Every once in a while, I run across a web site that I have to not only share, but insist you go take a look at, and Obvious News is the latest I've found. The title of the web site ought to explain what you can expect to find there, but in case it's not obvious enough, this is where you can find a round-up of the latest news that makes you smack your forehead and say, "Well, DUH!" A few of my favorite news stories: Fish live in water; Fruit and veggies good for your heart; Depression more common among drug users; and, Inexperienced workers more likely to be injured.
The front page of today's Stars & Stripes screams GAS PRICES RISE 20 CENTS! MAN THE BARRICADES! There are a lot of things I'm not going to miss about being stationed at Misawa, but I've had a long talk with the voices in my head, and we've decided that number one on our laundry list of Things That Suck Here has officially become: Bitching About Gas Prices.
Attention, psychology majors! Want to write a killer thesis for your doctorate? Come to Misawa, where you can study "The Pathology of Outrage; or, How Can People Make a Great Big Stink About Nothing?" Examine an amazing group of several thousand Americans living in a country where gasoline would cost them five dollars a gallon, if they were to buy it at gas stations in town. Instead, the Army & Air Force Exchange Service makes it available to them at half that price. Under these circumstances, what do you think the reaction of the American population would be:
a) they would write snarling letters to the editor condemning "price gouging" by AAFES
b) they would write insipid letters to the editor filled with enough price comparisons to choke the panel at a math meet
c) they would write vitriolic, ranting letters to the editor simply to vent their outrage at the AAFES "monopoly"
d) all of the above
I wouldn't work as a clerk in the base gas station right now if AAFES were paying twenty bucks an hour for the job.
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science-fiction cult phenomenon, spanning a radio show, a book, a television show and finally, if you recognize the name, then you probably know that it’s been released as a Hollywood movie. I want to see it, because I was a fan of the radio show, and I re-read the book every couple years, but I have some reservations about seeing it, for precisely the same reasons.
The radio show was popular enough to become a successful novel because the author, Douglas Adams, was a first-class wit who had a keen sense of how to write comedy exceptionally well. Both the radio show and the book were packed with such clever narrative and dialogue that when fans of the show (book, movie, whatever) get together, they exchange their favorite quotations the way Monty Python fans do. Any True Fan can, for instance, tell you exactly the way that Vogon ships hang in the sky.
The radio show charged my imagination with comic images of aliens and space travel that have remained crystal-clear in my head ever since. Here’s the problem I anticipate: I’m very, very worried that the movie’s visualizations will be wrong. There’s always the possibility they could improve the story on looks alone, but I have to say I’m already a little sorry that I’ve seen the movie’s version of Marvin, who, in my mind, should look like the howling man in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, and the Vogons ought to be pencil-thin office drones in high-neck collars and bow ties with petulant, constipated attitudes that made them look down their noses at everybody.
I’m not so much worried that the story will suck, or the actors will bumble their way through a poor script and bad direction, because I feel they’ll be lucky to ever measure up to what’s already gone before. The radio show was so inspired that it’ll always be the standard to measure the rest of the works against, and now that Adams is gone, I think it’ll be quite a while before anybody measures up.
If you paid a day’s visit to just about any military base, you could be excused for coming away thinking that the primary purpose of the military was to sell cookies and brownies. Just about everywhere you go, you’ll find a bake sale, sponsored by one unit or another trying to raise money for their holiday parties or suchlike.
And the cost of a brownie at one of these sales? “Donation,” the sign usually says, if the people at the table don’t. Which leaves you with the sticky problem: You don’t want to pay five bucks for that brownie, so what’s the least you can give as “a donation” without appearing to be a penny-pinching Scrooge?
How do you get your teenaged son to clean the kitchen floor? Bet him a dollar he won’t lick up the cat food kibble. I didn’t really expect that he would do it, but he didn’t dicker, he didn’t even have to think about it, he just got down on all fours and licked it right up. I don’t think I was ever that weird.
Just incidentally, this is the same kid who would eat tofu only after I offered him five bucks to do it. I’ve tried to get him to eat some more, but no amount of money will entice him. I told you he was weird.
As I stood drying myself off in the shower stall, I heard Barb on the other side of the door calling, “Darling! I’ve got a special treat for you!”
“Hot Dog!” I shouted, and opened the door with nothing but a towel around my waist. She giggled at me and held out a blueberry fruit smoothie.
“Is it the smoothie?” I asked, hope in one hand, spit in the other.
It was the smoothie. Ah, well.
I was about halfway through an hour-long staff meeting, bombarded by facts and figures which had nothing to do with me, when all at once my brains felt numb all over, and my eyes began to cross so that I literally couldn’t focus on anything anybody was saying. It’s not the first time this has happened to me at one of the many hundreds of meetings I’ve had to endure, and I’ve often wondered why. I should have some say in whether or not my brains are up and running, shouldn’t I? Or are the workings of every last ganglion and synapse of my nervous system entirely automatic, and if so, why?
Immediately after the meeting, I had to suffer nearly an hour of droning, mostly one-sided conversation with a co-worker so dreadfully dull that it’s entirely possible he could one day be convicted and sent to the electric chair for assault with a deadly monologue. Once again, I found myself fading into oblivion, with no control whatsoever over my own faculties. That’s when I got the crazy idea that this behavior may be some kind of self-preservation reflex. Perhaps the human brain has developed the ability to shield itself from inane conversation and other meaningless blather by flat-lining all its normal operations and lapsing into inactivity. The mind is a delicate balance of sense and chaos, and I have no doubt that the actions of some people can make others insane. What if your brain can somehow anesthetize itself to avoid the corruption that mind-numbingly bad conversation might have on its higher functions?
And, best of all, what if you could learn to trigger this reflex in others? You come home from a hard day at work to find your dearly beloved is on your case? I think I can safely say that just about anybody would make me a very wealthy man if I could show them how to send a cranky spouse to la-la land. Trouble with this idea, like so many others, is that my boredom reflex kicked in during biology class, so I have no idea how I’m going to learn enough about human physiology to unlock the secret of this gold mine. I’ll just go back to sleep now.
Speaking of sleep, I was slipping off to slumberland just last night when one of the cats jumped square in the middle of my back from about thirty thousand feet, or at least it felt that way. Have you ever been drifting off when you jerk yourself awake? It was like that, except a lot scarier. After I managed to start breathing regularly again, I rolled over and tried to focus on a happy thought, like strangling acrobatic cats, to stop my heart from thudding a million miles an hour. I was just starting to slide off to sleep again when Barb came into the room from downstairs. I’m not normally bothered when she comes in after I’m sleeping, but when she bounced into bed she had her arm crooked around about a dozen books, which she dumped onto the middle of the bed, coincidentally the spot where I was sleeping. Just as there are days when you shouldn’t get out of bed, there are nights when you probably shouldn’t go to bed, either. Too bad we never know when one of those days comes along until it’s too late.
I heard it again! I listen to a local radio station, just for variety’s sake, and this morning the announcer was very excited about a recording, which he said was Don’t Fog Wet Ma Heart. The first time I heard this song, just a day or two ago, I had one of those moments when you shake your head and ask yourself, “Did she really just say what I think she said?” So I turned up the volume in hopes that she would repeat it, and I wasn’t disappointed. The refrain is in Japanese, but the last line goes, “No, no, no, noooo, dent fog wet ma hot!” This morning, the announcer was so animated about the recording that I thought he was going to talk the lips right off his face; then he hit the brakes and very carefully pronounced the title. No doubt about it, he very definitely said what I think he said.
Is it called rap “music” or what? Hip-hop sort of has a tune, so I don’t have any trouble with that, but whenever I refer to rap, I mentally trip over the descriptive word. I know I slipped and called it a “song” in the previous paragraph, but there were two other places where I had to use “recording” because I just don’t think of rap as a song, any more than I think of a drum roll as a song. I know, I know, drums are musical instruments. Rap is percussive. So is a salvo from a battery of 155mm Howitzers, which is a lot easier for me to listen to that most rap. (Sorry about the cheap shot.) (And the lousy pun.)
It’s so much easier to buy stuff when you can swipe a card, isn’t it? “See some ID with that?” Sure, here you go. If somebody could make ID cards harder to fake, you’d feel even better about verifying your credit card purchases, wouldn’t you? How about a driver’s license that isn’t just a card with your name and your picture on it, but a supercard that’s very close to being a tiny little computer, with an amazing chip almost too small to see. This gizmo will not only be able to recall your name and pages of your other personal information, it can also send it by radio! No more waiting in line while the guy in front of you fumbles to take his card out of his wallet.
Incredible as it may seem, this is not just some far-out idea, it’s happening every day, right now. It’s called radio-frequency identification, or RFID, and Fed-Ex uses it to deliver packages, Cub Foods inventories stock on store shelves with it, and if you’ve “chipped” your pet, it’ll help you find your lost dog or cat. RFID lets you pay a toll on busy highways without stopping, and thanks to the Real ID bill, pretty soon it’ll help you breeze through the checkout at Wal-Mart when you flash it along with your credit card.
But it doesn’t have to stop there! Confirming your identify for check-cashing and credit-card purchases is only the beginning of what this little powerhouse can do for you! If a one-stop store, such as Wal-Mart, were to add a few simple, off-the-shelf computer upgrades, their existing computer network could analyze the purchases you make each time you go shopping. Then, no matter which Wal-Mart you went to, greeters could not only welcome you by name, but would also be able to point you to the aisle and shelf where you could find your favorite products. You’d never be lost in Wal-Mart again!
By making identification foolproof and nearly impossible to fake, the Real ID standards could not only make a visit to the store easier and your credit more secure, it could once again make all travel safe and practically carefree. How?
First of all, the security of commercial air travel could be guaranteed if all passengers were required to show two forms of photo ID that could be confirmed using the networked computer technology of RFID. If your U.S. passport were a part of the system, passenger airlines could again be the safest way to travel.
And Real ID standards could easily ensure the safety of all forms of travel. Existing technology could read the information on every driver’s license while they’re moving down the road to make sure, for instance, that they all have basic collision insurance, or that they have a driver’s license at all! Imagine the peace of mind you would have knowing that every other driver on the road with you was properly licensed and insured, and that the police could pinpoint the whereabouts of traffic scofflaws.
Just three years after the Real ID bill is signed into law, you’ll be carrying one of these incredibly useful cards everywhere you go. When you wave your driver’s license at any card reader anywhere in the United States, you can be assured of a safe, secure and positive identification that you, and only you, can produce. And I have some swamp land in Florida at a bargain price, but it's going fast.
Tim was telling me about his scary dream, a classic falling dream where he fell from a great height and jerked himself awake just before he hit, which is a good thing because, as you know, if you hit bottom before you wake up, you DIE!
I told him I used to have that one all the time, except that about half the time I hit. I really hated those. You know the radio transmission towers with the red blinking lights, the ones that are about a thousand feet tall? They scare the hell out of me because one of the scariest recurring dreams that I had was that I was climbing one, I don’t know why, when it fell over. I’d be almost all the way to the top when I’d feel it begin to topple. At that point, I was screwed no matter what I did: I could hang on and die, or I could jump and die. I usually hung on. I should have tried to jump and fly away; I can do that sometimes, if I realize I’m having a dream, but either I didn’t realize it, or it happened too quickly for me to react. The tower would fall, quickly picking up speed, and I clung to it in sheer terror until I’d hit the ground with a crunch and jerk myself awake. It really sucked.
I asked Tim if he could read in his dreams; he thought he could. I know I can’t, or at least I don’t remember if I’ve had a dream where I can. When I’ve tried to read a book or a newspaper, I can see something’s printed on it, but I can’t read it. It doesn’t even look like words. Sometimes I’m called on to read my own notes to a group of people and I can’t read what I’ve written. A couple times I’ve realized I was having a dream and I’ve tried really hard for what seems like forever to read whatever it is, but it’s no use. I’m completely illiterate in my dreams.
I got my hair cut in the morning and very carefully pointed out this time to the nice Japanese barber lady that I would like her to trim the top, and only trim a little bit off the sides and back, instead of mowing a wide, white swath around the sides and back of my head in alarmingly quick strokes with the electric clipper, the way she did it last time after I cavalierly answered her with “trim the sides and back.” She follows my instructions very carefully ... when I’m careful about how I give them to her.
It rained nearly all day, a generous dump, which I mention only because I decided to lower the price on the van, so last night I scrubbed off the white shoe polish I used to paint “$2000 OBO” on the windows. I only scrubbed off the “2” and the first “0” and changed the price to $1600, but when I went back out to the car to drive home for lunch, I noticed that the rain had washed off the “1” on every side, so that I was driving around with “$600 OBO” on my car. I sat through lunch dreading the sound of the phone ringing, but apparently nobody who wanted a $600 van saw me, which is a little depressing, now that I think about it.
The IG prep team must be taking a closer look at the PT program; our PT monitor usually lets us run at our own pace for a mile and a half, then we can go home. It usually takes about twenty minutes. Today, he said we had to perform at least 45 minutes of cardio before we could leave. He even noted the time on his watch and said we couldn’t sign out to go home until 1620.
I wanted to go running outside, but 45 minutes of running is a lot of running. Still, the alternative was 45 minutes of cardio on a machine in the gym, and any more than ten or fifteen minutes of that bores all the hair off my head, so Wyzon and I ran down past the helicopter hangars. It must be at least three, maybe four miles.
As we passed the hangars, Wyzon checked his stopwatch, so I had to ask, “Have we run for twenty-two and one-half minutes yet?”
“Nope,” he answered, “sixteen.”
Bloody hell! “Six and a half more minutes is going to take us halfway around the base!” I whined.
“Maybe we should just go all the way around,” he suggested.
He was half-kidding, but I thought about maybe just running all the way home, although it didn't take long to decide against it. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to sign out. Also, I’d probably collapse and wake up with tubes in my arm. “I’m turning back,” I told Wyzon, “and darned if it won’t take me exactly forty-five minutes to finish this run.”
Bonkers and Boo eagerly followed me down to the kitchen this morning, but when I poured kibble into Bonkers’s dish he was so disgusted with me that he wouldn’t even look at me the rest of the morning, and he wasn’t about to rush over to the bowl to eat the kibble, either. Boo doesn’t mind going back to dry food, but after two weeks of canned tuna, Bonkers isn’t very happy at all with his old diet. He sat in the middle of the floor, facing away from me, for about ten minutes, then sidled over to the patio door to gaze out the window — just to gaze out the window, mind you, and definitely not to eat the kibble. Then he squatted down in front of his bowl and gazed a few minutes more before he finally, and very casually, began to nibble on his breakfast.
Barb’s super-secret project, which she code-named “Prism” on the daily calendar, turned out to be a visit to an off-base hair dresser’s for a “straight perm.” That means now she’s got straight, silky hair like a model in a shampoo commercial. She said she’s wanted to try it for months, but had to talk herself into spending a big bundle of her tip money on it. The first thing she wanted to do when she got home was wrap her bangs around a curling iron. Is it just me, or does that not make sense?
I may have met the only other person on earth who thinks that Cinnabon rolls taste like crap, besides me.
Ron was telling Truman that he went by Cinnabon every day, and the smell of the place was so good that it just about drove him crazy. He finally surrendered to temptation yesterday, bought a bun, tried it, and almost immediately regretted it.
The same thing happened to me about a year ago. I had to pick up something to bring in to work for a pot luck, and was strolling past the Cinnabon when it occurred to me to pick up a box of their cinnamon rolls. Just like Ron, I start to water at the mouth ever time I get a whiff of what they’re baking in there. Even though everybody cooed and rushed to get a roll when I brought them in, I managed to snag one for myself — and then I bit into one, and was absolutely gobsmacked to find that they could make something that smelled so good taste so bad.
I was just beginning to think that I was the only person anywhere who didn’t like Cinnabon, until I heard Ron talking this morning. I don’t think I need to lower my expectations; I love cinnamon rolls from just about every other bakery. Just not Cinnabon. I can’t explain it.
I went down to TMO to request pack-out dates. The guys working the desk must all be hard of hearing, or they’re used to working in a very loud warehouse, or on the flight line, or maybe they just like to shout every single word that comes out of their mouths. All the time I was talking to them, I felt a nagging urge to reach for a remote and hit the mute button.
The staff sergeant gave me the most thorough briefing I’ve had in years. She explained every option to me, repeated my choice, spoke it out loud again as she wrote it on the checklist she made up for me, and then reiterated all the consequences of that option. This went on for the better part of a half-hour.
I wanted to get so much more done today, but I’m not too worried that I didn’t. Friday’s my last day at work, and after that I’ll have as much time as I need to put the things in the house in order prior to the pack-out on the 20th of June. Or that’s what I’m telling myself now, at least. The way it’ll actually turn out, I’m sure, is that the days will fly by so quickly that I won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to so much as vacuum a rug before the movers pack everything out and the housing inspector’s waiting at the front door, tapping his toe impatiently.
After my retirement ceremony on Friday, I’ll have a month before I have to report to the personnel office to out-process. That’s four weeks during which I won’t have to report for duty. I’ll be on leave. I could use the time to see if I’ve still got a beard worth looking at. I was thinking about growing out the whole thing, then trying something really strange, like a goatee or a van dyke. Or muttonchops. I’ve never played around with it before, and this would be the perfect time to experiment before I show up in the world and settle down in a neighborhood where people will eventually know me, or at least my face. It’s a hairy decision to make. Har.
Movie Time: I can’t believe The Perfect Score got panned by the critics. I don’t pretend that it’s a caper movie on a par with Ocean’s Eleven, but it’s not so bad that it deserves a 15% on the Tomatometer! This was a fun movie! The plot was original! The dialogue was clever! Leonardo Nam was hilarious! It’s at least worth the price of a rental and a bag of microwave popcorn! Recommended! With extreme prejudice.
And even Tim enjoyed Sideways enough to want to talk about it. An extraordinary movie about ordinary people. I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out where I’ve seen Virginia Madsen before. I looked up her other films on the internet, and I’ve never seen any of them, but I know I’ve seen her. It’s going to drive me nuts.
If my home town of Manawa is known for anything, it’s the rodeo that’s held there every year in July. I usually got a job at the rodeo to make a little extra money, selling programs, or grilling chicken on the barbeque, or pushing a wheelbarrow full of iced soft drinks for sale.
One year, I worked in a trailer that sold junk food; I was the guy making the cotton candy, which is a simple but really messy, hot job. You pour colored sugar into a little pot at the top of a spindle. A motor spins the pot and a heating element melts the sugar, which leaks out of the pot through holes in the side. The melted sugar is spun into floss as it hits the air. It’s a really nifty-looking effect, which is why the machine is usually in the window where everybody can see it.
After all the cowboys rode all the bulls and broncos and lassoed all the calves, the spectators surged out of the stands in a wave to eat grilled chicken or ribs, cob corn, hot dogs or burgers, all the food that’s customarily roasted over an open, flaming pit of charcoal in July. They came over to the junk food trailer to get sodas and sweets, and especially to get cotton candy. God knows why anybody would want to eat cotton candy on a hot night in July, but they couldn’t get enough of it. I stood hunched over that machine winding up one big, fluffy wad of floss after another without a break for what seemed like forever. Most people don’t realize how hot that machine gets, especially on a July afternoon inside a junk-food trailer. An added plus is that the floss sticks to everything, especially hair.
At some point in the evening I caught a break, no more than a breather, actually, when I could stand up, take one step back from the machine, and stretch the kinks out of my spine. A light breeze came through the open sales window and, as I turned to face it, sweat streaming off my floss-covered features, the guy in the line just outside the sales window, who had apparently been waiting a few minutes longer than he though he should have to, glared at me and said something like, “Lookin’ for something to do?” I was too young then to think of the answer that springs to mind now: “Why, yes — I was looking to piss in the face of a wiseass, and it looks like I’ve found one.”
I remembered this guy when Barb was telling me all about the night from hell she had at work. Whoever cleaned the Flurpee machine didn’t put it back together the right way, and when one of the baristas poured the syrup into it, the Flurpee machine burped it back up, all over the counter, the floor, a nearby table where a family was eating their supper; it was a mess, and all Barb had to sop it up with was a couple packets of brown paper towels. As she tried to contain the damage and start cleaning up, she also had to try to help the other barista take orders. She couldn’t help noticing that several people in line were almost, but not quite, rude with her because she wasn’t focusing her full attention on them.
Every time I see customers in restaurants, or in any retail setting, getting cranky with the staff, I have to wonder: How do they think that gets things done in their favor? Getting your way by force never really works to anybody’s favor. It puts me in mind of the time I was on a narrow mountain road so steep and winding that it was almost impossible to drive faster than thirty miles per hour. I came around a bend and found myself behind a guy in a sports car, who was right behind a guy in something like a big, red Chevy Impala convertible. The Chevy driver was obviously out for an afternoon of sight-seeing in the mountains. The guy in the sports car, however, was in a great rushing hurry to get up the mountain. He was never farther than three feet from the rear bumper of the Chevy, he never stopped honking his horn, and he was so hot about his predicament that flames were shooting out of his ears, mouth and nose. As he honked the horn, he also shouted and waved his fist, but the driver in the Chevy never lost his cool, and never went faster than thirty.
Although I’d probably have a hard time convincing his mother that it was possible, Tim tried on dress shirts with no argument at all, and picked out a classy-looking blue one that wasn’t baggy as a tent. Then he went and washed his new dress shirt all by itself. When I asked him why he didn’t wash anything else with it, he explained to me, with the haughty air of somebody whose motives couldn’t possibly be understood by the likes of me, that he didn’t have anything else blue to wash, and, unlike me, he “didn’t mix colors.”
I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention that, on this day, I received my certificate of retirement. Thank you, thank you very much. I can't think of a single word that might begin to describe the happiness this event brought me, but if it's true that a picture is worth a thousand of them, maybe the right ones will come to you if you take a look at these photos.
I got the van registered with the auto hobby shop and parked it on the lemon lot, where all the used cars for sale are parked. All the people who are just arriving at Misawa go there to look for cars to buy, which is good and bad. Our van is pretty old, and looks it. Next to all the other, newer vans, the only thing ours appears to have going for it is its low, low price.
When I registered it at the hobby shop, the clerk got all the details she needed from my title and registration, except one. “Price?” she asked.
“$750,” I answered.
She paused for a heartbeat, then asked, “Or best offer?” just to make sure.
“No,” I chuckled, “firm. I’m pricing it to sell, but I’m not desperate yet.”
I went over to the exchange yesterday to see if they had the music from the movie The Incredibles in their typically anemic stock of soundtrack albums. I was not all that hopeful. What they have is a wide range of children’s sing-along tunes, one or two soundtracks from the very latest movies (but only if the background music was rap, hip-hop, or whatever they call those dirges that ernest young men sing in mournful voices to the accompaniment of three or four chords on an acoustic guitar that make me want to gnaw my own arms off) and a dusty copy of the music from The Thief and the Cobbler that nobody wants to buy. The snazzy jazz riffs of The Incredibles is so far from any of that, but what the hell — it was right in the front row of the rack. Last one, too. I snatched it and ran home.
I don’t expect there are many people my age out there who get their groove on to Henri Mancini or Nelson Riddle tunes; wicked brass jazz just doesn’t seem to stir modern people (which, believe it or not, I consider myself) even though it was once considered very modern. But for the lucky few who do enjoy their music this way, I’m going to have to jump up on a great big tall thing and scream: BUY THE SOUNDTRACK TO THE INCREDIBLES RIGHT NOW! I haven’t heard a cartoon soundtrack that was this much fun since I bought the Vince Guiraldi album of songs from A Charlie Brown Christmas, and if you don’t know what that means, you’d better put a crowbar in your wallet and buy both albums or live with crushing regret the rest of your life.
Now, on to the movie: I’m going to hit the Johnny Quest riff first, partly to get it out of the way, but mostly because I’m so damned jazzed about it. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Johnny Quest. Johnny was the son of brilliant scientist Benton Quest, who always seemed to be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough of one form or another. He could cobble together a laser cannon in an afternoon, and he designed supersonic jet planes for his personal use. Maybe you know the type. Because Dr. Quest’s scientific work was so mind-bogglingly advanced, a secret service agent, Roger Bannon, was detailed to protect them from the evil madmen who lined up to menace them. Johnny called Bannon “Race” for no reason I could figure out other than it sounded so cool. Johnny’s best buddy was Hadji, a Sikh boy from Calcutta, and they had a bulldog named Bandit who was always leading the boys straight into life-threatening danger.
The Quests lived in a house with a soaring, boomerang-style roof and picture-window walls on a private island in the Florida Keys. They hopped from one adventure to another in a jet plane that took off vertically, or in a couple of flying saucers, or a hydrofoil speedboat, and of course each of them had jet packs. Everything that could be “atomic-powered” was atomic-powered. The architecture was all straight out of Tomorrowland, the vehicles were all sleek art deco masterpieces, and all their high-speed adventures started off with a snappy jazz theme song. For capturing the hyper-modern space-age feel of the 1960’s, I can think of only a few other cartoons that have come close to matching it. I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that Johnny Quest was high art. The animation was choppy, the stories were often overly simple, but for capturing the hyper-modern space-age feel of the 1960’s, I can think of only a few other cartoons that have come close to matching it, until now.
The Incredibles has set the bar for 60’s retro wanna-be movies and television shows. From the brassy James Bond-like theme song to the googie-style architecture and the art deco aerodynamic cars, this movie is so retro-cool I’ll be nerding out over it for weeks. And speaking of ubernerd cartoon cross-references, check out the killer robot, a spider-legged attack droid straight out of Johnny Quest Episode #8, “The Robot Spy.” The evil genius sends it to destroy the city, making it look like it came from outer space (or, as they say in the tradition of the classic space-invaders movies, “FROM OUTER OUTER outer SPAAAAAACE! AAAACE! aaaace!”) by dropping it from orbit in a delta-winged ship, the same way Dr. Zinn tricked Benton Quest! This is soooo great!
But the nerdiest thrill of all is that The Incredibles is about a family of superheroes. I’ve been a comic-book superhero geek since way back, so this was, like, the best of everything! Space Age! Johnny Quest! Jazz riff! Super heroes! How could it be better? The geek appeal of superheroes, if you can stand a little expository writing, is that they’re just like you and me, and they can punch through brick walls, or maybe they’re very large and green, or laser beams shoot out of their eyes. Because of these special abilities they tend to stand out in a crowd, which works in their favor when fighting malfeasance, but a guy’s got to buy groceries sometime, and then they just want to fit in, a theme that’s been explored over and over again in comic books, most famously in Spider-Man, and on television most recently as Smallville.
For those of you who aren’t drawn to movies by the geeky appeal of the gadgets or the music or superheroes, I should mention that The Incredibles has a genuinely enjoyable story behind it, too. Bob Parr has been forcibly retired from the only work he really loves, catching crooks and saving the day. Now he works in a cubicle farm, where his jerk of a boss is driving him nuts. Who couldn’t sympathize with that? In fact, all the superheroes have been driven into permanent retirement by a flurry of lawsuits resulting from their tendency to smash whole city blocks while fighting the latest monster from outer space, a modern, nearly cynical comment on our litigious society.
I think what’s probably most impressive about The Incredibles is that, though the characters in the movie may be cartoons, the animators have done an incredible job, if I may, of giving them an impressive range of believable emotions. Cartoons are usually drawn for laughs, and even though these characters deliver plenty of good yuks, they also fight and cry and talk to each other in a convincingly human way. The clashes and the kisses between Bob and his wife Helen are remarkably affecting. Of course, they go right on doing this while they’re beating up bad guys, so I admit it’s a bit of a stretch to say they’re entirely realistic. You might also raise a justified objection to the violence in The Incredibles, but it’s a cartoon after all, and most of it amounts to no more than the pratfalls you’d see in a Roadrunner short.
Kids will like The Incredibles for the action and the superheroes; parents will find themselves watching and smiling at the sly jokes; and geeks like me will love it on so many levels they’ll burn out their ganglia. Big, atomic-powered recommendation.
I took a little bike ride this morning, 8.5 miles around the perimeter road. That kind of ride takes me about an hour, and when I’m in the saddle that long, I need some padding, so I slip into my bicycling shorts. You’ve probably seen cyclist wear these. Apparently Tim hasn’t. When I strolled through the living room where he was watching television, he took one look and quickly averted his eyes.
“Oh, my god, dad!” he said. “Please don’t tell me you went out in public like that!”
He’s got a problem with the way I wear sandals, too. I guess only übergeeks wear white socks, or any socks at all, in sandals. And even some sandals are very uncool, for that matter. While he was trying out some size seventeen Air Jordans and trying to pretend I wasn’t there, I wandered away to check out a very nice pair of leather sandals. When he caught a glimpse of what I was looking at, he just about burst his jugular. “I’m going to disown you if you wear those,” he warned me. They’re so delicate when they’re teenagers, aren’t they?
This morning’s bicycle ride around the perimeter road was officially the suckingest workout ever. A few drops of rain came down earlier, but by the time I was ready to go there was no rain at all, the sky was broken cloud cover, and the wind was light. I didn’t want to lose a minute of it, so hit the road hard and fast, and made it to the north area in just under twenty minutes, pretty good time. By then it was sprinkling again, just a little bit in fits and starts, but I was doing so well that I couldn’t get discouraged about it.
What I could, and did, get discouraged about was the headwind I caught on the return trip, which is a long, steady uphill climb, by the way. Thin as I am, you’d think that a little wind, or even a lot of wind, wouldn't slow me down much, but I was reduced to a crawl as I pushed straight into it. The slow, steady uphill climb becomes a very sudden, steep uphill trudge of about forty yards at one point, and again about a half-mile further, where I stood up and torqued hard to get it over with. By the time I got around the end of the runway and I could ease up a bit, crabbing through the wind, I was beat, and I still had two or three miles to go. That’s when the rain started coming steadily down, not quite drenching me, but never letting up enough to make it worth while to clear my glasses. You know how some people say they feel like a used dishrag when they’re really tired? I not only felt that way, I looked it.
I was still feeling a little ragged from yesterday’s bicycle ride (uphill and into the wind, mile after mile), and today is only the third day in a row that I’ve been riding around the perimeter road, so I made it a low-impact day, riding in low gear and taking it easy, especially on the uphill climbs. About halfway around the circuit I passed a jogger; not unusual at all; the perimeter road is usually choked with runners, especially Japanese, but there were no runners at all this morning. I passed her, went through the north area at an easy speed, coasted the downhill run to the beach and climbed back up to the golf course in the lowest gears. I was still holding back to a relaxed speed when I passed her again, just before I got to the end of the runway. She’d run halfway around the base in about the time it took for me to cycle it, and she looked like she wasn’t even trying very hard. Can’t get much more humbling than that.
Memorial Day is arguably the most military of all federal holidays on the calendar. It used to be celebrated by parades of veterans and brass bands belting out Sousa marches and respectful speeches over the graves of war dead at the local cemetery, and perhaps they still do that back in the States, but here on a remote military post in the Pacific, just a missile shot away from North Korea and China, we celebrate it by taking advantage of the bargains on sale at the base exchange! That says something especially revealing about us, if only I could say what it is.
Barb and I went to the main exchange today so that she could buy baby clothes for a shower. I went along as chauffer, and wandered through the book store where she met me after she was done shopping. On our way out of the store we passed a rack of comic books by the door, not where they’re usually set up, and Barb noticed that they were the complimentary comics she’d read about in the Stars & Stripes.
Complimentary comic books?
Captain America and Mr. Fantastic saluted smartly on a front cover splashed with the American flag. It was a single-issue episode featuring the New Avengers and the Fantastic Four subduing invaders from outer space. A web site called AmericaSupportsYou.com commissioned the special issue, made especially for distribution to U.S. troops overseas, who are coincidentally selling them for up to fifteen bucks to comic book collectors on another web site, ebay.com. And people wonder what makes me cynical.
Do you know what tomorrow is? DO YOU KNOW WHAT TOMORROW IS? Tomorrow is the first day of June! Do you know what happens in June? DO YOU? In June, I get to climb into a jet airplane and fly away from Misawa very, very quickly to the United States. Just the idea of the possibility of the event makes me so excited that I want to, ah, yes, in fact I just did wet myself. No, don’t worry about it, I have a hankie.
Okay, I wasn’t entirely accurate about how we’re going to leave Misawa. In fact, we’ll all get on a train to Hachinohe, where we’ll change to an incredibly fast train to Tokyo. That’s where the jet plane’s waiting for us. Okay, that’s not entirely accurate, either; it won’t wait at all for us. But we’ll be there with plenty of time to spare, because the bullet train travels so fast that it stops the hands on your wristwatch, if you’re as old-fashioned as I am and still wear a watch that has hands.
The bullet train’s the only way we can get from Misawa to Tokyo without crating our cats like mail-order meat and stuffing them in the cargo hold of an airplane. They can sit in our laps on the bullet train, and they can ride in the cabin on the plane from Tokyo to Los Angeles. That’s right, we’ll be flying Air McDonald, traveling across the Pacific Ocean on a prop plane with Gramma Elsie and Unka Bob and their whole flock of chickens and a goat. No, actually United Airlines lets anybody bring their cats on board, at least in theory. I read it on their web page, I called them on the phone, and Barb called them again because she’s really nervous that we’ll get to the check-in and one of the flight attendants will point at the cat carriers and say, “Where do you think you’re going with that?” It’s going to happen, she just knows it.
There’s a tiny little Air Force base in Los Angeles called — Anyone? Anyone? — Los Angeles Air Force Base. The runway’s part of a commercial air port, and the base is apparently no more than one or two very small buildings where old putzes like me out-process when they return to the States. Out-processing must take a mountain of paperwork that makes a mortgage-signing look quick and easy, because we’ll be there for three days while they turn me into a civilian again. I hope there’s no shock therapy or video taped briefings involved; I want to retain the few intact brain cells I still have.
We land in Los Angeles on a Monday, and we leave for Wisconsin the following Friday, landing at Dane County Airport in time for the start of the July 4th weekend. That’s when the intact brain cells I was saving will selflessly surrender their lives to a celebratory meal of beer and bratwurst. Hungover, and brain-cell free, I will then offer myself to the Wisconsin job market. How perfect is that?