mad dogs and servicemen

The memorable theme song of M*A*S*H* became a little more haunting to me when I learnt awhile back that it has lyrics and the song itself is “Called Suicide is Painless.” One could imagine droning along to the tune of that dirge.
A bit of trivia even more intriguing about the score came courtesy of Dr. Caligari’s daily amalgams of history: celebrating the premiere of the Academy Award winning film this week in 1970, it was pointed out that the composer of the theme, the son of the virtuoso director, Robert Altman—fourteen years old at the time, has earned nearly three times what the director was paid for the movie, making over two million dollars in royalties after the series based on the film was launched. Work is more of a soap opera but can at times feel like the dark comedy with the jingoism and ingratiating ironies. Incorporating the same signature tune, the show had a run of eleven years and I still remember when all the neighbours came over to watch the series finale and how emotional everyone got when saying goodbye, farewell and amen.

desquamate or they’re tearing all the factories doiwn

I noticed that my athletic, sporty body-wash boasts “aroma” and an equally invigorating mystery substance called allantoin—which was new to me but apparently as pervasive as any of our daily chemical compounds. Like other products containing urea (which strikes me as a grave incongruity for skin-care but there you go), the manufactured version aims to replicate the application of an herbal ointment—a virtual panacea known as the comphrey plant.
The wildflowers (Beinwell oder Walluwurz and are related to forget-me-nots) have a long and established history of medical applications as an anti-inflammatory and exfoliating agent. Molecularly, the distilled allantoin used in industrial applications is identical to what comphrey yields but like with any cosmetic pandering, the metabolic shortcut is co-opted and tamed in the sanitary world first to make one’s skin insensitive to irritating ingredients that are part of the industrial process and to encourage peeling way of old skin (it’s called desquamation, descaling a fish) so one feels soft and supple. I suppose that beauty is not for the squeamish.

flight deck

Forty years ago this week, the maiden voyages of the sleek, supersonic jet liner, Concorde a joint Franco-British collaboration, took place, continuing for twenty-seven years before the fleet was retired. The combination of low fuel prices and industries still slowly being decommissioned as Europe transitioned into its Cold War identity made the time just right for this sort of venture—which sounds like fun and familiar times, four decades on.
The decision to ground the planes and put them on almost taxidermical display so one can wonder and be nostalgic over having never been whisked across the ocean at twice the speed of sound always strikes me as an affront to progress—no matter how elite and exclusive that the manifest tended to be, and was driven in part to the 9/11 Terror Attacks that drained all the romance out of jet-setting and also to the development of higher capacity freighters to shuttle more and more passengers to their destinations, teethed on high-overhead and unchecked competition. Maybe it’s even more retrograde to try to recapture past accomplish, though the technical achievement (at least for something that is commercially available) was never repeated, and though although new break-through in æro-space but it would behove one to remember that cruise-goers (or soldiers’ of fortune) are not the heroes that astronauts are, and while space-tourism might be driven by individual investment and could very well lead to innovations in efficiency, that enterprise—purely a commercial venture—also strikes me as giving up the ghost. Like for Concorde, there’s no separate flag-ship and we’re all just classed in different ways—through cordons and charters that might make the flying experience marginally less traumatic for a few but generally, democratically bad all around. What do you think? Can you believe it’s been forty years since the inaugural flight?

damn it, janet

Way back with the elevation of US president-elect Reagan—a seismic shift that really marked the change in the country’s political landscape with a new partisan permanency that few could see as lasting, in the late fall of 1980, a satirical comedy programme lampooned the whole frightening opera with an extended sketch—a spoof within a spoof, called the “Ronnie Horror Picture Show.” Vice-President George H.W. Bush also makes an appearance as man-servant Riff-Raff. The production is fraught with clever references and well-staged musical numbers, and one can watch the late-night double-feature at the link in its entirety. Be sure to visit some of Dangerous Minds’ other brilliant vignettes as well.  Someone ought to adapt this for today’s ideological battlefield.

mulder and scully

Although Wired!’s sneak preview of the return of the X-Files only mentions the changing face of technology in its headline (“and now it has smartphones”), I am grateful that at least one other person is recalling the state of connectivity at that time. Admittedly, I was a late-adopter and really only had a cellular phone for emergency purposes, but back in college (when the original syndicate had its run) I can’t remember anyone having a mobile phone, much less using them ubiquitously and gratuitously.
The dormitories weren’t wired for landlines and we had a sheltered computer lab for word-processing and for those cognoscenti, to access the World-Wide Web. One day, queuing up at the cafeteria, I remember having to awkwardly juggle my tray to try to answer an incoming call and holding up the line behind me. The lunch-lady told me to take my time, “It’s alright—X-File.” I wonder if the show helped to introduce and normalise the way we use the wireless today—especially given that, for people of a certain age bracket, our only other formative exposure came with pagers—in MTV’s The Real World—which are not for presumptive drug-dealers. The cultural influence, spin-offs and perhaps distrust certainly cannot be underestimated.