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New stuff. Magical.

April 13, 2013 /

Maybe it isn’t considered the age of Invention and Wonder, but the years of my youth included enough newly imagined products that it may have de-sensitized me to the process. I didn’t grow up during the Industrial Revolution, but the latter part of the twentieth century did bring out eye-openers like the cellular telephone. And the weedwacker.

(That’s probably not a good description of the range, but you get the idea.)

There were many new items on many new fronts. Microwave ovens. Video games, beginning at Atari. Pong. Oooh. Calculator watches (I didn’t say all the inventions were keepers…)

In the days of my growing up – my youth – we’d turn around and something new would hit us in the face. Sometimes literally. (I got whacked on the forehead by a Frisbee at a Jethro Tull concert at the Convention Center. Ironically, I had just turned back around after warning my buddy Mike to be on the lookout for flying disks. It was his first concert, and I was the experienced venue-pro. Naturally, it hit me instead of him.)

I’ve never surveyed it, but I imagine some people believe these things have been around since the dawn of man. Nah. In a historical sense, many of our everyday comforts are recent contrivances. I remember when Mountain Dew first came out. Yellow liquid that looked a lot like – well, let’s say it didn’t look particularly appealing when poured in a clear glass. That’s why it came out in a green bottle, I suppose.

Something new would come out, and it seemed to be generally accepted without a lot of hoopla or fanfare. I don’t remember lines of people camped out overnight for a chance to buy a portable Compaq computer. (They were so large as to be only marginally portable.) No midnight-opening events for the eight-track tape players. Or the cassettes. None for the VHS, BetaMax, or VideoDisk either, as I recall. (Early DVDs were the size of vinyl records, but I’m betting few of you recall those beasts.)

They might generate a brief Wow, or Hmmmm. The more elaborate items could draw out a Cool! (Or Far-Out, as it tended to be expressed back then.)

Now, though, I find myself taking the time to actually marvel about the products being introduced. Not the phones. I know some of you live and breathe for your cels, but – old school as I am – those are still just telephones to me. And I’ve never been that keen on phone conversations.

Bluetooth, now – that definitely rates a ten on the coolness scale for me. Here, I’ve just berated the cellphone and now I have to backtrack and admit I like being able to take a picture with it and – through a series of onscreen menu choices – send it through the air to my computer. Wireless. Cool. Far-Out. Awesome.

Here’s another. The image is of an approaching storm the other evening. I wasn’t near a television or radio, and knew there was a threat of nasty weather.

“Where is that storm?, I wondered aloud, talking to myself as I am wont to do these days. “How can I find out?”

There is an app for that. Downloaded a powerful weather radar program that even allowed it to email the radar-sweep to someone. I sent a copy to myself, just to see what it looked like on the other end. Click on it and you’ll notice the first wave of severe weather has already moved east of Tulsa and the big blob is still approaching. The calm between the storms was the impetus for my downloading the application. They’d said another wave was coming, and I just wanted to be able to see it. Bam! There it is. Oooh.

The picture of the storm is a still image, but the application does the whole deal, the line that sweeps around in a circle like the second hand of a clock, updating the intensity-color-shades as it passes. Just like the toys of the big TV boys (and girls).

I’m still marveling at the fact that I have access, 24 hours a day, to the same sophisticated technology that the meteorologists have. Of course, I have little or no understanding of what the different settings and screens are for, but I know the big red blobs are danger, Will Robinson. Green? Good. Red, bad. Green, good. Awesome.

There you have the summary of my weather-radar savvy. Color-based.

Cool.

The Rachel Ray of Radio…

April 4, 2013 /

iPads. uTubes. iScream uScream. We all scream for ice cream. Then, we whip out our iPods and other such devices. Digital downloads. MP3s. Streaming from the Cloud. That thing called radio is still around, but it is a lot different than it used to be.

For one thing, there weren’t as many stations. FM – in the big scheme of things – was a late-comer to the party. But when it crashed onto the scene, it changed everything.

I’ve mentioned before that I find all sorts of things tucked into the pages of books that come into the shop. (Everything except money…) Today, it was a small, bookmark-sized calendar for 1934. On the back was a listing of radio stations that carried a cooking program called Pet-Milky-Way, “Broadcast direct from the PET MILK KITCHEN.”

The host was Mary Lee Taylor, a nutritionist and home economist for the PET Milk Company. Her program debuted in 1933 on CBS radio and, over time, became the longing running cooking program on radio. Her fifteen minutes aired twice a week, originally on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and was available to listeners in Oklahoma City and beyond on KOMA radio.

(Waaay back when, my friends and I called that radio station “coma” because we believed it was our job to be smart-alecky. We worked hard at it, but the pay was below minimal.)

Mary Lee later had the show evolve into more than just cooking tips. “The Story of the Week” featured the lives of a young married couple named Jim and Sally Carter. A soap opera for the kitchen crowd. When the hi-jinks and drama were over, Mary Lee would sit down at the microphone and present a complete menu that featured recipes using PET Milk. (I feel compelled to explain that PET Milk is a condensed product – evaporated milk – that comes in a can and was popular in the days before refrigerators. I know some folks use it still, because I see it on the shelf at Reasors. These days, I suppose it is used in baking and other specialty recipes.)

People liked her cooking tips, so she wrote a cookbook. She offered free recipes by mail. Chances are, one of your grandmothers sent off for one, or knew someone who did. In 1948, the show moved from CBS to NBC radio, still back in those days when the big national networks had a radio presence.

She kept at it until 1954, completing more than two decades broadcasting from the Pet Milk Kitchen. One of the original foodies, I suppose. The Rachel Ray of her day. Truth is, she wasn’t Rachel Ray or even Mary Lee Taylor.

Her real name was Erma Proetz.

The Mary Lee Taylor thing was her radio pseudonym. Something that she just baked up – I guess.

Off to see the Wizard…

April 3, 2013 /

You don’t have to be ‘off’ to see the wizard. States of inebriation help, perhaps, but are not required. (Kidding…) In reference to the classic from L. Frankie, Mr. Baum – he had his own wizardry and I finally got around to it.

Restless sleep last night. Weird nightmare. Had nothing to do, I pretty sure, with the late night reading.

I finished up The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before shutting off the light.

When I was a kid, I remember those scary flying monkeys that whipped Dorothy off to the Wicked Witch’s lair. That was pretty scary stuff. The part that REALLY got me was that airborne, bicycle riding, dressed in flowing-black, cackling crazy-laughter, outside-in-the-wind, schoolmarm-from-heck. Oh, man.

Then, there were those Ooompa-looompa-kind-of guards marching around like stormtroopers, chanting in unison, Yo-oh! Yo-ee-oh! Yo-oh! Yo-ee-oh! Maybe I was a sheltered child, but those guys made me pretty nervous, too.

In his preface, L. Frank Baum explains that he wanted to write a children’s story that was free of all the scary elements of the Grimm Brother’s fairy tales. No children-eating witches. No woodcutter’s wives leaving the kids out in the forest. He wanted a pleasant little story that could be taken in without the risk of nightmares.

For the most part, he succeeded. And for the most part, the famous movie did Mr. Baum justice. All the elements are there from his book: the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Toto the dog. The Yellow Brick Road leads to Oz and there is that dreadful field of poppies that is so vast that it cannot be crossed without being overcome from breathing in the pleasant but poisonous scent.

The twister lifts Dorothy in the farmhouse and lands her on the Wicked Witch, saving the Munchkins – same – movie and book. The witch’s feet sticking out from underneath wearing Silver Slippers.

What?

Silver slippers?

Everyone knows Dorothy inherited ruby slippers. In fact, the shoes that Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film are in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It was just last October that the Museum announced it was making a rare loan of the slippers to a British museum.

In the book, though, they are silver slippers. They do have a magical power, but in an unusual occasion of the screenwriters getting it correct, the visual magic works a lot better than Mr Baum’s version.

You see, in the novel, Dorothy can wish herself home while wearing the silver slippers, and she does so – with not an ounce of pizzazz.

Dorothy: I wish I was back in dreary Kansas.

Shoes: Seems like a wasted wish, but – Boom! There you go.

Dorothy, back in Kansas: Should have picked Vegas. Or even Branson.

Everyone knows that – in the movie – Dorothy clicks the heels of her ruby-red slippers together and repeats “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

Whiskety-whisk! She’s back in Kansas, on the bed with all her friends gathered around. Ahhhh. It was all a dream. A drug-induced psychedelic meth-trip (just kidding… We know what a straight-shooter Dorothy was.). All her friends were there, and it was all beautiful, but…

There’s no place like home.

Mr. Baum played it a little more low-key. Slippers (Silver) on, got the wish working. Bang! Dorothy is back in Kansas, tossed-down-like in the dusty farmland.

Dorothy, picking herself up: I’m back in dreary Kansas!

Aunty Em: There you are, Dorothy. Get washed up for dinner now. There’s chores later.

The return from the Wonderful Land of Oz and the Emerald City is about as matter-of-fact as it could possibly have been written. Oh, you’re back then. Good deal. Let’s go clean out the pigsty.

On second thought, maybe that troubling end had something to do with my sleep issues. Something about a plot-stealing monster that made off with the great ending for L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I Woke up and didn’t recognize any of those people standing around my bed.

Come get a copy and read it for yourself!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main, Broken Arrow, OK
918-258-3301

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