Tagged with history …

Nov 04 2011
3 Comments
Ohio, Sports, Uncategorized

4. father’s day.

We’re a day away from another home football game, and I have my regular football partner with me tomorrow. That wasn’t the case a week ago, but it worked out pretty well anyway.

I’m always a little out of sorts when Mrs. Crappy can’t come to a game. She’s been my partner in Ohio Stadium for even longer than we’ve been married, and when she can’t come for some reason, I miss her terribly.

That was the case a week ago, when Mrs. Crappy was recovering from the nasty cold and didn’t come out to Columbus. It was the case for my dad too, as my Mom, who had been sick all week, came to the tailgate party but didn’t stick around for the game that night.

And that’s how I got to watch a game — that game — with my Dad.

Mrs. Crappy’s been my official football partner for more than a decade now, but my Dad and I go back even further. My first Ohio State game was with him — a Wisconsin game, no less, in 1974. Long before I was in high school, he made a point of taking me to what would be the last game between Upper Arlington — for whom I would play several years later — and Bishop Watterson, the local Catholic high school; that rivalry was ending as UA moved to a new conference, but I mostly remember the pre-game meal we shared at White Castle. There were Browns games in the old Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, including one bitterly cold game in which Cleveland secured a playoff berth.

And there were Ohio State games. Too many to count in the stadium — I was the default choice when mom decided it was too cold or rainy to go — and even more on TV in our house or elsewhere.

I am the way I am, in terms of football, because of him. He’s a little more understated these days, but the stuff I remember:

  • TP-ing the house of a Michigan fan after the 1975 comeback win.
  • Standing by the outerbelt waiving an enormous Ohio State flag — which I still have — at passing traffic after we watched the 1979 win against Michigan.
  • Dangling my buddy Carolina Boy over the edge of our deck because he wore his Michigan gear to one of my folks’ Beat Michigan parties.

Has this rubbed off? As I gave what can only be described as a totally over-the-top pep talk at the end of our tailgate toast on Saturday, I heard someone say to my father: “Yeah, he’s your son.”

Father and son got to watch a remarkable game on Saturday night. Ohio State’s first late touchdown — the long Braxton Miller run — had both of us jumping up and down — something that’s not easy for Dad these days. We reacted differently to Miller’s long TD pass, though — as the stadium erupted around us, we could only look at each other in disbelief.

He’s got a few more games on me — to the tune of 20 seasons or so — but neither of us could come up with one that compared to last week’s win against Wisconsin. We saw an all-timer. And I got to share it with the guy who is the reason for me being the fan I am.

I get to watch this week’s game with Mrs. Crappy, and I’m happy she’s back. But I will always be grateful for — and I will never forget — last weekend.

Thanks, Dad.

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Oct 05 2011
2 Comments
Elsewhere, Social Media

5. thought different.

I arrived in Athens, Ohio, in the fall of 1985. As I moved in at Washington Hall, I met my roommate for the first time. He had all the normal moving into college stuff — clothes, some music, stuff to hang on the walls.

But he also had a small, black vinyl bag, like a little suitcase. It was one of the last things he unpacked. He did so carefully, gently placing the bag and its contents on one of the two desks in the room. I hadn’t seen it before, but I knew what it was.

It was a Macintosh.

My roommate turned out to be kind of a tool, but he said I could use the Mac whenever I wanted. I used it a lot. My mother had an Apple II that I had a hard time deciphering, but the Mac was a whole different experience. No deciphering necessary. Jump in. Start doing.

My roommate and I managed to tolerate each other until January, and I moved to a different room. I didn’t miss him, but I missed that computer, especially after I started working at the student newspaper at OU. There were computers there, sort of. We had these black-box word processors and we had a newer system, which we not-so-lovingly called the POS (that actually stood for something besides Pieces of Shit, which was the common name in the newsroom). We had to code headlines, bylines, different type styles we used in the paper.

And I missed that Mac.

I didn’t return to The Post right away when I returned to Athens after the Army, but when I did, I was in for a nice surprise. We wrote stories on Mac Classics. We did all the design and pagination on Mac Quadras. And if we had technical problems during a late night, it was mostly because of the OOPS, our massive typesetting beast, and not the computers. Again — it was easy.

And since then, I’ve been hooked. Yes, I’ve worked on PCs since I started the professional portion of my career — and I’ve become pretty comfortable with them. But when I’ve had a choice about what we’ve used at home, I’ve always turned to Apple. I had — still have, actually — a Bondi Blue iMac (Rev. B, because I know you’re wondering). That was replaced with an eMac that still lives a happy life in my mother in law’s house. And I’m hoping that the iMac I’m writing this on will be with us for years.

And that says nothing of the other things. The music freak in me is still grateful for the old iPod that allowed me to carry dozens of Grateful Dead, Wilco and Phish shows — with room for plenty more — anywhere I went. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the iPhone is at least partially responsible for me finding the amazing group of friends I have here in Pittsburgh — not to mention having the still not-quite-fully-realized potential for changing how I do my job.

I don’t need Apple devices to do these things these days. I have two Android devices that I use and I like.  But Apple still does it better, and it won’t be long until I’m able to happily — and finally — get an iPhone 4.

It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say this is all the responsibility of one man. But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s hard to say that Steve Jobs changed the world — and changed how I live in it.

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Aug 01 2011
12 Comments
Music

thirty.

My relationship with MTV was always a little different.

Once I got past the initial thrill of just seeing the network, which turns 30 today, I was a little dismissive of MTV. There was some remarkable stuff there, sure, but between the endless stream of Top 40 stuff that I never found all that interesting and the fact that MTV largely ignored the music I was interested in — with the exception of 1987, otherwise known as the Summer of Touch — I generally didn’t find much there for me.

As I think about it now — more than a decade after MTV traded in music for crappy reality programming — I wish I had paid a little more attention. There was more good stuff there than I gave it credit for, and some of my favorite musical moments — and some sort of non-musical ones– were a direct result of watching.

I got to watch portions of the revived Woodstock festival — the fun one, not the ugly one a few years later — and seeing the Nine Inch Nails set — remember the mud flinging? — was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen on television anywhere; also, seeing the Allman Brothers set on that Sunday mornings was priceless.

But this is about video, right? I liked Nirvana, but I didn’t love them until I saw this:

The chilling Leadbelly song was the perfect way to wrap up their Unplugged set.

The 1993 VMAs did two things for me: I got the perfect version of “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Pearl Jam backing Neil Young, but that was preceded by something even better:

Stunning.

I can’t find the clip of my favorite REM appearance on MTV, even though I know it used to be available on YouTube. The band did a live set on the network not long after Bill Berry left the band. Before the launched into “Radio Free Europe,” Stipe urged the audience to shout FUCK throughout the song in hopes that MTV couldn’t use it on air. And then the band roared through a sloppy, garage-y and joyful version of the song. This is similar , especially in that Stipe can’t remember the words, but I have to find that clip again someday:

And yeah, the Summer of Touch:

I still love it. Happy birthday, MTV — turns out you weren’t so bad after all.

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Jul 08 2011
1 Comment
Ohio

when I knew.

Whenever a space shuttle launches, I try to watch. I did so this morning, when Atlantis took off for the program’s final mission.

I was watching at lunch on Jan. 28,1986, when Challenger began what would be its last mission. I was a freshman at OU, and after pestering the editors for weeks, I had just been given a staff writer’s job at The Post, the independent student paper there. Journalism was I went to Athens after high school, but outside of a couple feature stories and the column that got my foot in the door the previous fall, I hadn’t really done much yet.

Watching the Challenger explode 73 seconds into its flight was horrifying, of course; I watched the footage over and over, stunned, while I stood in the little restaurant in Baker Center. And I’m not sure why it happened, but eventually something made me move, I walked to the other side of the building, where The Post had its offices, to see if there was anything I should be doing.

There was, of course. I didn’t get to my classes that afternoon, because one of the editors — might have been Ethel, now that I think about it — sent me out to collect reactions from fellow students. While I was doing that, others were talking to people in town and the campus editor — my editor — drove to another town in eastern Ohio to interview a friend of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who had died along with six astronauts on the flight.

I may still have a copy of that paper somewhere. I remember being proud of helping, in a small way, of getting that paper out.

When a catastrophe like the Challenger explosion happens, people tend to shut down while they process what they’ve seen and heard. The people in my business are wired differently, though — it’s not that we don’t share those emotions, but we’re able to put them aside and do our jobs. Looking back, that was the first day I knew I was wired that day. I came to Athens for OU’s journalism program; I knew on that day I had made the right choice.

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Mar 15 2011
7 Comments
I Have No Idea

13. nickname.

I’ve written about the origin of the Uncle Crappy before, but that was many years ago, and for god’s sake don’t go back in the archives and look because they can be pretty rough. But a couple of you *coughgoonsquadsarahahem* have asked recently where the name came from, and I think I can probably do a slightly less awful job of re-telling the story here.

See, there is this bar…

The Union, in Athens, Ohio, was my bar from the day I returned to town after a couple years in the Army. I was familiar with it during my first try at college — it’s where I wore Grateful Dead t-shirts to hardcore shows, much to the consternation of my friends who were a bit more serious about metal than I was — but I was younger then and the combination of townies and PIBs was slightly intimidating.

When I returned to Athens, though, the Union was where I was comfortable. No one cared who you were or what music you listened to; if you could handle yourself on the pinball machine or the pool table — and if you bought a pitcher once in while — you were in. It had cheap hot dogs, decent-but-inexpensive beer, a killer jukebox and, most importantly, it was just a block from the offices of the student newspaper.

What’s not to like?

Our beer of choice back then was Lowenbrau Dark — it wasn’t nasty macro swill and pitchers were just $3.50 (Again — what’s not to like?). I couldn’t begin to count the nights, or the money, I spent there over the years, and I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.

The Union was a habit I shared with a pretty good number of friends from the student newspaper in particular, so much so that when we had reunions, we always ended up there. During one of those reunion weekends — please don’t ask me which one, because I have no idea — we started and finished the night there. I seem to recall going for a while before having to break the seal, but that detail isn’t especially important; what was important was what I saw when I walked in the men’s room for the first time that night.

The dark, stinky, graffiti-covered men’s room had a sort-of-functioning sink, one light, and two partitions that separated the toilet and the urinal from the rest of the closet-sized space. If I remember correctly, it had a holstein-themed paint job — black-and-white splotches, covered in graffiti, covering the walls. But that wasn’t there this night — I just remember dark red paint, accented by black Sharpie, all over everything but the plumbing fixtures.

I remember one other thing: Someone had started a list on the partition next to the urinal. The title? Suggested Band Names. And while I don’t recall any of the other names people had written on the list, I clearly, to this very day, remember No. 6.

Uncle Crappy.

I was so taken that I actually dragged the future Mrs. Crappy into the men’s room so she could share in my epiphany. I don’t think she was quite as impressed as I was, but the name was burned in my brain. I lack the musical talent to ever have a band to name, but once I had graduated from my horrible Geocities site to Blogger, I thought I should probably come up with a decent blog name; that, my friends, had to be Uncle Crappy.

(As a postscript of sorts: For years, Mrs. Crappy’s name on the blog was simply The Wife. She hates that term, but, fortunately for me, found it endlessly amusing that that was her name here. But when she showed some interest in Twitter, we found that @thewife had already been taken; she opted for Mrs. Crappy — over Aunt Crappy — instead, and was officially promoted to that title back in February 2009.)

I just wrote 700 words explaining where Uncle Crappy came from — @supa probably knows I’m like this already, right? — but the name has served me well over the years. It’s been worth it to me, especially since there are still a pretty good number of people in Pittsburgh who don’t have any idea what my actual name is.

That means I picked a good one, right?

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Mar 13 2011
Music

10. bear.

If I had to pick one guy, outside of the immediate circle of musicians or lyricists, who was responsible for the success of the Grateful Dead, it would be Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

If you were a member of the GD circle, you knew him as Bear. If you bought LSD anywhere on the west coast in the late 1960s or early 1970s, you knew him simply as Owsley, the guy who cooked millions of doses, before and after the drug was deemed to be illegal in 1966.

Bear was killed on Sunday, in a car accident near his home in Australia.

Bear’s underground industry helped him finance the band, which he first saw at one of the Bay Area Acid Test shows. He bought gear, he paid for their living expenses and allowed them the time to develop from something of a novelty to the biggest band in the San Francisco area. He even took them in while he lived in Los Angeles for a spell, feeding the band’s members only steak — he thought vegetables were toxic and carbohydrates caused diabetes — kept them stoned nearly all the time, because they all lived in the lab where he was cooking the substance that paid for the band’s expenses.

He observed early on that the band’s live harmonies were horrible; he actually went as far as to suggest that they play only songs that didn’t require background vocals. The guys didn’t go for that, so Bear did the next best thing — he upgraded their monitors and sound system, a process that continued with him until he designed the Wall of Sound, a monstrous system that could produce crystal-clear sound at a staggering decibel level. For those two-and-a-half years, the band had to use two Walls of Sound, so one could jump ahead to the next venue while the band used the other for the current show. It was a sonic success but a business nightmare — the expenses associated with hauling two of those things around the country nearly bankrupted the band and was a big factor in the hiatus that started in 1974.

Bear was a notorious pain in the ass, and he pushed the band through the years about matters both artistic and acoustic. That had an impact, back then and today, as Weir said in a statement posted at Jambands.com:

He taught me to take myself and my interests out of the picture and work with the subject under consideration so that the best deductions or conclusions are made. I guess this means working from the point of view of the higher self, though that term never came up; it was always just assumed…Most important was the approach he taught me: Always be open and engaging – always critical and questioning, but not negatively so much as playfully.

There are pictures of Bear available through the magic of Google, and I’m not going to post any of them here. Bear preferred to be a behind-the-scenes guy, and that’s something I’ll respect here.

Instead, you get a Stealie, which Bear helped design as a stencil to easily identify the band’s gear. It’s a pretty good symbol of the impact he had on the band. He needed something to make his job and that of the crew a little easier; what he came up with because the best-recognized icon for an iconic band.

Thanks, Bear, for that and everything else.

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