I made the mistake of thinking to take the kids to Peter Piper Pizza on a Saturday night. I somehow failed to reason out that it would be a madhouse!
I was going to blog about (hey! I just did) and started to take pictures to illustrate. When I did, I got the infamous scrambled iPhone photo. I thought this had been fixed. Guess not.
Times are tough. We went to the 99 Cent Only store today.
They advertise that everything in the store is 99 cents. Inflation takes its toll though because over the loudspeaker they were announcing special items for 99.99 cents! That’s a 10% price increase!
But I ask you: Who would pay $0.99 for this hideous thing?!
Here it is. Ghost House… a short video we did for Fusion Patrol some years ago. Back then, we were making fun of Taiwanese and Japanese ghost shows, which usually ran a couple hours and consisted of placing two girls in an abandoned house in the dark and waiting for them to get scared of something. Afterwards, they’d find some dust floating in the air, or paradolia in a window or something and declaring it a real haunting.
Little did we know that these programs would be adapted and polluting American TV screens in the near future.
Why am I posting it to the site today? I was looking over some new YouTube demographic tools after I posted the earlier video today and, Ghost House is our most popular video, without over 100,000 views - and, if the tools are to be believed, 56,000 of them are from schoolgirls in France (age 13-17.)
This makes sense of why at one point my YouTube account suddenly became French.
I still love the comments on Ghost House… a video, clearly labeled as “comedy” and so obviously (obviously!) staged, still has people believing it’s real. (I loved the comment from the guy who said people like us give “serious” ghost hunters a bad name. Ha!
So, the world’s in financial turmoil, and things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better. My employer (and technically speaking, my wife’s, too) is $1 billion over budget this year. People are worried about their jobs. Prices are up. Sales are down. Fuel Prices/Airfare are outrageous. The UK is one of the most expensive places to visit.
But, dammit, I promised my daughter a cricket match and a trip to the British Museum of Natural History for her birthday, and I aim to keep that promise. At least it is still 8 months away.
(Video after the jump…)
…except that I found this video both nostalgic and funny with the new lyrics.
And this one is not as good, but…
The new Meikong Plaza (an indoor Asian mall) opened today in the hinterland of the Mesa/Tempe border just a couple blocks from the terminal Phoenix Light Rail station.
Inside the mall is Taiwan Food Express and new Taiwanese restaurant with an impressively large menu.
It’s a pity the menu isn’t edible as there wasn’t much food in evidence on grand opening day.
We wanted beef noodle soup, they were out.
We tried to get chicken curry over rice, they were out.
We tried to get xiao long bao (steamed dumplings), they were out.
I gave up and just wanted a Dr. Pepper and they were out.
My wife finally asked them what the did have and they indicated just a 2 inch section of the menu that they had. They finally got a pork chop (bland) and a bowl of noodles in broth.
We also ordered three drinks and the got one of them wrong.
Despite not having much food, they weren’t hurting for customers hoping to buy something.
We’ll give them another try someday, maybe after the trains are running. In the meantime, don’t bother to look at the menu, just ask what they’ve got.
Sonic Drive-ins are an interesting bit of Americana. Emulating old episodes of Happy Days, these restaurants are designed fir you to drive up, park, order through a speaker next to your car and then your food us delivered right to the car where you proceed to eat it.
Personally, apart from the novelty, I hate that arrangement. I don’t like eating in a car, which makes the experience a non-starter for me.
On the other hand, the have an interesting drinks selection and a couple food items that I quite like. Net result: I probably eat at a Sonic once a year. Considering that I eat at McDonald’s 15-24 times a year and I like Sonic’s food a lot better, I consider them to be a failed concept in fast food deployment.
Today we spied something new: a Sonic without the drive-in. It was actually an indoor restaurant with a drive-through.
You order through red Soviet Hotline looking phones on the tables and the “carhop” brings the food to your table.
Weird, but if they had these closer to my home, McDonald’s would be loosijg some business.
Why on earth would the city of Phoenix send out a work crew to start work replacing a perfectly good fire hydrant with another fire hydrant at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon?
Like how they mostly block off my driveway?
Update: 6:30, it’s getting dark and they’re still sitting around in the hole. At least the heavy machinery has stopped.
Update: 9:30
I can’t take it anymore. The curiosity is killing me. What’s wrong with my existing fire hydrant? What could go wrong? Why plop in with a backhoe and tear up my neighbor’s lawn just to replace it?
I finally ask one of the workers. I’m told that Phoenix has 21 different types of fire hydrants. The city has decided they only want 4 types of hydrant. As the worker said, “My boss tells me to replace ‘em, so I do. ”
This raises lots of questions, chief of which is, “Is this really necessary in this time of extreme budget crunch?”. “Was the fire department having some sort of problems with the hydrants, if so, was it house safe? If not, why is my tax money being wasted?”
Something is wrong here.
Some 15 years ago we used to have a little thing called “Public Access TV”, now largely defunct.
For those not familiar with the concept, Public Access was supposed to be a way that local community members could use the medium of television to reach out to their community. In one of the brighter, more lucid moments of government regulation, someone figured out that television vastly shapes and informs the opinions of the public. They also realized that television was a medium that requires large sums of money to participate in.
The mechanism was that, as a city granted a monopoly contract to a cable TV contractor to come build out the infrastructure, they were were required to maintain a channel that any citizen could air video on, without censorship (within certain generally loose restrictions: No pornography as defined by community standards, no sales, no gambling and no solicitations for money.)
Further, the cable companies were required to supply equipment and studio space for these programs to be produced.
This all seems quaint in this age of internet video, dirt-cheap camcorders and home computers with sufficient power to do video editing, but back then, this was a significant investment.
I always thought it was a grand idea. There was just one flaw. As with so many other grand ideas, the people fail to live up to them. What had been conceived as an outlet for artistic express and community-building became a wallowing ground for crackpots, fringe radicals, churches (big ones trying to skit the no solicitations for money rules and little ones trying to build their flock) and teenagers (and post-adolescent wannabe teenagers) who thought it was cool (and/or funny) to swear on TV.
After watching enough Public Access, one day I just had enough. I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s perfectly acceptable to gripe about things, but eventually you have to put your money where you mouth is and do something about it. For me, Fusion Patrol was that something.
One day, while watching a show on Public Access, hoping against futile hope that the program, which was a bunch of teenagers standing around reciting Metallica lyrics (although you couldn’t tell because the sound was inaudible) would actually do something, I snapped. I could stand the crap no more and Fusion Patrol was born.
Over the course of a several years, a band of intrepid volunteers and I put on a TV show. Honestly, it sucked. Well, OK, it started of technically sucky, but with time and practice and a desire to improve which seemed lacking in the other Public Access producers, the show got better. Technically better, anyway. You either like the content or you don’t. Although, one of the proudest moments in my stint at Fusion Patrol is when one of the popular local morning radio DJ teams saw the show and talked about it on the air. They called us a “…local, Pythonesque comedy troupe.”
How cool is that?! Compared to Monty Python! And not even in a negative way! (Admittedly, they did, by coincidence, happen to see our most Pythonesque episode and even still we’re not a patch on the Pythons’ collective asses.)
With the program getting better (again, I stress, technically better) it took more and more time to produce, and as each of us progressed in our lives, we had less and less time to devote to the production. Fusion Patrol died not in fire, but with a whimper of missed deadlines and conflicting priorities.
Nowadays, I see the YouTube phenomena as the ultimate liberation of television from the hands of the vested corporate interests. Web video has finally created the environment that Public Access dreamed of creating.
…and yet, when I look at YouTube videos, more often than not, I get that same feeling I had watching those damn teenagers all those years ago.
I shall produce more Fusion Patrol.
Of the original crew of ten, two are dead, two are missing without trace, one has not been available and three others have been added, making the “new” Fusion Patrol a team of eight.
Keep watching this spot. We’re in pre-production meetings now. I’m working on revamping the Fusion Patrol Website soon to accommodate video podcasting and hopefully soon I’ll have more information and details about the production.
