The thing I remember most about the storm was that it forced me to move into my first apartment much sooner than I'd expected. I was taking a winter-term history class at Elon and my new roomie was off in London for the entire month: nobody was in the apartment and the last roommate had owned most of the furniture, so the place was really bare. Well, during the first storm I wound up staying one night in my old dorm room, made the very careful drive back home the next afternoon and heard that a second storm was on its way. I figured the logical thing to do was to hole up in the apartment a lot sooner than anticipated, so I'd be close to campus if we had class the next day. So I packed up a sleeping bag, a lamp, some books, and the TV/VCR combo I'd gotten for Christmas - and a few other essentials - into the car and headed for my new digs. I got the car unpacked and headed out to find food and some entertainment to hold me over in case I got iced-in with nowhere to go. I wound up getting a Battletech novel and a Doctor Who videotape ("The Five Doctors" episode) from the Burlington mall and then one of those 2-pizza deals from Little Caesar's (and some breadsticks 'course), and some two-liter Cokes. The accomodations that night - my first ever in my own apartment - were Spartan to say the least: without my own bed for the time being I had to sleep on the couch. But as I ate my pizza and watched the video, with the ice that ended up trapping me indoors for the next two days falling outside... I felt so much triumphant pleasure. Like a king over my own domain. It didn't matter that I barely had anything at all in the apartment: that it was my very own place to live in for the first time in my life was all that mattered to me. And I was loving it! It was so much fun in fact that a few years later when I moved into my next apartment, I just had to replicate the ritual of eating pizza while watching that same Doctor Who tape on my first night in the place.
Lotta good memories that were had in that apartment, along with a few crazy ones and some that... well, no one would ever believe me if I wrote about it here. But they all started with the ice storm ten years ago this week. And I just felt led to share my own memories about it, to add to those of anyone else who probably remembers the storm also.
First of all, this is a great game in and of itself, even in single-player mode. Longtime fans of the Mario Kart series (going all the way back to the Super Nintendo) will find that this has all the action and humor you'd come to expect from the line. But as any of us who've played a Mario Kart game knows, the real fun is when you play with friends and compete in the race while throwing Koopa shells and Bob-ombs at each other (the one I really hate getting hit with is the lightning bolt that momentarily shrinks you): No telling how many times Lisa and I have thrashed each other playing Mario Kart Double-Dash on the Gamecube. Ideally you and your friends will each have a Nintendo DS and at least one Mario Kart DS cartridge (the game uses the DS's wireless capability to let multiple systems run off one cartridge). But what if you don't know of anyone else with a DS, or what if you do and that friend is located on the other side of the state... or even in another country?
So here is Otto. He's not doing much in the picture because I took his photo while he was asleep. So far I've taught him his name and trained him to sit, speak, and shake hands, and I'm working on having him wiggle his butt in the air on command. Otto likes to play ball but for some reason he's scared of the stick when I throw it for him to fetch. He's pretty friendly to other dogs that he meets when I take him out for a walk (usually about twice a day) but sometimes he's too curious for his own good (like yesterday when he ate a bag of popcorn that was laying in the street). He's a pretty clean dog: he "relieves" himself just about every time we go for a walk, and I've only had to give him a bath once since we've been together. He seems to get hungry an awful lot though, but I guess that's 'cuz he's still a puppy, although one of the nice things about Nintendogs is that the pups never get any older.
Vincent Schiavelli was one of the most well-known character actors of the past thirty years. He first came to prominence as Frederickson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Later on he appeared in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Amadeus. Fifteen years ago he had a memorable role in Ghost: he played the ghost in the subway who taught Patrick Swayze's Sam Wheat character how to move physical objects. Not long after that he played the Organ Grinder in Batman Begins, which I always thought was a role that he should have been given a lot more to do with: I mean c'mon, a guy with a Gatling machine gun built into his grind organ is a pretty cool thing. Maybe no one else will remember this but I gotta mention that he was pretty good in Tim Conway's "Dorf" videos too. Schiavelli wasn't just a great actor, he was also an accomplished gourmet chef who wrote three cookbooks and articles for various cooking magazines. He died of lung cancer at his home in Sicily (where he'd been busy directing some plays) at the age of 57... way too young for a guy with his talents, if you ask me.
Then not long after hearing that Schiavelli had left us, it came down the wire that Michael Vale died on Christmas Eve at the age of 83. Vale will forever be remembered by those of us who lived in the 80s and 90s as Fred the Baker, for whom it was always "Time to make the donuts!" at Dunkin' Donuts. So many hilarious commercials that Vale did for Dunkin' that come to mind. My favorite was the one where Fred dresses up as a woman in the aisles of some supermarket before confronting the store's bakery about how fresh their donuts were. Another one had him constantly going out his front door saying "Time to make the donuts!" before literally meeting himself at the end of the commercial saying "I made the donuts!" Vale retired from the Dunkin' Donuts commercials eight years ago, but to this day his is the face that always comes to mind whenever I drive past a Dunkin' Donuts store. In a far more serious vein, Vale also played a jewelry salesman in Marathon Man.
