Dream Forge Demo 1995 February/df9502r.zip/DFI

Text File | 1995-02-01 | 6KB | 118 lines

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Brighton Bealer Memoirs
  by Dave Bealer
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  Some people don't like their own names. Of all the billions of
problems that can afflict human beings, that has to be one of the
worst. After all, your name affects the way people view you
throughout your life. For proof look at the Zappa kids, Dweezil
and Moon Unit.

  Of all the millions of problems I've faced in my life, having to
deal with a dopey name is not one of them. Mine was a narrow escape,
though. My mother once admitted that she wanted to name me Brighton.
Brighton Bealer? Apparently Mom fell off the same flying saucer as
Frank Zappa. Luckily, Dad put a stop to that nonsense before it got
started and I ended up with the perfectly normal name of David.

  Mom was the only person I knew well who called me David. There is
something in the mental makeup of most mothers that forces them to
refer to all their children by their entire first names. Not that I
minded. David is an acceptable name -- in Hebrew it means "beloved."
Always short for my age (5' 7" is short for 37, isn't it?), I had to
put up with a few slingshot jokes in school, but it wasn't that bad.
About the only real problem I have with it is due to childhood years
of watching the national television news with my parents. In the
unlikely event someone says "Good night, David" to me, I have to
fight down the urge to reply, "Good night, Chet, and good night for
NBC News."

  Other than David Brinkley, I naturally identify with other famous
Davids and Daves, both real and fictional. My first memory of this
is from 1968, when I saw _2001: A Space Odyssey_ with some friends.
For the next few weeks I had to put up with the little creeps
answering my every request with their best HAL 9000 impressions, "I'm
sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." Even today I occasionally
run into that response from a particularly demented coworker.

  It's comforting to know that the last human in the universe
will be named Dave. This according to "Red Dwarf," the British
science fiction situation comedy series. Dave Lister, the last human,
is a chicken soup dispenser repair technician (third class) on the
mining ship _Red Dwarf_. Under normal circumstances, Lister ranked
below "the man who changed the bog rolls." (I can readily identify
with an underachiever of that magnitude.)

  Now, stuck three million years in the future, Lister has the run
of the ship. The problem is that Dave's only companions are Rimmer,
a hologram of his dead bunkmate (whom Lister loathed), a prissy
android named Kryten, and Cat, the humanoid descendent (that evolved
over three million years) of Lister's pet cat. About the only thing I
really have in common with Lister, besides being an underachiever, is
that we both like spicy food and hate exercise.

  Another fictional Dave I have come to like is Glenn Ford's
character from _Pocketful of Miracles_, Dave "The Dude" Conway. A
gambler, bootlegger, and racketeer, this Dave is nobody's chicken
soup dispenser repairman. Tough and slick on the outside, The Dude
turns out, in classic movie style, to have a heart of gold.

  Dave Barry is widely known as the funniest man in America. His
reputation is well earned. This Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for
the _Miami Herald_ is syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide
every weekend. Knight-Ridder, the company that owns the _Herald_,
withdrew Dave's column from ClariNet, the Internet's own newspaper,
last year. K-R took this action over a flap about the column being
redistributed illegally on the net.

  The illegal actions of a few brain-dead yahoos whose rallying
cry was "information wants to be free" caused those Dave Barry fans
who are also legitimate subscribers to ClariNet-carrying systems
(this writer included) to have to purchase a several pound stack of
newsprint every Sunday just so we can read the great man's words.
When are these clowns going to realize that creative people (the
worthwhile ones) won't work for free, at least forever? "Dave's
World," the top ten sitcom based on Dave's columns, stars Harry
Anderson as Dave himself. The show can be seen Monday nights on CBS.

  Not everything is rosy on the Dave front, I'm sorry to say. One of
my least favorite television personalities is "Super" Dave Osborne,
of cable infamy. This guy doesn't have to worry about having his
stuff stolen by net denizens because he's so irretrievably lame.

  David Letterman inherited Johnny Carson's title as the "King of
Late Night Talk Show Hosts" a few years back when Johnny retired.
The last time I watched Dave regularly was back in the early eighties
when I was in college -- anything was more fun than doing homework.
No, that's not fair. David Letterman is a funny man. His "stupid
pet tricks" were a fun innovation. Still, there was something about
Johnny Carson that nobody else has been able to duplicate. At least
Paul Shaffer is a better bandleader than Doc Severnsen, plus Paul has
a better band.

  A few years back the U.S. National Weather Service started naming
hurricanes after men as well as women. Color me sexist, but I was a
little incensed when the first really destructive hurricane given a
masculine name was Hurricane David. We Davids just aren't like that,
unless we have a slingshot.

                               {DREAM}

Copyright 1995 Dave Bealer, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Dave Bealer is a thirty-something mainframe systems programmer who
works with CICS, MVS and all manner of nasty acronyms at one of the
largest heavy metal shops on the East Coast. He shares a waterfront
townhome in Pasadena, MD. with two cats who annoy him endlessly as he
writes and publishes electronically. Dave can be reached at:
[e-mail]
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