That was supposed to suggest Jimmy Fallon in that old “Saturday Night Live” sketch about an obnoxious morning radio DJ.
Except I certainly couldn’t scream it like he did.
I’ve been under the weather for about a month now and still don’t really feel like myself, but I need to feed the blog. So I’m going to play pop culture catch-up some in the next few days.
Hopefully.
I haven’t been feeling well recently, so of course I thought about Paul McCartney.
Okay, let me retrace my steps there.
I stayed home sick today and saw, on TV or the Interwebs, mention of the rumor that Jon Bon Jovi was dead. Specifically, I saw debunking of the rumor by the New Jersey rocker himself.
Which made me think of the fan furor over the “death” of Beatle Paul McCartney in the 1960s.
I wasn’t the most discriminating music fan as an elementary schooler. I liked the Beatles but I also liked the Monkees, Rolling Stones and yes, even the Dave Clark Five.
I’m not positive I was aware of the McCartney rumors, but if I wasn’t before a visit to my doctor’s office, I certainly was after.
There, in the waiting room of Muncie’s Children’s Clinic, was the Nov. 7, 1969 cover of Life magazine, with Paul and Linda and their kids on the cover.
“The Case of the ‘Missing’ Beatle: Paul is Still With Us,” the headline read.
If you don’t remember the “Paul is dead” rumor, it was basically that McCartney had been killed in a 1966 car accident. The Beatles had quietly replaced him with an impostor but then had, improbably, included clues as to his death in music and album cover images. (“Turn me on dead man,” Paul facing backward, Paul not wearing shoes, etc.)
Flash forward to the summer of 1969, when a radio DJ began publicizing the rumor. Reports of Paul’s death circulated quickly, prompting Life to send a reporter and photographer to McCartney’s farm in Scotland.
I don’t remember a lot about the Life article, but I remember eagerly reading it. I’m not sure it was my first dose of reality about the scary possibility of death — I was an avid viewer of the “Combat!” TV series, after all, and battlefield deaths were commonplace in the show — but it affected me enough that I remember it all these years later.
The other day I found out about the death of North Korean “dear leader” Kim Jong Il from the Twitter feed of comedian and writer Patton Oswalt. The Associated Press Tweet about the story came later.
The lightning speed of news today — not only genuine breaking news but also rumors like those that hit Bon Jovi — means that stories circulate more quickly than ever.
That means the resolution to those stories circulates more quickly too. None of us had to wait three years for Life magazine to debunk the Bon Jovi rumor.
Thank goodness. I’m already sick and wouldn’t want to deal with that on top of a bad cold.
Most of us know how the story of Indiana preacher Jim Jones ended: Jones, a madman cloaked in the robes of a preacher, civil rights activist and would-be socialist, led nearly 1,000 of his followers to their deaths in a 1978 mass suicide in the South American country of Guyana.
But considering Jones grew up just a county over from where I sit as I write this, I didn’t know the full scope and breadth of Jones’ story. And I certainly didn’t know the lives and tragic deaths of his followers.
Until I read Julia Scheeres’ “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown.”
Scheeres — whose previous book, “Jesus Land,” was a wrenching memoir of her early years in Indiana and, along with her brother, incarceration in a twisted South American youth camp run by a religious group — found a surprisingly similar theme when she chose Jonestown as the focus of her second book: The evil that people do in the name of their beliefs.
In the case of Jim Jones and his self-named South American settlement, those beliefs were, almost whole-heartedly, focused on the group’s leader. Jones, who had churches in Indianapolis and San Francisco before he moved his flock to Guyana, might have gradually succumbed to the the depths of his mental illness but was certainly fixated on exerting control over others even from his early days in the pulpit.
That control extended to every area of their lives. Jones took money from his followers — perhaps millions of dollars by the end — as well as their dignity. He seduced, coerced and outright sexually assaulted many of his people. He broke up families and turned spouses and siblings against each other.
Well before the end, Jonestown was a place where members of the Peoples Temple informed on each other and willingly — perhaps even with a heady sense of the control that Jones enjoyed — exacted punishment from their fellow church members.
Scheeres, who writes in a matter-of-fact tone that packs a punch, retells the story of Jones and his church through not only interviews with survivors but information gleaned from thousands of FBI documents.
The picture she paints is powerful and disturbing. She captures the anxiety and fear of a handful of Jones’ followers as well as the frightening tactics the Peoples Temple leader employed. Even while Jones worked to persuade his church members that “revolutionary suicide” — a term that Jones misunderstood or deliberately misstated — was their only possible fate, he staged fake assassination attempts and attacks to sell his plan.
In hindsight it’s hard to imagine how the authorities didn’t put a stop to Jones’ plan. But church members were so afraid and so mentally enslaved that, until the very end, many didn’t try to get away from their inevitable fate. And the authorities, both in the U.S. and in Guyana, couldn’t believe the warning signs. Who could possibly imagine that one man would convince nearly a thousand people to kill themselves?
Who would want, or could exert, that kind of control?
The Hoosier state, maybe not even the United States, might never again spawn such a man as Jim Jones. But Julia Scheeres’ “A Thousand Lives” is an eyes-wide-open look at how it happened once thanks to belief in a madman and the disbelief of those on the outside looking in.
I drink a couple of bottles of Diet Pepsi — Diet Coke when necessary — a day, but when I was growing up, pop — as we called it — was a fairly rare thing for us.
Maybe that’s why the memories associated with it — the taste, the smell but also the look of the bottles and various Pepsi accoutrements — are so memorable.
We ate dinner tonight at a local restaurant with lots of nostalgic decorations, the kind of place that Moe from “The Simpsons” described as “a place with a whole lot of crazy crap on the walls.”
Among the nostalgic decor was something I’d never seen before: Metal Pepsi bottle carriers.
I don’t have any memory of those and I wonder if they had even been available around here.
I do have vivid memories of the thick paper cartons that six glass bottles of Pepsi, Mountain Dew and other drinks came in. We would get a six-bottle carton of Pepsi on a trip to the grocery store and, a week or so later when we made our next shopping trip, we would buy another.
A big part of that return visit, of course, was returning the empty glass bottles for deposit.
We would save the bottles as they were emptied over the course of a week — remarkable that they lasted that long, but we drank things like milk and water more than pop in those days — and return them to the store in the paper carton. We would show the carton full of bottles at the supermarket office and get the deposit back — a nickel or quarter or whatever it was for the six pack.
I also have vivid memories of the liners of the Pepsi bottle caps. For much of the time that I remember, the bottle cap liners were made of plastic and, at least some of the time, the caps were imprinted with pictures of American presidents. You could collect all the presidents and paste them on some sort of official game card and then … well, I have no idea. I don’t remember ever collecting all the presidents, even though there were only about 17 chief executives to that point.
Kidding.
Before the plastic liners, which the Interwebs tells me were introduced in the 1960s, were cork bottle cap liners. I can’t remember if Pepsi ever conducted games with the cork liners, although I do remember digging them out of the bottle caps for some reason. I remember that because of how easily they fell apart.
I know soft drink companies still do the occasional bottle cap game. But it’s hard to imagine kids today laboring over fragile cap liners, carefully pulling them out of the caps and collecting them for some unimaginable prize.
Yes, yes, I know that fall officially arrived more than a month ago, and we’ve had enough cool temperatures in Indiana to warrant switching on the furnace.
But there’s something about November that really reinforces the idea: It’s fall.
With Halloween over and the holiday season rushing toward us like an oncoming train, maybe there’s time to take a breath and contemplate the change of seasons.
These photos were taken with my iPhone in my neighborhood in recent days.
This green leaf — hanging precariously on a gate above a pile of leaves waiting to be raked — sums up how I feel about fall sometimes. I see it coming but I hate to give in because of what follows.
Most have given in already.
Fall’s colors are beautiful.
Just a few months ago, this little ditch was teaming with wildlife. This morning it’s frosty.
A nice spot for watching the change of seasons.
Enjoy fall!
At some point while we were watching “The Help,” my wife nudged me and pointed out a restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi, in the background in one scene of the movie, where’s she eaten. Her old high-school got name-checked, and so did a familiar grocery store chain, Jitney Jungle.
Yes, you might say the movie — and the book on which it’s based — is familiar territory for her. Literally.
And those who know my family know that its topic — relations between the races in the broadest terms — is one that’s dear to us.
I haven’t read the book, by Kathryn Stockett, but my wife liked it pretty well, although she was boggled by the idea that its events — the struggle of black maids in pre-civil-rights-era Mississippi — took place only a few years before she grew up there.
The movie — which showcases some wonderful actresses, from Viola Davis to Octavia Spencer to Emma Stone to Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays a reprehensible and pathetic racist — is good and manages to avoid the pitfalls of movies like “Mississippi Burning,” which relegated its black characters to the background in favor of the adventures of heroic white FBI agents.
There’s some comfort in watching the movie and not only feeling smug about the foolishness of racism but thinking about how much attitudes have changed. Even in Mississippi.
As someone with an abiding interest in tolerance, I think I was struck most by sympathy for the people who suffered, many mightily, through the depths of segregation and racism in the south as well as awe at how different our lives might have been if attitudes hadn’t changed.
“The Help” is a moment, frozen in time. Thankfully, that time has passed.
One of the best things about a trip to the Louisville area is on the Indiana side of the Ohio River: The Falls of the Ohio State Park.
If you’ve never been, it’s more than worth a visit. Remember learning about trilobites in science class? Well, thousands of the fossilized marine creatures are embedded in the rocky floor of the falls area. The nearly-400-million-year-old fossil beds are the main attraction of the park.
Depending on the time of year and level of the river — which is usually held back by a 30-foot dam — visitors can walk far out onto the floor of the falls.
When I was there for a visit last fall, the river level was low and you could very nearly walk out to the dam. This week, the water level was quite high and the water was rolling violently.
The effects of the variable water level are obvious in the photo below. High above the water level we found this week were piles and piles of driftwood that had washed up onto the banks.
While the fossil beds are cool and the raging waters were impressive, one of the best reasons to go to the Falls of the Ohio is the peace and beauty of being close to nature — but still close to civilization, with New Albany on the Indiana side and Louisville on the Kentucky side.
Here’s the website for the DNR park if you want to explore further.
(Photos with this blog were taken by me in October 2011.)
The trailer for “The Avengers,” next summer’s Marvel superhero team-up movie, hit the Internets today.
And it’s pretty cool.
I’d like to embed the video here, but as is typical of WordPress lately, it won’t let me.
So, rather than have you take my word for it, I’ll post a link here.
I love Spam.
The kind you eat.
Well, maybe love is too strong a word. But I like Spam. In a world where people eat raw fish — and pay premium prices to do so — Spam is not only a taste sensation but a bargain.
Okay, maybe there’s a bit of tongue in cheek — not to mention meat byproducts — in this ode to Hormel’s processed meat. But I genuinely enjoy the stuff.
My dad was a Spam eater from way back. (Or, if you prefer, SPAM. But that seems kind of stilted, so for the purposes of this blog, it’s Spam.)
Spam was a taste my dad acquired in World War II, when he was stationed in the Pacific Theater and spent part of his time as an Army cook. Hormel says 100 million pounds of Spam was shipped overseas during World War II. Some of it was even eaten. Much of it was used by my dad in various recipes.
During the war, my dad ate Spam because he had to but retained an appreciation for it, which he passed along to me.
Some of the foods of my youth — most sugary cereals, Beanie Weanies — don’t stand the taste-test of time today. Spam does, however.
I can eat it fresh (well … ) out of the can. I can eat it cold. I can eat it fried, preferably with eggs.
Part of the continuing appeal of Spam, I think, is that it horrifies my son so much. I enjoy torturing him by pulling a can of Spam out of our cabinet — I think that can has been there for much of his young life — and telling him, “What do you think? Should we have Spam tonight?” He reacts with disgust, of course, and so far I haven’t actually made him eat any.
Spam has gotten a bad rap in recent years. Its reputation took on a new luster with Monty Python’s “Spamalot,” but there’s not a lot that even a spoofy Broadway musical can do to overcome the onus of having particularly obnoxious junk email named after it.
Dang. All this writing about Spam is making me hungry. I don’t have any reason to worry that the can of Spam has been eaten, but it might have disappeared from the cabinet through some Spam-preventive skullduggery.
Ah, no. Still there. Waiting for me.
Soon, Spam. Soon.
I was watching the “Today” show last week and Ann Curry mentioned that Lester Holt had been chosen as the new host of “Dateline” on NBC.
Okay, let’s set aside, for the moment, that I didn’t know that NBC was still showing “Dateline.” It was only a few years ago that the network was airing the magazine show six or seven or possibly eight times a week. But I haven’t noticed it lately.
But I’m totally not surprised that Lester Holt is going to anchor the show.
Holt very possibly anchors more hours of network TV each week than any other living being.
Before the “Dateline” gig, Holt was already hosting the weekend editions of “Today.” Two hours (only one hour on the Indy affiliate) Saturday and Sunday mornings.
He’s also the anchor of “NBC Nightly News” on Saturdays and Sundays.
That means that Holt, a fixture on NBC and MSNBC since 2000, finishes with the “Today” show and then comes back 10 or so hours later to host “Nightly News.”
It’s no secret that the hours suck in journalism. Weekend hours are among the suckiest. But does anybody have suckier hours than Lester? I mean, does NBC give him a cot to nap on between morning and evening shifts at least?
That doesn’t even count all the times Holt guest-anchors on “Today” or “Nightly News” during the week while Matt Lauer and Brian Williams go kayaking or whatever the heck TV news anchors do.
And now “Dateline.”
I don’t think Lester would be quite so appealing, however, if he didn’t seem like such a nice guy. TV thrives on warm personalities. It’s possible for viewers to watch and enjoy an aloof jerk, but I think bad attitudes and star-tripping egos are ultimately obvious.
Lester never gives off that vibe.
And what’s more, he doesn’t even seem frazzled or tired, no matter how sucky his work hours.
I’m not sure even Lester can get me to watch “Dateline,” but I’m glad he’s there.
keithroysdon 