VARIATIONS ON A THEME

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (05-21-26)

 

      The television industry has gone through a lot of changes since the first nascent broadcasts of the 1930s, including trying to muddle on without me now that I have retired from it. One transformation is the evolution of the television theme song. To accommodate more commercials, the opening songs have lately been reduced to only a few notes, barely long enough to get something unhealthy from the fridge.

     Those catchy jingle-like songs have become anthems to a bygone era. A simpler time, where you could leave things to Beavers, and horses could talk, nuns could fly and you could marry a witch and even mention it to her face, and at the end of 30 minutes, all would be normal again.

     Making up a theme song can't be very easy. You might have to make sense of a show premise that may be ridiculous, like "identical cousins" that are "two of a kind," without going into too many specifics regarding molecular genetic biology.  Or you may be forced to introduce characters who are either uninteresting, like "Potsie" or have a stupid name, like "Potsie." Or you may be faced with the fact that nothing rhymes with "Alf."  

     Often it was up to the writer of these songs to convey the entire arc of a sometimes preposterous plot in under a minute. "Okay. We'll need a 50-second song that explains that a family of Halloween-related nuts and misfits, with a servant who is a disembodied hand, a cousin made up only of talking luxurious hair, a carnivorous creeping vine and a fat kid live in a mansion and are funny. If you get stuck, you can use the word "ookie" if you need to. Where are you going?"

     "We also have a show about a crime-fighting millionaire who lives in a cave powered by a nuclear reactor-type-thing, and he wears a cape and ladies hosiery, but don't worry, it's a flattering color, and he has a youthful ward but in those days that just meant you were unemployed, and he wears tights too and his name is Robin, not too gender-specific but it's okay he wears a mask so he won't die of embarrassment each week, and there's a butler, but he doesn't wear tights, maybe on his own time, and- where are you going?" But the writer returns a few months later with a song that just says "Batman" eight times and YOU figure the damn thing out.

     "Okay. This one's a no-brainer. There's a family of six that plays music together, and they ride around in a school bus and tour in Las Vegas, even though only the Mom is old enough to get in, and the 10 year-old who is the only one who has red hair knows a middle-aged manager with no other clients and no one happens to notice that after three years one of the children is different. You got all that? Hey! Come BACK!"

     You might have to explain the bizarre premise DURING the theme song, so that people know what they're getting into, and leave it for the police to sort out the consequences. "Ma'am, we're responding to a complaint of shots fired at a frozen pizza outside of your home." "Oh, yeah, that was me, trying to see if there was any petroleum reserves on my property, like on the 'Beverly Hillbillies.'" "Ma'am, your home is in Brooklyn." "Yes, but as the theme song said, the poor mountaineer was shooting at some food, and, while I am not poor, I do have some credit card debt, and even though this is not technically a mountain, it is Brooklyn Heights. I never actually saw the show, but I'm exploring alternative avenues of possible revenue."

     You'll have to roll with the punches. You may need to build into the song the sound of Dick van Dyke tripping over an ottoman each week even though it's always in the same place, or you may have to change some lyrics if the Professor and Mary Ann don't want to just be "the rest" anymore, or you may have to figure out an entirely new theme for a show about Americans in a Nazi Germany prisoner-of-war camp during World War Two, because they forgot to tell you it was a comedy.

     Even if you came up with a wonderful theme song, eventually you could count on the suits upstairs to chime in and ruin it. And that's how you end up with phrases like, "who can turn the world on with their smile," or "come on, get happy." If we wanted to be turned on and happy, we'd shut the TV off for four or five minutes.

     So, the next time you're watching "Seinfeld" and you hear that theme song that sounds like popcorn popping, just remember that someone had to write those tunes that make you want to go where everybody knows your name, and it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and your friends will be there for you when the rain starts to pour, and all it takes to get there is the courtesy of Fred's two feet.

ROCKET SCIENCE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (05-07-26)

 

      Now that the Artemis II spacecraft has safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, we can all breathe a sigh of relief and thank the crew and NASA for a job well done. What exactly was the job? NASA lists the mission as a "crewed lunar flyby," which is a nice way of saying "sightseeing trip." Of course, I jest. There were important reasons for this flight, mainly testing the capabilities of the Orion spacecraft that is to be used for future adventures. But it seems like NASA has a unique way of adding more syllables to a phrase to make it sound more interesting. For example, a spacewalk is referred to as an "extravehicular activity." Try it yourself: you just take a noun, add a prefix and then a second word that could mean just about anything. So, an Easter egg hunt becomes, say, a "post-ovulation reconnaissance operation."

     Anyway, there are other less tangible benefits to the spaceshot, such as bringing together a deeply divided country to share in the glory of the culmination of decades of scientific advancement. I remember watching the lunar landing of Apollo 11 as an 11 year-old, along with the rest of the world, wide-eyed as Buzz Aldrin saluted a flag with the MTV logo on it while a song by the Buggles played in the background. I might be getting some of the details confused, but it was a long time ago. 

     Those were the days when you were told that in America, you could be anything you wanted to be, if you would only "apply yourself." I'm not sure a generous application of ME would have helped the space program, but I was forced to do my homework anyway. Did I really need to know the value of x to become an astronaut? Y? As long as you trained hard and were in peak physical shape, ANYone could become an astronaut in America. Not if you have bone spurs, of course. In reality, only a select few become astronauts- there were only four missionary positions available on the latest flight, for example. But you never know.

     One exciting thing the Artemis mission has done for the first time is get a good look at the dark side of the moon. And what they found is that it's NOTHING like the Pink Floyd album. It has less light and fewer synthesizer solos than previously thought. What if there are space beings living on the dark side of the moon, and we never knew about them because we never saw the dark side of the moon, and all this time they wondered if there was life on other planets, and they concluded, maybe, but they're never going to find there way here, and then all of a sudden they see this spacecraft go by, a flying object which they can't identify, but the government denies it and tries to cover it up, and then everyone sees that it landed and space aliens come out of it and start shagging golf balls?

     Sound far-fetched? Maybe. I've always said that mathematically there has to be life on other planets, that seems like an easy one. But are they planning a trip to visit Earth? It's probably going to take a long time to get here, so I hope they don't have six kids traveling with them like my parents did. "If you don't cut that out right now I'm going to STOP this car and you can all WALK home." And that's when we were sleeping. My parents could only hope that aliens would come and abduct us, maybe perform a few experiments involving how much pain a human could take after not doing the dishes.

     It seems like NASA could have thought up some other important tasks for this mission, to justify it to those who might say we could have spent some of that 93 billion to fix a few things here on Earth, like maybe health care. I've come up with a few: 1.) From a vantage point in outer space, maybe we could find out what exactly does make the world go 'round? Is it money? Is it love? Is it beer? There were a few times at college where beer made the world go 'round and 'round, and it was tough to get it to stop. 2.) More experiments with weightlessness. I don't know what we might specifically learn from it, but I just love to see stuff floating around the space capsule. Let's see how mayonnaise reacts in a zero-G sandwich. 3.) Can you do anything about the weather while you're up there? I don't want to seem selfish, but if we could agree to stick to one season at a time it would be great. 

     It's not all fun and games up there. Apparently, the toilet failed. I would NOT want to be the astronaut that broke the toilet, and then tried to explain it to the others, while looking a little flushed. There is the boredom factor. Ten days is a long time to be away from decent wi-fi. And there is also that dangerous period where you lose all communication while burning through the Earth's atmosphere, and no way to get yourself out of an emergency situation. It's like driving through Passaic with no cell phone and no car radio.

     And yet, I read that the entire National Science Board has been fired. Let's hope that soon, we'll have leaders that lead the way in knowledge and learning, so we don't find ourselves living on the dark side of the Earth.

WHAT'S LEFT

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (04-26-26)

 

      I've got advanced arthritis in my right wrist, and I think I know what caused it. The same thing that's responsible for everything else that's wrong with every male of the species: saying immediately after we sprained something, "It's probably fine," and then going right back to whatever we were doing that caused it to probably not be fine at all. The lesson here folks, is listen to your body- it's trying to tell you something. It starts with a polite whisper: "You know, it might behoove you to have this checked out," and you think, if my body used the word, "behoove," how serious could it be? And after a few months, your body is hitting you over the head with a crowbar and yelling, "HEY STUPID, I told you before to see a doctor! Now LOOK- your stupid head ruined my crowbar."

     At my age, my body is trying to tell me so many things at once I have to yell, HEY, HEY, HEY- ONE AT A TIME. Meanwhile, I'm one limb short. One hand no longer washes the other. If something costs an arm and a leg I have to pay through the nose. My wrist is in such pain I had to use a pair of Vise-grips to open a bottle of Tylenol (true). It was still hard to do, and I almost plugged in my Milwaukee Sawzall to get the job done, but I felt like I wouldn't have stopped with the bottle once I powered up the saw.

     There are some things I cant do lefty, as a mostly right-handed person. I'm a drummer however, and drummers can do things with their left hand that other people wouldn't even attempt, such as half a paradiddle. But if you're used to paradiddling with your right hand, you might be in for a bitter disappointment.

     Brushing my teeth left-handed is a challenge. It's hard to do without also brushing my nose and my chin. I thought it might help to do it while looking in the mirror, but it was worse since I could the see how stupid I looked. Opening a can of soup is next to impossible using a right-handed can opener. I found out that I could open the can upside down with my left hand using the same can opener, which turned out to be much worse than not opening it at all. I hate to open up a can of worms, so I'm glad that I can't at the moment.

     Trying to open "easy-open" packaging is problematic even with two hands. Once you locate the "easy open" tear tab and pull it, you then try to find the two "easy open" edges of the "easy open" zipper pouch and pull them apart. With only one hand, a bag of grated cheese was all of a sudden Fort Knox. I could have tried to open it with my teeth if I wasn't afraid that I would somehow sprain my tooth. So I grabbed a pair of scissors to simply cut it open, and that's when I realized that trying to use a pair of scissors left-handed is a major cause of mental illness.

     My handwriting has gotten worse and worse throughout the years, since I don't write very much in long hand and care much less about what it looks like. As a result, it appears that I'm trying to disguise my own handwriting to cover up a crime. I can't even make out myself what I wrote on the grocery list. Only my wife can, and if she can't decipher it she just assumes that it says "Kit Kat Bars." Even if it doesn't I'll be much happier with the Kit Kat Bars than whatever it really said. So writing lefty is actually a rare improvement, since I have to do it slower.

     Putting on clothes with buttons is difficult with the wrong hand. I read that women's clothing has buttons on the left side because back in the days when women had dressers, it was easier for right-handed buttoners to button. So maybe it'll be easier if I pick up a couple pretty blouses while I'm waiting for my hand to heal, or maybe I'll bring the tube top back into style. It's also harder to zip your fly left-handed. The bottom part and the top are easy, but the middle is tough. If that's true it may be easier for me to zip your fly, and I hope the opportunity never arises. 

     There are a few things I do better lefty, like making a left-hand turn on the ski slope. I admit I'm not the greatest skier, and I've found that if you make too many left-hand turns you end up facing back up the slope. I can also stand on my left leg longer and steadier than my right, which isn't a particularly impressive skill unless you've been asked to do field sobriety test. I don't drink and drive, but if I do ever get stopped by the cops I intend to show them that I can open a can of soup upside down, as an alternative measure of sobriety.

     The one thing I've always excelled at is left-handed compliments. "This meatloaf is AWFULly good!" "Oh! You really think so?" "Yes! TERRIBLy good! And your new hairdo. It makes you seem like a very highly-paid executive! At the Department of Motor Vehicles!" 

     I've never trusted left-handed people. They don't even have hands, they have paws; a left-handed pitcher is a "south-paw." You never heard of a north-paw, did you? Of course not. Did you know that the Latin word for "left" is "sinistra," or "sinister?" That's right, I took Latin in school after hearing a lot of talk about "Latin lovers" and grossly misunderstanding how to become one.

     Well, I suppose I will have to see somebody about this wrist. And if I do want to see someone, I guess I had better bring my glasses.