I’m not really sure who is or isn’t interested in my record finds, but if you’re like me, and I know I am, you’ll enjoy it. Jive Time Records in Fremont, Seattle has been nothing short of a Godsend yet again.

They actually put out new 12″ singles pretty much every week. I scored some great fun.

They’re getting to know me in there, which is pretty cool. The guy at the register remembered that I was into Duran Duran and told me that they just put a 12″ of “Is There Something I Should Know” on the racks. I had it, of course (had it when I was like 10 or 11), but it was nice to be remembered. Really nice.

Anyway, want to hear the run down? Sure! Let’s go!

-Midnight Oil – Beds Are Burning (with a remix!)
-Wang Chung – Everybody Have Fun Tonight (with a few remixes)
-Art of Noise – Peter Gunn (Jive Time has a LOT of Art of Noise)
-Peter Schilling – Major Tom (Coming Home) (this is the unofficial sequel to David Bowie’s “Ground Control to Major Tom”… seriously. And it’s also in German!)
-Talking Heads – Wild Wild Life (remix with “People Like Us” sung by John Goodman… hell yes)
-Information Society – Repetition (remixes)
-Information Society – Walking Away (six freakin remixes)
-Aha – The Sun Always Shines on TV (remix)
-Aha – Hunting High and Low (remix)
-Tears for Fears – Pale Shelter (remix)
-New Order – Fine Time (remixes, of course)
-Sparks – Cool Places (remix and I’m really stoked about this one!)
-OMD – Dreaming (remix)

I also picked up a couple of LPs
-Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run (I actually have none of his studio stuff on vinyl)
-Josie Cotton – Convertible Music (had a couple of fun songs on the Valley Girl soundtrack… never know. Oddly, this LP came with a Josie Cotton photo and bio plus a 7″ on pink vinyl! Score!)
-Squeeze – East Side Story
-Elvis Costello – Almost Blue
-Madness – One Step Beyond (it has some chunks taking out of the cover, but the vinyl looks good – only a buck)
-Pretty in Pink Soundtrack (been looking for this and it was $3)

That sums up yet another trip to Jive Time. I hope they appreciate my comings and goings.

I passed up the second LP from Kix (local boys from Sunbury, PA .. well, at least one of them was…) for $6. I really debated it and I might just go back and get it. I remember it being pretty bad and rather creepy… especially the song “YEAH YEAH YEAH,” which is basically about the singer taking a girl in the back of the van and trying to have his nasty way with her. She says “NO! NO! NO!” and he says “Don’t tell me no! Tell me YEAH YEAH YEAH!!” Which is really creepy. Especially because it probably happened in Sunbury. Ew.

This morning I threw together a new front page for my website. The blog is the biggest “feature” on it… well, a link to the blog, anyway. And the link to “poetry” isn’t up yet.

You can see it here.

I’m planning on redoing the poetry section (a lot of purging) and will see what happens. I’m not really sure of a good way to do this section. The way I had it before was clunky and I never liked it.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to arrange this? I can do the formatting, etc., it’s more of a logistics question. How does one display poetry on a webpage?

I did this for my book from last year. It’s interesting, but also very clunky. And it only works if your poems are image files (which, for this book, they were).

So anyway, that’s that for now. If anyone has suggestions, I’m open to them.

Yesterday, we had a great Thanksgiving dinner at our place. Ryan and Jaime and the kids showed up. There was much food and fun and general hanging out. We had a great time spending time with each other, sharing each others company and conversation. I truly am thankful to have them.

Also yesterday, I received the obligatory anti-Thanksgiving MySpace bulletins. Being a vegan anarchist and having friends who are mostly vegan anarchists, I find myself running into some pretty angry folks.

My favorite was:

who calls Thanksgiving a holiday:

FUCK YOU.

Read a fucking book.

Seriously? Someone seeing Thanksgiving as a holiday deserves a “fuck you”? And what would reading a fucking book do to help this situation? I guess it depends on the book. I just finished one on the Oregon Trial. Really good book, but I don’t think it would have changed my opinion of Thanksgiving one way or the other. Please, angry people, be specific!

The person who sent it claims to be an anarchist and a vegetarian (I don’t think she’s vegan, but maybe she is now – goes back and forth a lot). And really, even at the most uber-annoying height of my in-yo-face style of pissing people off to the very thought and idea of anything I believed in I don’t think I was this angry/ridiculous.

Sure, Thanksgiving is a silly holiday. It’s one based upon killing birds for no real reason and a historical inaccuracy. Thanksgiving wasn’t even first celebrated at Plymouth Rock in some wacky festival thanking the natives for all the help. It was celebrated in Florida by Spaniards. What good can come from Florida (except the first couple Against Me 7″s)?

You know, being all pissed off and yelling “FUCK YOU” to people isn’t going to make them be all like “gee, you’re right, let me re-examine my entire lifestyle.” It’s going to make them say “pass me a turkey leg and fuck you too.”

But even above all of this, why not just celebrate it? You know traditional Thanksgiving is a crock. And I bet all of your friends know it too. So why not just get together, cook up some amazing vegan dishes and have fun? You can even dumpster dive the food if that makes you somehow feel better!

What’s the harm in co-opting Thanksgiving for our own means? What’s wrong with making Thanksgiving our own holiday? Sounds fairly revolutionary to me. Certainly more revolutionary than a MySpace bulletin. Just sayin’.

In case you were wondering, Tom Servo is complete. Check him out in all of his mighty awesomeness. I finished the painting and gluing and whatnot this afternoon. He is now a real live Tom Servo! Mazal Tov!!

What will I do with Thomas Servo now that I have him? Well, I’m not really sure. He just sort of sits there looking all smug and stuff. Oh heck, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

But for now, we shall gaze lovingly into the future. Me and Tom, a bot whose body no dog could pass up!

Not a whole lot to say, but I do have some pics!

Here I am in the car hole with Servo all in pieces. I'm painting!

And here's the hover skirt with black trains around it. You can also see the arms!

Here I am as an old man painting the pistons on the engine block of Servo's body. Exciting!

After all those goings ons, you can see me assembling. He's not nearly completed though. Still quite a bit of work to do.

Hello and welcome, won’t you?

Here is a box.

What could possibly be in this box? It could be anything. Oh just imagine all of the wonderful possibilities! It could be money or women or presents for all of us!

But no. It’s not.

What is it?

It’s nearly all the pieces I need to make a real life Tom Servo! Check it out!

And so I got right to work. Zipped off to the store to buy the rest of what I need (paint, glue… screws… corn….green peppers…chili…….onions……….) and got back to the apartment and started drilling and cutting.

I’m following the instructions here with a few modifications.

I’m not going to detail the process, since the link above does that pretty well. But tonight, I drilled a couple of holes, ran the string, etc for his mouth, cut out and rough sanded some pieces around the engine block and basically figured it all out.

Tomorrow I need to get some finer sand paper, a couple of nuts, some more paint (have to find a hobby shop) and a few odds and ends. I’ll be painting tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain, which kind of sucks for painting, but hopefully, it’ll be ok. I used to paint scooter parts in my bathroom in the winter – that worked out pretty well (oddly enough).

Things should look a lot more like Servo tomorrow. Woo!

If Sir Thomas Serveaux can be completed by Thanksgiving, he shall be the centerpiece of a wonderful feast!

Today is a hallowed day in the halls of geekdom. For on this day, twenty years ago, the first two episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 aired on Minneapolis station KTMA. It would last for another eleven seasons.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K to the fans) is a show about a guy (Joel and then later Mike) who was shot into space because his bosses didn’t like him. They would then beam to him cheesy movies (the worst they could find), making him watch them while they monitored his mind. To deal with the loneliness and boredom of space, Joel created some robot friends, Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot and Gypsy. Gypsy controls the higher functions of the ship while Tom and Crow hang out with Joel (and then later Mike) and watch the crappy movies sent to them by the mad scientists.

Lucky for us, we get to watch.

I first discovered MST3K in 1991, during one of the shows “Turkey Day Marathons.” One of my first episodes was Teenagers from Outer Space. I remember sitting in Todd Fogel’s living room during breaks at band practice (for some reason we were practicing on Thanksgiving Day, not sure why) and we’d watch MST3K. I immediately “got it.”

I mean, who hasn’t sat through a crappy movie and yelled riffs back at the screen? How can you not? It just seemed so natural. But with the wacky storyline of a guy being shot into space and forced to do it, well, it just won me over with its surrealism.

The riffs hurled at the screen by the denizens of the Satellite of Love (the name of the ship where Joel/Mike and the bots were sequestered) weren’t low-brow dick and fart jokes. Largely they were references to pop culture, poetry, politics, sports, literature, theater and 70’s TV. What was strange is that I got most of them.

Of course, nobody got all of them. “Stop her! She’s got Mike’s keyboard!” was a riff said by Joel (when Mike was just a behind-the-scenes writer) about the girl who stole Mike’s keyboard.” (Anyone remember which episode this was?) And an almost dizzying amount ofreferences to “Killdozer.”

However, it was this down-home, folksy feeling the show gave us. It wasn’t some Hollywood-produced studio show. It was made in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Many of the jokes reflected the mid-west and were lost on pretty much anyone not familiar with the place (hamdingers? Manards?).

What I love most about MST3K was that it was like hanging out with friends. When you put on an episode, you’re never alone. There’s Joel and the bots riffing along with you. Sure, MST is best watched with a room full of fans, but the show also gets you through those lonely winter nights.

Here is a show that rewards your intelligence, that doesn’t talk down to you, that can mix a Robert Frost joke with a fart joke and make you laugh at both. This is a show that stands up to multiple viewings (I’ve seen some episodes countless times). There had never been anything like it before and there’s not likely to be anything (of any value) like it again.

I could never understand why some folks didn’t like the show. Sure, the humor was a little high-brow, but there was enough low-brow to keep even a child interested (my kid, Michael, started watching it before he was 10). In the early seasons, they would read viewer mail, much of it from kids or research scientists. How could you not love this?

My life has been changed and vastly enriched by the very existence of the “cow town puppet show.” Honestly, I can’t really picture what my life would be like without it. How did I live before coming to MST3K? And why would I ever want to live a life where MST3K didn’t at least enter my thoughts (and usually my TV) on a day to day basis?

So here’s to you, Mystery Science Theater 3000! Thank you for teaching us to laugh at love again!

Thank you and may god bless!

So sit back and enjoy a wonderful montage from Teenagers from Outer Space…