Richard Pryor had a kid's show on CBS in 1984. It was produced by the Krofft brothers of Lidsville and H. R. Pufnstuf fame. Pat Morita guest starred. And the man singing the theme song is Ray Parker Jr., who did the Ghostbuster's theme song. It was called "Pryor's Place."

Suffice it to say, it failed. When you think about it, no any other fate could have arisen. The weight all these VH1-dubbed retro-artifactual people working in tandem like this had to have crushed it. Were it to succeed, it understood all too well the kind of scrutiny it would be under from peering hipsters twenty-odd years in the future, searching relentlessly for underground reserves of pop culture to mine. This is such stuff as Urban Outfitters is made on, and its little life is rounded with a sleep. (Urban Outfitters is also made of drywall and Puma shoes)

And who could deal with that? I mean, Pryor was tough. He ran around on fire. He grew up in his grandmother's brothel. But when it comes to the collective analysis of the occasionally-clever-but-ultimately-just-slightly-too-vacuous Klosterman-style culture pundit types (with whom I'd be myopic and hypocritical not to admit I sometimes fear I share too many similar traits, but dammit don't we all), who could ever deal with that? I mean, we've seen what it does to Vanilla Ice, and though Pryor's not in the least bit a comparable figure, the psychology's pretty much the same, I'd imagine.

On another note, though, I think it's kinda unfair to look at this outside of the context of being an actual kid that could've watched the show. If I'd been the proper age at the time, this all would've amounted to nothing. Absolutely nothing. For example, I was in the Shining Time Station's intended viewership, and to be honest, George Carlin replacing Ringo as the little conductor man meant nearly nothing to me until I was reminded of how strange all of that was in retrospect--Carlin, Ringo, repackaging British television, Frenchy from Grease, why Schemer wasn't just banned from the premises for chrissakes, the circle eyes silently expressing all emotions, the scary jukebox puppet band that took the nickels, the eerily stilted kids' dialogue, the lite-rock theme song--a few months back when I came across episodes on YouTube.

I guess childhood's being catalogued these days like it hasn't really before. A lot of older people say this kind of stuff and think they're really clever for it, so it's hard for me to realize it, but it's kinda true. If I want to relive the 3-2-1 Contact theme song, something with which I should be just barely familiar (and with which I probably wouldn't have been familiar had by brother not been 5 1/2 years older), I can. Easily. From 1980, 1983, and 1987, when the numbers look a lot less cool for being done on a better computer. That other people, my dad included, have lived through a time not only when this kind of access was totally unfathomable, but when there really wasn't much of a children's media to begin with is pretty mind-boggling.

If my dad wanted to look back at his childhood, he'd have Little Orphan Annie decoder rings. When I'm older, I'll have collaborative deconstructions of Ghostwriter episodes.

And I don't know what that means for us. But I know it's stupid to fear it.

First, some boring stuff I need to say about this website. (You can skip this if you want; it's mostly here for my own sake.)

So I've been in college lately, and as a consequence of that, I've been chronically busy-ish.

Don't get me wrong or anything. It's a good kind of busy, and I'm generally happy to be busy in the ways that I am busy right now. Unfortuanately, though, this place suffers just a bit because of it, and so to anybody who has been checking back with any sort of frequency, anticipating something new and exciting only to be let down by the grim countenance of that story about my dad and his t-shirt ideas,

I am somewhat sorry.

That said, I have decided to change my approach a bit so my presence here is more than large periods of silence punctuated by a longish but maybe entertaining occasional post. Instead, I will post more frequently; I will write about a wider range of things; and most importantly, I will risk making everything less personally entertaining. Stasis ain't cool for anyone but Disney's head. I think things'll be better.

Second, here are a few interesting things to make up for the boring thing.

- A lot of blogs occasionally addresses this, but to see all these screen captures together is pretty fantastic. Fox News is doubleplus fucking amazing.

My favorites are the ones that first write off the civil war in Iraq as a media invention, and then try to talk about an "upside" to it. The repeated "Foley is a Democrat" stuff is pretty amazing, too. It's a classy establishment.

- This has been around a while, but I still find it worth taking a look at. I don't quite understand the source of all the recent papercraft excitement on the internet (I swear to God it has something to do with Mark Frauenfelder), and sometimes, papercraft things that other people think are really amazing seem kinda dull to me, but I really love the contrast between the insane levels of meticulousness and the overall simpleness these have. I used to make boxes out of index cards and think I was pretty cool. It was a big delusion.

I do think, though, that the sprawling tents I used to make in my living room out of nothing but newspaper and tape were pretty fucking amazing. Maybe I should revisit that idea.

- Apache Plaza. I remember the trolley and Woolworth's, but just barely. My brother (he can correct be if I'm wrong) was excited when he went to Coach's Corner to buy a Magic: the Gathering starter set. I have no clue how much he used it. The Mondrian-style stained glass was long gone when I was a kid, and the place had already started down its path to ghostdom, but damn, would that have been cool. I vaguely remember the bowling alley in the basement and the green-walled dollar store. The last time I was in there was in middle school, I think, when my nephew got his glasses at the Vision World still inside.

I don't know if I really feel nostalgic about this place. I don't feel as though it was enough of a major environment in my life. Rosedale's a bit different, though; we used to go there pretty frequently (I think) when I was in elementary school. All the toy stores but Kay-Bee had a Darta set set up, and some idiot kid would never know how to rev the little cars right. I thought I did, but really, I had no clue. They'd make the satisfying click, but goddammit, they'd never get around the primary-colored knot of track. I'm pretty sure Rosedale used to have a Warner Brothers store as well, with some sort of touchscreen coloring book that I'd always wait in an excruciatingly long line for only to get access to just as my family wanted to leave. It was upsetting. Aladdin's Castle became appealing when I got well into my eights. Dayton's was really really boring and smelled overwhelmingly of perfume and the piano.

The guy who invented the mall intended for it to resuscitate the idea of a city center. He wanted to curb urban sprawl. He wanted people to be less alienated in a post-war boxesmadeoftickytack world. In this, his idea was one of the most tragic failures ever, but even as somebody who has nothing but the utmost sympathy for his original intentions, even as somebody who grew to dislike malls probably too early (who the hell were these kids in middle school that fucking shopped all the time? Did I invent that?), I'd be lying if I didn't at least mention that their environments give me a strange, elusively post-apocalyptic feeling.

About like La Jetee. I don't know why.