John Cleese owes my dad 50.00

It is strange how memories jump into your conscience, we were watching the Lobos game and they were well ahead of a team the suspended their big man for admitting to a sexual relationship with his girlfriend. Rules are rules but I felt bad for the kid for having his business aired in public. There has been a lot of discussion on whether the kid deserved to get suspended, he signed an honor code, and I signed an honor code in a HS boarding school I went to, and you have to follow the rules. The school really screwed this kid by outing him, and if he were just suspended for not following team rules, and leave the honor code out of it, and the media was told it was an internal matter, the kid could have been saved a lot of grief.

Back to Mr.Clease, and why my dad is deserving of $50.00 cash, or mostly cash. My father is from the vacuum tube generation, I remember as a young lad staring wide eyed at the glowing tubes, my dad blowing the dust out of the insides and giving the radio or TV a good whack, which surprisingly worked. I suppose the equivalent would be turning the computer of HD TV on and off. When VCR’s became affordable I had to program the VCR because my dad went ballistic turning the little wheels trying to tune in the station, and cable ready VCR’s came in soon afterwards.

The VCR’s of the day promoted on screen programming, a feat my dad never mastered and after recording the wrong show several times he would call me and I would do it for him. There was a commercial with John Cleese of Monty Python pitching a universal remote that was voice activated, he would say , as best my memory can recall “Record start 8:00 end 10:00, how hard is that”

Well the old man went out and bought it and was assured by the good people at Baillos that is was full proof, and was a steal at $50.00. He brought it home read the manual very carefully and went over with it with me. To work you had to repeat every word the unit said like “start”, “end”, and all the numbers, a low whisle would start and rise in pitch and move on to the next one, if it did not understand it would say “Repeat” and you would say it again.
The Old man had me set it up and started “one” my dad says “one”, “repeat” and on and on and on, and he started to get pissed, and I wanted to but my gut laughing, except I couldn’t laugh, I was biting my hand. He started swearing in Spanish and yelling for my mom “R____..what the hell is wrong with this? ” He face was red, he gave up and he never took it back

So Mr. Clease cough up the 50 bucks