You know, I can't think of anybody better to explain about social media than Paul Swansen. Paul is a journalist, traditional radio broadcast guy, tech guru and Internet radio entrepreneur -- and, appropriately enough, we became acquiainted through social media.
I first "met" Paul through Flickr because I enjoyed his photo documentation project for my hometown of Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I especially like "Gas in 80033," in which Paul keeps tabs of fluctuating prices at local pumps.
Turns out Paul also knows a former colleague of mine, Len Edgerly, whom I worked with some years back at the Casper Star-Tribune. It's a small social media world, after all.
Paul and I chatted about social media as I drove my rented GMC Canyon (above) from Wheat Ridge up to Idaho Springs. We also tracked down the location of the Steve Canyon statue up there.
I don't think the statue looks anything like Milton Caniff's famous comic strip character. And those buttons on his shirt are way too big.
I'm not entirely sure why I scanned it and have kept posting it every holiday season since.
Maybe I just like that way that a tiny artistic addition has taken what previously had been a pedestrian piece of clip art and transformed it into something worthy of Charles Addams.
For at least a month now, I've nearly lost bladder control whenever any one of several bobbing-head commercials comes on. I call them this because the universal body movement that indicates product satisfaction these days has become the bobbing head.
One prominent bobbing head promotes the Digital Message Reminder, which you get free when you order the Buxton Over the Shoulder Oragnizer. The DMR is about the size of a first-generation car remote lock. And boy, is this device handy! The video shows an apparently forgetful young woman using it to remember to buy milk or something at the supermarket.
And what does she do when that little recorder plays back the message and reminds her of her shopping obligation? She bobs her head! Yes, siree! Boing! Boing! Boing!
Similar head-bobbing goes on in the commercial for a device called Listen Up. This piece of technology is about the size of an iPod and allows you to hear sounds, voices and even gossip at a distance. The commercial shows a variety of goofy-looking folks whose lives are made all the better by this electronic wonder.
The lead doofus in the Listen Up commercial is a totally whipped guy whose wife bitches at him endlessly about the TV being too loud, the stereo being too loud, blah blah blah. This poor schelp probably hasn't gotten any since "B.J. and the Bear" was first-run.
Anyway, thanks to Listen Up, he's able to listen to TV in bed without his wife getting on his case. Other folks find Listen Up of value, too: Some non-studly dude at the gym learns that two semi-babes have the hots for him, moms at the playground monitor their snot-nosed spawn, a new resident in a suburban neighborhood eavesdrops on what the neighbors are saving about her, a gunless hunter who apparently puts game in a half-nelson hears his prey approaching, and (my favorite) an elderly lady already suffering from rigor mortis proudly clutches her Listen Up in church while her befuddled husband sits there not hearing a word and is most assuredly bound for hell.
There's head bobbing a-plenty during all of this.
Keep in mind I'm not criticizing these products. In fact, I could probably get into a lot of enjoyable mischief with the Listen Up. And I'd almost consider buying the Buxton as a ready bag for a small camera or two. Note that I said almost. It looks way too much like a purse for a guy to be caught dead carrying.
I first saw "Two-Lane Blacktop" during high school in its initial release back in 1971. I saw it at a drive-in theater -- probably the Lakeshore Drive-In in Edgewater, Colorado, although it could have been at the Wadsworth or West. (My parents always felt the Lakeshore attracted too many hoods, so we were discouraged from going there.)
Even with the threat of hoodlums aside, this road film made a big impression on me then. The plot of "Two-Lane Blacktop" is simple: Two cars race across the American heartland and, ultimately, we see that its characters are going absolutely nowhere. If anything, I guess this movie forces viewers to fill in the blanks.
Filling in those blanks proved easy for me. Our family moved several times during my adolescence and I was intimately familiar with highways and horizons. Once, in a grand but ultimately disastrous adventure, my dad moved us cross-country from Colorado to California, then to Alaska, and then back to Colorado. And we drove all the way. The Alaska Highway has been burned into my brain, along with memories of crossing Utah, Nevada and the vast northern expanses of the Yukon Territory -- when gasoline was sold in imperial gallons and we picked up a hitchhiker who, we later found out, was an escaped murderer being pursued by the RCMP.
Maybe this why when I headed out on my own and moved to Wyoming and, later, Arizona, I found myself looking forward to the long, lonely drives. In an odd way, I find myself enjoying the start of the trip and the midpoint more than the arrival. In fact, the arrival usually is a let-down. "Two-Lane Blacktop" has no let-down; its characters never reach their destinations and are still traveling when the movie ends.
Director Monte Hellman hadn't made a movie like much of the others out there at the time. I had managed to sneak into R-rated "Dirty Harry" at the Paramount Theater in downtown Denver and really appreciated what I perceived to be its sophisticated storytelling techniques. However, that Don Siegel film seemed hopelessly mainstream compared to "Two-Lane Blacktop," which frequently has been described as nothing less than existential.
I missed out on Anchor Bay's limited release of the film about 10 years ago, so the next time I saw "Two-Lane Blacktop" was last year, when it was available for something like six months as part of Comcast's free on-demand movie service. Although I must have watched it a dozen times and enjoyed it, there was still something missing, mostly because this anamorphic widescreen movie had been converted to the dreaded "full screen" pan-and-scan format.
Thankfully, the film is now available in its original format on a new Criterion Collection release. Take a look at the frame grab I've placed here. It shows Warren Oates, Laurie Bird, James Taylor and Dennis Wilson at a small-town gas station where the decision is made to race all the way to Washington, D.C., for pink slips. Just image cropping that image to 1.8 times its width; Hellman's thoughtful widescreen composition demands letterboxing at the 2.39:1 ratio.
The supplemental material on Criterion's two-disc set provides additional insight into the making of "Two-Lane Blacktop" and its creators' mindset. In one segment, Hellman's daughter drives the director and several of his film students from Los Angeles out to one of the remote, high-desert locations used in the film. In another, Hellman interviews James Taylor, who has apparently never watched the film he starred in almost 38 years ago.
There's no musical soundtrack to "Two-Lane Blacktop" in the usual sense; music in the movie is heard in the background from radios. That's why the best interview by far is with Kris Kristofferson, whose "Me and Bobby McGee" sets the tone for the film. Kristofferson's original version of his song plays in the background as James Taylor challenges Warren Oates to the cross-country race. The result is a haunting, almost melancholy yearning for the open road.
Interestingly enough, when I bought this Criterion version from Amazon, I was prompted to buy it as a package deal with "Vanishing Point" and "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry," two other car chase films of the 1970s. Both are entertaining, but fall far short of reaching the classic level of "Two-Lane Blacktop."
I was saddened by the news that Michael Crichton has died of cancer at age 66. Ever since I first read "The Andromeda Strain" that summer of the first manned moon landing, Crichton has been one of my favorite authors. Once my grandmother, an avid mystery reader, learned that I liked the book, she turned me on to the many thrillers Crichton had written under the pseudonym John Lange.
Later, in college, I was impressed by Crichton's "Westworld," a film he not only wrote, but directed. The plot had some significant holes (although not significant enough for Crichton to avoid recycling it for "Jurassic Park"), but my wannabe filmmaker friends and I gave the guy kudos for making the most of a relatively low budget.
Years later when I was copy desk chief at Chicago's Lerner Community Newspapers, I spent some time out in Los Angeles learning to operate the Information International Inc. electronic publishing system, a token-ring network that bridged the gap between cold type and desktop pagination. It did not escape me that Triple-I had done the groundbreaking robot-vision effects for "Westworld" -- although by the time I spent a week there, the company had abandoned its movie-industry efforts.
After I saw "Westworld," I fired off a letter to Crichton congratulating him on the movie and asking some goofy, fanboy questions. He was kind enough to reply.
Crichton wrote and directed some fine stuff. I'm sorry he's gone.
Pop culture guy Brendan Shultz is back -- with a solid suggestion that you check out Science Chicago, a yearlong celebration and promotion of science.
As Brendan points out, the United States graduates nearly 10 times as many lawyers and accountants than scientists and engineers. Is that a problem? Listen to Brendan's assessment and tell us what you think.
DOWNLOADS AND WEBSITES Brendan takes a look at Google's new Chrome browser, which promises to give Internet Explorer and Firefox a run for their money. He's especially impressed by Chrome's stability, its "incognito mode" that hides your browsing tracks and how the application displays recent history within tabs.
If you have some time on your hands and are handy with your hands, Brendan says you should take a look at the blockheaded pop-cultural icons at Cubeecraft. Imperial Stormtroopers, Indiana Jones -- even Mr. Stay Puft can emerge from your printer and grace your work area.
Rounding out our list of fun stuff is Fantastic Contraption, a Flash-based online game that makes players construct devices to deliver a pink ball into a pink square. The devices can become quite complex -- and you can see and learn from what others have built. One of Brendan's favorites is "Redneck Truck."
Warning: The Fantastic Contraption website loads with background music (at least on my Mac, it does), so if you're surfing in stealth mode at work, you might want to turn off your sound first.
From time to time, I like to check the play count on iTunes after syncing my iPhone. This frequently gives me an amazing insight into what songs I'm listening to the most. Here are the top 10 selections, as of today:
1. "Four Cornish Dances" - Malcolm Arnold; Andrew Penny and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra
2. "Main Title (Captain Nemo's Theme)" from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" soundtrack - Paul J. Smith
3. "Faleena (From El Paso)" - Marty Robbins
4. "You're the Reason" - Hank Williams III
5. "Iko Iko" (Power Drive Radio Mix) - Natasha England
6. "The Strawberry Roan" - Moe Bandy
7. "Ride to Fort Hays" from "Dances With Wolves" soundtrack - John Barry
8. "Strayaway Child" - David Childers & The Modern Don Juans
9. "You Can in Yucatan" - Desi Arnaz
10. "The Swing of Things" - Kent Rose
I particularly like the Desi Arnaz song, which has the following couplet: "You think that Adam had it nice? Why, all he had was Paradise."
Desktop snacking is the scourge of my efforts to diet. This is compounded by the easy availability of a cornucopia of piggy-boy dee-lites at the Walgreens across the street.
My latest discovery at the Walgreens is Burger King Ketchup & Fries, which is supposed to taste like french fries smothered in ketchup, I suppose. That's not exactly the taste that comes through, but I found myself eating half the bag.
So, I guess that means they're good.
While searching for other assessments of Burger King Ketchup & Fries, I found a great site devoted to snacks called Taquitos.net. They really liked this snack.
Technical note: I recorded the audio on my iPhone using a killer application called Recorder. What I really like now is that even when I don't have my Marantz recorder or Canon PowerShot with me, I can still create podcasts on the fly with my iPhone using Recorder for sound and iPhone's camera for the visual.
I was working late one night last week and wandered across the street to Walgreens and bought these treats from Dwight Yoakam's Baskersfield Biscuits line of frozen food.
The one on the left is Chicken Lickin's Buffalo Style Bites. The one on the right is Take 'Ems Macaroni Mouth Poppers -- sort of like macaroni and cheese in a Chicken McNuggets shell. Despite the box's requisite disclaimer of "serving suggestion," I mistakenly assumed that each product included a small container of dipping sauce. But neither did. And neither tasted very good to me, either.
A co-worker who sampled the stuff suggested that maybe it would have fared better if heated in a conventional oven.
Or maybe not. Check out Flickr photos and discussions of other ways to chow down on Dwight here and here and here and here and here and the group Celebrity Products.
Slide rules, calculators and the new iPhone. I'm thinking about these things right now.
It all started because I needed to buy a new scrubber sponge. I'd grabbed the first sponge at hand the other day when more than a few areas of the bathroom needed some attention.
And then I tossed that sponge back into the kitchen sink. Last night, I stood there merrily scrubbing plates when I realized, damn, this is the same sponge that last night had biblical knowledge of the toilet rim.
The fascinating website Hidden Dangers Revealed has this to say about kitchen sponges and dishrags:
Some sponges have enough bacteria to cause serious gastro-intestinal distress. A bacteria filled dishrag used to dry dishes could actually be transmitting a host of bacteria to the dry dishes, which could make you sick the next time you use them.
Holy moly, huh? I can't begin to imagine what they'd say about using a toilet sponge to scrub pizza off your plates.
So, I set out this afternoon to buy a new sponge. First stop: The Ace Hardware store near Milwaukee and Lawrence avenues about two blocks from Chez ChicagoScope. To my chagrin, the store is closed -- and, apparently, has been for several months. I guess I never managed to figure this out because displays remain in the front windows and the place is still filled with inventory.
A major clue should have been the signs in the windows offering "space for lease," but I assumed that, like the Foot Locker situation that I'll get to in just a moment, that there was unused square footage that an independent locksmith or such might use.
Well, duh.
This building used to house the Jefferson Park Woolworth's, and ever since it shut down about 10 years ago, the space has been cursed. First, the space became a Foot Locker store, probably because Foot Locker is the surviving Woolworth vestige. Trouble is, the store always looked pathetic because they only utilized about a third of the available space. As a result, it gave the impression of a desperate retailer on its last legs, which isn't the case with Foot Locker at all, as the the operation is quite successful in other locations.
Then, a couple of years ago, Foot Locker pulled out and Ace Hardware moved in. I had high hopes when this happened, since I hoped that it signaled a revitalization of the entire Jefferson Park commercial district. But that didn't happen.
So, I walked up the street a block and bought the sponge at the CVS drugstore. By the way, there are two CVS drugstores within two blocks of my place. I can't imagine how this makes any market sense, but CVS has always done things that I can't comprehend. Not the least of these is the sucky design of their checkout stations.
Instead of designing their stores with separate checkout lanes, CVS puts all of their clerks behind one central counter at the front of the store. This might be OK if customers were steered into queues like at airline checkins or banks, but CVS actively discourages this by placing impulse-purchase merchandise at the checkout area -- including most candy. This only encourages jerks to jump ahead in line.
I've complained about this to several CVS managers and they confirm that the stores' checkout procedure is customers' No. 1 beef and they can't do anything about it.
But back to the sponge saga. To get to the housewares aisle at CVS, I had to walk past office supplies, and I paused to look at a display of electronic calculators. Most were made by Casio, and even the most expensive scientific model cost less than $20. This was sure a change from when I was in high school. In those distant times, you still wielded a slide rule unless you were one of the few kids whose family was wealthy enough to pop for one of the new electronic calculators -- which cost several hundred dollars at the time.
I had a pretty good slide rule, though. Dad drove me over to the University of Colorado at Denver's bookstore, where he bought me a circular slide rule. I was disappointed because it didn't look much like a "real" slide rule. My definition of a real slide rule, of course, was one of those higher-end Pickett models resplendent in bright yellow lacquer.
But the circular slide rule did have a major advantage: It didn't get knocked out of alignment if dropped, a big consideration during tests in math-heavy PSSC Physics. (This was the only class in which I ever earned an "F" -- but that's another story.)
I used my little circular slide rule for 20 years almost daily in my job. I didn't calculate engineering projects or check calculus results or anything like that. I simply used it to specify enlargement or reduction percentages for photos and graphics at newspapers.
Today, I perform such calculations within Photoshop or InDesign, or on the iPhone's nifty calculator. But I still have that circular slide rule tucked away in a closet somewhere around here. I wonder if I still know to use it.
I also wonder whether I managed to smear feces onto the plates used for last night's dinner -- and whether I'm going come down with food poisoning. I'll keep you posted.
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About Me
I'm Leigh Hanlon, a writer and photographer in Chicago. Before moving to the Windy City, I worked at daily and weekly newspapers in Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. (Photo by Marty Larkin)
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I first "met" Paul through Flickr because I enjoyed his photo documentation project for my hometown of Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I especially like "
I was handed this little gem of a promo postcard one night several years back while shooting pictures at 
For at least a month now, I've nearly lost bladder control whenever any one of several bobbing-head commercials comes on. I call them this because the universal body movement that indicates product satisfaction these days has become the bobbing head.
Later, in college, I was impressed by Crichton's "
Pop culture guy Brendan Shultz is back -- with a solid suggestion that you check out 
If you have some time on your hands and are handy with your hands, Brendan says you should take a look at the blockheaded pop-cultural icons at 
Slide rules, calculators and the new iPhone. I'm thinking about these things right now.
