Now’s the time to order your copy of Buk 100: My Old Man, A Birthday Greeting.Click right here for Newington Blue Press’ limited edition chapbook. Only 100 copies will be printed in this initial run, which celebrates what would have been Charles Bukowski’s 100th birthday.
When you read it, be sure take a gander at two poems of mine: “First Smoke” and “Guerrilla Poet.” (The latter piece is an homage to my good friend and colleague in the writing world, poet Dennis Villelmi.)
I hope you guys are looking forward to a great weekend! No matter what you’ve got planned, remember Buk’s advice — “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
I remember Laser Tag as an exciting but fairly brief blip in 1980’s pop culture. A lot of the kids I knew got excited about these commercials, a lot of us asked earnestly for Laser Tag guns Christmas, and … none of us got them. (Our parents seemed unanimous that they were too expensive.)
Ah, well. The subsequent buzz around my neighborhood was that our parents were probably wise, anyway — we heard later that the guns hardly worked, making the product nowhere near as cool as the commercials depicted. (I am linking below to Kevin Noonan’s Youtube Channel, by the way.)
And then the fad faded — all the hubbub around Laser Tag (and Photon, its cheaper competitor) just kinda went away. It sort of makes sense. Paintball was alive and well as an edgier, more subversive, and more exciting sport; I can’t imagine how these gaudy electronic products could compete with that.
The Wikipedia entry for Laser Tag had a couple of surprises for me. For starters, the technology for the products’ infrared light guns and sensors was developed by the United States Army in the 1970’s — I guess it was an Ender’s Game-type scenario. And the first game system using the technology was South Bend’s Star Trek Electronic Phaser Guns in 1979. (Those toys were released in conjunction with the premiere of that year’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”)
Didn’t see that one coming. I’ll bet those toys fetch a nice price among collectors.
Anyway, there was another Laser Tag commercial that everybody talked about back in the day … it depicted American and Russian teams competing in a dystopian-future tournament, in which the Statue of Liberty was the trophy. It’s smile-inducing. I couldn’t find a really decent copy of it to link to here, but you can find it on Youtube.
A pal of mine gave me this N99 mask. Little could she know that she would inadvertently AWAKEN AN ANCIENT WARRIOR. The time has come to put my lengthy and grueling ninjutsu training to work.
Ignore the wisps of gray hair. That’s … part of the ninja disguise.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 