Category: Absent friends

One less bozo on the bus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
A fragment of the Firesign collection here at Ed Siegelman's Ground Zero Equal Opportunity Apartments, purchased from the fine folks at Giant Toad Supermarkets.
A fragment of the Firesign collection here at Ed Siegelman’s Ground Zero Equal Opportunity Apartments, purchased from the fine folks at Giant Toad Supermarkets.

Nick Danger is no longer at The Old Same Place. Phil Austin, who voiced that character and so many others for The Firesign Theatre, went west on Thursday. He was 74.

I stumbled across Firesign in high school, years before I ever heard of Monty Python, and snapped up almost every bit of work that they did, either as a group — a collective self-dubbed “Four or Five Crazee Guys” for the invisible fifth person that arose from their collaboration — or as fragments thereof.

The collection includes the widely known (“Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus”) and the less so (“Everything You Know Is Wrong,” “In the Next World You’re On Your Own,” and “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra”). I got ’em all, on vinyl, CD and occasionally both.

Some friends and I had the good fortune to catch their act in Denver once, Back In the Day™. You can keep your Beatles, Stones, and Dead, thanks. I got my Firesign, and that’s better than a pile of groatcakes soaked in 30-weight with an entrenching tool within easy reach.

Fellow Firesign Peter Bergman beat Austin out the door in 2012. Or maybe he’s on the other side of the album! I’d better check. …

• Late update: Any Firesign fans out there packing iPhones? Tell Siri, “This is Worker speaking,” or ask her, “Why does the porridge-bird lay its eggs in the air?” I’d forgotten that Austin did some voiceover work for Apple commercials, and it seems that “Bozos” may have struck a chord with the Black Turtleneck Mob.

R.I.P., Leonard Nimoy

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Mr. Spock, everyone's favorite green-blooded, pointy-eared freak.
Mr. Spock, everyone’s favorite green-blooded, pointy-eared freak.

Mr. Spock has beamed up for the final time.

My favorite quote so far comes from The Los Angeles Times: “My folks came to the U.S. as immigrants,” he said in a 2012 speech at Boston University. “They were aliens, and then became citizens. I was born in Boston a citizen, and then I went to Hollywood and became an alien.”

I don’t know about you, but I watched me a shitload of “Star Trek,” mostly in college, when I was supposed to have been getting one a them, whatchamacallit, edjimications.

Here's a little LLAP dance for you.
Here’s a little LLAP dance for you.

I could Name That Episode about a nanosecond into any one of them, which made me a hair slower than Ed the Beard, a total sci-fi geekazoid who christened his beater Step van “The Hawkwind.” We used it to deliver appliances rather than Michael Moorcock-inspired space rock.

Spock almost always had the snarkiest lines, which may be why I liked the character so much. Scotty and Bones were too excitable, and Kirk was a dickhead authority figure, so yeah, Spock.

When Edith Keeler asked what he was building, Spock replied, “I am endeavoring, ma’am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.”

Chatting about Tribbles with McCoy, who said they were “nice, they’re soft and they’re furry, and they make a pleasant sound,” Spock replied, “So would an ermine violin, Doctor, but I see no advantage in having one.”

Discussing Harcourt Fenton Mudd’s having skipped appointments with Bones, Spock noted: “It’s not at all surprising, Doctor. He’s probably terrified of your beads and rattles.”

Well, now he’s boldly gone where all men (and women) must go. We’ll miss him. Live long and prosper, the rest of yis.

Some Zappantani for breakfast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

This just in: Marco Pantani is still dead. So is Frank Zappa, but nobody killed him, not even the Mafia, Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo.

That’s right, kiddies, it’s Round One of Zappadan, also known as BummerNacht, the anniversary of FZ’s departure to The Big Studio In the Sky. But don’t freak out, working yourself into an imaginary frenzy — he shall rise again on Zero Day, December 21, the anniversary of his birth.

So whip up a tasty platter of hot rats in lumpy gravy, ring up Uncle Meat and the Grand Wazoo, and go cruising with Ruben and the Jets. But first clean up that cosmik debris (it’ll cure your asthma, too). Now, everybody sing along: “Look, here, NASA … who you jivin’ with that cosmik debris?”

 

R.I.P., Lori Cohen

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
"Lori "Doc" Cohen.
“Lori “Doc” Cohen.

My friend Lori Cohen went west on Saturday after a long battle with cancer.

“Doc” was my chiropractor, and she spent a lot of time and energy saving me from myself, so much so that she tried to get me interested in yoga to lighten her load a bit (sorry, Doc).

We shared a wide variety of interests — food and the preparation thereof, exercise to burn off the attendant calories, Santa Fe, Vespas, lefty politics, snark, and so on.

The final stage of her illness came on as we were beginning the transition from Bibleburg to Duke City, and I wasn’t able to give Doc as much attention as she deserved, having given so much of hers to me over the years.

But I did drop by on the day she was selling her beloved blue Vespa LX 150, to take it for a short test ride, make sure everything was in working order, and see how she was bearing up.

After I rolled the Vespa back into her driveway, Doc said she wanted to take a final spin on the scoot. The cancer had brought her quite a bit of pain, and limited her use of one arm, so I wasn’t eager to sign off on the ride, noting that if anything got horribly sideways her longtime friend and caregiver Jeff Tarbert would beat the shit out of both of us, but mostly me.

But Doc wasn’t going to let that final opportunity pass her by. She climbed aboard, twisted the throttle and putt-putted off up the hill. She didn’t fall off until Saturday.

My thoughts are with her many friends and family.

Calvin and Hogges

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Bill Watterson, creator of the fabled and much-missed “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip, got back in the game for a while this past week as a guest artist for the Stephan Pastis strip “Pearls Before Swine.”

The famously reclusive Watterson, who sent Calvin and his stuffed tiger sledding into history in 1995, collaborated with Pastis in part for fun and in part to help raise money for Parkinson’s research, according to Michael Cavna of The Washington Post.

Pastis did the writing and some of the drawing, turning Watterson loose in the middle panels. And both apparently had a wonderful time.

“I had expected to just mess around with his characters while they did their usual things, but Stephan kept setting up these situations that required more challenging drawings … so I had to work a lot harder than I planned to! It was a lot of fun.” Watterson told Cavna.

As for Pastis, he said: “It’s just massive … the biggest thing I’ve ever been a part of.”