Herculodge

World's Sexiest Radio Ever?

The Eton Corporation’s website announces that “coming soon” will be the Eton Sound 100, an AM/FM tabletop clock radio with memory presets. Available in seven colors, it's being marketed as a “Retro Style” radio. The price has not been announced but I guess it will be in the $100-150 range. More photos are available from the recent Eton display at a Nevada convention. I believe it’s made by the highly-reputed Tecsun for Eton, so it should be a strong performer.

The Compulsion to Poke at Our Chancre Sores

Some of us suffer from the compulsion to fiendishly poke into our chancre sores until tears pour out of our eyes.  Replaying our past failures is a lot like that.  Endlessly hashing over our squandered opportunities, we torture ourselves with fantasies of how glorious it would have been had we only seized what was rightfully ours. In many ways, Jay Gatsby’s enduring chancre sore is his refusal to let go of his sweetheart Daisy Buchanan. He inflates his lost love into a larger-than-life myth when she is hardly deserving of such adulation. In turn, he attempts to make himself into the myth of the rich business man,  The Great Gatsby,  in order to impress her. He then lures her into his world with all sorts of parties in which he invites the town’s most popular cliques. It all sounds so very high school. In the end, Gatsby’s adolescent aggrandizement kills him and the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway considers how helplessly immature we are, largely because we seem so incapable of learning from our past mistakes: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Pulling us “back ceaselessly into the past” of our high school days is The Myth of Squandered Opportunity, which compels us to obsess over our romantic failings and wonder how much pleasure we could have enjoyed had we only seized the opportunities that presented themselves to us. For example, I know three men who many years ago were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van of a pale orange color. Standing outside of the van were four giddy, nubile, beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.” Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still giddy from a Grateful Dead concert and they greeted their rescuers by waving their tie-dye bikinis and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores. My three mechanically-adroit friends stopped with an exclamatory screech, helped cool off the wood nymphs’  steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women were grateful for my friends’ help and invited the eager teenagers to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, the men told me many years later, earthy women who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire. But my naïve friends had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer,  the three apologetic teens rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.

Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they abandon these luscious ladies in order to see some stupid, low-scoring baseball contest. Even ten years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the hippy goddesses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, they’re still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that titillate their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those Bacchanalian sylphs. Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, they can not live in the present and as such they treat their girlfriends, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard.

I suspect most of us are trapped in a time warp, unwilling to let go of a past “glory” that never really existed. How easier—and far more dangerous—to live inside our delusions than to tackle reality every day. I’m sorry to say but many of us are hard-wired to be eternally miserable, unable to live in the here and now because our minds and souls remain fixated on some mythical hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of reach. 

Chest-Thumping Monsters Preserved in the Formaldehyde of Their Own Arrested Development

What becomes of heavy metal rockers as they try to assert their hypermasculine posturing well into middle-age? The answer is clearly chronicled in the documentary  Metallica: Some Kind of Monster in which we are afforded a close look at the tensions and anxieties of the world’s most successful heavy metal band. Having sold more than 90 million albums since 1981, packing more stadiums in the 1990s than any other rockers, Metallica has been the king of gonad-strutting metal rock for over twenty years. But the  band mates’ “marriage” is strained under the weight of personality clashes, delusions of grandeur, spite, paranoia, self-pity, burnout, alcoholism, and mid-life identity crises as they try to make a comeback album titled St. Anger.

Their identity crisis is somewhat predictable. Think about being in your forties, being married with children, going to your kids’ open house, managing your tax shelter annuities and going in for regular colonoscopies, and then trying to reconcile all these adult responsibilities with your rock stage persona: A grizzly rocker going on stage night after night and trying to muster conviction as you thump your chest, shake your fist, and sing an anthem to male aggression, the raging fire inside your tumescent loins, defiance against authority, feelings of being persecuted, and the need to find, through rock and roll, solace in a world that has never understood you. The songs’ themes and lyrics resemble the kind of simple-rhyme “poetry” written by high school loners whose musings are confiscated by their teachers and then sent to the campus counselor who then puts the poems in their “Columbine File.” 

It is only natural that these middle-age rockers are strained by the incompatibility of their middle-age life with their adolescent rock personas,  but believing that the two worlds can be reconciled, Metallica hires, at a cost of 40 thousand a month, a “performance-enhancement coach,” Phil Towle. At sixty-five years of age and wearing Bill Cosby sweaters, Towle, a former psychotherapist, tries to settle the band members’ testy egos and depression with cloying, pretentious therapy speak and, from the touchy-feely narcissistic bromides and clichés uttered from the mouths of these middle-aged heavy metal rockers, we learn that Towle has insidiously gotten inside their heads. The Metallica band members cannot utter a sentence without beginning with the words, “I feel.” Everything is a “process.” Everyone has “boundaries.” They work on their “creative wave length,” “opening doors,” getting into their “stream of consciousness.” Towle finds it necessary to draft the band’s Mission Statement, which talks about their “collective journeys” and the true meaning of “family born of conflict and pain” and how they must all be “healers” who find “ultimate togetherness.” At one point as the band is snarling at each other and their new project is spiraling downward, Towle says, without irony, that they are the “co-producers of the process of slipping off the planet.” At another point he supervises a therapy session between the band and ex-member Dave Mustaine who, twenty years earlier, was kicked out for alcohol abuse, and has never forgiven them. Unable to see the role of his own alcoholism and his own reckless irresponsibility as the reason for his being ousted, Mustaine, who has enjoyed huge success in the heavy metal band Megadeath, is still bereaved. “Am I happy being number two?” he says to them, complaining that the millions he’s made with Megadeath is an insult compared to the many millions he should have made by being in the number-one band. He cannot let go. Over and over, he says, “What have I been through?”

We’re not sure how helpful Towne is in establishing any reconciliation between Mustaine and Metallica. But he does seem to be an able peace-maker between the band members, and their relative lack of strife allows them to get enough songs finished for their album. As they get closer to finishing St. Anger, however, they begin to question their dependence on Towle. Perhaps his intrusive presence is creating more problems than it is solving. But the cunning therapist finds a way to be “needed.” He has a way of making them feel guilty and ashamed every time they broach the subject of no longer needing his services and no matter how resolved they were to fire him, their attempts always fail. In fact, we get the impression that Towne will never leave Metallica whom, he has convinced, will need his services for all eternity. After all, without him, the great father figure, they are helpless children, prone to the excesses and indulgences of adolescence that could at any time push them over the edge. So what we have, then, is the Myth of Rock and Roll—machismo bluster as a thin veil over the fear of having never grown up. But Daddy Towne is there, for 40 thousand a month, to keep those fears at bay.

Do Android Sheep Dream of Lost Characters?

Fans of the ABC smash hit Lost have speculated that the island of castaways, survivors of a jet plane crash, are being experimented on by diabolical scientists. But we can infer from a recent article in the Los Angeles Times that in fact the fans of Lost are the subjects of a highly elaborate research project in which a team of scientists posing as television producers have created a highly addictive television show which generates hundreds upon hundreds of unofficial websites in which viewers speculate about thousands of possible scenarios including the possibility that the show is in many ways a retelling of Flann O'Brien's cult novel   The Third Policeman.

But the experiment is even more invasive and is in fact raising many ethical questions in the scientific community. For it has been learned that the fans’ addiction has now entered a more virulent stage in which the scientists have created an “all-encompassing experience” which will involve “other platforms,” not the least of which are clues embedded in commercials, jigsaw puzzles, the Internet, mythology, puzzle solving, the deciphering of anagrams, cryptic languages, enigmatic maps, a derivative novel. There will even be a separate but related story, with parallels to Lost, to follow, all part of “The Lost Experience.” And all being kept secret for the time being.

It has come to our attention that the scientists have many objectives, many of which they will not disclose in order to “maintain the integrity of the experiment.” But one objective that is self-evident is for them to see if Lost fans, after their long hiatus from reality, can integrate back into society, hold a job, thrive in a healthy relationship, etc.

Of course, other scientists, jealous of the attention that Lost scientists are enjoying, are copying this type of experimentation. For example, in Namibia there is a top-secret compound where two of the world's most beautiful people are giving birth to a race of super babies. It is being speculated that the beautiful couple and their offspring will live, like the characters of Lost, in total isolation and be subject to a variety of "tests." The expirement is so shrouded in mystery that scientists have surrounded the compound with a phalanx of lions to repel the nosey media.

Critics of the aforementioned experiments accuse them of redundancy for over ten years ago such an experiment, transporting people from reality for a proctracted period, was already conducted. It went under the secret code name "The O.J. Simpson Case."

Hidden-Camera TV As Therapy for the Masses

MTV’s Boiling Points is one of those hidden-camera shows that pits diabolical actors against unsuspecting victims and tests those victims’ limits. For example, one actor, a 300-pound man with geek horned-rimmed glasses, will saunter into a crowded park, strip down to a pair of Speedos and plop down next to a couple who were enjoying the sylvan ambiance until the fat man starts smacking on his chicken, clipping his toe nails, shaving his nose hairs, belching, etc. Our delight as viewers is watching how the victims respond to someone’s inappropriate, rude, obnoxious, boundary-breaching behavior. Oxygen TV’s Girls Behaving Badly   engages in similar mischief. The best antic I’ve seen so far is when an actress wearing a prosthetic pregnant belly tells women in a café that because she is averse to breast-feeding her pending child, she would like these women to volunteer their breasts, whose milk can be induced with a simple injection. She even produces a breast pump from her purse to show how serious she is. When the victim understandably balks, however politely at the “pregnant” actor’s persistent requests, another actress appears and scolds the victim for being so selfish with her breasts. This second actress feigns to be so outraged, in fact, that she offers her breast milk to the poor pregnant woman and after taking the breast pump, discreetly turns around and pretends to be filling the pump with her own breast milk when in fact her blouse contains a second, already-milk-filled pump. The grayish milk is shown to the now shocked victim who watches with even more repugnance as the pregnant woman drinks the milk from the pump. Only after the victim’s credulity has been strained to the point of near nervous breakdown do the two actresses come clean and say “You’ve just been pranked by Girls Behaving Badly!”

The show features all kinds of moral cretins, including presumptuous narcissists, intrusive entrepreneurs, authority-abusing security guards, and supercilious maitre d’s. The show resonates with us because we sense that the world is becoming more and more populated by clueless sociopaths, moral cretins, and unabashed predators—a collective Raging Id that is asserting chaos into our daily lives so that shows like Boiling Points and Girls Behaving Badly give a face to our enemies and help us vent our frustration at a world that is teeming with morons and madmen who are rarely accountable for the abuses they direct toward us.

Two Radios Every Home Should Have

The best small radio for the money (about $90) is the Kaito 1103   or its original Chinese clone the Degen 1103 (cheaper but doesn't have USA adapter), which will give you the best FM reception ever. But an upgraded version has been sold to Eton and it goes under the name the Eton E5. It has an improved interface and an easy volume control dial unlike the infamous toggle on the 1103 models. However, the E5 costs about 150 dollars. Jay Allen has written a thorough, helpful review of the E5 for RadioIntel .

For a big sturdy radio that fills a room and has an easy-to-use analog dial and digital station read-out, nothing is as good, for FM and AM, as the upgraded Eton S350 DL (formerly the Grundig S350). Formerly 150 dollars, it's now going for $100.

There are sexier, more modern looking radios out there, for example, the Tivoli Songbook, which I reviewed for RadioIntel, but the 1103 or its upgraded more expensive brother the E5 and the Eton S350 DL will give you topnotch sterling reception, better than any radios available.

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The Appeal of The Real Housewives of Orange County

Bravo TV’s reality show  The Real Housewives of Orange County features five decent, attractive woman, most of whom grace their gated community Coto de Caza with conspicuous breast implants that burst in bellicose fashion from their tight tops and heavy coats of coral and lavender make-up, as they navigate in their SUVs through homes that average 1.6 million dollars. Occasionally the show focuses on their conspicuous consumption and other grotesqueries but mostly it spotlights the same struggles any family has to go through. But the women’s insulated community and consumer power does make Coto de Caza a Petri dish in which we can analyze the American Dream through a microscope and, looking at our exaggerated selves, see our souls more clearly than before. Our presumptuousness, our sense of entitlement, our complete ignorance of history and world culture, our myopic provincialism which inflates our self-importance. Our need to assert our identity by showing off or to use the words of Paul Fussell, author of Bad, Or the Dumbing of America, our affliction of the “libido ostentandi,” our incurable lust for ostentation. These flaws are so self-evident that anyone with discerning tastes would ask me why I waste my time watching it. The answer is that I am, like most Americans, overcome by voyeurism, Puritanism, and class envy. I want to see the salacious indulgences of a culture that overemphasis appearance and carnal recreation. I want to judge such a culture and enjoy my sense of self-righteous superiority even as I whet my prurient appetite. And finally, I want to watch people in homes worth three times my own and console myself by saying, “I simply don’t have that kind of money because I lack the vulgarity to excel in such a rapacious, materialistic environment. In short, I am a snide hypocrite and hypocrisy sells.

The Schadenfreude of the Prius Driver

As I write, unleaded regular gas costs about 3.30 a gallon and it costs me about 45 dollars to fill up my Volvo S70, which gets a not very pretty 15 mpg around town. If I had a Prius I would probably gloat as I watched others in their Expeditions and Hummers filling up at the pumps. 

One of my students owns a Prius, which affords her diamond lane privileges, and I asked her if she gloats as she drives past people on the freeway. At first she denied it, but I pressed on. “Come on,” I said. “Don’t you just beam with self-righteous certitude as you move past the SUVs, knowing that your car gets five hundred percent better gas mileage than theirs?” She started to laugh because I suspect deep down she does enjoy a little glow of joy from knowing she has an advantage over the SUV buyers who for so many years have so obnoxiously bullied small car owners on the road.

It is this gloating that feeds the ire of John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of KFI Radio’s The John and Ken Show. One of the hosts recently described Prius drivers as those prissy know-it-all types who drive super slow in the passing lane, so proud of themselves for slowing down the traffic and asserting their politically correct, environmental prudence on the rest of us. Further adding to the Prius driver caricature is a recent episode of  South Park which characterizes Prius drivers of being so in love with themselves that they relish with giddy delight when inhaling the sweet smells of their own flatulence.

I believe it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who said that the those residing in heaven would enjoy their bliss all the greater by being afforded a view of the damned writhing in hell. And so it is with Prius drivers as they watch the conspicuous consumers of SUVs writhing at the gas pump inferno. Nothing like being a know-it-all who gets the last word.

Dale Gribble Syndrome in the Age of Blog

Dr. Dean Edell on his radio show last Sunday cited a study that shows that people who believe in the supernatural—demonic possession, haunted houses, ghosts, etc.—have lower IQs than those who are skeptical of such phenomena. As my wife and I listened to the study, I turned to her and said that if I had a spouse who started professing a belief in ghosts, aliens, or Sasquatch, I would be overcome with panic that the relationship was on the brink for I would have to assume that such a person, emotionally unstable to say the least, had fallen ill of Dale Gribble Syndrome. Featured in the animated satire King of the Hill, Dale Gribble is a true believer in the paranormal and supernatural—he buys alien urine, most likely as a libido enhancer.

Gullibility is the least of character flaws I associate with those who preoccupy themselves with paranormal tabloid fodder. Such people spend too much time living inside their heads. They are annoying in that they see themselves as possessing hidden truths that the rest of us are too dense to comprehend. Slothful and narcissistic, they see themselves as experts on human origins, spirituality, medicine, and the secrets of longevity for they believe their connection to the supernatural and alien world affords them insights that the rest of us are denied. Thus they arch their eyes at us with a look of a smug know-it-all.

In short, the Dale Gribbles of the world are not ignorant in the benign passive sense. Rather they are ignroant in an aggressive, belligerent manner in which they proselytize their tomfoolery on the rest of us. The irony is that they have never exerted rigorous research in anything to arrive at their conclusions. Instead, they are dilettantes who read a few Internet websites and then fancy themselves sages of the supernatural. Their vain delusions compensate for the fact that they are incurable ciphers who, discontent with their lowly place in the world, must forever chafe the rest of us with their endless imbecilities.

Worse, in this age of blogging, in which all voices great and small enjoy a sort of democratization, the slew of frantically-typing Dale Gribbles pour their toxic hallucinations with great profligacy into the Internet landscape. 

The Treasure of Obnoxious Bilious

I finally watched the documentary Overnight, which chronicles the manner in which Troy Duffy, hyped-up screenwriter of The Boondock Saints, behaves like a malignant bully toward his buddies, his agents, and his producers. Duffy sees himself as a working-class hero whose genius was discovered by the right people. But what we see, contrary to Duffy, is an overgrown shrieking infant seething with megalomaniacal tantrums, self-aggrandizing fantasies, and paranoid delusions who, alienating everyone, sees himself as an innocent victim. One is tempted to think that the promise of wealth turned him into such a bilious, obnoxious lout, like those characters turned rotten in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. But at the end of the documentary we are given a deliciously insightful quote from Albert Goldman, which sets the record straight:

"No man is really changed by success. What happens is that success works on the man's personality like a truth drug, bringing him out of the closet and revealing...what was always inside his head."