Movie Sunday: Mystery Science Theater 3000

Image from here

I know what you're thinking.  "MST3K is not a movie, it's a TV show," you say.*

"Aha!" I respond. "There was a movie! It was released between seasons six and seven." And, I don't even remember what it was about. Okay, it was This Island Earth, but I take your point. I doubt anyone saw the movie that didn't watch the show.

But I don't care. I'm a MSTie still, a dozen years after the show's run has ended. And I haven't watched any movies this week that are worth writing about. Take The Social Network, for instance. I'm not sure why everyone thought this was such a great movie. It was like critics thought if they were effusive enough, Zuckerberg might drop a billion on them. I mean it was fine, but I didn't find anything particularly outstanding about it. Maybe it's because I spend every day with computer geniuses, but I think it's more likely that it's just an average movie.

I got a new office at work a couple of weeks ago, with walls and a desk and a door and a bookshelf all of my own. I haven't had an office with walls and a desk, etc., in about four years, so this is kind of a big deal for me. I started bringing in a book a day, and the occasional piece of personabilia to make the place feel more like me.

One of the first things I brought in was a Mystery Science Theater coffee mug. It doesn't have any text -- it's emblazoned with a scene from the show featuring Joel and the bots. I put whiteboard markers in it and stuck it on my round conversation table, where it acts as a sort of litmus test of visitors. Those who know what it is are in the club. Those who -- like our purchasing agent -- pick it up and look quizzical, are not.**

If you're not a fan of MST3K, then you've undoubtedly stopped reading by now. If you are, go back and watch a couple of old episodes.  It's still a really enjoyable experience, and many of them will stream from Netflix. Some of my favorite episodes are The Crawling Hand, Prince of Space, and Time Chasers. And you should definitely save Space Mutiny. It features the fieriest golf cart crash ever, as well as a lack of continuity that is astounding.  Maybe you could even watch the movie.

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* You know who you are. And so do I.

** He never had a chance. He's twenty-three and a purchasing agent. And he wears a goatee with no mustache, so he might be an Amish kid on rumspringa.

Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out

So I've really been avoiding telling this story, but after Johnny Virgil wrote about taking his wife to see REO Speedwagon, I started having flashbacks of the tour that was largely responsible for me leaving the road. I still remember standing backstage in some arena in California, talking to the future ex on the phone, with Kevin Cronin in the background singing, "Golden country, your face is so red-uh," and hearing myself say, "I have GOT to find something different to do for a living."

REO had already been around for what seemed like forever when the 9 Lives tour kicked off. During my high school years, they rolled through town every three months or so, with Deep Purple, BTO, or Brownsville Station. One would headline a tour, and one of the others would open for them. When I heard that we had landed them as a client, and that I would be doing special effects for the tour, I discovered that I was drawing a blank on their music, so I asked one of the guys in the shop what songs they did. He said, "Oh, you know REO. They do ... uh ... umm ... let's go ask Garvey." I got exactly the same reaction from about a dozen other people over the next couple of days.* Finally, someone came up with Ridin' the Storm Out, which broke the memory block for all of us, and everyone started blurting out the names of REO songs: Golden Country, Roll With the Changes, Keep on Loving You, 157 Riverside Avenue, etc. I felt better. I knew and liked all of those songs, and midwestern rockers generally knew how to throw a tour.

The good feeling started to change as soon as we got to rehearsal. REO was nearing the height of their popularity, but they were also coming apart as a group. They suffered from the occupational hazard of terminal self-importance, facilitated by sycophants and douchebags, and intensified by impressive amounts of chemicals -- even by rock and roll standards. There were at least three gigantic egos onstage, and several more in the wings.

Gary Richrath, the lead guitarist, was undoubtedly the most talented, but he was fighting some pretty serious demons. We calculated that he was probably losing money while on the road. He tended to huff when he played (think Lamaze breathing), and by the end of the night there was a white crust encasing his microphone cover. I'm sure we could have scraped that off and gotten quite a buzz, but no one ever got that desperate. At least, not that I know of.

Kevin Cronin, the lead singer, was sure that he was the most talented, and suffered from major Napoleon syndrome. He insisted on playing guitar when he wasn't too busy prancing around in his little turquoise spandex pants, despite the fact that it sounded like someone sawing a guitar in half with a hacksaw. The sound man kept his guitar turned off in the house, so the audience couldn't really hear it, but it was loud and proud onstage, and contributed mightily to the cacophony that we endured nightly. Kevin was an amateur pharmacologist, and partially as a result, his mood swings were dramatic. One day we ran up on him sitting in the floor of a hotel lobby, pulling laundry from one bag and putting it in another, muttering to himself. We just kept walking.

The other members of the band were generally no more egotistical than your average rock star, but the environment was so toxic that they were always being pulled into one dispute or another. The road managers liked to play the band members off of each other to get whatever they wanted. The result was band members who barely spoke to each other, and a road staff that was not exactly the elite of the business. "Motor," their drum roadie was good, although he got a little weird when he went on the all-fruit diet. Most of the rest ... not so much. Oh, and the band sounded like crap most every night.

Without mentioning names, the biggest pain in my particular ass was Bob "Flash" Gordon, the lighting director. I will spare you my critique of his lighting style, which wasn't really my biggest problem with him. The real issue was that he was sure he knew everything important, and most of everything else. I've worked successfully with a lot of people like him since -- mostly Army generals -- but I was younger then, and I considered his existence and success a personal affront to all that was fair and decent.** I hated him a lot.

I forget exactly what effects I had to manage for the tour, but it wasn't a whole lot by my standards. We've already talked about the Spinal Tap quality fog curtain that opened the show. The other major effect was a series of fiery explosions during the last song, Ridin' the Storm Out. One of the reasons I was on the tour was that we had recently invented some giant flashpots built from #2 washtubs, and I was the only one at the time who knew how to load them, or that could be trusted not to blow up something important. We had developed them for use in the Superdome, and they created a flash and concussion in a regular arena that was hard to believe. Or justify. We had four of these that exploded together at the climax of the song (sort of a Star Wars Deathstar effect), and followed eight smaller explosions that built up to it.

Picture from here.

The effect was really rather cool, except for two problems. The first had to do with my control board. We had two dedicated special effects boards, but one was in the shop for repairs, and the other was out with Nazareth, or Genesis or somebody. So the biggest burnout in the electronics shop soldered together a little box specifically for the first leg of this tour, until we could get back to Dallas and pick up the other board. The box was crap, and for various, mostly boring reasons, it tended to take half a beat between the time I pushed the button and the time the explosion happened. But only sometimes. While this would probably be fine in a mining operation, it was definitely not close enough for rock and roll. Bob was constantly trying to convince me that he could fix it "in a matter of minutes."

The other problem was that Bob wanted the sound of the explosion, not the flash, to match the music. Like lightning and thunder, the boomy part tends to lag behind the flashy part, especially if you are sitting a few hundred feet away. So he would call the cue a split second before the beat. I don't think he realized that the timing would be different at different points in the hall. I don't think Bob took a lot of science in school.

You know who wasn't sitting a few hundred feet away? The band. From their point of view, the bombs were going off early. Or late. Or both. And since they were already pissed about the fog curtain, and each other, and their lives, and everything else, and since this particular effect closed the show, it was the last thing they had a chance to be pissed about. So one or another of them would come over and yell at me and call me names every couple of nights. They even threatened to replace me a couple of times. I don't think they liked it when I begged them to go through with it.

So after about a month of this, we arrived at the day that would bring the worst concert I have ever seen, and convince me once and for all that this would not be my life's work. But that will have to wait for Part 2. This post is already getting very long, and I'm starting to feel like there are spiders on me. I'm going to need a whiskey float and a couple of hours of Bob Dylan before I can continue.

Updated: Part 2 is finished.

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* I swear to Baby Jesus that this part is true. I never saw anything like it. We were all really familiar with the band. It was just that no one could come up with a song. And these people knew music better than any hipster you ever met.

** I grew up watching way too many westerns and WW II movies, and reading about people like Don Quixote and Robin Hood.

Damn Right, I've Got the Blues!

Last night, Buddy Guy played a benefit concert at the Pointe Coupee Civic Center to a hometown crowd of a few hundred people. We were able to score some VIP tickets from a friend connected to the show, and I watched the 90 minute performance from the center of the second row. I still have a big smile stuck to my face, despite exceeding the maximum recommended number of beers for a Sunday night.

Those of you who have seen Buddy Guy live are already jealous. I cannot remember ever seeing a better show. And if you haven't been paying attention, I've seen a lot of concerts.

If you don't know his work, don't feel left out. He has never really been a household name. But Buddy Guy is a man who inspired a generation of electric guitar gods, and changed modern music forever. Jimi Hendrix would sometimes cancel his own shows to go see Buddy Guy play. Eric Clapton called him, "by far and without a doubt the best guitar player alive." Stevie Ray Vaughan used to say that without Buddy Guy, there would be no Stevie Ray Vaughan. He simply does things with an electric guitar that you wouldn't think are possible. He played a medley at the end of the show that included selections from Clapton, Hendrix, and others, and he mimicked each of their styles effortlessly. And he can sing!

 I didn't really expect that much when I committed to go. After all, the man is 73 years old, and I've seen the Cream reunion videos. It was also held in a place that is basically a gymnasium with a stage at the end, similar to hotel ballrooms where one often eats rubber chicken in uncomfortable chairs and listens to boring motivational speeches. Or wedding toasts. I assumed it would be somewhat nostalgic, and a moderate amount of fun, and he would probably sit for a good part of the show. I thought he might even play by himself.

OH MY EFFING GEE*, was I wrong! He ripped through an hour and a half of blues, rock, soul, and genre-defying pieces with so much energy, and showmanship, and jaw-dropping skill that it was over before we could even really catch our collective breath.  Not only did he not sit, we didn't spend much time in our seats, either.

He played the guitar behind his back.

He played the guitar with a drumstick.

He played the guitar with a towel.

He played the guitar lying on a speaker, fingering with the towel.

He played the guitar with his FRACKING TEETH!

Which is all fun and fine and we've all seen it, except for the fact that you couldn't tell by listening that he was playing behind his back, or with a drumstick, or with a towel, or with his fracking teeth. It sounded like someone really talented playing the guitar.  Seriously. For reals. We kept looking at the band guitarist to make sure he wasn't picking up the slack. He wasn't.

The band was outstanding. I would probably pay to see them, even without Buddy Guy. Not as much, but still.

At one point, he strolled around on the floor, singing, and playing, and letting us know what his Momma told him. He passed close enough for me to push him over, but I didn't, partially because the big guy following him would probably have smacked me across the head with the big police flashlight he was carrying.

And oh, what he does to the women, no matter what age or ethnicity. I was keeping a close eye on the wife at the reception after the show, where he signed autographs and took pictures with people for well over an hour. Buddy seemed to enjoy the attention from the girls, despite being visibly drained from the show. Also, it was probably past his bedtime.

One side note of the "let this be a lesson to you" variety. Buddy Guy was born in Pointe Coupee Parish and left home when he was 19. He said that in the intervening half century, no one had ever asked him to come back home to play. All it took to make it happen was one spunky little lady without the sense to know that someone like that would never come to a place like this. She called, he said yes, and then she had to figure out how to pull it all together.

Oh, one more lesson. This opportunity did not come through any of my old show business friends. With one exception, none of them have done anything music-related for me since I left the business. This particular opportunity came from a friend I met in graduate school, who owns a business in the area. So stay in school kids, and maybe take some science. Someday you might get to meet Ludacris. Or Fifty Cent. Or whatever random crap-of-the-month you damned kids listen to these days.

Buddy's skills are apparent on his records and DVD's, but it compares to his live shows about like a picture of a baguette compares to the smell of baking bread. If you've ever liked blues, or soul, or electric guitars, you need to see Buddy Guy, before this unique American treasure disappears forever. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

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* Sorry to have to pull out the interweb abbreviation curses, but sometimes nothing else will do.

Fun with graphs

I dare you to look at this graph and not have this song in your head for the rest of the day.

Okay, sorry. I know rickrolling is like, so last year*, but a student showed me this and it took me like a week to kill the worm. And we all know the rule: Chris does not suffer alone. Plus, it's a pie chart. And I love pie.

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* I also realize that "so last year" is like, so five years ago. And the "like" thing started in the 1980's, when the Internet had about 5 users. I'm old, I can't help it. You're lucky I didn't say it was groovy.

Oktoberfest on the North Shore

New Orleans once boasted a number of large breweries, and was well known around the region for its beer. Falstaff, Jax, Dixie and Regal were the best known brands. But beermaking in New Orleans went the way of beermaking in most cities, and only Dixie survived, holding on as a local sentimental favorite.

Beer-making in earnest returned to the area in the 1990's, in the form of Abita Brewing Co., which started as a brew pub in the 80's and is now something of a regional powerhouse. Abita Springs (where Abita is located) is north of Lake Pontchartrain, an area known locally as "the north shore." During the 90's and the first part of this decade, other small breweries sprung up around New Orleans and the north shore, and beermaking looked to be on the verge of a comeback.


Map from Google Maps

Hurricane Katrina sealed the fates of most of the new breweries, and the fate of the north shore in a different way. The 50 miles or so between the I-12 junction with I-55 and its eastern junction with I-10/59 has been growing fairly rapidly for at least 20 years, but the population of the area has exploded since the hurricane. I know a lot of people who evacuated from the New Orleans area to one of the communities there and never went back, and more who returned to New Orleans and then relocated to the north shore a year or two later.


Image from here

One of the breweries that opened without much fanfare around the turn of the millennium was Heiner Brau in Covington. Started by a German brew master named Henryk "Heiner" Orlik, the brewery has supplemented its own brands by brewing "store brand" beers for some well known area restaurants. They even brewed some Dixie beer in the aftermath of the hurricane. Over the last few years, the brand has really started to take off, and is available in a large number of local groceries and watering holes.

Being German, Heiner probably feels compelled to put on an Oktoberfest celebration, if for no other reason so that he and his family can attend one. The Wife first learned of the brewery because of the involvement of the brother of her BFF from childhood, so the BFF often comes down from the midwest and we roll over there for the party.


Image from here

This year's celebration is this coming Saturday. Munich it's not, but fun it definitely is. There is a 5K in the morning (no thank you), some family and shopping time in the middle of the day, and around 2 pm the oompah band starts up in the big tent, and the beer and brats start to flow. That's usually when we show up. The crowd's not too big, and the beer's not too expensive, and it's the only Oktoberfest for hundreds of miles that I know of. And if you hang around and look interested, you might get a tour of the brewery. It's small, but it's spunky. Oh, and did I mention the beer is excellent?

So if you find yourself within 100 miles of Covington, LA this Saturday and you feel like a polka*, you should drop by. Maybe we'll see you there.
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*That's what she said.

Sleep tip

It is probably best to avoid watching 1408* late at night in an historic old hotel. Even if they do have free satellite TV. Trust me on this.

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* 1408 is a John Cusack movie about an evil hotel room. Much better than I expected.

Nerd Alert!

Okay, let's establish up front that I'm as much of a nerd as the next person. I like science toys. I have a telescope. I take off work when a new Star Trek movie comes out. (Everyone does that, right?) I saw Alien in the theater the day it opened because I had read about it in Omni magazine. I was distraught when Battlestar ended, and I'm heartbroken that Disney is buying Marvel. I bought a copy of X-Men #1 the week it came out.

But I had to prostrate myself in unworthiness -- Wayne and Garth style -- when I saw the e-mail announcing the ping pong tournament at the big Physics Block Party this afternoon at my university. I mean, it's not so much the ping pong, though given the fact that probably half the physics students are Chinese, I expect the competition to be fierce. No, it was the paragraph describing all of the other "much good food and fun competitions" that will be taking place that showed me how real nerds pass a good time.

"The food will include free pizza (at 3:30), sodas, homemade brownies, and LN2* ice cream with various mixins for flavors. The competitions will include the Ping Pong Tournament (sign in by 3:30), Guitar Hero (throughout), the notorious Physics IQ test (due by the end), and the Maniacal Laugh Contest (starting at 4:00)."

The message ends, "This should all be fun." Perhaps the saddest part, especially for my wife who has to take me out in public, is that it all does sound like fun. If I weren't thirty years older than everyone who is going to be there, I would probably show up. I mean, hey, what's more fun at a party than liquid nitrogen? Plus, I think I could hold my own in the maniacal laugh department.

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Liquid nitrogen ice cream. A better example of nerd food preparation is hard to find.

Lunch for two one

Don't you hate when someone invites you to lunch and then doesn't show up? I'm never really sure whether to be offended or worried. Today's perpetrator is a bit of a screwup free spirit, so I'm leaning towards the former.

Luckily we were meeting at everyone's favorite near-campus landmark, which features very good local cuisine and almost 200 varieties of beer. So I had a plate of etouffee and a pint of outstanding local brew, and let the two tables of lawyers next to me remind me why I don't have any friends who are lawyers. (Not that there is anything wrong with them.)

It actually turned out pretty well. I've had a pretty tough week so far, and it would have been easy to let being stood up ruin my lunch and the rest of my day. I'm not sure where I found the attitude to blow it off and enjoy myself, but I'm glad I did. Sometimes I still surprise myself.

Have we ever seen these two together?

From a New York Times article today on Hilary Clinton showing support for the new government of Somalia:

"Mrs. Clinton said* that the battle for Somalia, which has been the lawless home to Islamist extremists, terrorists, gun runners, drug smugglers, teenage gunmen and even pirates for the past 18 years, is deeply connected to American interests."

Does this remind anyone but me of Hedley Lamar's speech in Blazing Saddles?



"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con-men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull-dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers, and Methodists!**"

I guess life -- or at least journalism -- does imitate art. Or maybe Harvey Korman faked his death and is secretly running Somalia.
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* It's not clear from the article whether Mrs. Clinton actually said all that stuff about the terrorists and pirates and teenage ghosts. But I thought it was funny.

** This sounds a little bit like my old neighborhood.

Must see TV

A friend posted this on Facebook the other day. All my instincts tell me to let you watch the clip and then shut up, but I've never really been one to follow good advice. See, the thing that makes this video so amazing is that it is 100% serious. Bill Shatner was part of a few shows I worked in 1978-79, and this is not an act. This is exactly how he was then, on and off camera. You could not find anyone who was more of an ass in the western hemisphere. You know that noise that Kif makes on Futurama whenever Zapp Brannigan asks to have his toes cleaned or whatever? We worked with Leonard Nimoy a few times that same year, and he made that noise almost every time Shatner's name came up.

Which is actually what makes present day, Boston Public Travelocity Shatner so wonderful. It's a testament to the power of continued existence and "character building" experiences to help us become better people in spite of our best efforts to do otherwise. Because I can't imagine what would transform the guy in the video into a jolly fat man with a sense of humor about the guy in the video except thirty years of perspective and a fair amount of getting your ass kicked by life. Let's face it. No one reinvents themselves until they find themselves in pieces on the floor and can't figure out how to put the old way back together.

I've got a friend from high school who could have been voted Most Likely to Have a Successful Yet Unremarkable Life, who had a seemingly successful and unremarkable life until about two years ago, when the whole thing turned to liquid shit. Since then it's been divorce, job loss, kids in trouble -- totally made for TV movie material. Maybe I will send him the link.

Road Stories

Between the ongoing t-shirt discussion on the old roadies mailing list and This is Spinal Tap showing on Palladia last night, I have old road stories bubbling around in my head, so I might as well tell one or two. Actually, I was going to go another way with this, but let's start with the movie.

Spinal Tap is undoubtedly the best movie ever made about the rock monsters of the sixties and seventies. Besides being funny enough to make things shoot out of one's nose, it is a more accurate depiction of the people and the life than most documentaries* I have seen. Every stupid thing that happens in that movie reminds me of a (more or less) true story from the day, and every slimy or bitchy or otherwise ridiculous person in there brings to mind someone that I knew. And don't even get me started on the hair.

I remember a night, I think with Rufus (with special guest Chaka Khan!) and the Brothers Johnson in Kiel Auditorium (may it rest in piece) in St. Louis, where the promoter kept running back and forth to the ticket office to get enough money to pay us enough that we would turn on the lights and the show would go on. I'm pretty sure that was also the show where they served Manischewitz Cream Red and Cream White to the band to satisfy the contract requirement for red and white wine in the dressing room. Chaka Khan didn't show up. But she was like seven months pregnant, so that happened a lot.



REO Speedwagon trashed their dressing room one time because they didn't have the right color M&M's. The Kiss roadies stuck a girl to the wall of the Pontiac Sheraton with gaffers tape** a few days before we came through. Speaking of REO, they didn't exactly have lighted electric uteri to walk out of, but they did have the worst opening effect I've ever seen in person. Bob "Flash" Gordon, their lighting designer, thought it would be really cool if they started the show by walking through a curtain of dry ice fog. It wasn't actually a terrible idea. CO2 fog is considerably heavier than air, so if you can get enough of it way up in the air somehow it will fall rapidly and run over the front of the stage. The problem is getting the fog 20 feet up in the air and getting it to come out in any sort of even curtain, given that it is heavier than air and the fog machines weren't pressurized***. The only good solution would have been to put the fog machines on the lighting rig, but since they weighed almost 500 lbs. each, pulled enough power to light a small house, and had to be loaded with dry ice right before the show, that was a non-starter. I won't bother you with the details, but it usually ended up looking like five or six randomly placed fire extinguishers shooting at the stage. The band threw a fit about it almost every night. You would have thought that after thirty shows or so they would have figured out it was never going to work, but they were pretty much impervious to learning.


Image from here

Flash Gordon was also responsible for the worst day of my life -- at least until my first marriage -- but that's a another story. Oh, good. One of the elder alumni just stopped the t-shirt conversation with a 36-point typeface rant. It had been going on for over a week and was really starting to get on my nerves. So, any good concert memories out there?
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* Or "rockumentaries", if you will.
** Think of black, extra-sticky duct tape. Show business runs on it.
*** Our fog machines were custom built and famous for the time. Two of them could produce enough fog to asphyxiate Lionel Ritchie at the piano, though I am not at liberty to say how I know that.

Robot Birthday

Yesterday it was my birthday. I hung one more year on the line.* It ended up being sort of a robot-themed day, partially through coincidence, if you believe in such things. I had decided while watching trailers before seeing Star Trek that I wanted to see the new Terminator movie on my birthday (NERDS!!!). I did not know that my wife had already bought me this:

Inevitable, really. I've been fascinated with automation and figuring out how things work as far back as I can remember. The first symptom I remember came when I was about five or six and I picked out a Big Bruiser from the Sears Catalog for my number one Christmas present. If you are too young to remember the Sears Catalog in its heyday, think of it as a paper version of Amazon.

A year or so later I got an Erector set, and built a skyscraper with a working crane.

The year after that it was a crystal radio kit, which I still believe is magic. I mean, I put the thing together myself. I know there was no battery in it, but I could listen to the radio (almost) as well as people with batteries. That might be the first "What the Hell?!?!" experience I can remember.

Subsequent Christmases and birthdays saw a steady procession of telescopes, microscopes, chemistry sets,



rock collecting kits, crystal growing sets and dissection kits. That's right, kids. In those days you could buy something in the toy department that would help you carve up little woodland creatures that you might capture around the house. It came with a frog and a couple of bugs in formaldehyde**, but how long is that going to amuse a curious 10 year old boy with a scalpel, tweezers and low power microscope?

This was all in addition to the dozens of watches, clocks, toys, tools and household appliances that I took apart to see how they worked. Of course, this included many of the items mentioned above. In my defense, most were broken when I started, I got almost all of them back together with no pieces left over, and I actually fixed a few things.

Then I got older and put away childish things. Except for the year after I was married and got the Big Trak.

Oh, and then the rockets.

And the RoboRaptor.

The cats are pretty sure he is mentally challenged.



So, that's a roundabout and memory-filled way of saying I've always been a science nerd and a sucker for cool toys, and I suppose I always will be.

As for Terminator. It was good. Star Trek was better. Oh, and this is what I built with my robot kit:

I'll be back.

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*With apologies to Paul Simon

** Kids today don't appreciate a good carcinogen in their toys like in our day. Nowadays you put a little lead in a toy car and everyone starts acting stupid. Oh,wait. Sorry.

Fun with Google Image

I think we've all been surprised at one time or another by the results we get from Google Image searches, like the time my wife typed in "discipline dog collar" to try to find a product to help control her unruly pooch. This can lead to literally hours of entertainment if in the proper frame of mind. Personally, my mind runs too much on the tracks to think of typing in "angel butt" or "church dress". But this doesn't mean I can't have fun with Google Image Search myself. Even those of us who are creatively challenged can enjoy this great (and relatively low cost) entertainment, thanks to the chaotic wonder of the Internet.

So try this for fun. Type in your birth date, or your name or hometown, or the street you grew up on and your first pet. Practically anything will do to get the game started.

Once you find something interesting, type that back in as the search term. I mean, how else are you ever going to learn about pansy rings? (I'm actually surprised I didn't get something completely different for "pansy ring".)

This reentrant search technique is sort of the solitaire version of a word association game -- except with pictures -- and can really take you some places you never in a million years thought you would end up. It's not really limited to images, and it's fun for the whole family as long as your SafeSearch parameters are set properly. I got a picture of some stuff in a dishwasher just now that I will spend a good part of the weekend trying to drink out of my brain.

Anyway, enjoy. I guess the real question is how many different terms will you type before you get a picture of Kevin Bacon?

Nights to Remember

I can't let this day pass without mentioning a time and a place and a group of people that meant a great deal to the direction of my life. Somewhere around the dawn of time (1970), when rock concert tours were starting to be a big deal, a couple of musicians from Dallas discovered that they were actually better at building sound gear than they were at making music come out of it. The demand for their equipment was high enough -- and the interest in their music low enough -- that they decided to start a sound equipment rental company. This was the beginning of SHOWCO, Inc., a sound -- and eventually lighting, staging and special effects -- company that became almost synonymous with the golden age of big rock shows in the 70's and 80's.

Besides providing sound equipment, lights, pyrotechnics, lasers, spotlights, mirror balls, projectors, bubble machines, chase lights and practically everything else you can imagine to the biggest names in the music industry, SHOWCO and its people helped create and define an important segment of the entertainment industry with constant innovation and a commitment to excellence that was second to no one. If companies had mission statements back then, theirs would have been, "Make it happen." I once saw them charter a Lear jet to fly a laser to Canada for a stadium show that was going to start in a little over eight hours.

The lighting division of SHOWCO was eventually consumed by their own invention, the Vari-lite, while the sound arm was purchased in 2000 by their major rival. The company that bought SHOWCO used both names, like FedEx Kinkos, until they decided this past year that time had run out on the SHOWCO brand and retired the name, presumably forever.

The company provided services to more top tier bands than I can list here. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Black Sabbath, The Bee Gees, Genesis, Three Dog Night, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, David Bowie, ZZ Top and James Taylor are a very few examples. In addition, they produced several large fashion shows, conventions and special events, including the annual convention for Mary Kay Cosmetics, whose big pink headquarters was around the corner from their own. Oh, and their lighting director programmed the big light ball on top of the Dallas Hyatt Regency. Most people don't know that the lights were supposed to flash in patterns. The first couple of nights they used it there were so many accidents on I-35E that they had to stop.

The scale of some of these tours, and the work required to put them on, was hard to conceive. The very large tours would have up to 15 semi trailers packed full of equipment that had to be unloaded in the morning, put together, tested, repaired and adjusted, used to its limits during the show, and then pulled down, taken apart and put back in the trucks. All fifteen trucks would then have to drive three or four hundred miles to do it all again the next day. Along the way they faced and solved technical and artistic challenges on a daily basis. Whether it was chroming the entire lighting system for the Bee Gees, mounting six huge, rotating mirrors above the Genesis stage that totaled more than 2500 lbs., making music sound good outdoors and still be loud enough to make your ears bleed, or simply figuring out how to put together pyrotechnics that would rattle the Superdome, SHOWCO people made it happen time and time and time again.

The workload was brutal. It wasn't Alaskan crab fishing dangerous, but there were definite similarities. Thirty-six hour days were common. Days off on tour were rare, which meant that the traveling crew were living on two or three hours of sleep (sometimes less) for weeks at a time. One becomes very familiar with the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy. Very few people lasted a year. I once fell asleep on the sidewalk at the Sacramento airport while someone went to fetch the rental car. And when Jackson Browne said that roadies were "working for that minimum wage," he was being charitable if you consider the hours worked. His was another SHOWCO crew.

So why did people do it? One thing: the music. Not "partying with the band," not the women (they were only interested in the musicians, anyway), and not the glamorous lifestyle. When you were on tour with a good -- or even better a great -- band, the two hours or so of live music made up for all of the pain and loneliness and frustration. There is nothing like being at a great concert with 25,000 of your closest friends, unless it's being onstage for it. I can't even imagine what a rush it is for the musicians. No wonder so many of them go all crazy. Oh, and tour jackets were cool, but they weren't really worth the effort without the music thing.

I was fortunate enough to work for SHOWCO for three years in their heyday. I worked with some of the biggest acts on the planet, visited 45 states and 3 foreign countries, stayed in practically every Holiday Inn in America, and became intimately acquainted with theater and arena design. To this day I don't even have to think about where to find the bathrooms in a public arena. And I made a few lifelong friends. I met some of the best and most interesting and unique people I have known, and each and every one would show up to help you move. I learned things in that three years that most people will never even suspect.

Tonight at the Arcade Bar in Dallas a bunch of nondescript, middle-aged men and women are gathering to mark the passing of the SHOWCO name and raise a glass to the days when sex and drugs and rock & roll were as much a part of the fabric of the country as consumer credit and reality shows are today, and the dinosaurs of entertainment ruled the earth. I'm sure many lies will be told, and even more true stories that are harder to believe. At least as much of it as they can remember. If you happen to be there, or if you ever run into an old roadie in a bar, buy them a drink. They will almost certainly have an interesting story to tell.