Early George Lucas collaborator Gary Kurtz finally talks about why he parted ways with Lucas after The Empire Strikes Back.
Did ‘Star Wars’ become a toy story?
“I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz said. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”
I have a longer Required Reading post in the works, but this link deserves its own entry.
Professors: Hot at Their Own Risk examines the challenges that attractive academics face.
The idea of appealing educators being harassed by their students seems a little gross as I approach 40. When I was in college, though, there was always that hope at the beginning of each semester that one of my classes would be taught by a hottie. As best as I can remember, it only happened once.
The graduate student who taught one of my Spanish classes was a looker. She was smart, funny, spoke four languages, had a cool sounding name, and her looks were right up my alley. Since I had trouble talking to random girls at bars or parties, there was no way I could pull off making a move on Senorita Dias. But over the semester, we established a nice rapport so there was always that tiny chance that perhaps we would run into each other out on the town and one thing could lead to another.
I know, this from the guy who walked right by the hot TV anchor he was in love with when she was staring at him a few years later.
Anyway, as I tended to do back then, I skipped a number of classes over the semester and missed some assignments. Since she was a student herself, and super cool, she opened her office at the end of the semester for everyone to come in and complete all their missed assignments after our final oral exam. When I arrived for my presentation, one of my friends from class was in the corner knocking out all of his missed assignments. This both put me at ease and gave me a shot of confidence: he struggled in class so I was going to seem fluent in comparison.
The exam was basically a conversation. The instructor would ask a question to start and our job was to carry on a conversation, completely in Spanish, for 5-10 minutes. I was in the zone! I was conjugating verbs correctly, remembering obscure words, and so on. It was going great.
I finished up and swapped places with my buddy. I worked through all my missed assignments as he struggled to put more than three words together correctly. From time-to-time our teacher gave him permission to ask me for help. I was both being generous and padding my grade!
His exam ended, he left, and I wrapped up my make-up work. The teacher said something about having missed her bus. I had driven to campus that day and offered her a ride. She seemed a bit nervous but accepted. We walked to my car and talked about our plans for the holidays. At one point she tripped over a coat hanger that was lying on the sidewalk, getting her feet caught inside. She was either very clumsy or very nervous. Was she nervous because she was hanging out with a student, or because she was interested in me, too?
We got to my car, I drove her home, we said our goodbyes, and I never saw her again. Naturally. I know a normal guy would have made some kind of move, either seeing what she was doing before she left for home or giving her a call when the new semester started. Not me, the champion of failing to pursue romantic opportunities.
“I never thought something like this could happen to a guy like me, but…”
There’s no doubting I would have blown it, but who doesn’t at least smile and say hello? Me, that’s who.
❖
One of my (many) sisters-in-law completed her first half-marathon last weekend, running the Indianapolis Mini Marathon in atrocious conditions. Her accomplishment got me reminiscing about my own running milestones over the years. Completing the Chicago Marathon in 2001, a half-marathon in 2000, and my first triathlon in 1999. But my favorite was much further back than that.
In the spring of my first-grade year, my parents separated for the first time. This happened a couple more times and by the time they divorced two years later, I was an old pro at handling parental break ups. But I’ll admit I was a bit messed up in the spring of 1978, mostly because my mom and I abruptly moved and I had to start in a new school in April.
It was a struggle to fit in, especially when I didn’t really understand what was going on with my parents. All the kids knew each other and had forged friendships over the course of the year. I was the new kid at an age when no one is really sure what to do with the new kid.
Fortunately it was spring, though, and that meant gym class was outside and involved running around, playing kickball, etc. The other kids in my class spoke reverently of a kid in my class named Kyle and his super-human speed. They talked about how he ran away from everyone last fall during football games, how he beat everyone in races, and so on. I figured they know the deal, so I too learned to be in awe of Kyle.1
When early May rolled around, our gym teacher lined us up and explained that the school’s field day was coming up, and we would spend the next few weeks practicing for the big day and picking class representatives for the races. 2 I wasn’t really sure what he was talking about, but it sounded fun. I liked competitions, and the lucky winners in our class races would get to compete against the winners from the other first grade classes on the high school football field in front of the entire elementary school.
So we lined up for our first 50 yard dash practice. I remember the day clearly. It was morning, so the grass was still heavy with dew, the sun shining brightly in our eyes as it crested the trees across the field. Kyle was located just a couple lanes to my left. I figured if I kept him in my sights, I’d have a solid shot of making the first grade finals. The teacher put us on our marks, raised his arm, and shouted “Go!” I took off, pumping my arms, raising my knees high, all the stuff that OJ Simpson did when he ran the ball. I focused on the finish line but also monitored my left peripheral vision, waiting for Kyle to appear. I could feel my blood pumping in my ear drums, my throat burned, and I gasped for breaths. I crossed the finish line and pulled to a stop, looking anxiously to the teacher to see where I finished. Turns out, I won.
“This must be a mistake,” I thought.
I found Kyle and asked if he slipped in the wet grass at the start.
“No,” he replied, he ran fine. I just beat him.
I could sense a murmur amongst our classmates. The new kid had just beat Kyle in a race. Was it a fluke? Had the world as they knew it just been shattered into a million pieces?
Over the next couple weeks we continued our practice for Field Day. Kyle won a few races. Most days, though, I beat him. It was obvious we would be the two runners representing Mrs. Alexander’s class.
When the big day rolled around, we filed into the football stadium and sat in the concrete stands, nervously watching the other races as we waited our turn to take the field. When they called for the first grade 50 yard dashers, Kyle and I made our way to the field, our classmates wishing us luck along the way.
We lined up on the field, and as I looked down to the finish line, 50 yards sure seemed a lot longer than it had been in gym class. We took our marks, a teacher raised a real starter pistol, and shot a round to send us on our way.
This was a fairly small school, I think there were four first grade classes, but I had no scouting report on the other classes. I didn’t know if Kyle had been the class of the entire school before my arrival, or if perhaps another class featured a budding Olympian. Fortunately, when you’re not-yet seven, you don’t think of these things. I just knew Kyle was fast, I had beat him a few times, and one of us would win this race. Still, there were a lot of strangers on the field with me.
I ran hard. I pumped my fists and raised my knees high. I felt my blood in my ear drums, felt the burn in my throat, and gasped for breaths. I crossed the finish line and looked around. Had I won? Or did I finish last? I had no idea until the teacher holding the blue ribbon ran over and grabbed me so they could line people up for awards. I finished first, Kyle right behind me. Mrs. Alexander had a future track team in her class!
I’m pretty sure that was the first time I ever won anything official. I remember how sweet the rest of that day was, walking around at the post-race picnic with my blue ribbon pinned to my shirt.3 My speed held until high school, when there were far better sprinters around. I could usually win the mile warm-up runs in gym class, but I dumbly thought that cross country and distance racing in track were for freaks, and never tried out for either one.
Now accomplishment is more about getting off the couch and doing something than being the first one across the finish line. The prize is the t-shirt or finisher’s medal that everyone receives. While those are nice, that blue ribbon in May of 1978 will never be topped.
I recently discovered the site How I Met Your Motherboard, which features stories of first computer experiences. Interestingly, one of the stories mirrors my own.
Seems like perfect fodder for my own blog post, no?
People occasionally ask me why I’m so nutty for Apple products. I think part of it is because of when I got my first Mac: just as I was leaving the corporate world, becoming a father, starting down the path as a stay-at-home parent, etc. I was in the midst of several major life changes. At the same time, I purchased a new consumer electronic device that has a devoted following. As I educated myself on how to use my Mac, I got sucked into the Cult as a way of finding meaning and comfort in my strange new life.
But there’s more to it than that. A college roommate had a mid-90s Mac, on which I discovered the Internet. He dropped a few thousand on it for architecture projects and I probably spent more time on it than him once I discovered America Online and e-mail. Earlier in college, a friend down the hall had a Mac SE, and he allowed us to spend hours playing Tetris on it.
Most importantly, though, was my first ever computer experience, on an Apple ][ Plus in middle school.
Through some wrinkle in the system, I got into my school district’s gifted and talented program. The program was once every two weeks: on those days, we’d go to school, then get on a different bus and go to the old junior high, where the program had carved out three rooms full of stuff to keep us occupied for five hours. For me, the highlight were the two Apple ][ Plus computers that we worked on during each session.
In the morning, we had a programming lesson, in which we learned a series of BASIC commands. Then, we signed up for computer time and had to write our own program based on that lesson. That was all super cool, but I also enjoyed jumping on the computers at lunchtime and playing Lemonade Stand, Oregon Trail, or Midway. I was thoroughly enamored with these cool new toys.
Somewhere along the way I picked up a guide to programming in BASIC. I poured through it, imagining all the cool things I could do with my own computer. I wrote simple, text-based adventure games in a notebook. I would check out computer books from the gifted class’ library and dutifully copy down hundreds of lines of code for cool games that I would enter into my own machine some day. If I came across a magazine article or TV show about computers, I watched it. At the time I was crazy about sports, the Kansas City Royals in particular. Slowly but surely computers were creeping up on sports as my favorite interest.
I begged my mother to buy me an Apple ][ for Christmas in 1982. I’m pretty sure I cried and kicked and screamed. I explained how I would use it to design my own video games. I would learn all the latest programing techniques. I would launch myself on a path that would end with me writing games for Atari in Sunnyvale, CA after college.
She refused.
I pouted.
I did not understand that an Apple ][ ran about $2000 at the time. Throw in more money for disk drives, etc. and we’re talking $2500. In 1982 dollars. If I’ve done the math correctly, that’s roughly $5000 today. Back in ’82, my mom was working two and sometimes three jobs to keep us afloat. I obviously had no understanding of how much the Apple ][ cost, or how little my mom was making at the time.
I tried to talk her down to an Atari 400 or 800, but the answer remained the same.
A year later, when our financial situation had improved slightly, I got an Atari 2600 game system for Christmas. While that was one of my all-time favorite Christmas gifts, I was left playing other people’s games rather than making my own. I did get my own computer, eventually. In 1996, to be exact.
What could have been.
As I recall, I did fine on the entrance test, but my teachers were worried that I wouldn’t take it seriously. In fact, they left the decision to me. “If you think you can stay focused and be serious about this, we’ll let you sign up. But if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.” Or something like that.
❖
The latest installment in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentaries is a funny look at the origins of fantasy sports: Rotisserie Baseball.
I enjoyed it for many of the same reasons the AV Club reviewer enjoyed it: while the idea of fantasy sports appealed to me, I must admit I was more in love with the books that explained the game.
I remember first noticing the original Rotisserie baseball book sometime in the summer of 1985. I flipped through it a few times, but figured it seemed like something older people might do, not 14 year olds. I came across a gift certificate at some point that fall and decided to blow it on the Rotisserie League book. While the Royals were busy making a late run in the AL West, then coming back from 3-1 deficits against Toronto and St. Louis to win the pennant and the World Series, the book languished in my room.
Finally, sometime in the summer of ’86 I dusted it off and read through it. I loved it. The concept of the game appealed to me, then in my final years of total baseball geekdom. But I especially enjoyed the stories of the original drafts and off-seasons, the team biographies and accounts of their pennant races. I immediately drafted a league of eight teams and spent a month or so pouring through USA Today each morning to update each team’s stats.* I resolved to put a real league together the next spring.
(This is a good point to remind you I didn’t talk to girls much back then.)
Well, we moved away to California the following fall and I was still struggling to make friends at my new school when baseball season rolled around. I again did my own league for part of the summer, but something that would remain true 20 years later was apparent then: it was more fun to do all the research that went into putting a team together and then go through the draft than to actually play the game. That was true when it was just me running a pretend league of eight teams, and when I was in 12 team fantasy leagues with coworkers years later.
I gave up on fantasy sports a few years ago. I finished second in a football league and figured that’s the best I would ever do. I don’t miss it in the fall, when friends are frantically checking their fantasy football stats as the games progress each Sunday. But each spring, when I buy a baseball preview, I spend a week or so thinking about joining a league and getting back into the game. I always know, though, that I just want to go through those early stages of the season, and by July I will no longer care about my lineups or making trades or checking the standings.
Now if I could land a book contract and keep the history of a season, as the originators did, I might make the jump again.
I got into fantasy baseball because of the books they wrote chronicling the ups and downs of their teams; the idea of a fake baseball team was moderately appealing to me as a high school ballplayer, but even more, I loved reading about these smart, funny people and their adventures in playing it.
Well, the girls and I survived three days without their mother. S. arrived home from her trip to visit her new nephew this afternoon and found a house that was remarkably clean,* three daughters that were still alive and happy to see her, and a slightly tired husband.
(In my opinion.)
And suddenly it’s the final day of the year. And decade for that matter. I still owe you a Decade in Music essay, which I’m rethinking a bit after a book I read last week.
I found this essay by sports writer Dan Shanoff on Wednesday. It’s quite nice and got me thinking about the amazing changes in my life over the past ten years. What’s made those changes fun is the majority of my readers have gone through many of the same changes at the same time. Most of us rang in the new millennium single. Few of my friends who were already married had started having children. Even as we were getting older and adding responsibilities, most of us were living lives filled with freedom.
On December 31, 1999 I was single, living in downtown Kansas City, working for a Fortune 500 company, drove a 4Runner, and spent most of my weekends cruising a handful of bars with a close group of friends. I’ll admit, after a decade of epic failure romantically, by 1999 I had kind of given up on long term relationships and decided just to go with the flow. If I met a nice girl and we went out for a few weeks and then went separate ways, that was fine. No stressing about what each relationship might bring. Enjoy the company of someone interesting and be thankful for whatever good comes out of it.
In late April 2000, I was introduced to a young lady who was soon moving to Kansas City. Two months later she established residence on the Plaza, made an appearance at my birthday party, and a few nights later we had our first date. Things went well and she’s yet to stop returning my calls.
So on December 31, 2009 I am married, living in Indianapolis, a father of three girls I take care of full-time, the holder of a Master’s degree, a part-time sports writer, driver of a minivan, and if I’m lucky I’m in a bar three or four times a year. All because I met a nice girl four months into the new millennium.
Some decade. I hope I haven’t used up all my good luck.
Happy New Year to you all.
❖
One day recently I heard The Spinners’ “The Rubberband Man” while running errands. That was a song I grew up on, since my parents were very much into the early 1970s soul sound. But I recall it most fondly because of former NBA player Paul Pressey.
While Pressey played his college ball at Tulsa, he earned the nickname “Rubberband Man” because of his dunking abilities. This was back in the day when dunks were simple and you earned a nickname simply if you dunked often.*
(Dr. J. Dr. Dunkenstein. Chocolate Thunder. Etc.)
During his senior season, I remember NBC having a feature about Pressey before their Saturday game of the week. Interviews with Pressey and his coaches, lots of highlights, all with The Spinners as soundtrack. I loved it. I decided when I grew up and played in the NBA, I, too, would be The Rubberband Man. I put my rather meager visual arts skills to work and drew a small poster of a anthropomorphic rubber band dunking the ball and stuck it to my wall. When I made it to the Show, this would be my logo.*
(I was years ahead of Jordan when it came to logos!)
Obviously the NBA thing never worked out; I never even played high school ball. In college I got to the point where I could consistently dunk on a 9.5′ rim, and I could throw down some decent dunks at nine feet. But I don’t think I ever earned the label Rubberband Man. But I can always dream.
The Wikipedia tells me Pressey’s son will enroll at Missouri next year. If he’s the Little Rubberband Man, or something like that, he might instantly become my favorite MU player ever.
Thank goodness the World Series is over. I watched a total of five minutes of the six games. Just couldn’t take A-Rod and the Yanks winning. It made me sad that Pedro couldn’t get it done last night. It’s always disappointing when a guy who was as good as he was loses it. I was hoping for one last classic performance from him.
The one upside to the Series was how it brought up discussion of Willie Wilson and Willie Mays Aikens. The most excellent Cardboard Gods site shared some thoughts about Willie Wilson. I was watching Sportscenter at the gym the other day and they had a feature on the Philadelphia Eagles’ DeSean Jackson. That kid is fast. And they have Jeremy Maclin, too? Yikes.
Anyway, between the Jackson feature and Willie being a topic of discussion, I’ve been remembering Willie fondly. He’s legitimately one of the fastest guys to ever play baseball. But, he also benefits from the classic “great athlete when you’re a kid” syndrome. To me, and a lot of people my age, Willie will always have superhuman speed, speed that no current athlete can touch. When you’re eight or nine and you hear announcers and fans talk about speed or power or some other physical attribute, it is always magnified. I’m glad it’s Willie that I think of first when I think of fast baseball players. And when I think of him, I think of him either sliding into second – was he the last super-speedster who consistently slid feet-first? – or racing around third, his hands in the air in triumph, when he scored the winning run in game four of the 1980 World Series. On a hit by Aikens, by the way.
Wilson, forever the fastest man in the baseball universe inside my skull, if not in the baseball universe itself
When I hear about people staying up all night to play video games these days, it kind of makes sense, since modern games offer so much depth and possibilities for play. Looking back, why the hell would we play Atari all day? Those games sucked. Need proof? Check out Atari’s 1978 catalog. Things only got slightly better before the 2600 faded away nearly a decade later.
A look at the 1978 Atari Catalog
These were times that a giant block with 4 smaller blocks on it really did look like a race car, triangles shooting dots at each other was a super-realistic looking space war, and prison breakouts were simulated with a line bouncing a dot against rainbow striped bricks!
I’m not what you would call a gamer. Sure, I owned an Atari 2600 and spent countless hours playing Pole Position, Q*Bert, Pitfall, etc. I wasted most of my freshman year of college playing Nintendo until all hours. Madden and NHL 93-95 were staples on the Sega my roommates and I shared in the mid-90s. And I did own a Playstation for a few years, although when I put it in my sister-in-law’s yard sale last year, I didn’t remember playing about half the games I had purchased.
(20 years ago this week!)
Still, that’s a fairly limited history compared to some people. I have friends who have been sucked into the various on-line role playing games and spend hours on one quest or another. I like to laugh at them and tell them they should get a life.
I do have a dirty secret, though. I was once addicted to a computer game. And I’ve recently discovered an iPhone version that has me on a nasty gaming bender.
Back in the summer of ‘96 I picked up Sid Meier’s Civilization II, a turn-based game in which you attempt to build a civilization and defeat other developing nations through force, economic power, or by building a spaceship and getting to Alpha Centauri first. I didn’t have a lot going on in my life at the time – I had just, finally finished college and was using my poli sci degree working the second shift at a distribution warehouse – so I was a prime candidate to get sucked in.
I normally got home between 10:30 PM and 12:30 AM, depending on if we worked overtime or not. I would wash up, grab a snack, and sit down in front of the computer, telling myself I would only play for 30-40 minutes or so. There were far too many times that I finally turned the computer off and collapsed into bed as the sun was coming up. One especially bad night I got home, played all night, then went back into work for a four-hour morning shift. Given that I operated some large power equipment at work, it probably wasn’t the safest thing in the world for me to stay awake for 30 straight hours and then start driving forklifts around.
My sickness reached the point where I owned multiple books on how to “beat” Civ II, an expansion disk that added all kinds of cool* options, and would read various forums looking for ways to improve my play.
(Cool being a subjective term.)
Fortunately, after about two months of this, I burned out and packed the books and disks away. Periodically I’ll consider picking up the latest version of Civ, but I’ve always resisted temptation, knowing I can’t stay awake all night playing computer games anymore and would rather read a book anyway.
Then I found the iPhone version a couple weeks back, Civilization Revolution. I’m totally hooked. When the girls are driving me crazy, I fire it up for “15 minutes or so,” which quickly becomes a 30-minute session. The game is true to the original version (and current, I imagine), although it is a bit simplified to make game play faster and easier. I never, ever won a game in Civ II. I’ve won with four different civilizations in four different ways over the past week.* It’s kind of like crack; I can’t stop playing. I even completely drained the battery on my phone one day.
(You select one of several civilizations when you begin a game, and take on the persona of that civ’s leader. For example, if you select the Americans, you’re Abe Lincoln; the Russians, Catherine the Great; the British, Winston Churchill; etc. I’ll admit it felt a little extra good when, while playing as the Indians, I developed atomic weapons and dropped a bomb on an opponent’s capital. That’s right, I had Gandhi drop a nuke!)
I’m sure this will all pass. But I’ve already played Civ Rev more than all the other games I’ve bought from the App Store combined. It’s worth every one of the 499 pennies I spent on it.
❖
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