Technically, It IS "Later"

Okay, when I said in my last post I would post something later I hadn’t meant this much later, but I kind of got caught up in doing a whole lot of nothing in particular and never got around to writing anything.
Oh well.
When I got up yesterday morning, I fired up the work laptop, connected to my wireless network, logged into the corporate VPN, and got to work. I set the laptop up at my desk, and with the dual monitors of my desktop, it looked like the set up of some movie hacker:


Oddly enough, I didn’t nearly initiate a nuclear war, discover that the world we know is just an advanced computer simulation, or do whatever the hell those idiots in that shitty Hackers movie did. Nor did I hook up with Ally Sheedy, Carrie-Ann Moss, or Angelina Jolie.

After closing up shop for the day I watched a Riff Trax version of the most inexplicable thing I’ve ever seen: 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special.
If you’ve ever seen it – Riffed or otherwise – you know what I’m talking about when I say WTF?
Art Carney with a shirt open to his navel? Harvey Korman in drag? Bea Arthur singing? Chewbacca’s father (note: “Chewbacca’s” was a recognized word in Word’s dictionary) plugging into some virtual reality masturbation machine and watching Diahann Caroll sing?
It just…I can’t…huh?
I distinctly recall being upset as a kid because I missed the Star Wars Holiday Special. It bothered me for a long time. Now it appears that I dodged a bullet, though recognizing the fact that I would have had the critical faculties of a six year old, I probably would have liked it had I seen it thirty years ago. After all, it was Star Wars, and as a kid I was obsessed with all things Star Wars.
I was five when the movie came out, and I actually missed my chance to see it in 1977. I was supposed to spend a weekend at my grandmother’s house during which my brother Brad was going to take me to see it, but, being five, I had a hard time being parted from my parents and ended up going home.
I actually saw The Empire Strikes Back before I saw the first movie. Randomly, sometime after Empire, a local theater ran the first movie again for a limited time.
In any case, I find myself somewhat surprised that Lucas hasn’t decided to digitally touch up the special and release a new version of it that more closely adheres to his vision for it in a way that 1970’s technology just wouldn’t allow.