PW! Pass the bong.

Hello! tap tap tap Is this thing on?

Hold on, I think Kevin has it…

Laserium in Golden Gate Park – Dark Side of the Moon, cover to cover.

Flashback arriving in 5,4,3…

Great times!

I am afraid that I really can’t imagine being 16 in 1979, since I was 27 and working on my second marriage at the time. I do remember watching Yellow Submarine on MDA, however. 8-)

(high-pitched squeal of acoustic feedback)

Yeah, it’s on.

“I’ve got a hoooole in me pocket!”

Ouch! Oh well, I think we killed the cockroaches.

I was 11 and not yet very interested in girls. I did, however, discover the joys of Star Trek around that time.

Oh, and Larry Fast is a genius.

To this day I am not sure what was in the movie and what was just in my head.

I was 19 in 1979 and poking glowing, phosphorescent creatures washing up on the beach on MDA. Good times….until Danny drove us into the water.

The walking shoe with teeth? Movie. The old lady with the five breasts and the battle axes for legs? Your head.

Maybe the whole movie was just in your head. Maybe you’re still there.

Ow ow ow!

Wow, man! That is like, cosmic!

The Yellow Submarine experience was about 9 years earlier and I had slowed down greatly by 1979. Being a single father will do that to you.

Heh. Now I learn via Der Google that Laser Fantasy was/is a national chain. I always thought it was just one doofus with a dream that petered out after a few yeas.

Didn’t fall for that shit then and certainly do not now. Have to say, however, that my experiences in the late 60s and early 70s had a lot to do with why I think postmodernists are full of shit.

Are you suggesting that the PoMos are on drugs? Or are you just stating it outright?

Ever watched the movie called “Dazed and Confused”? That was me. That was my time, my place and those actors were portraying people I knew. When I saw that, (about ten years after it was made), it was like watching a very high quality home movie of my life in high school. “The Emporium” was actually called “The Break Shot” but other than that, same places, same people, same adventures.

I am saying that they would make more sense if they were.

I’d forgotten about the patented mini-bongs. They were ideal for taking an unwelcome swig of bongwater.

My coming of age was more a cross of American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show, but with more drugs.

Didn’t see that one, but I know the type. Remember the Dry Look and sideburns past the jawline?

A few years before my time. :)

I remember everybody was wearing nylon shirts full of seed burns….You should take a look at it. VH1 plays it fairly regularly.

Wish I’d realized in the ’70s what a fucking good time I was having. Seems like the good times were always overshadowed by some looming authoritarian menace.

I’m a pop culture moran so have little to offer here. Just continue to be amazed by how rapidly time passes, and how, being divorced from pop culture, I missed the most important changes in U.S. society.

Or spilling it all over an inside jacket pocket. Or purse. After about, oh, four or five bowls’ worth of resinated reek had passed into the liquid. (Because of course they were so small, you figured you could carry it around without it leaking, y’know.)

Yeah, for me too. If you watch Dazed and Confused, I’m a mixture of the stoner kids and the philosophical kids.

I don’t think I have a coming of age movie. I just didn’t fit those Brat Pack flicks they were churning out when I was slouching toward adulthood.

Just kick back and listen to the tune. Larry Fast knew/knows how to make synths work for him and the music.

Same here, really. I was too much of a nerd for that.

Oh really.

I’ve told this story before, but it seems appropriate.

A propo of nothing, a RA of mine in the 1990s, said: It must have been great after the pill and before AIDS.

All I could do was respond: It was.

That was the 1970s (and late 1960s). Had to be the greatest decade+ in U.S. history. At least from the POV of a U.S. pre-menopausal female.

Actually, this literally describes my HS years (it is the only song I know of about my home town).

I can’t either; I’m actually older than you. Although not by much….

Or spilling it in your parents’ car…

ah, the Golden Age of Science Fiction….

Wasn’t bad for us guys either. ;-)

Well, the movie describes the scene I was going through but none of those kids had much in common with me. For example, I was like the main driver/enthusiast in the science club and I was also known to go to the back fence and smoke dope when I was supposed to be playing softball. The characters in the movie with the exception of Randall Pink Floyd were much shallower than most real people, though some were certainly parodies. We used to make fun of them though. Harshly.

Sadly, being something of a pariah I derived no benefit at that time from advances in contraception.

It is similar though. All the advances of the ’60s and ’70s were overshadowed by the Cold War, the Vietnam war, social unrest, assassination, etc.. It was enough to spoil your buzz, man.

Way off topic but any interested Firepups…

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson will be at Tulane tomorrow:

https://tulane.edu/calendar/event-details.cfm?uid=5CAB080A-D8FF-877F-9E5A9397AB0B621F

Yeah. Especially if you got your draft notice, as I did in 1971.

I have a pot story about one of my first jobs out of high school. I used to work late at night and of course I wanted to catch a buzz on the way home. I was driving a 1964 Chevy Impala then and it had a lot of ticking coming out of the seat under my butt. I twisted one on the way home one night and it was full of seeds. I sparked it up and a seed popped and landed in the ticking so here I was, driving down the road and trying to put out the fire under my ass. I thought I had put it out but the next morning I woke up and my windows were black and my front seat was bare springs. I drove that car sitting on those springs for another two years.

This is what I looked like at the time.

Thanks!

I always rolled eleven joints (because ten apparently wasnt enough) the night before a school day and carried them in one of those nifty tin Sucrets cases. Good times… sort of. I spent so little time in class that I’m still mystified by the fact that I graduated.

Kitty!

With your most excellent companion, Ratfucker. Great name for a cat.

It depends on how socially involved one was.

I would like to describe my fundamental “values” as being on the moral side of the issues, but not at all letting those interfere with my personal ‘tactical’ enjoyment.

I did nothing overt to change the way U.S. society worked. In the words of Nixon/Safire, I was one of the ‘silent majority,’ (TM) but on the other side from the one they thought the silent majority was on.

Did I count? Who the hell knows.

I’m sure you catch my drift.

Hmmm. Lesson for today?

Did you get a college deferrment? The war was a travesty but a terrific academic incentive.

Anyone there who can carry my hugs & kisses please do so.

I thought the movie was dreck beyond redemption, but hope they made a lot of money from it.

I thought so, but then I was stoned all the time back then. How I managed a 3.92 GPA my freshman year when I was pretty much stoned through the whole thing, I will never know.

Were you still a member of the RC congregation or had you started your recovery?

Everybody smoked Marlboro in the box when I was in HS. The better to carry your joints.

I was originally classed 1Y (a medical deferment), which was better than the student deferment, so I foolishly never applied for the student deferment. Unfortunately they decided to change the draft law the year of my eligibility and abolished the 1Y classification, reclassifying us all as 1A. Not a good thing when your draft number is 3 like mine was.

My oldest brother was three years behind you. His draft number was due to be called in August of ’74, so he just missed being one of the guys evacuating the embassy roof.

The theme song of his graduating class was Mason Proffit’s “Two Hangmen Hangin’ from a Tree”.

I still have that album somewhere.

I didn’t smoke tobacco when I was in high school. Of course I’d been raised in a fog of second-hand smoke, so it probably made little difference.

I am getting this picture of our current Official Great Leader as, if he were in our approximate age range, the guy who somehow ‘accidentally’ says something that tells TPTB that something’s going on and they need to look into it. Every time.

My brother, who is pretty nearly your age, managed to get CO. Much correspondence with his draft board, sent Return Receipt Requested. (He’s still a CO. If he were religiously inclined, I’d expect him to be either Buddhist or Quaker.)

I’ve had in-depth conversations with my contractor about this period. He’s about 2 years younger than me, so we experienced the same social climate.

40+ years later, we may well have switched roles.

Back then, he was a pink diaper baby who went to rallies and got roughed up by cops. And physically compromised by sex & drugs.

I, OTOH, kept my nose to the grindstone, graduated from a female poison ivy college which I hated, went on to a quasi-successful career on Wall ST. Never did drugs & escaped all the bad sex-related health stuff.

He was much more knowledgeable, less naive than I. Although I never bought into the USG version. I was just ‘pragmatic’, while he was (self-destructively) idealistic.

Now, he thinks that O is the best we can do, while I think O is evil.

Inneressing complications.

I was a committed pacifist at time, but I was not religious and Oklahoma draft boards really did not believe in COs and made you a special project if you asked for it.

In 1966 my brother-in-law was a dead cert to be drafted so he joined the Air Force. It was pretty smart actually because it allowed him to exert a little more influence over how he served. He spent a couple years fueling planes in Taiwan. My sister went over too. They lived in a big (cheap) house off base. It was undoubtedly a beneficial experience for both of them.

…imagine being a sixteen-year-old kid in 1979, sitting in a dark movie theater after the mini-bong’s been discreetly passed around a couple of times…

I have fond memories of passing around doobs to HS buds, in my folks’ theater in Na’alehu, back in ’80 daze…

one of my Xeriod friends built a portable laser device that would create patters on the wall ceiling etc by being oscillated by the incoming audio signal, made amazing patterns… Funny thing he used a piece of a condom to mount a first surface mirror on a iron core that was oscillated by the signal.. It was in a brief case so was very portable…

Oh, I departed terminally from R.C.s in 1957, when I was 13, long before the social upheavals of the 1970s.

Unfortunately the perspectives that O is the best we can do and evil are not mutually exclusive.

A lot of guys did that. Of course it could back fire on you. One friend who was from NY enlisted in the Coast Guard to avoid Vietnam in 1968. He wound up on a gunship patrolling the Mekong delta. For his second tour, the added insult to injury by stationing him in Greenland.

Yes. I’m trying to come to grips with that.

I have great deal of respect for my contractor’s POV, because he knew more & was less naive, long before me.

I heard that the North Hollywood draft board would draft anyone whose parents weren’t rich or famous, including, apparently, anyone who could show up for the physical, even if they had a medical record six inches thick that could be summed up as ’4F’.

The same age that I did though a different year.

This is the kind of boat he was on

Hey, gang, I have to hit the hay. Will you all promise to be excellent to each other while I’m gone? No bogarting!

Who got a fucking DRAFT number??? I was 1A in 66 no such thingy as a lottery.. I was just prime Beef for Uncle Sam… Had my induction notice before I turned 19… Ended up enlisting.. probably the best thing I did as some how I avoided the Nam…. Thank you very much and I did get some education under my belt which stood by me till the DOT com bust…

In the late 70s i was working for an electronics company that built a device that ran a microwave signal into a germanium crystal (a large one, at that) and used it to modulate a laser beam. As a light-show item, it would have been extremely expensive, but it was kind of neat.

Hey, LateNiters! I’m back! in several ways. All weekend battled one of those faux antivirus warning programs that was popping up constantly and blocking programs I wanted to run. I was screaming a lot, as I was also dealing w/ w/drawal from antidepressant, from a combo of my mistake – not realizing I had no refills left at the end of the bottle, and some error on the part of my doc’s office. Appears they called in the script to the wrong pharmacy on Fri. So, a tortured weekend of headaches and insomnia and increasing short-tempered-ness.
This morning it got straightened out, and by golly, for the first time in days I’m kinda sleepy at bedtime.
And this evening, I was calm enough to bust through the popups to get to “restore to an earlier date” on the computer, and praise be, it worked! The faux antivirus is gone, and I can work and read in peace.

For which, btw, I must thank Margaret, if you’re still here. I hadn’t thought of that…maybe ’cause I wasn’t thinking very well, anyway.

It’s good to feel human again. *g*

I’m afraid I have to walk back my suggestion that living in Taiwan was positive for my sister and her husband. I was thinking that experiencing life outside the US broadens an individual’s perspective but that was before Taiwan’s economic upswing. It was essentially a third-world country and I suspect living there cemented their belief in American exceptionalism. They might have become hardcore Republicans regardless but that happened to be the path they took.

The Oklahoma City Receiving Station, which processed all inductees for the state, had a reputation for passing anything that came in the door and was breathing. Of the 450 men that went through the day I did, I was the only one who flunked (I had letters) and we had a couple of the guys from Deliverance and what I now think was an intersex guy (the doctor called all the other doctors over to look and then they asked him where he peed from).

Night!

Of my brother’s friends, one refused induction (and was still behind bars when Nixon declared the war over) and one got an appointment to the Coast Guard Academy. I don’t know who got the best deal there.

Nighters PW, thanks for doing LN duty.

I should get back to my chores. Wishing a splendid evening to all.

WooHoo! Glad for your personal and cyber recovery. :)

Night Ratty and PW.

Congrats and good night!

‘Night, Ratty!

Nighters! I should toddle off as well as the corrupting shifts into high gear tomorrow. Take care all.

Margaret -

My trans student came into see me today and he has decided he wants to be completely out and open with the class. We had a good conversation and I think his perspective will be good for the class.

Oh F*ck…! That would’ve sucked…! 8-(

Oh yeah it was great to watch… funny thing is that if I connected my Bass and strummed a D it would paint a perfect circle on the wall… every song created it’s own signature patterns…

I don’t have a lot of stories about VN inductees.

My contractor got out on some kind of dietary trickery, as did a sculpture I knew earlier.

To keep to the thread – my 1st husband was 1Y, even tho’ he had a congenital heart condition. He went to the induction, with letters, and failed the exam, I think. His heart condition was real…I shudder to think what might have happened to him even in boot camp. Got some scary symptoms on exertion even in his ’20′s. Runs in the family;
but his “little” brother was healthy and bound to be drafted, so he was another who enlisted in the AF. Got into intelligence, sent around the world, but avoided VN.
Elder brother, OTOH, went to med school on a ROTC scholarship – found himself the only MD at Khe Sanh.
This thread is dredging up old memories…
That was in ’69, right after his college graduation.

Back to the first comment…

My usually-unreliable-source has a story about one of his buddies who was made 1A despite having only one not-working-very-well kidney (and the six-inch stack of medical reports). He went to basic, told his DI (and, I suspect, every officer he could get to listen) about the dicey kidney, and sure enough, it went out on him. And, since he was already in, they had to take care of it.

I long ago decided that I wasn’t going to keep anything secret but I’ve come to realize that advertising my situation isn’t always the best thing either. I’ve relaxed into an equilibrium where I neither try to keep it secret nor do I go out of my way to bring the subject up.

Hopefully you have a good anti-virus client.. You should turn off the restore feature and run you A/V program so it can clean up the mess your PC contracted. After you are sure IT has been cured then turn it back on… I have seen many a PC cleaned but they failed to clean the restore files because they are protected and you can’t treat the files until they are unprotected…

That happened a fair bit.

Thx. I owe ya. By tomorrow I should be back to what passes for normal. ;)

While I was still hurting this a.m. – rage and adrenaline led me to drag that ginormous tv the ex gave me off the stinky tv stand, disconnect everything, and haul the stand out to the alley by the garbage cans. Turned out to be worse peed-on than I thought (long story here – ex gave me this tv and cheapo stand which had already been peed on by his cats w/o his noticing. When summer dry weather ended and the rains began, the smell appeared, and my cat had to cover up that stranger’s odor…you get the picture. The thing was so heavy I felt helpless to move it out w/o help, which was not avalable).
anyway, I kinda dumped the tv on the floor, but amazingly, it still works. The DVD player turned out to be peed on, too (maybe that was why it stopped working?), so I threw it out, too.
Then I got on the phone and left a really angry message on my ex’s voice mail, demanding he replace the stand and tv at his expense. (who needs a tv so big you can’t move it when you need to?)

It’s not likely to happen, but expressing the pent up anger of months seems to have exorcised it, so that’s part of why I feel better, too. And the room doesn’t reek anymore.

Yeah. that probably sounds like the best course. My trans colleague has pretty much adopted the same policy. My student has just started transitioning (just started hormone replacement therapy) and is still working through all of that (including getting straight on the pronouns, which came up in our conversation).

I have an AV program, but it didn’t catch this malware. (there’s a n ame for this fake AV warning isn’t there? Can’t remember what it is. Had it once several yrs ago and downloaded something from MS that cured it.)

So, if I understand your advice to turn off the restore feature – running the AV after that cleans files that might still be lurking?

On edit: I always download the updates for everything, so am not sure how this thing got through.

Wow! Let it all out girl. :)

nothing worse than cat piss.. specially if it gets wet and heated up by the tv….

Yep. He’ll figure it out. I’ve found that it really doesn’t matter where one is, assholes abound and he’ll find that out too. But one can also find support in unexpected places. I didn’t lose a single person whom I had called “friend” but my family deserted me like rats on the Titanic. Of course it gave many family members a new hobby: Giving me suggestions on how to improve myself.

yep and then turn it back on again and rerun your av… you might also go to http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm but use IE as it takes extra work using Firefox…

Yeah. Sorry. fdl is my home…and some things you can’t tell your mother. *g*
Mine, especially on cat-related complaints – she hates the critters. Her expression of sympathy for Patchy’s death was followed immediately by: “Dont adopt any more!!” So I never tell her anything negative about the cats.

happy 100 tejanarusa!!!!

I always download the updates for everything, so am not sure how this thing got through.

It happens. I got mine directly after I ran a Norton update. But it wasn’t Norton telling me I got a bug. One thing I never do anymore is click on web advertisements. What had happened was I accidentally clicked one when the page shifted while it was loading. These days I try to make sure the page is done loading and I keep track of the warnings I get.

Oh, yeah..that was one of the frustrations – I tried MS onecarelive – began following steps, then got messages that it wouldn’t work with my computer config – (using FF), must use IE.
Open IE – get full-page message from malware program I was trying to kill.
Stymied.
Thankd G for Margaret’s suggestion to use system restore. And that took multiple tries as the malware kept blocking it from opening. Finally got it done immediately on turning laptop on …malware hadn’t kicked in yet. Though it tried…but the restore was already running.
Whew. I hate computers…but can’t live w/o ‘em, obviously.

Don’t apologize. I was impressed. :)

Yep. I had to start mine up in safe mode and then go to a restore point. Sounds like we had the same bug.

Ohhh…I hate to admit it, but the ad companies have my profile down, so I do sometimes click on ads…only for known companies/stores, not som ething I’ve never heard of. Many are for companies I’ve ordered from, so you would think they’d be safe???

what chaps me, of course, is the amount of time and energy it takes to fix such stuff—always unscheduled, often preventing you from doing something productive with that time.

Nahant – I’ll take your advice tomorrow. Gotta go to bed shortly, get back on a normal schedule.

Great advice Peg. I use Zone Alarm Extreme and have been using their products for 10 years and it has always protected me even when things are down loaded in the background… I also use their router/firewall which has greatly cut down on intrusions…

Oh. Whew. I rant, I know. It isn’t a trait always appreciated…which of course, is why fdl is home….;)

in the future you can do a restore in the SAFE MODE with networking enabled… that way you can get to the safety scanner.. Good luck..

SHEESH see Peg above….

Umm, to both of you…hate to admit it…not sure how to get to safe mode on purpose….

The problem with clicking on ads is that you are allowing something to be downloaded on your computer so unless you trust them implicitly, I wouldn’t do so. I’m sure you didn’t select an ad that said “free virus scan” but it happened anyway. Never left click on a pop up ad, even if you’re just trying to close it.

at boot up hold down F8 and it should get you to a boot menu where you can select what you want to boot from and select Safe Mode with networking so you can connect to the internet for the safety scan…

‘kay. I’m making a note. Right clicking is safer?

No doubt you’re exactly right, that’s how I got it. Who remembers having done stuff like that? I shall be much more careful in future. I suppose if some ad is too enticing, I could just go there the old-fashioned way, by typing in the url in the address bar, instead of clicking.

Sigh. I used to trust people…

Anyway, glad you’re better now. Going to go to bed. Oya! :)

You can usually right click and then select “close”. Much safer.

Congrats!

reason I really like Zone Alarm you can use a private browser where nothing gets saved from your browsing everything during your session is quarantined and then deleted when you close your browser.. and it protects you from malware scripts that may be embed in the icon you click on…

If PW hadn’t already gone, I’d apologize for turning her thread into a computer safety tutorial.

Love all you guys; I really did make notes and will put them in a safe spot for future reference.

And now, I’d really better shut down and get ready for bed.
Thank you so, so much! Be well, firepups.

night and glad to help a fellow pup with these damn PC’s…

Aloha, Really Big Guy…!

I had my little fun too, eh…? ;-)

Ah. I use to use a variation of that for improvised party lighting: Hang a small mirror on the speaker grille, and bounce a laser off of it. Speaker vibrates the mirror, and presto! Music with synchronized laser show. Multiple mirrors with different colored lasers greatly enhanced the effect.

Sssh…! You’ll never hear the end of it from newt, bro…! ;-)

Genius!

Not a problem CT he after is on an APPLE….

╔═══╗ ♪
║███║ ♫
║ (●) ♫
╚═══╝♪♪

╔══╗
║██║
║(O)║♫ ♪ ♫ ♪
╚══╝
▄ █ ▄ █ ▄ ▄ █ ▄ █ ▄ █
Min- – - – - – - – - – - -●Max

Hard for me to believe that smart people still use PCs instead of Macs.

Mac users don’t have these problems.

I once heard of a PC cleanup company that disinfected PCs by copying the contents of the hard drive to a Mac, erasing the PC drive, then copying the contents back to the PC.

The Mac wouldn’t copy the virus files.

Oh, don’t poke at them. They always get loud.

very similar using the audio to move the mirror, my friends was in a brief case size container very easy to transport and worked like a charm till the condom rubber dried out…

Psst! Hiya Pups!

come on Jobs stole the interface from Small Talk developed in the PARC labs…I do know… Beside apple OS is still on the minority of running computers.. a poor mans UNIX…at best…

Hey! I forgot to ask you last night – did you get your machine back?

now now newt..
but hey how ya doing??

You’re right, I should know better.
Could say more, but won’t.

Yes, this is common knowledge.
But Macs work and PCs suck.

I’ve used both and know.
Don’t get me started.

CTuttle is upstairs!
Late, Late Night FDL: Read Me My Rights

Yes, and in reply to #130 foxman. They had to put in two logic boards. And tear my computer apart so that a new clamshell had to be added to the $823.00 invoice. Nice, for a four month old apple.

Jobbed!
If you still have my email address, send me the serial number of your machine. I have a few channels.

hmmmm…

Thanks guys, it will be fine.
After all , I’m here!

Okay then.
Enjoy all the viruses and worms you get because as nahant says:

“Beside apple OS is still on the minority of running computers.. a poor mans UNIX…at best…”

Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to start OS wars here.
Should have listened to newtonusr.

See you on the upside. Thanks my dear, I was SO PISSED.

Christine,

I thought you had given up on the Mac.
At least there is an Apple store to take your grievances to; as newtonusr suggests, they will sometimes do the repairs for free, if you push.