You’ll Die Laughing…Or Not
What was it about these trading cards that made them so irresistible?
I grew up calling them Monster Cards, although that is merely a generic description. Collectors often refer to them as You'll Die Laughing cards. That is also incorrect. For many years, the proper name for this bizarre series eluded me, as I had discarded the colorful wax paper pack wrappers shortly after every purchase, and I was only five at the time. In fact, the fabled Topps collectibles were marketed as Creature Feature in 1973 with an initial run of 62 trading cards, followed shortly thereafter with a second series of 66. The images on those cards are still familiar to me all these years later.
The Creature Feature gimmick was as elementary as its target demographic. Black and white stills from old Universal Pictures horror films were given ridiculous dialogue captions. The reverse, printed in purple ink on gray card stock, featured a fanciful illustration of jovial monsters gathered around a tombstone, upon which was inscribed a terribly corny joke. Despite the heading You'll Die Laughing, it's unlikely that the lame attempts at humor provoked so much as a mild snort, let alone a lethal guffaw.
A Strange Case
105? There must be some significance to that combination...
It's been ten years since I left the business world for a career in education. A decade is an apt interval for reflection, for that is precisely how long I spent in the private sector. As a fresh college graduate in the spring of 1990, I turned my part-time job with a small records management company into a sustaining occupation. Eventually I was given a salary and entrusted with running the micrographics department. If the notion of storing data on microfilm seems quaint today, the inevitability of a digital future was obvious even then. By the end of the nineties, it was long past due to move on.
Although few mementos remain from that period of my life, I recently exhumed the most substantial relic of my business days: a briefcase. It was resting in the corner of my basement underneath a six-disc CD player, a pair of plastic aquariums, a slim wooden case containing a decorative carving knife, and an assortment of small items that accumulated there during the latest attempt at organization. After carefully removing the precariously balanced upper archaeological layer, I was able to retrieve this artifact from my past in order to examine it closely.
Welcome Back, My Friends (Again)
If at first you don't succeed...
Fans of Keith Emerson and Greg Lake can be forgiven for being a little nervous this past Wednesday when an announced 7:30 showtime came and went with no sight of the famous prog rockers. Sure, it's not unusual at all for rock concerts to start quite late, but those of us squirming restlessly in our seats had been through this once before. As previously documented, the Emerson/Lake tour had been set to debut in Cleveland on April 1, but the show was abruptly called off at the last second to the consternation of a stunned audience. The next two dates were canceled as well, and sheepish statements were issued from the boys that vaguely attributed the mishap to unresolved technical issues. When at last the tour started with a successful date in Annapolis, the next evening's show in Alexandria was canceled due to laryngitis. Finally the ball got rolling, and our heroes managed to pull of a dozen consecutive performances without incident. Ticketholders from previously canceled shows were assuaged with rescheduled dates. Then, on what would have been the duo's thirteenth concert in a row on April 28, Lake's illness forced a cancellation at Colorado Springs. Before returning to Cleveland, the Emerson/Lake tour continued with a trio of Texas shows. So, given the tour's 79% success rate, we weren't about to get too excited until we saw the whites of their English eyes.
The minutes passed by, dry ice swirled under the lighting rig, a bottle of water was set in place for Mr. Lake -- all of the things that had happened last time at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium. As I began to experience an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu and reassured myself that they surely would not cancel a second time, the noticeably thinner audience was getting restless. My front-row seat at center stage was flanked by three empty seats to my left and three empty seats to my right. Even some of the people in the VIP orchestra pit seating had apparently taken refunds rather than return. Someone called out from behind me, "We've waited a month!" Then, just a couple minutes shy of eight o'clock, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake took the stage, and all was forgiven.
Cheap Thrills
Bring back these two wonderfully corny attractions, and I'll make a beeline for Sandusky.
Amusement park season is arriving soon in Ohio, and I am less than excited. The perennial allure of Cedar Point and Kings Island, which bookend our stoically Midwestern state to the north and south like a pair of Mad magazines bracketing a law library, will surely attract the usual stream of thrill seekers and families in search of a summer diversion. Local media will carry the customary publicity puffery touting the heights and speeds of each park's marquee roller coasters, and we shall be further enticed by breathless promises of all that is NEW for 2010! I don't begrudge anyone the pleasure of giddy anticipation, but I cannot muster much enthusiasm.
It wasn't always this way. There was a time when I looked forward to a day at either of our big amusement parks with the same measure of excitement that was provoked by the imminence of my birthday or the arrival of Christmas. Actually, now that I think about it, that remains the case today, as I no longer get worked up about my birthday or Christmas. But there was a time - and I'm sure you can accurately identify it - when all three of these events represented the pinnacle of fun and enjoyment.
Circus Peanut Paradox
Fear not, my peanut-sensitive friends, for these faux goobers are but textured marshmallows.
I grew up ingesting just about any variety of candy I encountered. With a preference for chocolate and a fond appreciation of sugary sweetness, there was little that did not meet my approval. I consumed more than my fair share of all the venerable brands, proven classics like Hershey bars, M&M's, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Nestle Crunch, Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, and that great American add-an-ingredient trio of Three Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I indulged in Marathon bars and mint chocolate Royals, candy that would charm a generation before mysteriously disappearing forever. And I was a sucker for novelty, accumulating plenty of those plastic coffins containing interlocking bone candy and once savoring a wedge of waffle-shaped gum that came with its own packet of maple syrup.
There was an entirely different class of candy that I ate as well, and it included all of the time-honored confections that had been enjoyed by so many generations that they transcended the names of their many manufacturers. Lemon drops, root beer barrels, cinnamon imperials (commonly branded as Red Hots), licorice, hard candy sticks, wax bottles filled with colored liquid, French burnt peanuts, Boston baked beans - I ate them all and loved it. But then there were circus peanuts, the oversize orange marshmallows with rows of indentations suggesting the texture of a peanut shell. With them my palate encountered a rare displeasure. In fact, I was outright disgusted by them, so much so that seriously contemplating a bag of circus peanuts could trigger a gag reflex. The rest of the candy universe was tolerable, but these were not. Why?
Come Inside, The Show’s About To Start…
...guaranteed to blow your head apart...rest assured you'll get your money's worth...
Last night's Lakewood, Ohio concert by Keith Emerson and Greg Lake was the stuff of dreams. I should know, for as a longtime fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the prog-rock trio has literally appeared in my somnambulistic scenarios no less than three times. In one ridiculous dream from years ago, they arrived at my house for the purpose of playing a game of Scrabble on my deluxe, $500, Franklin Mint Collector's Edition board. In another, I sat on a gym floor and watched them perform to hardly anyone from mere feet away. More recently, I dreamt that I stumbled across ELP playing an outdoor set in a park, and I simply ambled up to the front of the stage. I suppose hours and hours of listening to Brain Salad Surgery and Tarkus will do that to the sleeping mind.
So when I heard that two-thirds of my favorite band were due to appear in a high school auditorium near Cleveland to kick off an unprecedented series of intimate, semi-unplugged shows, I was intrigued. It sounded like something I would dream. I checked the date and was surprised to find that it coincided with the very beginning of my Spring Break; I could conceivably head up north after school and catch the show. Then, when I got in on a fan club presale and purchased a single ticket, I was definitely excited. I would be sitting in the middle of the first row. Like my actual ELP dreams, this reality was strange, wonderful, and maybe too good to be true.
Great Albums: Jesus Christ Superstar
An iconic cover and a menacing overture filled my young mind with fear.
If I were to choose a favorite decade of recorded music, I would pick the incredibly fertile ten years from 1965 through 1974. It was the golden era of unrestrained, long-form, innovative rock music, when an unprecedented tolerance for experimentation allowed talented artists to create some remarkable records that took full advantage of the latest advances in electronic instruments and multitrack recording. The new technology enabled a production style that reproduced each instrument clearly and distinctly, offering discriminating listeners the opportunity to focus their attention on any one of many different elements every time a platter was spun. I love the sound of the albums that were made during those years.
One of the best of the bunch was Jesus Christ Superstar, which was released by Decca Records in October of 1970. For me, it represents the closest thing to perfection in each of the three areas that contribute to a great album: writing, production, and performance. Unsurpassed by its subsequent incarnations as well as the later work of its creators, it has transcended the label of "rock opera" to become one of the defining recordings of its time.
The Annotated Edward Cramer
An early influence?
When children express their boundless imagination in writing, the results can be bizarre. I am regularly reminded of this as a teacher of elementary-age students. It is my privilege to observe their literary development at a formative stage, when their novice attempts to emulate various styles sometimes merge with their limited background knowledge to surreal and unintentionally humorous effect.
What I try to remember when evaluating student narratives is how incredibly strange my own attempts at storytelling were at that age. As unusual as some of the student work I've encountered has been, none of it has surpassed some of my juvenile efforts in their breadth and depth of sheer weirdness. Take, for example, The Glass Eye, a macabre stab at humor that I wrote circa second or third grade. Its off-kilter flavor is apparent even in its byline, as I attributed the work to Edward Cramer.
Take Me To Your Liter
Let's see: 1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters, so 1 centimeter equals...hmm...
Whatever happened to that great push to fully implement the metric system of measurement in the United States? I was only an elementary school student in the Seventies, yet I was not immune to the controversy surrounding some contemporary educational issues. There was the backlash against New Math, for example, as parents questioned the relevance of learning abstract mathematical concepts to the computational competency of their children. The use of phonics instruction still annoyed those who remembered becoming perfectly good readers without repeatedly breaking down words into their phonetic components. I was dimly aware of these debates, but the hot issue that really got my attention was the impending rise and dominance of the metric system.
As a child, this major societal shift was presented to me as an inevitability, and I perceived a menacing future. There would be no use resisting, it was implied. It wouldn't matter if you expressed a preference for the customary system or voiced an objection. Well, you better learn to like it, because it's coming! By the time we were adults, we could expect grocery store shelves filled with canned goods packaged by the gram, gas stations selling liters of gas, and car speedometers indicating kilometers per hour. I was apprehensive. Just the sight of the fraction 5/9 in the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion formula made me uneasy.
Unfortunately, performing cumbersome system conversions seemed to be the extent of the educational effort to make the metric system relevant to our everyday lives. No wonder so many of us developed a prejudice against a measurement method that is preferred by nearly everyone else in the world.
Geese Is The Word
The local supermarket where I often buy gas has apparently taken measures to rid their premises of Canada geese. The rectangular retention pond that drains the parking lot and provides a buffer zone from an adjacent four-lane road is now criss-crossed with a matrix of fine netting. From the perspective of a goose, the unsightly, white lattice must be one giant pain in the bill.
Imagine trying to land in this once-familiar pond. Skim the surface too closely and you're suddenly somersaulting into the drink. Manage a graceful touchdown and you're floating upon an aquatic cell with an area of just several square yards. Want to float around in the cell next door? Time to fly again. Thinking about taking the goslings for a swim? Might as well forget it. There's nothing dangerous about your former haven, but like rush-hour traffic, it sure is frustrating trying to get around.
I was disheartened to discover the nets during a recent fill-up, not due to any concerns over animal welfare, but simply because I love geese. They are far and away my favorite bird.