Last night I ended up watching the entire miniseries ‘The Lost Room’ on DVD. I had somehow missed this when it was on SciFi a while back. I rank it absolutely fantastic right up until the very end when the writers seemed to have shrugged and just killed it off. It had a lot of potential for a better ending.
While I was watching the movie I noticed a bug on my screen. One of those little dirt moths that flies in the house every now and then. After a while it was annoying me, so I got up to flick it off, and saw to my annoyance that it was actually under the screen. Somehow it had gotten on the other side of the fresnel lens of my projection television. Not I have to figure out how to pull it off to get that bug out. Or its going to drive me mad.
I had so much to gab about Spring Fest that instead of one long boring post I will just make a series of posts this week. I’ll start off with Nick The Dirty Hippie.
Nick the dirty hippie was an old school hippie in his 50’s or 60’s. He had actually been to Woodstock (or so he claimed). Nick looked a little like Gandalf The Gray if Gandalf had suddenly dropped a few dozen IQ points and had completely given up on personal hygiene. He was bearded and bandy-legged with a pot belly and had a scraggly face that has seen a lot of outdoor weather in his time. His daily wear consisted of some old shorts and a tye dye t-shirt. He was also an immensely cheerfully guy. Right after we started setting up camp he had wandered over to talk to us. In fact as far as I could tell Nick would talk to anyone who just happened to be walking by.
Actually he talked a little too much. Once he started the words would just roll out of his mouth until it sounded more like you were listening to his own personal inner dialog taking place rather than any form of actual two way conversation. He was always very friendly and polite, especially after I gave him a few shots of RedRum, then he went off on a short speech about meeting new friends and good people until he blinked blearily a few times and then simply wandered away.
He ended up getting busted for smoking a joint. Apparently there were cops in the woods that were dressed like any other festival patrons and were zipping around on a golf kart. Nick, perhaps thinking it was the 60’s again, was sitting around in plain view smoking a fat joint. They snagged him up and took him to the police station and booked him. Two hours later nick had bailed himself out and was back out at the festival, moving around on his bandy legs and talking to whoever felt like stopping for a moment to listen.
You just can’t keep a good hippie down.
2026 Update
Crank the dial: it's 18 years back, and Ed has a moth living inside his cinema.
Ah, 2008. A time when people watched a miniseries on physical discs and worried about a moth trapped inside a projection television's fresnel lens. In 2026, the moth would be the least of your problems—you'd be arguing with an ad-supported streaming service that insists you need the premium family plan just to watch a miniseries about a motel room key. The gadget itself is extinct; the modern equivalent is a paper-thin flat screen mounted above a fireplace where the HDMI cable expires every three years. And Nick? A grinning fifty-something hippie getting busted for a joint in the woods now feels almost like a woolly mammoth of cannabis culture, taken down by plainclothes cops on a golf cart. We still have tie-dye and undercover security, but everyone's got a phone recording your regrettable decisions and a QR code for the temporary bail app. Ed's whole life was a content farm before content was a word. He just didn't know it.
“2008 Ed, be honest: did you ever pry open that projection TV to rescue the moth, or did you just let it die in there while you finished the disappointing finale of 'The Lost Room'?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Ahh, Beelzebubba, you know me too well. I let that little dust moth suffer in there for a couple more days, mostly because the idea of prying open that rear projection TV sounded like a one-way trip to electric shock city. I kept telling myself I’d get to it, but then The Lost Room ended all lame and I sort of lost my motivation. By the time I finally worked up the nerve to unscrew the panel, the bug was just a crispy little husk lying on the lens. I fished it out with a pair of tweezers and a lot of muttered swearing. So no, I did not rescue the moth. I entombed it, then exhumed it. Somehow that feels like the perfect metaphor for my entire week. Take that, tiny dead bug.
