Let us take a little trip back in time, thirty-eight years to be precise.
The date is February 11, 1984. The Free World (which, contrary to George Orwell's earlier warnings, still exists and is not being watched by Big Brother... yet) is led by an actor, whose most famous role was playing second to a chimpanzee. This actor-turned-president is up for re-election later in the year. No one knows it yet but he will win by one of the biggest landslides in US presidential election history. Also unimaginable to most people is the fact that by the end of his second term he will have successfully dismantled the Soviet Union, which currently seems invincible.
Makes you wonder what would've happened if we elected the chimpanzee. Bonzo 2024! We miss you, Ronnie.
But that comes later. For now, NASA's 10th shuttle mission, the Challenger 4, has returned to Earth, and Wayne Gretzky has just set the NHL short handed season scoring record at 11. The Chopleys are celebrating the arrival of their new baby, Sherlyn, while Mr. and Mrs. O'Day's new bundle of joy has been given the name Aubrey. And while new life is entering the world, old life must leave it. Hence, the New York Times is reporting (2 days late) on the death of Soviet Communist Party Secretary General Yuri P. Andropov.
If we turn on the radio we will likely hear "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club, the current chart-topper. Van Halen's "Jump" is not in the top 5 yet but it climbed six places from the previous week, and there's a new release by Michael Jackson called "Thriller."
But we've had enough music for a while. Let's check out the screen, shall we? We'll take a little trip to the local movie theater. But first we'll stop in at the video arcade. Oh, far-out, dude! They've got that new single-screener that came out last July, "Mario Bros." After we drop an unholy amount of quarters in the slot, we finally slink off to the theater and see there's not a lot of movies worth seeing, but there are "coming soon" posters for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which is set for release later in the year. Right next to that, we see posters for another film to be released later in the year; a low-budget B-movie described by its foreign star with a funny accent as "just some shit movie I'm working on." This "shit movie," by unknown director James Cameron, is called The Terminator.
No one expects that one to do too well, but who knows? There could be more to it than meets the eye. Speaking of which, machines are the latest thing in the toy world too. Hasbro is busy manufacturing a new line of reconfigurable robot toys called "Transformers," and a cartoon series based around these toys is already in the works for release later in the year. These silly toys are likely being played with in a cheap living room in Northampton, Massachusetts, by a couple of struggling artists named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, who have spent the past few months doodling a set of characters they scrawled onto a napkin in November. As a name for these half-baked characters, they have jokingly come up with the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." My God, have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?
Needless to say, no one expects these characters to ever do too well, but Eastman and Laird are busy chartering a company called Mirage Studios to produce comics about them. Word is they're going to launch the company next month.
Speaking of things that nobody expects to succeed, in a tiny hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, a local-born farm girl who is currently a Liberal Arts major at LSU-S has been in labor for 30 hours while her husband, the transplanted son of an Iowa oil man, paces the floor frantically. Finally, around 18:00 US Central Time, into this crazy world we have just described, she delivers a baby boy. This boy's arrival in the world will later be described by his father as "raising hell, telling us all how it ought to be done and letting us know [he] would do it [his] way."
Well, thirty-eight years later, that child is still raising hell, but now he does it here on Hive. He's still telling the world how it ought to be done, and even though he's been to hell and back and all over the world along the way, he's still doing it his way, and he's not bloody likely to quit that any time soon. One might ask who this ne'er-do-well, who was born into such a wild and unbalanced world, actually is.
