Showing posts with label 1983. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1983. Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Oh, baby, dat's a lotta Spandex!


I remember when Scoot was the morning guy at WRNO in New Orleans in the 1970s. WRNO was the antithesis of this, and Scoot in the Morning would have had a field day with Airwaves Scoot on WDSU-TV.

Then again, it was 1983. It was "interesting," 1983 was.

Don't judge your parents harshly, kids. People smoked a lot of weed in 1983 . . .
and this was their brain on dope.

Scoot, Scoot, Scoot. You watched the
WKRP episodes where Dr. Johnny Fever turned into Rip Tide, didn't you?

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Monday, December 13, 2010

Your Daily '80s: It's the future . . . today!


Man . . . look at this stuff! It's a futuristic wonderland . . . right now in 1983!

Lost in Space has come to pass! Look, it's the Robot!


The next thing you know, we'll have "communicators" and "tricorders," just like on Star Trek!

And huge view screens just like on the bridge of the Enterprise. I wonder what wonders we'll see in 2010?

We'll be getting around in nuclear levitating cars, no doubt.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Fight the last war, lose the next


Fall 1983.

Apple and its co-founder, Steve Jobs, have massed it forces for a frontal assault on the Evil Empire, otherwise known as IBM. The Macintosh attacked the Empire early in 1984, then fell back under a withering assault from . . . Microsoft and its new Windows operating system.

Jobs left Apple in 1985, victim of a botched coup d'etat against the CEO he hired, John Sculley. Apple was nearly broke by 1997 . . . at which point Jobs came back to lead a renaissance of the company, which began to dominate in products not Macintosh.

Now behemoth Apple girds for battle with behemoth Google as behemoth Microsoft continues being Microsoft but can't compete with Jobs in anything except the operating-system market. Right now, Apple looks unbeatable.

And it will until it is.


There's a moral in that -- not that anybody ever pays attention to it.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Your Daily '80s: True


Spandau Ballet was all over the charts with "True" the summer and fall of 1983 -- it hit the Billboard Top 40 on Aug. 27 and stayed there for 10 weeks, peaking at No. 4.

Not only is "True" a great pop song, it also forever
will take me back to being a newlywed; it hit the Top 40 exactly one week after Mrs. Favog and I were married.

We had just moved across the country, from North Platte, Neb., to Baton Rouge, and I was heading back to LSU to finish my degree.

Good times, and a fitting soundtrack.

Thursday, November 04, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Cold coffee. I blame Reagan.


Cold coffee.

Before Starbucks.

Came to Omaha.

The state of office coffee drinking, circa 1983, immortalized by University Television at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The weekly TV show was called Cityscape; the music was by Citydog.

Welcome back to when Omaha was New Wave.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Dance Fever!


One question about Lita Ford's appearance on this 1983 episode of
Dance Fever.

If you're going to have Lita lip-sync into a dead wireless microphone,
would it have been too much to plug a cable to nowhere into her electric guitar?


AND HERE'S a Dance Fever promo from 1985.

You know, new host Adrian Zmed was no Deney Terrio. That's not necessarily saying much about anything.

Now, if
Dance Fever had had William Shatner (Zmed's old T.J. Hooker co-star) on the show to reprise his spoken-word version of "Rocket Man," that would have been somethin'.

Oh, look. I happen to have a copy.


IT'S NOT
from the '80s (it's from the 1978 Science Fiction Awards show), but who cares?
I'm not proud.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Your Daily '80s: You. All. SUUUUUUUCCCK!


tHE GeeZErS anD THE FloWEr chilDReN try To MaKe heaDs OR taILs of thE PUNKS, ciRCA 1983 oN wCCo-TV iN mINNEApoLIS.

liSTen, IT Ain'T BRain SurGEry, faSCISt mATErialISTs! PUNKs HatE yOUr PhonY MiDDLe-CLASS, GrEEDy SoCIeTY, and Then tHEy SAy THEY HAtE yOu, TOO, yOU ConFORMIst PIGS, and You pUt ON ThiS bRaIN-Dead FAKE SmilE, anD yOu sAY, "Oh, AlL RigHT, DEaR. ThAt'S NICe."

YoU ARE sO PatHETiC. DIE! DIE! DIE!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Your Daily '80s: The ghost of Tigers past


Well, it had to happen. LSU lost for the first time this football season.

And the fans who wanted Coach Les Miles gone when the Tigers were 1-0 . . . 2-0 . . . 3-0 . . . 4-0 . . . 5-0 . . . 6-0 . . . and 7-0, really want him gone at 7-1 after the loss to No. 4 Auburn. For example:
Les you should go to Texas Jerry Jones will love you; PLEASE (Posted on 10/24/10 at 1:17 a.m.)

Mr Miles you will love it there; great place to live We will sell your house for you if you could leave now. Please think about how great it would be living in Texas. Good luck and leave now. :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
WAIT. Where am I? What's happening to me?

Why am I being forced to watch dismal "highlights" from the 1983 LSU-Tennessee game?
What the. . . ?

Didn't they fire Jerry Stovall after he finished that season 4-7? Hey . . .
what's this here?


AND THIS? What is the purpose of subjecting me to this 1980s Tiger-football hell???


OH, DEAR LORD. Thank God this isn't an LSU football installment of Your Daily '90s: LSU . . . the Curley Hallman Years.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Your Daily '80s: The year that was almost our last

Somewhere near Moscow.
Sept. 26, 1983.

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow.


It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute.

Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky.

He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement - anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching a nuclear attack.

This was the height of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. Both sides packed a formidable punch - hundreds of rockets and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of reducing the other to rubble.

It was a game of nerves, of bluff and counterbluff. Who would fire first? Would the other have the chance to retaliate?

The flying time of an inter-continental ballistic missile, from the U.S. to the USSR, and vice-versa, was around 12 minutes. If the Cold War were ever to go 'hot', seconds could make the difference between life and death.

Everything would hinge on snap decisions. For now, though, as far as Petrov was concerned, more hinged on just getting through another boring night in which nothing ever happened.

Except then, suddenly, it did. A warning light flashed up, screaming red letters on a white background - 'LAUNCH. LAUNCH'. Deafening sirens wailed. The computer was telling him that the U.S. had just gone to war.

The blood drained from his face. He broke out in a cold sweat. But he kept his nerve. The computer had detected missiles being fired but the hazy screens were showing nothing untoward at all, no tell-tale flash of an missile roaring out of its silo into the sky. Could this be a computer glitch rather than Armageddon?

Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait.

The warning light flashed again - a second missile was, apparently, in the air. And then a third. Now the computer had stepped up the warning: 'Missile attack imminent!'

But this did not make sense. The computer had supposedly detected three, no, now it was four, and then five rockets, but the numbers were still peculiarly small. It was a basic tenet of Cold War strategy that, if one side ever did make a preemptive strike, it would do so with a mass launch, an overwhelming force, not this dribble.

Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake.