Call-out for Fallout

… BBS Flashbacks reminded me why my basement, garage and cedar closet are full of things I look at once a decade.  Memories.  TMC brought up World Devastation, a fantasy band that had a fantasy tour that we actually made up t-shirts for. 

So, as soon as I read his post, I ran into my bedroom, rifled through the closet and, voila, found a mint condition World Devastation Call-out for Fallout shirt.  I went and took pictures of it, front (above) and back (below), put them on my site and sent him links to the pictures.

Now, we spent a lot of time on those t-shirts, Not just coming up with the perfect picture on the front, but coming up with the cities for the tour.  The goal was to come up with the most convoluted tour route (map the towns, you’ll see), going to the funniest named towns, with ridiculous populations (the green numbers are their populations in 1987). 

Yeah, it was fun.  And thanks for reminding me TMC.

Old photo of the day...

In honor of my little brother's birthday, I chose this as the "old photo of the day". It's from the Motel West BBS days, back around 1987. He, his wife, another friend and I rented a house out in West Valley City, it became the Motel West hangout. To this day we refer to it as "HQ". Those were fun times, people coming and going at all times, like freakin' Grand Central station. Nobody bothered calling to see what was going on that night, they just showed up. One of my funniest memories from that time was when we had a water fight with the neighbor kids. The kids had the hose and some buckets or something like that outside, and the "adults" were throwing water at them from inside the house. We got soaked. They got soaked. The house got soaked. Fun times.

In the picture below are (by their screen name);

Sitting up : Your Conscience, Sir Duke, White Lioness, Ed Broadbent, Professor Faust.

Laying down : Frankie the Z

The head you can just barely see, underneath everyone else : The late, great Mr. Coffee.

Ahhh, the good old days. Gas @ $1.80 a gallon, minimum wage @$3.65

Ok, quiz time. Do you know what the letters BBS stand for? You, in the back with the wrench hanging from your ear....Nope, I'm talking before Boy Band Singers.....Yes you? Oh, the contractions are only 4 minutes apart? Is your mom sober yet? Think you can make it until 3rd period? Good. No, I'm talking about Bulletin Board Systems, the fetal period of the public internet. If you have no idea or don't care about what I'm talking about, then just move along. If you remember it, or want to get an idea about what it was like before DSL, terrabytes, http://www.anything.whatever or Windows 95, have I got the blog for you. An old friend of mine from a BBS called "The Motel West" has a blog about the good old days. He doesn't post a whole hell of a lot, but for me it brings back some fond memories. Check it out, or not, the choice is yours....

http://motelwest.blogspot.com/

Reunion 2007

Well, as I mentioned before, thanks to the internet and some serious boredom, Sir Duke got in touch with us again and we've been going over old times ever since. Well, he's coming into town and has given us the OK to let everyone involved in the Motel West know. He comes into town on August 16th and would like to get together with everyone sometime that weekend. If you are of the old Motel West crowd and are interested in getting together with us feel free to e-mail me.

Motel West, alive and kicking......

Ahhh, names like General Chaos, Midnight Cavalier (and getting to call him Midnight Chevette again) right here on my blog. Heard from (other than here) Sir Duke, White Lioness, Herb Doom, Frank Zelba and of course DB Rat. Names I haven't heard, let alone read on a computer screen, for years. Makes me wonder what Your Concience, Ed Broadbent, Dr. Faust, Michael Binkley, The Apex, Nosferatu !, Oliver Wendell Jones and the rest are up to.

I found an old IBM 386 laying around the school last winter and set it up in my classroom. Has Windows 3.1, but also had DOS Wordperfect 5.1 - which is the only way I can get the old dot matrix printer to work. I was teaching a computer tech class at the time, and part of the curriculum was a little bit of history. So, I get the computer printing up some papers for me and of course the kids ask "What is that noise?" Which lead straight into the workings of the old IBM with 256 KB memory, a 20 MB harddrive and Windoes 3.1. Most of them don't remember anything before Windows 98, and that's ancient. Almost died when I told them that I hadn't made a mistake and it was in fact 256 KB and 20 MB, not MB and Gigs. It put things into perspective when a student held up this thing that was the size of a really thin lighter and pointed out it had 100 times the memory of that hard drive. So I decided to really freak them out and describe the experience of downloading a message from the BBS with a 300 baud modem. Jaws hit the keyboards as I described watching the letters come through one by one, almost like someone was typing it right there in front of me. When one of them asked "how long did it take for a picture to come through?" I just laughed.

Legacy of the Motel West BBS (circa 1987)

I've been writing back and forth with Sir Duke, the sysop of the old Motel West BBS that I belonged to in the late 1980's. We've been swapping stories about our times at Chevron - he worked graveyards for a year or so and I've been working part time at one for 3 years now. He got on the subject of practical jokes, which reminded me of one I pulled at Churchill Jr. that I'm particularly proud of :

I haven’t pulled many practical jokes at the Chevron, but I’ve done some good ones at the schools I’ve been at. One of the best ones I can think of was on April 1st, about 10 years ago. The Spanish teacher and the Vice Principal at the school were (well, still are) major Diet Coke addicts. I made sure I worked late the night before the 1st, they both had left the building and I pulled out $20 in quarters and bought all the Diet Coke out of the faculty vending machine. Then I talked one of the custodians into letting me into the Vice Principal’s office and the Spanish teacher’s room and cleaned out their personal stashes. Pretty much cleaned out all the Diet Cokes in the entire building. Put them in the cooler and brought them home. The next day (April 1st) I show up and hide the cooler in the auditorium, and say absolutely nothing to anyone. Halfway through 2nd period the Spanish teacher shows up at my room, murderous look in her eye and says, sounding remarkably like “The Exorcist”, “GIVE ME A DIET COKE!” Why do you think I brought a cooler full of Diet Cokes to school, I knew my life was on the line. I run off to the auditorium, get her a couple dripping, cold cans and I could see the Devil leave her body. Didn’t hear anything from the Vice Principal, so at lunch I get another ice cold can and bring it down to her. When I get there, she’s drinking a warm 4 month old Diet Coke (it had the Christmas lable on it) that she found in the bottom of her closet. Now, this may not be reality, but it’s the way I remember it – she see’s the can, dripping cold water and her tongue comes out and drools, just like Homer Simpson. I swear. They ended up buying back all the soda, I reclaimed my $20 bucks.

Anyway, if you have any good ones. go ahead and post it here - always like a good, tasteful practical joke

Blast from the past....

Everybody who remembers what a BBS is, raise their hands..............ok, three of you. Well, I like to think of them as the infancy of the Internet - when one computer could connect with one other computer over the phone lines. One-to-one connections only, if someone was on your favorite BBS you just had to wait until they got off. Information transfer rates were originally (for my experience) 300 baud, which meant you could watch the letters of a post like this one come in one at a time, like someone was typing it just for you. Rich people had 1200 baud, a whole sentence at a time. Pictures? Uh, yeah right. First of all, computer screens were all monochromatic, my Apple IIe had a black background with green letters. That's it. But the BBS was almost exactly like this blog here - the sysop would write about something and the rest of us could respond.

The one I hung out at was "The Motel West", run by Sir Duke. My alias was Dirty Bastard Rat (started out Lucifer, but thanks to "Your Conscious" and some BBS type siblingish rivalry, Sir Duke ended up changing my alias when I wasn't looking.) The Motel West, like many other BBSs, was not just a couple computers talking to each other, it became a community. There was a core of us that met through the BBS and we ended up becoming good friends and spending a lot of time together in the real world - to the extent of renting a house in West Valley together (dubbed "HQ"), and 20 years later still being in weekly contact with at least one of the people I met there.

So, today I got an e-mail from Sir Duke himself, who disappeared off the face of the earth over a decade ago. It was good to hear from him, good to remember the times we had, things we did and trouble we always seemed to just barely miss getting into.

Sir Duke, glad to hear you're faring well.