Floppys still in service, Sputnik intercepts, and Good To Go
Chuck E. Cheese shows still run on diskette
(You can click the image or the link up top to bring up the tiktok video)
All you really need to know you get from the first 10 seconds of the clip. Or even the screenshot I took. Or just the title. The rest is kind of tedious, but if you’re like me you end up finding ShowbizPizzaman’s style and mannerisms and sweet sweet 'stache entirely adorable.
This is the sort of old-technology-existing-alongside-new-technology moment that fans of major sci-fi franchises call bullshit on when they see it in the movies. I bet it’s far more common than we realize. I think of my old plumber Johnny Warren (rest in peace OG man in black). Some time around 2006 when he was working on my commode, he brought in what looked like a steampunk era fully exposed flywheel engine/air compressor or something thing to drive his drain cleaning tool. He operated it in his black silk western shirt with a white tee under it, jeans and fine leather cowboy boots, true to form.
It looked kind of sort of distantly like this, but in brass and black and way sleeker:
(click to see a video and post about this contraption on Reddit)
Man, though. Think about that tiktok video for a moment. If there’s a diskette right here at a Chuck E. location, a new diskette, with new dance numbers, then somewhere out there there’s a computer with a 3.5” floppy disk drive where new dance numbers get composed and loaded. I think we need to find the person who makes those.
If any of you still run in to operational and in-operation 3.5” floppy disks for any reason in the course of your travels through life, please hit reply and tell me about it.
Go Ahead Caller, from 2005 Kilocycles. Paul Ford shared this historical recording of a guy named Joe Centers from Brooklyn Center calling in to a Minnesota radio show in 1957 to share shortwave radio broadcasts he happened to hear coming from the Russian satellite Sputnik - embedded mastodon link below, or use the link in bold up above this graf:
Paul Ford: “Here’s a guy in Minneapolis calling into the radi…” - tilde.zone
Here’s a guy in Minneapolis calling into the radio in 1957 to share a live shortwave transmission from Sputnik. https://archive.org/details/wtcnam1280khzsputnik120005khz101957
(Brush up on Sputnik and space race history if you need it here.)
Joe the caller is super helpful and tells the listening audience how they can find it themselves. I like how he uses the expression “according to Hoyle.” There’s an incredible amount of shortwave minutiae back and forth between Joe and the host if that’s your thing. I just find the whole thing fascinating. You don’t get a lot of color from either of them about how it felt to be contemplating the Russian’s first artificial satellite, other than excitement at the newsworthiness of it.
This is of a piece with the bananas about similar more recent phenomena in October of 2020 - both the developer in Pakistan who happened to see the helicopters coming for the top secret Bin Laden raid and tweeted about it, and also the signals that led someone to know something was up when then-President Trump came down with Covid-19. Back then I wrote that this sort of thing is “a really valuable “eyes on the world” function of Twitter, and I would miss it if I stopped using the platform.” And sure enough I have stopped using it, and I know I will miss this function.
But What’s ‘Good To Go?’ Occasionally I can remember the very specific way a word or phrase crossed my consciousness. The phrase “Good To Go” today usually means either “I’m ready, let’s get out of here” (apparently the military-derived variant) or something like what Mr. Roper in Three’s Company meant when he said “hot to trot”. Before I heard it in Tone Loc’s Funky Cold Medina, which was released on my birthday in 1989 and was actually written by Marvin Young aka Young MC, I saw it on these t-shirts. Probably in middle school.
My poor young brain was just absolutely flummoxed with maybe only the primitive Gopher and Usenet internet tools to turn to. What did these words mean? Why are they on a shirt with Mickey and Minnie wearing Fila gear? Is this all referring to something that’s really really cool and I am just too hopelessly behind to know about it? It was probably also one of my first brushes with street style, with underground goods, and also the reappropriation or claiming and remixing of mainstream images by cool subcultures.
It really took me a long time to learn more about it. And it was definitely a thing. Here's a snippet from the Evening Sun newspaper from October 16, 1987 noting a particular shoe shine worker's attire:
And a Guttersnipe gang blog entry from 2008 remembers too.
I don't have a ton to say about it except that fashion and the play of subcultures and mainstream culture has evolved so much that it's really hard to remember how jarring and unusual this was in the late 80's. Nowadays it works in both directions, and all the time, as one of the main engines of style - high fashion steals streetwear and re-commoditizes it, streetwear takes old high fashion and recontextualizes it, and the cycle goes on and on.
The reason why this is a banana is that this Washington Post article from 1987 has been sitting in my bookmarks for a while, and I don’t remember how it first landed there. It’s about Disney’s legendary legal team attempting to bring the hammer down on these very shirts. I don’t think the effort was as successful as they’d hoped it would be.
They are definitely still around and easy to find online. Here’s one from a clearly upstanding and rights-compliant vendor tee shunt pedia...ok it’s tees hunt pedia I guess but I can’t see it any other way now.
These are the bananas I found for you this week. It feels good to be back. You can hit "reply" and the message will go only to me. Thank you.