“Driving Home for Christmas,” Chris Rea, 1986
I nearly always spend Christmas in my hometown, which is just over two hours away by car. It’s in South Texas, so I’ve never driven for days or through snow, but I can certainly relate to spending a little time on the interstate on the way to loved ones.
Enjoy the full list of Christmas favorites on YouTube!
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You are listening to ‘300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz,’ and this is episode number 118, “In the year two-thousand and suck,” so let the 300 Seconds begin!
It can be hard to believe sometimes, but we are now living in the Twenty-First Century. The Future, such as it is. Back on New Year’s Day of 2010, I thought back to all of those Nintendo and Super Nintendo video games that I played that took place “IN THE YEAR 20XX” and realized: Wow, we’re there now. In the novel 2001 A Space Odyssey, we were supposed to have a space station and a moon base. Here we are, twenty years after 2001, and while the International Space Station is neat, it’s no Space Station V. There is also no Clavius Base on the moon. Heck, we don’t even have a Moonbase Alpha.
My vision of how the future was going to play out was heavily influenced by all of the episodes of The Jetsons that I watched growing up as a kid and Isaac Asimov’s stories and novels, so it would be an understatement to say that I have been sorely disappointed in what I have seen in the first fifth of the twenty-first century so far. Let’s be honest, the future just isn’t what it used to be.
To begin with, technology as a whole has not advanced as far as it could have, and one could argue that some things are moving in the wrong direction. Take cars, for example. Flying cars were a thing in The Jetsons, though George Jetson still had to contend with lousy traffic, because despite what Star Trek preaches, lots of people are still going to suck one hundred years from now. I’m not even a fan of the concept of a flying car, because what goes up will eventually come down, and given the number of poorly maintained vehicles I regularly see on the road, I’m pretty sure we’re going to have a lot of people ignoring the ‘Check Anti-Grav Soon’ light on their future-car dashboard. Honestly, though, I don’t even want flying cars, I think it would be enough for them to hover, just maybe a foot off the ground like a Star Wars land speeder. Hover-cars would solve a lot of problems. No need for tires, less wear and tear on the roads, or maybe, as Doc Brown once said, we won’t need roads.
I think robots are neat, and one thing that The Jetsons gave us to look forward to was having a robot maid to clean up the house. Given that at this point in time, we barely have a robot vacuum cleaner, I don’t expect to have a robot maid clanking around my apartment keeping things clean anytime soon. I also think that Artificial Intelligence is also going to have a pretty hard time replicating the sassiness of Rosie the Robot. It’s going to be a while before we figure out ‘smart technology,’ and even longer before we can have “smart-aleck technology.”
While science fiction made a lot of educated guesses as to what kind of technology we would have in the future, I don’t think anyone predicted the emergence of the Internet to say nothing of having access to it via a hand-held computer. Isaac Asimov wrote several stories about a giant computer called MultiVac that literally contained all the information about the world. I have a friend who refers to their cell phone as their “Mother Box,” which is probably the best description of a cell phone that I think I’ve ever heard, so maybe Jack Kirby was onto something. Unfortunately, it is a great irony that unlimited access to unlimited information has collectively made people dumber. This is partially thanks to social media, because no matter how terrible, out there, or insane the belief is, there will be a bunch of people with similar views online. I’m just saying Flat Earthers should not be a thing in the 21st century.
One particularly awful trend that I have noticed in this year of twenty-twenty-one is the slow deterioration of the written and spoken English language. Maybe it’s because of all the science fiction that I have read and watched over the years, but I was kinda hoping that we’d be using cool future words by now. Going back to Asimov, he had his characters say things like “Aw, space!” in situations where one would expect to swear. The Battlestar Galactica reboot famously used frak as it’s and one of my favorite future comics, Magnus, Robot Fighter would have characters say things like “I’m feeling sore down to the subatomic level.” I always thought future-talk was neat and have adopted a similar tactic to cut down on the amount of salty language coming from me, though my preferred exclamations are “Craters!” and “Shazbot!”
People are inherently lazy, so I understand using acronyms on-line. LOL, AFK, WTF, STFU and so on. My personal favorite is IANAL, which stands for I Am Not A Lawyer. I still remember the first time I heard someone actually say LOL out loud in a conversation: The person, whom up to that point I thought was otherwise intelligent said “LAWL!” When I heard that, I wanted to smack the taste out of their mouth. Seriously, what the hell? Is laughing so difficult for you that you have to abbreviate it instead of actually laughing?!
On the plus side, a common trope in near-future science fiction is that marijuana is legal, and that seems to be slowly happening, so hooray, I guess. It also might explain a few things…
This has been 300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz, the next episode will be posted after I start writing a story about a tomorrow where nothing freaking changes, just to be different. For more wonderfully weird, witty and mostly grammatically correct words written by me, visit Eduardo Soliz dot com and I thank you for listening! Be good, take care, and God Bless.
NOTE: This is a transcript of a podcast for those with hearing difficulties, those that prefer to read, and those who would prefer to not hear the sound of my voice. 😉
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You are listening to ‘300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz,’ and this is episode number 117, “Radio,” so let the 300 Seconds begin!
I consider myself blessed to be a part of Generation X. I was born in the analog days of the seventies, grew up during the early digital age of the eighties, when video games and home computers were new, and saw the internet grow up in the 1990s from clunky beige PCs dialing up over phone lines to now being an indispensable part of modern life in the twenty-first century as we carry around our cell phones wherever we go.
Despite all the new super-awesome whiz-bang music technology that has come and gone over the years from cassette tapes to Walkmans to CDs to MP3 players to streaming services, I still have a soft spot for radio.
Back in the day, radio was where you went to hear the newest music. If there was a particular song you really liked, you could use a tape recorder to catch it the next time it came on. Hopefully you were there to press Record and hopefully the dee-jay didn’t blab over the beginning or the end of the song too much and hopefully your tape didn’t get chewed up by the player. Ah, good times.
My mother had a radio in the kitchen when I was a kid. I remember sitting nearby in the mornings watching her cooking breakfast while music played. Years later, when I eventually bought a house, I also bought a radio for the kitchen.
My first car back in 1990 had a tape player that ended up being less than reliable so I spent my first years of college listening to local radio stations during my twenty-mile commute to school and back. I particularly liked the oldies station; I remember listening to the morning DJs reading the local school lunch menus during my commute, peppering them with corny jokes and funny sound effects. The radio in my car eventually quit working to the point where it would only pick up the AM dial and even then, there was only one country station that the thing would pick up reliably. I don’t care much for country music, but they did play Paul Harvey in the afternoons during my drive home, so I got to hear a lot of Paul Harvey. Good day.
It wasn’t until 2005 that I got a car with a CD player in it, so radio was my driving companion for a number of years, and over those years, I have noticed a few changes. Like everything else in life, some of those changes have been good and others have been not so good.
One trend that I liked was when stations started popping up that didn’t have DJs. Jack-FM in San Antonio was the first one that I heard, and I’m pretty sure there is one in your neck of the woods, whether it’s called Jack or John or Bob or Sue or whatever one-syllable name they happen to give to it. As much as I enjoyed the two guys on the oldies station back in the nineties, way too many DJs fill the airwaves with annoying blather that could be filled with music instead. Yeah, I’ll switch over to the AM dial if I want to hear mindless yakking. But, if there is one thing that AM radio is still good for, it’s sports. I have spent many a Sunday listening to the Dallas Cowboys play on my drive home, and I have to say that listening to them suck is only slightly less painful than watching them suck on television.
Even though I have a USB drive loaded with my favorite radio hits of the 70s and 80s plugged into my vehicle, I still listen to radio for music on occasion, though it has become a bit harder as of late, and of course, commercials are to blame.
I get it. Complaining about the number of commercials on the radio is like complaining about the weather: You can’t do a whole lot about it so there really isn’t much point. But, just like the weather, radio is getting worse: You see, in order to play more commercials, you have to play less of something else, and kind of like how network TV shows became shorter over the years, radio stations have been trimming songs to make room for more commercials. I mainly listen to stations that play of 80s and 90s music that I heard growing up, so when something is taken out of a song, I immediately notice. Usually it’s something like a guitar solo, but I was legitimately upset the first time I heard Michael Jackson’s Thriller with the Vincent Price voiceover cut out. Whomever made that decision needs to be fired…preferably from a cannon. Radio, somebody still loves you, but we need to talk.
This has been 300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz, the next episode will be posted after I sign up for Pandora. For more wonderfully weird and witty words written by me, visit Eduardo Soliz dot com, and I thank you for listening! Be good, take care and God Bless.
NOTE: This is a transcript of a podcast for those with hearing difficulties, those that prefer to read, and those who would prefer to not hear the sound of my voice. 😉
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You are listening to ‘300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz,’ and this is episode number 116, “What’s in My Name?” so let the 300 seconds begin!
It says something that even my name makes my life a little bit trickier than it has to be. Growing up, I went by “Edward” instead of “Eduardo.” If you’re wondering why, let’s just say that in my parent’s time, having a Spanish name wasn’t always an asset. In any event, I went by Edward when I was in grade school and high school and even put it on my first driver’s license. Once I finished high school and started college I stopped going by Edward. My thinking was that Eduardo was the name that my parents gave me and so that was going to be the name I used from there on out. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t get any grief from the folks at the Department of Transportation when I asked to have it changed on my first driver’s license renewal.
I’ve gone by Eduardo ever since then, so family members and people that knew me in my younger years tend to call me Edward, and everybody that has met me since college and beyond will use “Eduardo.” And because people are lazy, lots of people will just shorten it to “Ed.”
And that’s okay. I am perfectly fine with “Ed.” A funny thing happens when I tell people my name; they tend to ask what I want to go by. “Should I call you ‘Eduardo’ or ‘Ed?’” they ask. I usually tell folks that are obviously, shall we say, “ethnically challenged” to use “Ed” because Spanish is sometimes hard. Also, most folks are eventually going to chop it down to “Ed,” anyway. I will sometimes make the mistake giving people a choice, I’ll tell them: “Whichever one is easier for you to pronounce.” That often results in a blank stare. You know that look that your dog gives you when you throw a ball but instead you really kept it in your hand and they figure it out? That’s the kind of look that I get. Just flip a coin or something, people, it’s not that hard. I had one manager who would completely screw it up when he took attendance at our daily meetings. I figured that he was either super-ethnically challenged or he was an idiot. We quickly found out that not only was he an idiot, but he was the living, walking embodiment of the Peter Principle. Look it up.
When I had a job that involved talking on the phones, I quickly learned that using the proper pronunciation of ‘Eduardo’ would end up turning into a way-too-long discussion about my name. If I answered the phone like this: “Thank you for calling, my name is Eduardo, how may I help you?” the customer would usually answer with a question like: “What’s your name? How do you spell that? Can you repeat that?” and my personal favorite: “Are you in the United States?” and so on and so on. I quickly learned that if I wanted to avoid that business, I had to gringo up the pronunciation by saying ‘Ed-whar-doe’ and dying just a little bit on the inside.
The spelling of “Eduardo” is another fun thing that I have to live with. Whenever I’m asked to give my name at a restaurant, I always tell them ‘Edward’ because I don’t feel like teaching the cashier how to spell “Eduardo.” Now, if I don’t give them the spelling of Eduardo and I use it, there’s probably a fifty-fifty chance they’re going to put a w in place of the u. Which is no biggie, I’ve learned to live with it, and it’s actually really close. My all-time favorite spelling goof had to be when the people at the San Japan anime convention substituted a ‘y’ in place of the ‘u’ in their schedule. To this day, “Edyardo” still cracks me up and I do have a few friends who like to rib me about it every so often.
The pronounciation of Eduardo is also a little bit tricky and my Spanish admittedly isn’t the best, I will occasionally trip over the R. I had a co-worker once tell me that ‘the R shouldn’t be rolled because it wasn’t proper Spanish.’ I responded by telling him that it was my name and I was gonna pronounce it however I damn well pleased. I mean come on, we’re all about mangling and messing up languages here in the good ol’ US of A…after all, look at what we did to English!
This has been 300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz, the next episode will be posted after I practice rolling my R’s like Ricardo Montalban. Thank you for listening and visit eduardosoliz.com for more of my wonderfully weird and witty words. Be good, take care, and God Bless.
A few months ago, I started a field technician job which requires me to drive around the great state of Texas. Of course, while on the highways, byways, and backways of the Lone Star State, I noticed a few things:
#7 My road! (sort of)
You are listening to ‘300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz,’ and this is episode number 94, “Highways and By-ways,” so let the 300 Seconds begin!
Owning a car is a requirement when you live in Texas, and when you’re raised in a small town like I was, it was a necessity, because just about everything significant was either in the larger town ten miles away or in the big city that was twenty miles away. An interesting side effect of that experience is that driving around doesn’t bother me as much as it does my friends that grew up in the city.
When I was in my small town and I wanted to go to HEB, it was a ten-mile drive. Blockbuster Video? Fifteen miles. The mall? Twenty miles. Heck, if you wanted something to eat that wasn’t Dairy Queen or the local Mexican place it was at least a ten mile drive. My city friends are used to having everything close by and I’m used to having everything far away, so where the thought of driving to the other side of town horrifies them; for me, it’s a big deal.
I make a trip to see my parents about every month or so, and thus, I know Interstate 37 between San Antonio and Corpus Christi like the back of my hand. It’s interesting to see it slowly change over the years: Quirky mom and pop gas stations that had animatronic cowboys and sold ostrich eggs have been replaced by big shiny corporate twenty-pump monstrosities that can probably be seen from space at night.
I find it interesting how most of the newer gas stations are trying really hard to be Buc-ees. One even tried a little too hard and ended up being sued over it. (Buc-ees won, by the way) Try as they might, though, nobody has ever been able to completely pull it off, because they all forget the one thing that makes Buc-ees, Buc-ees: It isn’t the massive store, or the kitschy souvenirs that they sell, or the friendly workers, or even the mascot. It’s the guy cleaning the bathrooms. When you walk into the bathroom at Buc-ees, not only is it huge, but it’s always super-clean, day or night. The other guys try: They’ll put locks on the stall doors and solid walls in between them, but all it takes is one clogged toilet or not-working sink or funky smell to remind you that they ain’t Buc-ees.
A rival gas station, QuikTrip, recently took the title of favorite gas station in Texas from Buc-ees in a 2017 GasBuddy survey. That which had some folks, including myself, up in arms: “There is just no way some other lousy gas station could be better than Buc-ees!” Everybody said. Quik Trip recently began opening stations in the San Antonio area, and one opened up on my way to work, so I decided to check it out. In doing so, I figured out why they won the title. Much like Buc-ees, Quik Trip is a really nice gas station with a good selection of hot food, snacks, drinks, and friendly employees.
You see, Buc-ees is where you stop when you are on a road trip. In Texas, it’s to the point where a stop at Buc-ees is almost a part of the vacation itself, but it’s where you stop when you are on your way to somewhere far away. It’s where you make a pit stop to use the bathroom and get beef jerky, kolaches, tacos, BBQ sandwiches, sweets, sodas, beaver nuggets, and maybe even a T-shirt or maybe even an ice chest or even a grill. And that’s great. Quik Trip, on the other hand, is where you go to gas up from week in and week out for work. Their gas is fairly cheap, and the station is always clean and has a pretty good selection of food and snacks. Now, is Quik Trip as big as Buc-ees? No. Does it have fresh kolaches and beef jerky like Buc-ees? No. Souvenirs? No. But it is nicer than most other gas stations and probably closer to home for most than Buc-ees. So yeah, I can see why it is more popular, especially if the gas is just as cheap, and isn’t cheap gas what we’re all looking for?
This has been 300 Seconds, the next episode will be posted after I top-up my SUV. I am Eduardo Soliz, if you’d like to hear or read more of my words visit Eduardo Soliz dot com, and I thank you for listening!
When it’s Christmas Time in Texas, George Strait, 1986
Having lived in Texas for all of my life, I can certainly relate to George Strait’s ode to Christmas in the Lone Star State. While y’all are having turkey and ham, we’re firing up the grill.
Crazy thing: I’ve actually experienced a White Christmas once, in 2004 in Corpus Christi, of all places. That’s it for this year’s additions!
Listen to all of the songs here on YouTube!
“Up On The Housetop,” Gene Autry, 1953
This is Gene’s third (and well-deserved) entry on this list. Who wouldn’t go?
TRIVIA: The song was written by Benjamin Hanby in 1864. In addition to being a songwriter, Benjamin was also involved in the Underground Railroad.
Click here for sixty more Christmas songs!
#25: Darn skippy
After (too many) years since my last trip to the iconic Texas summer getaway, I decided to take stay for a night to see if anything had changed since then. I’m glad to say that the park is mostly the same, but I did notice a few things…
#13: Canyonero!
Upon reaching my site, I had to take a picture of my CR-V like it’s in one of those SUV commercials.
BUNNY!
So purdy!
I would drive one thousand miles…
Of course, now that its all said and done, one last list.
Eduardo Soliz 