However, I never gave it much thought. I plan to hit Waterloo Records this weekend, maybe a staffer can answer this question.

The theory about Billboard‘s charts had some validity initially but then again, I remembered how the retailers used to fudge the sales numbers up through the early Nineties. Then soundscan cut the stores out of the equation, revealing to the world that people were buying more Rap and Garth Brooks than originally reported.

Personally, I will go with the same explanation for some restaurants being closed on Monday. Tuesday is a better starting day and stuff can be restocked during the slowness of Mondays. After books, music is the first modern product with new material on a weekly basis, it’s not a wonder videotapes, DVDs and videogames have followed suit.

I didn’t know new albums were released on Tuesdays until 1988. During that Summer, I made sure I rushed down to Radio Doctors in Milwaukee to get Temple of Low Men by Crowded House on the first day it hit the shelves.

However, it was great to see a couple Eighties’ movies which stayed faithful to the original vampire genre. In these two stories, the bloodsuckers are menacing, cunning and dangerous. They will kill you at the first opportunity they get, not bore you to death with awful poetry or their feelings.

First up was a revisit of Fright Night, now rumored to be on the re-make docket with David Tennant in Roddy McDowell’s role. As much as I liked the former Doctor, I’d prefer it if he passed on this old B-movie gem. Chris Sarandon makes this Horror flick great as the vampire next door, especially when he mocks Roddy’s goofy TV show. Fright also sticks to the cliches we’re accustomed to from the Universal movies: the vampire’s vulnerabilities to crosses, holy water, sunlight, wooden stakes, mirrors and they cannot enter a house without being invited. This flick has the Eighties throughout its DNA too: the cheesy synthesizer mood music, the fashion and the obligatory bare-breast shots! It’s also hard to tell if the producers/director intended it to be serious or camp. (When Reagan was president, the nation’s sense of irony was suspended.) Lastly, seeing Amanda Bearse portraying a teenager a year before she played the annoying neighbor Darcy on Married with Children for 11 seasons gives it a delayed creepiness.

The other, Vamp, I never saw before. My wife did, hence why she had it lined up in her NetFlix DVD queue. It was better than I anticipated because I thought it was centered around Grace Jones killing people. Instead it’s focused on the misadventures of three friends wandering into a seedy little city where Jones is the star attraction of a strip club run by her minions. There’s a good chance Tarantino used Vamp‘s premise to write Dusk ‘Til Dawn. Thankfully, Jones doesn’t speak since acting wasn’t exactly her strong suit if you’ve sat through Conan the Destroyer or A View to a Kill. I was more surprised by the casting of the buddies: Chris Makepeace (Meatballs, My Bodyguard), Robert Rusler (Weird Science, Babylon 5) and the Dongster, Gedde Watanabe. Here I think the people responsible for making Vamp were intentionally trying to create a goofy flick sprinkled with gore.

Either way, both of these movies were better time-wasters than sitting through Brad Pitt blather on about how rough he has it or Gary Oldman pining for Wynona Ryder.

My other recommendations of vampires doing their thing: Near Dark, Dracula 2000 (starring a lesser-known Gerard Butler!) and Vampire$.

1905

A list of famous guests, oddly most aren't from my grandparents' generation. I do remember Duran Duran showing this place in their 1984 tour movie.

So the first main attraction we visited was The Liberace Museum located on Tropicana, somewhat east from the Strip. Contrary to my generation’s alleged love for kitsch, we didn’t go there for such reasons. Maybe when I first spotted the place in 1997 but as I’ve grown older, I learned more about him and discovered that he earned his rightful place in the history and development of popular music. For starters, Liberace was the inspiration (directly or indirectly) for many others in Pop Music who followed, namely Elton John yet I would argue his influence extends to Bette Midler, David Bowie, Kate Bush and Cher on the showmanship factor. When it comes to piano players being at the forefront my list is much longer: Billy Joel, Tori Amos, Ben Folds, Crooked Fingers, Rufus Wainwright, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Sarah McLachlan, Dr. John and Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls).

Liberace owned the world's largest rhinestone ever made. That thing is 115,000 carats and was created just for him. It was a gift because he financially rescued the Austrian company which made the good ones.

Liberace, like Elvis, Tom Jones, Celine Dion and Wayne Newton, is synonymous with Las Vegas too. His performances at the various venues there from the Fifties on helped mold the city’s image as an entertainment destination. Sadly, they have no named a street after him yet. I think this will come in time. Right now, the world and Vegas have more pressing concerns.

Anyway, what’s there to see? A really good amount of interesting things. By the Seventies, Liberace realized he had accumulated numerous cars, pianos, costumes, honors and knickknacks. Thus, he opened the museum in 1979 to share these belongings with the public. It also became the public face to his foundation which helps other young musicians attend universities or whatever can further their musical education (I recall he sponsored a scholarship at Marquette in the theater department because my alma mater doesn’t have a music program). His family didn’t have much money when he was growing up in Milwaukee during the Twenties and early Thirties so Liberace never forgot how fortunate he was to receive a scholarship with the local conservatory. He wanted to return the favor in kind to the world.

One of the oldest pianos in existence. This instrument was hand made around 1788. I tried counting the keys but can't make out an exact number (64?) yet I'm sure it doesn't have 88 like a modern one.

It was certainly an educational and entertaining tour. I didn’t believe I knew everything about the man, just more than average in light of being a resident of Milwaukee (his hometown) for five years. Seems I wasn’t even close from these facts the museum pointed out below:

• I figured he came from a family of musicians but his father was a member of John Philip Sousa’s band.
• He is in the Guinness Book of World Records for his earnings and for playing the 2000 notes (accurately) in two minutes, I think. I didn’t have much luck finding this nor did Somara have a photo of the bronze plate claiming this.
• He loved dogs and took in dozens of the abandoned creatures to care for them.
• He was only 5′ 8″, 185 pounds and despite being a three-pack-a-day smoker, he worked out. It was required because his capes weighed as much as 150 pounds and it explains why his later entrances were in cars.
• My favorite discovery was a certificate declaring Liberace Day of something in Louisville, KY in the late Seventies. The big-wig official representing the city then is none other than homophobe, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

We certainly got our forty bucks worth. As you may have seen earlier, I had the opportunity to try on one of his lighter capes (20 pounds). There’s also this one guy decked out completely in piano regalia and he was a walking treasure trove of Libby trivia. He could answer about everything, including the more specific details regarding the lawsuit Liberace won agains the music critic who called him a derogatory gay term. The same victory my grandmother swore to us that it meant he wasn’t a homosexual, despite my grandfather’s taunting. Lastly, we made it in time for the afternoon performance of Ali Spuck at the Cabaret within the second building. I thought she was wonderful too. Her performance was something you enjoyable, light and funny. Not a “museum piece” in which you’re checking your watch every few minutes, wondering when is it over. Ali originates from the Dallas area to boot! Definitely want to see her again.

Those who ridicule my unusual Chucks need to see these shoes.

Would I go back? Sure. If I’ve been through Graceland three times, why wouldn’t I pay my respects to the guy who allegedly advised the future King to stop dressing like a Memphis pimp? The staff also changes out the costumes every few months because they said there’s warehouses of clothes the guy owned. I think the bigger selling point is the place being a charity, not really a money-making enterprise.

Should I actually know you and for some reason you check this out on my recommendation. Tell the nice staff I sent you. If you decide it was total crap, I’ll refund your money because I sincerely endorse this Vegas site. My only wish is that Grandma were alive and willing enough to see it. She was a fan of his. Enough to influence me into watching his famous 1979 Valentine’s Day special; I even saw the harness he used to fly over the crowd at the end.

It was 1976 so everybody looked dorky then. I'm sure if he had lived longer, he would've laughed at this too.

Meanwhile, I am now really looking forward to the possible movie Soderbergh was going to do about Liberace with Michael Douglas as the renowned pianist and Matt Damon as the companion who sued him for palimony in 1983.

So, after we got back from Florida and Grandma Maggi passed away, Brian and I discovered this hidden world of coolness near ISU’s campus; these stores on North Avenue along with Adventureland would assuage me until I left for college in a real city like Chicago, LA or Houston. I had no idea where I really wanted to go then, I was more caught up in the immediate crisis of my pending senior year.

With University High being a bust, there were two other choices: Bloomington or Central Catholic. Ointment or suppositories in my opinion. Either place was going to be my sixth high school. How awesome that would look on a college application! I was a proponent of the public institution: no dress code, no religion courses, diversity and anonymity. Mom and Brian outvoted me with their push for Central or what I prefer to call Catholic Prison. Admittedly, it was down the street which made a short walk but I wouldn’t stand for it. After my great experiences at Clear Creek, I never wanted to attend a Catholic anything again. Lawrence Central and Beulah weren’t great but they beat the hell out of Bishop Chatard on what mattered to me. I’m confident Brian was fine with me going elsewhere, I had embarrassed him too many times at Chatard; he was a cool kid, I never was. Mom wouldn’t have it. She was adamant about us attending the same school together and/or had this crazy hope I could be converted into a “better” Catholic, aka thought like her. Talk about a Hail Mary attempt. Years ago, the Jesuits at Strake failed miserably and they’re considered the Church’s best educators, what chance did a Podunk school have?

The debate, more like a verbal fight, raged on through the end of August. Name calling, blaming, the whole bit. I didn’t pull any (vocal) punches, especially with my disappointment over the Florida debacle. I’m confident Mom brought up her usual litany of things she loved to blame: music/MTV, D&D, “hooligan” friends and “promiscuous” girls (really penpals, I didn’t have much luck on the girlfriend front nor  was sex discussed in correspondence). When you’re a boring teen without a drinking, drug or humping problem and has good grades, someone like my mother has to fall back on desperate accusations.

Sadly, her vivid imagination remained intact into my adulthood as our final conversation in 2003 proved. She thought that my household was Letters to Penthouse incarnate because Somara and I lived together for three years before we were married.

Things came to a head before Labor Day Weekend when I called her a bitch. Tame even by 1985 standards. It got the green light for Prime Time shows over the last 20 years. This didn’t matter. I gave her the excuse to get on the phone with my old man in North Dakota. She claimed I was out of control, blah blah blah; therefore, he had to come down to Bloomington and take me back to live with him. The clinching lie to get a rise was her claim of me hitting her, something I’ve never done. What I did was take the whiffle bat out of her hands after I tolerated enough hits in the forearms. My rebuttal to her exaggeration didn’t help my case. I said something to the effect of, “If I actually hit you, you wouldn’t be able to stand up for a while.” Never mind that in 1985 I weighed 140 pounds and was pushing six feet tall; in football terms, I was built like a wide receiver, not a bruising linesman who can hurt you.

I thought Dad would tell her to calm down, he had better things to do and figured she was lying over the fictional hit. Maybe he’d come visit over the long weekend, try to scare me into cooperating and/or physically assault me (his temper is legendary and why I find hitting children sick). No dice, he made the trip and I had to go back with him. But first, there was a tutorial on driving his truck with its manual transmission. This involved cursing in the parking lot of Bloomington HS…from both of us. (Contrary to what Dad said, my mechanic says there’s nothing wrong with riding the clutch on contemporary cars.)

Some suspected I accepted my “banishment” over a girl named Mary back in Beulah, namely my brother. Not really. I figured I would go on dates regardless of where I went to school or lived, plus college was going to be better. Truthfully, what I realized was I pushed my luck but I just couldn’t stand living under the same roof with my mother. She was nuts and was going to micromanage me to the point of suicide, hers or mine. Somebody had to go. It just ended up being me because I didn’t have any power or real say.

While the reality of it was sinking in, I embraced the silver linings I found. I had friends back at Beulah HS: Mike, Jason, Darren and Jon. Mary was a plus. No starting over with school for the fourth year in a row! I also knew Dad was unusually mellow and easier going when Mom wasn’t around. Besides, he wasn’t paranoid about me getting any girls pregnant unlike Mom. I think he feared me being gay more. This didn’t prevent a tense, uncomfortable drive through Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and a constant smell of pig feces with the windows rolled down; this truck lacked AC.

The Summer of 1985 ended disastrously for me but in the long run, it worked out for the best. Graduating from a North Dakota high school probably gave me the opportunities to be accepted by more universities than if I were in Illinois or Florida. My relationship with Dad was much smoother because he preferred having the company and realized I was a low-maintenance teen compared to others he knew of. Thus, I had a relatively high amount of freedom to come and go as I wish. The cats came along too so I had the companionship of Mewsette and Teddy until Mom took them back at Christmas. Brian got his wish as well. He got to attend school without the baggage of a dorky older brother bringing down his coolness rating.

Would I do it differently had I known the outcome? I don’t honestly know. I’m leaning toward “probably not” due to the college acceptance factor and the remoteness molding me into a more relatively responsible teenager, thanks to my Dad’s trust.

Last week, my brother sent me a package which included my high school yearbook from Beulah. Talk about coincidence. Somara hasn’t seen it in great detail. I’m reviewing the thing because I haven’t read it in over 20 years. I want to make sure I’m over any jarring shocks first.

Besides The Nation and Scientific American, I need to see if Mental Floss exists in an iPad savvy format. This weekend, they posted a report on how close the human race came to extinction through nuclear war. Personally, I’d say seven is a conservative estimate. You probably thought this publication specialized in useless crap such as the details of Airplane!

The Suez Canal situation used to be covered in my high school history books, stating how close the world came to war. Hopefully, the revisionism movement hasn’t removed it. The other two at the end I did remember hearing about through the news, computer science class in the mid Eighties and first-hand accounts from residents of Grand Forks, ND. I need to get in touch with this Air Force veteran I knew at Apple. He could possibly tell me the declassified details on what happened at his post.

One good side effect would be the computer glitches providing fodder for the hit movie War Games, implausible and stupid as it was. Believe me, it used to set my father, the systems analyst before IT’s ascension, off for 10 minutes on back doors having a limited number of attempts before they’re shut down; the number Matthew Broderick is dialing with his modem would stop accepting calls after several incorrect passwords.

Maybe we’ll finally discover how many times Reagan brought us to the edge since he did enough saber rattling at the Soviet Union. He only came to the table with Gorbachev because he didn’t like the new guy getting all the good press and he needed something to distract the country from his arms-for-hostages scandal.

The Bushes and Clinton will be important too. North Korea and Pakistan joined the club so I’m confident they had their scares.

I was pretty nervous yet I had to do something different. After being turned down for a managerial and Q&P position, I felt that the Desktop Coaching position was an unacceptable dead end.  However, I didn’t know squat regarding mail servers or the current demon, Macintosh Manager. Conrad, the manager who approved my transfer, was more confident. He said, you’re reasonably intelligent, I think you’ll figure it out. I wish he mentioned the six-month breaking-in period because I began to regret my decision all through the remainder of the year. The friends I had in the department leaving shortly after my arrival didn’t help too: Garrett and David namely. I had no idea how the hell DNS worked beyond an analogy.

By the following year, I gained a comfortable level of traction on the essentials of AppleShare IP 6, Network Assistant and Macintosh Manager. My expertise also grew to the point that I was assigned to call back customers regarding their MM issues if a co-worker couldn’t solve it. A key factor to my success was embracing the team’s lab which provided the means to recreate how the products worked. In my opinion, it was easier to control/observe an MM client to figure out what the customers were having difficulty with. Often it was perception and not a technical failure. Today, I continue to be a proponent for my team’s lab because there’s only so much equipment one can fit in a cubicle realistically.

Here’s the fun, trivial element. There are two people with more years on the phones than me in this group. Under the larger umbrella of my product family, I would safely say there are at least a dozen. I think this speaks volumes about Apple and its dedicated employees. I’m pretty lucky to work with so many talented people too. They make my job easier, especially if it involves Active Directory. I’m looking forward to celebrating with them at AppeCare’s 10th straight victory party at the Austin Pizza Park in two weeks. Once again, we came in first place with Consumer Reports.

I was a bit miffed with it ending at 12 but then I remembered how cable networks, especially Comedy Central have shorter seasons compared to the dying dinosaurs known as broadcast networks. Even South Park is abbreviated most years. I’m confident I will have to buy another season pass through iTunes based upon the rather arbitrary definition.

Still, I feel the show regained its footing and could gamble more on its jokes because it was on a basic cable channel which means the standards and practices aren’t as lame; Al Jean of The Simpsons stated how butt cracks aren’t allowed on Fox…Fox of all networks, the one which lowered the standard along with injecting more advertising so a half-hour sitcom is only 20 minutes? Comedy Central isn’t quite as Puritanical yet they share Fox’s mercenary values.

Enough griping. Here’s the synopses on what will have to suffice until Comedy Central airs the remaining 14 they ordered with hopes they’ll buy another couple seasons.

A Clockwork Origin takes on the arguments of Evolution versus Creationism with a hilarious cameo during the Creationists’ protest. My favorite part was Professor Farnsworth deflating a common argument (more like a tactic) Intelligent Design proponents use called God of the Gaps. Somebody on the writing staff really knew his/her anthropology. I found the ending to be a cop out in the vein of Maureen Dowd’s way of thinking.

The Prisoner of Benda is the triumphant return of writer Ken Keeler doing a show (he’s part of the regular staff) and demonstrating how Math (really Logic or a Proof) can be utilized to make an awesome plot. It hinges upon the Professor and Amy building a machine which transfer personalities between bodies but it’s a one-way trip. Oddly, there’s no musical number which Keeler’s other claim to fame.

Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences brings everybody’s favorite conquerer to Earth, Lrrr of Omicron Persei 8. Due to his wife Ndnd’s nagging, Lrrr crashes San Diego Comicon 3010 and gets contradictory marital advice from the Planet Express crew, namely Leela and Bender. I loved the jokes ripping on how fanboys behave at conventions. Believe me, people are so f-ing rude recording with their phones at these events and concerts. This was written by Patric Verrone who contributes to the comic book and most may know him as the former WGA (West) President during the writers’ strike. Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) is the guest voice of Grrrl alongside Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and cartoonist Sergio Aragones.

The Mutants are Revolting celebrates the 100th show (not bad, it took 11 years) which coincides with PE making its 100th delivery! Devo appears through the voice of Mark Mothersbaugh. Watch for the reference from one of the first major Sci-Fi movie ever made. It’s a bittersweet milestone because there’s a dedication at the end for producer Alex Johns who died last month. He was very involved with the program’s original run on Fox and worked on other animated shows/movies: The Ant Bully, Olive the Other Reindeer and Ren & Stimpy.

The scorecard as per The Onion’s AV Club:

• A Clockwork Origin: B
• The Prisoner of Benda: A+
• Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences: B+
• The Mutants are Revolting: B

Any regrets? Nothing serious. It certainly keeps me from doing anything rash such as packing up and leaving for another city, trying to find greener grass; not hard to do this time of year with the drought. I certainly don’t want a repeat of North Carolina too.

There won’t be any celebration. The house is nice but any kind of milestone to throw a party over would be when I can tell Wells Fargo to suck it regarding their PMI and escrow. I have enough discipline to take care of the hazard insurance and property taxes myself. Speaking of scams, just like an election year we’re in the process (again) for changing hazard insurance coverage. Never mind the economy being horrible, Travelers raised the premium…ready? Nineteen percent! I am definitely in the wrong busy, so is organized crime. Fortunately, our membership with Costco helped us get a alternative for 60 percent of what Warren Buffet would gouge us while provided more coverage on mold and some other stuff.

I’m so excited to have one of my best friends nearby and we finally have a reason to drive north on I-35 to see Dallas, besides seeing my Flyers play the Stars every other year.

How soon will they be there? Probably a few weeks. Jose’s position with the Census Bureau has to wind down and then comes all the fun with moving.

Meanwhile, all of us Texas residents should give Nancy and Jose a big, friendly, non-partisan welcome.

The iPod Touch getting a makeover wasn’t a surprise, its look and features maintain parity with the iPhone. Now my friend Lester can do Face Time over Skype but I probably should buy him a replacement to show I’m magnanimous in Apple’s victory over Microsoft, Dell and the others; they’re currently too busy trying to build an iPad competitor.

Now I can see us buying an Apple TV. The previous model was nice and we enjoy using a couple our friends have. Owning one though? It was expensive for how limited it was. Numerous other people bought Minis and hacked them instead to run Boxee. The remaining barrier is a new television. This Apple TV requires an HD model but at least it can operate Netflix in addition to all the content Apple is offering. Acquiring it now would also be the cart going before the horse: a $99 device making us purchase a $1000 set!

iTunes 10 operates smoothly. It’s amazing how far this piece of software has come. Just ten years ago it was SoundJam distributed by Cassady & Greene, something I actually paid money for! The Ping element definitely needs time to develop. I wasn’t too thrilled to receive what appeared to be the default recommendations. They all sucked. For me, my top 10 albums will reflect what it is on the special page here. I know the knives were out for Apple on Ping too. All the Facebook and LastFM comparisons will abound. However, Apple was late on MP3 players, a storefront for downloadable content, Podcasts, mobile phones and tablet computers. Somehow they still managed to do these things better in order to take over a major share of those markets. Ping just makes it easier because I haven’t even bothered to look at my LastFM page in years and as much as artists prefer MySpace, that site was craptacular from day one; it was so cluttered you could tell it was designed by a PC user who had no basic layout skills.

Don’t feel hurt if I don’t invite you to follow or vice versa. I plan to keep my circle limited to those I know who really follow music as much as I do. Nothing bruises a relationship like finding out a good friend has crappy tastes, or an obscure, elitist one I’ve been accused of having.

My May visit was fair. The only nasty warning I had was a pair of sixes next to each other. Dr. Alice said if it didn’t improve by now, I would be looking at oral surgery to shore it up. The remedy? More aggressive flossing and injecting peroxide. Not the clear hydrogen peroxide people use on cuts. It was this messy, brown chemical I had to mix with 90 percent water.

It paid off, the sixes are gone, replaced by fours. Not a home run, more like an RBI and I’ll take it. Besides, it’s hard to get three or less with my lower, back teeth. Until I can make my jaw unhinge as if I were a PEZ dispenser, chemical rinses need to pick up the slack.

Now to tackle the fours and a five which popped up elsewhere by the first week of December. All this beats having dentures.

Here’s my other great acquisition from Hot Topic. Their selection of Cartoon Network/Nick gear is often feast versus famine, especially when it comes to something in my size.

I have always loved Dexter’s Laboratory. It was truly CN’s first original show. Maybe they started production on something else but Dexter is the one which got the ball rolling, paved the way for Powerpuff Girls; Ed, Edd & Eddy; Courage the Cowardly Dog; Cow & Chicken; Johnny Bravo; KND; Billy & Mandy; Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Chowder. However, CN has never treated the show’s legacy very well. About half of the programs I listed earlier have at least one entire season available on DVD.

There was a more colorful shirt featuring some of Dexter’s gadgets and his nemesis…Dee Dee! I would say Mandark is a rival. Obviously, it didn’t fit, hence this painfully bright red garment featuring our hero from his final seasons under the direction of Chris Savino and the Candi Milo’s voice.

Next objective over the Labor Day weekend. Finding three older shirts to throw in the retirement pile and ship to friends’ kids.

Larry’s 29-year run was part educational yet all entertaining. When I did listen, I liked how he didn’t talk down to the audience since Blues is a genre with a small, dedicated and often pretentious fan base. Although I’ve only live in Austin since 1994, I’m confident he was also an early promoter of SRV long before Texas Flood hit the streets.

Sadly, KUT for the last few years has been purging the old guard in favor of syndicated programming and when it does play music, it’s turning into a refuge for KGSR’s former air staff. I should’ve taking the outright plug for buying Dell computers as the beginning of the end with the current GM.

Farewell Larry. I thank you for the indirect lessons on how the Blues is more than SRV, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Johnny Lang, BB King and Eric Clapton trying too hard. I hope you get to enjoy your retirement doing what you love.

July was the tense, bellicose month in Florida despite visiting Disney World, EPCOT and getting to know the Tampa faction of Maggis.

August wasn’t completely as awful as July’s conclusion had been. The accusations, name-calling and hostility died down once we got resettled in Bloomington. Any immediate plans regarding the upcoming school year were then put on hold because Grandma Maggi’s situation had deteriorated after returning. Off we went to Minooka to hang with cousins Jason and Leesa, I knew I was looking forward to the like-minded company.

It was through this sad event I made a great discovery regarding my paternal grandmother, our mutual love of Science Fiction. For years it was a mystery on where it came from. Neither parent read those books and they were ambivalent over the movies; Dad was a mystery fan, Mom preferred non-fiction and my brother Brian despised the genre. Therefore I felt like a minor freak. While Grandma was still coherent, she worked with Leesa about what to do with her personal belongings. I recall Leesa recommended me for Grandma’s collection of paperbacks. Uncle Chief received the hardbacks she owned of Dune and Tolkein. I have no idea why, I didn’t feel jealous about those, I was more touched to receive almost 200 novels from her. To this day, I feel a bit cheated over this realization. Not for her generous, thoughtful gesture but for having this connection to her being pointed out too late. Thankfully, I did have a great bond with the maternal set, tumultuous as it was. It’s what family is all about!

The end came for Grandma Maggi in a slow manner as she gradually faded away over a few days until she stopped breathing. It was rough on everybody, especially Aunt Letty, Uncle Cliff, Leesa and Jason, they were the closest to her those last several years as housemates.

Then came the funeral which was the only time I have ever seen Dad with all of his siblings. Uncle Skip lived nearby in Ottawa. Chief, Dad, Loren and Michele flew in from Florida, North Dakota, Alaska and Hawaii respectively. My maternal grandparents showed up too. I was initially surprised since I had never seen these disparate relatives together before. However, I knew their sense of respect for Grandma Maggi overrode anything else: they didn’t dislike her, they just never fraternized. There were also some distant relatives Skip introduced us to. Hard to believe there were Maggis in farming. I had always thought we were city folk.

Being a Protestant (I think Grandma Maggi was a Baptist), the ceremony was presided by a minister who rankled the Catholic faction during the eulogy. There was one thing he said which made him come off like a pushy missionary. I let it slide due to it being a sad, somber occasion. It didn’t stop Uncle Skip when someone asked at the after-funeral dinner, “How was the minister?” His reply, “He was recruiting.” Aunt Letty surely gave him the evil eye for saying what was on many people’s minds. (Skip is also where I inherited my humor and blunt, troublemaking tongue.) Still, I was more touched seeing my Uncle Cliff cry over Grandma’s demise. For years, Cliff was always perceived (by me) as a gruff, tough but well-meaning guy. He worked on the assembly lines at Caterpillar, he was blue-collar to the bone and seemed to be a rock. It didn’t mean he was emotionless or heartless. I just figured he would be stoic, hide his feelings like most men his generation were ingrained to do. Cliff proved that the all the mother-in-law antagonisms are really sitcom bullshit.

There was one final gathering at Skip’s house, namely to get a photo of the six Maggis together before a couple had to fly home. Leesa, Jason, Brian and me were the only grandchildren present: the others couldn’t make it due to costs, logistics or previous commitments. It would’ve been nice to see them. Maybe help them out since Loren’s kids (Ronnie, Angie and Cora) were closer to Grandma before they moved to Alaska or see Skip’s three D’s: David, Denise and Dana.

Other strong memories I have about hanging with the Maggis:

• Uncle Skip had a talking bird next to the TV. If you sat quietly for a few minutes, it would spew a torrent of profanity it had learned from HBO…and Uncle Skip.
• Seeing the 1985 new comedians special hosted by Rodney Dangerfield. This one-hour showcase was the national debut for Sam Kinison and Rita Rudner.
• Music shopping with our cousins. Plus mix-tape exchanges between Leesa and me. I’m sure Brian and Jason compared notes on Oingo Boingo.

With all these matters concluded, time was running out regarding school. As I mentioned earlier, any hopes of attending University High were dashed. Mom had unrealistic expectations which infected us with false hope. There was a waiting list or enrollment required a parent who worked at ISU. It didn’t matter anymore. I had scoped out Bloomington High School during my driver’s ed course. It wasn’t fantastic. I put it on par with Lawrence Central for its facilities. After attending three other public schools and figuring there was a need to save money, I (stupidly) assumed I could focus on the more pressing concern, getting a part-time job.

I can’t remember the specifics for my failure. It was likely a combination of attitude (I think I wanted to wait tables) and the local market being tight (higher density of college students than the suburbs in India-no-place). I probably didn’t try too hard, figuring I could keep pursuing this while attending school.

Bored, unemployed and seeking entertainment away from Grandma Maier’s house, my brother and I decided to hoof it near ISU’s campus. We figured the video games at the Garcia’s Pizza under the giant dorm would alleviate the doldrums. What we found along North Avenue (ISU’s main drag, short as it is compared to UT or Marquette’s) blew our teenage minds. There was a decent arcade, a used book store, a comic-book store (pre-Metropolis days), a head shop (these were still good for finding cool posters despite the smell) and best of all, an Apple Tree record store, the music shop we got started with when we resided in Springfield. How I had missed this stuff before was beyond me. I don’t think my parents were hiding it from us.

With this stuff in Normal, Adventureland over in Bloomington, life there wasn’t going to be as awful as I feared. It was certainly better than what Beulah had to offer and was more accessible than the metropolises we spent 1982-85 in.

By the following week, we scraped up what money we had to go shopping at Apple Tree Records on our next expedition. The two purchases burned permanently into my memory were Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam & the Ants and Waiata by Split Enz (really known elsewhere as Corroboree), the latter became the launching point for making Neil Finn my favorite songwriter of all time. Originally, I wanted to buy True Colours but they didn’t have it and nothing seemed familiar on Time & Tide. I had known the hit “History Never Repeats” because I had seen it on MTV years ago yet I was amazed by the rest: “Hard Act to Follow,” “One Step Ahead,” “I Don’t Wanna Dance,” and “Iris.” The other side was a bit more experimental with “Ships” and “Walking Through the Ruins,” the former track seemed like a dry run of what would follow in Time‘s “Log Cabin Fever.”

Years later, many critics usually rip on Corroboree for being a mediocre, rushed sequel to Colours because the material wasn’t as strong. To me, it became the best starting point with Split Enz. Thanks to MTV, the band was perceived by many Americans as an Aussie New Wave act. Corroboree was released around the height of the genre’s heyday, 1981, thus it did deliver to my expectations. Had I gone with their later music, I probably would’ve been puzzled, got into something else and their very early stuff I didn’t learn about until college, when they were trying to be New Zealand’s answer to Genesis. That material, I’m certain I probably would’ve hated at 17. Colours is their most successful album (something like one out of nine people in Australia owned it in the late Seventies) so had I received my original wish, it could’ve set the bar too high.

Critics be damned in general. Corroboree really related with me more in its subject matter than my previous favorites did: Duran Duran had drifted especially through those side bands in 1985. So I spent many hours for the rest of the Summer, playing my brother’s stereo, making my personal connection with the Finn brothers’ lyrics which finally culminated when I actually met Neil Finn this Summer.

Coming up…the Summer of 1985 ends disastrously around Labor Day weekend. Part IV which happened because I couldn’t squeeze it into Part III and it really deserves its own section.

Even though the first episode was a live demonstration of his latest book, it still rocked to see a scale demonstration on what a meteor impact would be like and how ineffective nuclear weapons are against roaming asteroids. In short, we’re screwed especially if the object is made out of solid metal. What he left out from the book was the wiser solution, sending a probe or astronauts to install a rocket to nudge it a bit, then it’ll miss the Earth.

Comets? I thought they’d be easier. It turns out they’re worse since the Sun’s heat could cause a random jet of gas to go off, thus making it unpredictably change direction. So much the certainty of Haley’s Comet.

Hopefully he will be on next week to discuss the other topics: Gamma-Ray bursts, black holes, alien invasions and the heat death of the universe. Plus, he’ll stop picking on the Aussie metropolis of Sydney as the theoretical victim.

Fortunately, there are always sprouts of good taste amongst the weeds of awfulness in HT’s band-shirt selection: Ting Tings, Deathcab for Cutie, Weezer and Bad Religion. Plenty of “retro” via The Clash, Beatles, Queen (I scored News of the World), Metallica, AC/DC, Johnny Cash, Nirvana, Morrissey, Hendrix, so on. But when I saw Elvis dressed up as a TV Seventies detective, I had to own this! Actually, if you take away the badge, he resembles a stereotypical Mafia figure. Better yet, I got it on sale because it was classified as music apparel.

Now I’m in a scramble to hunt down the music of Pinkard & Bowden, Country music’s attempt at having its own Weird Al. Why? Back when I was in college, WMUR had a copy of their album PG-13. Nobody wanted it…it was Country! eww! (Dwight and Lyle used to get an equally chilly reception too.) I looked over the song titles, noticed how they stated one was set to “Islands in the Stream,” they called it “Music Industry.” However, the winner on it is “Elvis was a Narc.”

Here’s a little sample of the chorus I have branded in my brain:

Elvis was a Narc
Wearing rhinestones after dark.
Fighting crime from his limousine.
He knew every pill he’d eat.
Would be one less on the street.
Elvis took those drugs for you and me.

Cool, for once Google came up with a winner. These guys still offer their stuff online from the pseudo retirement and I won’t have to settle with the live record on iTunes!

We dropped by Austin’s only one at Barton Creek Mall (one store over from Apple) because Somara wanted to get a new case for her iPhone 4. The choices were Hot Topic and Apple. I convinced her to go to the south side of Austin since we could hit one destination instead of two separate trips up north (Doman and Lakeline). Besides, I weaseled this destination in. I found out about its existence yesterday from a lady with a Lego-person keychain. To show her I was a fan, I showed the one I got courtesy of Rock Band. Then I asked where she got hers.

How is it? It’s relatively small compared to the lines of products Lego carries. There’s a whole section obviously dedicated to Star Wars, their most successful license but the generic stuff they’re known for is present: City, Atlantis, those lame attempts at action figures. Plus they had small amounts of Toy Story, Prince of Persia (soon to be in the discount bin next to the Last Airbender and Jonah Hex toys), Spongebob and Harry Potter.

The best part is all the bins of generic blocks. All you can fill in two sizes of cups for eight or 15 bucks. There are some specialized parts like wheels, axles, shingles, doors, antennae and control panels.

Due to the mall not being officially open until noon, there was a birthday party happening when I first walked by. Curiously, I asked how much these events cost. Not bad. For close to 200 dollars, the birthday kid and 10 guests get the store to themselves for an hour plus other goodies I didn’t quite memorize.

Something I need to discuss with my sister-in-law Anje.

It has been a year since John Hughes died suddenly. I was pretty sad over the news, I welled up some during the ending of Sixteen Candles last Summer for Alamo’s Girlie Night. Recently I stumbled upon this documentary via Netflix streaming. As part of my current goal of clearing out our queue before adding anything else (now complicated by the arrival of a new Simpsons DVD set), I finally felt prepared to watch.

I’ll start with the negative parts.

The movie turned out to be a vanity piece for a quartet of Canadians who are at least 15 years younger than I am. It’s great they loved Hughes’ string of teen comedies but their connection or affinity to these films are equal to Beatles fans under 50; it’s second-hand at best because they weren’t old enough to experience the zeitgeist happening in teen culture from 1984-1987. Personally, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass which flicks were their favorites nor could I sit through their road trip to Chicago in order to stalk the reclusive director/writer. Thankfully, the fast-forward button functions with streams.

There are also interviews with some high school kids complaining about how today’s movies involving teenagers suck and how they can’t relate to the characters. Despite them being Canadian, they’re not that radically different from us in the States. However, their complaint isn’t new. This was a common gripe long before Hughes’ Sixteen Candles debuted. Hollywood had always cast twenty-year-olds for decades and still does. The only pseudo-exception I can think of immediately would be Square Pegs yet the principal actresses were 16, not 14 like their characters. Besides, Hughes only had age-appropriate principal actors a few times with Molly Ringwald, Michael-Anthony Hall, Mia Sara and Ilan Mitchell-Smith. The rest were easily in their early to mid Twenties and Alan Ruck, the dude who played Cameron, was 29 when Ferris was filmed!

Moving to the good parts which kept me watching until the end because it still did a good job celebrating Hughes’ works.

Somehow the producers succeeded in getting great interviews from the less-famous actors: Smith (retired), Sara, Kelly LeBrock, Gedde Wantanabe, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, John Kapelos (Carl the Janitor), Andrew McCarthy, Annie Potts and Alan Ruck; the director Howard Deutch (Pretty, Wonderful), Chicago film critic (and former screenwriter) Roger Ebert, Kevin Smith and the producers/writers/directors responsible for She’s All That, Not Another Teen Movie, Pump Up the Volume, Juno and Napoleon Dynamite. There’s some other people I didn’t recognize nor consider important to the conversation. The biggest surprise for me was Jim Kerr, the lead singer of Simple Minds, telling the story about how John Hughes twisted his arm into doing the hit he didn’t want to do. His explanation is very amusing, especially with it being coated in his Scottish brogue. This is where the documentary succeeds because the participants are sharing their experiences on making these films, their interactions with Hughes, the inspiration he gave them and everything else.

I did also like seeing the clips of negative reviews Hughes received when his films were initially released. One very painful scene came from the other Chicago critic Gene Siskel tearing Ferris a new sphincter. It’s nice to know Hughes’ heyday wasn’t received with unanimous praise (my mother generally rolled her eyes at Breakfast‘s language) and eventually he has been vindicated for the bulk of his Eighties work; the Nineties would be best ignored…Curly Sue, pass.

So I’ll spoil the ending of this craptacular homage to save you 90 minutes you won’t get back. The Canadians arrive in Chicago, patrol the ‘burb Hughes lives in, try to pry information from the residents and go to the director’s house. One volunteers to ring the doorbell, ask for an audience, receives rejection but leaves a package with the person who answered the door. What’s inside? A DVD of the interviews they collected and a hand-written letter from the flat four. The result? It’s all returned six weeks later via FedEx, leaving them puzzled if the subject read or watched the material.

This demonstrates what a bunch of amateurs they are. If they had any sense of decorum, they would’ve pursued proper channels through his agent (he still wrote scripts under the alias Edmond Dantes) or if that was a bust, get Roger Ebert’s assistance. Showing up unannounced to ambush him with a camera crew, outside his house is a tactic reserved by the goons at Fox News. Besides, if they knew the man as much as they claimed, they should’ve known about his reluctance to discuss the past.

Maybe some other people will make a better, more fitting and complete tribute to John Hughes. One which will include works these dullards overlooked since his vision encompassed more than teen flicks: Hughes’ time writing for National Lampoon the magazine and films, he did write the first three Vacations; other successes based in Chicago, love them or hate them: Uncle Buck; She’s Having a Baby; Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and Home Alone. A well-versed team of producers, not wannabes, research their subject regardless of how well they think they know it. While writing this post, even I learned some things in my fact-checking such as his involvement as the screenwriter for the awful Flubber remake and the Americanization of Les Visiteurs.