Click to play:

[media id=6 width=420 height=300]

Trudy Haynes is my favorite. “I’m your direct connection… to the grapevine.” But I love it all — the weird sunny/rainy/lightning bolts over Philadelphia City Hall, the dramatic electronics from the stock ticker and meterological equipment, the “Whoo!‘s” from the electro-disco sound track, it’s all fantastic.

PS: I have written a blog post about this before, but the clip keeps on disappearing from Youtube. This time, I snagged a copy of my own so that it won’t happen again. (All copyrights respective of their owners, this is for educational purposes only.)

It is nuts how in 1980, mustachioed men in leotards were simply “court jesters” that told the story of TV ratings success, and not big flaming homosexuals doing pirouettes.

This is really worth a watch — for a number of reasons. It offers a glimpse into a world of broadcast television that used to spend lots of money to develop strong brand images, and it also offers a glimpse into the world of leotard-wearing fancy men circa 1980 in The Metroplex.

You can search by last name, by zip code, you can sort by county (Pinellas, Hillsborough, etc.), by gender, height, weight, etc.  This is all publicly available information, but the way this website packages it is is something uniquely dehumanizing.

The first thing that surprised me is how many of the people look the same.  Similar hair cuts, similar expressions, and those people are often convicted of similar things.  Most of the people I picked out as “normal looking” were usually booked for DWI or possession of marijuana.  Most of the people I picked out as looking like “thugs” or “hooligans” tended to be assault, battery, theft, grand theft, etc.  I am surprised at how few Hispanic people are on the list — this is significant considering that Florida is a fairly Latino-heavy state.  Hillsborough County is 18% Hispanic, but they certainly seem to make up only about 10% of the mug shots using my unscientific estimate.

Also, the way the counties are ranked is slightly deceptive — clearly, Pinellas and Hillsborough are much more populous than Manatee and Pasco County, but the bar graph makes it appear that crime is several times worse in those counties, even when their crime rates are only slightly worse.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the fact that the plurality of offenders are 20–25 or so in age.

Here’s an example of someone that would frighten me:

Here’s someone who is named after an unreliable compact car from the early 80’s:

But that wasn’t Chevette’s first time in jail:

I don’t think traffic tickets are included on this page — if so, I would be scared, because I once forgot to pay a speeding ticket many years ago and would hate to think that I could potentially end up on a page like this.

I am no legal expert, but it seems like this kind of website should only feature those who have been proven guilty, at least for crimes below a certain level.  I would imagine that a small percentage of these people are in fact innocent, and knowing that their careers, their reputation, or their dignity might suffer as a result of this kind of website leaves me depressed and even more cynical about the justice system.

The design king amongst board games has to be the 1971-era edition of Careers. With a name like that, you can only imagine that it was a hit amongst guidance counselors. But it’s the clean Helvetica that attracts my eye these days.

The board game’s cover isn’t quite as bold with its typographical license, but there’s a lot of modernism to be felt in the deliberate choice to not capitalize the first ‘c’ in Careers.  Caught with mink, lose 1/2 your fame? Common sense.  Let boss win at golf? Now that’s the dated adage I was looking for — who plays golf with their boss any more?

The ungame is derided today, although to be fair it is still in print. I give it some pomo credit for having such a fantastically existential name — it “tells it like it is” and lets you know, right up front, that it ISN’T a game!  It is a tool for hapless middle class parents to somehow discuss morality and contemporary issues with their children.  And it even came in religious editions:

If you squint you can see such exciting un-locations as the “Favor Factory” and the “Compliment Clubhouse”.  An entire CLUBHOUSE devoted to compliments?  This game would be fantastic to play while drunk, the answers would be truer to life than Dr. James Dobson could ever have hoped.

Side note: Austin, Texas’ NBC affiliate co-opted the “tell it like it is” phrase, right down to using the exact same font, from this game, sometime in the late 1980’s for their ad campaigns.

Another favorite game of mine was “Bargain Hunter” — it was actually billed as a fun antidote to inflation, the non-corporeal scapegoat of early 1980’s malaise.  It was also the first board game to feature credit cards!

Design-wise, Bargain Hunter is only middlebrow, but I do appreciate how slavish it was to the style of TV game shows of the time.  It looks like it could be “Let’s Make A Deal”, which it clearly owes a bit of its substance to.

Payday was the ultimate board game product of the 1970’s — the first signs of Keynesian distress appeared in the recreational amusements of Americana.  To wit, it was a pretty ingenious idea to use a calendar and paycheck to teach children that their life would be consigned to humdrum doom.

While the Peter Max-esque drawings are merely okay and a bit ‘bandwagon’ in terms of design, the font I love to hate to love makes an appearance!  Take a look at day 29 — Lottery Draw!  That, my friends is the inimitable Bookman Swash.  Yes, this Bookman Swash:

“Sentence Cube Game” was another one I used to mostly play with myself (although I do remember conning a few friends into thinking it was the REAL SCRABBLE).  This game looks like what  Meathead probably played with Gloria while Archie was away at work.  “Ages 12 and up — quaaludes not included.”

I am a nostalgic, I admit it.  I don’t really own any new board games.  This was my last acquisition:

Anyone want to play? I get to be Jessica Fletcher.

Here is proof positive that this is the man who wears the pantaloni in Italy, for better or worse. He’s Italy’s lovable quasi-dictatorial, excessively vain, loafer-wearing Casio consumer!

My interests:

beating stagflation, instilling rote rehearsal and efficiency from the checkout line to the breadline and the unemployment line, small businesses, startups that aren’t just another rehashed concept that will never be monetized, decentralized office structure, design driving data and not the other way around, consumer science, whistleblowing, whether it’s whistling while I work, during an extended break in a disco song, or whether it’s chewing the fat before the fat chews me, creative writing being merged into technical writing for the sake of simplicity, starching my ties because it might just help!, whipping inflation now! Reruns of Love, American Style, wondering how Goldie Hawn survived without laughing in too much, knowing how Sandra Bernhard spells her last name (with a ‘d’), chicken balti, trying to beat the baby boomers at their own game by not owning anything that would contribute to the tax base, wishing Dr. Jarvik had invented the artificial soul.

Groups and Associations:

Toastmaster’s Club of Brooklyn, Club Med, Club Soda, Club Crackers, Cluedo Clubdo of Basingstoke (my favorite), Club Tropicana (when Andrew Ridgeley is around).

Honors and Awards:

Top Scorer, Cash Cab, 2006
National Geography Bee, 1992
Naming that tune in one note, and hearing it above the gasps in the crowd
Toastmaster’s Award of Shaker Heights, with a Reduction of Expectorant followed up with Miss Pringle, a Yorkshire Terrier from Ripon.

Now, I have been accused of having a humorous vernacular that’s so obscure that nobody gets it, kind of like the “Shaka when the Walls Fell”  aliens (who spoke entirely in metaphor and therefore whose language was impossible to decode using the universal translator) from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  But surely something on here makes you laugh, right?  I am cracking myself up at the moment — still pleased that I’m able to be self-satisfied by my own humor.

(For the record, it’s located off of Rittiman Road just west of Loop 410.)

It is a neighborhood where all the streets are lovingly named after failed and/or obscure European automobiles.  And not your Ferraris or Mercedes, we’re talking the Hillman, the Austin Allegro, the Renault Dauphine, Alfa Romeo, and Fiat.

Heeeeere’s Fiat!  They improved the warranty because they had to.

At least this Austin Allegro didn’t have the quartic (read: square) steering wheel that came standard in the UK.

Alfa’s weren’t all that obscure, being favored by the quirky, swinging, polygamist, condo-dwelling middle-aged people who usually bought Saabs.

It actually unlocks its own doors for you!  But not much else.  C’est tellement de luxe, n’est-ce pas?

Dauphine, French for princess!  Even though the French abandoned the monarchy in the 1700’s!

Hillmans were lower-range cars made by Rootes, which was a second banana British car manufacturer.  Their biggest impact on America was the design of the Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon, two hideously ugly early 80’s hatchbacks.

And check out the kreepy kid in the back seat!

SBS, by the way, is something akin to our PBS, so you can transpose as much as needed in order to produce laughter.

You have to watch both.

(The actresses who play Kath & Kim appear at the end, by the way)

This is who and what they’re parodying, Basia Bonkowski. Fascinating documentaries from Yugoslavia…

Watch that one ’til the end — it has the adorable Australian baby montage, showing how multicultural Australia really is. All of those babies are approximately 29 years old now! And Basia Bonkowski? Ageless, just like Yugoslavia.

Other cities boundaries end where Loop 610 is located, thus allowing them to be judged based solely on their pre-war contents, which are, as you know, very hip things these days. To put it in geographical perspective, pretend to start talking about how great Williamsburg is, and mention that it’s on Long Island, and you start to see how large boundaries tend to obfuscate the good and bad that is present in any metropolitan area. To play reverse psychology, we would have to start saying “Webster, We Have A Problem.” Compton would be judged as a neighborhood of LA and not as an independent bedroom community. So why do we judge Houston on that which is really not “Houston” but Cinco Ranch, Kashmere Heights, Greenspoint, South Park, and Klein? We look at the Houston area’s smog, its menacing freeways leading to freeway spurs and limited-access parkways, we look at its religious nutbags, we look at its poverty-stricken industrial neighborhoods, and we insist we can’t see the Menil Collection, the joggers in Memorial Park, the universities, the theatres, the housing, the bayous, and we do ourselves a disservice.

If one is to look at the sense of ‘place’ and ignore the political sharpie maneuvers that make up American suburbanization, Houston stands on its own. It’s not the BEST city in the US, and most of what everyone accepts as truth is in fact truth. But what’s also true is that Houston has neat stuff, too, not “neat for Texas” but unique.

To be fair, Houston is a live and let live city. If you can handle the flat terrain, checkerboard development, and if you can handle a city that repeats its own basic recipe over and over in 8 directions, then you can enjoy the fruits thereof — affordability, flexibility, mobility. It’s laughable to say that Houston resists urbanization, true urbanization, when Houston’s generally eager to please and let itself be the largest test grounds for suburbia. Big lots, small lots, McMansions, tax abatements, great rooms and phase III’s, they form a type of classification all their own — suburbia’s sub-suburbs.

But Houston loves skyscrapers, and puts them wherever it can fit them. If you want a 40-story tower, Houston assumes you must need one if you’re asking to build one. If you want a rowhouse downtown, or a high-rise with a view of another downtown, Houston has a place for you. It’s not picky, and it has one of everything just in case.

It is a place of Southern gentility, of art deco chutzpah, of black families between railroad tracks and power lines, of black families in colonials, of Republican businesswomen who dine with their gay “best friends” at a restaurant that allows you to park in front.

I like Houston, and I don’t know why more people don’t. You won’t find a catchy disco theme song with TV’s Patrick Duffy in the credits, and you might be hard pressed to catch Renee Zellweger proudly professing her nostalgia for Katy.

But I’ll profess my nostalgia for the Katy Freeway, the now 26-lane-wide freeway that makes straight lines and cruise control seem like a conveyor belt to a suburban death squad, priced from the 180’s. This is Houston’s Champs-Elysees to many who reach Houston from a western approach. It is ugly, but it is also AMAZING. You drive it wondering what was below the main lanes before they were added; was it a frontage road, a pine tree, a warehouse, or was it just an empty lot like all the other empty lots in Houston? It is a driving tour of what America sometimes feels like to the old-world provincial — bewildering, seemingly unncessary, brash, brutal and overly functional, but serving a perverse function at that, evacuating middle class money as far away from downtown as possible.

But then you look at the other side of Katy Freeway and you see people in smaller cars, people with Obama stickers, people with parking garage tags to places between traditional downtown and traditional exurbia, places with phase numbers and building numbers and small, discreet corporate logos on the top right margin. It works both ways in Houston, including rush hour, commuting, new money and old money. People get to go where they want to go in Houston — they can live downtown and work downtown, or live downtown and work in the Woodlands, or they can live in the Woodlands and work in Conroe. If you want a 15 minute commute, you can have one. If you want a huge huge huge house, you can have one (but you might not have a 15 minute commute.) You may escape blacks and Latinos, once living in Sharpstown, but then the blacks and Latinos move up too, and then someone else takes over. Houston reinvents parts of itself in a modest way that is never showy.

Houston is nothing if not daring for carrying a speculative and deregulated environment to its most literal conclusion. I like Houston despite its blatantly ugly appendages, and despite its curried favor by Republicans with duallys and minivan-driving Vietnamese women who hiss at you under their breath.

I feel like I fell in love with the only one who’d accept the ring when I say that I like Houston and might consider moving there. I do know that I could take my pick of high-rise, low-rise, garden apartment, or loft and work in the energy industry, in the shipping industry, in the tech industry, in the puppy boutique industry, in the French business magazine industry, in the widget industry, or in the heroin trafficking industry. I can take my pick in Houston.

[Gallery not found]

‘Twas A Merry Morn In Malta!