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Tue Dec 23 10:00:01 UTC 2025
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Slept from one to nine.
Woke briefly around six.
Mostly cloudy.
Highs in the mid 40s.
West winds 5 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph.
# To do
* [ ] Ask if Dr. Lipson takes my new health insurance (Priority Health). If so, schedule appointment?
* [ ] set 401K contribution (As of Dec 4, the Vanguard website suggest my first contribution will be Dec 10. Emailed payroll Dec 19.)
Read more of Strange Houses.
Fun and spooky.
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/mst3k-oral-history/
> Weinstein: The whole production cycle at KTMA was like 24 hours long. We’d gather at the station and Jim would have a couple of movies that he’d pulled out of the station’s library. He’d say, “What do you think about this?” We’d watch maybe 10 minutes and go, “OK, yeah. That will do.”
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> Trace Beaulieu (writer-performer): I learned how to talk back to movies by reading Mad magazine. They were the first to not treat film like the reverential art form that Hollywood would like you to believe it is, and they would do it visually and verbally. It was an absolutely brilliant thing for a kid to read that and go, “Hey, not everything is the way grown-ups are saying it is.” But in the first season we basically went in cold without watching the films. If you look at those episodes, they’re real hit-or-miss. It was just off the top of our heads.
> Weinstein: We eventually realized, hey, this might be funnier if we had some jokes in our back pocket.
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> Beaulieu: As a character, Crow was a wiseass. He was certainly influenced by Groucho Marx—always tilting at some kind of authority. But he started out with a very stilted, robotic kind of approach. We had scripted it so that after every line, Crow would say, “Yes, Joel Hodgson. No, Joel Hodgson.” It’s very hard to generate other voices or impressions in that sort of voice.
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> Weinstein: I was inspired to make Tom Servo sort of a smarmy AM radio DJ. He had this incredibly inflated opinion of himself and considered himself a ladies’ robot.
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> Hodgson: Josh really is Tom Servo. When Josh was 16, he drank single-malt scotch and smoked cigars; he was like a 40-year-old man in a 17-year-old body, which is like Tom Servo. And Crow is like Trace: He can do millions of characters, and he splits the difference between being playful and cynical.
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> Mallon: If I channeled anybody for Gypsy, I channeled my mom. She had a heart of gold and always looked to the best of everything and the best of everyone. And when confronted with difficult things, she was somewhat lost [Laughs]. She didn’t know how to negotiate when things went poorly. She would be hurt, so Gypsy would be hurt at times and turn to the other robots for support.
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> Beaulieu: Our budget for the show was microscopic. I think Josh and I were pulling down $25 a show, and I think Joel’s budget was a little higher, because he had to build props.
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> Mallon: Initially they wanted us all to move to New York to make the show. Some of us had families, and none of us wanted to just drop everything and move. Also, we’d been shown the new studios they built, and they were tiny—to us it looked like a horrible place to make the show. Finally, we said, “We have to make it out here.”
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> Murphy: If we had done the show in New York, it would have been canceled within a season or two. There would have been people in there sticking their fingers in it. And the reason the show got to grow was because nobody wanted to come out to Minnesota.
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> Bill Corbett (writer-performer): The Best Brains office was in this industrial park in a second-ring suburb, by all these medical-equipment buildings. It could not have been more generic-looking. When people took the Best Brains tour, they were often shocked: “Is somebody going to kidnap us and kill us?”
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> Hodgson: Film distributors would do this trick where they’d license you several movies. Half of them might be movies you’d heard of, and half were the movies we actually wanted, the B movies. We didn’t want the cocaine—we wanted the baby laxative they put in the cocaine.
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> Art Bell (Comedy Central executive, 1989–1996): We probably sent 10 films for every one they picked for the show. It seemed like we’d find the perfect movie for them, and they’d say, “No, that doesn’t work.” But the fact that they were so picky helped make the show as good as it was. They honed bad-movie selection into a fine art.
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> Corbett: When we watched the movies, we were looking for a bunch of things. It couldn’t be god-awful in terms of sound and picture, although we did a bunch of them that were borderline in that regard. And the ones that were just boring and really, really talky—where we couldn’t find any space to get any jokes in—those were rejected pretty quickly. We also tended to stay away from superviolent or NC-17 stuff.
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> Mike Nelson: You’d get, like, a box of gory Italian horror movies where there were nuns eating each other. And we’d just go, “We can pretty much disqualify that.”
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> Hodgson: Our riffs were never too negative. We were the audience’s companions, and people don’t want to spend time with assholes. If you’re negative, it may be funny, but it’s not sustainable. So we had a lot of respect for the movies, because we had to work with them. Trace once said a really clever thing: “The movies are Margaret Dumont, and we’re the Marx Brothers.”
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> Mallon: A lot of these films were owned by, say, fertilizer salesmen. They were all characters, and part of the challenge of the show was dealing with them.
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> Bell: There were crazy chains of ownership for all of these films. Sometimes people died and left the movie to their grandson. We had to track them down, and some people were reluctant, because they said, “What do you want to do with this movie?” They often didn’t know how to price these things, and we were trying to buy this stuff by the pound. We had a lot to buy, and we didn’t have a lot of money.
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> Hodgson: I’m really proud of how the writers’ room was set up. I had read a bunch of creativity books and I wanted to avoid ever saying no to anybody in the writers’ room. I knew that would be really bad. And there was no one sitting at a table and pitching jokes—you said your riffs to the TV. That’s what allowed us to do them so quickly. It freed up everybody’s id.
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> Mary Jo Pehl (writer-performer): The atmosphere in the writers’ room was cacophonous. There was no pausing to say, “Let me add to that joke.” And the typist had to transcribe everything that he or she could catch. Sometimes we’d be stopped on a frame for a good 10, 15 minutes, because there were so many jokes.
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> Mike Nelson: In one movie, there was a Japanese girl running, and Trace said, “Look, she stole Mike’s keyboard.” And this was based on a girlfriend that I had who stole my keyboard and flew it over to Japan. That was officially the most obscure joke we ever made.
> Mike Nelson: The Minnesota Vikings had their training camp kitty-corner from us. And there were guys on the team who loved the show, and they would just come over. So occasionally there’d be these giant guys standing in the editing suite. We would go, “Who the hell is that?” “He’s the long snapper for the Vikings.” So that was our personal little fan club.
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> Beaulieu: Frank Zappa was a fan. He actually called the office once, and we got to talk with him. He was very complimentary. He said it was “the funniest fucking thing on TV.”
> Mike Nelson: In the early days, we’d go to lunch and divide up the mail. There’d be maybe 10 letters, and it was either fan mail or it was hate mail—it was a little lottery. Sometimes we’d open them up and say, “Oh, mine’s a ‘Why the hell are you guys talking over my movie?’ letter.” It was really exciting to get one of those. Most of the time we heard that sort of complaint secondhand, because nobody’s going to call you up and say, “How dare you make fun of my really, really crappy movie that everyone acknowledges is crappy?” But privately you would hear, “Oh, I worked with this director, and I brought up MST3K, and he started yelling.”
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> Hodgson: The first guy to contact us was Miles O’Keeffe, the star of Cave Dwellers [a 1984 Conan the Barbarian rip-off]. He tracked us down and called us. And he was supersweet, like, “Man, I’ve been waiting a long time for something like this to happen to one of my movies.” It was really cool.
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> Beaulieu: Since Joel’s character created the robots, his relationship with them was kind of parental. Then when Mike’s character came in, it was a completely different dynamic. He had to keep those guys in line, but he was also one of the gang. The onscreen persona was like a pizza restaurant manager who’s only like maybe a couple of months older than the staff is.
Vacuumed.
Installed NixOS on an old ThinkPad and played with it for a while.
Half-hour walk in the late afternoon.
Sunny and nearly fifty degrees.
Most of the snow has melted.
A week ago, we had half a foot on the ground.
Servings: grains 2/4, vegetables+fruit 3/5, dairy+meat 3/4, nuts+beans 0/0.5
Brunch: toast, egg, tomato, banana, coffee
Afternoon snack: turkey wrap with cucumber
Dinner:
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