smacky and bucky

I'm posting this because there's a neat story behind these bottles. They're Galaxy Syrup Bottles, made by Space Foods Company in Baltimore, Maryland in 1953. You would purchase a bottle of syrup and add it to carbonated water to make your own sodas. The company went out of business after the bottles were manufactured but before they could be filled and distributed. As a result, there are cases of unused bottles out there.

The company made bottles for ten different flavors of syrup, with each flavor represented by a different color. The neat thing is that the bottles are shaped like spacemen, and each flavor also had a rank: Space Scout, Space Sentry, Space Admiral, Space Bombardier, Space Ace, Interplanetary Commander, Orbit Admiral, Space Navigator, Space Commander, and Asteroid Commander. Each bottle has a metal screw-cap with a slot in the top. The idea was that when you finished the syrup you could punch out the cardboard under the cap and use the bottle as a bank!

I stumbled across one of the bottles at an antique store I had been dragged to in the middle of nowhere , and they wanted $20 for it. That was a bit much, so I did some research and discovered someone in Maryland selling entire cases of unused, like-new bottles in their original shipping box (which has cool retro Flash Gordon-type graphics on it. Picture of the box here). I purchased the case, and now I have them displayed with Silver Surfer in the front, just cruising by.

I suspect the current auction on ebay is by the same seller from whom I purchased my case, though the price has gone up a lot in two years (with a "Buy it now" price of $125.) You can see that auction here.

<== The Band


Last night was a lot of fun. As part of an old married couple, we don't go out much on weekdays, unless it's a trip to Borders or Best Buy, but last night we ventured out to catch FourGoodMen, the band comprised or former members of Big Country and Simple Minds. They were awesome! They played hits from both bands, and some original songs that kicked, including Alive and Kicking, Chance, In a Big Country, and Fields of Fire. They closed with Don't You Forget About Me. I picked up their tour sampler CD, but since it was already after 11 when the show ended, decided not to play fanboy and wait to get it signed by the band, even though the woman selling the CDs said they would. Laura was looking a bit tired by then, and another hour there and she'd have been curled up in a corner asleep.


Bruce Watson======>

Ah... what a relaxing break... five days off.

Laura cooked Thanksgiving for 12 people, and everything was delicious.

We all slept in this morning (me, wife, and pets), but I only got to work 15 minutes later than usual, which is still an hour and 45 minutes earlier than most people, so no worries.

Now it's back to the grind, handling work issues, gearing up for a discussion with the power company (The electricians who repaired the dryer plug after the surge are now saying they are denying the claim, saying it was not part of the surge, but we haven't received a bill, so WTF? I have to call this number now, but I feel like it will just be drawing attention to myself and they'll send a bill, but I have to do something because silence would equal acceptance to these people. Sigh.) And I have another huge pile of leaves to get up at the other house, I'm sure.

I watched Broken Flowers over the vacation. I felt like a moron for not "getting" the ending, but I read up on it this morning, and I realized it was purposely open-ended, and they inserted a little inside joke that you probably won't get at first viewing. It was still better than the ending of Lost in Translation. There, I said it.

Usually, there's only one thing to do when faced with a movie with an ambiguous ending:

We're taking tomorrow off. Laura is preparing Thanksgiving dinner for about 12 people and needs a day's head start! Personally, I'm looking forward to a long break, relaxing, watching some movies, and reading a book or two.
--------

If I had to name my favorite band of all time, I'd think about it for a moment before going with the name that popped into my head the second the question was asked: Big Country. Their songs are like anthems of hope, and they rock too. The lead singer committed suicide in 2001, and that effectively ended the band. The guitarist, Bruce Watson, is now in a new band called FOURGOODMEN along with some former members of Simple Minds. About this new band:

Between them, they have had almost 60 top 40 singles and 20 top 10 albums, 8 of them number 1's. Total records sold to date: 40,000,000. The band's debut show was at Glasgow Green, July 2005, performing to an audience of 15,000. Then top of the bill at The Mull of Kintyre Music Festival, Campbeltown, August 2005. Further high profile concerts and festivals in Scotland and Ireland have followed since. All sell outs. The band is:

• Derek Forbes (bass) - Simple Minds
• Mick MacNeil (keyboards) - Simple Minds
• Bruce Watson (guitar) - Big Country
• Ian Donaldson (vocals) - H20
• Smiley (drums) - Robbie Williams / Joe Strummer

This weekend we went south to Lynchburg, VA, my hometown... where I spent my formative years pretty much not forming much of anything. Anywho, I won't start a rant about that town, just an observation: We were cleaning out my grandmother's house and took a break for a late lunch. We went to a new diner nearby (food was okay, nothing great). At the next table, who sits down? Jerry Falwell. Yeah, yeah, he has his church and his college there, but there are a LOT of restaurants in Lynchburg (really, a freakish amount. People must come into town from 50 miles away to fill up these restaurants). I come to town for the first time since last Christmas, and I'm close enough to that man to hear his lunch order (broccoli cheese soup and a 1/4 lb hot dog with everything, in case you just had to know). What are the odds?

=======================

I'm fortunate to have a good relationship with my wife's family. It could have easily gone something like this:

Productive week at work, date last night with my wife (fancy pizza at a nice, cozy place downtown), sunny cool weekend predicted. And I'm taking the afternoon off, so I'm leaving work at 11am! Whooooooooooooooo!

After work yesterday, I let the dog out and noticed a gutter on the garage was hanging down about a foot on the right side. Apparently between the multiple inches of rain and the high winds, the gutter tore loose from the garage. I grabbed the ladder and climbed up to check it out. Three long nails had been pulled out of the wood. That was quite a storm! A few hammer swings later and everything was back in place. I like home repair jobs that don't require hours of work and multiple trips to the hardware store for supplies.

Nothing much else to say. Weekend report on Monday.

Content Smacky, signing off.

Have a nice weekend, all.

Every weekday morning, I make a pretty decent cup of coffee to bring to work, since the coffee at work sucks. This morning as I was entering the office, I realized I left my coffee sitting on the counter at home. Sigh. As I was logging in to my computer, I realized I left my lunch at home too! SIGH. So today, I'm the "not so smart girl."

That deserves a "Sheesh." Can I get a "Sheesh" Mary Worth?

Thanks, Mary. Yes, I know, I can always go out and grab some lunch, but they're calling for thunderstorms and 60 MPH winds around noon today, and I also forgot my umbrella. Damn!

Oh, how I wish I had a funny story to share about a dumb girl... Then it would make sense to post this comic panel.

Oh well.

Heroes last night was really good. They concentrated on just a few members of the cast, so we had room to get to know them a bit better. It's leading up to a big showdown between the heroes and the serial killer over the cheerleader.

I also learned from a program I watched last night that the chemist that invented LSD was working on a medicine to treat migraines. Supposedly, he tested it on himself, then went for a bike ride in the country, having the first ever LSD trip.

Creepiness courtesy of Judge Parker (click for larger picture):

So Deep Discount DVD is having their 20% off sale (with free shipping) but I can't think of anything that's come out that I want. Any ideas what I shoulc get? Here are some 20% off discount codes (You can use each one ONCE, so that's why there are so many!):

• DVDTALK
• USATODAY
• NYTIMES
• SUPERSALE
• DD1110
• LATIMES
• ESPN
• WGN
• YAHOO

This has been a strange week. We have tomorrow off, so yay, three-day weekend, but work has been sort of nutty, all over the place putting out fires and grabbing at all the loose ends.

Yesterday my mom emailed to tell me news about my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me, married, with two young kids. She has breast cancer and had surgery and chemotherapy for it. The news my mother had is that they had to stop treatment because it was causing severe numbness on one side of her body, and they just discovered that the cancer has moved into her bones, so it's gone from bad to horribly worse. I think her children are four and two.

So under the circumstances, I guess I'll pass on discussions of Jericho and Lost (though both were good last night).

Two staff meetings to get through today, then I can catch my breath.

I rocked the vote this morning, to the extreme! Actually, I stood in line for half an hour at a municipal community center. Of course, with no paper receipt and no log-in specific to me, there is no record of my vote anywhere... no proof of how I cast my ballot. The fact that the head of Diebold, the company that makes the machines, is a vocal Bush supporter doesn't fill me with optimism. Neither does the fact that the governor of Maryland told his supporters to use paper absentee ballots because he doesn't trust the machines! Sigh.

I had to drop a package off at the UPS store last night, so I stopped at the local chain bookstore on the way home, looking for this:
The new 2-CD set by Nellie McKay. She was signed to Columbia, and her first release was also a 2-CD set, but when she was ready to release this one, Columbia told her to cut some tracks and make it a single CD release. So she left Columbia and released this the way she wanted to on her own label. Yay for artistic integrity!

While I was walking to the register, I glanced over and saw this:

Over 500 pages of classic Kirby, none of which I've read before. Awesome.

Finally, this comic is a good representation of what I've been going through the last few months:

Interesting weekend. My wife tripped over the power cord to her scanner and hit the floor Saturday afternoon. At 2am that night she woke me up and told me her foot hurt. A lot. So we went to the emergency room. They took her to the back and I read a six-month-old People and tried not to fall asleep. She came back around 4am with a bandage and an ice pack. Verdict: one broken bone, hairline. No need for a cast, just ice and elevate. We got back home around 4:40 and went back to sleep.

This is getting annoying. Why introduce two new characters in such a ham-fisted way (they were always here, just in the background), and then kill one of the best longterm ones?

Why introduce patch-man when you haven't answered many of the other older questions? Yeah, we know Ben has the tumor, but that was introduced in the previous episode. No long-term speculation there. Here are a few examples of dropped threads:

• Ana Lucia said the others took a total of 13 of the tailies over the first and second night, including all the kids and the stewardess (if she really was taken. She could have quietly slipped off just before Shannon was shot.) Those 13 people have been held somewhere for about a month now in island time. Where? And we also know that the others (Ben's others) are the ones that took them, because of Goodwin's comments to Ana Lucia just before he died: "The kids are fine...".
• I understand introducing new mysteries to keep people interested, or to draw in new viewers, but at least reward longtime viewers by answering something. Like Crazy French Lady? Where is she? Is she telling the truth that she's never seen the others in her 16 years on the island? Did she really capture Ben, or did they plot it together? If the others don't know what the bright light meant when the hatch imploded, why did Ben lie and convince Locke the button didn't do anything? Is he just a compulsive liar? We know now (if it's true) that Ben set up his capture to work the fake trade to capture Jack so he'd operate on him. Kudos for longterm plans, Ben. Sorry you had to be tortured to get what you wanted.
• Now we'll never know how the Nigerian plane got to the island. No point in exploring that now that the only person with a connection to it is dead.

No wonder Locke was giggling to himself last night when he said "Guess he'll be expecting us now." It's getting ridiculous. Just pile on another mystery. And Eko's last words: Locke said they were "We're next." But Eko must have said "You're next" and Locke took that to be the plural "You." Since English doesn't have unique words for the singular and plural forms of "You" (unlike French, for example, which has "tu" and "vous"), how does Locke know he didn't mean Locke specifically ("You're next, you bald bastard.")?

And yes, the acting of the "others" is good, but it's getting really old every time Ben says "We're the good guys." I guess he subscribes to the Punisher's concept of good guy, where it's okay to beat people and manipulate them to kill Ana Lucia and Libby to get what you want.

Please have the writers (or some interns, I don't care) sit down with the series DVDs and a thick pad of paper, and have them write down each mystery, each unanswered question, from each episode. Between episodes, put check marks beside ones answered. When they reach episode 6 of season 3, I think they'll be surprised the items that were raised and then dropped.

Halloween was uneventful. It didn't look like we'd get many trick-or-treaters, when none had arrived by 7. But a car pulled up in front of our house and about 15 kids in costume climbed out of the back seat. It looked like a clown car in the circus. I think parents brought them to the suburbs from an apartment complex. I ended up giving out all of the candy by the end of the evening, and ten Star Wars Pez dispensers.

Costumes ranged from Pirate (quite a few of them) to Power Ranger. Cutest costume award is a tie between the little boy in a full Spider-Man costume that said "Happy birthday, Spider-Man!" when I opened the door, and the three-year-old girl in the witch costume that silently held out her bag (which was snapped shut). I opened it for her and poured a lot of candy in, then picked up her little pointed hat and put it back on her head. Cutie!

The award for most awkward moment goes to the two girls who came to the door together, somewhere between age 13 and 16 (tough to tell with the heavy make-up). One was dressed like a cop, and the other was dressed like a firefighter, except for the tiny skirts, halter tops, and three-inch heels. Yeah, they were dressed in stripper costumes.

Maddie poked her head around the door and peeked out, and the "cop" stripper said, "I see you have a Halloween cat." (Who talks like that?) It made the scene even more awkward. I just said, "Yeah," and gave them candy, shutting the door quickly so no one would think I was staring at them as they walked away. Sheesh.

At 8, as planned, I was out of candy, so I turned off all the lights and turned on Texas Chainsaw Massacre on cable. I had never seen the entire movie, and it deserves its reputation as a very scary movie. It's hardly gory at all, but it's damn creepy. Every scene is uncomfortable. Even before anything bad happens, there's a feeling of impending doom. It could have something to do with the fact that the title of the movie contains the words chainsaw and massacre, but it also has to do with the camera shots. The camera just lingers on everything. No quick MTV-style jump cuts to create false terror.

By the way, the award for most persistent child goes to the one that knocked on my door repeatedly at 8:30, even though all the lights were out. He may also get the award for dimmest kid. I think the first rule of trick-or-treating is only go to houses with the front light on. The second rule being don't eat homemade food, even if you know the person giving them out. The nice old lady may have taken the opportunity to poison the children with her popcorm balls. Ew. The third rule this year seemed to be: You're not too old to trick-or-treat until YOU feel too old to trick-or-treat. But I have the uncomfortable feeling that those two stripper girls were just stockpiling candy for later, when they return from the bachelor party they had been booked for.