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Right Angle: Backstage 09/12/23

This week: all of the horrors of nostalgia!

This week: Steven Wright’s hibernation capsule has failed, searching for Gary Sandy, tech giants turned to the Dark Side, no more awesome 70 flavor soda machines, a treatise on the nature and composition of Twinkies, having fun with Color TV dials, and the English language reduced to four or five emojis… all this and so much less in this edition of Right Angle: Backstage!

42 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 09/12/23”

What is up with you guys that day! Way too much talking over each other. Scott needs to take the lead and hand the mike over audibly. He shouldn’t just stop in midsentence, leaving no one knowing who he’s handing it over to. This was not a normal show today! Either talking all the time or not talking at all. A riot! LOL

Yeah … Beards are a matter of personal perspective. I think Scott’s beard looks better and better the longer it gets. To me it looks well trimmed and shaped but then my beard is at least twice as long as Scott’s and it’s taken years for it to get where it is now. I can’t speak for Scott but the idea of “looking younger” holds no appeal to me at all.

To each his own.

I have worn a beard for most of the last 20 years, with a very few, brief periods without. Fairly tight, and always trimmed and clean. I wear my hair pretty short so it blends nicely.
I look a lot younger without facial hair, that is true. But according to the only two people in my life whose opinion on such things matter to me; I don’t look like me.
BTW – It is almost completely grey at this point, very little of my original near black left either on face or head. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I earned every grey hair I have.
Now, Mrs. Ron has some Cherokee in her genealogy. And though technically older than I am, has almost no silver in her hair. At first glance there are many who think I married a much younger woman. Other’s who know her age just presume she has a great hair stylist who does great work with color. Her dad is 93 and has more black in his hair then I do.
People are blessed in different ways. I like being a silver fox (her term) it suits me.
Scott would not look like himself if the beard matched the hair color.

I personally have never liked the idea of coloring hair. It seems a bit vainglorious to me for a man to do that. I don’t mean effeminate, I mean egocentric. In men it’s a silly vanity.

Women are a totally different matter. Women are different creatures to men. My mom used to color her hair, my second wife did too. I would never, ever dream of telling a woman how she should groom or accoutrement herself. We call them “the fairer sex” because that’s what they are, from birth to grave. What they do in service to that designation is their business and no one else’s.

My natural hair color of my youth was blond. Depending on how much time I spent in the sun it ranged from “dishwater blond” to a gold color. My beard, the few times I was in a position to grow any at all, was a reddish blond. My beard and scalp hair never matched and it never occurred to me that they should.

These are Scandinavian traits that are quite common. There were so many blond people where I grew up I got sick of them. One time when I was home I went to a popular bar (drinking Coca-Cola btw because I was carrying). I took out my calculator and over the course of an evening of the hundred or so +/- in that bar the number of people that could be described as blond averaged out between 85 – 95%.

When I finally got to a place in life where I didn’t have to keep my hair short and be clean shaven I said “Hell, I’m gonna grow some hair while I still can”. So I did. I haven’t paid a barber in well over a decade.

And now every bit of that hair is a silver gray. I wouldn’t dream of changing the color to “look younger”. I’m not going to try to make myself look like something there’s no way I can be. to me it would be like wearing a silly lie for everyone to see.

But then, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon and always have been. I think the same way about toupees and hair implants.

My second wife had a good way of putting that sort of thing, It applied equally to male or female. She called it “Mutton done up as lamb”.

When I was quite young, less than 10 probably closer to 7, I first heard the old wives tale that a man gets his hairline from his maternal grandfather.
Well mine had the hair of a Franciscan monk and not by choice. So that Sunday I made a vow in church; as long as I kept my thick full head of hair I would never color it and wouldn’t fret about its color.
I started turning grey in my 30s and never cared.
Little bit of pepper still, but on my face almost none. My wife likes it and that is all I care about.

RE: how did the old gramaphones and victrolas work without electronics? When I was a kid, we’d take a sheet of paper and make a cone out if it, and then stick a sharp straight pin through the small base of the cone. Using a 45rpm record instead of an LP (larger grooves), we’d place the point of the pin into the groove and TA-DA! Sound! Music! It was pretty thin, crappy sound, of course, but it made for a fun Science Fair exhibit. And somewhere around here, I still have the Heathkit shortwave radio receiver that I built at age 12. It had about 8 tubes in it, and one of these days I’ll try to find some tubes and see if it still works. My teenage grandkids find all this simply amazing.

I had an old GM who coached his kids Basketball team (under 10) whose rules stated that everyone who showed up played the same minutes.
The league also broke kids into 4 groups based on skill level so that each team had A,B,C,and D players.
Most coaches would try to game the playing time by having either their A or B or there at all times.
Brian just kept it simple. If he had 10 guys, every few minutes he subbed out all five. If he had less than 10, he figured out a rotation to cover it (he is an engineer so he had a plan for all numbers) and just played everyone.
They won more than one would thing because the kids knew every few minutes of clock they were getting back in and they hustled when out there.
He also kicked my ass in chess fairly regularly. But I got him back at scrabble.

Like anything else, people improve with practice and experience. That goes double for kids because they absorb new things very quickly. The simple fact is that if you don’t play you can’t get good at playing.

A kid’s coach that only puts his very best players in the game is hog-tying his team. He’s doing that to win games, not build better players. At that age winning isn’t as important as learning and the players on the bench are not learning. The numbers say that some of those kids warming the bench are great players who don’t have the experience they need to do well yet.

Basically a coach like that is shooting for bragging rights and using little kids to get bragging rights is a crappy thing to do to the kids.

There’s a delicate balance involved because no one wants to be on a team that loses all the time either. That way lies discouragement and apathy. If you’re never going to win then why try?

Your friend Brian appears to have known all this.

This ‘win at any cost’ idea is a result of modern bread-and-circuses mentality. It’s actually irrationally obsessive and counter productive. To me it seems to stem from what I would call “sports-brain disorder”.

Many years ago I applied for an IT job at a fledgling company and was interviewed by the business owner. He sat there in our interview and blatted on and on with football analogies, making it clear he saw himself as a wannabe coach of what he envisioned was a “winning team”. His vision for his company clearly involved the idea that a good “pep talk” could infinitely ramp up performance and production. He said a LOT of very stupid things in the process of the interview.* When he got done he asked me how soon I could start. I stood up, shook his hand and said …

“We’re not a good fit for each other. I retract my application but thank you for your time anyway.”

… and calmly walked out of his office before he could say anything more.

I’m certain that if he’s still alive to this day he doesn’t know why I did that. I did that because there is no way to please someone like him and any future with his company would revolve around being what he saw would be “star players” arbitrarily measured by his sports-brain disorder.

He wasn’t looking for good people adept and competent in their field, he was looking to build a team of “A-List” players to fit some distorted view of reality he nursed like Al Bundy living off the glory of his high school football days.

It was a good move on my part, that company went bankrupt within a year from opening its doors. I knew that was going to happen because the owner was irrationally obsessive and counter productive. He saw everything as a football game and thought that world view was a winning approach. Only a dumbass absurdly obsessed with football would see things that way.

I ended up taking a position with one of his competitors. This was in a medium-small midwestern town in the early days of IT services and we buried him in very short order. Strangely enough, my bosses didn’t compare anything about our business with football at all. They wanted competent people willing to work very hard to make their business succeed. Not star players that would do anything to be on a winning team. Therein lies all the difference.

(*From what he said it was obvious to me that he had inherited a goodly sum of money and was looking to reinvest that cash in a productive business. That’s a good strategy of itself but this guy had no clue about the business he was trying to build nor any idea how to build a business in the first place. He believed his sports-brain disorder would carry him through to the goal posts and it did not.)

As team statistician for my son’s 5th – 8th grade basketball team I kept 23 stats, including “per/min played” stats. This gave every player a few strong stats regardless of playing time. The coach played everybody, but not equally. In spite of W/L records of 3-10, 4-11, 4-11, the team size grew every year. My stats also showed an undercurrent of individual improvement which finally overflowed into an 8th grade 17-6 record. That gradual gathering of power led me to nickname the coach, “Tsunami Mike.”

So other than Bill being about 3 seconds behind Steve for most of this causing over-chatter, good discussions.
Most evident when Scott was off and Bill and Steve were talking about Peter O’Toole movies. BTW – both those mentioned are really good. My Favorite Year and The Stuntman – really entertaining.

Re: The overchatter …

I closed my eyes and really listened so I could separate the voices and hear what was being said. Whether they think so or not, that’s actually a compliment because there are few people anymore that I’d go to that kind of effort to pay attention to what they have to say …

My hearing isn’t all that great anymore. Not as bad as it could be, considering tens of thousands (maybe more) of rounds of unprotected weapons fire but taking that into account, it’s not bad. And …

My hearing makes a great excuse not to hear things I don’t want to. 😉

My wife would bludgeon me with that comment every time I’d say “Huh?” or “Pardon me?”. Nearly a year ago, I finally got some pretty amazing hearing aids and now, she knows I can hear her….can’t hide behind huh or pardon me just because I didn’t want to listen. My hearing was shot with loud music, loud machinery and exostosis from surfing, on top of being born with the deficiency.
I really like the idea of not looking and just paying attention to the speech. I had not listened to this Back Stage BS yet, but will with new ears. Great suggestion.

Perceptive senses tend to overlap and overwhelm. Especially where confusion is a factor. You can teach yourself to bring one of them to the foreground and pay particular attention to it. It’s not hard to do if you can isolate that particular sense to give it an advantage over everything else that’s clamoring for your attention.

I didn’t have much trouble understanding the dialog in the video but it took some extra effort. In this case “the juice is worth the squeeze” as one of my buddies would say.

ACTS (TM), I did it and it actually helped a LOT. It’s weird, you can isolate individual voices and ignore others, to keep the stream of dialog going. Thanks for this tip!

I have excellent hearing still. However, I frequently miss things I don’t want to hear. Selective tuning. 😉

Ohh Ohh…here’s an idea. In the future, Bill should just post all 3 individual tracks and make US composite the audio to get it all aligned! Yeah, that’ll work!!!.
Yeah, yeah, I know….Bill’s the professional E D I T O R but why not just let us do the audio track work!

I actually think this is as simple as he knew Steve was a little ahead, say 1.5 seconds, and slid that track. . . the wrong way 1.5 seconds making it worse. He and Scott sound ok, it is really that Steve’s track was off.

It also looks to me like that’s the problem. Road Rider’s suggestion about posting the tracks so we could work on them has merit but I’m not sure how to make editing by committee work.

I think you have a good idea but like I also said to Ron SAE, I don’t know how the particulars of editing-by-committee would work out. Upload permissions and all that kind of thing could be a nightmare.

I’d be willing to donate some time on something like that. Anyone doing that would get a sneak preview as a natural consequence.

The concept is good, I’m just not sure how the mechanics would work. Like so many good ideas, the devil is in the details.

I was reminded of a line by George Carlin, “when you do a line of cocaine, you feel like a new man. The problem is, the first thing that new man wants to do is another line of cocaine.”

I was confused hearing all three of you conversing at the same time, and none of you knowing the others were speaking. Scott’s problems were apparently of one sort and Steve’s seemed to be a very slow connection, as when Bill would answer and then Steve would ask the question. This episode was brought with difficulties that are not your normal. I hope you guys get this resolved so I don’t have to record this three times and then eliminate two of the voices and then splice them in proper order to understand what was being said. Or I can just chalk it up to a weird and wacky fluke of nature and the internet. At first, I was beginning to be irritated because everyone was speaking at the same time. I then realized it was one of the funky days that the universe decided to conspire against all of you. (😅) emoji, because I talk too much) Ha ha!

Ronald Durham would record the tracks, put each guy on a separate track, reposition the audio tracks so they would align….then play and listen. You, Sir, are committed to the cause!

The most tragic is when the pheromones respond dramatically to a woman who is not your wife. After decades of marriage, I’m glad the better brain – the one in my skull – now reacts by thinking about the cost.

When I was in high school I had a car that had a gas gauge that acted exactly like an iPhone battery. If you started the car it always showed less gas than the last time you shut it off. If you floored the accelerator you could watch the gas gauge go down and it would not recover. It wasn’t because the gas was sloshing to the back of the tank away from the fuel gauge sender, it was because the car was using that much gas.

That was a 1966 Buick Wildcat with a 465 Wildcat engine, a Holly 4 barrel center squirter and a few other minor modifications I made as I could afford them. It was cool as hell.

My Dad let me drive that car to school for two years before I was eligible to get a driver’s license. I had to park a couple blocks away from the school, never ever let anyone ride with me, and not tell people I was driving. If I did any of those things Dad would take the car away. He really meant it too, he would take the distributor out of the car and keep it at work where I couldn’t get to it.

He let me do this so I could run my trap line before and after school. I made fairly decent money for a kid in those days by trapping and furbearer hunting. I was hunting by observing the woods and fields between trap sets. So there was always a respectable rifle in the car with me.

Dad knew whatever money I made would go into that car, mostly for gas. So I was driving around with no license and a gun in a fairly fast but not particularly appealing car and I didn’t want to do anything to lose those privileges.

The reason I’m telling you this is because this situation forced me to choose between what I liked to do at considerable personal sacrifice in time and treasure or ride a bus which I hated but involved no sacrifice at all. So at a young age I learned to prioritize things according to the benefits to me that I would reap from my choices.

This is why, among many other reasons, that I will never own anything made by Apple Inc.

My phone is a relatively new (3-4 year old) Motorola G7 Power. It has a huge battery capacity that will run the phone for 5 days and I have replaced that battery once since I got the phone. I use a phone for communication 99% of the time and a dead battery means no communication. I don’t care about the cool factor, I’m a function over form kind of guy. This phone does everything I need it to and a lot I don’t. It does this reliably without fail or fuss. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than an iPhone and there is nothing an iPhone will do that this phone won’t … That I would miss by not owning an iPhone.

If someone gave me a brand new iPhone of the latest make and model I’d sell it on eBay the next day. Then use the money to buy something genuinely useful and pocket the considerable difference.

You can keep your cool Apple crap.

I am sorely tempted to start a Monty Python routine here.
Your car had a gas gauge? I had to stick a branch down into the gas tank every morning to see what was left.
If I floored the accelerator, my foot would likely go through the rusty floorboards.

In all honesty, my grandfather had an affinity for Caprice Classics. He also traded in every 4 years, because in the 60s and 70s things would start to break in GM cars.
My older brother got his 1973 CC, 2-door with the hood that looked like an aircraft carrier deck.
My joke to him was that the car wouldn’t let him drive past a service station, except the one where I worked.

Bill … I have a Grafonola record player. The needle tracks in the groove and vibrates a little round diaphragm in the tone arm end where the needle mounts. There’s a direct air channel from that diaphragm to the horn. The horn amplifies the sound. It basically works the same as an electronic device with a diaphragm picking up the sound and transmitting it to the amplifier but does so without electronics or electricity.

I’m the kind of guy that refills his gas tank when it hits half full. I grew up in a northern tier state where running out of gas in the wintertime can be more than a bother, it can be fatal. If you slide off the road in a blizzard and don’t have enough gas to idle your vehicle until help comes along you can freeze to death.

The habit has stuck with me the rest of my life.

This back stage is like Stratosphere lounge the worst produced show on the internet started ok then got confused in the middle recovered long enough to end with no discussion of interviews and only a mention of Mace. Still looking forward to what ever comes this week.

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