including the bird agrees, is a better fate than a pellet to the head.
Sun Valley (the neighborhood I grew up in) has been having an annual neighborhood garage sale day for as long as I can remember. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve been writing about them for as long as I’ve been blogging.
As has been the tradition, the Friday night before Garage Sale Day, I hauled my golf cart over to Dad’s house and had it ready to go. I also took with me my small red trailer that I got last year at last year’s garage sale day, and a cooler full of ice and bottled water.
A few hours after garage sale day officially kicked off, my golf cart looked like this:
On the back of the trailer there you can see a couple of suitcases Susan picked up for decorating purposes. In front of those sits my blue 30-gallon tub, which we filled up twice with random odds and ends. We actually bought so many things this year that about halfway through the day we had to make a run back to Dad’s house to unload the trailer!
One of the better things I found were these tubs, for $10. I had been looking for some like these, and Office Depot has them for $30-$40 (each), so this was a great deal.
I think Susan spent the most money, although the kids may have ended up with the most stuff. They (literally) “nickel and dime” the garage sales, picking up a toy water gun here or a pair of cheap earrings there. One of Mason’s favorite scores was this giant red foam cowboy hat, which the cat has already moved in to.
The last part of garage sale day is bringing all your loot home and finding places to put it all. Above our dining room sunken into the wall is (what we call) our “niche,” which Susan is always trying to come up with interest ways to display inside. After a few trips up and down our ladder, the luggage Susan picked up over the weekend found a new resting place.
My favorite find of the day was this ram skull. In this picture it’s only temporary, but I will soon be figuring out how to permanently mount it to the golf cart.
Sunday, Susan and I will be weighing in for the OKC Weight Loss Challenge. The contest is free to enter. Whoever loses the most amount of weight (percentage) over 12 weeks wins a car, among other perks. Official weigh-ins must take place at an authorized location here in the city (by appointment only), and you must weigh again 12 weeks later to the day.
The first place winner will take home a 2012 Nissan Versa from Fenton Nissan. I have not yet decided if I will use it as my daily driver or sell it. I’ll let you know on August 11th, the day the contest ends.
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