Sometimes they come back for more

I just found the most wondrous thing: the Wayback Machine. It's a website that allows you to see old versions of websites, even back to 1996 in some cases. The internet as I've known it is pretty much 10 years old now! And I started realizing recently that a lot of what I experienced almost a decade ago is completely nonexistent. Angelfire and Geocities webpages, 28.8 Kb/s connection speeds, the Daily Show screensaver with Craig Kilborn dancing, pages where there's some kind of picture that follows your mouse around and all sorts of jarring color combinations, pages that look an awful lot like the one Strong Bad makes here. Live Mike's Garbage Pail Kids Hangout with it's "Thriller" midi playing, and Midi files for that matter. Comedy Central's old site, with these little image file things (called Things, aptly) that would change when you rolled your mouse over them. The way Weird Al's website used to look. I'm in the process of strolling down the Information Memory Lane and it's great. I'll definitely miss the old internet, but it sure is nice to know a lot of it is still out there, somewhere.

One time he came yesterday

So my roommate moved in yesterday. We purchased a table and chairs today. I've been doing my best to make it to the gym at least four days a week. And I'm working hard on the website, though I can't imagine it being ready for at least a couple more months.

Sometimes they come back again

I can't remember the year, exactly. Probably sometime in the very early nineties. We didn't have cable television back then; our house was so far from the road that it would be too expensive to get it put in. At least, that was the story for many, many years. I spent many late mornings on summer weekdays watching PBS: Mr. Rogers, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Zoobilee Zoo, Shining Time Station, that show with the artist guy who had a dragon that he let do some of the shading, and whenever I could catch it on, Square One Television. Square One Television was a program focusing exclusively on teaching math to kids in an exciting and humorous way. There was Mathman, a Pac-man send-up where the character going through the maze would have to answer math questions. There was Mathnet, a spoof of Dragnet, where George Frankly and Kate Monday would solve crimes having to do with math. There were sketches, game shows, and music videos. One of these is the video you see above, which was my very first exposure to "Weird Al" Yankovic. It's just another in a series of things I never thought I see again, all made possible by people posting things to websites like YouTube, Putfile, and Google Video. Now I'm just waiting for some videos of the old Polaner All-Fruit commercial ("Please pass the jelly!") and the Buford and Bernice spots for Transmission Specialists (the latter being far less likely), and my memories of childhood can be a little more complete. Or at least a little bit more visual.

Luck

So I went to my local Barnes & Noble today to put a hold on a copy of the new Captain Underpants book set to come out next Tuesday. And whattaya know, they already had it out on the shelves. Apparently, because it's not a major release, like the next Harry Potter book, it's not a crime to put it out a little early. At least not according to the people at Scholastic, who publish the Captain Underpants books. The books themselves are always a hoot, and guaranteed to have jokes that the target audience won't necessarily get. And they break down whatever serves as a fourth wall in books in just the right places, like referring to a voice as coming from the bottom of the right-hand page, or characters asking things like "Weren't you fired in the last book?" Dav Pilkey also pokes fun at his own story-telling abilities, joking that the storyline of the book itself is typical of authors who have run out of good stories.

Speaking of people who have run out of good stories, remember me puking over the idea of another CG-animated Garfield movie a few months back? Sure you do. I won't go into my disgust at the glut of computer-animated movies out there right now, but I will mention this. The plotline of the second Garfield movie is just another rehash of the Prince and the Pauper. Hasn't this story been done enough already. Golo and I think that overused plots like that should eventually be retired. For instance, it would be great if, whoever does the next Prince and the Pauper-type movie, they should bill it as "The Last Time You'll Ever See the Prince and the Pauper Re-Done! We Dare You To Make Another Movie With This Plot!" and just be done with it once and for all. Then do it with every other story that's used that way, and eventually force scriptwriters to come up with something new.

Tube Tops

And now, 2 minutes of pure gold, courtesy of the Bert Fershners

Mysteries of the Universe, Part Ten

Okay, I had really hoped to have an answer to this one by now, but here's what is, to me, a true mystery.

There's a lot of great music featured on the show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. I got an album of all the stuff Polaris did for the show--at least, all the full songs. There's some bits of those songs that are just the music without words that show up in the occasional scene or two. I haven't started tracking down all the stuff by the Magnetic Fields and the other bands' music that was used for the show yet. I think it would be really awesome to compile a definitive, episode-by-episode list of the music from the show. But the thing that would be the piece to get is Marmalade Cream, which shows up in at least a couple of episodes in the background. None of the Pete & Pete fansites know who did it, or where to get it. I tried one of my two far-flung routes of obtaining any information on it, and the other seems a lot less worthwhile. But I think it's time to try. If I ever find it, I'll explain how I got it. But at any rate, that's what keeps gnawing at the back of my mind this month. I think it just reached my temporal lobe, so if I don't hear from any of you for awhile, I'll understand why.