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[austin_dern]

The question people asked me about the tickets to the final Late Night with Conan O'Brien were, how did I get them? But that was straightforward: in January Conan talked on his show about how they were coming up to the final weeks, and they knew they had dedicated fans, and if you want a ticket you should write in the conangobyebye-at-nbc-dot-com. I'd been meaning to get around to seeing the show sometime, but it wasn't really practical while I was in Singapore --- you have to request tickets very far out and they give tickets for the day they like, not you, and that's not necessarily compatible with being home for one week some of which will be taken up with my mother asking when I'll get a haircut.

So this was my last chance and I put in the e-mail to them that I was indeed a fan, and had been watching even the very first episode even though it included leg-wrestling with George Wendt, and had been to the show a reasonable number of times in the 1990s (I think five or so) and as part of a Usenet group dedicated to the show we'd been making comments that seemed to get winked at on-air for fifteen years now. (Among the ambiguous clues was one time when we got to discussing 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoons and a couple days later the band played, for the first and so far as I know only time, the theme to Top Cat; and after I grumbled that every ``Actual Items'' sketch included a joke where the name-dropping of Hitler was meant to be the punchline and it usually wasn't funny and just made latter pieces a Prisoner's Dilemma wait for the unfunny one they did their first of many ``Actual Items'' without the namedrop.) In an IRC chat (remember those?) in the late 90s one of the show's writers announced that as they understood the Internet it was all run by one guy, me, and one of the writers got to repeating my (actual) last name like a mantra. If they were judging by fandom qualifications I was probably in.

So with my father --- with whom I'd gone maybe two times and had kept asking when I was sending away for tickets again --- I set out early Friday with ... well, I paused to weigh myself on the WiiFit so my streak of days actually doing something wouldn't be broken. According to it I'd gained about a pound since the previous evening. I tried to not feel slightly down about the way the day was starting.

Trivia: The word ``handsome'' appeared in English around 1425, at which time it meant ``easy to handle or use''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Life The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I've been looking into what it takes to get tickets for the Colbert Report. You do, in a sense, get to pick a date -- but you don't know what date is going to become available next and the competition is stiff so if you're choosy about dates you're probably going to make things too hard for yourself. This morning, for instance, tickets for 4/21 became available but were gone by the time I looked (a couple hours later). (April would be much sooner than I could probably make it back out there in any case.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's much more interactive than it ever used to be for Late Night --- back in the 90s we'd just mail in a request for tickets sometime the week of something desired and maybe they would come back. Of course, in those days we didn't have highly interactive things like Twitter and we didn't have Ajax or Flash web pages to crash our browsers; they had to be crashed the old-fashioned way, with malformed tables and Javascript.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: and one of the writers got to repeating my (actual) last name like a mantra.

Well, you've gotta admit you've got a good surname for it, what with the two short syllables and the homophony to two common English words yet a concatenation that is completely non-Anglo-Saxon and therefore uncommon to the U.S. viewing audience. But the combination doesn't sound scurrilous or scandalous in any way, which must've been a downer for the LNCOB (natural logarithm of corn on the cob, drooool) writers, although not as much as it'd be for the writers of Robot Chicken, who recently produced a rhyming sketch about Tourette's Syndrome.

::: 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoons

The other day I learned that Filmation was responsible, not just for Star Trek TAS, Flash Gordon and He-Man, but also animated versions of The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, and The Lone Ranger. To have confirmation that your earliest recollections of TV are not mis-reconstructed memories or outright hallucinations is, I must say, reassuring. That such shows existed, well; not so much.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's not just unfamiliar to the United States viewing audience; to the best I can determine it's obscure even in its nation of origin. (I can't find it in a casual study of meanings-of-surnames books, most particularly, at least under the most obvious to me spellings.) Though based on past experience they'd probably be pronouncing my name wrong in a way that's harmless but makes it reminiscent of only one English word.

Our group acronym for the show was always LNwCOB, so we never really got natural logarithm jokes that flowed smoothly. That's almost certainly a derivative of how Letterman's show was abbreviated as LNwDL.

There actually were some sketches in the early days, I think spinoffs of a joke where four guys would (comically ineptly) make fun of Conan's name, where ``COB'' was turned into a corn-on-the-cob character, complete with a giant ear of corn costume that they used enough to amortize the cost of things.

I used to have a very hard time convincing people I didn't make up Gilligan's Planet, although the cartoon version of My Favorite Martian ... actually, nobody cared about. I did know a guy who was very upset with me when I told him that The Daily Show Global Edition ran on CNN International (rather than Comedy Central), but probably everybody knows someone like that.