Dear Readers of Novel-Length Blog Posts--

First off, let me say I'm flattered and honored by the kind response to my last blog--I was afraid I got too personal. I suppose I really needed to sit down and spell out some of the things I'm dealing with in recent days. I may very well do it again as I figure out how to avoid making my headaches worse. The outpouring of support was a wonderful gift and I appreciate it a lot.
In other news, I had a long conversation with my brother Alex yesterday evening and I thought I'd share summaries of and recent thoughts about a couple of the more interesting topics with you.

1. David Hasselhoff vs. Mr. T--Who Wins?
Obviously, in a knock-down-drag-out, Mr. T takes this one. David Hasselhoff has Knight Rider and Baywatch. Mr. T has the Mr. T cartoon show and the A-Team. Mr. T is now doing Comcast commercials, and David Hasselhoff is now a judge on America's Got Talent (which is grammatically incorrect and that bugs me). Mr. T has quotes that people use ("I pity the fool," "Got no time for the jibba-jabba," etc.) while David Hasselhoff has, at best, an adult contemporary musical career ("Can't Stop This Feeling," etc.). Mr. T fought Rocky.
We decided that David Hasselhoff is as magical as the theme song from The Neverending Story, and that every time you make a wish on David Hasselhoff, you enrich the tapestry that is Fantasia.

2. Naked Time Travel
According to the film logic in the Terminator series, it is necessary when traveling through time to be completely naked. My personal theory is that the spectacle of naked time travelers with lightning bolts and glowing spheres of energy and no machine or capsule was a way for the filmmakers to A: save money in designing and constructing machinery, and B: to make you notice that the actors were naked, thereby getting you to believe in their time-traveling abilities because it was so out there and unexpected it must be based in reality somehow, because the reality of how really complicated technology works is beyond the realm of simple understanding. So, if it's totally weird or unexpected, the technology must be futuristic and realistic and possible and awesome. The rebel time traveler as well as the T-100 had to travel naked and find clothes when they arrived. That's fine, but I assume that since the female model from T3 also came through naked, and since she had similar material on her skin to the material that formed the T-1000 from T2, that the T-1000 also came through naked (even though you don't actually see him appear). But that's crazy! That's crazy because the T-1000 and whatever designation the female terminator was never wore clothes in the first place! They just faked clothes by morphing into that shape and color, which means they were just time traveling looking naked for fun! I mean, whether those robots looked naked or not made no difference. They could have looked like anything they wanted. So why bother looking naked at all? Is that just some sort of arbitrary procedure?
I mean, come on. Why can't you wear clothes when you time travel? Does clothing resist the time field? Ruin the calibrations? Obviously, complex organic molecules and super-tuned precision cyborgs can time-travel, no problem. Just not Hanes. No cottons or silks or elastics. No Keds. I bet there's a warning sign at their time travel facility that shows an international man symbol with a necktie and a big red line through it. "WARNING: CLOTHING RESTRICTED IN THIS AREA! NUDITY REQUIRED!"
I'm glad it didn't work that way in Back To The Future. "We're about to hit 88 miles per hour! Great Scott! Take off your pants!" Or like my brother said, "The lightning bolt hits the clock tower at this exact time. At that moment, the Delorean contacts the wire going 88 miles per hour and 1.21 Gigawatts goes directly into the flux capacitor. This is an intense precision operation, so when the alarm goes off you start driving! And for God's sake, when you get here, don't be wearing any pants!"
There was a scene in an episode of Family Guy where Peter tried to spin around and go back in time, but he failed and only managed to destroy a coffee table and a cabinet before losing consciousness. My theory behind his failure was not that traveling through time that way is impossible, it's that he was wearing clothes.
The only reason Superman was able to reverse time by turning the earth backwards on its axis is because he sent out a memo the week before instructing the entire population of the world to get naked for the exact same several hours (Greenwich Mean Time) that were necessary to reverse in order to save Lois Lane. So basically, there's this massive earthquake somewhere in America, and everyone but Lois Lane (who is busy dying of suffocation in a car that fell into a fissure) throws off his or her clothes like mad, ensuring that when Superman discovers Lois's body he has enough international nude time to reverse everyone and everything to right before Lois's death. The effect this has on the world is that at the moment the earthquake happens, suddenly everyone in the world instantly becomes naked for no apparent reason. Then everyone in his or her own language says, "Oh, that wacky Superman," and shakes his or her head in silent laughter. Wacky is right, because later, they find that because Lois Lane was not naked, Superman was unable to transport her and only her into the past, which means she actually appeared to jump several hours into the future, to a place in space where the buried car will eventually be coming by during the natural orbit of the earth relative to the center of the universe. Boink! But that's okay, because Superman was the only one who liked Lois Lane for real anyway.
I wonder what really counts as clothing. Obviously, the visual representation of clothing by a liquid metal robot is somehow disallowed. Does that mean if one wore a huge piece of paper covered in a photo of clothing, that woulsn't fly? What if it was a photo of a leopard pouncing instead? Ooh, what about just leopard spots? That's a tough one. It's certainly not a question of organic, electronic, or metallic materials, otherwise no cyborgs and no humans allowed. But we know they made it through.
Good thing when people finally figure out matter transporters, clothing is transportable. Otherwise, Star Trek might have been even more pornographic than it already is. They time traveled too, on occasion, but they must have had some kind of force field or something--oh yeah--Star Trek was real and all that other stuff was movies.

Be careful next time you're in the shower.

Your struly,
Logan