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March 21, 2008
Fearless Freep, cont.
Call me Fearless Freep. I am always Caps, but Fearless Freep is the new nom. It's loaded up and ready to be dropped like a million airhorns next time I play out.
Word of explanation: my dad was enamored of VHS technology when it first hit. Obsessed, even. Pehaps because he was born into 1926's radioland, the idea of being able to capture media always appealed to him - for one thing, it was free! (His collection of recorded/dubbed audio cassette tapes, for example, was powerful and diverse. Last time I was home, I checked out George Jones and Abdullah Ibrahim.) Anyway, since I was born in '81, I was at prime tape-viewing age when pops started to record EVERYTHING: movies, shows, specials. That's why to this day my family has recorded entertainments ranging from the Bills AFC championship games to Woody Allen's Bananas to 1987's regrettable Gremlins knockoff Munchies, all stored on VHS cassette. In fact, each cassette has about three or so movies on it, with my dad's most legible handwriting denoting where each begins and ends. (Specifically, via reference to the 4 digit number displayed on the VHS player's "counter." One would reset the counter at the beginning of the tape, then watch it tick ever higher as the tape progressed.) (Also: Remember "fast forwarding"? When the "tape" would have to be "physically moved" to the desired starting point?) So if you felt like checking out a Romancing the Stone / Empire Strikes Back / Hannah and Her Sisters triple feature, you'd pop in one of my dad's tapes and be good for like 6 hours.
Since me and my sister we were kids, Dad recorded a hell of a lot of awesome content just for us - much of it copied from other VHS tapes we had rented, since at some point we got two VHS machines and thus could dub tapes. One of our most beloved was the Bugs/Daffy collection, which we watched many, many times. (I still remember "What's Opera, Doc?" vividly. Vividly.)
"High Diving Hare," shown below, was on one of those tapes. And when I was typing about the Sabres the other night, half-drunk, exuberant and victorious, the name "Fearless Freep" presented itself to me. It was filed under "death-defying" in my mind from way back. Thaaaaaaaaat's mah boyyyyyyyyy!
1. Subway hero! My favorite part is him jumping BACK ACROSS after saving the drunk dude. Wow! One of those things you maybe think about when you're waiting for the train - could I do that? would I do that? what happens if...? - except this dude DID IT. Wow.
2. Discovered: Jellyfish with twelve foot tentacles.
3. Mark Halperin spells it out for Hillary. This is the math: it is indisputable.
4. Drunk Redneck Guy Jumps Suzuki
Posted by caps at March 21, 2008 12:33 PM