Is there anybody…

…going to listen to my story…? Here’s today, 13 September.

  1. This cold just won’t quit — it’s going to be a DayQuil day (and evening, since I won’t see home till around 8 p.m.). Oh boo hoo.
  2. Today would have been Mother’s 72nd birthday.
  3. Remember the Attica prison riots in 1971? I do, but just barely. It’s the first memory I have of seeing “real” violence on the television news.
  4. Tupac Shakur died on this day in 1996. (Or did he…?) :-)
  5. It was a year ago today that Kanye West — with the aid of several heapin’ helpins of Hennessy, no doubt —  embarrassed himself and Taylor Swift in front of a national TV audience. He’s been trying to talk his way out of it for 364 days now, with limited success.
  6. 13 September marks four more days till BoomR’s visit! YaaAaaaay

Can Mondays be happy? I guess so. Here’s to giving it the old college try.

9 thoughts on “Is there anybody…

  1. Ross

    Attica was your first TV violence eh? I remember mine, it wasn’t quite the same, I was in the 8th grade, so like 1984, I’m in bed watching 20/20 on a black and white 13 inch television, it’s a story about these new lightweight powered little airplanes with motors that seemingly anyone could pilot, and I’m just following the story, no expectations, when they suddenly show the guy they were just talking to take his little open-cockpit plane up in the sky, suddenly the engine starts to run, almost a high-pitched buzzing noise, plane loses stability, the narrator’s saying something, Hugh Downs or someone like him, and all the sudden the damn pilot tumbles out of his plane. I sat straight up in bed, stunned. Before that I’d never see anyone actually die, in real life.

    Reply
    1. Rat Fink Post author

      I SAW THAT!!! I was completely freaked out! And the guy holding the camera was like, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” It was terrifying.

      Another time was in the late 70s when the MGM Grand Las Vegas caught fire. I saw a pregnant woman jump to her death. Although it didn’t show her landing, I could only imagine the horror of having nowhere else to go but out the window.

      I can’t believe you brought that up — I saw it too!

      Reply
      1. Ross

        I can’t believe you saw that too!! That’s a seminal moment in my life. A real dividing line. Do you remember the scene the way I do, or am I getting some details skewed? Although I’ve never remembered it any other way, I still find it very odd how the guy fell … even though it seemed obvious that the plane was the reason he fell, I recall him kind of tumbling like he’d passed out or something. No flailing.

        Pregnant woman jumping from the MGM- that’s just hideous, hideous.

        Reply
        1. Rat Fink Post author

          Yep — I remember the ultralight just kind of all-of-a-sudden flipping over, and out he fell. It just dumped him out, and he was in freefall. It was the guy holding the camera who freaked me out…I mean, I’d be doing the same thing, but oh my, it was so sad.

          I have just spent the last 20 or so minutes trying to find that footage. If you run across it, let me know!

          Reply
  2. Ross

    Ultralight, that’s right.

    I thought about searching for the clip last night … let’s see so if you’ve already burned 20 minutes I can assume you started with the most likely places, like YouTube. I guess the first question is, was it 20/20? I’m pretty firm on that part, these weren’t the days of competing news magazines quite yet. The only other similar show might have been 60 Minutes, but this was a weeknight, eliminating that possibility. Who were the correspondents? John Stossell of course … but Downs and Walters were the anchors so they would not have been covering it … ok well I’ll start a search too … together we can do it, we can find this awful tragedy somewhere online!

    Reply
  3. Ross

    By the way I didn’t find the footage, although I found a few references to where I’d find the footage but they were never good links. What I did learn was that in the episode, entitled “Ultralights: Flying or Dying?” the pilot was a TV reporter (probably a local one) with little or no experience and no safety belts on. Nonetheless, the episode is infamous in the ultralight community for demolishing the industry’s budding economy….

    Reply

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