On something

I remember summers up at the cabin when I was a kid. There was a whole chest filled with comic books. Archie, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Dot, all the greats. These were no mere comics. They were survivors. Ancient relics from bygone eras. Their brittle, yellowed pages were born from the turbulent cultures of the 60's and 70's. Or maybe the 80's. To be honest, I don't know how old they were, but for the purposes of this story it would be better if they were really old.

I would read them obsessively, going back to the chest each and every visit to re-read the same weird stories of Archie competing in a cross-country remote control car race, Little Dot freaking out over polka dots, and Casper doing some lame-ass sad sack ghost shit. Oh, the hours I wasted on terrible jokes and poor illustration.

But one of my favorite parts of those old comics was the mail order advertisements in the back of each issue. For mere pennies, they promised submarines big enough to ride in and Dick Tracy-esque watches that really worked. I would read those ads and wish that I had been born thirty years earlier so I could take advantage of such miraculous deals. But most tantalizing was always the mystery package.

For only one dollar you could send away for a bountiful grab bag of top secret prizes. The ads promised that the contents would be completely random. It could be anything. Even then I knew it was probably just things like plastic spiders, X-ray glasses, etc... the cream of crop of cutting edge 1960's practical joke technology. Those things were all still available in 1991 when I was laying on my cabin's thick shag carpet dreamily turning the moldering pages, and if I really wanted I could just win them as skee ball prizes at Chuck E. Cheese or wherever. But what if it was something else? What if some benevolent trickster at the mail order company secretly slipped a huge diamond into the mystery pack? Maybe that happened all the time. Maybe that's how the world worked in the 60's, you could send a dollar away and wind up with a diamond worth millions. It was nothing like the cold, crushing reality of the 90's where it was almost impossible for a six-year-old to get his hands on a big fat diamond. If only I could have gone back in time to when those offers were still valid. Those mystery packages would have made me millions.

Turns out I didn't need to go back in time. I needed to go forward, to 2010. I just plunked down ten bones to get something delivered from the Something Store. I just know it's going to be diamonds. Big ones.

P.S. I never found out if Archie ever won that cross country RC car race, but I would really like to know. Can someone please track down that issue so I can finally get some closure? It eats at me constantly, just like Tintin did.

On a new project

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Minnesota Minutiae:

As you can tell from this sparkling 10-megapixel photograph (taken with a Fujifilm Finepix F70 EXR camera, thankyouverymuch), it is a Minnesota themed trivia game. You can also tell that it's pretty darn old. It was published only in 1984, when it sold a couple thousand copies and was never seen again. Here is an example of some of the 1,500 some odd "salient and sublime" trivia questions:

Pretty tricky, eh? I myself knew only the question about the Babe the Blue Ox statue, but was able to guess the answer to the bus company question.

It just so happens that my father was the creative madman behind Minnesota Minutiae. He saw a market, and with some help from friends, he developed this collection of eclectic Minnesota facts. It was all done a year before I was born, so I don't have any memory of the actual creation, but I do remember the little blue box floating around the house when I was little.

I couldn't answer any of the questions, of course. But I remember being amazed that my dad (my dad!) had created it. I also couldn't understand why it hadn't made us all rich. Surely it was outselling Monopoly in the stores, right? Of course it was. Millions of copies of Minnesota Minutiae were flying off the shelves every day. Trillions. So don't even pretend like you can't buy me that $200 LEGO set when I know your pockets are bulging with Minutiae profits.

I still think it's pretty cool that he made it. And because he did it in 1984, it was all done without the aid of computers. All of the research was done using library books and hand-written notes. The cards were typeset at a printing facility and collated by hand. Apparently it was quite the undertaking.

Anyway, my dad had a talk with me the other night. He thinks it's time for an update. A new, better version, with questions that include all of the great stuff that has happened in Minnesota in the past 26 years. Then he said he was handing the reigns over to me. "It's time to join the family business," he said.

At first I wasn't so sure, but now I'm fairly certain that I'm going to do it. I don't know squat about making a trivia game, but then again, neither did he. It's going to need a major overhaul from a game standpoint, perhaps something more than the pseudo-Trivial Pursuit trappings. It's also going to take a lot of time to collate enough interesting facts, so it's more of a long-term project. But, with the internet and all, it shouldn't actually be all that difficult. And I know a few artists and graphic designers, so it should look a little snazzier than the spartan blue box and gray note cards of yore. Plus, when trillions of copies are flying off the shelves each day, I will finally be able to buy that $200 LEGO set.

Answers:
1. 1968
2. Brainerd
3. Greyhound
4. Minneapolis Lakers
5. Gig Young
6. 1910

On a weekend of bad photography

I'm still trying to figure out how my camera works, but I took it for a spin this weekend.

I needed a new Myspace profile picture. Next time I must remember to take it shirtless in the bathroom.

Hipster party photo of Diddy and Generickson. Thinking about a career as a nightlife photographer for an obscure alternative weekly newspaper.

I stood outside taking photos of the sign like I'd never seen a neon sign before.

Black Blondie apparently features Lady Gaga on keyboards.

Sun splashed soccer scarves in sepia. So arty! Taken while watching the hockey game. Goddamn Crosby. And Goddamn Parise, getting everybody's hopes up.

So far all of my pictures are coming out real grainy. I need to figure it out. I think I've been mistakenly using some sort of lo-fi mode or something. Still, it's great to have a camera again.

On my new toy that will inevitably break

Well, my new camera finally arrived. A genuine, bona fide Fujifilm F70EXR. It's a nice little ten megapixel beast with some advanced sensors and a 10x zoom all wrapped up in around six ounces of plastic. Of course I have no idea how to use it properly, but that won't stop me from taking dozens of poorly framed pictures of every shiny thing that catches my eye.

And because it's a camera with such a high powered zoom lens, the obvious first step was to test out the macro function. I snapped a few shots of the Cardboard Safari rhinoceros trophy that my sister gave me for Christmas.

This thing is totally boss.

Check out that amazing depth of field and my complete inability to properly frame anything!

My dad also helped me test it out. Thanks dad.

I guess I will start taking some zoom pictures now, possibly while listening to Wreckx-N-Effect. Look forward to a lot more amateur photography on this blog.

In other news, I am attempting a dietary experiment whereby I have stopped eating meat. But I have no desire to go full veggie, so I am going the cowardly pescetarian route. We shall see how long it lasts. My original goal was to do it for the duration of Lent, but I ain't no Catholic so who cares really. Maybe I will actually like it and keep going for longer. It's been a week so far and I'm already craving a cheeseburger, so yeah.

On the Radio Justice Patrol

While doing a little early Spring cleaning this past week I unearthed a bunch of old sketchbooks from back when I used to play at art. There's some pretty great stuff in them, especially in the high school books. I'll scan some of the pages in the future, but today I want to look at a few things that fell out of my college sketchbook.

You see, back in my school boy days, I was the best damn radio DJ on the best damn radio station in the whole damn world. I would average almost ten listeners a show. Ten! I was the best. And yet I never let my immense popularity go to my head. Except for this one time when a girl actually told me she listened to my show all the time and that she loved my voice. It was quite possibly the most flattered I had ever been, and without a doubt the high point of my radio career. Then she made out with my roommate instead of me and broke my teenage heart. The end.

Sophomore year my friend Amy and I had a really sweet show that we called Radio Justice Patrol. To go along with the rad name (I'm pretty sure I used to say "rad" back then) I had all of these high concept ideas about creating on-air superhero personas. I thought that in between songs we could do little radio dramas about fighting music related crime. Or something. It was a pretty silly idea, and needless to say we never did anything of the sort. But that didn't stop me from coming up with a bunch of totally boss posters with which to paper the campus:

An early concept. Two people wearing headphones running around with swords and cuffed jeans.

In later mock-ups I gave them masks, but stayed with the stylized iconography (most likely stolen from some google image search for "cheap looking tattoo design"). I also stayed with the red-blue-black color scheme (those were the only sharpies I had).

Now we're talking! Psionic powers and evil boxing robots. Pretty hot shit for someone with zero graphic design experience, eh? Eh?

With the proof of concept out of the way, I spent a little more time conceiving a real poster. The swords became light sabers and the figures slightly more detailed. I was pretty proud of that badge.

I remember spending a lot of time on this one. I'm not much of a graffiti artist, but I thought I did a pretty good job aping the style. I also brought back the cuffed jeans and the robots, because there's nothing cooler than cuffed jeans and robots. Totally rad!

Sadly, none of these posters were ever actually used. We got them approved by the school to hang on campus and everything, but for one reason or another we just never did anything with them. Such a shame, but at least I held on to them. Maybe I'll print them off now and hang them up around Minneapolis. See how many people will tune into an empty frequency after seeing my awesome drawrings.

In other news, I would like to extend a hearty Screw You to Dell Computers. I ordered a camera from them because they had the one I wanted at the lowest price. Then I went ahead and paid for next day shipping, because I'm impatient and impulsive and wanted to cancel out any and all savings I was getting by buying it from them. But apparently for Dell, "next day shipping" secretly means "take an entire week to process a simple order, then cancel it without any explanation." Pretty lame. I have since ordered it from another company, and look forward to taking many a picture.