This brings back so many memories! It’s a video from 1987 – just after guitarist John Norum quit his band Europe at the peak of their success, due to disinterest in the more keyboard dominated sound, he started his own solo project. From his debut solo album Total Control, here’s the video for Back On The Streets. If I’m not mistaken the vocals are provided by fellow Swede Goran Edman.
Category: Nostalgia
So I Can Hold You In My Arms
Ah, the 1980s had some major power ballads and Whitesnake had some of the best ever. This is Is This Love performer live at the Hammersmith in London, 2004.
We’re Only Immortal For A Limited Time
The year is 1992 a few months before I turned 16. I had completed high school and enjoying 3 months of summer vacation before pre-degree in a college. Not knowing how to spend my time, I joined Datapro for a 2 month course on Computer Basics. I enjoyed my time there and made a couple of friends. One of those afternoons on the way back home I stopped at this music store / gift shop. I saw the cover of a tape of a band that I had never heard of before. I liked the cover – a young boy kicking a skeleton and the background was a wall made entirely of dominoes. So I bought the album, called Roll The Bones and put it on as soon as I reached home; this song Dreamline came on and boom – I was introduced to the world of Rush!
Star Trek TOS: The Trouble With Tribbles
One of the best episodes in any of the Star Trek franchises, and certainly one of the funniest, The Trouble With Tribbles takes place on Deep Space Station 7 in a section of space that has a disputed planet – disputed between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. According to the Organian treaty, each side is given a chance to show who is better suited to develop the planet’s resources. The Enterprise answers an emergency hail from DS7 but Captain Kirk is annoyed to find out that the alarm was raised to protect the storage of a grain, the only kind which can be grown on the planet. On orders from an admiral Kirk is forced to place guards to protect the grain. Meanwhile the Klingons appear, headed by Captain Koloth (played by William Campbell).
The Klingons claim that they are for shore leave and Kirk reluctantly allows them to send down only 12 soldiers at a time and he also allows his own crew to take shore leave on the station. While at the station’s bar, Uhura is gifted a tribble, a small furry creature that seems to purr in a manner that makes humans (and Spock too even though he won’t admit it) calm and affectionate towards the creatures. Unfortunately, feeding it only creates a problem – the tribbles multiply like crazy. Each tribble can deliver 10 at a time and soon they are all over the station and the ship.
While on shore leave Scotty & Chekov get into a bar room brawl with Koloth’s first officer Korax and it develops into a big fight between the humans and the Klingons. Funny part – when a drunk Korax insults Kirk, Scotty restrains Chekov from hitting the Klingon but when the drunk officer insults the Enterprise twice Scotty hit him. Equally funny is when Scotty admits to throwing the first punch and the bemused and embarrassed look on Kirk’s face when he finds out that insulting him was a lesser sin for Scotty than insulting the ship!
The humour carries on to the interaction between Kirk and Nilz Baris, a Federation official in charge of the planet development project. And the reactions to seeing lots of tribbles on the ship including the bridge. It also seems that the tribbles seem to like humans and Vulcans but do not like Klingons. This is crucial in unmasking Baris’ assistant Arne Darvin as a Klingon spy – the tribbles emit a shrill sound when in proximity to him just as they do with all Klingons. In turn the noise they make seems to make the Klingons nervous. Hence at the end, Scotty beams all the tribbles from their ship…onto the Klingon ship!
Truly classic episode and it has it’s fans far and wide. A must watch for anyone even if you are not a Star Trek fan.
A Bed Of Straw, Against The Lace
RIP Ronnie James Dio. He was, what I always thought to be, the greatest rock & metal vocalists of all time. Hell the most powerful vocalist of all time. He passed away in May, while my computer was down, and so I couldn’t blog about it athe time. Here is my favourite Rainbow song – Catch The Rainbow, sung live by Dio and his band.
You Kept Your Feelings Locked Inside Of You
Kip Winger performs his band’s biggest hit solo on a 12 string acoustic guitar for VH1. Man this song brings back so many memories. 1990, Winger was huge. I used to listen to this song along with my cousins a lot. We played it off mixed tapes of the late 1980’s & early 90s rock hit singles. Almost each one of my cousins at the time knew of this song & it’s lyrics. I love this song.
Who’s The One Who Brought The Jungle Fame?
When I was about 8 or 9, Kuwait’s national network started showing a cartoon series on their Channel 2. I hadn’t known that they would be showing a new cartoon but when I switched on the tv, this white, energetic drawing appeared and I was a fan.
Kimba The White Lion was a Japanese anime series from the 1950s. Created by Osamu Tezuka and based on his manga of the same title which began publication in 1950, it was the first color animated television series created in Japan. The English series started in 1966 (which were the ones that I saw). It’s the story of a young cub Kimba (Leo in Japanese) whose parents were captured by a hunter and after his father was killed, his pregnant mother is sent on a ship to be taken to a zoo. Kimba is born on the ship.
After a storm wrecks the ship, Kimba finds himself alone in the ocean, guided by fish & butterflies and encouraged by the face of his mother formed in the clouds. He is found and cared for by some people. He learns the advantages of human culture, and decides that when he returns to his wild home he will bring culture to the jungle and stand for peace like his father. The series follows his adventures as he grows up.
It wasn’t just a cartoon, it has a message and also tackled death. That was rare in cartoons that I saw and I just felt nostalgic for this series when I saw a photo of a white lion in Flickr. I think I’ll try to watch some of it online.
ROSHAN’S ELEVEN: Top Tv Shows From My Childhood
- The A-Team
- Knight Rider
- Misfits Of Science
- Starsky & Hutch
- T J Hooker
- Moonlighting
- Remington Steele
- Gimme A Break
- Battlestar Galatica : Galatica 1980
- V
- Silver Spoons
You’re Cryin’ Me A River But I Got To Get Across
It’s 1989, Aerosmith have made their big comeback and then they release their magnum opus PUMP and one of their hits of the album is the wonderfully catchy Take Me To The Other Side.
A Motor Mouth From My Childhood
When I was in the 10th grade I made a friend who was new to our school. He was a loud-mouthed, arrogant yet smart & friendly former Saudi resident named Sameer Siddique. Guy was a smart ass and pissed people off at first but then they understood that he was just kidding and soon most of my classmates started warming up to him. For that year and for the next couple of years, he was my best friend.
Sameer had a volatile temper and a mouth with a motor attached to it. Petty things that 15 year old boys could dole out in class could really rile him up. And the teachers would turn to me to calm him down! I had that effect on people (stopped when I started getting a really bad temper by the age of 25). Anyways, it was a really good friendship. My family knew him well. I got to know his sister & his mom and even went to his dad’s office (he was a heart surgeon) at times.
I hung out at his house a lot; whenever his parents & sister were away visiting relatives, I’d stay over and we’d watch movies, eat a lot of good food and talk about the future. I even went a mosque with him (I was an atheist by then but still curious). We’d go to movies together (I went to this really awful Kamala Hassan Tamil movie back in 1991) and teamed up for a couple of events at school. His sister’s first child was even named Roshanara after me despite their claims that it isn’t :)
By 1993-94 he moved to Velloor to study medicine and become a doctor like his dad. His friends would always support him and say that finally he would discover what was wrong with him once he could self-diagnose himself :P. But jokes aside, he was very single minded in his ambition to become a doctor and focused on it. I lost touch with him around that time. During the summer of 1997, he called me up and asked if we could hang out and go for lunch or something. So we hooked up with a couple of other buddies from school and went for lunch and a movie.
That was the last I saw of him. Over the years since I’ve thought about my childhood and my old friends a lot. I miss a lot of them and I miss Sameer. As I grow older I’ve begun to really appreciate the positive figures I met in my life and I’ve tried reaching out to the old friends I’ve lost touch with. I’ve tried Orkut & Facebook and MySpace in an effort to find out my old school friends. I haven’t found Sameer in any of them yet but I hope to someday.
And oh yeah – he had this big mouth so we used to call him Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger back in the day!
I Suppose A Rock’s Out Of The Question?
Let’s Get Rocked by Def Leppard performed live in Sheffield back in 1993. Ah, this brings back so many memories of rocking out with my cousins and, like the song says ‘heaven knows I’m sick and tired of dancing with this broom’.
Star Trek : TOS Women 4
An absolutely stunning imagery of womanly sex appeal & beauty combined with a touch of class. My computer monitor almost melted when the first scene featuring the lovely Miss Sherry Jackson was playing!
Truly a magnificent example of my theory that women in the 60s were just sexier than of any other decade – plain goddamn simple for anyone with a brain & eyes to see. Sherry Jackson guest appears in the season 1 episode What Are Little Girls Made Of? as Andrea, a female android built sometime between 2261 and 2266, by Roger Korby. By Human standards, her behavior was quite simplistic, to the point where she would duplicate patterns of learned behavior.
To demonstrate that she was merely a machine and unable to feel emotions, Korby ordered her to kiss and then strike Captain Kirk. Later, when Kirk kissed her again, she next attempted to strike him, as she had done earlier. This time he kissed her much more passionately, and she became confused and upset, claiming she was “not programmed” for Kirk. William Shatner is one of the luckiest actors on television ever!
Ordered to protect the complex after Ruk’s destruction, Andrea mistakenly destroyed the android copy of Kirk. When she found Korby and realized her mistake, she became emotional. Perhaps threatened by his love for Christine Chapel, perhaps seeking his approval, Andrea began to kiss Korby passionately. This may have convinced Korby that Kirk was right, and the androids were vulnerable to unprogrammed emotions, for during this kiss, Korby activated a phaser, destroying himself and Andrea.
RIP Corey Haim
Canadian child actor icon Corey Haim has died at the age of 38 of an apparent accidental drug overdose, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Police told Canwest News Service they received a call just before 4 a.m. that Haim had been transported from a residence in North Hollywood to Providence St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., where the actor was pronounced dead, LAPD Sgt. Michael Cammert said Wednesday.
Known for a 1980s Hollywood career as a teen idol, he was born in Toronto to Jewish parents. He starred or co-starred in a number of films such as Lucas, Murphy’s Romance, The Lost Boys, License to Drive, Silver Bullet and Dream a Little Dream. Most notably, he collaborated numerous times with Corey Feldman, the pair being dubbed “The Two Coreys”. Haim and Feldman starred in a TV ‘reality’ show titled The Two Coreys, which aired on the A&E Network from 2007 to 2008.
Never able to capture the stardom he had as a child, Haim struggled for years with substance abuse issues. However, his role in the movie Lucas is one of the best that I have ever seen by a teenage actor and I always get tears in my eyes when I think or tell others of the final scene. Corey, you were a big part of my 1980s and my childhood & teenage years. We will miss you.
Corey Ian Haim (December 23, 1971 – March 10, 2010)
The Scariest School Uniform Ever
When my family & I moved from Kuwait back home to India, way back in 1987, they looked for a suitable school in our homecity of Cochin. My parents wanted a good school and hopefully they wanted one near our little suburb of Thrikkakara. Not being very familiar with the schools in Kerala, my dad looked around in the city for a school.
One evening at home, my cousin Arun (who was three years older than me) spoke out loud that his school was quite near my house and why not admit me there? I’m still wanting to kill him for it! But anyway, my decided to look into it and yes they did have an option for Special English, which was a separate class for kids who couldn’t read or write Malayalam (the local language), yours truly being one among them. And so I joined Hill Valley High School at the age of 11 years in the 6th grade.
When I saw the school uniform I almost blacked out! It was bottle green pants, with cream colour shirts on which they had bottle green spots (like the shirt had a green variant of the measles). We had bottle green ties on which in bright yellow, the school crest was sewn! I still have nightmares of this uniform.
The joke among the students was that, when we go on school trips to other cities, no one gets lost – there’s no chance in hell of anyone misplacing us with that gaudy uniform!
Out Of The Blue & Into The Black
My favourite Neil Young song, although I prefer him playing it alone with just his guitar and harmonica, it’s an anthem for the ages – Hey Hey My My.
This Used To Be My Town
Two nights ago, on our way to the party at the hotel in Kakkanad, I passed through Thrikkakara. My old home town, the little suburban town that I called my home area for 19 years (1987-2006). It was a little after 7:30 pm when the van passed that area but I felt pangs in my heart & soul, missing the place that I’d never thought I would ever miss.
There’s a lot of change in that area. A mall near by, a couple of super markets, ATMs and I think a bank has a branch there. With the lights of various establishments glowing in the night, a few offices springing up, the place looks so much livelier and colourful now compared to just a few years ago. It used to be a very, quite, humble little semi-rural area. The only thing worth mentioning, well not to me, was the temple near my house. The only entertainment for many years was the Suburban Club were my family used to go a couple of evenings in a month and take visiting relatives to.
It has changed a lot and I hope it develops a lot more but keep it’s clean air and greenery. Wouldn’t want progress to happen at the cost of natural beauty.
Kor In Errand Of Mercy
In my mind, Klingons were the best possible villains, except for the Borg ofcourse, for Star Trek. Maybe villains is too strong a word – anti-heroes is more appropriate I think. Brutish, courageous, warrior like, proud and honour-minded – they have some good qualities in them. They along with the Romulans were the strongest antagonists in The Original Series. Ofcourse by 1987 and the era of TNG, they were allies and part of the Federation and newer villains took over. However, I always liked the Klingons when they locked horns with Starfleet’s finest.
Today I watched the first episode to feature Klingons – Errand Of Mercy. The Klingon leader in this episode is Commander Kor – played by the late stage & television actor John Colicos. Colicos fashioned the look of the Klingons after Ghengis Khan – long mustaches with an oriental/Mongol look. As you can see here, the famed forehead ridges that we have known to feature on Klingons were not added to the fictional race at this time. But Kor still is menacing with his superiority complex and his rage.
Kos captures the neutral & seemingly primitive planet of Oraganos in Errand of Mercy and clashes with Captain Kirk & Spock. His plans to execute the two of them is spoiled by the Organians, who halt the war between the Klingons and the Federation by use of their superior powers, much to the surprise of Kor & Kirk, who thought that the race was a much technologically inferior one.
Colicos did a fine job then and in 3 episodes of DS9, where he played an older Kor. The Shakespearean actor died in 2000. Ofcourse he was more famous as the evil Balthar who sold humanity to the Cylons in the original Battlestar Galactica. Colicos’s portrayal of Balthar is, in my opinion, miles ahead of the bumbling English man in the new BSG. He was pure evil, greedy and manipulative and thoroughly enjoyable to watch.
Jeff Beck : Beck’s Bolero
When I think about the name Beck in context with the music world, I think of guitar legend Jeff Beck and not the guy with the weird music. Here’s Beck’s Bolero played by the great man himself.