Unplanned Obsolescence

Or: How We’re All Technology’s Bitches.

Remember that scene near the beginning in Back To the Future II, when Marty and Doc Brown park in the alley? Remember all those shrink-wrapped laserdiscs waiting to be hauled away with the rest of the garbage? Well ...

For those of you who are of too tender years to even know what the word "laserdisc" means, let me first curse you enthusiastically for being so young, and then tell you that laserdiscs are to DVDs what LP record albums were to CDs -- big, ungainly discs, each one containing a movie. (And if you don’t know what LPs are -- or even, in this brave new world of iTunes, what CDs are, I give up. Ask your mother. Or your grandmother.) Being of the old-fashioned analogue, as opposed to digital, technology, they could only squeeze about an hour’s worth of movie on a side, so, unless you owned a laserdisc player fancy enough that the laser would automatically circumnavigate the disc to play Side 2, you had to get up halfway through your movie and manually flip the disc over. Positively antediluvian, I know, but hey, at least we got some exercise.

Why have them? Well, because they provided a better picture by far than did VHS, which was the only other option Back Then. Unless you were willing to spend the GDP of a small emirate on line doublers and suchlike, VHS looked like animated mud on the big-screen TVs of the time. Laserdiscs provided a better picture, and they offered another option not to be found on the plebian tapes: Widescreen. Plus some of them featured something totally new: a separate audio track on which film critics and auteurs commented on the movies while you watched them. Clearly, laserdiscs were the only medium of choice for the serious cineáste.

And then DVDs came along and blew ‘em out of the water.

I had a lot of laserdiscs. Not sure exactly how many, but it was over 400 for sure. All of which I have been, over the past four years, laboriously dubbing onto recordable DVDs. The project got stalled last year when my player finally gave up the ghost, but recently I found a refurbished Pioneer DVL-909 on eBay for a price too good to pass up. (Note to self: Stay off eBay!) I figure that I only have to dub fifteen or so movies to make it pay for itself.

Except, of course, for the ones that I have to buy again because of all the new bells and whistles.

Sigh. I’m resigned to being a running dog lackey of the Technolords. I just wish they weren’t quite so smugly certain that eventually I’ll succumb to Blu-Ray and it'll start all over again ...

Death Star Jr.

So the mass-market paperback of Death Star just arrived -- 25 copies, all nicely shrouded in bubblewrap, delivered right to my front door by a polite emissary of the United Parcel Service. Ain't life grand?

It doesn't look half bad. Couple of nice blurbs and ads for my Coruscant Nights trilogy on the inside flap. Plus it's nice and thick, which, as we all know, is good value for your hard-earned dollars. I think it'll do well. It's my 24th book.

Okay, enough smugness. Up it goes on my 5-foot shelf, and on I go with my life.

A Kegger Of Amontillado

Some thoughts on living with Parkinson’s Disease, borne of trying to explain what it’s like to some friends:

It’s a lot like being trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story (pretty much any one, as they all seem to be about premature burial, being mortared up behind a wall, etc.). The one that comes most readily to mind is A Cask of Amontillado.

It’s also like going around in my own private gravity field -- one with a faulty intensity switch. There are times when I feel like I'm wearing my “Parkinson’s suit”, which consists of a big bag of dirt strapped across my shoulders, five-pound bracelets and gangland-style cement overshoes (the kind favored by Jimmy Hoffa). Each movement, even little ones like picking up a glass of water, takes at least twice as much effort. It also throws my balance off.

As bad as that is, however, if I had to choose against between that and not having a voice, I’d pick the Parkinson’s suit every time. For over eight months now I’ve barely been able to croak a few words with about the same clarity as a dyspeptic frog. And when I can produce enough air support to make a sound, it’s so hypernasal you can’t help feeling that somewhere a village is missing its idiot.

So I try to write, but that's no good either. My hand shakes, and people with Parkinson's are prone to micrographia, which means writing teeny-tiny words. I can't write longhand effectively. I can type, but picking away laboriously, one key at a time, really draws out the conversation to an excruciating degree for most parties.

I still have stories to tell, but they're trapped inside my head. Yeah, I know people have written wordage of Proustian length while completely paralyzed, save for an eyebrow or a pinkie they can twitch, so quitcher bellyaching, Reaves. I'm not that bad off, comparitively. But what's a blog for if not to blow off steam every now and then?

There are a lot of crimes that a lot of people have laid at George W. Bush’s door, but the one that’s affected me the most is, of course, his all-but-unilateral ban on stem-cell research, as a cynical bone tossed to the religious right, who think it’s blasphemy to use blastemas for research.

Think about it. To use just one hypothetical example, if stem-cell research hadn't been so hobbled and blinkered over the past eight years, Christopher Reeve might still be alive. Maybe even walking.

It's a sad universe we live in when Superman dies of bedsores.

Obama says that one of his first acts as president will be to undo many of Bush’s medieval policies, and stem cells is high, if not first on the list. I hope so. If I had a god I’d pray for it.

Remember A Cask of Amontillado? Remember the ending, as Montressor walls Fortunado away, brick by brick, in the tomb of his ancestors?

“For the love of God, Montressor!”
“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God.”

Reefer Mildness

I see that Massachusetts has pretty much decriminalized personal use of marijuana, more or less by 2-1.

Out here in enlightened California, of course, we've had milder laws concerning loco weed for some time. Unlike Massachusetts, however, same-sex marriage is still against the law.

I guess it’s comforting for gays and lesbians to know that, even though they still can’t marry in the Golden State, they can at least get stoned and forget their problems.

Batagorey

So it's 12:30 in the morning, and I can't sleep. I rev up the StumbleUpon button on my browser, and first click off, what do I learn?

"(Edward Gorey) had particular affection for dark genre series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman: The Animated Series, and The X-Files; he once told an interviewer that he so enjoyed the Batman series that it was influencing the visual style of one of his upcoming books."

As my son would say: Dude. Dude. Edward Gorey. I mean, yeah, okay, it's from Wikipedia, which means you're best off taking it with an entire salt lick, but still --

Edward Gorey.

Excuse me while I do a total fanboy wigout.

Anybody out there have any idea which book of his we influenced?

Proposition Hate

One of the biggest arguments against “intelligent design,” for my money, is the concept of the reproductive organs being chock-a-block with the excretory ones (and, in the case of the penis, actually doing double duty). Either God has a really sick sense of humor, or everything above the amoeba has been the most screwed up operation since the Bride Of Frankenstein.

I’m just going to say this straight out -- the physical act of homosexuality really freaks me out. It gives me the willies. (Male homosexuality, that is; along with Woody Allen, I’m much more tolerant of lesbianism.) And why do I confess to this politically-incorrect stance? Simply to point out that, even feeling this way, I still find the passage of Proposition 8 a high (or low) point in bigotry and intolerance.

It seems we always go two steps forward and one step back. We elect a man who's right for the job at long last, without letting the color of his skin be an issue. We finally repudiate the backwards intolerant policies of the incumbent party. But then we heartlessly marginalize a percentage of the population for a difference than is really, when all is said and done, no difference at all.

Yes We Did

I’ve said it before -- I’m not a political animal. I’m not even a political vertebrate. (That sounded a whole lot funnier in my head.) But, like I suspect many people have, I’ve followed this campaign with a passion and a desperation the likes of which I can’t recall feeling in a long time -- maybe ever.

I grew up in the 50s, and I lived in the Deep South during the early 60s. I’ve seen racism as a casual, cruel afterthought of society; seen public rest rooms, waiting rooms, drinking fountains and the like divided into “Colored” and “White”, and attended a public school in Tennessee in which there was one, count ‘em, one African-American student in a student body of about 400.

He wasn’t referred to as “African-American”. Or “Black”. Or even “Colored”. I never knew his name. I wish I could say I championed his cause, but as a stranger in a strange land myself, I was in no position to stick my neck out.

I never thought I would see a black man elected President.

I have to say, I’m proud of my country. Not so much because we elected, at long last, a black man President, but because we elected the right man President.

Yes we can. And yes, we did. There just may be hope for us yet.