Objets D’Obsolete

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Each of the three cars I have owned … hold on, was it three? Let’s count.

My first car exploded into a fireball and melted into a big mound of car before my eyes precisely 23 hours after its long-standing overheating issue had been repaired. Making so many repair shop visits about this concern had been annoying, but some quick fixes are neither. The next car was also prone to overheating—steam, not flame, in this case—and I perpetually thought it was ten minutes from an explosion as well. When one has owned a car that one watched meet its end via self-immolation, one develops a sensitivity to over-heating. PTSD, even. But I saw that car on the roads of my town for a full five years after I sold it. My last car was repossessed because I was not an adult back then, and banks like doing business with adults. So, yes, three cars.

The tools of life and I do not have a functional working agreement.
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I’ve Always Depended on …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Angry, barking angry. “Ass-hat angry,” neither of my grandfathers would have called it, because neither of my grandfathers ever said “ass-hat.” The kind of angry that both of my departed grandfathers in the hereafter would have been forced to come up with pretend back-country colloquialisms to describe their grandson, also known as me. That frustrated and angry.

The story has a happy ending, of course. And the anger departed the moment it was expressed at the anonymous Newark-ian who knocked me over. It was a night in which Jen and I discovered that there are no short-cuts on the path to meeting good people.
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TV Land is Not Bree Newsome

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am offended that I have to defend “The Dukes of Hazzard,” a show I was not a fan of, but this is where the purveyors of popular culture have brought us. Not “where we have been brought,” but where they have decided to bring us.

Two blogs broke the news today that TV Land, a channel dedicated to TV nostalgia, has silently pulled the late-’70s comedy from its line up. “TV Classics ‘R’ Us” published a piece, and then Will McKinley’s great website, “cinematically insane,” followed up on this news, and he requested an official comment from the nostalgia channel. A representative from TV Land confirmed to him that the program had been deleted but gave no elaboration. (Article: “TV Land Pulls ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.'”)
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