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Right Angle: Backstage 10/31/23

The Kinda A Bummer Edition this week on Right Angle: Backstage!

It’s the Kinda a Bummer edition this week, featuring: Driving with GPS, Phill Hartman, Matthew Perry, The Empty Hole int he Heart of Celebrities, the Curse of the High School Hero, a Hockey Fatality, Maine Shooter, Probable Cause, AI and Kenya, Scotty Kilmer, no cell phones in schools and Grandfluencers… all this and so much less on his week’s edition of Right Angle: Backstage!

34 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 10/31/23”

I also remember the phone number I grew up with. It just had 7 digits, and the first 2 were letters. Yeah, I lived before Area and ZIP codes. I used my old phone number as my password on my first home computer – a Bondi Blue iMac.

I’ve spent a lifetime looking forward. I went to my 10th year HS reunion and left in 45 minutes. I had not seen any of the attendees in 10 years and honestly, really didn’t care. It was 10 years in the past. Skipped the 20 and 30 year too. Just too busy “living the freedom” in the present.

Has Bill done any TSL’s lately? I’m not able to catch any of them live and have to wait for the video later. But I can’t find anything more recent than #374 which was back in July or August. Have they been moved somewhere?

Yes, both TSL and TSS. He’s been spending a LOT of time trying to get the new web site operational and trying to get his Story Mechanic series started that he may not have time to get the Stratosphere stuff posted.

I’ve never been to a class reunion and have zero desire to attend one.

I hated high school. Not because of the curriculum or the other-than-social environment aspects …

I didn’t like the people I went to school with. I didn’t care if I “fit in” or not because I had no desire to conform enough to gain the approval a bunch of what I saw as idiots, posers and puerile simpletons. I got along with the teachers a lot better than I got along with my fellow students. I had “friends” that were more acquaintances and wouldn’t discover until after I joined the Marine Corps what true friends were. That’s because I met a much, much higher caliber of people in the military than I went to school with. Which should tell you much about the kind of people that populated my high school. Even the Marines are not universally sterling personalities.

Unlike most people I’ve met, because we moved a lot when I was young I didn’t grow up around a set group of kids. By the time I arrived on the scene all the little social cliques and pecking orders were well established. I learned early that the first people who showed signs of wanting me in their group were the least desirable as friends. Because they had little or no social capital if I turned out to be a low-life like them they had nothing to lose and everything to gain if I somehow added to their standing. Moving up the social order was more trouble than it was worth and involved compromises I was not willing to make. My best friends were books, rod and reel and hunting firearms.

Surprise, surprise — I got in a lot of fights too. The bulk of the students in my school didn’t like me a lot either. I learned to give as good or better than I got. If people didn’t respect me for who I was then they’d learn to respect the fear of what I would do if they messed with me. I was the ‘new kid’ in the last three years of my high school and it didn’t take long for the bullies and the aggressive to learn that leaving me alone was the least painful course of action. You leave me be, I’ll leave you be too. Failing that, it was time for you to learn a lesson about the advantages of minding your own business.

If I got a beating I made sure the other guy(s) walked around school for a week or two showing the marks of what that beating cost them. Sometimes I left permanent scars as a reminder. One little d-bag named Charlie Shultz went through the rest of his life with a very noticeable crooked nose, unless he paid for plastic surgery sometime after we parted ways.

I don’t know if as Harry Ferguson and I have previously discussed this lack of desire to fit in was maybe because I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum, which I suspect I am but have never been formally diagnosed. Or it’s just a personality quirk and I have more than a few of those too.

Some of it has to do with my Dad, who was a very successful salesman and later became an executive in the ag business. He was neither of those things when I was young but he was the same man as he would become later. He always had the attitude that if you didn’t like him, screw you and move on. I’m sure I picked up a lot of that from him.

In fact, his favorite movie was “Father Goose” with Cary Grant and Leslie Caron. The song in the opening credits is “Pass me By” sung by Digby Wolfe. The chorus to that song was …

Pass Me By-y, Pass Me By-y-y.
If you don’t happen to like it Pass Me By.

I remember as a kid hearing my Dad humming that tune to himself often.

I didn’t feel like I didn’t fit in, I didn’t care if I fit in or not. I have absolutely no desire to ever see any of those people again.

Conversely, I have some very good friends I made in the military and have attended several unit reunions and Marine Corps Balls (double entendre if ever there was one, huh?) so as to catch up with them and their lives when I could. So I don’t think it’s me, I think it’s the dipwads I was stuck with in high school.

I understand what Scott’s saying about “everyone not fitting in” but in my personal case I think that was more fact than perspective.

All of that said, your mileage may differ. If so, feel free to pass me by.

 his favorite movie was “Father Goose” with Cary Grant and Leslie Caron

Something tells me that your dad and I would have gotten along just fine. This is also one of my favorites, and I really enjoyed a lot of his movies. This one stands out to me probably because he didn’t look all “Cary Grant”.
I also hum and sing to myself. I think it is my version of purring and just means all dials and gauges are A-OK.

My dad was a real character. I think you would have liked him. I didn’t admire everything he did but I loved and respected him until the day he died.

I hope in my comment above I didn’t give the wrong impression. Unlike a lot of kids I had a very good, stable, wholesome home life. My parents did the best they could with what they had while I and my sister were still living at home. Things kind of fell apart after that, as they do sometimes.

I don’t fit in with the group that blames their parents for things. I am the way I am because I made me that way, they didn’t. They wanted the best for me and did what they could.

It was my dad who taught me to stand up for myself, even if the odds were unfavorable and it hurt. I don’t like pain any more than anyone else does but there are different kinds of pain. Physical pain is not the worst of them. Most kids don’t know that, some never do learn it. In the those cases fear can be a master. For those that know better it’s not. Thanks to my dad that was a problem I was able to deal with appropriately and proportionately as the situation arose.

My mom was like any other good mom. It hurt her to see her little boy hurt. She didn’t cry at my wedding but she did cry the day I left for the Marine Corps. I think my mom experienced a lot of sadness vicariously for me. She didn’t have as good a life as she deserved. I’m in no small part a reason for that. Not the only reason by far, but a significant one even so.

One thing I’m certain of; prayer works. She prayed for me every day I might have been in any sort of peril and I’m here answering your comment largely due to that fact. Her efforts in that regard were not futile but it took its toll on her even so.

I agree with the rule to keep phones out of classrooms. One thing the prohibition will avoid is the students filming battles with their teachers and each other. They will have to wait until after class or after school to be famous for 15 minutes.

Ronette is teaching HS (To Mrs Ron’s and my shock) and as the new teacher this is one that is often debated.
Keep it in the bookbag for lots of reasons, but the one you point out is a good one. As Steve pointed out in Bill’s episode about Body Cams, people behave differently when they are on camera.

On Mathew Perry, he boasted about being “boosted” to the max. From the testing and studies I’ve been following, I believe he had some kind of heart problem or stroke while in his hot tub. It’s sad to the extreme that so very many people of all ages are dying from complications of vaccines.

When I need driving directions, I print out the Mapquest driving directions, put the page on the passenger seat, and after the “lengthy mileage” parts I use a red ink pen to draw a line that this is where to pay attention. My 1999 Saab missed out on GPS, and so far I’m the last person in the world who doesn’t use a cell phone. I think I can make it through life this way.

No GPS for me, and I’ve disabled the location feature on my phone, which I only have because my sister couldn’t bring hers to work due to the security implications and the camera. And even then, it was only after my flip phone finally bricked itself (likely with the help of Verizon). I don’t want to make it easy to track me, And I have an impeccable sense of direction, and like reading maps. And exploring.

Agree. Laws are a necessary evil. Minimal laws minimalizes that evil.

The problem is that minimizing laws means you have to be able to trust the enforcement and judicial systems to apply wisdom and restraint. As we have moved away from that state, laws have had to become more and more definitive and restricting to counterbalance that lack*. Which has not resulted in an improvement and is as much a failure as lack of wisdom and restraint.

(*Three strike laws are a great example. Because some Judges went soft on certain criminals legislatures felt the need to apply wisdom by legislation as a counterbalance. We would never have heard of, nor would there be any need for, three strike laws if Judges applied wisdom in sentencing dangerous antisocial criminals.)

I tell my kids, who are met by a barrage of new laws to vote for or against at election time, to judge every proposal from the standpoint of “what does this mean to my freedom” and “how much of my tax burden will this add” and vote accordingly.

I have nothing really useful to add to this discussion other than I very much enjoyed it. This is definitely worth the price of admission.
Aside – my wife and I went to her 40th HS reunion recently. My only coherent thought was my wife must have graduated HS at 10 or many of her classmates got held back, a lot.

Don’t you find that high school reunions are somewhat equalizers? Time spares no one. Next year is my 50th reunion and I look forward to it, even though I am twice the size of most of those who will be attending. I will just be glad to see everyone again.

Congratulations on getting Back Stage posted so quickly despite the problems you spoke of last night. Mathew Perry has not yet had the toxicology report issued lots of speculation. Phil Hartman is more appreciated after his passing. Then mix in Bob Ross and Scotty Kilmer together in the same discussion and this is what I love about your discussions.

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