Off Duty XXIII

The prerequisites of daily toil keep me from offering you a substantive post today. So, content yourself with the image above, 1938's Action Comics #1, which features the first appearance of Superman. My favorite story told by comic shoppe owners - and all comic shoppe owners seem to have a variation of this tale - is the person who comes in their store in an attempt to sell a would-be copy of Action Comics #1, not realizing that it is a far, far more recent reprint, than the original issue, now worth tens of thousands. If that customer sincerely believed they had such a prize (and was not attempting to pull a fast one on the owner), they must look crestfallen.

Off Duty XXII

Remember Snake Eyes? Remember Storm Shadow?

They had jobs, too, and I have one, as well, and it forces me to remain off duty today.

By the way, I bought the above referenced issue of G.I. Joe the very week it went on sale.

Yes, dear readers, I am old.

Off Duty XXI

It's been one of those weeks, so today dear readers, I must take a vacation day. Perhaps I am less stressed than, say, Cobra Commander in the image above, but there's no way to quantify.

It's not a crime to be off duty on a Friday, is it?

Off Duty XX

Even the Man of Steel is occasionally affected by the burdens of his daily toil. Far less a man than he, we here at Chronological Snobbery must take today off. Hey, it's a holiday weekend.

Off Duty XIX

Whew. After spending so much time and energy last week stewarding the coverage of the tenth anniversary of the 2000 film High Fidelity, I need a vacation. Well, if not that, at least an off duty day. So, for the time being, content yourself with the above image of the Grim Reaper facing that hell of hells, the consumer hardware store. The image, of course, is from the 1991 film, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, a flick that I'll surely get around to revisiting here some fateful day.

Off Duty XVIII

This weekend's misadventures have kept me from authoring a substantive post today. However, stay tuned, for the upcoming week here at Chronological Snobbery will be a doozy. Above, of course, is Marshall BraveStarr and his valiant steed, Thirty/Thirty. An awful cartoon indeed.

Off Duty XVII

All things being equal, I'd rather be in Otisburg. I'm taking the day off from blogging today, as I suspect that I am soon to be under the weather. Allergies, or illness, thwarts a blogger's diligence. So, dear reader, thank you for your patience and concern. I shall return anon.

Off Duty XVI

Tonight is the season premiere of the sixth and final season of TV's "Lost." Sure, I could try to reconcile taking a vacation day from blogging about pop culture's past to watch a television show from its present. But I won't do that here. Know only that a show with mysterious flashbacks and time travel will always prevail over the toil that is nostalgia blogging. See you tomorrow. Maybe. (While you anxiously await the premiere, check out this family portrait of Ben Linus and his father, Roger, over at the Secret Fun Blog and this December 2009 account of anticipation or Lost's final season by The Nerdy Girl.). And, hey, I already blogged twice today!

See my predictions for the opening episode here, posted last week.

Off Duty XV

Remember Tab? I suppose The Coca Cola Company still makes it, but they certainly don't promote it the way they do Diet Coke or Coke Zero. Why did it fall by the wayside?

Something to ponder today, as I am off duty from blogging.

Off Duty XIV

Today, I'm off duty. As I continue with this enterprise, I wonder sometimes if I should, as a matter of course, take weekends off and only post on business days. However, as you'll see in the coming weeks, some weekend dates constitute various anniversaries or occasions I wish to observe on the blog, so were I to take it easy on the weekends, it would be sporadic. Perhaps that would be fine and well and good with other bloggers, but I've not exactly earned the benefit of the doubt with my various and past sabbaticals from blogging. Oh, well. So, whatever the case, at least for the time being, I may just note on a particular weekend day that I'm off duty. As here.

If only to alert you that I still live.

(I note that my last Off Duty post was on February 18, 2008).

Off Duty XIII

Sigh. An absolutely ridiculous amount of business travel this past week kept me from my duties as your resident Chronological Snob, and the past weekend was reserved for recuperation from same. Thus, after a week of radio silence, I must resort to an "Off Duty" post today. Never fear, though, as my stockpile of posts needing only a bit of tinkering to finalize remains intact. Regular posting will resume anon.

Off Duty XII

With the sudden influx of quotidian toil at my office, I can relate to Harry Lime, depicted above and played by Orson Welles in the 1949 film, The Third Man (which, Wikipedia notes, was released on the second day of 1950 in the United States). If you've not seen it, you have been deprived of a fine cinematic experience. The film also starred Joseph Cotten, who had appeared with Welles eight years before in Welles' magnus opus, Citizen Kane. Rounding out the cast was the lovely Italian actress, Alida Valli, who had appeared in the early 1940s Italian films, Noi Vivi and Addio, Kira, both based upon "We The Living," the first novel of Ayn Rand.

Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, "Noi Vivi" (later combined with its sequel into a single film decades later) was a bold anti-totalitarian work considering who was running Italy at the time. The film generally avoids the haughty certainty of its source material and its author, who most thinking people abandon after a literary fling during the first semester of their freshman year of college. Although Rand was fiercely anti-communist, a champion of individualism seems less credible when she runs her school of thought as an absolutist. Rand - like the totaliarians she held in such great disdain - refused to tolerate any dissent in her philosophical movement, Objectivism. Further, Rand's novels are vexing in that her characters are not human beings to whom the reader can relate so much as amalgams of Rand's various philosophical tenets. As such, these Objectivist archetypes do not feel, emote, or change, as they have already reached the Randian ideal and thus they are already perfect in their creator's eyes. The other characters, as polar opposites of Rand's darlings, are weak stereotypes of collectivists or traitors to the capitalist utopia for which Rand longed. But with Valli as the protagonist/Rand surrogate, such faults can be overlooked when translated to celluloid.

Off Duty XI

What better way to recognize that the parlous perils of one's profession can preempt a blog post than to recognize Elsa Lanchester, the title character in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein? At 33, she was still a relatively young actress when she played the role with which she would forever be associated. Despite the fame and notoriety of her role as the monster's wife, few modern viewers know her name, or any other role which she played over the remaining forty five years of her career. (Her last film role was in 1980's Murder by Death; she died in 1986).

Off Duty X

You don't expect me to blog fully on the day before Christmas, do you? In the meantime, then, content yourself with the infographic depicted above, which tells us how nature would reclaim the Earth if humans were to suddenly disappear from the planet. (The original source for the graphic was this October 2006 post from Boing Boing, which in turn cited a post from Treehugger, which no longer exists). The chart in question is very similar to the relatively new tome, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, who purports to tell that tale as well.

In sum, Excellent Christmas time reading.

Off Duty IX

Business travel keeps me from making a substantive post today, but I do have time to pause and ask of you, how could you not have signed up for the Spinal Tap Fan Club in 1992 when the world's loudest band resurfaced to support its then-new album, Break Like The Wind?

Depicted above, and below, are the front and back of an interest post card sent by the club 15 years ago. Early that year, Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls triumphantly returned to popular culture after a multi-year absence that began following the release of 1984's This is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary which introduced the band to the world.



The back of the post card reads:

Dear Fan,

We're sorry it took so long to get back to you but we've been quite busy lately.

What with rehearsing for our upcoming tour and trying to straighten out our tangled legal problems. Oh, well!

We love hearing from you so please stay in touch.

Thanks for your support!

1992 was also the year of The Return of Spinal Tap, a television special and faux sequel to the originally faux movie which gave birth to their careers in the first place. (This would later be released on DVD; thank the maker.). Also that year, Tap's members quibbled with Metallica about black album covers and that band's theft of that concept for their 1991 self-titled album:



There was the controversial video for the band's 1992 single, "Bitch School," which was allegedly, although probably only in jest, banned from MTV:




They also released a video for "The Majesty of Rock," another 1992 video (featuring appearances by, of all people, Janis Joplin, Roy Orbison, and Buddy Holly):



Fifteen years after that, in 2007, the band would reunite again to play Live Earth. This means, of course, that since 1984 they have been together, played more significant gigs, and garnered more attention than many "real" bands. Ah, parody.

Off Duty VIII

Several weeks ago, I posted a review and commentary of Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, which tells the tale of Timothy Treadwell, a self professed savior of bears who was mauled to death by those he was trying to save in 2003. During the course of writing that piece, I had contacted Dr. Franc Fallico, Alaska's chief medical examiner and the coroner who performed the autopsy on Treadwell. In Herzog's film, Fallico provided a particularly dramatic interview to Herzog on Treadwell's last moments. Recently, I received Dr. Fallico's response to my interview request. Accordingly, I have updated the original post to feature the unedited Q&A with him (which you can find if you scroll down to the last part of the posted article).

Off Duty VII

Travel today thwarts my attempt at a more substantive post. Have you queried your presidential candidate of choice as to his or her views on the Mutant Registration Act?

Off Duty VI

The perils of my professional career keep me from authoring a substantive post today, but I expect to return to regularly scheduled programming in time for tomorrow's installment of Chronological Snobbery. However, if it is snobbery you crave today, you might investigate the very, very new and entirely unrelated blog, Adventures in Literary Snobbery, authored by one Calliope of New York City. That blog has but two posts, but its most recent entry concerns Kevin Brockmeier's haunting novel, A Brief History of the Dead (about which I myself previously blogged here). In the novel, the afterlife is a city filled with everyone who is specifically remembered by someone - anyone - who still lives. But Calliope writes that this city of the dead may actually be preferable to those in which we dwell while alive:

You die and wake up in a giant city. The city is very much like the ones found on the Earth you knew in life: apartment buildings, divey diners, giant corporations, mom ‘n pop stores, bums on the sidewalks, overflowing trash cans. But somehow, this city – The City of The Dead – is better than anything you experienced while you were alive.

There’s a “what if” game that’s fun to play: What if you could go back to high school (or “your twenties” or “elementary school”) with everything you knew now? What pitfalls would you avoid? What mistakes would you correct? What encounters would you risk?

In The Brief History of the Dead, this is exactly the sort of scenario Kevin Brockmeier envisions for his version of Heaven; not eternal perfection, but knowledge and second chances.

...

The trappings of a universal and perfect heaven are disregarded as illogical; because how could “perfection” be universal? These tiny happinesses are only exist for each individual character and are made all the sweeter because they were given the chance to choose their happiness.

Ah, second chances.

Nostalgic popular culture posts will return tomorrow; thanks for your patience.

Off Duty V

Fatigue preempts a substantive post today, but you must behold the Wikipedia entry for Skeletor, evil jackanapes and foe of 1980s era cartoon hero He-Man. Startling is the length and depth of this entry (which, as of today, includes sections entitled "The Scare Glow controversy," "Skeletor in popular culture" (where else would he be?), and, of course, "The question of Skeletor's head," in which we learn, at last, that "[i]t has never been clarified as to what extent any version of Skeletor is supposed to have remaining fleshy matter in his head, and thus to what extent Skeletor retains normal biological functions, if any."). One of the criticisms of Wikipedia is its priorities; its collected knowledge of things pop culture is encyclopedic, while its entries on things of more import are less so. (See generally the Wikipedia entry for lightsaber, or compare those of comic strip character Mallard Fillmore and former U.S. President Millard Fillmore.). That said, without this resource, how would we know that Skeletor may have once been Keldor, uncle to Price Adam/He-Man? Where would we turn for information on Panthor, Skeletor's "evil feline companion"? How could his relationship with Stinkor, "The Evil Master of Odors," be fully explored? ("[Skeletor] does seem to have a sense of smell though, as he is shown in the 2002 MYP series attempting to block his nose when Stinkor appears before him to beg a boon, which has some logic as his skull would still have nasal passages permitting him to breathe, if he in fact still needs to."). Thank the maker that these truly scholarly issues have been addressed and forever preserved.

Off Duty IV

The perils of making my living kept me from authoring a substantive post today, but I expect to return to regularly scheduled programming in time for tomorrow's installment of Chronological Snobbery (which will not, actually, have anything to do with Superman, weeping or otherwise). Thanks for your patience.