Six Flags Under

Greg: Hurty, but fun.
Me: Worst amusement park ever. Hurty fun for the whole family! House
of Pins! Acid Flume! Tunnel of Bees!
Greg: The Bully Simulator!
Me: Teacups! Full of piping hot tea! Actual Pirates of the Carribean!
Greg: Botulism Bay!

Thursdays with Walter, week 11

There should be a technology fight song. Go, technology, go!

You'll be sorry you came to this class. This is the get jiggy class.

It's the Mothers of Invention. It's something old people use to like.

It's always somebody and his orchestra.

We have lugged in about 3000 pounds of equipment tonight, ostensibly to show you things.

I do accept coloring books in lieu of final papers, so if you threw anything away, ha ha!

Why you trickin' me, man?

What's this http thing I keep seeing? And three w's? Is that a mystical organization? They make things appear on my screen!

And that's actually Ronald Reagan!

Okay, let's not panic, we have options.

We don't have any sound off these things. What a cheap classroom.

Whoa! That's Moby Dick the sound recorder. Is that Edison right there? Whoever he is, he liked a beer after work.

That also is Ronald Reagan, by the way.

We could do ancestry next class.

Ah, it's beautiful: the music coffin.

Open the doors! Play it for the neighbors, see if I care!

If they want credit they have to stay! I love this!

Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville, ore Eddie Martin as we used to call him...

Oh geez, I've got a class and I forgot my crank!

In the modern era, today it's an iPod, tomorrow it's a peapod, I don't know what's coming next and neither do you, and don't say you do.

No, no, don't come up with a better solution, I can't handle it. My whole house is full of better solutions.

I'm s'posed to clean this and have gloves on and...you know, read.

We're gonna do one more yodel.

Okay that's Alpine Harry and his Bob Dylan impersonation.

That's probably the greatness of museums and libraries: that the past is still there.

If you go back through old issues of Scientific American, you'll see why our society is really odd.

This thing has more scratches than Gabby Hayes's whiskers on a cheesecake.

Who says that? Chico!

If you know this group, you have serious issues.

It's too bad we can't hear this, because this is awful.

They have metal things coming our of their heads, and they look at me like I'm some kind of tree fossil. They're surprised I'm alive.

Ah! This is one handout you'll really want to color.

It was like watching a xerox copy of a baseball game.

The wildest surrealist poet on all available drugs at the same time couldn't come up with these band names.

You inhaled, you put [Inagaddadavida] on, and the next thing you knew it was Sunday!

You listen to T.S. Eliot, you don't need an antidepressant, you need someone to see where you are on the floor.

We've got time for a song. Do you want Barenaked Ladies, or Mingus, or...ooh!

Okay, the first track is called "Oh Lord, Don't Let 'Em Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me," and the second one is "Eat That Chicken."

Thereby combining Gospel and the beatniks in an eclectic mix of noise.

Razzmatootie!

If you want to learn how to preserve it, read the material.

Thursdays with Walter, week 10

I don't want to look for it, I want it to come to me!

Then we'll see if he's just another corporate fraud.

Color wrecked all that beautiful imagery!

Ol' Hook-Nose Wellington we used to call him; I remember it well.

God, I hate the web!

A friend gave it to me. Shows what kind of friends I have.

I feel like I'm repeating myself tonight. I feel like I'm repeating myself tonight.

He tried to make an engine using gunpowder. One can imagine how well that worked out, when the engine landed in Ohio, even before there was an Ohio!

You can never have too many Google windows open.

He wrote a book, and said some people are coming up with an idea, only he was writing in Latin, so it was some people are coming up with an idea est.

I'm going to bed. It's 8:00. It's dark. There's nothing to do. There won't be tomorrow, either.

I hate to tell you, it's one guy in New Jersey with a whole lot of tricks.

These are very hypnotic, so if you're feeling sleepy, put $20 in an envelope and bring it to the front of the room.

And you'd go out and burn down a barn! You were in a tizzy!

No lights, lost kids, drunk uncles? Sort of like that experience.

There ya go. If you weren't having an epileptic seizure, wait 30 seconds.

An Edison cylinder hooked up to your ears like...an ur-iPod.

It's a venti, not a grande. Shoot me.

How many pixels on the head of a pin?

If you don't know by now, you're from Mars.

I swear, one more time, it's good that I don't have a gun, because we wouldn't have a TV, we'd just have a hole.

What you don't want is a Lincoln Log on your player head.

The next time the music comes on, you'll get blown out of your chair.

It's like a phone book of the dead.

If you know Oscar Levant, you know how funny that is.

You gotta save the footage of Hero the Wonder Dog!

Next week, bring your ears.

Thursdays with Walter, week 9

(I missed weeks 7 and 8, so don't ask me anything about disaster preparedness and recovery.)

Gigs? No, I play for the walls, and they're sorry enough.

People call me the book magnet.

Okay! I'm going to read your midterms out loud and comment on them as I go. None of you did really horribly, which was disappointing. Where are the flunkies?!

Oh, this one is in English. Good!

Some of you made a lot of sense. I was impressed.

This is a class on electronics, isn't it?

It's a waste of time looking. I won't bother. Oh, here it is!

I'm sorry, we can't hire you as investigative reporters.

When you have a good enough infection of preservation that you get the disease, then you start to be like me.

If I had not been watching the World Series, I would've read them with my other eye, too. This is the first time I didn't give any B's. See what baseball does for you?

Is the broadcast archives person here? See? What if she was my only pinch hitter?!

You'd wish it was absinthe.

Ha! This guy was really lit up!

We're saving these stories, and then we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to keep them away from children.

Okay, okay, show us Superman now!

Do you have a library card? Are you a convicted felon?

In this one, the people and the machines are robots.

Well, that's it. Sorry we didn't have popcorn.

No! 1957 was the Milwaukee Braves!

My training for that event was to go out in a school corridor and hide under my coat. A kid's winter coat that you wear for five years without ever laundering? *cough, cough* And if they dropped the bomb, who would care? It'd be an act of mercy!

You put all these bizarre stories together, and it turns out to be the truth!

Do you ever ponder? When's the last time you pondered?

You gotta start writing these names down and start reading stuff! You're culturally deprived!!

Lemon juice on the Constitution? She would've been so fired!

We're all moving way too fast.

Dewey Decimated: it's another story where someone gets murdered with a rare book.

Wherever the Right ends, he was to the right of that.

You're not gonna write this down, because come on.

That's our homage to the Native American

Why, it's the damn Book of Kells--again!

Oh where, oh where has my Book of Kells gone...

You can make your whole family look like they're from Jupiter with a few clicks.

I knew I shouldn't have drank that hearing stopper.

A, we couldn't cover it in five semesters, and B, no one will ever cover it.

If you want to save the forests, don't go there.

Billions of pixels per square nanometer!

I'm a little capture device!

You can't open a jpeg 354 Chrysler engine with a tiff six-cylinder Packard.

It becomes present with lots of little toasters. This is toaster paradise!

Millions of colors! You could go mad!

If you're not interested in this, you won't be interested.

I have two in my office--one for each eye.

That's the Achilles elbow...heel, neck, whatever you want to do.

It's like Lucy Ricardo packing chocolates.

There's a couple of words you don't hear at Yahoo: quality control.

What's your favorite M-word? Metadata!

They are trying to standardize things, because too many things are optional things in the world of thingyness.

Okay, we have Canon, and we have Epson, and let's say it's a new merged company, called Can-Epson. Conniption would be good. And your company is...Lego. It's very colorful and has a lot of components. And yours is the Deutchland Uber Alles, machine, the Hasselblatt. Ah, the Hasselblatt! If I had the money! And if I cared!

We're little federal pea-shooters, and they have cannons in the industry.

You have to really Hasselblatt it to get it there.

They apparently have petabyte servers in their cars.

You can see a huge XML parade!

Machines are profoundly stupid.

I'm from the future.

Isn't it a lot easier to just pick up Dewey Decimated and just read it?

You say that like you mean it: it's fun. I know what kind of fun that is.

Thursdays with Walter, week 6

I have very good notes on this. Unfortunately they're not here. So tonight, we're going to get very imaginative.

You start making bird noises until a hawk attacks you.

As funds become available...so in other words, they're never going to do anything.

I don't have a pointer. Does anybody have any tall chalk?

If I want to see how Bob Dylan burns, I just light him up.

Look at what age does to you, baby. Whoa. That's what happens to rock stars. Can we have a moment of silence?

To test this, you have to build a structure and set it on fire, or it doesn't count.

Y'ever have to buy a roof?

So the guy shoots you when you're wet.

Maybe giraffes work there.

Land of a million sprinkler heads, all in a row, like a big huge insect.

The water doesn't know, "oh, I have to go around this post."

Within half an hour, the place is full of water and smoke, so I'm parboiled!

This is giving grandfathers a bad name: anything that's grandfathered in is a bad idea.

They call that the Fire Triangle in fire talk.

This is why this is the ideal job: you can only work four hours, and then you have to take a two-hour break.

You're gonna put a fire out with ice?

He moved to one side, and the pipe went whammo! If he'd stayed where he was, he would've been whammoed!

You get Fast Eddie's pipes, and two years later you have Fast Eddie's leaks.

Big smart-aleck preservation namby-pamby.

You're not supposed to git 'er done, you're supposed to git 'er tested!

Aspiration! Let's all aspirate!

It's an orange tube full of noses.

We've got a heavy breather on 2.

They test it by lighting something, hopefully not one of your rare books.

Why should we have an alarm? We're the fire department!

Get to be a consultant if you want to get rich. Hundred dollars an hour? Why stop there?

Removes oxygen from the space in four minutes? Removes oxygen from you a lot faster!

One of the problems with CO₂ is it's gonna kill you. Kind of a nasty side effect.

It's not gonna kill you. You might walk sideways or talk in a funny voice for the rest of your life, but what a price to pay.

Oh, well, we had a Gutenberg here, but it got blown off the shelf, a couple of pages got a little damaged...

Are computers all we talk about anymore?

If we don't get air in here soon, we're goners.

You see what happens with technology! Lucy showed us!

There's not much you can do about the weather. The weather's gonna win.

Doesn't that sound like a good idea? I could sell it to you.

Haven't you ever noticed when you move the toaster aside there's a little shadow of stuff?

That's my new favorite peeve.

I've talked fire suppression systems to death.

This is the real stuff, not just what I imagine.

This is the show and tell kingdom!

You touch the electrodes here...

It's like the flossing community. Big discussion.

And if it's late at night, it's a midnight quire.

Good for tomatoes, good for books.

Ah, the kettle stitch. Remains a mystery to me after all these years.

Bone folder! The terms start to thicken as you get into this.

Do you miss being in this class or what?

It has that acid free look.

If you don't know who Jack Kerouac is, you're not from this country.

He took some things in addition to his coffee.

Benzedrine is what there was before Starbucks. Starbucks is like a slow benzedrine.

When's the last time you were a hep cat?

You don't get free benzedrine.

The reality is that while you're at the Kerouac grave site, the guys mowing the cemetery are doing wheelies.

I was young once! Student: I was alive during the sixties. Hi! Send water!

This is relevant to the course...I'll make it relevant to the course.

There's a certificate of purity that comes with every bottle. You won't remember reading it, but in half an hour, you won't remember anything.

You're seeing things Jack Kerouac never saw.

They didn't do much editing; they just produced. Dickens was a tad wordy.

Craigslist, Harryslist, Edslist, next week it'll be Maryslist. They're all the same people. they're all Google. Google has all these pseudonyms so they can make extra money. It's like offshore banking.

The textbook industry is like an auction of your soul.

Before we go, you're gonna get one more glimpse of what's good about life.

I've accumulated quite a few things.

She was reading Kerouac.

That loaf of bread is so great to find in a book.

I need a refresher course in my own course.

Thursdays with Walter, week 5

I hope I terrified everyone: it's the midterm of midterms!

With the midterm being a big bomber, the end of the year stuff'll be a piece of cake.

This is your midterm. It's like a vision came to me.

For next week, I want you to write a short story that begins, "On the way to the wedding, I drove past a bloody corpse on the highway."

I asked them for a sample, and they send me a bible.

I'm a sham and a pretense, but I admit it.

These are the really unemployable.

Does anybody care about Google to the extent that you want to go there and say "Hi, what's new?" We just use them.

This is a cruel trade! I didn't know conservators were so ruthless!

I cooked up a horrific midterm in order to mask my ignorance.

I ain't never lickin' the tip of a ballpoint no more.

Put that in your "don't" column.

It's alcohol, alright!

If you can drink it, you can breathe it. Ooh! Write that down!

Oh wow, this is horrific, but it's original, so it's 11 million dollars.

Those tricksy conservators are behind all this.

That's what I like about the web: you get what you wanted plus 80 pages of comments.

Next week, I'll show you way more wheels. I have so many wheels now I could build an 18-wheeler.

This is your guide for the midterm. If you have trouble, light incense in front of him. If you want a color version, send me ten dollars and I'll give you a paint by number. Now that you have your totem, let's look at what you've gotten into.

If you're not here, raise your hand.

What's a Hemingway? Oh, about five pounds.

I got all of these from one box, from one dumpster. Student: Are you just hanging out by the dumpster waiting for an old guy with a box of books? Nah, these are all coincidences. I have book radar. I should be a book dowser.

"Salvation is Created" for marching band

David: I'm going to assume (hope, pray, whatever) that it's the warm-up chorale.
Me: Pfft. You know there's gonna be a flag routine with it.
David: No. I will not have that.
Me: I think you mean, "do not want."
David: That too.

Tis the Season

Me: You're so vain, you probably think Adeste Fideles is about you.

Not Helping

Austin: Oh, just what we need, more grainy, out of focus pictures of
Bigfoot. It's people like you who are ruining the field of
cryptozoology!

Could you be a little more vague, please?

Jay: What was that movie, where that guy dies?

Vinny: That’s pretty much every movie.

How's Married Life

Greg: Oh, I don't feel too good about that.
Me: What? I'm just tenting my fingers!

Surf City, It Ain't

Me: Every group going into the bar has one female and two males.
Greg: It's a good night for the ladies.
Me: And a bad day for Jan & Dean.

Jackie Chan at the Salvadoran Restaurant

Me: You're watching a Chinese movie, dubbed into English, dubbed into
Spanish, edited for television, in a mirror.
Greg: I'm not watching it for the plot.

Implausible Deniability

Greg: I deny everything!
Me: Everything?
Greg: No!
Me: Hm, even that?
Greg: No!

Fire or Ice?

Greg: It's the apocalypse, with a vampire. Can it get any worse?
Me: There could be a zombie rising out of the back seat.
Greg: There probably is.

Comedy Tonight

Me: Is there a game on? Why are the stadium lights on? Oh, it says
volleyball.
Greg: Tonight, volleyball. Tomorrow...
Me: Tragedy tomorrow, volleyball tonight.
Greg: I was going to say curling, but that's more or less the same as
tragedy.

Overheard in Port Lavaca

Teenage mother: I didn't drink at all! I had beer at the reception,
and a couple of Jagers, and that shot you gave me, and that's it!

Not Helping

Me: They really have the worst dog toy ever over there. It's the gift that if I gave it to Mike, would once and for all make Jen forbid him to talk to me.
Greg: Lemme see it.
Me, holding horrible dog toy: Look at it. It's like a mess, with a handle.
Greg: It's fantastic. You should get it for Mike.

What was that?

Me: That would be the sound of Greg's heart breaking.
Greg: It'd be kind of a clanging squeak.

Logic

Greg: There we have it: proof that John Tesh is a commie.