due west

Chanced upon a personal jackpot several days ago in the form of free access to a favorite childhood show called "The Wild Wild West" courtesy of some service named "Pluto" whose app appeared in a collection thereof on a new TV. Sure, commercials, but in a way that feels a lot like childhood TV as well (if that makes any sense).

And it just occurred to me that the show's initials suggest I was onto the WWW long before the silly computer kind....

My Dog, Inquiry, TCM (or a similar channel) runs Westerns *all day*! :P

My Dad was a total Western show/movie hound. It was all he watched! The Sons of Katie Elder, The Unforgiven (my fav of all time too), Two Mules for Sister Kate (correct title?), Gunsmoke, etc.

I dig The Unforgiven and Tombstone(?). The one with "Hell City" and Clint Eastwood. Not the one with Emilio Estevez and the other Brat Pack-ers.

Commercials are quasi-nostalgia now, a total pain in the ass prior to streaming services.

On that note, I have HBO Max for free with my phone upgrade, and as of today have WiFi to actually *watch* it too! :)

Now I wish the web's WWW stood for Wild Wild West.

haha, according to Jay-Z in the commercial he did for Samsung (the Tab 8?) back in 2013, World Wide Web *does* stand for Wild Wild West. And the "new generation has to make the new rules".

Nice line, but less rules/tampering always makes for a better Web experience, usually. Rick Rubin was in the commercial, though, so that made the ad kinda cool ;)

I don't want to give the impression I'm a Westerns aficionado, because my dad was into them too, and I think part of my youthful rebellion against him involved avoiding Westerns (although I'm a huge fan of the song "Wichita Lineman"...).

But The WWW seemed a genre unto itself to me. Sure, the settings were Western-ish. But for me it was the combination of a rather poignant campiness, Artie's incessant gadgeteering, and Artie's "characters within his character" (complete with disguises) that did it for me. I mean, the stunts were fun too, as someone "coming of age" I'd hoped to learn a thing or two from West's, um, "female cultivation skills".

But as a kid I was a huge fan of a book called "The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald" (still have the paperback from, oh... maybe 1968...?), was constantly disassembling electronica of the times and attempting to put it back together in new ways. Yeah, those new ways rarely worked, but there was intense joy in the journeys. I'd carved out a space that was basically a storage room in the basement that contained a wooden bar (as in the kind I can imagine in a meatspace Midnight Pub), and I turned that into my "Lab", created my own form of running water in it (a huge upside-down water jug fit with an Erlenmeyer flask stopper, some tubes, and an upside down, top half of a plastic milk carton serving as the sink (with a tube running to another jug to collect waste water). I protected the room by a burglar alarm of my own design, and still possess the main switch mechanism that caused a bell to ring when the door to the unfinished part of the basement opened - all powered by a model railroad "transformer", of course. :-)

Had a chemistry set in there, boxes of electronic guts from radios/tvs/etc. I regularly salvaged on garbage day - an activity my mom was often horrified by. :-)

I met a friend in high school that had gone a different path for elementary and middle school, and during college we wound up starting a snail and eventually e- mail correspondence that's a couple exchanges per week strong to this day, and somewhere along the line we discovered similar love for The WWW, so he was damned happen when I recently shared how I was finally getting back with it.

(Yeah, yeah... I'm sure it's on some "cable channel", but we're not cable TV subscribers.)

Paranoid minds think alike!

When I was 14 I wanted peace of mind when I was in my basement bedroom smoking weed (one hitters in the bathroom attached) and managed to rig up the lighting mechanism from a 3-in-1 (kid-style) gaming board (mini pool table, mini Ping Pong, mini air hockey) that went to air hockey, which read "SCORE!" in a big red light bar on top. I had some wiring deal running under the bathroom door, behind the bedroom couch, and out to the small rug at the bottom of the stairwell, where a mechanism (some padded button sort of a deal) lay beneath the rug, right where ones foot would land when descending the stairs.

It worked a couple times. Not accurately. And my folks could surely smell the pungent weed from upstairs either way (and didn't care, either way) so it WAS just for peace of mind. Haha!

Ah, the joy of youthful clandestine special ops!

Indoor THC in my day was quite risky, so that always took place "out in the woods".

*However*, visual aids for, um... "sex for one" <coughs profusely> were definitely best kept in cool, dry, undisclosed places. So viva la burglar alarm....

Well as per prior subject matter - I grew up with/in the WWW era, so an abundance of materials as such were a disk drive away at all times, lmao!