We watch The Daily Show regularly — more regularly when Jeff’s home than otherwise, to be sure, but more than any other program (well, except for The Colbert Report). Back in November, Jon had David Frost on as a guest, and then a few weeks later, Ron Howard was on. Of course, what they had in common was simple: Richard Nixon.
I spent the summer of 1974 working at The Computer Company, an APL timesharing house. One of my projects that year was a bulletin board system (written, of course, in APL), and for my testing, I decided the best thing to do was to post news and weather items as I heard them on the radio. I don’t remember most of what I posted, but in early August, most of my items had two words in common: Richard Nixon. And one of the last “test” items I posted was the news of his resignation; after that, I decided the system was ready to go into production.
We decided today would be a good day to go see a movie, and the obvious choice was Frost/Nixon. The downside of that choice was having to go to a theater owned by Cinemark, which donated towards Prop 8 (we still have our “No on 8” sign in our front yard) — and almost as bad, having to brave the Valley Fair/Santana Row axis of shopping three days before Christmas. But there weren’t any other movies we really wanted to see, and that theater was the only one showing the movie in the South Bay, so we gritted our teeth and sallied forth.
Parking was, as expected, no fun at all. In fact, I gave up at both Valley Fair and Santana Row; instead, we had lunch at a restaurant in a nearby strip mall and left our car parked there (shhh, don’t tell anyone…especially the other folks we saw doing the same thing — in previous years, that lot had had a guard during the peak of the season to ensure that people parking at least visited a store in the strip mall, but not this year) afterwards and went to the movie.
It was excellent. Frank Langella nailed Nixon, and, even though I knew how the story was going to end, the movie kept me glued to my seat. My only objection was that it was rated “R”, for a few profanities, and maybe because of the smoking — this is a movie that anyone interested in politics, even a young teenager, should see (and I’ll give you a hint — they’ve heard the F-word already). The movie goes into broad release on Thursday, so it might even be possible to see it in this area without supporting Cinemark.
After the movie, we went to Borders in hopes of finding the original Frost/Nixon interviews. They didn’t have them in stock, but Amazon does
So, you were blogging in 1974 using APL?
It was probably closer to tweeting, but basically, yes.