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I recently stumbled upon a Flickr account in which someone has
managed the impressive and noble task of scanning the complete
contents of several Sears and Montgomery Wards Christmas catalogs. The
sight launched me screaming headlong into the dusky realms of
nostalgia; back before the days of free two-day shipping from Amazon,
the Sears Catalog was the definitive masterwork on
consumeristic accessibility — or inaccessibility, if you were a kid
like me and couldn’t afford to buy the merchandise splayed loving
across the catalog’s 500-plus pages.
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That didn’t stop me from looking, though. I can’t even begin to
guess how many hours I squandered at my grandparents’ house, poring
over page after page of enticing game systems and G.I. Joe dioramas,
apparently with the conviction that the intensity with which I
scrutinized those items would somehow determine the likelihood of
them showing up under the Christmas tree.
Sometimes, it even worked! I stared at the G.I. Joe MOBAT so hard
that Santa took pity and dropped one under my tree that year.
Looking back at the catalog now, of course, provides an interesting
perspective on classic gaming that you can’t really glean from any
number of essays or retrospectives. The 1983 catalog, for instance,
was published at the peak of the Atari boom (which came right before
the Atari crash — we didn’t buy enough of the games listed in this
catalog that year, it seems). In those days, gaming was teetering
between becoming an enduring entertainment cornerstone and simply
washing out to be one of the novelty fads that swept America in
those days, a digital Pet Rock. As a result, the ‘83 catalog actually
lists fewer systems and games that remain recognizable in this era
than it does forgotten hangers-on and quasi-videogame cheese.
The portable games to the right, for instance, are pretty much what
those of us who couldn’t afford a Game & Watch
had to settle for. They weren’t really video games, you see, but
operated with simplistic, motorized, physical mechanisms — not unlike
pre-video arcade games. Even in 1983, they were interesting for about
three minutes, and then you felt sad because you could have spent
those three minutes playing Cement Factory or even
knock-offs like Epoch Man.
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width="253"/>Much more interesting is the Dungeons &
Dragons portable game across the page from the depressing
faux-games. While I have fairly clear memories of just about every
game in the catalog, I don’t recall the D&D handheld at all. From
the gameplay description — move through the maze and shoot a dragon
with an arrow — it sounds pretty much Wumpus. Hell,
I even see a little bat in the upper right hand area. Yeah, it’s Wumpus.
Chances are pretty good I saw this back in the day and promptly wiped
it from my memory after feeling betrayed and angry about the game’s
lack of a hot monk chick in a fur bikini and an adorable baby unicorn
companion. Not that the D&D cartoon was particularly accurate to
the table top game upon which the show was based, but I’m going to
hazard a guess and say it was more authentic than this LCD game.
I guess whatever disappointment I may have experienced wasn’t too
scarring, though, since just about all I play these days are
portable RPGs — some of which are far more faithful to D&D than others.
(Via 1UP’s Retro Gaming Blog.)
People who own a Kindle and an iPhone are in luck: Amazon has published a Kindle application on the iTunes Apps Store, so now you’ll be able to read Kindle books on your iPhone.%7Cutmcsr%3D(direct)%7Cutmcmd%3D(none)%3B%2B__utmv%3D55339865.-%3B){kind=small}
Every aspect of the American presidency comes under intense scrutiny, but few parts of a president’s life contain as many amusing, slightly sordid anecdotes as their siblings’ behavior. When a new president takes office, his ne’er-do-well siblings receive a whole slew of opportunities for corrupt behavior, legal scrapes, and generally humiliating mayhem. Here are a few of our favorites:
George W. Bush’s younger brother Neil certainly hasn’t done much to make his brother’s rocky political life any easier. Neil’s been making the wrong kind of news since as far back as the 1980s, when as the son of Vice President George H.W. Bush he served as a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, which cost taxpayers an estimated $1 billion when it collapsed. He drew accusations of insider trading chicanery in 1999 when he made nearly $800,000 in three trades of Kopin Corporation stock in a single day; Bush had been a consultant for Kopin and sold on the day the stock’s price soared as the result of good news from a client. Bush also had a somewhat dubious-sounding arrangement with Grace Semiconductor, a Chinese company with ties to former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Despite admittedly not knowing anything about semiconductors, Bush had a deal to receives $2 million in stock and $10,000 for every board meeting he attended to discuss business strategies, a deal that led to claims of influence peddling.
Some presidential siblings wait until their brother takes up residence in the White House to start making trouble. Not Bill Clinton’s half-brother Roger, though. By the time Bill had jumped from the Arkansas’ governor’s mansion to Washington, Roger had already spent a year behind bars for a 1984 cocaine distribution arrest. He then spent much of Bill’s two terms trying to realize his dream of becoming an Elvis-like rock star with his band, Politics, and appearing in a string of abysmal movies that must have been almost as embarrassing for Bill as the cocaine arrest. (It’s one thing to get in trouble for drug trafficking, but it’s quite another to have the poor judgment to appear opposite Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome.) Despite his busy schedule, he still found time to get into an altercation with a stockbroker at a Knicks game in 1993 and later unsuccessfully lobbied for pardons for his drug-dealing chums. Bill actually included Roger’s cocaine arrest in his flurry of pardons in 2001; Roger showed his gratitude by promptly getting arrested for drunk driving a month later. It’s easy to see why his Secret Service codename was “Headache.”
Despite the nickname, Roger might not even have been the biggest familial headache Bill Clinton had to deal with during his term. Instead, the Clintons introduced a new species of White House blight: bad presidential brothers-in-law. While Roger was pretty much a run-of-the-mill troublemaker, Hillary’s brothers Hugh and Tony were bumbling power grabbers who kept making almost comical attempts to capitalize on their sister’s high station. In 1999, Hugh, a former Florida public defender, and Tony, whose resume included work as both a private eye and a repo man, joined in on a $118 million business plan to process and import hazelnuts from the Republic of Georgia. There was a slight hitch though: the brothers’ key connection in Georgia was a major political rival of Georgia’s president (a key American ally). Bill and Hillary had to work in tandem with National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to talk the brothers out of their hazelnut empire. (We can only hope Roger Clinton would later defend his own antics with, “…yeah, but I never attempted to politically destabilize former Soviet republics, did I?”)
Truly the standard by which all other presidential sibling’s antics are judged, Billy burst onto the national scene as the boisterous, hard-drinking counterpoint to his pious, reserved brother Jimmy. Billy’s early antics were amusing and fairly innocuous: he endorsed the legendarily terrible Billy Beer in an effort to make a little cash off of his hard-living image, and he made quips like, “My mother went into the Peace Corps when she was sixty-eight. My one sister is a motorcycle freak, my other sister is a Holy Roller evangelist and my brother is running for president. I’m the only sane one in the family.” While he worked hard to convey a roughneck bumpkin image to the press, Billy’s confidantes claimed that he was in fact well-read and an able businessman who used his Southern bona fides to help his older brother’s political cause. On the other hand, Billy’s drinking turned from amusing to tragic as his fame grew.
The real capper, though, came when Billy began consorting with Libya at a time when relations between the North African nation and the U.S. were starting to strain. In 1978 he made a trip to Libya with a group of Georgia businessmen who were interested in expanding trade with the country; Billy then hosted a Libyan delegation in Atlanta. When questioned about his dealings, Billy responded, “The only thing I can say is there is a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews,” a public-relations nightmare for which he later apologized. The damage got worse in 1980 when Billy registered as an agent of the Libyan government and received a $220,000 loan from the Libyans for helping facilitate oil sales. This transaction led to accusations of influence peddling and a Congressional investigation. In short, it was enough to make Jimmy Carter long for the days when his brother’s antics only included such little quirks as urinating in public in front of a group of reporters and dignitaries.
Prior to 1960, nobody had even heard of Donald Nixon, even though his brother Richard had been VP under Eisenhower. When Richard launched his own presidential campaign against JFK, though, Donald found himself flung into the spotlight. Don was a restaurateur, and not a very good one. In 1954, he was running a chain of Nixon’s drive-ins in Whittier, California and fell upon some tough financial times. In an effort to keep the business afloat, he accepted a $205,000 loan from Howard Hughes. “Big Don,” as he called himself, never got around to paying Hughes back, and voters had to wonder why a defense contractor like Hughes was suddenly so interested in a chain of burger joints that just happened to be run by the Vice President’s rotund brother. Whatever the reasoning, the loan wasn’t enough, and the chain went under the following year.
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