Monday, April 9, 2012

R.I.P. Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Lite”

By Keith

Thomas, I hardly knew you. In fact, I never heard of you, much less viewed your work. I inhabit that rarefied elitist world of NYC where a trip to the dentist’s or doctor’s office is more likely to feature posters from MoMA or the Guggenheim displayed in waiting rooms. Secondly, can’t receive QVC on our limited TV roster.

Read of your death, coincident with Holy Week and Passover, and of curiosity pointed my browser to your website (warning, kitschy music and QVC-like folksy sales pitch) but it was “slashdotted.” Couldn’t get through.

Fortunately was able to at last view some of your paintings. How unfortunate your demise was upstaged by the Resurrection of Our Lord & Savior™. But Thomas, you’ve made my Holy Week all the more sacred, because I’m now imbued with a deeper understanding of the meaning of all that is conveniently referred to as “Kitsch.”

The lights are always on at St. Thomas Estates, thanks to our resident G.E. AP-100 30MW nuclear power station located in the basement of St. Thomas Rectory (far right). Besides complimentary electricity service, we offer a dazzling array of amenities for your residential security and well-being. Lakefront can be “parted” during emergencies for easy egress and exit. Our cadre of advanced Raytheon “Duck-Drones” will accompany you and your loved ones to and from most local conveniences (see “Terms of Service” below). You’ll feel as if the Lord’s Breath itself has entered your body once you inhabit your dream residential environment.
This lovely cottage has “Starter Home” written all over it. And wouldn’t you love to know what’s inside? Master bedroom and bath with sublime, gold-plated fixtures, spacious kitchen with all-marble surfaces, servants quarters located in basement/dungeon combo (can be used as home office). Simulated thatched roof opens on remote command so you can access our unique Raytheon laser-guided RPGs that can take out pesky intruders up to 250 yards, all from the convenience of your living room. Enjoy the evenings outside free of bothersome bugs and ticks ... they’ve been irradiated! $1.5 Million + closing says “You’re In!”
We at St. Thomas Estates haven’t forgotten the value of entertainment. Imagine yourself enjoying an evening aboard our flagship St. Thomas Showboat and complimentary cocktails on the top deck casino (See “Terms of Service” below). Or talk to the animals ... they’ll talk back! Better yet, make a reservation at our landmark Kinkade Hospitality Center (center) and savor a meal expertly prepared from fresh seafood gathered locally each and every day.

48 comments:

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

As terrifying as Kinkade fans are, I'm to the point of desperation that I would actually LIVE IN one of those horribly-tacky-to-fuck-and-back "places" if I could! And don't worry, I'd find a way to FIX all of that "painter of light" shit, believe you me, son...

Gottttttaaaa LOVE the ignoring-slavery aspect of his romanticism about "The Old South," n'est-ce pas? Just like Disney...

heydave said...

Didn't Kinkade have some quirky thing going on, like pissing whenever, wherever he was? I think he was a question once on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

Scott said...

Yep, I believe I read something about that in his autobiography, Thomas Kincaid: A Painter's Journey, From Water Colors to Water Sports.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Might I recommend a little Something Awful?
~

Carl said...

Truly, my favorite part of this story has yet to unfold: all the rubes who run out and pay double (on QVC, natch) for Kinkade's Franklin Mint NASCAR plates (look it up), only to find out in twenty or thirty years that the Mint glutted the market so endlessly that they're worth nothing.

Carl said...

Heydave,

Altho later he blamed the booze...and who among us hasn't pissed on a Winnie the Pooh statue at Disneyland while drunk?...he claimed at the time it was to mark territory.

Yes. He went there.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Ugh. Gack.

At least somebody of SOME worth ALSO died, and I just found out about it, though it happened on Saturday: Mike Wallace, a true journalist of no small stature (and unlike Bushista-ass-licking WHORE HIMBOS like Bob Schieffer, he never bragged about being a PARTISAN MORON!!!), died of natural causes. No, I haven't ever been a "faithful" 60 Minutes fan, but what I've seen of Mike all of my life, he followed strongly in the Murrow/Cronkite tradition. HIM, I'll miss.

If I ever find myself anywhere near the undoubtedly-hideous, tackier-than-fuck marble paen to himself that Kinkade rots-away in, I will be happy to return the "territory-marking" gesture upon his "Real" Housewives Of New Jersey-esque grave.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't Disney have some sort of copyright on those people and critters in the last "pic"?
Suezboo

Stacia said...

Kinkaid apparently painted licensed Disney characters in a series called "Disney Dreams", which makes the story of him pissing on a statue at Disney World even funnier than it already was.

Someone on AV Club summed it up best: "RIP Thomas Kinkaid. You were a horrible person."

Unknown said...

Of course the finishing touch on ANY cozy cabin is a garden bench large enough to fill a two-car garage.

JoeBuddha said...

Read somewhere that he started off as a promising artist before succumbing to the dark side.

JoeBuddha said...

(or the light side, if you will...)

Woodrowfan said...

are those buildings on fire???

Keith said...

This is probably what "light" looks like during ignition of a thermonuclear weapon.

This guy dropped a lot of Owsley's good stuff back when.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Keith! How dare you insult Owlsley like that!!!

For shame, for shame, to associate that magnanimous chemist with THIS scrotum-cheese motherfucker... *sigh*

Personally, I view the Kink-ade milieu as representative of thousands of confessions to unsolved arson cases...

Chris Vosburg said...

Nice one, Keith.

Also among the dead this week we may count one Jack Tramiel, to me the true father of the personal computer.

See, back when I was shopping for one in '82, the IBM PC was ridiculously expensive, and the Apple II was just as expensive, despite its phony "computer for the rest of us" hipster patina, so I went with Tramiel's Commodore 64, which caused me to miss work-- and sleep, for that matter-- for the first couple weeks I owned it, I was that fascinated with the thing.

Programming in BASIC came naturally to me, and within weeks, I was well into 6502 machine language, the native code of the machine itself, rewriting the operating system and burning the result onto EPROMS. Hey, the whole OS was only 16K, and there was a lot of support documentation for it, so you could do that sort of thing.

When I found myself out of work (I was in the printing industry back then) for the last time, I turned to repairing Commodore computers out of my home, since nobody else would (we don't repair toys here, kid!) and that was a very happy time for me.

I still have a business card from those days: "Commodore Repair" and in smaller print "Knowledgeable Commodore Repair in Los Angeles at last".

I've a lot of stories from those days, like when I sold a C64 power supply to JPL (they were using a C64 with a custom built interface to process data from one of their earlier space probes) and got a grand tour of the "campus", or the time I sold an SX64 (portable version of the 64, handy for MIDI sequencing on stage) to Silly Milli Vanilli at their rented Hollywood hills home and watched them argue over whether to spend their manager-allotted daily allowance on grass instead, two days before their lip-sync scandal exploded in the press.

Good times, good times.

And the Commodore 64 refuses to die, sort of, having been recently resurrected as a PC compatible, in that same coffee-with-cream colored case.

So RIP Jack Tramiel. You done good, kid.

Anonymous said...

Allegedly, he swindled his retailers, after using his religious cred to gain their trust. There was a Law and Order episode (I think--some cop show, though) loosely based on it.

Keith said...

Annti, I mean no disrespect to Owsley. Not only a superb chemist, but a sound engineer extraordinaire. Jim Marshall (who also died within the past week or so) may have invented the equipment, but it was Owsley Stanley who worked out the proper configuration of the gear to create what has endured as "stadium rock." Not shabby at all.

But one has to wonder to which muse we must attribute Kinkade's drippy demented vision. It's definitely "acid" but whether it's bad acid or good acid, I cannot say. These experiences are very subjective.

Kathy said...

Purple and yellow contrast nicely, yes!

But I've seen thatched houses and the thatch is not a glowing purple color. Its drab and makes me think of insects and rodents, and shudder at the idea of severe fire hazards. Especially if those cottages were lit by candle- and firelight.

The glowing lavender water and sky... as a commenter said above, it looks like a thoroughly irradiated landscape.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Awww mannn, now I feel guilty that I left out Marshall. *sigh* Moog just died a few years ago too, didn't he? I've got a documentary about him in my NetFlix queue, for when I'm within wall again (17 days and counting!), as well as a coupla freaky-deakies about R. Crumb... *sigh* again... I was so born two decades late! I'd happily donate a kidney in a bathtub to have had just ONE hit of Owlsley whilst enjoying Big Brother & The Holding Company @ Filmore West... and now I'm blanking on the fuckin' Cali music fest that INTRODUCED both Janis and Jimi to Murkin audiences (seeing as how his opening for The Monkees @ country club crowds of tweens didn't work out so well...) --- MONTERREY POP! Yup, THAT'S the place to have had some PRIMO Owlsley, as I've read & heard was enjoyed at the time, way pre-Woodstock... *sigh*

Kink-aid couldn't do this shit even on the WORST blotter, son. I blame cocaine. Or as a Robin Williams ("Live @ The Met") bit described a wizened old Amazon Indian chief as remarking, "Cocaine... is our little gift to the white man FOR WHAT HE DID TO US!"

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Fuckin' HTML...

Weird Dave said...

You're only getting 30MW out of your AP-100?
Man, are you getting ripped-off.

Keith said...

Dear Weird Dave,

OK, so we were off an order of magnitude. Is that so bad, considering? But thanks,

Li'l Innocent said...

Oh, you old techie guys, how I love to read your reminiscences, being a sharer of your time-frame tho not being able to lay claim to your utterly charming air of innocent expertise! So nice & sexy! We had a Commodore or two back in the day, and my Bell-Labs-engineer dad had a ball with it. And I used AOL.

And then we kids went down to the malt shop... sigh!

Kincaid was nutty. His ability to standardize the feeling and import of everything he touched was, um, remarkable. The Disney connection is important, I think, because if you look at the big Disney animated fairy tales from the 50s and 60s (not to mention parts of Fantasia) you'll see quite a bit of that Maxfield Parrish-influenced irradiation of sunrise/sunset colors which, in Kincaid's hands, produced that strangely unhealthy, thick luminescence in *everything*, with no rest for the eye or mind. And the religioso undertones! It's like everything is coated and filled with glowing Jesus custard.

He had his individual points though. That last pic ... the flirting frogs are one thing (it's like some infiltrators from Walt Kelly's world got lost in this scene and were co-opted), but what the heck is that thing on the lower right??? "Waiting on the levee, Waiting for the Loch Ness Monster to appear to meee..."

And maybe it did.

Kathy said...

That thing on the right looks like a giant green turd. Everything about that picture is awful, but the glowing yellow centers of the pink flowers are really horrible. No doubt tiny fairies live in them, and come out in the early morning to sprinkle fairy-dew on the flowers. Lavender Fairy-dew with yellow sparkles.

Kathy said...

I swear- that green thing in the lower right corner is a smiling aligator!

Li'l Innocent said...

Whaddayathink, KWillow - - could it be an uncontrollable Jungian uprising of the Kincade Id? I like the idea: lots more genuinely horrific than the subtle satire provided by the Something Awful link Thunder provided above.

BTW, I forgot to compliment Keith on a job well-done. That is some nauseating sales copy you generated there, dude, and so perfectly tuned to the illustrative material. I write such stuff for pay on occasion myself. Did you know that the substance abuse stats for advert copywriters is way above the national average? Fact.

Li'l Innocent said...

Holy Toledo, I just saw something else in that last pic. There's a giant, menacing face up in the clouds on the upper right. It seems to be a cross between Jehovah, Zeus in the "Pastorale Symphony" section of Fantasia, and Captain Hook.

Blimey!

Stacia said...

I'm was sure that's the crocodile from Peter Pan, but the Kinkade site says those are characters from something called The Princess and the Frog, which I never heard of.

All those Disney characters look like they were traced in and painted over. Golly.

Thomas Kinkade is expected to start releasing a new series starting in the Fall of 2012 based on classic Disney theme park attractions.

I think there might be a slight delay.

Weird Dave said...

Hey Keith,

No worries. I just wanted to make sure you got every MW you deserved. I know it must take a lot to keep that place lit.

And those characters in that last picture?
I saw the Princess and the Frog.
In a movie theater.
They are traced right out of it, including the face in the cloud.
Although in its defense (the movie, not the picture) it had pretty good music for a Disney flick.

Weird Dave said...

Oh, and Augustus Owsley Stanley III? I met Bear a few times. By the time I got to say hi to him he was acting like he couldn't trust anyone.
Go figure.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Li'l, sweetie, "The Princess & The Frog," a condescending pity-fuck for New Orleans like that rigged-as-fuck/bought-N-paid-for "Super Bowl win," was the crackers of Disney finally acknowledging that not all African-American/Caribbean-American/other African-originated-genealogy Americans had to play SERVANTS and SLAVES in their gawdless-awful cartoon movies. They blessed a young black girl with Disney's ideal "career"/"achievement" for a young (pretty/born-nobility or martyred-shoulda-been-nobility/skinny/poifect/etc.) female: A black/African-American/Caribbean-American *PRINCESS*!!!

After all, if a girl isn't born to the princess's coronet, why, then she must be RESCUED/besotted/plundered by an almighty fucking *PRINCE*!!! THAT is any woman's GREATEST accomplishment, to not only be "gifted" with Prima Nochte (sp?) nobility-legalized rape, but to be the PROPERTY of a real-live cartoon ROYAL SPAWN!!!

Nope, ain't seen the froggy picture and have no desire to learn another damned thing about it. That gator, though, mebbe it's just me, but it reminds me A LOT of the wicked "pet" gators from "The Rescuers"!!! I only got to see 3 or 4 movies in my "childhood," but THAT one sticks with me to this day, though the fox & bear & every other imaginable anthropomorphized critter from every continent version of "Robin Hood" is nothing but a thin wisp of memory. Somewhere around here, hopefully, I might have the Little Golden Book from that flick, but no memory of it, which is most unusual for my many-flawed, formerly-almost-impressive brain. 'Course, back then, I had NO idea that "Uncle Walt" was a Hitler-lovin, Nazi-sympathizing, dead-mama's-dress-wearing model for Norman Bates (no shit! Hitchcock HATED the fucker and based a LOT of "Psycho" ON Walt's actual life!!!), misogynist recidivist sexist pig.

The whole fixation/obsession/marketing orgy of brainwashing three generations of little girls the world 'round that they should WANT to be PRINCESSES when they grow up, y'know, instead of somebody USEFUL??? --- that being an almighty, job-skill-free PROFESSIONAL CUM-CATCHER FOR THE PRECIOUS INBRED BLUE-BLOOD JIZZ OF THOSE BORN TO THE SILVER COKE SPOON!!!! --- makes my blood boil every single time that they premiere another shampoo, bubble-bath, toy, costume-for-dress-up, Barbie Doll special editions, etc. to the point that my heart may well COOK FULL-THROUGH into stringy meat for a steak-and-kidney pie!!!
(Truncated...)

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

(Here we go again!)

And now that you mention it, that creepy periwinkle-tinged face in the "clouds" (Rockefeller/Standard Oil-generated POLLUTION is more like it!!) looks like yet another LA/NOLA cliche', like some "voodoo daddy"/mojo-exploiting pimp/voodoo "priest" who amalgamated the idolatry of "pagan" African/Caribbean religions with the idolatry of teh cathlicks with the herbal medicine of those melanin-gifted peoples and used it to intimidate/control the idiots who bought his wares, including the young girls whom he beat into productive submission. Disney would never say it OUTRIGHT, but yeah, those guys DID exist and STILL DO, of every color of the rainbow, but for THIS "civil rights achievement" (ONLY 160 YEARS LATE!!!) 'toon, of COURSE the "baddie," whatever he is, as personified by a peeping-tom apparition, has to be black and "magical," a fear-mongering stereotype used by geniuses like D.W. Griffith and his ilk. The "cocksucker" flat-brimmed "gambler's" hat just goes to add to the old-timey racist stereotypes of pimps down through blacksploitation of the 1970s to everyfuckingthing that Snoop Dogg Calvin Pussy-Fearin' Misogynist Broadus, still-unconvicted MURDERER and heavy investor in "Girls Gone Rufied"!!! Again, not having seen it nor ever intending to see it, I'd still wager that the creepy, sharp-featured baddie-in-the-pollution-hued-clouds face belongs to the aforementioned villain/voodoo "trickster."

You're welcome, if I haven't bored you titless and into a coma by now.

"I think there might be a slight delay." --- Stacia, dear heart, not only are you lovely, charming, and able to nearly out-cuss me AND the Teamsters, you also have a TRUE gift for brevity and one helluva sledgehammer punchline!

Weird Dave, I am damned jealous of your getting to meet Owsley, even if he was on the downslide of bitter --- (Truncation, truncation, so much consternation...)

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

LAST ONE, I PROMISE!!!

--- but wouldn't YOU be, if YOU'D done all of the ACTUAL **WORK** on perfecting acid and refining it into the only TRUE way for people to peel their brains open and find the GOOD PARTS (if they HAD any fuckin' brains, rather than vapid RECREATIONAL heads) --- and a purely-bullshit MEDIA WHORE like TIMOTHY LEARY (much like DENIS stealing his ENTIRE FUCKING *CAREER* FROM THE SOON-TO-BE-DYING BILL HICKS!!!) comes prancing along and CLAIMS ALL OF THE FUCKING CREDIT?!?!?!!? Yeah, T. Leary did SOME work, but only by stealing all of Owsley's SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH and then co-opting it as a fucking FASHION STATEMENT!!!

It's a testament to Owsley's truly beneficent nature, patience, and goodwill toward humankind, flawed as he may have been otherwise, that he never INTENTIONALLY DOSED Leary into a career as a PROFESSIONAL DROOLER!!! No, I'm not 100% on the intricacies of their interactions and/or correspondence, but I still look at Owsley as the good guy, if sadly naive, whilst Leary and his followers/looney-toons got all of the credit, federal "research" cash AND fame, so nyeh.

OT, but, here's an adorable Depression-era gem on teh syndicated sub-channels this morning: a VERY young Spencer Tracy in the jazz-flavored farcical "romance," "A Man's Castle"!!! Suffragettes, they ain't got, but for street-hustling, catch-as-catch-can kinda guys in that era, he's still damned charming for a slightly-more-sexist-than-absolutely-necessary lunkhead who takes "pity" upon a GORGEOUS but too-skinny Loretta Young. Not trying to plug these cheesebag Bowdlerized/Hays-Code-on-steroids sub-channels, but hey, a true classic is a lovely ol' rhinestone in a day/week/month/year/decade/life that's been nothing but rancid bullshit, y'know? Like finding a diamond in horse-apples. And pre-Larry, Darryl & Darryl, oh, what THIS man won't do for a dollar! It's on AntTV if y'all can catch it on the replay, they NEVER play ANYTHING just once, believe me. It'll never replace NetFlix, but they CAN be truly educational AND entertaining. Thus concludes tonight's programming notes and we now return you to your regularly-scheduled smartasses...

Green Eagle said...

Scott Drager said...

"Of course the finishing touch on ANY cozy cabin is a garden bench large enough to fill a two-car garage."

Scott, that's not a bench. It's a car elevator.

Kathy said...

OMG it is a hideous head/face in the clouds. UG!

My daughter loved the Disney store, and their !#%^&*! Princess dolls, up till she was about 11. Its the clothes- Disney gives its princesses a new outfit every few months, and the girls WANT it. Jess would take the dress off the doll almost immediately, and throw the princess into a corner. Other Moms agreed its what their daughters did too. Why? I think they just like the dresses.

It is snowing like... like... Heck! -here in Reno. Kinda hard on the trees & flowers that have bloomed in the 70° weather.

Keith said...

Don't worry about the menacing face peering from the clouds (pic 3). It's only <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin>Wotan.</a>

Keith said...

Sorry for the badly-formed HTML.

It's only Wotan.

TM said...

I'm sure someone's gone there already, and yes it's in bad taste, but oh won't some talented soul pick up the torch and continue... as Zombie Thomas Kincaid, the Painter of Night.

Chris Vosburg said...

Li'l Innocent writes Oh, you old techie guys, how I love to read your reminiscences

Dammit, just get off my lawn.

[scowling] kids.

Chris Vosburg said...

Annti writes: Awww mannn, now I feel guilty that I left out Marshall. *sigh* Moog just died a few years ago too, didn't he?

In the irony department, Pete Townshend was one of the handful of enthusiastic guitarists telling Marshall that he really oughta think about building bigger and louder guitar amplifiers.

As [what?!] history records [wait, what?!]-- Well, you know the rest of the story.

I wanted to talk about Moog, though. Part of the reason that the MiniMoog (the two-odd keyboard version) has a unique sound is that it's not just about oscillators: Robert Moog has a patent on the filters (espcially in this regard the low pass filters) used to process that oscillator and I know it's a little geeky, but I think it's relevant: that's why other synthesizers didn't sound like a Moog synthesizer.

So if you read this, you're all now geeks as well, is what I'm saying.

Chris Vosburg said...

If you haven't hallunicated since '68 and suddenly find yourself doing so again, am I to understand that this is a bad thing? (House covered this in an ep).

Chris Vosburg said...

L'il, I can't leave it at that: I think the world of your bell-labs-engineer Dad, and wanted to say hey to him.

Bell Labs was always such a puzzle, at once the most expansive and at the same time the most reticent of the research industries to share what they knew. I figured it was either a new CEO every week, or the same CEO with a serious bipolar disorder.

But that said, it suffered greatly from the "japanese? seriously?" disorder, which led to the development of wildly popular transistor devices upon which I listened to Vin Scully deliver Los Angeles Dodger games. None of these devices were built by American companies.

And I want to emphasize that this was well before the breakup of the Bell monopoly. Years before. And I want to make sure you understand that: Years before.

Again, your Dad is not a bad guy or a villain. He's a good engineer, working for the isolated, and insulated Bell Labs.

It's their problem, not his.

On the lighter side, the software guys expressed their fondness for Ed Wood movies by naming a UNIX derivative used by the shop "Plan Nine From Bell Labs"

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

OOH!! Bell Labs!! I can't be the only one who's ever watched "History Detectives" on PBS or read "Jetpack Dreams" by Mac Montandon, can I???

In re: History Detectives, it appears that some severe smartasses @ Bell Labs, in cahoots or perhaps behind the backs of Grumman techies, engineered the production of 5 or 6 large-postage-stamp-sized ceramic chips, if you will, emblazoned with the artwork of Warhol and 4 oe 5 more-tolerable artists of the day in severely-miniature form --- in order that it might be *hidden* on the landing capsule/pod of the Apollo 11 that would be left upon the moon. (The Bell guys who designed the emergency landing parachutes folded them precisely THEMSELVES after fabrication was completed, and included valuable stamps, team pennants, pictures of their kids, and possibly one dirty cartoon by R.Crumb!) A couple of the spare ceramics are still floating around THIS sphere in the antiques/specific collectables markets, but one actually DID make it aboard the landing pod. Look the episode up, no matter how annoying the midget chick "antiques authority" may be, because it is a HOOT!

Also from Bell Labs, giant paper-and-early-mylar helium balloons (different episode of "Detectives") which got a few people into a little trouble here and there... and then there's 80+/- years of sci-fi that led to 50-ish years of research by Bell, Northrup-Grumman, private investors & unqualified and overwealthy tinkers, gubmint contracts and crushed dreams, along with the weirdest opening ceremony for an American-based round of Olympic Games (L.A., 1984), all about individual "jet packs"/"jet belts"/etc. In other words, "They promised us flying cars, no more gridlock, and personal-sized jetpacks for commuting from Levittowns all across America to our Wish-We-Were-Don-Draper JOBS, dammit! WHERE'S OUR FUCKIN' JET PACKS?!?!

Haven't finished the book yet, but it's been a hoot thus far, despite the heartbreak and disappointment of those brave engineers, scientists, and brilliant/crazy upstate N.Y. men who enjoyed good Scotch and the perfect concentration of hydrogen peroxide as jet fuel. And yup, Bell Labs had a finger in EVERYBODY'S single-pilot jet-belts pies, too. Until they just TOOK the damned pies, that is... Hey, AT&T didn't get that big or those gubmint contracts by playing "nice" with ANYBODY, now did they? And whatever became of "Lucent Technologies," anyway?

Li'l Innocent said...

Gosh, this thread was still extant on the 15th... prolly no one still reading it now, but whattheheck: my dad, the Bell-Labs engineer, shuffled off the mortal coil back in 2005, but I'm sure he'd appreciate the cool words, Chris = and might have had some nifty historical remarks to make about the Labs and the creative types who worked there. His early years there were spent at the height of the Cold War, working on anti-missle missle guidance systems (lots of trips to White Sands and the Kwajalein Islands proving grounds); then he got switched (or asked to be transferred) to non-defense contract work. When his work was classified, he couldn't have talked about it to the family, and the later stuff we wouldn't have understood much about anyway, even if he'd been the chatty type.

As to being on your lawn with my trike and my rambunctious little dog, Chris, I'm sure I'm way, way your senior. But I'll keep Tige out of the dahlias.

My last woid on that Kincade thing is that it would be so much better for everyone if that WAS Wotan.

Li'l Innocent said...

That would be "anti-missile", wouldn't it?

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Aaahhh, who cares? If you're happy about the conversation, and know that it would've amused the hell out of your dad, that's all that matters!

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

P.S. Why is the globe-eating Google/Blogger discriminating against the elderly/rapidly-blinding with that TINY FUCKING FONT on the "prove yer not a robot" fill-in space?!?!?!? I can see the secret-decoder-ring words just fine, they're BIGGER, but when you type 'em in, they're fucking MICROSCOPIC, and no, CTRL+ doesn't do SHIT about it.

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