The Greatest Day Of The Week

From the time I was a little kid until my teen years Saturday was the greatest day of the week. As a kid there were Saturday morning cartoons to start the day and Chiller theater to close it out. Later on Saturday evenings gave way to Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live. There were other fun things sandwiched between the cartoons and late night tv, but the shows were the items that sat the tone for my day.

If I got up early enough on Saturday the stations had old episodes of Lassie, Skippy, and Daktari. If I got up too early there was the farm report or a test pattern. Neither of those interested me, but I loved the old Ivan Tors animal shows and Lassie was okay as well. A little later in the day the Saturday morning cartoons would start. Most of these were just that; cartoons. Live action Saturday morning fare was much less common. The big and possibly only exception to this rule was Sid and Marty Krofft… oh and the Hudson Brothers.

Recently I picked up season one and three of Land of the Lost on eBay for about $3 each. I already had the second season, so this completed the original series from my childhood. There was a reboot of the series in 1991 which my son watched, although he swears he only remembers watching the show on Nickelodeon. I never really warmed up to the reboot, and the theme song was nowhere near as catchy, but I loved the original 1974 version. It was one of the shows I hated to miss. The show I practically refused to miss was Return to the Planet of the Apes. I remember Mom had made a doctor’s appointment for me one week during the time Return to the Planet of the Apes was airing and I was extremely vocal about my disappointment in missing it. To Mom’s credit she didn’t smack my ass and tell me deal with it, she tried to reassure me that I could catch it on a repeat. Sadly it was cancelled and that episode never was repeated. I now have the whole series on DVD, but after 37 years I’ve forgotten what the storyline even was in the episode I missed. One day I just need to sit down and watch the whole series from start to finish. It only ran for 13 episodes, so that should be about 6 hours or less.

There were a plethora of fun shows on Saturday mornings during those years, but Chiller theater became more important to me toward the end of grade school. I was a huge fan and regular reader of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Castle of Frankenstein and The Monster Times. My fondest wish was to try and see all the classic monster movies. Every once in a while I would get lucky and find one of the Mummy movies or the Wolf Man, but usually it was B grade fare like Monster on Campus, The Monolith Monsters or The Indestructible Man. I still watched them, but I yearned for Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, or Godzilla.

As I entered fourth grade, I discovered Monty Python and British comedies. I would stay up until 11 PM waiting for the new Python episode. Python had a completely different sense of humor and I loved it. It also had occasional nudity which was another plus. The first episode I remember watching featured the skit Blackmail, where a game show host played video footage, showed pictures, or read partial lists of information about an illicit tryst in order to blackmail the guilty parties into paying him money.

Saturdays changed forever once our local NBC affiliate finally picked up Saturday Night Live. They didn’t carry it during the first season or two, opting instead for episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. My nephews had been watching it from the first episode and I got to see one episode when we were visiting them (for the record it was the one hosted by Hugh Hefner). I watched SNL up until the early part of the sixth season. I caught a few sporadic episodes over the next five years, but didn’t really start watching again until the 11th season which was probably one of the worst seasons in the show’s history. I gave up on it again until season 14 and then watched it religiously for several years.

These days Saturday mornings don’t even play that many cartoons. Most of the ones they do play are not exclusive to Saturday mornings either. And of course unlike in those days of yore, Saturday morning is not the only place you can find cartoons on tv. There is Cartoon Network, Toon Disney, Boomerang, and many other channels carrying nothing but animated programming. Chiller theater is long gone, but the classic monster movies are almost all available on Blu-ray or DVD. The only thing missing is a DVD of our syndicated horror host, Seymour. The entire series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is available as are the first five seasons of SNL. I still wish the other seasons of SNL were available, and I would also love a region 1 release of The Goodies which I also watched on PBS during that same time period.

The other big change is that now I don’t get up early enough to watch whatever the stations are showing, and I’m at work usually when SNL is on. I set my DVR for it if for no other reason than to catch Weekend Updates or the occasional on air flub (thank you, Jenny Slate).

DVD review: Tosh.0 Deep V’s

Tosh.0 Deep V’s is a 2 disc Blu-ray containing 16 episodes from season two of Tosh.0. I have trouble finding time to watch a lot of tv and when I do have time, my legs usually end up cramping on me and I have to give up. That’s why I split watching this Blu-ray into 4 sessions. I watched the first six episodes one night. Several days later I picked up and watched the next four episodes, finishing out the first disc. A few nights later I popped in disc 2 and watched the last 6 episodes. Finally I sat down and polished off the bonus features.

Tosh.0 is a series that airs on Comedy Central and stars stand up comic Daniel Tosh. Daniel shows videos from the Internet and makes jokes about them. The format is usually to open with about six different clips. One of them he usually has a filmed skit to go along with (usually a “re-enactment” of one of the videos. One clip he will have them put 20 seconds on the clock and see how many funny comments he can make. The last clip will usually be given the “video breakdown” where he analyzes it, pausing it several times along the way. Then it’s time for a commercial break so he gives us a teaser and then shows one more quick clip. After the break, he shows another video. This one he will bring the “star” of the clip out to Hollywood for a “Web Redemption”. In the early episodes, the clips were usually of someone screwing something up, so he would recreate the event and give them the chance to get it right. Later ones may only consist of him interviewing the person and doing some sort of skit around the premise of the video. This disc had several of both. After the redemption it’s time for another commercial break which he prefaces by saying, “We’ll be right back with more…” and then naming a cancelled Comedy Central series. Coming back from the break he will usually do something related to his audience, a previous show, a challenge, or something that he has discovered on the web. One episode had him doing “Things you should never run into a room and yell”. A few episodes later he showed videos his viewers had made using the same idea. Another segment is the viewer video of the week. This is supposed to be a video uploaded to his blog by his fans. Some of them are funny. Some of them are cute. Some of them are pure crap. Usually he will have a few comments which will often make the crappy videos tolerable. A prime example of this is a video of an older asian lady doing what looks like martial arts warm up exercises.

Deep V’s contains the last 16 episodes of season two. This is where the show really started to find its voice. I have watched all three of the DVD sets and there is definitely a more relaxed feeling in the season two episodes. The early episodes had a more rigid feel to them and they also had the usually horrible celebrity videos. The one with Dave Attell was amusing but still a little too long, but the one with Fred Willard was just a bad joke stretched past the point where any humor could be milked out of it. Side note; when is someone going to release full season sets of Insomniac? I have the two “Best Of” collections, but I want them all! Comedy Central could make this happen, but if they won’t Shout Factory needs to jump in for us.

The bonus features are all just extended bits from usually the Web Redemption segments. I find these to be interesting, and the expanded panel with the “world’s worst stand up comic” managed to be both funny and informative. An additional bonus feature was the Spoiler Alert segment on Human Centipede. Spoiler Alert has only appeared twice in these episodes. It is not a regular feature. This particular spoiler alert was the full 23 minute retelling of The Human Centipede. If you haven’t seen The Human Centipede, let me just say that it is not as disgusting as I expected it to be, a feeling Daniel seems to share. If you have seen it and enjoyed it even a smidgen, then you have to go online and watch Human Centipede The Musical. A comedy troupe took the Centipede story and performed on stage a musical comedy version of it. It is wonderful.

Tosh.0 Deep V’s is definitely entertaining if you like the show. I wish they had released the episodes in order, but unfortunately the 16 episodes between Hoodies and Deep V’s are on volume 3 Cardigans Plus Casual Jackets which is a Wal-Mart exclusive available only on DVD. I would also loved to have had some more behind the scenes bonus footage and a commentary track or two would have been nice. I’d also like it if they offered non-pixelated versions of the clips. The language has been uncensored for the DVD release, but nudity is still blurred out. Give us the uncensored nudity as a bonus feature.

You Leave Me Breathless

I am an asthmatic. I have been my whole life. While other kids were learning to ride bicycles, I was learning to live without breathing. As a small child I spent many a night in the hospital inside an oxygen tent. It never really scared me, and even the severe asthma attacks themselves never truly scared me. I guess for all I knew this was just something everyone went through.

For those of you that have never had an asthma attack before, let me try to give you a bit of perspective on it. Take a deep breath and hold it. When it becomes uncomfortable check how long you’ve held your breath and then let it out. Now exhale completely and prepare to take another deep breath only this time don’t actually take that deep breath, or a shallow one even. Now hold that little bit of air that you didn’t manage to exhale out of your body for the same length of time you held the deep breath. When it’s time, take a quick short gasp of air and hold that. That is about the closest way I know to describe what it feels like when you cannot get your lungs to accept enough oxygen. You can go back to breathing normally now.

The feeling of not breathing is usually accompanied by a pain in the chest as well. The lungs fight and gasp for air which hurts, but it also causes the heart to start beating faster which can then add to the chest discomfort. As I said, I’ve dealt with it for so many years that I hardly give it a second thought. When I notice that I am having breathing difficulty, I will usually use my rescue inhaler. If it gets really bad, I have a nebulizer with albuterol that I can inhale to open my breathing passages. If that fails, then it’s get me to the hospital… fast.

Over the years I have wondered how much damage to my memories the lack of sufficient oxygen might have caused. I used to have an amazing memory for facts and figures and trivia (other than dates, I was never good with dates). These days I live most of my life by rote actions. I place things back where they are supposed to be and I follow a repetitive routine. If I diverge from my routine, I will forget something every time.

How Much Is Your Childhood Worth?

Yesterday I was discussing several toys from my childhood about which I wished I had more information. Shortly after posting the article I was able to find out what two of the four items were called. Elated to know what these critters were actually called, I quickly hopped on eBay where I found out that those little pieces of plastic and rubber were worth quite a little bit. My little ghost, a Kooky Spooky called Baby Spook Em, was part of a group of four figures that were currently selling for over $120. A new Grandma McCreak still in the box was sitting at $500.

Let me try and make this as clear as I can. All this toy consists of is a little glow in the dark plastic finger puppet of a ghost with a painted on face. They each initially came with a little sign or other accessory, but the set of four, like my own Baby Spook Em, were all missing their signs or whatever. This means that a little finger puppet that vaguely resembles a floating sheet with eyes and a mouth painted on it is selling by itself for about $30. I might pay that for one of these ghosts still in their haunted house display box, but loose and without the sign, I would be hard pressed to go above $5.

The little rubber dungeon men were equally surprising. By the way, quick side note, do not put rubber dungeon men in your Google image search and hope to find these toys. I learned very quickly to use the term prisoners instead. Once I found the little rubber toys, I learned that they were called jigglers and that they also sold for a premium on eBay.

This morning I told my wife about what I had found out and her response was, “Great. Let’s sell yours.” Here’s the problem. I’ve had these toys packed away in the attic untouched for several years. They haven’t been played with or displayed since I was in grade school back in the early seventies. For all intents and purposes if they turned up missing, I wouldn’t even realize it unless I decided to do a search through the boxes of toys to try and locate them. Never the less, the thought of selling them is completely anathema to me. I may not want to spend $127 trying to give Baby Spook Em a family to hang around with, but I’d still rather have my old finger puppet ghost than the $30+ it might bring me on eBay.

So what is your childhood worth? How much would you take for the old treasures of your youth? How much would you pay to get them back? I have replaced several toys that I used to have with ones I found on eBay, and I have replaced some with modern reproductions where the original is extremely pricey and usually missing key accessories. I would love to have some better Major Matt Mason toys, but I know I would never pay the prices that they fetch on eBay. At the same time I would never think about selling my beat up old Major and his buddies even if I was offered $100 each for them as is.

To my mind there is an intangible part of my childhood still trapped inside of these little pieces of plastic. As long as I have them in my possession, my childhood will never completely slip away. The replacements and add-ons that I might pick up are just that. They have none of the magic of my childhood trapped inside of them. They are just pieces of plastic representing something I played with. The exception seems to be when I find a deal at a flea market or yard sale. About 20 years ago I stumbled across a couple of boxes of old model kits at a church yard sale. Some one had cleaned out their son’s old room and donated all of these old built up kits to the church. I bought every one of them, even the duplicates. There was Batman, Frankenstein, some sports kits, a space ship. They had all been assembled. Some had been painted. Many were missing pieces. The thing is you could still feel the love that the previous owner had for these toys. It was infused in the very plastic of these kits. They sold me the whole lot for about $5. I would have paid much much more for them. The kits are all collectible and I could easily make my money back just by selling any one of them, but I won’t. They aren’t just models. They are childhood memories, even if they aren’t mine, and childhood memories are priceless.

What Was That Thing Called?

One of the biggest obstacles that I run across in my nostalgia fueled searches is trying to remember what certain toys were called. I had this problem with the Ding-A-Lings and the Fighting Furies. I still have this problem for the… whatever the hell these four lines of toys were called.

The first toy is a finger puppet ghost. There were several of these and they were all cutesy and carried little plastic signs. They were molded in glow in the dark plastic and had little faces and details painted on as well. I seem to recall them being packed in a box shaped like a haunted house. I have one of these ghosts somewhere in my toy collection. I keep thinking it was called Baby Boo or something like this.

The second toy is a flashlight. Actually it’s a rubber like character with a squeeze activated flashlight inside of it. When you squeeze the monster, his eyes and other things light up. I have a green monster and I believe he had a tooth that lit up in addition to his eyes. There were several other designs. I’m not sure that they were all even monsters.

A third line consisted of plastic men with exaggerated comical faces. There were all sorts of different figures. I recall a judge and a cook. I think there was also a prisoner and several more. The play factor was that the heads were interchangeable as were the hats/hair. Other parts may have snapped on and off as well, but I definitely remember taking the powdered wig off of the judge. I think these figures were released in a package with two to six figures included. My nephews and I all got sets one of the times when we got to go to Whiz. Whiz was the best toy store in the whole world as far as we knew, and it wasn’t just a toy store. That was just the only part we cared about. Whiz was in Huntington, so we only went about once or twice a year (or at least it seemed that way).

The final group of toys were almost more carnival prizes rather than true toys, but we bought them out of a bin at a couple of different toy departments. They were little rubber figures of cartoonish men hung up by chains to an imaginary dungeon wall. They all had a little gold cloth thread like a Christmas ornament would hang from so that they could be hung from a rear-view mirror or some such location. I remember one in a green outfit that looked like something the jolly green giant would wear. One of the guys had a brown shirt and a bald head. Some of them had their tongues hanging out or their faces contorted. There was also a skeleton that hung there with them.

None of these toys were very expensive as I recall. The little rubber figures were particularly cheap and I had a full set of them at one time. I would love to have more information on all of these lines, but it’s nearly impossible to look them up on eBay without knowing what they are called.

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Guess I should have tried again on finding out these names. Turns out the ghost puppets were from Hasbro and were called Spooky Kooky. The rubber prisoners were Jigglers from I believe Jiggler Imperial. The flashlight and interchangeable head toys are still a mystery however.

Time And Related Distractions In Sleep

When I was a teenager I could stay up all night playing D&D and still be awake and alert the next morning. In my twenties if work called or the kids got sick in the middle of the night, I was wide awake and ready to go. In my thirties I could still stay out late, wake up quick, and function like nothing out of the ordinary. But now that I am in my forties and rapidly closing in on the big five oh, my body seems to have decided to give me a big F.U.

I began to notice that I couldn’t stay up like I used to unless I was actively involved in something like work. Watching tv or reading would cause the body to shut down quicker than an anesthetic. And getting up? Forget that. My legs take five good minutes just to decide to support my fat ass and allow it to wander down the hall to the bathroom. And if I fail to get my full 8 hours of sleep? Well, good luck getting a coherent functional human being for the rest of the day. As Adam Sandler once asked on one of his CDs, What the hell happened to me?

What switch got thrown in my body that caused it to go from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds to “let me hook up these jumper cables and try not to flood the engine”? More importantly, how do I switch it back? I have very little free time any more and I would really love to be able to read some comics or watch a movie or two. The other day I laid down to read the first 6 issues of All New X-Men and halfway through the fourth issue, I dropped like a stone. The night before I had only gotten six hours of sleep and my body was like a loan shark. It wanted those other two hours back and some interest on top of it.

Tonight I was sitting watching Tosh.0 on Blu-ray. I was in the middle of the bonus features watching the extended web redemption for the double rainbow guy. The next thing I know my brain has completely shut down. I am not hearing or processing anything that is being said. My eyes close and for a few seconds I am gone. I probably would have stayed just like that if the wife hadn’t yelled in to tell me that she was going to bed. That woke me up enough that I managed to realize the segment was ending and I sat there and stared at the menu for several minutes before deciding to try and move on.

Now I’m sitting here typing this and knowing that I have to stay up another twenty or so minutes so that I don’t throw off my body too bad when I go to work tomorrow. My mind is clicking off activities to keep me cognizant. Write this post. Write a post reviewing the Blu-ray I just finished. Check out the new shirts at RiptApparel and The Yetee in ten minutes. My twenty year old self would be sitting in the living room watching another DVD. My teen age body would be laying in the floor with his DM’s guide and PH book and Monster Manual and some graph paper designing a cool new dungeon for the weekend. But I’m no longer a teenager, a twenty-something, or even a thirty-something. I’m a forty-eight year old that wants his nap. Dear God, I’m not getting older, I’m becoming a toddler again.

Losing My Mind

People say it all the time, “I’m losing my mind.” Usually they only mean they have done something slightly silly. Usually it’s related to forgetfulness. The problem is, how do you get someone to believe you when you really do start losing your mind?

I’ve noticed myself forgetting stuff much more frequently lately. This is another reason for this blog. It forces me to remember, and it puts it down where I can refer back to it if I need to. So let’s examine the memory loss.

The most obvious signs for me are forgetting people’s names and my diminishing vocabulary. Everybody forgets someone’s name at one point or another, but with me it has now gotten to where I will blank out on the name of people who I work with. I work with them on a daily basis and have known them for seven years in many cases. Yet last night I totally lost this one lady’s name into the recesses of my mind. After a few moments, I was able to pull up her last name, but had only a vague idea about what the first letter of her first name might be. It was a couple of hours later before it finally came back to me. I recently found an old phone list and couldn’t remember half the people on it. If there was only a first or last name listed, I couldn’t supply the missing name to save my life. Keep in mind that these were people I knew well enough to have gotten their phone numbers and that I was likely enough to have a need to call that I would have taken the time to write their name and number down on a list that I carried with me.

The diminishing vocabulary is something that also bothers me, especially when I am trying to write. I used to write quite a bit. I have a complete script I wrote shortly after high school as well as numerous novels I began and never completed. I also have a script I worked on with a couple of friends and a half-dozen or so additional pieces that I worked on solo up until about the early 2000s. I had a large enough vocabulary that I had little trouble writing these pieces and making each character’s voice sound unique to them. I had the ability to always pick just the exact right word. These days I often have trouble remembering the name for that small furry creature that goes meow and likes to climb the drapes.

So the question is, am I actually losing my mind and did so many people jokingly use that phrase to the point that I now sound like the boy who cried wolf?

The Way We Were

One of the reasons I started this blog was to talk about what it was like being a child in the late sixties/early seventies. Today’s kids are used to going to the grocery store, scanning their frequent shopper card, and then paying for their purchase with a credit or debit card. When I was a kid you didn’t need a frequent shopper card to get the sale price or earn bonus discounts. The sale prices were clearly posted if the store hadn’t already reticketed all of the sale items with a sale price sticker. Oh, and everybody got the sale price, not just the shoppers with the card. After you checked out and paid with cash, the cashier would hand you a receipt and a handful of either Top Value or S&H Green Stamps. These sticky little pieces of paper were collected into a book which you could take to a special shop that would convert your stamps into a gift based on the value of the stamps you had accumulated. You could get a lamp or a toaster or a table. If you saved up enough you could get larger items as well.

By the time I was a kid, payment was definitely by cash. There were a few people who used checks, but they were few and far between in WV. Credit cards hadn’t arrived yet in any real force either as far as I recall. Mom got her check, cashed it, and paid for everything with cash. If we bought something by mail, we got a money order. The thing is, twenty years earlier, Mom would have simply walked into the locally owned grocery store, gathered her items, and the store would have added everything up and put it on her bill. When Dad would get paid, they would go down to the grocery store and pay their bill. Can you imagine doing that today? Sure a few rural Mom & Pop stores will let their regulars run a tab, but try getting Walmart or Krogers to let you leave without anything but a verbal promise to pay on check day. There’s one other big difference I’ve noticed as well. Back then when the shopper told the shopkeep that they would pay them on payday, that bill was the first thing those people took care of. I watched two stores in Gandeeville go out of business last year partly because of unpaid bills from regulars they had let run up a tab.

Another major change in shopping from when I was young involves the hours of operation. Most stores were not open on Sundays. No grocery stores, no department stores, no gasoline stations. The only exception might have been a drug store. People were expected to be in church on Sunday morning and visiting with family or relaxing at home the rest of the day. If you wanted to go out, you could go see a movie. By the time I really started paying attention, there were a few additional stores open. I remember going out to eat at BBF or Burger Chef on Sunday afternoons before or after seeing a movie. Teays Valley was one of the final holdouts on the Sunday business hours. They enforced these “blue laws” well up into my grade school years. What changed their minds? Hecks opened a store and wanted to open it for business seven days a week. I have been told that quite a bit of money was spent in getting the city to change its mind. However it came to pass, once the genie was out of the bottle, Sunday just became another day of commerce. People talk about the drop in church attendance and always want to point to taking prayer out of the schools. I think the real reason is they gave people a choice of things to do on Sunday. If the only places you could go to get out of the house were church and the houses of family members, you went to church and visited with the aunts and uncles.

Childhood Dreams

I recently found a box of papers that I thought had been lost in one of my moves throughout the years. It contained some small books from grade school book fairs that I had adored, some pamphlets from early trips to Illinois to visit my sister and her family, a paper bag from King’s Island when the characters on the bag were Scooby Doo, The Funky Phantom, Hair Bear, and Dick Dastardly, and other childhood treasures including a notebook full of old Virtue of Vera Valiant comic strips that I had clipped from the Charleston Daily Mail. The crown jewel in this box was my very first scrapbook.

My mom had bought me a large notebook at either Hecks or Arlens or G.C.Murphy. It featured a typical late 60s early 70s age of Aquarius design of the sun with the signs of the zodiac circling it. I had initially taken pen to blank paper and drawn a bunch of pictures in it. I must not have been too thrilled with these pictures because I soon began covering them up with movie advertisements from the Charleston Gazette. Many of these were ads for Disney movies that I had seen or wanted to see. There’s a cartoony looking drawing of Buddy Hackett staring lovingly at Herbie, the Volkswagen, in an ad for Disney’s new movie The Love Bug. Another ad touts “The Greatest Adventure Of Them All” over a drawing of a pirate attack from Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson in Technicolor Panavision (Starts Wednesday at the Kearse).

There are lots of non Disney ads as well. Cougar Country (In Color) was Coming Soon one ad exclaimed. Another ad promised “The Greatest Hunting and Fishing Spectacular Ever Filmed” in an ad for The Outdoorsman (Now! at the Capitol). Yet another ad touts the “Authentic True-To-Life Adventure” of North Country (In Color). Apparently in 1971 it was still necessary to advertise the fact that your film was in color. As you can tell most of the movies I was interested in were about animals. I remember when my mom took me to see The Outdoorsman, she was afraid I would be upset about all of the animals that were being shot and killed by the big game hunters, but for some reason I didn’t pay any attention to that. I just liked seeing the big horn sheep and the bears.

Not all of the ads were for films that I got to see. I have an ad I clipped for K. Gordon Murray’s Rumpelstiltskin that I don’t recall seeing in theaters or anywhere else for that matter. There’s also a pair of ads for the double feature of Sssssss and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (one for its run at the Valley Drive In and one for its run at the Trail Drive In). I loved monsters almost as much as animals, but there was zero chance of Mom taking me to see these movies even though they were both rated PG.

What’s amazing to me is the number of movies that you hear nothing about anymore as well as the number of theaters that I had forgotten existed. Browns Theater in Cabin Creek? Not a clue, but there it is alongside the Marmet (in Marmet) and the Roxy (in Clendenin) under the more prominent Kearse and Cinema 21 in another larger ad for North Country (Now Showing! One Week Only! In Color!). Does anyone else remember Hang Your Hat On The Wind? or Smith starring Glenn Ford? And where can I find a copy of Journey to the Beginning of Time with its “Authentic Re-creation of Prehistoric Times” not just in color but “In Full Color”?

Of course just like Facebook is not only pictures of cats, my scrapbook was not just movie ads. There were pictures of animals, celebrities I liked (or had at least heard of), obituaries for classmates that died way too young, and other items. There is a wonderful ad from Kmart for Halloween costumes during their “Million Dollar Discount Sale”. You could buy a pirate or a bunny for only 87 cents. If you wanted to dress up like Major Matt Mason or one of the Banana Splits however, it would set you back almost double that; $1.67.

The scrapbook also became the repository for the pictures off of my old Aurora monster models. I was keeping all of my old model boxes, crushed down flat and under my mattress. Mom thought I was crazy for saving them and they were starting to create a bulge in the mattress as well. She convinced me to soak the pictures off of the cardboard and glue them into my scrapbook. Eventually I gave up on trying to soak them off and just glued cardboard and all into my scrapbook.

Not only is this scrapbbook a wonderful trip down memory lane for me, but it reminds me of how much things have changed since I was a kid. They don’t make movies like Cougar Country, North Country, or The Ra Expeditions any longer. At least not with the frequency they made them back then. There are no more drive-ins and no stand-alone theaters in the area. There are more screens, but they are all located in four buildings. Newspapers don’t publish huge ads for new movies with artwork. Movie companies no longer try and produce art style posters for their films. Photoshop has killed the modern one-sheet in most cases. Figure models like the Aurora monster model kits are a thing of the past except for higher priced specialty kits from Moebius and other similar companies. And if you want to buy one of these kits, you won’t find it in your local Walmart or Target. Even the hobby shops have a very limited selection if they have any at all.

Of course one other stumbling block to a scrapbook like this is the slow death of print media. The Gazette and Daily Mail are both still around, but they just aren’t the same as they were. I miss the old days when I would wake up on a cold morning, crawl out of bed in my footie pajamas and plop down in the living room floor in front of our gas fireplace with the morning paper and a bowl of cereal. I started out just looking at the movie ads, but I soon started reading the comics. By junior high I had ditched the footie pajamas for pajamas and slippers and had started reading James Dent’s column The Gazetteer along with Ann Landers. By high school I was actually reading the news as well. I loved to read, and much of that was thanks to the morning newspaper, a family that read to me as a baby, and comic books (which is a topic for another post).

Wasted Days & Wasted Nights

It amazes me when I get a day off and don’t feel like I manage to accomplish a thing. Don’t get me wrong, I did get some things done, just not the laundry list of things I wanted to get done. The wife and I went through and shredded old receipts from 1989 through the early 2000’s today. Now while this was something that needed to be done, it just doesn’t feel like anything either. I had planned to move over another shelf full of magazines and a desk full of books to help finish out most of the center of the old house’s library. Instead we turned 15 years worth of phone bills into confetti.

I thought perhaps I would try and catch up on some comic reading. I got through the first three issues of All New X-Men and fell asleep in the middle of issue 4. Remember how I said in my last post that I need those 8 hours of sleep? Well I only got 6 last night and my body has been reminding me about it every waking moment. I think my DVR viewing is up to date with the exception of the new season of Workaholics. I have two episodes sitting on the DVR waiting to be watched, but no burning desire to jump in and start watching.

Workaholics is one of those shows that I enjoy, but I find myself dreading to watch. I have similar reactions to Wilfred and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. I’ve also had issues getting into Dexter for the last three seasons. I watched the first episode after Rita was killed and found it so depressing that I didn’t want to go back for the next episode. Then the next season started and I didn’t want to watch until I caught up on the other season. Finally the most recent season began and I found myself two season’s behind. I decided to just knuckle down and watch the first episode, totally ruining the previous season’s twist ending shocker. I still enjoyed the show, but never managed to go back and watch anything beyond that season opener.

One show that recently started back up and that I definitely don’t let sit on the DVR for too long is Archer. I absolutely loved the season premiere this year with an amnesiac Archer thinking his name is Bob and working at a burger joint named Bob’s Burgers with his wife, Linda, and their three children. The fact that H. Jon Benjamin voices both Archer and Bob in the two respective shows made this the greatest series mash up since Bob Newhart woke up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette. It was easily my favorite thirty minutes of television this year, although the scene of Jessica Lange singing “The Name Game” in the middle of Briarcliff Insane Asylum on American Horror Story: Asylum three weeks ago is definitely a close second. To go from such a dark depressing environment to the bright shiny and very colorful song and dance number still has me floored. Jessica Lange has come a long way from Dwan in King Kong and deserves another round of awards for this season.

So, how will I cap off the night? I think I’m going to try and finish off the first disc if my Tosh.0 Deep V’s Blu-ray. Tosh.0 was one of those shows I hated initially. I thought the celebrity videos were horrible and wasn’t a fan of much else on those early episodes either. I watched two episodes and I was done. Somewhere in the middle of the third season I started watching it again. I don’t know why. I think I just had the TV turned to Comedy Central and there wasn’t anything else on screaming for my attention. The next thing I knew, I had saved the show to my DVR and couldn’t wait until the new episode hit.

When Comedy Central started releasing the episodes on DVD and Blu-ray last year, I was thrilled. They made the decision not to release full season sets, but instead to release the show based on Daniel’s wardrobe. For those not familiar with the show, Daniel wears one type of clothing for each block of episodes of which there are usually two to three blocks per season. The first season consisted of hoodies and cardigans. Season two contained casual jackets and deep v’s. So the first Blu-ray consisted of all the Hoodies episodes. I bought it and watched it the night before my big job change in June 2012. It helped keep me up and entertained so I would be ready to take on going from day shift to evening shift. At Christmas time they released volume 2 on DVD and Blu-ray, but it was Deep V’s, the last 15 or so episodes of season 2. The last episodes of season 1 and the first episodes of season 2 were released on DVD only as a Wal-Mart exclusive and numbered as volume 3. Can somebody please tell Comedy Central that some of us out here actually care about about things like proper release order and numbering? I’m still pissed at the Simpsons for releasing season 20 after season 12 or 13.

I’m also pissed that no one has made a deal to release the later seasons of SNL. Don’t get me wrong. The first five seasons are THE classic years for the show, but I also want to see the train wreck that was season 6 and season 11. I want to watch the episodes with Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscipo that I ignored while I was in my senior year of high school. I want to catch the classic late 80s episodes with Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, and Dana Carvey. I also want to see the early Will Ferrell episodes and watch Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s early days before 30 Rock and Parks and Rec. If Universal doesn’t want to release them, they should license the rights to Shout Factory who does an amazing job with shows like this.