Mad Men TV Show

I recently posted on old school D&D, so I’m still ruminating on the memories. I wonder if anyone can tell me the name of this module from back in the day?

We’re talkin’ 1980 here, so only D&D geezers will probably remember this one from nearly thirty years back.

Leave your answer in the comments section. Be the first to guess correctly and win a nice Trivia Newton-John Award to place proudly in your blog’s sidebar. When the correct answer is given, I will post the award for the winner. Good luck!

***Update***

We have a winner! Congrats to Atom Kid. Collect your trophy!

Some musical acts from the 1970s transitioned nicely into the 1980s - Hall & Oates, Aerosmith and Prince found their niche in this new decade and flourished. Others… well, let’s just say things didn’t work out too well.

For example, if you were in a stanky booger nosed funk band, you had a choice: get Caucasian or die. The Ohio Players died, meanwhile the once-funky Kool & the Gang took a page from the Lionel Richie playbook and hung in there.

Hush Puppy wearin’ 70s guys like Seals & Crofts and Gordon Lightfoot were ancient history- not glossy and synthetic enough. However ex-hippies like Steve Winwood rolled with the changes and were successful.

And now, disco was dead and new wave was in… so what’s a band like The Village People to do? Answer: Try to fit into the New Romantic movement in such a way that twenty-five years later people are still laughing at them.

Some bands just completely chunked their former image (and credibility). One of the worst transitions had to be Grace Slick. How in the hell did she go from “White Rabbit” to “We Built this City”?!?!

And how do you go from being The First Lady of Acid Rock…

…to this and still look in the mirror without crying uncontrollably?

Oh well, I guess that’s just part of the music biz. You either stay in step with the times (no matter how awful they may be) or go bye-bye like The Ohio Players.

However, it still made me a bit sad to see a band like Heart get Wang Chunged. “These Dreams” was a far, far cry from the kick ass “Barracuda” (see previous post on the song), “Magic Man” and the incredible Zeppelin-esque “Love Alive”.

I won’t rant on and on in this installment. Instead, I’ll just throw out one word:

MELISMA

This is when pop diva wannabes sing sixty notes for a single syllable - it’s octave showboating and a form of auditory abuse. It’s on display with basically every American Idol contestant and almost every pop/hip-hop/R&B song on the radio.

Message to young pop stars: Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston have been there and done that. Move on. No more of this nonsense - not on American Idol, not while you’re singing the National Anthem, not ever! You are fracturing words into a soulless slur of syllables.

Your vocal gymnastics have become predictable and alienating. A steady note can be transcendent - try it sometime. Your amateur warbling is a trite, self-indulgent form of exhibitionism.

I’ll admit, very rarely a song can be enhanced by a dose of melisma. Roberta Flack could pull it off sparingly to great effect. But, most of the time “there isn’t any musical justification of what they are doing. Their runs interfere with the flow of the melody, of the lyric, of the harmonies, sometimes of the rhythm itself. It’s frequently a very vulgar and ugly display.” (quote from NPR)

So quit it.

(BTW: Frank’s singing book can actually be found here in its entirety - I’m talkin’ to YOU Jennifer Hudson!).

[related post see Reflections on Contemporary Music (and Why It Sucks) Part 1]

In high school and most of college, I was way too interested in… let’s just say less creative endeavors. Gary Gygax and Bugbears were a distant memory.

By the end of college, I guess I settled down a bit and rediscovered D&D and got to playing it again pretty regularly. I noticed it had changed a lot - now there was Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Al-Quadim, a bunch of stuff written by a guy named Ed Greenwood, etc. It was still the same game, except now it was a bit more advanced.

Well, once again I got off the D&D boat after a few years due to the demands from work and family… and haven’t been back since. My wife and I just unearthed our box of character sheets, Monstrous Compendium, and the like from the attic. I’d forgotten how much damn fun it was and it really got me wondering about the status of D&D today. Is it still the same game I played 15 years ago?

When I first started blogging I wrote a post called Whatever Happened to Dungeons & Dragons? (which featured a D&D commercial with Jamie Gertz!), but I was mainly just playing around. Now I’m serious. What has happened with Dungeons & Dragons? If it’s still around, would I even recognize it? An enquiring ex-dungeon master wants to know.

I’m not going to attempt to explain that last one. You either get it or you don’t. (swiped from RetroLife)

Now, let’s see how your modern psychobabble steeped mind interprets one of the most famous Brady Bunch subplots (from the episode: “Today, I Am a Freshman”).

Here’s the breakdown:
Marcia is getting older and is now entering high school.
She invites many of her pretty and popular friends over to the house.
Peter erects a volcano which spews a foamy discharge all over the girls.

Freud would have a field day with this.

20 July 1943 - 26 February 2009