Welcome to this week's selection of Picks, where we've been cleaning out our dusty attic in preparation for the coming year. Rummaging around through all this old junk sure conjures up some fond memories. For instance, we dug up a 1923 Underwood typewriter from the early days of "Picks of the Week." Nowadays, of course, we use fancy pants word processors and cool programs like Voycabulary, an interactive dictionary and thesaurus that lets you check the words of any online document for meaning and definition. Thanks to Voycabulary, we've saved enough time to take in at least two more hours of television a day! Yay, technology!
We also dredged up tons of old fan club memorabilia: autographs, posters, eight by ten glossies. Sure, we had our heroes. All kids do. Maybe they were "second-tier" celebrities (Clint Howard, Richard Dawson, Kate Jackson), but even minor character actors deserve fans. Just take a gander at The Clint Howard Project, a site dedicated to the gnomish brother of director Ron Howard. Peruse the site for the story behind Clint's meteoric rise to the very bottom of Hollywood's power structure. Print out the Clintography for a handy video store checklist. Then come back and maybe we might just show you our genuine Clint Howard stuffed weasel.
Tossing assorted animal bones into our recycling bin, we couldn't help but consider the case of Sue. Now there are some bones with staying power--65 million years worth. And instead of just chucking them, the folks at Chicago's Field Museum are going to make an entire exhibit. Of course, it does makes a lot of sense since Sue is the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found. We attempted to arrange our humble bone collection into a configuration that resembled Sue's 50-foot frame, but unfortunately the dog kept running off and burying pieces before we were finished. It looks like we're just going to have to gaze wistfully at the museum's web site and wonder what might have been.
Flipping through some early childhood snapshots brought back warm memories: sand castles, ice cream cones, fuzzy blankets, snarling pit bulls, distorted human torsos, dead crabs. Whoa. Seems as though some prankster slipped a few Simon Larbalestier photographs into the baby book. The British photographer, best known for his work on Pixies album sleeves, specializes in surreal imagery of a dark and downright scary nature. His subjects come right out of David Lynch's high school locker: stuffed monkeys, rusty pipes, animal teeth, rotting leather boots, barbed wire. They're not exactly uplifting photographs, but they're certainly unique.
Here's a question: how do you safely discard a trunkload of used whaling harpoons? This past summer we traveled to the great state of Tennessee to experience its plethora of tourist attractions: the Grand Old Opry, Dollyworld, the Jack Daniel’s Distillery, and the best gosh darn whale hunting south of the Mason-Dixon. Around the middle of the fourth day, following several tours of the Jack Daniel’s Distillery, we were primed and ready for a whale chase. The beauty of Tennessee is you don’t have to leave the comfort of your pick-up truck to hunt the blubbery mammals. Whale hunting from a moving automobile is perfectly legal in the Volunteer State. And it's a good thing we bagged a few -- we'd just run out of boiled peanuts.
The old duffel bag marked "PROPERTY OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON: DO NOT OPEN" yielded some unique surprises: a battered pair of aviator shades, a chewed cigarette holder, 60 bars of Neutrogena soap, a Sig Sauer semi-automatic assault rifle, two kilos of "baking soda," and eight partially consumed Crenshaw melons. How did we get his stuff? We're not sure. But we do know that the godfather of gonzo journalism just came out with a new book, "The Rum Diary," a semi-autobiographical novel which chronicles his exploits as a journalist in Puerto Rico in the Fifties. The Booksmith in San Francisco celebrates the arrival of "The Rum Diary" with an eclectic collection of photographs, journal entries, and audio clips. While we're happy about discovering Hunter's duffel bag, we also don't want to get arrested. Maybe we'll just stuff it under the golf clubs.
In a dusty steamer trunk we found a white suit and fedora from when we went through our "Samuel Clemens Phase." This was right after our introduction to Mark Twain at Large, the terrific online exhibit of the author's travel papers, from the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. It's an amazing collection of material, covering everything from Twain's early travels to his time "Roughing it in the West and Hawaii," and beyond. Around that time we took to wearing our white suit to work, and saying things like, "Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid of it," and "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned," and "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." But, after a while we dropped the gig. Truth is, we couldn't figure out what the heck we were talking about.
Nothing like cleaning out the old attic to vent some of those pent-up holiday season frustrations. Anyone interested in purchasing a perfectly salvageable 8-track tape deck? How about an ELO album collection? Please, take your pick(s).
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