Great end of the year newsletter. Funny, didn’t the phantom menace trailer drop with meet Joe black? Do we need Brad Pitt in the Star Wars universe? I think so, in Tyler we Trust 👍🏻 Jeff and all the other Star was fans he read this, have Happy and Safe holiday.
Thanks, Frank. You are correct there. I didn't do it, but I know there were a lot of Star Wars fans that bought a ticket for Meet Joe Black, watched the TPM trailer, and then left. That movie probably made a lot more money than it would have otherwise. Hope you and your family have a happy sand safe holiday as well!
Gaah. I had to go see "Wing Commander" when the Episode One trailer hit (I was writing for "Sci-Fi Universe" at the time), and everybody going in thought they were being clever by buying tickets for "Wing Commander," watching the trailer, and then going back out and demanding refunds. By Saturday morning, every theater had big notices at the ticket booth: "NO REFUNDS for Wing Commander after the previews start!" This didn't keep about three-quarters of the audience for walking out once they saw the trailer: a quarter-century later, I still envy them. Me, I spent the next 90 minutes impersonating Malcom McDowall: https://youtu.be/xhe9kRCySxM?si=qoULNVxHn0djAo2J
I heard enough horror tales about its making, particularly how essentially the main game designer was using the game to build up a demo reel for his planned directorial career. (There's a long, terrible history of game designers who assume they're also geniuses at movie or television directing or production. They're almost always wrong.)
A question and an observation: I will ask again about Lucasfilm treating the Holiday Special as canon. Does this mean that FINALLY Kevin Smith and I will get our "Cantina Barmaid Bea Arthur" action figure? (During my pro writing days, that was a regular gag of mine, right next to complaining about needing a "Meet the Feebles" lunchbox for work.)
Anyway, the observation: I actually bought a gallon of the blue milk. I had some really bad memories to fight through: in the late Eighties, I worked at a Texas Instruments plant back before TI's Defense Electronics Group (DESEG) was sold to Raytheon, and the big aluminum CNC machines used for cutting and shaping parts for TI's HARM missile used a coolant that looked EXACTLY like the blue milk. Worse, it had an offputting smell that combined rancid vegetable oil and baby powder, and no matter how hard they worked to put better and better covers over the machines to catch coolant spray, that stuff nebulized and went EVERYWHERE. One day, I had to clean the tops of the ventilation ducts near the ceiling, and the blue milk had collected with a decade of dust, making an absolutely ridiculous mess when I tried to wipe it up. Another incident with an idiot electrician who didn't understand how scissor lifts worked led to a broken pipe spraying blue milk over an entire section, and I spent the rest of the day mopping up liquid and shoveling up absorbent put down to keep the liquid from flowing into the aisles. That blue milk was expensive, so when aluminum shavings were removed from the machines, the resultant slurry was dumped into big dumpsters, where the blue milk drained out into an underground reservoir. One weekend, a torrential flood hit, overloading the reservoir and filling the drainage ditches behind the building with blue milk, requiring an all-hands run to suction out those drainage ditches before the EPA found out. And so on. When that TI plant shut down at the beginning of 1991, you would not believe how much blue milk they had to pull out of everything: big portions of the concrete slab under the building had to be pulled up and the soil underneath removed, because the blue milk had completely saturated the slabs and had started to work toward the groundwater. If we'd stayed open for another decade, I have to wonder what kind of chemical mitigation would have happened in Carrollton if that had hit the local groundwater.
You can understand my trepidation on the Borden blue milk based on my experience, but I have a track record for making really stupid decisions, especially where Texas Instruments was concerned. This one, though, wasn't bad at all. The flavor was mostly vanilla, with additional fillers to make it thicker than standard cow milk, making it absolutely perfect for coffee. It will never replace my coffee go-to (Tillamook Vanilla Bean, one spoon per cup and Death Wish Coffee dark roast poured over it from a French press), but it was good enough to consider spending another couple of bucks if it becomes available next year. And so it goes.
The Zuckerbook keeps suggesting to me groups who make their own custom action figures. I bet if you dig hard enough there’s a Cantina Barmaid Bea Arthur. If not, there should be…
Happy Holidays! Thanks for a great read!
Thanks, Matthew! Happy holidays for your family as well!
Great end of the year newsletter. Funny, didn’t the phantom menace trailer drop with meet Joe black? Do we need Brad Pitt in the Star Wars universe? I think so, in Tyler we Trust 👍🏻 Jeff and all the other Star was fans he read this, have Happy and Safe holiday.
Thanks, Frank. You are correct there. I didn't do it, but I know there were a lot of Star Wars fans that bought a ticket for Meet Joe Black, watched the TPM trailer, and then left. That movie probably made a lot more money than it would have otherwise. Hope you and your family have a happy sand safe holiday as well!
Gaah. I had to go see "Wing Commander" when the Episode One trailer hit (I was writing for "Sci-Fi Universe" at the time), and everybody going in thought they were being clever by buying tickets for "Wing Commander," watching the trailer, and then going back out and demanding refunds. By Saturday morning, every theater had big notices at the ticket booth: "NO REFUNDS for Wing Commander after the previews start!" This didn't keep about three-quarters of the audience for walking out once they saw the trailer: a quarter-century later, I still envy them. Me, I spent the next 90 minutes impersonating Malcom McDowall: https://youtu.be/xhe9kRCySxM?si=qoULNVxHn0djAo2J
I had completely forgot about the Wing Commander movie. A quick wikipedia search would suggest Freddie Prinze Jr would really like to forget about it.
I heard enough horror tales about its making, particularly how essentially the main game designer was using the game to build up a demo reel for his planned directorial career. (There's a long, terrible history of game designers who assume they're also geniuses at movie or television directing or production. They're almost always wrong.)
A question and an observation: I will ask again about Lucasfilm treating the Holiday Special as canon. Does this mean that FINALLY Kevin Smith and I will get our "Cantina Barmaid Bea Arthur" action figure? (During my pro writing days, that was a regular gag of mine, right next to complaining about needing a "Meet the Feebles" lunchbox for work.)
Anyway, the observation: I actually bought a gallon of the blue milk. I had some really bad memories to fight through: in the late Eighties, I worked at a Texas Instruments plant back before TI's Defense Electronics Group (DESEG) was sold to Raytheon, and the big aluminum CNC machines used for cutting and shaping parts for TI's HARM missile used a coolant that looked EXACTLY like the blue milk. Worse, it had an offputting smell that combined rancid vegetable oil and baby powder, and no matter how hard they worked to put better and better covers over the machines to catch coolant spray, that stuff nebulized and went EVERYWHERE. One day, I had to clean the tops of the ventilation ducts near the ceiling, and the blue milk had collected with a decade of dust, making an absolutely ridiculous mess when I tried to wipe it up. Another incident with an idiot electrician who didn't understand how scissor lifts worked led to a broken pipe spraying blue milk over an entire section, and I spent the rest of the day mopping up liquid and shoveling up absorbent put down to keep the liquid from flowing into the aisles. That blue milk was expensive, so when aluminum shavings were removed from the machines, the resultant slurry was dumped into big dumpsters, where the blue milk drained out into an underground reservoir. One weekend, a torrential flood hit, overloading the reservoir and filling the drainage ditches behind the building with blue milk, requiring an all-hands run to suction out those drainage ditches before the EPA found out. And so on. When that TI plant shut down at the beginning of 1991, you would not believe how much blue milk they had to pull out of everything: big portions of the concrete slab under the building had to be pulled up and the soil underneath removed, because the blue milk had completely saturated the slabs and had started to work toward the groundwater. If we'd stayed open for another decade, I have to wonder what kind of chemical mitigation would have happened in Carrollton if that had hit the local groundwater.
You can understand my trepidation on the Borden blue milk based on my experience, but I have a track record for making really stupid decisions, especially where Texas Instruments was concerned. This one, though, wasn't bad at all. The flavor was mostly vanilla, with additional fillers to make it thicker than standard cow milk, making it absolutely perfect for coffee. It will never replace my coffee go-to (Tillamook Vanilla Bean, one spoon per cup and Death Wish Coffee dark roast poured over it from a French press), but it was good enough to consider spending another couple of bucks if it becomes available next year. And so it goes.
The Zuckerbook keeps suggesting to me groups who make their own custom action figures. I bet if you dig hard enough there’s a Cantina Barmaid Bea Arthur. If not, there should be…
That Lego Porg is everything and now I want it to fly-hop over to my Nightmare Before Christmas set for an amazing crossover episode.