House of Eratosthenes

I just love this bad guy. You know he’s extra, extra bad because not only does he show the proper attributes and accoutrements — he’s obviously over forty-five, and wearing a nice suit with the tie knotted all the way up to the collar — he almost certainly dresses the same way at night, which in the 1970’s nailed the whole thing shut. Good guys wore plaid shirts, and jeans that were skin-tight around the size-twenty-eight General Lee window-wriggling ass, legs that trumpeted out to the size of manhole covers around the ankles. They did their good-guy things like jump up in the air and perform flying scissor-kicks, talk about self-esteem, tell beautiful naive young women they mustn’t blame themselves for something, and they rescued a lot of Russian gymnasts.

The nice suit was that decade’s “black top hat and twirly mustache” outfit. High-end menswear, worn properly, that meant you were bad. Call it the “Barbara Boxer Decade.” Just to eliminate any doubt, the necktie is white, he plans to blow up lots of innocent people with an atomic bomb, along with the President, and…

…just to make sure all doubt is removed, he forces beautiful women to wear skimpy bathing suits.

Oooh! What a demonic, dastardly devil! Atomic bombs and bathing suits? I’m so glad the bikini thing made it in there. Not only is Joanna Cameron a feast for the eyes whether she wants to wear the thing or not…but I wasn’t quite sold on the bad guy’s badness before that. The whole incinerating-thousands-of-innocents thing hadn’t pushed me over the top just yet. The Jabba-The-Hutt move accentuated his badness perfectly.

You know, I shouldn’t be so hard on the seventies. Nowadays we have the same mentality. Blow up lots of people with a bomb, but cherish the idea that the proper clothing for a woman in a desert environment is a big black walking-cocoon, and we’ll go easy on ya. How we’d treat mad bombers who like women in bikinis I don’t really know, but I got a gut feel the bikini thing would be just as much worth mentioning alongside the bomb thing nowadays, as it was back then.

Just curious, but do you talk a lot Morgan? I mean out loud, to other people.

Your volume of writing is stunningly prodigious, so I was wondering if you talk as much as you write.
- Daphne | 08/28/2009 @ 12:21
Don’t be bad-mouthing the ’70s, Mah Man. It was a great good time to be alive… and the livin’ was easy.

Apropos of not much… I DID, in fact, have a 28-inch waist back then. Still do, too. Eat your heart out. 🙂
- bpenni | 08/28/2009 @ 12:47
I’ve seen your pics Buck, you ain’t lying about being skinny. I want to come feed you.
- Daphne | 08/28/2009 @ 12:50
Did anyone but villains wear a three-piece suit?

You’re right, Buck, the 70s were OK. We didn’t know the decade would suck until after the fact. If only we felt that way now.
- chunt31854 | 08/28/2009 @ 14:06
Your volume of writing is stunningly prodigious, so I was wondering if you talk as much as you write.

Need one of two things: Alcohol, or an invite.

I have this irritating habit of “reading” the “market” for the spoken word. If the chatter is in high supply and low demand, and only the top four or five contenders will be allowed to say anything, I start going into “reading people” mode. That’s almost a Sun-Tzu kind of thing, making mental notes about vocabularies, facial expressions, hand gestures. Some folks get annoyed about this. Most of them forget I was ever there.

That’s only when I’m cold sober, though. So you’ll see me do this at parties a lot. I have this unusual rule about zero-exceptions in the drinking/driving thing, so if I did the driving, which is usually the case…I’ll be teetotalling. Which leads to the Sun-Tzu mode, and hey, there’s a lot to watch because when people are doing a lot of talking as a consequence of their imbibing, they’re generally pretty entertaining.

So if you want to sample my vocals, buy a round. Now you know.
- mkfreeberg | 08/28/2009 @ 14:22
You sound just like me, Morgan.

I’m a lot more quiet in person than my blog would suggest, unless I’m drinking or in the company of close friends. People watching is very entertaining, informative too.

I don’t drink and drive either, the consequences are too steep.

I’ll buy you a round or three on my back porch anytime you’re in town.
- Daphne | 08/28/2009 @ 14:31
…just to make sure all doubt is removed, he forces beautiful women to wear skimpy bathing suits.

Even when when the climate seemed a bit too…nippy!
- CaptDMO | 08/28/2009 @ 17:14
I’ll buy you a round or three on my back porch anytime you’re in town.

That’s you, Buck, Gerard, Andy…I should combine these all into one trip. What a vacation that will be! My gal is going to get sick and tired of watching me solve all the world’s problems, but it’d be worth it I for both of us, I think.

It was a great good time to be alive… and the livin’ was easy.

Some of us were just in the stage of puppy-love with our very first “acquaintances” in grade school. Knocking the panties off a delectable specimen with my mod furniture and awesome HiFi, wasn’t on the radar. In seventh grade, my idea of a “wild weekend” was hoping my Dad would slip into such a sound snoring stupor, that just before 1 a.m. I could click the channel to the forbidden fruit of “The Mister Bill Show” without the old man waking up and authoritatively intoning that he was watching the teevee and resting his eyes and why the hell wasn’t I in bed already. Which never worked of course…goddamn channel knob went KLUNK with every click, the sound echoing off the walls. I had to wait until that once in a blue moon when he and Mom went out on a real honest-to-God date. I still remember one time when Mr. Hand was saying “Bye bye!” just as the door opened. Hoo boy, did I ever catch it.

Yeah, I’ll just take your word for it on what the dating scene was like.
- mkfreeberg | 08/28/2009 @ 19:04
So you have four good friends who’d like the presence of your company, count yourself a fortunate man, Morgan.

Bring the gal, too. I expect we’d get along just fine.
- Daphne | 08/28/2009 @ 19:35
Too young to remember the 70’s, and not really sorry about it.

Double-digit inflation, drug use, the aftermath of Vietnam and the fallout, loss of American confidence in itself, long gas lines, ugly clothes, wimpy foreign policies, Soviet expansionism, weak and weasel presidents…

On the plus side, the dawn of the sci-fi era, and the music wasn’t all bad.

My memory pretty much starts around 1980, and that’s just fine with me. Wouldn’t have minded living through the 20’s or the 50’s…but I’d pass on the seventies.
- cylarz | 08/29/2009 @ 01:30
Too young to remember the 70’s, and not really sorry about it. Double-digit inflation, drug use, the aftermath of Vietnam and the fallout, loss of American confidence in itself, long gas lines, ugly clothes, wimpy foreign policies, Soviet expansionism, weak and weasel presidents…

We survived it, Cy. So if the decade hasn’t got anything else going for it, it gives us a message of hope whether it intended to or not. This is a message we desperately need now, because of all the problems with which we are coping…people have lost their tethering to reality and healthy decision-making, they think it’s trendy to lean hard-left, the nation is weakening in its sense of purpose, skyrocketing inflation and unemployment, our access to petroleum that fuels our society is in imminent jeopardy, the economy sucks…we had every single one of those problems in 1978-1980, and every single one of them was much worse than what’s going on now.

We had a hardcore left-wing regime installed. People got sick and tired of it and toppled it. That is irrefutable proof that there is a limit to what they’ll tolerate. You’ll notice liberals never, ever want to debate this part of things: If it’s the smarty-pants who first figure out we need more liberalism to get the world to respect us and make our economy hum along, and there’s some turning-point where the majority buys into this shit and whoever doesn’t go along is left in the dust for good, clinging to their guns and Bibles and crying in their beer that nobody respects them anymore…and that’s your Cinderalla “Happily Ever After” moment…how come this moves more in a circle than in a straight line? Why the need to figure out liberals are so much smarter than the rest of us — over and over and over again? Without the other guys having their own revolutions, there wouldn’t be any necessity of “taking the country back” in ’08, and ’92 and ’76 and ’60 and ’32 and ’12 and…and…and. Which is pretty meaningful, when having a revolution go your way, is a litmus test to your ideas being wonderful, virtuous and oh so smart.

So you have four good friends who’d like the presence of your company, count yourself a fortunate man, Morgan. Bring the gal, too. I expect we’d get along just fine.

MORE than four. I wouldn’t want anyone to read anything in to it that there are a lot of names I left out. And for that reason, I’ll take a pass on trying to put together an exhaustive list…

Let’s just say I agree with every single word, especially the part about being fortunate. And yes I think the two of you would get along famously.
- mkfreeberg | 08/29/2009 @ 04:45

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