Category: Uncategorized

home movies from late 1970s

I haven’t yet posted about the other highlight of my weekend back home in Rayne. On Mazie‘s birthday, a bunch of family came over, and conversation turned for some reason to the family vacations we took in the late 1970s. At the time, my aunts and uncles were starting to pop out babies (I’m an only child, so my first cousins are the closest sibling equivalents I’ve got), and we took a couple summer trips across the south. (I’ve mentioned these trips before, although I got the chronology wrong in the previous post — three of the four trips I described were actually combined in one 1978 jaunt.)
Anyway, someone mentioned that my uncle Alton had taken an old 8mm film camera along on these trips. These films hadn’t been watched in at least 15 years, probably longer. Upon learning of these films, I immediately dispatched a search team to Alton’s attic; they returned with four canisters of film and a non-functioning, dust-encrusted projector.
Another uncle managed to get the projector working (through the careful use of a rubber band, I kid you not — try that with a Pentium), and soon enough I was watching the 1- and 2-year-old versions of Josh, enjoying life at some of the region’s great tourist traps. Some observations:
– My grandmother, as much as I love her, should have been punished at some point for the things she made me wear. There’s a sailor suit I wish could be forever stricken from my permanent record. Alas, Super 8 does not lie.
– I had forgotten that I had a thing against going down playground slides the standard, butt-down way. For some reason, I convinced myself at an early age that going stomach-down was much more fun. Inevitably, this led to tummy-burn.
– All of us cousins (there were four born at this time, with three more to come along in the next few years) were cursed with parents dedicated to the forcing the knee-high-brown-socks-with-shorts look upon us.
– A cabbie named Irving Schaeffer showed us around Washington, D.C. one day. I know this because his name was emblazoned on the side of his cab. I also know that he was very, very nice, because his legend has survived among my aunts and uncles to this day, 24 years later.
– Uncle Alton evidently believed that filming endless miles of interstate highway through rural Alabama was a good way to use his precious Super 8 resources.
– My family had a habit of setting down the camera in front of an important building — say, the Capitol — standing shoulder-to-shoulder in line, then walking slowly toward the camera. In other words, my family invented the opening shot of Reservoir Dogs.
– Speaking of legends that have survived for decades: we tried to go to Graceland in 1978. Family legend has it that we waited in line to enter Elvis’ home, but the sky turned a horrific black and we were chased away in fear of approaching rain. Film evidence, however, clearly refutes that notion: the 1978 Memphis sky is as blue as can be.
– Seeing Roy Acuff’s house and the Country Music Wax Museum were clearly formative events in my family’s life.
– When eating cake, my cousin T-Ron had a habit at age 2 of grabbing some icing, looking at it, and smearing it on his right knee.
I’m hoping to get these reels (and others I haven’t yet seen) transfered to VHS so they can be preserved for posterity (and future T-Ron biographers). If anybody’s got a company to recommend to do the job, let me know.

pitcairn honey

For those of you who read my Pitcairn Island stories (linked a couple of entries below), you may have noticed my reference to the island’s honey. Since the few bees on the island have been segregated from other populations for so long, they haven’t developed a couple of diseases that, evidently, have afflicted just about every other bee in the world in the last century. Plus, all the fruit that grows on Pitcairn (which all tastes absolutely amazing) has always been pesticide-free, so the bees have only top-notch stuff to pollinate.
The result is that Pitcairn honey is probably the best honey in the world. I brought some back from the island (I had to sneak it through customs at LAX, since it was an unacceptable agricultural product from overseas). A coworker of mine who loves honey — he buys the imported French stuff for beaucoup bucks — said it was far and away better than the honey he pays top dollar for.
I mention all this because you can now buy the honey for a very reasonable price, $5 a jar. If you’re a honey lover, it’ll be worth it, I can assure you.

dallasnews.com makeover

It’s a new look for my employer’s web site. Critiques? I’m mixed: I think the bolder type on the front isn’t bad (if a little too MSNBC, down to the typeface), but the color scheme makes grey a little too dominant, and the yellow story boxes beneath the main header (and all over pages like this) look a little amateurish. Actually, that yellow looks awful in bulk, sort of jaundicey. And there are uneven-white-space-around-text-box issues all over the site.
Okay, maybe my feelings aren’t all that mixed at all, but really, it’s not so bad. (Anyway, TXCN needs a facelift much more than dallasnews.com or wfaa.com did.)

kidnapperguy@hotmail.com

Want to email a dangerous Islamic militant? Well, according to the New York Times, you can send your missive to kidnapperguy@hotmail.com — that’s the email address used for hostage negotiation by the militants who’ve kidnapped a Wall Street Journal reporter.
It’d be great if someone could hack into that account — aren’t there enough holes in Hotmail security for someone to get in? Or maybe someone should just start trying passwords, like “iloveosama” or “unveiledgirls” or “diegreatsatan.” (Or “d1egre@ts@t@n”?)

calvin trillin on boudin

New Yorker readers: I direct your attention to the piece on page 46 of the Jan. 28 issue. It’s a funny bit by my hero Calvin Trillin on the hunt for the best boudin in south Louisiana. (Boudin, if you don’t know, is a delicious Cajun sausage made of rice, pork, liver, and seasoning. Calvin’s been writing about the wonders of Cajun food at least since The Tummy Trilogy in the ’70s.)
The main character in the tale is James Edmunds, one of Calvin’s friends in New Iberia, former head honcho of the once-great Times of Acadiana weekly newspaper, and (oh by the way) a blogger his own bad self.
I was once lucky enough to eat a seven-course meal of nutria rat with Calvin and James, which remains one of the highlights of my life. But that’s a story for another day.
My favorite quote from the story: “When I am daydreaming of boudin, it sometimes occurs to me that of all the indignities the Acadians of Louisiana have had visited upon them — being booted out of Nova Scotia, being ridiculed as rubes and swamp rats by neighboring Anglophones for a couple of centuries, being punished for speaking their own language in the schoolyard — nothing has been as deeply insulting as what restaurants outside South Louisiana present as Cajun food.” Too true.
In related news, Calvin’s got a new novel out.

me in independent pitcairn story

I’m sure all my millions of British readers will be happy to learn I was quoted in The Independent (UK) newspaper last week.
The story’s about one of the few topics I can claim any degree of expertise on, Pitcairn Island. Depending on your definition, it’s the most remote inhabited place on earth, a mile-wide speck of volcanic rock in the South Pacific, many miles from anywhere else. Its inhabitants are not natives in the traditional sense; they’re the descendents of Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers on the HMS Bounty, who crash landed onto Pitcairn in 1790 after famously shipping off the tyrannical Captain Bligh. The mutiny on the Bounty has, of course, become a famous tale in Western culture; Fletcher’s been portrayed in movie versions of the story by Mel Gibson, Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn.
About 40 Pitcairners live alone on the rock their forefathers settled. There’s no airstrip, no harbor, no regular transportation to the rest of the world. They rely on the generosity of passing freighters and yachtsmen to get supplies or people in and out. It’s a thoroughly bizarre place, impossible to get to and impossible to understand once you do.
I managed to go there in 1999, for a week. I wrote a bunch of stories about it (the main story: part one and part two). Since only a handful of writers have been allowed onto the island in the last few decades, I occasionally get calls from other reporters working on Pitcairn stories.
Lately, the stories haven’t been very positive. As Kathy Marks writes in The Independent, there’s a huge, awful, nasty, disgusting child abuse scandal there. The island might be empty in another year or two, since a significant portion of the island’s male population stands accused of sex crimes. It’s a sad, sad story.