Ugh and Crap
Posted on December 14, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 19 Comments
Woke up past 10:30, could barely drag my ass out of bed, and apparently a flock of seagulls dumped a load in the back of my throat. Yup, I’m sick.
Now I have to catch up with a whole bunch of stuff. Be back later. In the meantime, enjoy this other Flock of Seagulls. They did nothing in my throat this morning, thank God:
Man, it’s amazing what an early 80s band could do with some NASA stock photography, a laser, and a cast-off Dr. Who set.
wow, i was just listening to this song on my way in to work this morning! hope you feel better john, you need to keep working so we can keep reading!
Well, you know. Other people write stuff too.
You know, I think that might be the set from that Lazer Tag commercial.
Well “stuff” yea, but who wants “stuff” when you’ve had ambrosia?
(nothing like gratuitous suck up to take your mind off of seagull jetsam in your head)
kero aka kevin makes a great point, who wants to ready junk when we could be reading new work from you! i’m gonna go order my leather-bound copy of the sagan diaries now and get my myself immortalized in the CDF…
sorry, “read” junk, not “ready” junk. dyslexia’s acting up again.
Must stop the hair. Hey, kid, you’re gonna put somebody’s eye out with that.
I was a Production Assistant on this one:
Something like 22 hours to shoot it. And the milk on the drums shot seemed truly inspired at the time.
Then maybe you can answer a question that I’ve waited decades to have answered, Nathan:
Can Peter Wolf actually walk like a normal person? Or does he, like, spin and move laterally all the time? I mean, I’m sure he can walk normally. But it occurs to me that I’ve never actually seen him do it. Only ever do that dance thing of his.
As I recall, when not spinning and crabbing to the left, he mostly sat… either slouched back or with his head in his hands. It was a looooong day.
THis is one of my favorite FOS songs. This one was a constant element on my walkman back in the day.
Give John a break. The man needs rest. I suggest you start reading the Wheel of Time from the beginning. Or hell, break open some Camus in the native French. That’ll keep you busy for at least a couple of weeks.
Hope you feel better John.
Give John a break. The man needs rest. I suggest you start reading the Wheel of Time from the beginning. Or hell, break open some Camus in the native French. That’ll keep you busy for at least a couple of weeks.
Thomas Pynchon has a new novel out.
Feel better, John.
FoS was a nice choice today. I haven’t heard this song in years and I discovered that I still enjoy it. (Hair wise, I think the bird coiffure still looks better than a mullet…but maybe that’s just PTSD: I never had the seagull style, but I did sport a mullet for a year or so (shudder).)
Nathan,
I almost thought you were a PA on this particular video. In which case I would have bought you a basket of minimuffins and some whiskey.
That you worked on Centerfold is pretty damn cool. But FOS was more my deal back in the day.
The Brainzeeter said,
I almost thought you were a PA on this particular video. In which case I would have bought you a basket of minimuffins and some whiskey.
Which,What,Huh?
(But I do enjoy minimuffins and whiskey. Jameson’s please.)
That is not a hairstyle or a hairdo.
That there’s a BBC Space Combover. Dude’s as bald as a rock.
I hope you feel better soon, John.
I was in college when Flock of Seagulls became popular — we called them “Flock of Shitheads.” In my freshman and sophomore years, we listened to a lot of stuff from the late 60s and early 70s, and also a lot of southern Rock. Then, when we came back to school the next fall, the entire world had gone New Wave. I never really recovered my interest in pop music after that, and my record cassette CD MP3 collection is still kind of stuck in the 70s and very early 80s.
On the other hand, that J.Geils song totally rocked, and the video, well, it took me back and put a smile on my face. The milk-in-the-drum thing is clever, and who cares that Ernie Kovacs did it in the 50s? — I hadn’t seen or heard of Kovacs when I saw that “Centerfold” video.
VH-1 had a thing on recently: 100 top songs of the 80s. Great fun, and I urge you to catch it if you can. The commentary was, much of the time, pretty clever, although some of the time I wished they’d just shut up and play the whole song.
Sympathies, John, just getting over some kind of mucus inducing funk myself.
I grew up in the 60’s and early 70’s and was raised on Rock and Roll, with maybe a little Vietnam era protest Rock thrown in here and there. I think one kid in my neighborhood had cable and I distinctly remember watching the MTV debut (The Buggles: Video Killed the Radio Star) thinking WTF?! New Wave was just bizarre to me, like aliens from the Farside cartoon landed in the cornfield, even worse than disco. Petty good for a laugh now though (in fact I just watched VKTS on YouTube, and it’s hysterical, also Radio by Men Without Hats). I’m with Mitch above though on the J. Geils video, hot girls in flimsy negligee dancing in a high school classroom – now that’s when MTV actually got interesting. The milk on the drum thing, well, yeah I guess it’s okay, I mean in a quaint non-GCI sort of way… Look here, kids, in the old days we didn’t have computerized special effects, and we had to watch music videos on the living room TV WITH OUR FOLKS IN THE ROOM ‘cause our phones couldn’t show video…and girls were all clones of Farrah Fawcett Majors (that’s right, Majors, that’s just how old I am).
In the future, phones will have no feet and they’ll walk uphill in the snow both ways, and be grateful.