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All your base are belong to us

Took a trip to my local grocery store the other day for some essentials. After successfully convincing myself to not buy the opened, but probably not used generic plastic food storage on the store’s clearance endcap, I passed by the magazine rack.  I was struck by how small the magazine selection (and retail space allotted to) had become over the years. When I was a kid in the early 1990′s and accompanied my parents to the store, any store, I’d seek out the periodicals and stay there for the duration of the excursion. There I’d read all that I could of the latest issue of The Dark Knight Detective, get the latest from the last of the territories in Pro Wrestler, and see who MAD Magazine was poking fun at this time. And if I exhausted all of that, there were always maps. Suddenly feeling nostalgic (as I often do), I thought that maybe it’d be fun to buy a magazine since I sometimes like to keep my bathroom reading analog. I immediately scanned the rack for the latest issue of Guitar Player. No joy. Dumb it down to Guitar World? Nada. How about a Batman comic? Joke’s on me! No MAD Magazine, either. So what DID I find?

Listen, I’ve got no interest in but also no problems with guns. If the internet is to be believed, there are obviously lots of passionate gun enthusiasts out there. And being that this is the internet and being that I have no interest in sparking a political argument, let's just pretend that the exorbitant amount of gun, knife, prepper, and car mags are foodie magazines. How about magazines devoted to scented magic marker enthusiasts (actually, send me a sub card for that)? Or, imagine something just completely ridiculous. Something that couldn’t possibly necessitate devoted publishing. Actually, that last bit kinda reminded me of a movie line that ironically links back to guns. 

Anyway. What I saw next left me rather speechless. Actually, that’s not true. It left me without a discernable vocabulary or at least one that was safe for work and/or children. I have no idea how to preempt the following photo, so I’ll just let you formulate your own rudimentary language. 

If words other than “the fuck?” passed your physical or mind’s lips, allow me to retort. 

I stepped back, almost in a panic. Maybe this is an extension of the REAL magazine rack. Maybe this is simply the Aisle of Misfit Magazines and I’m on the wrong side of the tracks. But no. This all there is. I know how buyers work at stores. It’s based on demographics. The magazines I expected to find exist, they just aren’t here because there isn’t a market for them in this area. This area is where I live. Paranoia crept in. I began looking at those around me as if I was in some sort of Twilight Zone and Rod Serling was providing the narration of my torment at the checkout counter.  I went back and bought that generic plastic food container that was probably used, washed, and returned. I didn’t care. It had a wordy cardboard box and I still needed something to read in the bathroom. I also ordered myself a subscription to MAD Magazine for $5 (CHEAPO!). It’ll be delivered right to my mailbox. Which is good since I don’t know where I am anymore.  What’s on YOUR local magazine rack? 

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Ghosts of Halloween Past (PODCAST)

Once upon a time, in a world not quite as scary, lived a podcast known as the FUHcast.  One of my favorite things about the FUHcast was our holiday specials. They took a crap ton of planning, recording, and editing. But in the end, it was all worth it. 

The inaugural Halloween podcast, dubbed “Halloween FUHRight Cast”, will always stick out in my mind. Recorded in 2011, it was the first time I had ever edited anything on such an epic scale. We also introduced resident mischievous demon Lothgar to the fray and took a trip to the can to chat with Bloody Larry, the urban legend worker who just needed a friend.  Take a listen HERE (<<Click)   

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, 2012′s sequel Halloween special was an even larger undertaking. Adding a third cohost and even more skits, the editing difficulty rose to new levels. I’m just as proud of this FUHright baby as I am of the first.  Take a listen HERE (<<Click)

If you like what you heard, you can subscribe to Head of the Cast podcast and have access to the ENTIRE File Under Horrible FUHcast podcast catalog by searching for “Head of the Cast” in your preferred podcast search engine/subscription service!

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Follow My Life: Dad

I was born at the tail end of 1979 in a suburb about 25 miles west of Chicago. The Reagan/Carter election was winding down, the Pope just made his first US visit, and production was getting ready to begin on Raiders of the Lost Ark. My father was a few months into age 22.  

As the purpose of this site has been to examine my past in order to better understand how I became who I am today and to better guide who I become later in life, I will keep this entry limited to my first 10 years (or so) in life. Because that’s the dad I want to tell you about. That’s the dad who became the most important man in my life.

My very first memory of my dad is his beard. Big, black, and sometimes bushy, I would relate him to Bluto in Popeye, save for the villainy. So prominent a feature of my father’s that it inspired my grandmother to sing me asleep with a campfire song turned lullaby titled “Father’s Whiskers”. I can hear my grandmother’s voice sing it to me in the back of my head as I write this. 

The second thing I came to notice about my father was his love of music. Actually, I think that I just associated my father with music in general. The image of an electric guitar and the sounds that it could make in capable hands was ingrained in me very early on. I have previously written about my dad and that special connection in a previous entry, so I won’t continue on much more about it here. In short, we were not a sports family, but we were a music family. And I’ve remained eternally grateful to him for that. I can’t imagine listening to a football game at the end of a stressful day. 

My sister was born 2 and a half years after myself and my parents divorced by the time I was 6 years old. The divorce isn’t something I want to dwell on, but it’s important to note that there was a certain amount of turmoil in my childhood. When kids go through troubling times at an early age, they immediately seek reassurance and some semblance of normalcy. They reach for rescue. They need a hero. My dad needed to be all of the above and he rarely let me down. As I grow older, I often imagine what my dad’s life was at my age. When I was 27, I imagined my father newly divorced with two little kids to feed and nurture. I often wondered if I would have been able to handle that. I’ll never know, but I think that I would have done alright given the example I lived through. 

If I haven’t mentioned it before (this will be a recurring theme), I was a super weird kid. I’d like to think I was entertaining, but I definitely wasn’t your normal sitcom kid. My father had a handle in that, too. My father had (and still has) a flair for the whimsical. He would read to my sister and I often and would create character voices that still live in my mind to this day. Whenever I see a copy of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a little play goes on in my mind and my father’s voice is the star of the show. 

As weird as I was, my dad never told me to stop. Never told me to grow up or grow out of it. Never told me to live in another reality that I didn’t want to live in. He knew how important it was to be a kid. And while my childhood had some rough spots, much of what I enjoyed has him tied to it.  While there are many ways that my father and I are different, in some aspects we are in parallel. We have a thousand ideas we want to share with the world and the portal for those ideas to escape is sometimes too small they never come to fruition. We are always creating something, if only for ourselves. And while we can both come at life with cynicism, we both just want to make things better for everyone we care about. That was something that he taught me at a very early age that lesson was taught with laughter. And we’re still laughing today. 

Thanks, pops. 

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Big McStake

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I thought it was the end, I thought it was the 4th of July.

I'm not upset at the fact that people are lighting off fireworks at 12:30am on a Friday night. I live in the suburbs and it's the weekend after the 4th. I'm not new. I am upset, however, that it woke my sleeping cat with a hair trigger bowel. The sounds of bottle rockets fired in rapid succession caused him to spring from his slumber and let loose an air destroyer that smells like a cross between an abandoned sausage factory in August and a Golgathan doing jumping jacks.

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Truth in memes.

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A recent arrival here at HEADquarters.

When you couldn’t afford a Game Boy in the 80’s, this is what you were rocking. I used to roll the score on this bad boy until my 10 year old thumbs cramped. The flipper buttons eventually gave out and it went in the trash over 25 years ago.

Thanks, ebay.

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Follow My Flicks: E.T. the Extra Terrestrial

You always remember your first. 

It wouldn’t be until the early 2000′s that I’d develop a deep seeded hatred for the moviegoing experience. The ridiculous ticket and concession prices, annoying general public, and finding parking made seeing a movie on the big screen more of a chore that I had to endure rather than a pastime I looked forward to. These days, I have a huge high-definition television,  hi-res media players, and a great sound system that affords me the ability to enjoy cinema at my leisure. But make no mistake, I was once a theater rat. I bled popcorn butter and shat gummy bears. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was a big part of my life. And it all started with an alien who also, after a while, just wanted to go home. 

‘E.T. the Extra Terrestrial’ was first released in 1982, which would have made me about 2 or 3 years old, much too young to see it when it first came to the theaters. The movie was such a giant box office success that Spielberg (director) and company wanted to strike while the iron was hot and since affordable home video options were not yet in existence, the film was re-released in theaters in the summer of 1985. I saw it that fall at the age of six. It would be the first movie I would see in a movie theater, or at least, the first movie I have memory of seeing without crapping in a diaper. Pretty sure I was out of diapers at 6. I digress.....

I would sometimes spend the odd weekend at my Aunt Rose’s house. While there, I would get to hang out with her son, my older cousin Jimmy. I really looked up to Jimmy when I was a kid. He was a good looking Italian guy, a few years my senior, who was kinda cool like Fonzi. And he was also once a contestant on The Bozo Show’s “Grand Prize Game” and let me play his Atari, which will be a story for another time. Jimmy also had a fondness for movies and led the charge in bamboozling Aunt Rose in taking us to see ‘E.T.’ the weekend before Halloween. I remember the time of year because it was after my October 10th birthday and because Jimmy had an E.T. mask, the thin plastic ones that might cut your face, and he let me wear it. There was no blood. 

My memories of that afternoon come to me in flashes. I distinctly remember going to early dinner at McDonald’s prior to going to the theater. The world was taken over by ‘E.T.’ fever, so McDonald’s was offering ‘E.T.” themed Happy Meals, complete with ‘E.T.’ movie posters. That poster is long gone, sadly, but did proudly hang in my room for at least a year after receiving it. 

Memories of the film itself tend to rush back to me in flashes whenever I view it. The film was immediately responsible for my love for Reece’s Pieces. I remembered seeing Henry Thomas as ‘Elliot’ and wondered why the Intellivision kid was hanging out with an alien when he had so many cool video games at home to play with. The music is what stuck with me the most. From that day forward, any sort of adrenaline rush I’d experience was accompanied by internal humming of the movie’s central theme crafted by the great John Williams.

At some point, Jimmy and I started collecting these  ‘E.T.’ toys. Small figurines released at some point by Universal Studios that depict special scenes in the movie. I believe that I, at one point, had amassed about 6 of these but have lost a bulk of them over the years of packing and unpacking. I had managed to keep only one, the E.T. in the house robe with a coffee cup in his hands. I’d keep it in my nightstand for years and would look at it when I needed a reminder of better, more innocent times. 

Jimmy died in the Spring of 2010. We sadly were not as close as I would have liked to have been after our childhood, but I knew better at that time than to dwell on things in life that are out of my control. A year or so later, I assisted my Aunt Rose consolidating her belongings as she prepared to move into an assisted living home. We sorted through her kitchen items, only taking the essentials; we did the same with the rest of the her home. 

It was difficult going through the things of Jimmy’s that Aunt Rose had hung onto. It was hard to reconcile the fact that he was gone at such a young age and the fact that we barely knew each other as adults didn’t help with this situational grieving process. But then, like a glowing alien finger of healing, they appeared to me. Jimmy had kept 2 ‘E.T.’ toys (pictured above). I don’t know how many of them he may have lost over the past 25 and I’ll never know if he kept them for the same sentimental reasons I did, but they were here and they were here for me to find. The reasons those toys are now with me is more than sentimental: they needed to go home. 

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Head of the Cast Episode 23: Cash Mah Head

Bill is ill, yo! Which isn't as awesome as it sounds. What is awesome is that the show is almost entirely listener voicemail driven. After Bill gets a bit serious about television exploiting today's youth, Jim From Canada calls in to talk superhero movies. Gutter Monk wonders what Bill thinks about Mike Tyson. All that in this jam packed Head of the Cast!

Check out Jim From Canada's Haunted Walk!

Straus21 has lots in store for you at the Reality Roundhouse!

Don't forget to check out Bill's musings at followmyhead.com!

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Not so neutral anymore, is it?

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Becoming The Champion of My Childhood

“The time has come to set aside childish things.”

But what if you never had a chance to have those childish things? What if they simply didn’t exist or were completely out of your practical grasp? Is there a time to set aside some of your adulthood and allow yourself to attain a part of your childhood? If there is and if that act is viewed as some sort of challenge, I have bested that challenged. I have slayed it. I have pinned it to the mat. 1...2....3.

In 1985, I saw my first professional wrestling match on television. It was The Brawl to End It All and it aired on MTV. Hulk Hogan beat Greg Valentine and Cyndie Lauper made an appearance. I wouldn’t really pay much attention to wrestling save for occasionally watching ‘Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling’ on Saturday mornings. At some point in 1988 I became a full blown wrestling junky at the age of eight and would remain so until around 1994.  I don’t know what attracted me to professional wrestling, specifically the World Wrestling Federation (then known as “WWF”). It was likely the music, the larger than life athletes, and the drama that unfolded week to week. Every guy was gunning for one thing: a WWF championship. The championship prize was a title belt that would be worn/carried to the ring by the championship and the belt that debuted on the waist of then-champion Hulk Hogan in 1988 was my favorite. I lusted after it every since Hogan bested Randy “Macho Man" Savage for the title in the main event of Wrestlemania V. 

I’ve talked about my period of pro wrestling nerddom on my podcast and on other podcasts, but I never talked about one aspect of my fandom: my homemade championship belts. As far as I knew, there was no costume replica that was suitable for play that I could feasibly ask for as a Christmas or birthday gift. I did what an aspiring WWF champion needed to do: I made my own WWF World Heavyweight Championship.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of my masterpiece to share, but I can describe it for the benefit of your mental theater. I started with an old leather belt, affixed pieces of cardboard that I cut out and colored with markers with duct tape. It’s about as horrific as you can imagine. My belts were rarely defended by me and were in a landfill before Monday Night Raw was even a note in Vince McMahon’s ledger. 

As I mentioned, I fell out of love with professional wrestling by the time I was in high school, long before “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and “The Rock” laid the smackdown and the WWF “got the F out” and became the WWE. I would casually watch as an outsider from time to time, but I never again followed it. The WWE has changed championship belt designs around a dozen times in the past 19 years and in my opinion, it’s not for the better. The current title belts will never come close to the glory that is the 1988 WWF World Heavyweight Championship belt, now commonly referred to as “The Winged Eagle” amongst fans and insiders. 

While doing some research prior to appearing on the Reality Roundhouse podcast, I found myself once again admiring the spectacle that was the WWF in the 1980′s and 1990′s. The characters, the drama, and yes, the championship belt. After Google image searching for the WWF winged eagle belt, I came to realize that the WWE had recently made available in their web store, an adult sized replica of the now long-retired championship belt that I so coveted in my youth. And it just happened to cost about the same amount I made from a recent guitar equipment sale. After nearly a day and a half of rationalizing with myself, I pinned my finger over the “Buy It Now” button and became the champion of my childhood. 

“The winner of this bout........and NEW champion of his childhood, Bill “The Bill” Harris!” And the crowd went.......nothing. There was no crowd. But when I opened that box that contained that beautiful belt you see above, a little voice inside me cheered and a feeling rushed over me that I won’t soon forget. A feeling of completion, if only for the little kid, swept over me for a brief moment. Long enough, however, to sustain itself in my memory. 

Money cannot and will not buy you happiness. But sometimes, you can buy something to get you there. You can buy, or at least obtain, something tangible to bring back a feeling. And if you can do it, if you have the means to obtain it, you should. I have zero shame in owning this piece of my childhood. Zero embarrassment. And if you want to come after me, for the belt, I will beat you......1, 2, 3. 

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Follow My Recommendation: Reality Roundhouse podcast

Before I became a podcaster myself, I was (and am) a huge fan of podcasts. Having grown up in Chicago, I was brought up with some of the greats in talk radio. Folks with the gift of gab, quality gab, are hard to come by and should be appreciated when discovered.

If you haven’t heard Mike Straus’s (AKA @Straus21) podcast, REALITY ROUNDHOUSE podcast, I urge you to correct that heinous error immediately. You can start by listening to the two episodes that I appear in!

Reality Roundhouse - Episode 1 (<<<LINK) This is the first episode of the podcast. Mike and I discuss our love for 80′s and 90′s professional wrestling. We break down our favorite grapplers and storylines and discuss where we feel today’s product is lacking.

Reality Roundhouse - Episode 17 (<<<LINK) As 2016 had recently ended, predictions for 2017 are made in this episode. I make some bold predictions about the Trump presidency and Nintendo and Mike goes the X-Files route and digs into Area 51 territory for the New Year. And lots of death. Good stuff.

REALITY ROUNDHOUSE podcast is also available on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher Smart Radio, and just about anywhere else you can find a podcast.

What are some of YOUR favorite podcasts?

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Totally not fake news.  Find the Head of the Cast podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and Sticher Smart Radio.

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Follow My Tube: Family Classics

In the mid-1980′s, cable television was very much in its infancy and DVRs that you could program from your mobile phone was the stuff of Gene Roddenberry's nocturnal emissions. Broadcast television on Sundays was generally fairly dull, consisting mostly of obscure reruns of TV shows no one cared to watch the first time, televangelists peddling clouds, and Meet The Press.  This normally wouldn’t bother me since I was a kid with toys and an overactive imagination. The Ghostbusters and He-Man needed to save Gonzo from the monster under the basement stairs shortly after breakfast and the battle typically developed into a multi-universe crisis that lasted until right before dinner. And then ‘The Disney Sunday Night Movie’ would come on and I guess Gonzo just died or became Skeletor’s newest court jester.  When you’re 7 years old and you’re sick, you’re pretty screwed. Can’t go out and play and can’t do much with your toys when sitting up makes you want to barf. And you can only look at the same View-Master slides for so long before Mother Angelica makes sense and you consider going into that good light. Local Chicago television channel WGN, home of Bozo the Clown and a slew of other iconic classic television icons, had an angel in lying in wait. 

It was the summer of 1987 when I first grew to appreciate Family Classics. I was sick with what I assume was some sort of stomach virus and my father let me sleep in his bedroom as it had air conditioning, a small black and white television, and a temperature-controlled waterbed. I was king of the Queezy Ship of the Sea. After watching what seemed to be an endless loop of Laurel and Hardy and Three Stooges, Family Classics started and featured the animated ‘Gulliver's Travels’, thus cementing that film in tmy mind as one of the greatest pieces of animation ever.  If you don’t live in Chicago or haven’t spent hours upon hours on YouTube watching retro television clips (I currently do both), then you likely haven’t heard of Family Classics. It was a Sunday afternoon movie matinee hosted by the late, great Frazier Thomas; a hero to kids from before my time, but someone who I later grew to have an immense appreciation for albeit posthumously. I’d describe the show’s opening theme to you, but the wonder that is the internet allows me offer you a visual of what life before on demand relief from boredom was like. 

When I’m ill and need to lay down and pray for death, I remember Mother Angelica’s eye patch and search out YouTube for some Family Classic relief. I somehow make due without the chilled waterbed. 

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Follow My Toy Box: View-Master

I look at my cell phone every night before I fall asleep. Not because I'm one of those people who can't stand to not be connected to their e-lives, but more so because I need one last thing to place my focus on before closing my eyes; a vain, often futile, attempt to quiet my brain. Visual focus has been a night time ritual of mine since I was a child. In the mid-1980′s, the idea of our modern day smartphones was a fantasy realized only in science fiction. So until ‘The Jetsons’ became reality, the seven year old me was going to settle for the next best thing: my trusty View-Master.

I only had a few View-Master reels and they were increasingly difficult to keep track of after each move to a new home. I eventually came down to only two. A Shirt Tales reel and my favorite, the B reels from 1980′s “The Muppet Audition Night”. The very viewer I used then is pictured above, but I had to re-purchase the reel.  Each View-Master reel has seven stereo images. You insert the reel into the viewer, place the viewer to your eyes as you would binoculars, and aim your gaze toward an available light source. My light source at the time period was the green glow of my late 1970′s digital alarm clock. It was just bright enough to brilliantly illuminate my Muppet pals, but more importantly, give life to my favorite image on the slide: B7 - ‘Electric Mayhem in Concert’. 

I wouldn’t just pick up the viewer and start on B7. No. This was a ritual. I always started at the first slide, B1. I’d give each image and Muppet their proper respect before pulling the orange lever to advance to the next frame, in anticipation of the grand finale of my day: B7. What a glorious photo. A pitch black backdrop with my favorite rock band (I was seven) shining like gods under the stage lights in fantastic action poses, cementing a place in my thoughts and shielding me from whatever nightmare may have been hiding in the darkness of my eyelids. 

The View-Master would, like so many childhood things, go into a box as I got older. I would come to rely on other things to keep the night terrors at bay but always remembered Dr. Teeth and his best band fondly. In recent years, I began to collect View-Master viewers and reels, but that’s a story best left for another time. 

At the time of this writing, there is a View-Master on my nightstand, B7 patiently awaiting its nightly duty. 

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Across The Internet

Fact: I owe much of my life to the World Wide Web. There. I said it. There is no denying it. As much as I want to hate that fact, it is exactly that. Fact. 

I make my income using the internet. I shop for clothing, food, basic life necessities using the internet. I reach thousands of podcast listeners and 10′s of readers each week, from all across the globe, using the internet. And while the internet has a nasty way of highlighting the very worst in humanity, it’s brought me back in touch with humans I might have forever lost touch with. 

I was born a nomad. In my 37 years on this Earth, I’ve never lived in one place for more than a four year stretch. I went to 4 different elementary schools and 2 high schools between 1985 and 1998. That’s a lot of zip codes, a lot of phone numbers, and a lot of being the new kid. I made friends easily enough, but keeping in touch with those friends after moving in the pre-digital age was next to impossible. 

I moved to a town a few towns over when I was in the 6th grade. When I started junior high, I met a kid named Mike. If my fond memories are correct, we almost immediately hit it off. We shared a love for heavy metal and Hulk Hogan era professional wrestling and we tolerated each other’s otherwise intolerable sense of humor. I don’t remember many weekends in the 7th grade not being in each other’s company. When you’re in the most hellacious years of adolescence, the bonds you form with people you can relate to are strong. Mike and I drifted apart when we got to high school and toward the end of freshman year, we barely talked. I moved to a town further away that summer and wouldn’t hear from Mike again. 

Through the years, thoughts of Mike and other ghosts lingered in the back of my mind. These people and the relationships with them were, after all, a part of my fabric. So when social networks became prevalent in the early 2000′s, I began to dig up my school yearbooks for periodic searches. MySpace became a bastion of long forgotten faces and memories and feelings. Looking through my friends list was like looking through a yearbook of my life, but with only the people I cared to remember. 

I finally found Mike on Facebook in April of 2012. We began talking and going through the motions of getting to know each other again, albeit digitally, after a nearly nineteen year gap. We began talking a lot in October of 2016 when Mike contacted me to pick my brain about podcasting as he was beginning to pursue a career in broadcasting. Facebook messaging turned to emails and emaila finally turned to a face-to-face meet-up.  Sitting across from your adolescent best friend after a 22-year absence is something I hope everyone gets to experience, or at least something like it. We sat at a Denny’s, had crappy coffee, and tried to fill each other in on 22 years of life. Our lives couldn’t have been more different but we somehow ended up with a similar mindset, sharing some of the same sensibilities. The chemistry those 12 year old kids had back proved itself to be indestructible to time. The only evidence of passing years being a with a few lines on our heads and grey hairs appearing in our beards. Since that first meeting, I feel like I got back a few years. Just a little of the time that I lost. Mike and I continue to grow as friends. We’re both reaching near middle age and we still haven’t told each other all of our stories. I’ve been a guest on his podcast several times and he’ll be featuring on mine in the future. We’re able to share that chemistry and our still intolerable sense of humor with the world at the click of a submit button. I think if we knew the possibilities for the future back then, we would have recorded ourselves to share with the world now.  Someone would have found something worthwhile in it. Somewhere, across the internet.