Monday, April 21, 2008

A Couple Of Mysteries

I was going to do a post about this story, because it piqued my interest. I mean, I can see a person being able to maybe tie their hands and feet, but then how do you put the duct tape over your eyes? Unless you did that first, since good duct tape is hard to rip with out scissors or a knife, but then how could you see well enough to tie your hands and feet? And then, once you're all bound and blindfolded, how would you be able to throw yourself in a lake? What if you headed in the wrong direction? Many puzzling questions with no real answers so...
......I thought it was time for a fluff piece on something I discovered a month or so ago called Retro Jams.
Saturday mornings, my youngest son and I, both being early risers, will get up and scan the television for something to watch, nearly impossible since I don't have cable and the only thing on at that hour is infomercials or NASCAR updates. One time, at the upper end of the UHF spectrum, we did stumble across something we called the whistling channel, since it showed pastoral videos accompanied by whistling.
One morning, after my oldest spent the night at school, we had to get up early to pick him up. When we brought him home, he was very tired (having spent the entire night being awake) so he crawled into bed, while his brother and I watched television, figuring we might as well since we were up.
"Let's watch the whistling channel," my youngest one suggested, so I grabbed the clicker and found that the whistling channel wasn't coming in, or if it was, it wasn't showing the whistling show, so I began to search all the channels I can get with just a set of rabbit ears (and a loop antenna) on my set.
We came across a vintage video of Nancy Sinatra singing "These Boots Are Made For Walking", and I assumed it was an infomercial for some Time_Life collection of greatest-sixties-songs-we-could-get-clearance-rights-to-put-on-a-CD, but immediately after, they showed a Turtles video for "Happy Together", also vintage. But when they showed a clip (obviously aired on some sixties pop music show) of the Who doing "Pinball Wizard", well, we were hooked.
Some of the videos are, well, clips from films. Most of the Zeppelin videos are culled from The Song Remains The Same, the Pink Floyd version of "One Of These Days" looks to be from a concert film from the early seventies. But the selections are broken down into segments based on style of music (funk, rap, classic rock, oldies, punk/new wave) with a Madonna video every hour and a half.
Where this channel originates is a mystery; it is however nationwide, as sometimes during breaks, it will list all the channels and cities where it can be found. A Google search will not provide any fruitful information. And it's not all great (it does play of lot of drum heavy 80's music, for instance)and will often leave you wondering things like "Whatever happened to those guys?"

2 comments:

Tom Harper said...

LOL. That's a wacky way to commit suicide. Who knows, maybe Jesus committed suicide by crucifying himself.

Kathy said...

Retro Jams? Never heard of it, but it sounds like it would definitely put me to sleep. I've become accustomed to the propaganda on stations like ABC and Fox. ;-)