My Hometown

I found this hilarious and sadly accurate blog post by Richard Lawrence Cohen, a traveler passing through my hometown, San Angelo, Texas. Scroll about halfway down the post until you get to this sentence:

"San Angelo looks like the set of the beginning of a slasher movie, before anything has happened or anyone suspects."

He talks about the unfriendly shopkeepers in the downtown area, which is a bizarre concept to me. When I lived there, there wasn't anything downtown. When the mall opened near the more affluent side of town, all the stores moved there and the downtown area (which is maybe 10 minutes' drive from the mall) quickly came to resemble Springsteen lyrics.

The blogger's summary:

"The guidebook says that San Angelo is much more livable than Midland, Odessa, Wichita Falls, or Abilene, because of its diversified, non–oil–based economy. The awful thing is, I believe it."

Zing! And also true. Take that, Abilene, with your fancy zoo and smug newscasters and the only NBC affiliate that serves the San Angelo area, which has no ABC affiliate at all unless you have cable or satellite!

My aunt worked as a waitress at the Mexican restaurant mentioned in the article. As one of approximately three Texans who doesn't speak Spanish, I didn't know what the name meant until just now.

The saddest part is, I'd jump at the chance to visit San Angelo again if I didn't have to drive seven hours to get there. I'd have a corn dog at Der Wienerschnitzel and walk around my old elementary school, and play at the park across the street from my old house. Surely the death trap play equipment has been replaced by safer stuff now, right?

A funny bit from McSweeney's

A Selection from George W. Bush's Eavesdropping Tapes: Matthew Barney and Bjork Place an Ikea Phone Order.

I hope some flunky at the NSA isn't forced to listen to my phone conversations. I'm bored by most of them.

Who do you call if this happens?

Firemen's party ends in blaze. At least no one was injured.

Once I toured a fire station in elementary school, and one of my classmates asked whether the station had ever had a fire. The fireman said no, but that the smoke detector in the station's kitchen went off frequently due to the lack of cooking skills among some of the fire fighters. I think of that every time I accidentally set off the alarm in my kitchen.

National Film Registry's list for 2005

This morning the annual list of 25 films that will be preserved for posterity by the National Film Registry was released. The whole list is here. As usual, they have a bunch of good but pretty standard entries (Cool Hand Luke, Giant, Miracle on 34th Street, A Raisin in the Sun and others), several films of historical importance (like footage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) and a few real surprises that keep me convinced that the folks picking the films really love movies of all kinds and know what they're talking about.

Back in 1996, the very first list of 25 movies included This Is Spinal Tap, which showed they were off to a good start, but this year they've continued that trend. Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Rocky Horror Picture Show are great and deserving choices, as is Mom and Dad. Lest you should think I'm implying RHPS is a "great film", I'm not, but it (and its cult following) is undeniably significant and influential in the history of film and belongs on the list every bit as much as The Music Man, plus it's way more fun than The freaking Music Man.

Mom and Dad is a fantastic choice. The most influential of all the "personal hygeine" explotation films, it's one of the most successful independent films of all time (take that, Blair Witch Project) and toured the country for years. It's a low-budget sexploitation film, but was always shown to single-gender adult audiences as an educational film about the importance of having frank and informative dicussions with your teenaged children about sex. Because it usually included some nude shots and/or graphic footage of a live birth, depending upon how much the exhibitor could get away with in each town, audiences got their share of shock and tittilation but without the guilt of having seen a "dirty movie", because it was educational, you see. Little booklets about the film's subject matter (sex! but it's educational!) were also sold at the screenings, ensuring more cash flowed to the exhibitor. Joe Bob Briggs' excellent book Profoundly Disturbing : The Shocking Movies that Changed History has a chapter on Mom and Dad that tells the complete story of this film's strange history. I wish some enterprising soul would put the film on DVD. There are umpteen versions of Reefer Madness out there; shouldn't we be able to see Mom and Dad too?

Watch out for acetaminophen

This story contains important information about the pain reliever acetaminophen. Acetaminophen is not just Tylenol, but is in a lot of over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription drugs. A lot of people don't realize that improper use of OTC drugs can be extremely harmful. Just because you can buy something without a prescription doesn't make it safe for you to take the whole bottle, or to mix any two random medications.

I once took several different medicines to treat a cold and didn't realize that each of them contained a big dose of acetaminophen. I wound up vomiting blood. So be careful, unless you've always wanted to puke blood or try your luck at a liver transplant.