Future then & now

This should be sent only to those whose level of maturity qualifies them to relate to it...

1960: Long hair
2011: Longing for hair

1960: KEG
2011: EKG


1960: Acid rock
2011: Acid reflux


1960: Moving to California because it's cool
2011: Moving to Arizona because it's warm


1960: Trying to look like Marlon Brando or Liz Taylor
2011: Trying NOT to look like Marlon Brando or Liz Taylor


1960: Seeds and stems
2011: Roughage


1960: Hoping for a BMW
2011: Hoping for a BM


1960: Going to a new, hip joint
2011: Receiving a new hip joint


1960: Rolling Stones
2011: Kidney Stones


1960: Screw the system
2011: Upgrade the system


1960: Disco
2011: Costco


1960: Parents begging you to get your hair cut
2011: Children begging you to get their heads shaved


1960: Passing the drivers' test
2011: Passing the vision test

Animal Serve Out

For this month's serve out, I've gathered up all the animal photos that have accumulated in the in box.

Yes! The snack wagon is here! 

Okay, short straw has to get out and fix the flat.

What goes up must come down.

So, how's the wife?

Honest! The last time I saw him was over there. Burrrp!

Nice to meet you!

How 'bout a lift?

I know! I know! Call on me!

Can I see? Can I see?

When I want you to say something, I'll call on you!

Well, gag me!

Aww. For me?

So just give it to her, okay?

Do you mind?

I think the focus is a little soft.

Say cheese!

Why me?

Gotcha!

Beat it! It's mine and I'm not sharing!

Oh, for Pete's sake!

Okay, you'll have to come up with your own caption for this one.

Making movies - stories for my grandchildren

When I was a really, really young guy I made movies. Not quite Hollywood, but the movies I worked on did get a lot of TV air time. I worked for the company that produced the Herald of Truth Radio and Television programs, and later for a splinter company that produced TV commercials and sponsored films.

Back in the '60s the Herald of Truth ministry produced half-hour radio broadcasts and television films and made them available to stations across the country. At one point, as many as 500 radio stations and 120 TV stations carried the program. The Herald of Truth still exists as an organization, but now features shorter messages, Internet downloads and printed materials. The old 30-minute programs lie mouldering in the Millikin Special Collection archives at ACU.

We filmed the television programs in studio sets, built to resemble an office setting, first on a sound stage in Dallas, and later in Abilene. Everything was shot on 16mm film, and mostly in black and white. As I recall, the last set of 30 minute films were shot in color, but I had moved on by then.

Studio work was a long, drawn-out process, with interminable waits. Either the crew was waiting on the "talent" or the talent was waiting on the crew, or everyone was waiting on the writers, or for the train to pass (yes, they did build the Abilene sound stage less than a hundred yards from the train tracks). Progress was measured in feet of film; and some days the footage was short.

The fun part of filming was on location; a certain percentage of every program had "wild" footage, usually outdoorsy, scenic stuff - sunrises, sunsets, rivers, forests, etc. Sometimes it was used for background with scripture verses superimposed over it, sometimes it more closely fit the narration, or served as illustrations of the story being told. We did a lot of dusty roads and marketplaces, and more than a few crosses. For one series, we filmed in Nashville at the Hillsboro church. In a few instances, we filmed actors in various settings; I once glued on hair and a beard (before I grew my own) and delivered Peter's sermon at Pentecost for a film. Barb had a role as the victim of an auto accident in another.

And sometimes, the film was made for other customers. We spent a week on the Texas A&M campus, shooting an undergraduate recruiting film; we were hired by the Canadian Broadcasting Company to film an interview with Melvin Beli, the attorney that represented Jack Ruby after Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And in the Dallas studio we filmed "The Dan Smoot Report." Smoot was an ex-FBI agent turned political activist and chronicled alleged communist infiltration in various sectors of American government and society. I wonder if anyone recognized that Batsell Barrett Baxter, spokesman for the Herald of Truth, and Dan Smoot, spokesman for the John Birch Society were filmed in the same office set?

For some reason, we did a lot of filming of and in aircraft. Sometimes the results were mixed; we rented a helicopter for part of the A&M shoot and the pilot had to make an emergency landing. On another occasion we were shooting aerial footage of the ACU campus from a helicopter and the pilot got in trouble with the FAA while doing it. It wasn't just helicopters - we made a movie for the Mooney Aircraft Corporation, featuring a sweet little turboprop airplane they were trying to get off the ground (sales-wise, that is). The filming was fun but the client went broke before we got paid in full.

We were hired by the US Air Force to make a classified training film and a lot of the footage was shot from a little jet trainer. After our cameraman got in the second seat, a bar was bolted across his lap as a camera mount. The pilot emphasized that pulling the ejection lever would be a very bad idea. After that film was finished and paid for, the FBI came around checking security clearances; turns out several had none, and one of the crew was even a Canadian citizen!

We spent two weeks at the New York World's Fair, filming mostly at night, because we were totally non-union and the Fair was totally unionized. One night a Teamster stopped us at the vehicle entrance and asked what we were bringing in. When we told him "materials for the Church of Christ exhibit," which was partially true, he went in the trailer parked at the gate to check with his boss and almost immediately was thrown back out the door. A big, burly Union Steward stood in the door yelling, "I told you, don't %$# with no &($#% churches!"

We made a lot of commercials, as well. I built a kitchen set in Abilene and it was the background for numerous cooking and homemaking spots for West Texas Utilities. And somewhere, at the base of one of the bluffs overlooking the highway to San Angelo, there is the wreckage of a car that we sent hurtling over the bluff for a bank commercial.At least they didn't want us to crash an airplane into Lake Phantom Hill!

Monday Meanderings - 9.24.2012

The space shuttle Endeavour paid a brief visit the other day, flying low over the city on its way to its last stop in California. During the thirty year shuttle era, three have stopped over in Austin as they criss-crossed the country; the Concorde, the ill-fated Columbia, and the Discovery. I don't recall which one, but the kids and I drove out to see one of the shuttles. It was parked at Bergstom, an Air Force Base at the time, and was clearly visible from the highway, bolted awkwardly atop another aircraft.
 
Last week our refrigerator began making strange, loud "knocking" noises. I did some research on the Internet, and thus far I have ruled out "the little guy that lives inside and turns the light off when you close the door." Some advice is worth only what you pay for it, I guess.
 
After a several-year wait, Time Warner and the NFL network finally came to terms and beginning Thursday we will get one more pro game on TV. Yea! Still no Longhorn Network, though. Boo!
 
Saturday was so nice, I said "Mosquitoes be darned!" and spent a cautious five minutes on the patio. Nobody can say I'm not a risk-taker!
 
Under the heading, "Nothing exceeds like excess," the news is that a new Buc-ee's is coming to the area. No, not a new hamburger place or foodie establishment, Buc-ee's is a chain of convenience stores on steroids. The flagship store in New Braunfels, previously the closest, has 60 gas pumps and 67,000 square feet of convenience store items such as fountain drinks, ice, hunting equipment, Texas kitsch, baked goods, meat and sandwiches, toys and jewelry, beaver nuggets (caramel-coated corn puffs: the first five ingredients on this health-food favorite: Sugar, corn meal, corn syrup, canola oil, molasses), weather vanes, cheese, barbecue, barbecue pits, cookbooks, produce, religious items and much, much more. Take a look at the wall of snacks:
 

The new store, in Bastop, will only have 24 gas pumps and 650 parking spaces. It will, however, have 71 "spotless toilets and urinals." I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear that.
 

Need a place to stay in Austin?

Short term home-rentals in Austin used to be discreet, somewhat under-the-table deals; bands coming to SXSW needed a place to stay and folks in the know rented their house for a week while they camped at the in-laws. The band got a crash pad and the renters got help with the mortgage payment. Everybody came out ahead with the possible exception of the neighbors.
 
SXSW kept getting bigger, folks coming to the ACL fest added to the demand (ACL will span two weekends this year) and with the looming specter of no-hotel-rooms-at-all during Formula One week, short-term rentals suddenly became a big business, so much so that the all-wise city fathers got involved. After someone explained to the city council that shutting down short-term rentals was not nearly as lucrative to the city as was simply charging a "modest" fee to license such rentals, Austin is now a short-term rental hotspot. Consider these listings that just popped up for F1 week:

• One-week stay on a 40-acre Austin estate, complete with a helicopter landing site — $69,000.
• Luxury hacienda-style Lake Austin-area estate — $25,000.
• Dripping Springs-area ranch will provide an on-site chef and concierge services, plus a helicopter pad and other amenities — $35,000
• Five-bedroom house in the exclusive Rob Roy subdivision, complete with eight tickets in a large private suite at the start/finish line at the Circuit of the Americas track. Your choice of an S-Class Mercedes, a limo or an Escalade ESV with a 24-hour chauffeur for your stay, plus a full time housekeeper. Backyard outdoor entertainment includes a pool, swim-up bar and bocce ball court. A detached five-car garage can double as a private concert/party venue for up to 300 guests — $150,000 for the week.

Obviously, I need to cash in on this sweet deal, so I'm putting the house on the STR market for F1 week. Here's what I have to offer:

• Three bedrooms, two futons and a lumpy couch
• Only 6 miles from SH-130, the main thoroughfare to the Circuit of the Americas track
• Helicopter pad (if you can miss the big hackberry tree hanging over the back yard)
• Close to take-out Pizza Hut, Whataburger and Subway shop
• Free Wi-Fi, Cable TV and daily delivery of the Statesman (if the neighbor's dog doesn't get it first)
• Price is negotiable; make me an offer (Hint: use the listings above as a guideline)

Now I just need to figure out which of my relatives I can mooch off of for that week and we're in business.
 
I love this town!
 

A published author - stories for my grandchildren

Kids, did you know that I am a published author? That I am a famous columnist and public speaker, and that I have written two highly-regarded books? No, really. Books that were actually sold in the market place, with an advance on royalties and everything?

A little history lesson is needed here.  Before the earth's crust cooled, business computers were largish boxes kept in air-conditioned rooms. Access to the business computer's applications was usually with a data terminal; a dedicated, non-graphical computer screen and keyboard (for the most part, also largish). But the personal computer was storming through the business world back then and the early PC displays were also rather bloated. Real estate on the desk top was valuable and everyone thought, "Why can't I access my business computer applications with my PC?" Well, you could, but it was hard to do and required special hardware and special software and special connections and a lot of tweaking and jiggering and holding your mouth just right. And I learned how to do that.

I worked in a rather narrow niche in the computer industry, a field call "mid-range computing" (as opposed to "main-frames," the heavy duty machines of big business), but from the standpoint of the number of installed boxes, it was a popular field and a lot of people needed my services. There was a magazine dedicated to mid-range computing and I gathered up what I had learned and sent it to them and asked if they would be interested in publishing it as an article. They wrote back and said "Yes," and "Would you write a monthly column about the subject?"

So I wrote 55 monthly articles over the next several years and the magazine published them and I became famous. Well, a small segment of a narrow niche of a specialized computer market read some of my articles. Sometimes readers even agreed with me. The best part of the whole deal was that every summer the magazine, based in Colorado, invited all the writers to come participate in an expense-paid conference in places like Aspen, and Breckenridge (Colorado)  and Estes Park and talk about plans for the coming year. How cool was that?

Then the magazine began holding user conferences in those same places and I went back as a session presenter. Another group had started a mid-range expo about that time and I was invited to speak in places like Anaheim, Toronto and Atlanta for that group.

And finally the magazine said, "We need a book about this stuff. Here's an advance; you and some other guys divide up the chapters and we'll publish a book." So we did, and they did and here's the book:

No. I didn't come up with the title. I had to look up "Quintessential" to find out what it means. Later we published a second book on the same subject, but taking into account changes in the industry. No longer "Quintessential," it was only "Essential;" and "PC Support" had been branded by IBM as "Client Access."

So, what happened to my career as columnist, public speaker and author? Technology changed. Microsoft Windows came along and took over the PC world, local-area networks solved the connectivity problems and IBM finally made it duck-soup easy to access their business computers from Windows. It became a no-brainer and just like that I was a former columnist, public speaker and author.

But the best part was after the first book was published, I proudly showed it to my parents, and my sweet mother, your great-grandmother, looked at every page in the book, nodding as if she were agreeing with what I had written. I think she was looking for something - anything - in that highly technical, arcane, narrowly-focused book that she understood. I looked at them again the other evening and I felt the same way. And if you want to read them, I have a couple of boxes of them in the attic.

Monday Meanderings - 9.17.2012

Now that's a weather map that you can really appreciate. In fact, just shortly before that screen shot was made, we got soaked, trying to get to the car in the parking lot! It has been cool and rainy all weekend; really nice. The lawn actually made it through the summer with only a few not-so-green areas and I didn't have to float a loan to pay the water bill. Sweet!

Of course I am Texas-centric. I'm a native son and proud of my roots, and thus I point out that if you want your waffles toasted in the shape of a state, your choices are Texas and, well, Texas. Of course, I only include states that have a shape; Wyoming and Colorado are essentially boringly square, but not quite, so they don't qualify. You might make a case for New Mexico in that list if you dribbled a little overflow batter in the lower left corner, but really.

Popular in the state's motel serve-yourself breakfast offerings, you can purchase your own Texas-shaped waffle makers from any number of places, but you won't find any, say, California-shaped waffle makers. I base this bold statement on diligent Internet research. I looked long and hard, and while I found heart-shaped waffle makers, and Where's Kitty-shaped waffle makers and Winnie the Pooh shaped waffle makers and even makers that produce waffles in the shape of PC keyboards, I did not find any other state represented by this culinary genre. So. There you have it.

And while looking at a Texas-based Whataburger commercial for a Patty Melt Burger, Barb wondered what they call Texas toast in Oklahoma? Apparently they call it Texas toast there and everywhere else in the country. At least that's what Connecticut-based Pepperidge Farms, New York Brand and California-based Safeway call it. In fact, if you mention Oklahoma Toast, natives of that state think you are referring to the State Song.

And while we are on the subject, the DQ commercials here end, "That's what I like about Texas." Is there a "That's what I like about New Jersey?" Just wondering, ya'll.

Tried a new Mexican food place called Lupe Tortilla. It's a Houston-based outfit that put too much effort into the decor and not enough into the food and service; the size of the patio and bar makes it obvious that they are after the happy-hour crowd. Dishes look to be more interior Mexico than Tex-Mex and were over priced. One unusual twist is that they serve chips with baracho beans as the dip. We might go back, but not for Sunday lunch. I give them two stars.

A dying pronoun?

An headline in the Kansas City Star (you mean you don't read the Kansas City newspapers?) caught my eye: "Hallmark drives another nail in dying pronoun's coffin." The author, James A. Fussell, writes that the Hallmark Channel is promoting the premiere of an original movie entitled, "I Married Who?" Fussell states that Hallmark (headquartered there in Kansas City) knows that the title should be "I Married Whom?" but they just don't care. Fussell continues:

"Oh sure, it was important to Ernest Hemingway when he wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls” more than 70 years ago. We still teach “whom” in high school and use it as a salutation in letters to unknown recipients. And we might drop an “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” misquote of a John Donne poem into casual conversation. But, you know, whom really cares, right?"

There's a lot more in the article about this disappearing pronoun, but I've probably antagonized English teachers that are near and dear to me enough. So I leave you with this list:

RIGHT BUT WRONG
Many well-known songs and phrases use the incorrect “who,” but who could argue in favor of these grammar fixes?

Whom do you Love?” — Bo Diddley (and George Thorogood)

“Two, four, six, eight, whom do we appreciate?”

“Who Made Whom?” — AC/DC

“Who’s Zoomin’ Whom?” — Aretha Franklin

“Whom you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” — Chico Marx (impersonating Groucho in “Duck Soup”)

“Whom ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!” — Ray Parker Jr.

Monday Meanderings - 9.10.2012

I think Saturday was the magic morning. Temperatures in the 70's; the clear promise of cooler days as the norm. Now if we could just do something about the %$#@ mosquitoes so I could go back to the patio.

Football is back. It's been a long dry spell, but with games last Saturday, almost every night this past week, all day this Saturday, the usual Sunday lineup and tonight a double-header MNF,  I think I'm about back up to speed. You notice I didn't mention the Longhorns. Their first two games were exclusively on the Longhorn Network, which we still DON'T GET, thank you very much!

A news story about Walmart testing customers scanning merchandise with their smart phones contains the incredible statement that paying checkers costs Walmart $12 million a SECOND. All I can say is, they're saving a lot of money at our store. Two out of 16 lanes open is the norm here.

The speed limit on SH130 toll road near our house is being raised to 85 MPH, highest speed limit in the nation. In November, a new section of the highway will extend all the way to Lockhart. Total distance from our house to Lockhart on this route is 41 miles. At 85 MPH, that means Kreuz Market, Smitty's and Black's BBQ will be only 30 minutes away. Sweet.

Speaking of good things to eat, the list of goodies that have been offered at the State Fair of Texas includes, (and they are all deep-fried, mind you): bubblegum, butter, beer, peanut butter banana cheeseburgers, coke, chicken-fried bacon, jelly belly jellybeans, Cadbury creme eggs, pizza, Kool-aid, pecan pie, PB&J, salsa, pop tarts, club salad (!), s'mores, pumpkin pie, pineapple upside down cake, cheesecake, Oreos, and this year's competition winner - deep fried jambalaya!

If you'll excuse me, I need to go find some Rollaids.

The Lufkin Police Blotter for July

Well, the July entries for the Lufkin police blotter don't disappoint.
 
July 1
A man was arrested for stealing instant coffee, air gun pellets, toiletries, swimming pool supplies, a hose regulator, DVD movie discs and bug repellent products.
 
July 1
A man was reported stealing a pair of capri pants from a store.
 
July 5
A 48-year-old Lufkin man was arrested Wednesday afternoon after darting back and forth across North Medford Drive, waving a towel. … When asked what he was doing, the man told the officers he was “getting exercise.”
 
July 8
Someone told Lufkin Police that her uncle bit her finger after some type of confrontation.
 
July 10
A Masonic emblem was reportedly pried off a vehicle with its owner witnessing the act Monday afternoon in the 4600 block of South Medford Drive. The owner stopped the suspect and got the emblem back.
 
July 13
Newspaper machines were reportedly broken into by an unknown suspect.
 
July 13
A Lufkin man allegedly high on PCP was arrested Thursday night after being found growling outside a motel room, lifting imaginary weights.
 
July 18
A woman was arrested for reportedly stealing clothes she hid in a baby stroller.
 
July 23
A Lufkin man and woman were arrested Sunday evening after getting caught trying to steal crab meat. The woman is on probation for an April 2010 incident in which she reportedly stabbed her boyfriend with scissors for being bad in bed.
 
July 24
A naked woman was arrested on a charge of public intoxication after police received calls of her walking down Raguet Street. When officers caught up with the woman, she was reportedly wearing only an unbuttoned, button-up shirt, no pants and no undergarments.
 
July 24
A man reported finding a steak knife stuck in the ground outside his apartment Monday morning.
 
July 25
A Walmart employee injured a finger trying to stop a man from stealing an air conditioner and some dishes.
 
July 30
An intoxicated Hudson man was arrested Sunday morning after being caught stealing beer. He was arrested after trying to make an unsuccessful getaway around 8 a.m. Sunday. Beer cannot be purchased before noon on Sundays, according to state law.
 
July 31
Funyuns, steak, goggles, soda, charcoal and beer were among the items a Diboll man reportedly tried to steal from Walmart.
 
July 31
A beer delivery truck driver reported having beer stolen out of his unattended truck.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Reading the news - stories for my grandchildren

I have blogged on other occasions about my stint as a disk jockey, back in the glory days of rock and roll radio. I've talked about the celebrities I met and the remote broadcasts, and the records I played, but there was more to a DJ's life than fame and fortune; there was also reading the news and weather.

At that time, news arrived on a teletype machine - basically a big typewriter that noisily pounded out the stories of the hour on long rolls of paper. Broadcasters subscribed to a news service, most often the Associated Press, that fed these items down the phone wires and one or more teletype machines turned them into the hourly "Five-Minute Summary" or the "News in Depth" or the ball scores, or the weather reports, or (accompanied by bells), "Breaking News" items.

It was the announcer's job to gather up the long stream of teletype output, strip out the section scheduled for that time slot, review it carefully (typos were rampant and equipment or line failures notoriously left stories unfinished, or garbled) and then read the news or weather as part of the broadcast. In reality, what usually happened is that I would look up, see that I had a five-minute summary coming up in two minutes, rush out to the closet where the teletype was stashed, rip off the last 40 feet of paper roll and rush back to the control room, desperately scanning the output for my needed summary and read it cold.

I was not alone in this practice; we all did it, much to management's dismay. There is an apocryphal story about the manager that inserted into the middle of a news story the sentence "Okay, you #$%&; you got yourself into this, let's see you get yourself out of it." and garbled the rest of the story. My news-reading disasters were at the hands of my fellow announcers, however.

Once, at the station in Breckenridge, I had one end of the news roll in my hands, reading the five-minute summary, and the other end trailed out the door, through the studio next door and into the hall. During my reading, I smelled smoke and looked down to see that a "buddy" had set fire to the paper trail, and it was quickly climbing the strip toward me. I got in about half of the scheduled five minutes before I had to drop the paper and ad lib my way out of the mess.

The one that got me called into the station owner's office, however, was in fact not my fault. This was in Abilene and we actually had a news department; guys that stripped the teletype, wrote up stories of local interest, and hung it all appropriately on the news room wall. We simply picked up our material, rehearsed it (in theory), and read it at the proper time.

One weekend I had a local story about an air show, to be held out at nearby Phantom Hill Lake. The story described the show in detail, how it was sponsored by the local Jaycees, admission was blah, blah, blah. And the conclusion of the story, and to the airshow, was a paragraph about how the stunt pilots were going to put a plane into a spiral, parachute out and let the plane crash into the lake!

The airshow was legitimate; the part about crashing a plane into the lake was pure fabrication, and on Monday I got a call to come in early because the station owner wanted to see me before I went on the air. IF I went on the air.

I'm not sure Mr. Ackers ever believed me when I vociferously protested that I had not made up the crash part and inserted it as a lark. The copy of the story that was retrieved from the "Read News" basket did not have the plane crash paragraph, and it was my word against the senior news guy's, but thankfully Mr. Ackers didn't fire me.

Larry Fitzgerald, the senior news guy and the perpetrator of this gag (though he never admitted it), went on to have a notable career in broadcasting in Abilene. During my less-illustrious career, I made sure that I never promoted another airshow.

Monday Meanderings - 9.3.2012

 
Barb was handed a $2 bill as change this past week, a rare occurrence. When I enrolled at ACU, back before the earth's crust cooled, the administration handed out $2 bills in every cash transaction made by every student. Book store, cafeteria, registrar's office - every cash back included the somewhat rare denomination. The purpose was to show the merchants of Abilene just how big a financial impact ACU's student body had on the town's economy. I don't know about the merchants, but I was impressed. Those funny bills turned up for months.
 
The US Women's Soccer Team - fresh off their Olympic gold-medal victory in London - has begun their Fan Tribute Tour back in the States. It's an effort to build on the interest that the Olympics created; the women are having trouble keeping a professional league viable. I don't know the full schedule yet, but the opener this weekend was against poor Costa Rica, who had not scored a goal against the US in 8 previous matches. They didn't this match either - the US coasted to an 8-0 victory. I don't think we'll see Japan or Canada in the Fan Tribute Tour.
 
I mentioned that I thought this year's pecan crop was a total loss. Not quite. There are some pecans still on the tree, usually at the very end of bare branches, like the one below. Very strange looking.
 

 
The great news for the day is - Seattle's Best is going to introduce bacon-flavored coffee! Yesss! Now you can indulge in two vices at once. The company held a contest in NYC to find the flavor, and Eileen Gannon’s “How to Win A Guy With One Sip” coffee beverage combined bacon-flavored syrup with candied bacon to win the $10,000 prize and the slot on Seattle Best’s menu.Now I can quit stirring my coffee with a strip of bacon.
 

 
 
Keeping Austin Weird - this sign is posted by a resident of South Austin as a reminder of the ongoing and seemingly endless construction on Oltorf Street. The number of months gets changed regularly, so is a bit smudged. It currently stands at 16 months with no end in sight..
 

 
 
And your guess is as good as mine about the name choice on this food truck.