Whine and Cheese

After getting the grocery shopping done and a couple of loads of laundry out of the way, I was debating on what to watch. I've been looking through a lot of my Christmas-themed horror flicks and decided to watch "Black Christmas" (1974) again.



There are so many things I love about this movie, but I'd say a great deal of it involves the setting - the early 1970's. As I'm watching the movie tonight, I decided to jot down some things that clearly identify the time setting of the movie.

• Smoking. Several characters smoke, which you don't see in movies very often anymore. In fact, a close eye sees ashtrays in offices and auditoriums.


• Posters. The decorations on the walls of the girls' rooms give away the time frame. Some of them are very cool and I would love to see them come back.


• Wallpaper. Like the posters, the wallpaper is very telling, very elaborate graphic patterns you would have seen on album covers of the period or the Electric Company.


• Rotary telephones. One of the big parts of the movie is the phone calls made to the sorority sisters from the killer. The sorority house only has telephones downstairs for the sisters, so people do have to "run" for the phone, unlike today where the phone is cordless and in your pocket. The rotary dials dates it even more, as there are now whole generations of people who have never made a phone call using them.


• Phone numbers. Probably the best gag in the whole movie is the use of a word to describe the exchange of a phone number. Barb (Margot Kidder) gives the phone number of the sorority house to a bumbling and naive desk sergeant as "Fellatio 2-0880," explaining to him that it's a new exchange "F-E" (This is actually a blooper in the movie as the number is later given/seen as a different number). Now I was born on the cusp of the exchanges no longer being described this way, so I never had to make a call giving one. An exchange, that is... not fellatio.


• Cars. They're boats essentially.


• The fashions. The clothes the ladies wear aren't as dated as they could look vintage today, but the hairstyles I think give the 70's away, including those on the guys. One white guy has an afro while another has hair that looks like a shag.

I was born in early 1973 so I don't recall the early 70's at all, but vaguely recall the later part of the decade mostly. If reincarnation is real, I often wonder if my past life was in this time frame, considering my admiration for the time period.

While I love the advantages of having all the technology we have today, and will have even more in the future, life certainly does seem a little simpler back then. Maybe that is also one of the appealing parts.

If anyone wants to watch the movie, it's posted, in full, on You Tube. The new remake comes out this Friday. I'm going to try my best to judge it on its own merits and not draw comparisons repeatedly to my favorite. I admit, I'm looking forward to it.

From 6th grade to my senior year in high school, I was part of an afterschool program called SOAR (Students with the Optimal Ability to Reason). Essentially, it was a chance for the smart kids in school to take a class in an odd or innovative area outside their normal school work. It met on Monday afternoons for an hour at our high school and usually involved some outside work between SOAR meetings.



My mom found the original course schedule from the first year and gave it to me over the holidays. I was part of the program from the beginning, taking a school bus from my elementary school to the high school by myself every Monday. I was the only student from my elementary school to go that I remember. It made me feel very grown up to go to the high school. The only class I recall taking that year was typing.

aceofspace and I were both in the SOAR program, though our participation dwindled a bit when we were juniors and seniors in high school. By then, other activities like the school newspaper and the yearbook seemed to take precedence. Still, we took rocketry or something for the third or fourth time I think. My high school diploma has a seal on it from the SOAR program.

It was a neat program. In looking back, I wish I had taken other classes, like German. I swapped out of the Media class because it involved speaking in front of groups, which terrified me at the time. This particular Media class was taught by a man named Roger Marcum, a tall kind man with a thick black mustache, who intimidated the heck out of me for some reason. He tried to get me to stay, recognizing that I needed to get out of my shy shell I think, but I dodged him quickly. In the few classes I had with him there, he walked around with his fly open for a good ten minutes, the class snickering until he figured it out. He laughed about it, asking why no one had told him. The guy eventually became the chairman of the Kentucky Board of Education, so I know he knew his stuff.

I’m not even sure they still do this program, but it was a nice taste of college for me, getting to pick and choose different courses to take for fun. I’m surprised my mom still had this to be honest.

Yesterday I was printed out six presentations I have to give next week, each one between 45 minutes to 90 minutes long, for the computer class I teach. As I was driving home, I was going over the easiest one in my head, planning the approach I would use to try to make a dull topic interesting.

For some reason, I thought of Mrs. Crabtree, my freshman and junior-year high school English teacher. aceofspace and I endured that lady for two years.

( Set the Wayback to 1987 and 1989 -- English Class )

Happy Leap Day, all :)

Since the age of three, I have owned my own television. My first was a little 13-inch black & white TV. While it was in the room I shared with the twin, all folks generally recognized that it was mine. With its VHF and UHF dials, my parents hooked up the cable and I was spinning through the dozen channels, of which only a handful had actual stations, to catch cartoons, PBS, etc. I credit "Sesame Street," "3-2-1 Contact," and "The Electric Company" for enabling me to read before school started and allowing me to skip to second grade after two months of being in first.

My love of the TV was absolute. With shows like "Wonder Woman," "The Bionic Woman," "Fantasy Island," and "Charlie's Angels" on the tube, I knew the TV schedule better than TV Guide. My parents more than likely got me the TV so they could watch what they wanted without me griping about it. I watched so much of it, I actually could tell you what station you were watching by the amount of static and the lighting of the screen. It's hardly a super-power that would get me into the Legion, but my dad seemed oddly proud of this skill of mine.

Despite having milk accidentally poured down its vent and the knobs eventually breaking off from years of turning, the little TV was a trooper. Eventually, my folks got me a color TV for my room and the little black & white, while still working, went to my nephew.

When I went to college, my college roommate had a TV so I didn't need one. When I was a senior and had no roommate, my sister got me a small 13-inch color TV for my dorm room. After seven different dorm rooms, apartments, temporary quarters and homes, spanning three states and seventeen years, the little color TV finally gave up the ghost last Tuesday morning in my home office.

I never realized how much I watch TV in the mornings while getting ready for work. I have other TV's in the house, but they are too large for my home office, where I check emails and such before getting out the door in the morning. So I bought a small 18" LCD for my office. So far so good.

Today, I took the day off. One of my errands today was to take the little broken TV to Best Buy to be recycled. It's not a bad program. They charge you a $10 fee, but give you a $10 gift card back. So I bought the original 1978 "Piranha" on DVD, which ironically I probably watched for the first time on that little black & white many, many years ago.

A few weeks ago I was going through some boxes of photos, looking for a picture of a friend of mine who is retiring in July. I used the pic to draw his retirement cartoon. In the stack of photos, I found these little reminders of youth taken on the same roll of film. It was the summer of 1998 and I just got back from DC (where my friend worked).

It is amazing how much a person can change over the course of 12 years. back then I had that cheesy mustache and my hair was amazingly thick.



There are very few photos of me while I was in school and after really. It was only after I came out that I really didn't mind having my pic taken. I became a lot more open and thanks to the advancement in digital photography did it become so much more accessible to get pics.

And nowadays I can laugh at myself. Even at that cheesy mustache. Why I didn't grow my goatee or beard out back then is a mystery.