Old Hat from 1998
Winter
Last Days of December 1998 Awards: The Grand Wazoo Award from the Yellow Shark [now defunct], R's Award for Zappa Web Excellence [now defunct], and The Iron Sausage Award for Frank Zappa Web Excellence [now defunct]. Also, Big Swifty & Associates, Trendmongers [guess what: defunct], endorsed this site in the very last days of 1998!
Christmas Eve 1998, 23:58 CET: Zoot Allures and a
Chinese NORTH & SOUTH SHAOLIN 
laserdisc for Christmas! Hurrah! And I gave
away a copy of the "I Don't Wanna Get
Drafted"/"Ancient Armaments" single to one of the regular contributors
to and helpers-out with the Vinyl vs CDs FAQ,
Singles FAQ [now moved-away]
and the Weirdo
Discography. Merry Christmas to him!
Christmas Eve 1998, 0:00 CET: The new, real, tinsely Christmas stylesheet for Internet Explorer 4 for Windows is applied (the old one was just bogus) and slows everything down nice and mellow, just like Christmas should. It's snowing in Sweden. Bootleg of the month: of course 'Tis the Season to Be Jelly (don't click on it, it's not fun).
December 11 1998: On the floor of a grade-school dining-room, the webmaster fights back the tears during a wonderful LUCIA celebration with 11-year-old kids. ("Lucia celebrations" are an odd Swedish tradition - Lucia herself is a saint from Sicily, who died in Ancient Rome around 300 AD. She is celebrated in Sweden, for complicated reasons, on the 13th of December (if the 13th is a Saturday or Sunday, public celebrations may start on the 11th or 12th) by large choirs wearing white gowns, dunce caps (boys) and silver tinsel (girls) who sing Christmas carols. Each girl holds a candle, and each boy holds a cardboard-cutout star on a wand ("star boys"). One girl - usually elected in a beauty-pageant fashion - gets to put on a red, wide sash and a crown of candles and be Lucia. This is considered a great honour.) Many of the kids in this little school are Hindus and Muslims (they have a Hindu Lucia), and here they are, in their white gowns, singing about Jesus. It's very stupid and very moving at the same time; they look positively angelic and they sing BEAUTIFULLY. Greetings to every last one of them!
December 1998 is a busy month. Nevertheless, there are updates pretty much everywhere. You'll find them when you need them. The bootleg lists have been cleaned up to use HTML bullets instead of the minus sign they've been using ever since they were a text file.
November 1998: The aeons are closing:
the VAULTS ARE OPENINING! No, not the Zappa Family Trust vaults in the Hollywood Hills, even
better: the Shaw Brothers vaults in Clearwater Bay, Hong
Kong 
! At least,
rumours are beginning to spread. Who knows? Maybe such ultra-classics as 18
LEGENDARY WEAPONS 
and 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER 
will finally become
available again, if the prints haven't completely dissolved by now. Also, I'm campaigning
(again!) to get this site listed at yahoo.
Anyway, there are updates all over, as usual, and you can tune in on the 26th
for a birthday celebration!
Autumn
Halloween 1998 was a radiant success here at
~w-59501, with a new, spooky, Halloween-decorated stylesheet for Internet Explorer 4 users.
October 1998: Early October 1998 saw what may have been the funniest
jokes ever posted to the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.frank-zappa.
They have been archived here, but click carefully, because
this page may be in violation of copyright. (You have to know a little bit about band
members, and maybe have watched the Muppet Show, in order to fully
appreciate it.) There are also many updates everywhere.
Quote of the month: "You listen to indie pop! You listen to indie
pop! You like KENT [a Swedish group], you like SUEDE!
I can tell by the way you move!" That's what a ninth-grade girl kept saying to me
today, which is the ... ninth. ("Ja, jävligt indie".) Link of the month:
Ace Wong Sightings! [www.goldensilk.com/wushu/ace.html - down - Ed.] The
web at its absolute best!
September 1998: (The police just drove by really
close to my house. Man, that was scary!) Back in the early '90s, when I did my third year
in high school, me and my classmates (N3) got our own rec room. We were
the only students with our own rec room (and coffee machine; some of us even liked
coffee), it was next-door to a biology lab, and we put posters on the walls to make
ourselves at home. One girl even put up a poster of Stefan Edberg (a Swedish tennis player). I
brought a really big old authentic 1980s poster of Boy George, which
looked absolutely smashing on the wall, but our biology teacher tore it down
almost immediately, in an outbreak of family values. Now I've found what is basically the
same picture on the net, and I display it to the left as a sort of personal fuck-you
note to whom it may concern. The Mobile Monks page is still off-line, but
we're printing T-shirts. The FIST OF LEGEND 
LD Search 98 came to a
memorable close on September 21, when a copy glittering with gold and wrapped in two
layers of grade A plastic arrived from Sacramento, California. And after that last
phonebill, there will be no more IRC for the webmaster, which should
theoretically amount to more time to update the web. Happy now?
Summer
August 1998: Finally-finally, Media Asia released the ONCE UPON A
TIME IN CHINA 
1-3 classics on DVD - I told you it was party year! For what
was basically the first time, I got to transfer money directly into the Hong
Kong economy, so I'm a big
boy now. On
another note, an ad campaign for our Swedish Channel 5
TV in the Stockholm subway - the channel that brought us long-awaited shows like
Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Friends, Spin City, Fresh Prince in Bel-Air, Hangin'
with Mr Cooper, and Family Matters - mentioned
Frank Zappa. Quote of the month: "I was raped at the
Water Festival ... but it felt pretty good" (in Swedish: "Jag har blivit
våldtagen på Vattenfestivalen ... men det var rätt skönt"), overheard in a
teengirl conversation on bus 555 (from Granhammar) around noon on August 9. She said a
friend of someone's (her?) sister had said it in a phone call to mom. I'm not making this
up. There are updates all over town; you'll find them when you need them.
A nice guy (Anders Sahlin) snail-mailed me xerox copies of bootleg listings from the old Society
Pages fanzine, so if there's so much snow next winter that I can't get out of the
house for weeks, there will be LOTS of updates. :)
August 1998: when HAPPY TOGETHER 
was released in
South Korea, where it had previously been banned, it went straight to #1,
ahead of films like LETHAL WEAPON 4, MÙLÁN 
and ARMAGEDDON.
Not bad! The film features two Zappa songs: "Chunga's Revenge" and "I Have
Been in You".
![CHEN XIAOWANG US TOUR 1998 [this used to be a clickable-link image, but 1) the target page went off-line, and 2) I lost the URL]](banners/cxwsmnr.gif)
July 1998 Award: Our pal, the Biffy the Elephant Shrew's seal of approval!
The SEAL OF APPROVAL
Assures the removal
Of anything bad at all ...
And just to prove it's real,
Here's BIFFY'S Approval Seal:
"AAARF."
He adds: "The above jingle was stolen from Arbogast & Ross's radio satire CHAOS. Roger Waters, go fuck yourself."
July 1998 Award: A links2go Key Resource Award in the Zappa topic", as a
result of "over 10 person years of research into machine learning and intelligent
agent technology", make of it what you will.
July 1998: The hunt for
the FIST OF LEGEND
laserdisc is on again (caution: sponsored by chiefinspector);
if you have a copy to sell, and you don't mind doing business with Sweden, and you're not
going to rip me off, you can pretty much name your price. (Not to mention what would
happen if you happened to have a spare copy of the movie poster.) The star-spangled STORM
RIDERS 
made history as the first Chinese film in years to break (in fact,
totally disintegrate) the box-office record in Hong Kong. Way to go on top of a
71-meter Buddha! Also, the webmaster has new contact lenses, saw Dana
International in Stockholm, and finally, about three years late, realised that he
went to high school with Magdalena Graaf, one of the
famous (?) Graaf sisters of Sweden (in the breast-implant and sleaze-queen business).
They appear sleazily to the left or above-left, depending on circumstances, and
Magdalena had short hair then. Respekt!
And as always, an array of updates are scattered across the web; you'll
find them when you need them.
Summer 1998: Frank Zappa - a Weirdo Discography appears on the web at http://home5.swipnet.se/~w-59501/weirdo/.
Spring
Spring 1998: VIVA VICTORIA - Dana
International won the European Song Contest! You may not have heard about the
Eurovision song contest, and you may not have heard about miss International either, but
trust me: until next Eurovision, it's party year and these pages will
only be updated on a pink-champagne hangover basis, and the updates will be limited to new
pictures of Dana. Which is why you should check back often.
Also in Spring 1998: The alt.fan.frank-zappa Singles FAQ Some More
appears on the web at http://home5.swipnet.se/~w-59501/singles/.