Good Idea/Bad Idea

I was out running some errands the other day, and like other days off from work, all errands run in and around our little (large) hamlet of the LBC are done by bicycle. After finishing up, I went back to the veritable freeway for bikes on the west side of town, the LA River Bikeway.

At this point in the LA River's meandering path--near the terminus here at the LA/LB Harbors, is less meandering than forced linearity. It's not so much paved as it is controlled by artificial banks.

But, along the Bikeway that runs north from the ocean along the river twelve miles or so, at least here, there has been either purposefully planted, accidentally placed, or wildly growing grapes.



At some point I stopped and examined a few bunches.



The last few times I've been out on the Bikeway there haven't been even any grape buds, but this time, there were many unripened bunches.

The title of this post concerns a decision I had to make. Should I pluck an unripe specimen of a wild bunch of grapes that are growing on the LA River's freaking Bikeway? A flowing collection of water I would do my damnedest to avoid contacting?

If you know me, or have been reading this site long enough, I hope you can correctly guess how I proceeded.

Unripened fruit is something for which I've always had a weakness. My brother and my friend Chris Farley and I used to gorge ourselves on unripened plums from a tree on our street. Later that day we'd suffer the consequences of such snacks.

This experience was not without discomfort, which is quite remarkable considering the iron stomach I have hidden under my hairy beer-belly.

Animation on TV Memories

Anyone like me with a blog could trove the internet for lists about things they have thoughts about and then discuss it themselves, there's really nothing to that. That's not original. Redundancy is not completely foreign here, and, as I hope to usually be original, that with rather unoriginal ideas I try to either bring something new or rekindle memories and help you, my readers, experience things.

In some meanderings through the virtual world of the Internet, with Mayor Flynn looking the other way (I did just make that reference deliberately), I came across a list that was from IGN, a site that deals with video games, flash animation, and the tech-ier side of pop-culture. It was their list of the Top 100 Best Animated TV Shows.

The Top 100 Cartoons? I was researching an animated show that appeared on the USA network back in the late '90s, Duckman, when I initially discovered the list. It came in at #48. Wow, I thought, there must be some way cool shows on here if the rather good Duckman is #48. If you, a fair reader of this blog, are unaware of Duckman, think amoral foulmouthed incompetent private investigator duck, voiced by Jason Alexander (George Costanza from Seinfeld), with music provided by Frank Zappa. That should be enough information to help you decide if you'd like to learn more about the show.

I'm not sure exactly what the list was meant to be. It wasn't exactly a list of the most influential shows...Rocky and Bullwinkle was in the top 20 but not the top 10, and it was responsible for an entire generation of comedy writers and would-be animators; and the Pink Panther, responsible for the basic Spongebob conceit, a single character infuriating those around him (actually this was a Goofy conceit from the 30s), cracked the top 30. It did have moments of going with things with which we grew up and loved, that, when viewed as adults, are mostly unwatchable (He-Man and Voltron), while ranking other shows lower that only get better with time (The Animated Star Trek, a vastly underrated show).

Under no circumstances are He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Voltron better than Duckman or Dexter's Laboratory. Samurai Jack is even behind G.I. Joe. Travesty.

The Maxx, from the comic of the same name by Sam Kieth, a beautifully stylized show that looked almost exactly like the comic, is probably ranked well, in the low 20s or high teens.

They have three different Sider-Man shows, but no Daria. So, Spider-Man from the 80s, 90s, and mid 00s were all better than MTV's spinoff queen? Daria started as a character forced upon Mike Judge (to his credit he welcomed the idea) by MTV executives as a strong counterpoint to his two lovable idiots. She, like the show, was caustic, sardonic, witty and smart. I didn't really watch Daria, but I respected it.

I'm not going to play up suspense about #1, because we all know what cartoon that is, and if you don't, you could probably guess from all the references I've put towards it here. Any show that is about to eclipse Gunsmoke as the longest running television program in American history, and remains, if not the most cutting edge and important show on TV, relevant all these years later, and was drawn by hand, has to be #1. Seriously, I have teammates that were born when The Simpsons was already a household name. Imagine the world in late 1992, specifically November 19th. That was the day the "Mr. Plow" episode aired. Having seen that episode recently, a tiny bit caught my eye, and I gained a whole new reference point to appreciate and love The Simpsons. Homer's about to go up and save Barney from peril which Homer himself was responsible. In a quick bit of animation, Bart opens a beer and pours it into Homer's thermos, and gives it to him as he gets into his plow. 1992.

I guess the real suspense for me was seeing the other shows in the top 10; the website loaded slowly and only showed one at a time. I'll go in bunches here, and I'm skipping #10, which was an anime show called Neon Genesis Evangeline. I hadn't heard of it until this list, so I'm probably not the best person to discuss its place in the Top 10 Animated TV Show list. It sounds cool from what I've read about it.

So...

9. The Flintstones
8. Futurama
7: Family Guy

The Flintstones, obviously...the Honeymooners rip-off changed the way America looked at prime-time animation, and made a world where the Simpsons can do what they did possible. I'm not clambering to purchase the shows on DVD, though. The next two make me sigh. I think Futurama is exponentially better than Family Guy, but, really, I think Futurama is better than most of the shows on this list anyway. If I were to make my own Top 100 list, would I really have it 1-2 go Simpsons-Futurama?

Maybe not, but...but, on the other hand, Futurama is a show that rewards viewers who pay attention to every single minute detail, almost necessitating rewatching, and it rewards those who have higher than usual knowledge of upper echelon math, science fiction stuff, Thomas Pynchon, and New York City. Basically it reward nerds. And I concede I'm a nerd. I like paying attention and getting math jokes; I like spotting all the silly references that I have to explain to Corrie...

Not everyone is like me, though, and that's where Family Guy comes in. To me, the enjoyment is lowered if you pay attention to closely and look at the deeper undertones. South Park did an episode where they skewered Family Guy with the one pillar of criticism that thinky bastards (like me) always attack the show with: the shows humor doesn't derive from the plot, it's a series of non-sequiturs. Which can be funny. Peter's obvious misogyny and lack of learning lessons, coupled with their utter dislike for their own daughter Meg, make it harder for me to enjoy the non-sequiturs. Maybe that's closer to reality. In any case, it sounds like my problem, not theirs.

6. The Tick
5. Beavis and Butt-head
4. South Park

Since I started at 10 and worked my way down, (after making sure #1 was #1) when I saw South Park at #4 I almost choked on my coffee. How can this show not be #2? I don't understand. Maybe that would displace Futurama on my list.

Back to the chronology..The Tick? Seriously? I'm glad it got a shout-out. I like The Tick. I remember hearing they were going to make a colorful cartoon out of the black and white comic that I passed on when I was collecting because I'd already missed the first six issues. The Tick lived in a city, The City, that City where all the other super-heroes who wear costumes lived and spent his time foiling completely absurd baddies. It was clever...in some way it was the humorous little brother to the dower Watchmen, a comic about the world where comics would be real, but here it was played for laughs.

It was funny and novel and clever and good. But, and not to say that these shows were necessarily better even though some were, but Rocky and Bullwinkle and Danger Mouse and Muppet Babies and Duck Tales and King of the Hill (which I like more than Family Guy) all meant more to me at different points in my life than The Tick ever did. Maybe that's what makes The Tick so good...it just is.

I'm not necessarily surprised that Beavis and Butt-head rank so high. Those two did and said all of the things that many young men felt like doing and saying, but which the little common-sense filter generally prevented. They were stupid, crass, unrepentant and had no empathy. They were awesome. We could watch the ramifications of mindless brute destruction with a pair that absolutely did not care about what they were doing. It was refreshing and safe. I'm sure that the brass, and writers, of IGN, the site that hosted the list, are all my same age (roughly) and grew up on the show as I did.

I've heard two things recently: the lady who's son started the fire that burned down the trailer and killed the two-year-old, prompting the permanent censoring of Beavis' favorite refrain, Fire! Fire!, actually did not have cable.

The second thing I heard that I had to research to believe was that Mike Judge is bringing the boys back. After fourteen or fifteen years, Beavis and Butt-head will be back, unaged, and ready to rip into all the crap they have on MTV nowadays. I've seen footage, and it's funny. Mike was approached by MTV, and he agreed after doing a bit for David Letterman, where the two introduced a scene from Judge's new (at the time) release, Extract (check it out on YouTube...(30-somethings waxing nostalgic follows)).

South Park? Not #2? Or even #3? Again, travesty.

#3. Looney Tunes

They mentioned that this was a strange pick, since the cartoons all aired originally before theatrical movies in the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Okay...I'll give them this one. A world without Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Taz, Wiley and the Roadrunner, wouldn't have any of these other other shows on this list, or even this list at all. I get that. These are animated shorts as artistic entertainment, not allusion and allegory about current events, or math or Pynchon jokes. Why their Disney counterparts have been left off the list I'll never know. I grew up with those animated shorts more so than with the Looney Tunes. Cable, you might say, because they were on the Disney Channel, but heck, this list has shows from MTV, Nickelodeon, Sci-Fi, USA, Comedy Central, and even HBO, so I don't buy it. Maybe the general anti-Disney feeling that permeates those web-sites.

What came in at #2?

Batman: The Animated Series, from the early 90s.

Hmmm...an inspired pick, if anything. It was a well crafted program, very dark, very cinematic, each episode was a twenty-two minute movie. It also set the tone for the entire design philosophy of the DC animated universe, when it finally got off the groud, made possible in part by the high quality and popularity of this Batman iteration.

I wouldn't make it number two on my list, but I couldn't argue it out of my top 10, or even top 5, maybe, or would even want to.

Silly Long Post...

So, the last show I'll mention, #99: The Mask. Who remembers The Mask? It was another commercial for their toys, where these toys were about half the size of G.I. Joes, and all had masks that gave them certain abilities. The cast was rather well represented ethnically, and the show might have been one of the better toy-commercial-toons of the 80s (Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats...).

I think I set my all time record with the number of italics used...

Some Changes (Again)

I'm experimenting with the "Look" again of tis site...check it out...

I finally have links to some of my most favorite posts, so I can retrieve and reread them faster. I'll rotate them on a semi regular basis...

"My Blue Heaven" Memories

Another film from the Great Salvage of Citrus Heights Action, where I liberated a pile of DVDs that my brother was about to free himself of, is My Blue Heaven, the Steve Martin and Rick Moranis buddy flick from 1990. Rick Moranis plays an FBI agent protecting Steve Martin's character, a mobster stoolie who has a difficult time going straight, in a story inspired by Henry Hill's book Wiseguy, which makes it kinda like an illegitimate brother of Goodfellas.

Strangely, Steve Martin was originally going to play the straight-laced Barney Coopersmith, the special agent, and Rick Moranis was going to play the gangster in the Witness Relocation Program. If you have seen the movie, try imaging that.

In any case, I remember catching a scene on TV while living in San Luis Obispo, and saw the grocery store we went to regularly. Upon doing some research, I learned that the film was filmed in San Luis and nearby Atascadero, while minor scenes were shot in recognizable areas of San Diego, where the film took place.

Enjoying it as a kid propelled my to choose it as one of the films I liberated during the Salvage, as well as wanting to watch it from the start knowing where it was filmed.

The use of still frames with plot movement (words that explain what's going on) reminded me initially of Pynchon, since the first one starts "In which I...". That's how sections start in Pynchon's V.

In the opening five minutes of the film, we see the house the feds have moved the gangster Vinnie and his wife, Linda, into, and it's the last house in a line of developments that, to me and others familiar with the area, is obviously Atascadero. In a later scene Barney (Moranis) tells his superior "He's living in the middle of nowhere; he's safe."

After the movie I joked with Corrie about that "middle of nowhere" quote, and she laughed and said, "It's still the middle of nowhere." To many degrees, she's right. In the grand scheme of California population centers, Atascadero isn't quite Firebaugh or Coalinga, but it's pretty much out there.

It was cool seeing Bishop's Peak in the background of certain scenes, as well as the Fremont Theater.

It was also refreshing to realize that the movie didn't age so poorly, and retains some of the humor I remember as a kid.

Interesting Etymological Discovery

Heading home after dropping a teammate off at their house, I heard an interesting discussion on a late night NPR program, the BBC-America show Americana, about the origins of many strange phrases and words in American English.

It was a discussion of some of the obscure discoveries the writer of a book on the subject had made, like a "Californian prayer book" is a deck of cards and an "Arkansas toothpick" is a knife with an extremely long blade, and is meant to connote that an opponent is armed with one and has the upper hand in a conflict.

There were a few more, but the one that really stuck with me was a word that she included in her book just for the fellas, a word she knew we'd get a kick out of: "fart-knocker".

Anyone relatively my age and gender who had MTV as a kid and like to play with matches remembers quite fondly two idiots who made the word "fart-knocker" a regular member of our everyday lexicon.

The compound word comes from the South in the early nineteenth century. It means, essentially, a nasty fall from a horse, one bad enough to knock the wind out of you.

Apparently, their wind was different from how we understand that idiom today.

Happy Birthday Ryan!

This is the first year of my three years of keeping this blog of recognizing my good friend Ryan's birthday on time. I was late the past two August 7ths.

Happy Birthday Ryan, I hope you enjoy that round at the Morro Bay course, in the shadow of the rock.




I'd love to be there to celebrate with you.

Stenciled PSAs

Different communities down here in the Southland have different identities, and out of these distinct identities come minor differences in how similar things get done. Something as simple as the heavy duty metallic stencil painting "No Dumping" notices that adorn the ground and accompany the street-level sewer drains, the kind that warn that runoff heads to the ocean, can take on interesting looks from place to place.

The most common look out here uses the fish skeleton. This look, and variations of it, can be seen from Santa Monica all the way down here in Long Beach, where from this particular picture comes.



In San Pedro, far closer to us than Santa Monica, they go with a different look, with a symbol that exemplifies our imagination's ocean-living counterparts; the dolphin.



And lastly, a city on an island uses it's own animal representative in a picture I've posted before; Avalon and its flying fish.