Welcome to state-of-the-art kitchen technology, 80s style!
My parents had the model in the middle (or something very close to it). This was a kitchen appliance that I positively monopolized.
Around 1982, I discovered fitness, and with that came an obsession with protein powder. Throughout my high school years, I experimented with various iterations of the whey-based protein shake. I often included such exotic ingredients as raw eggs and frozen bananas.
The great thing about a whey protein shake? It can be made to taste sort of like a milkshake, while still being good for you!
Much to my chagrin, I did not turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger, even with all those whey shakes, and countless hours spent in the gym. (Many of us really are limited by our genetics, in the quest to become Mr. Universe.)
I still like protein shakes, but I don’t even own a blender anymore. Nowadays, I opt for a modern, streamlined solution: the kinetic blender/shaker bottle. There are some good ones here on this Amazon page.
A blast of unseasonable cold has struck Cincinnati for Thanksgiving 2024, but I plan to have a good holiday nonetheless. I may even make it into the gym later today.
I hope that you, Dear Reader, will spend the day with people you love. If half of your friends/relatives voted for Trump, and half for Harris (a statistical likelihood throughout most of the country) dinnertime discussion may be interesting, to say the least.
Keep your cool and try to make the best of it. Remember that politics always change, but Thanksgiving remains the same, coming back year after year.
Just look at the above artwork from Norman Rockwell, 1919. The image is as inviting today as it was 105 years ago.
I love many people who, for whatever reason, don’t see the world through the same lenses I do. You likely do, too; and should.
I shall return on Friday. In the meantime, I hope you have a happy and safe Thanksgiving 2024.
Regular readers will know that I am a language aficionado. Years ago, I was a Japanese language translator/interpreter.
The languages that I’m currently learning and/or maintaining include Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, German, and Russian.
I’ve dabbled some with Italian and Portuguese, too. But I’ll likely wait to get serious about those. (They both overlap too much with Spanish.)
I have been tempted by Polish at times. Poland is a country that I would very much like to visit someday.
But I have to confess—Polish is simply too much of a mess for me to take on at this point.
What do I mean by “a mess”? Watch the video above for starters. But all Slavic languages contain multiple case endings. Russian case endings are no piece of cake.
The biggest problem with Polish, though, is its whacky phonetic system.
Let’s begin with all the consonant clusters. Below are some of the Polish surnames in my immediate social circle:
Szymkowiak
Perszyk
Stopczynski
Here is a simple Polish sentence:
Która jest godzina teraz w Warszawie?
(“What time is it in Warsaw now?”)
If you listen to the above sentence in Polish, you’ll find little relation between what you expect Latin letters to do, and what the Polish language requires them to do. When you learn Polish, you have to relearn the Latin alphabet again from scratch.
Polish is a language that really should be using the Cyrillic alphabet, instead of a [highly] modified version of the Latin alphabet. But given Poland’s current focus on the West, and its troubled history with Russia, I doubt that’s ever going to happen.
It’s 1978 and Christmas is approaching. That means lots of television ads for McDonald’s gift certificates!
As I recall, these came in denominations of 50 cents and 1 dollar. That was not a fortune even in 1978. (Stagflation, remember!) But in 1978, a single McDonald’s gift certificate of 50 cents or a dollar could at at least buy one menu item. Not like nowadays.
These were advertised as stocking stuffers and X-mas card inserts, not proper gifts. Even in the 1970s, we weren’t quite that parsimonious.
I don’t remember ever buying any of these, let alone receiving any. But McDonald’s really pushed them in television ads in November and December.
I recently received an email from a reader of 12 Hours of Halloween, asking me about “Devil’s Night” and the 1980s. The reader wanted to know if I participated in any Devil’s Night mayhem as a youth.
For those of you who don’t know the term: Devil’s Night, aka Damage Night, or Mischief Night, is traditionally the night before Halloween, October 30.
The observance apparently dates back tothe 1790s. In the 1800s, this was a night when children engaged in innocent pranks, like soaping neighbors’ windows.
But nothing remains innocent for long, does it? By the time I was a kid, in the late 1970s, Devil’s Night had acquired a bad reputation. This was largely owing to the destructive arson sprees that took place in cities like Detroit on October 30, starting in the 1960s.
Strait-laced suburban youth that I was, I wanted no part of any of that. Nor did I hear much about such pranks during my trick-or-treating years. I think a few kids may have toilet-papered trees. But that’s about the extent of it.
My maternal grandfather, mid-1930s
In my personal circle, I have been acquainted with exactly one person who admitted to serious Devil’s Night misconduct: my maternal grandfather.
My maternal grandfather (who loved Halloween) was one of my favorite people. He was also a World War II veteran.
But before all of that, he was a youth in rural Southern Ohio, on the westernmost fringes of Appalachia. He grew up in the 1930s. And if you think those were innocent times, then you’ve been watching too many episodes of The Waltons.
On Devil’s Night, my grandfather and his friends used to engage in some marginally malicious hijinks. Much of this consisted of tipping over outhouses
My grandfather told me about one Devil’s Night on which a crotchety old man (who was the bane of local children) fired a shotgun at him and his friends in the dark.
No one was harmed. According to my grandfather, though, the man had fired his shotgun with the intent of doing serious bodily injury to the trespassers. (And they had just tipped over his outhouse.)
Do I approve of what my grandfather and his friends did that night? No, of course not. But I’m quite grateful that that old man’s aim was off. Otherwise, I might not be here to write this post.
-ET
**12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN**
Halloween night 1980 will be unlike any other!
On Halloween night 1980, three young friends face the perils of a supernatural curse.
Their familiar suburban environment is transformed into a nightmare hellscape of witches, evil spirits, and unimaginable creatures.
A terrifying coming-of-age tale for Generation X, or anyone nostalgic for the 1980s!
In 1989 I was 21 years old and a student at the University of Cincinnati.
I was also deep in the initial phase of my fascination with Japan, its language, and its culture.
Japan would become a lifelong fascination of mine…with some inevitable diminutions. Thirty-five years later, I am no longer quite as enraptured with every aspect of Japan as I once was. But I still spend time each day listening to Japanese-language YouTubers, podcasters, and media broadcasts. If a story about Japan appears in the Western media, I’m usually on top of it.
But back to 1989. Around the same time that I discovered Japan, I also discovered the novels of James Clavell. The two were interconnected, you see. It is impossible to read Clavell and not become interested in the cultures of East Asia. James Clavell’s books fueled my early interest in learning Japanese.
James Clavell
Clavell (1921 – 1994) was a British-Australian man of the World War II generation. He published most of his Asian Saga novels between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s. This was a time when Asian languages and cultures were not widely known in the West, and a certain amount of exoticism, or what is sometimes called orientalism, was par for the course.
Clavell’s work has thusly been critiqued by the nattering nabobs of political correctness. Not all of their criticisms are completely unfair…from the perspective of the third decade of the twenty-first century, that is. But Shōgun, Clavell’s novel about Edo Period Japan, was published in 1975. Almost 50 years ago. In those days, almost no one in the United States bothered to learn anything about Japan, except for the fact that Japan had been our World War II enemy.
Clavell often got the history wrong, too. Shōgun is loosely based on the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the early 1600s. Clavell captures the big sweep of that historical period, but the names and personalities are largely fictional.
The main character of Shōgun, John Blackthorne, is loosely based on William Adams (1564 -1620), known in Japan as Miura Anjin. Suffice it to say that the real William Adams was not nearly as exciting as Clavell’s creation.
What Clavell brought to the table was the genuine enthusiasm of a Westerner who was trying his level best to understand East Asian culture. He did this imperfectly, to be sure. But his passion for the subject matter was infectious.
Ditto for Clavell’s skills as a storyteller. When he was at his best, Clavell could tell a story that would hold your interest even if you didn’t share his enthusiasm for Asia.
I distinctly remember reading Shōgun in 1989. The novel was already more than a decade old then. Although I was busy with schoolwork and a part-time job, I nevertheless made my way through this 1,110-page potboiler within about two weeks.
That was 35 years ago. I occasionally reread books, provided a.) the book is worth a second reading, and b.) at least 10 years have elapsed since my first reading. Shōgun made the cut on both counts. This time, however, I’m listening to the audiobook—all 52 hours worth.
As noted above, my fascination with Japan, while still extant, doesn’t burn quite as intensely as it did in 1989. Japan was an unknown land of adventure for me 35 years ago. Since 1989, I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan…mostly for business. For me, Japan has become not the land of samurais and geishas, but the land of interminable business meetings and automobile factories. But I still love the place.
James Clavell’s storytelling abilities in Shōgun are just as good the second time around. After 35 years, I still recall some of the book’s major plot points, but enough time has passed that I’m still surprised by much of what I read. I also have the benefit of historical knowledge about Japan. (I knew almost nothing about Japan’s history in 1989.) And yes, I’ve been there now, multiple times.
What about the television adaptations?
The first TV adaptation of Shōgun starred Richard Chamberlain. It ran on NBC for five days in September 1980. You didn’t need any streaming subscriptions or memberships. The show was supported by commercials.
I recall watching the first screen adaptation of Shōgun when it ran, but in 1980 I was 12 years old. I knew next to nothing about Japan, and most of it went over my head.
I’m aware of the streaming FX series which was released this year. A remake was long overdue after 45 years; and the teaser clips I have seen online look promising.
Typical of the streaming era, there is no way to watch the show without buying a subscription to Hulu or Disney+. How I long for the benighted “old days”, when television was mostly free, and far more convenient to watch. But I digress.
I’ll get around to watching the 2024 screen adaptation of Shōgun at some point, I’m sure. In the meantime, I will content myself with this second journey through the book, via audio. I’m a little more than halfway through, and nowhere close to being bored.
The book haul video is a thing on the Japanese corners of YouTube, just as it is among English-language booktubers.
As in English, the Japanese book haul video (and the entire booktuber sector) is dominated by young women. No complaints here, except to point out that men of all ages, in all countries, should read more.
I have not been to Japan for more than a decade now. One thing I really miss about being in Japan is browsing bookstores, and looking for new books to read.
Even with the Internet, the acquisition of Japanese-language reading materials remains something of an ordeal in the United States. The US division of Amazon stocks relatively few Japanese-language titles. The demand simply isn’t there.
At the same time, US-based, independently owned mail-order Japanese bookstores have mostly gone out of business. This is yet another case of the Internet ruining a business model without providing an acceptable substitute.
I recall Sasuga Bookstore of Cambridge, Massachusetts with particular fondness. I purchased many books from them throughout the 1990s and early 00s. (Sasuga closed its doors for good in 2010. 残念でした.)
A quick personal reading note: I’m on volume 6 of 課長島耕作 (Kachou Shima Kousaku). I’m rereading the whole series, which I read for the first time in the mid-1990s.
And yes, I’m reading it in the original Japanese. I was a Japanese language translator throughout much of the 1990s. I started studying Japanese back in 1988.
But if you don’t read Japanese, you can probably find the long-running Shima Kousaku series in English. (I’ve definitely seen it out there.)
People who know about my Japanese-language background often ask me about manga. Do I like it?
Well…yes and no. In general, I don’t care for the (often) sexualized fantasy tropes that comprise so much of the manga sphere. I much prefer the more realistic Japanese manga; and Shima Kousaku is my favorite.
The Shima Kousaku series begins in the 1980s. It follows the journey of a Japanese corporate employee, or salaryman, as he moves up the ladder of his employer, Hatsushiba Electric.
Not much happens in these stories, in terms of high-concept plot. These are basically soap operas, but they’re exceptionally well-done soap operas, with plenty of microtension.
A story doesn’t need zombies and car chases to be enthralling. (Though a story certainly can be enthralling with zombies and car chases; don’t get me wrong.)
The Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 is one of the first major global events that I remember.
I was 11 years old on November 4, 1979, when Iran’s revolution came to a head, and a mob of student militants overran the US Embassy in Tehran. The student militants took 66 American hostages. 52 of these hostages would remain in Iran until January, 1981.
American hostages in Tehran, Iran in 1979
I followed the 444-day crisis on the news. But being 11 years old, I was sketchy on most of the historical background.
I’ve read a lot more about the crisis since then. I’m presently finishing up the above book, Guests of the Ayatollah: the First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden.
Bowden’s book includes not only the overarching historical details, but also many individual stories: of the hostages, and others whose lives were impacted.
Definitely worth a read if this is a subject that interests you!
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
I am a diehard fanatic of only a handful of books, movies, and musical oeuvres. And I evangelize only a subset of those.
For example, I love the music of Rush and Iron Maiden; but I don’t consider the appeal of these bands to be universal, by any means. Likewise, I realize that a coming-of-age movie that spoke volumes to me in 1984 might not have the same significance for a teenager of 2024. Or for a Boomer who was a teenager in 1964, for that matter.
But everyone should see The Americans.
The Americans is part family saga, part period drama, and part espionage thriller. The show is set in both America and Russia during the last decade of the Cold War.
I watched The Americans in its entirety during the show’s original primetime run on FX from 2013 to 2018. During those years, I looked forward to each new episode.
I loved the series so much, I recently decided to watch it again. But as is so often the case with these modern conveniences of ours, the situation has been made less convenient than it would have been in pre-Internet days. No longer do non-primetime shows circulate to rerun syndication in non-primetime hours. They move to paid streaming platforms.
If you want to see all six seasons of The Americans in 2024, you have several options. You can pay to download each episode from Amazon, or you can purchase a subscription to Hulu, where the series is now streaming.
Or you can purchase the complete series on DVD. I determined this to be my best and most cost-effective option. The above package arrived on my doorstep from Amazon yesterday.
I look forward to watching this series again from beginning to end. And if you haven’t yet seen The Americans, you might consider buying the DVDs, too. They are still in stock on Amazon.
Some books bring back memories. And so it is for me, with Stephen King’s illustrated novella, Cycle of the Werewolf.
I remember purchasing this book at the B. Dalton bookstore in Cincinnati’s Beechmont Mall in the mid-1980s. I had only recently become a Stephen King fan, and I was working my way through his entire oeuvre, which then consisted of about ten years’ worth of novels and collections.
The copy I bought in the 1980s has long since been lost. I’m glad to see that the book is still available, with the original illustrations from Bernie Wrightson.
You can get a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf on Amazon by clicking here.
I discovered the books of historical novelist John Jakes (1932 – 2023) as a high school student during the 1980s. The television miniseries adaptation of his Civil War epic, North and South, aired in 1985.
North and South was extremely well-done for a network (ABC) television production of the mid-1980s. The cast included Patrick Swayze, Kirstie Alley, David Carradine, Lesley-Anne Down, and Parker Stevenson. The sets were realistic and the production values were high.
After watching that, I decided to give John Jakes’s books a try. I read North and South(1982), plus the subsequent two books in the North and South trilogy, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987).
Then I delved into The Kent Family Chronicles. The books in this long family saga were published between 1974 and 1979. These are the books that really put Jakes on the map as an author of commercial historical fiction.
I emphasize commercial. John Jakes never strove for the painstaking historical accuracy of Jeff Shaara, or his approximate contemporary, James Michener. Jakes’s first objective was always to entertain. If the reader learned something about the American Revolution or the Civil War along the way, that was icing on the cake.
As a result, John Jakes’s novels lie somewhere along the spectrum between literary fiction and potboilers. His characters are memorable and he imparts a sense of time and place. But these are plot-driven stories.
At the same time, Jakes’s plots have a way of being simultaneously difficult to believe and predictable. Almost all of his books have a Forrest Gump aspect. His characters are ordinary men and women, but they all seem to rub shoulders with figures from your high school history classes.
That said, Jakes is one of the few authors whose books pleased both the teenage me and the fiftysomething me. This past year, I started rereading The Kent Family Chronicles, and catching up on the few installments I missed back in the 1980s. I have changed as much as any person changes between the ages of 17 and 55, but I still find these books to be page-turners.
This past week, I started listening to the audiobook version of California Gold. This one was published in 1989, after Jakes’s long run of success with The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold is the story of Mack Chance, a Pennsylvania coal miner’s son who walks to California to seek his fortune in the 1880s.
I will be honest with the reader: I don’t like California Gold as much as Jakes’s earlier bestsellers. California Gold is episodic in structure, and the main character is far less likable than some of Jakes’s earlier creations. In California Gold, Jakes indulges his tendency to pay lip service to the issues of the day (in this case: the budding American labor movement and early feminism) through the voices of his characters. Most of these pronouncements are politically correct and clichéd.
Worst of all, California Gold employs sex scenes as spice for low points in the plot. This is always a sign that a writer is struggling for ideas, or boring himself as he writes. When Jakes wrote California Gold, he may have been a little burned out, after writing The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold, though, won’t be tossed aside on my did-not-finish (DNF) pile. This is still a good novel. Just not the caliber of novel I’d come to expect from John Jakes. No novelist, unfortunately, can hit one out of the park every time.
There really was something special about growing up in an era when video games were not old hat, but something brand-new and on the cutting edge of the technology of that time.
I suppose I like my 21st-century iPhone and my MacBook as much as the next person, but they are tools for me, not objects of indulgence. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything quite as much as that first Atari console I received for Christmas in 1981.
Did I have a favorite game? Of course I did. Space Invaders, hands down. Missile Command came in a close second, though.
Today’s solar eclipse was a bit anticlimactic here in Cincinnati. The local news channels all predicted a 99.2 percent eclipse in my area just outside the city.
That didn’t happen, not by a long shot:
Me, eagerly awaiting the full eclipse as the shadows start to lengthen
This is going to get good any minute now! I tell myself. But I am already growing skeptical.
The high point of the eclipse, at around 3:20 p.m. EST. The sun has been noticeably dimmed, but it’s a long way from dark.
What can I say? Here in Cincinnati, the local weather forecasts are right only about 50 percent of the time. Why should the eclipse forecast be any different?
This was worth walking outside for, but I’m glad I didn’t make a day of it.
I hope the eclipse was better for you, if you live in an area that was forecast to experience it.
