beautiful, funny, sad & true

As those of you who are among my Twitter minions (or ‘Twitches’, which is the hilarious term that my friend @barrington coined) are already well aware, there is a smallish group of us at work who curtailed our usual activities in order to work in the basement.  It’s not filing, exactly, but it’s not much more difficult than that, and it’s way too boring to waste any more space describing here.

I told you all that to tell you that when you work in close quarters with people for eight hours a day, you tend to talk to each other about lots of subjects that had previously been undiscussed.  The majority of the people working downstairs are women, who either already have children or who are trying desperately to have them, so I now feel that I know way more than I ever wanted to know about dilation and labor and episiotomies and all that.

But it isn’t ALL glamorous.

We do talk about lots of other things too, and a lot of the time we enjoy being down there and it makes the day pass much faster.  I learned something interesting last week, when one of the women claimed that the ‘inner’ female reproductive system could be drawn in the shape of a cute little bunny.  I had to see this for myself, so she pulled out a pen and a sticky note pad and drew the following picture:

In order to salvage some dignity for my blog and hopefully still retain a compelling sense of mystery, I will leave the parts unnamed, but I think you get the picture.  If you don’t, uhh. . .well. . .I guess you can have your parents explain it to you or something.  This is a hilarious idea, and if I remember correctly, she did say that she used this to explain the very basics to her daughter when her daughter got to a certain age.

So there, you see?  Despite the fact that I haven’t been able to listen to any CD’s or NPR (not to mention all of the music I need to learn by St. Patrick’s Day to perform with IrishBand) for three weeks now, being in the basement has provided many opportunities to learn new and interesting things.

As I find out more, I’ll keep you posted.  You know I will.

Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh.  It was called the Banana Junior 6000.

You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way.  Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .

. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:

This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large.  Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it.  I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue.  The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world.  Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.

Still rings true today, eh?

I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’  That’s just pure genius.  Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.

Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips.  Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either.  My hat’s definitely off to both of them.

Apple just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, and I thought it would be fun to scrounge up the original television ad for it, from 1984.  It’s a classic.

The ad had a bit of a resurgence in 2008, when a parody of it was used for the Obama presidential campaign.

Here’s the first real life introduction of a Macintosh computer, hosted by the ubiquitous Steve Jobs, but the Mac speaks for itself, both figuratively and literally.

Before that, in 1983, there was a super-weird industry event called the “Macintosh Dating Game,” which was emceed by Steve Jobs, and which featured three software CEO’s, two of whom have become historical also-ran’s, but one of whom is someone who you will no doubt recognize.

It’s interesting in hindsight that Apple spent so much time taking pot shots at IBM, when Microsoft was the company they should really have been paying attention to.

There’s so much more I could share about all this.  I find the early days of the personal computer industry endlessly fascinating, because that’s when it was all being born, and I was just the right age to be interested in all of it, and what’s more important for this entry, just the right age to remember and be able to share it these many years later.

Now, as back then, Macs comprise about ten percent of the market, but as Douglas Adams famously said in an ad (which I’ve so far been unable to scrounge up), “They may have only ten percent, but it’s clearly the top ten percent.”  Well said, Douglas, well said.

If you’re so inclined, here’s an interesting collection of articles called 25 Years of Macintosh for you to share and enjoy.

Happy birthday, Mac!

Star Wars geek-out beginniiiiiiiiing. . . . . . . . . . . now.

Ackbar! The Star Wars Talk Show

That might be the weirdest title I’ve ever written for a blog entry, but all I ask is that you bear with me on this one.

I got a text message from a friend yesterday that said, “Turn on NPR right now.”  I did, and heard a story about a bunch of bizarre medical conditions that afflict musicians, like that badge-of-honor rash that violinists get on the left side of their necks from rubbing a violin across it for years or decades.

I didn’t hear anything that would have caused my friend to write with such urgency, though, so after the story was over, I wrote back and said, “Caught a bit of it. . .musicians’ ailments.  What’d I miss?”

“Cello scrotum.  You need to hear the whole story.”

“Holy crap!”  I had to find out more.

As it turns out,  an English medical journal back in the 1970’s reported about a condition called ‘guitarist’s nipple’ that is (supposedly) an irritation caused by a guitar rubbing across your chest.  I suppose that’s assuming that you’re not wearing a shirt.  I’ve played guitar for many years, and my nipples are fine and dandy, thank you very much.  (TMI?  NEI?)  My ribs do go in a little bit on one side, where the top of the body of the guitar rests against your chest while you’re sitting down with it.  Oh yeah, and the calluses on my fingers are thick enough that I can touch a hot pan or something for a while and not feel it.  (“Mmmm, what’s that smell?  Smells like bacon.  Oh. . .it’s my finger.”)

So.  Anyway.

Around the time of said nipple affliction, this English doctor and her husband thought it would be funny if they one-upped that condition, so they dreamed up ‘cello scrotum’, which they said was chafing in the scrotal area.  This is, of course, impossible, because when you play the cello, you hold the instrument between your knees, which are spread far apart, which also means that your nether region is getting plenty of air, so there’s no opportunity for chafing.  Not to belabor the point, but. . .

. . .there, you see?  No chafing.  You DO get sore sometimes from sitting on the edge of a chair all the time, but that’s about it.  The cello is one of the most ergonomic instruments out there.

Apparently, though, the myth of scrotal chafing persisted for decades, until another journal mentioned the condition last December, which prompted the doctor to write to the journal and put the matter to rest once and for all.

The money quote of the article was this:   “Perhaps after 34 years, it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum.”

Here’s a link to the story.

I had a ball writing this entry, by the way, but ultimately I find this subject to be completely nuts.