Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 10/10/21

Sleighbells Jinglin’ Edition

The first real blast of cold swept through North Texas this week, sending the scattered remnants of humanity scurrying for their parkas, their mukluks, and their snow goggles. Just in case. Everyone in administration agrees that it’s not really cold until the temperature drops below forty degrees. Until as such time as that’s the norm, the bunker-issued hoodies will more than suffice.

Nothing to see here, Looky-Lous. Just doing a little Product Evaluation for the R&D Division. Pretty nifty, eh?

A return to the bunker has brought about some changes, thanks to a group of Bunker Elves, led by the Grown-Up Niece. It’s been quite illuminating looking at the interior with Less Stuff in it. Also, it’s always a fun little game to play as I spend the next week in a frantic scavenger hunt, looking for the stuff they stacked, stashed, or stowed. I suspect this is done as a form of occupational therapy, like when they give lab rats tiny Rubic’s Cubes to solve so they don’t chew through their wire mesh cages. I prefer to think of myself as Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau and my hidden things as Cato, just waiting to surprise me when I least expect it.

Podcastery and Whatnot

One of the changes that will be happening over the holidays is the addition of an actual broadcasting booth for making recordings of an audio-visual nature. Here’s a few behind-the-scenes snapshots, utilizing Good Old-Fashioned Apocalypse Bunker Ingenuity to get it done.

The space, mucked out and ready for the load-in.

A quick height test with my approximate position in the Command Chair.

Cloaking Device deployed! So far, so good.

A quick lighting test to see what needs tweaking.

You may infer from these photos whatever you like. Whilst all of this continues apace, I’m still jumping into various podcasts from time to time, such as The 42Cast. The episode below that I’m on is all about The Mandalorian, specifically the second season. It’s long, and detailed, and it’s just the thing you will need to get your head ready for the upcoming Book of Boba Fett. You can listen to Episode 135 here, and if you dig it, the first episode is available here: Episode 93 - This is the Way.

Pre-Solstice Statistics

The boys in the Statistics Division have whipped up some quick and dirty numbers as a kind of snapshot for the Silly Season. In the interest of Inter-Office transparency, I thought I’d run them here for your perusal:

Number of Presents Bought: 17

Number of hours spent listing to Christmas Music: 5

Number of minutes spent singing Christmas Music: 112

Number of Christmas Movies watched: 2

Percentage of Humbuggery Indulged: 21%

Current Level of Christmas Spirit: 33%

Clearly, these numbers are lagging at the moment. We are hoping for a rally in the coming weeks or the end of the month report will be grim, if not dire.

K9 Division Update: Condition Yellow

The Bunker Mascot came home and tried to re-assimilate into bunker living, to no avail. Her convalescence at the Central Texas Apocalypse Satellite Station has thus been extended through the month of December. She is taking her meds like a champ and will soon start rehab to get the leg up to fighting trim again.

The Administrator has been beside himself, worrying about her health and well-being. She is otherwise very healthy and has no desire to slow down, which made the stairs challenge all the more heartbreaking for both of us. I will be making a few alterations to the Bunker that will hopefully help her when she’s ready to come home. In the meantime, I’m getting regular Proof of Life photos from the Director of Bunker Operations.

“Convalescence,” my ass! She’s snockered!

In Other News...

Sonya’s mobility problem has been very triggering for me. I’ve found it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything while I’ve been dealing with this; and by “dealing with this” I mean, running the situation around in my head like a crack-addled hamster, envisioning everything from Rube Goldberg-style Doggy Lifts to relocating my entire home into the theater downstairs so we can be together without straining her leg.

You know. Practical stuff.

All kidding aside...I’m in a real panic. If she can’t navigate the steps after all of this, then I need to make some difficult decisions about whether or not I keep her and move her permanently downstairs (which would make us both miserable) and giving her away to someone who would look after her in her old age (making me miserable and leaving her without her original parents). I don’t like either of them. I just want to take care of her for the rest of her life. She’s my responsibility. I want to see it through.

I’m tired of making hard calls. Sick and tired.

The K9 Division and Bunker Administration on a conference call.

If you have any clever ideas on how to get 65 lbs worth of twelve-year old dog up two flights of concrete steps (about forty feet worth of climbing), I’m all ears. Leave me a comment with thoughts and links.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Live in Front of a Studio Audience: the Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes (ABC)

Here’s the Premise for this, this, this thing: In order to bask in the Oleo-Saturated backwash of Nostalgia that Burbank, CA, loves to peddle, the powers-that-be went back into some much-beloved classic sitcoms, recast a couple of representative episodes from the show’s catalogs, and staged it as a live theatrical experience as a kind of victory lap for their bravery and ingenuity. For anyone still on the fence about whether or not this is worth tuning in for, the producers have obligingly scoured all of the home shopping network channels to find every available former child star actor from the good old days, and plunked them down in front of the cameras for a quick wave.

When they did All In the Family and The Jeffersons, Norman Lear was in the audience. It was played off as a celebration for his groundbreaking shows, his storied career, and so on and so forth. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, it played out exactly like that. The follow up was another episode of All in the Family and an episode of Good Times. Inarguably groundbreaking stuff.

For their third outing, chose The Facts of Life and Diff’rent Strokes, two shows that, um, lacked the cultural gravitas of the former shows by a significant margin. But! Wait! Norman Lear is still alive! Let’s prop him up and try the same tactic again! In fact, let’s get all of the people willing to appear on camera and wave at the audience and truck them out, too. For The Facts of Life, it was Blair (Lisa Whelchel), Tootie (Kim Fields), and Natalie (Mindy Cohn). For Diff’rent Strokes, it was...Todd Bridges. Because he’s the only one left. And let’s be clear about that: the only reason he’s still alive is that he went into rehab first.

The whole thing was just bleak. These were grown-up, talented actors, award-winners, even…playing kid parts. It’s funny when it’s PEN15 on Hulu, because I don’t know who those two really are. But I know who Jennifer Aniston is, and there’s no way to watch this, this, this thing and not see Jennifer Aniston as anyone other than Jennifer Aniston. She sleep-walked through the part, and she was a thousand times better than child star Lisa Welchel was on her best day. Talk about a waste. It’s like driving a Lamborghini to the convenience store for toilet paper.

You want to talk Stunt Casting? Holy shit. This was the Cannonball Run of self-congratulatory TV entertainment, just crammed to the gills with as many A-listers and B-listers, and well, even some C-listers...but that’s beside the point, because even if they had only used D-listers, they would have crushed the infantile material under their not-ready-for-prime-time heels. I mean, how do you reconcile Jennifer Anniston, Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn, and Will Arnett with the children who played these parts in the early 1980s?

But as cringe-worthy as The Facts of Life was to watch, it paled in comparison to the Diff’rent Strokes episode...starring Damon Wayans and Kevin Hart as Willis and Arnold. I shit you not. Granted, I’ll give them credit where credit is due and say that Jon Lithgow was inspired casting for Conrad Bain, but then again, that was an adult-to-adult ratio, there. The only thing that Wayans and Hart nailed was the height difference.

Adults, playing child actors, badly acting with inane, juvenile writing. I’m absolutely poleaxed. When I was12 years old and had nothing else to compare it to, those sitcoms were okay, despite the heavy psychic toll it took on both our collective consciousness and the child actor’s actual souls. But I’m theoretically an adult now. Whatever marginal, scant interest those original shows may or may not still have for me is eclipsed entirely by my lack of interest in seeing them replayed with better actors, sleep-walking through the material.

Maybe these old sitcoms still generate The Feels for you. Maybe they are your Chicken Soup for the Pop Culture Soul. Maybe you like them uncritically. That’s all well and good. But sitcoms in the 1980s don’t begin to compete with the vast array of amazing television we have to choose from now.

This was something that didn’t need to exist.

I embarrassingly watched the Facts of Life. I couldn’t make it through the first ten minutes of Diff’rent Strokes. Thomas Wolfe said, “You can never go home again.” He’s almost right when it comes to the television of my youth. If I never try, I get to keep those warm fuzzies in my head, where they belong. There’s no way I got what they were trying desperately to peddle out of Live in Front of a Studio Audience. Maybe you will, but I highly doubt it. Still, I’m grateful for one thing about this show: it knocked Tiger King Season 2 out of the basement for me in terms of the worst thing I watched in 2021.