February 2019
Lobsta Mania!
(slightly updated September 2021 to fix or remove broken video links)
Welcome to IMS Boston 2019!
In honor of IMS being back in the Bay State, Microwaves101 will offer stuffed lobsters to all who stop by the booth. Not the Food Network kind, the other kind. You will have to sign the adoption papers which requires your email address... There are three colors of lobster, and they each have names:
Rocky (blue), JoyBoy (orange), and Hippo (red)
Below, some explanation as to what part of Pop Culture the names came from. And we offer an alternative name.... Schwab.
Rock Lobster
The B52s signature song from 1978, with absurd noises by by Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. It's in the same key as Beethovan's Moonlight Sonata and Chopin's Fantasy Impromptu, C-sharp minor.
Rock Lobster by the B52s
Joyboy
"The Loved One" is a comedy-tragedy by Evelyn Waugh from the early 1960s. He is basically making fun of Hollywood by parodying Whispering Glades, a cemetary in Los Angeles , and doing a great job. If you see the movie, read the book. In the scene below, Joyboy (one of the lead morticians) is courting Amy Thanotogenis (a cosmetician), by inviting her to meet "Mama". It does not go well. Rod Steiger should have won an Oscar, so should Anjanette Comer. There is no one I have met that does not like this film.
The Loved One
Zorak meets Hippo
Back in the mid-1960s, there was a cartoon on Saturday mornings called Space Ghost. Much like the live-action series Batman of the time, Space Ghost wore a cowl and a cape and spent most of his time rescuing his teen aged side kicks from an assortment of colorful (though evil) villians like Moldor and Brago and Spider Woman and the Creature King. Fast foward a couple of decades to the mid 1990s, and Cartoon Network came out with an animated show called Space Ghost Coast to Coast. In this makeover, Space Ghost was working as an underappreciated talk show host. As punishment for their crimes, many of the former adversaries are now forced to work on the talk show (Moldar is the technician, Zorak is the band leader, etc.) . Brak, who had once tried to take over the universe, is now a child-like who mostly interrupts the work of the other characters. Where does the lobster come in?? Eventually, Brak got his own spin off series called The Brak Show, where he plays a less-than-bright but always cheerful teenager in suburbia. His favorite toy is a stuffed lobster he calls Hippo.
Zorak, Hippo, and Brak
Later on, Hippo has his own TV show, with a catchy tune and clever lyrics: " Show us your garbage, show us your trash, and if Hippo likes it, you'll win some cash."
OJ and Stiggs
This is a movie that 9 out 10 people hate, but I am a fan (perhaps because I remember the National Lampoon stories that it was based on, which are NSFW). OC (Oliver Cromwell) and Stiggs exist only to torture the Schwab family. You can find the OC & Stiggs movie on YouTube - but we don't recommend that you watch the whole thing (or at least not while you're at work). It is politically incorrect by today's standards. Just check out the first 5 minutes and get back to me, love it or hate it? So what does all this have to do with lobsters? Well, in the very first scene of the movie, our heros OC & Stiggs steal all the lobsters off the Schwab's grill, then patch into the Schwab's phone line to call Africa to run up the phone bill. And they do it on a lobster phone. Here's a screen shot of Stiggs chatting to the operator in Gabon.
Stiggs on the Lobster Phone
In the movie around 1:17, King Sunny Ade's African beats play a concert in tribute to Wino Bob. Forty years later, if you are lucky, King Sunny will do another US tour and you can enjoy his Nigerian music first hand:
Check out the Unknown Editor's amazing archives when you are looking for a way to screw off for a couple of hours or more!
Fan/hate mail can always be sent to UE@microwaves101.com