Alex Chilton– precocious frontman for the Box Tops and then leader of the influential power pop band Big Star– has died at age 59.

Here a 16- or 17-year old Chilton performs the Box Tops’ hit “The Letter”:

UPDATE: A tribute (soundtrack: “Alex Chilton” by the Replacements):

We’ve got Olympics fever, but it’s for Lillehammer, 1994 and one magical performance…

From a New York Times article on Wednesday. Wednesday, June 3, 1892. (Not a joke.)

A HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR; PROMISED RATE OF TRAVEL FROM ST. LOUIS TO CHICAGO. DR. WELLINGTON ADAMS TELLS ELECTRIC CLUB MEMBERS OF A WONDERFUL ELECTRIC RAILROAD — THE SECRET OF HIS MOTORS RETAINED.

The Empire State Express, which flies from New-York to Buffalo, is soon to be entirely eclipsed by an electric express traveling at thunderbolt speed over a road as straight as an arrow’s course, if the story be not a dream which Dr. Wellington Adams unfolded last night to the members of the Electric Club…

Another excellent installment of “Afterburner,” in which Bill Whittle wistfully recalls his visit to GM’s Futurama exhibit at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1964.

I feel something similar for Disney’s Tomorrowland (probably heir to Futurama), but the nostalgia is balanced out to some degree by a sense of parallel-world eeriness.

(I’m still looking for a great word for “nostalgia for a future envisioned in the past,” but I enjoyed this piece from the Atlantic’s Word Fugitives from a few years back– October 2001, as it turns out– curiously apropos.)

Few things are as uncomfortable to watch, on so many levels, as these videos from the U.K’s “Protect and Survive” public information series from the early 1980s. (And maybe it’s just me, but I get an eerie sense of Cold War-era nostalgia, too.)

Each video begins with a mushroom cloud cartoon and concludes with what somebody on Wikipedia aptly called “a memorably unsettling electronic musical phrase.”

Most of the crap you’re instructed to do seems like a doomed, absurd existential charade, and altogether unlikely to save any lives. (Much like our own “Duck and Cover,” as I understand it.)

Witness this comically futile fall-out “refuge” from part 6 (“Refuges“).

And this guy, hiding from fall-out under a bridge.

And this pitiful attempt to dignify a shit bucket. (Which actually seems like a very British thing to do.)

All the videos are available here, but I’ve embedded a small selection:

#1. Nuclear Explosions Explained

#3.  ”What To Do When The Warnings Sounds” (Jesus, even the “All Clear” signal is deeply unnerving.)

#4. “Stay At Home”

#10. “Action After Warnings”

#15. “Life Under Fall-Out Conditions”

#20. “Casualties” (Creepy. I can understand why they saved this one for last.)

R.C. Pro-Am

This morning I received an email from Friendster announcing some exciting new changes. (I hadn’t been on the site, like everybody else, since about 2004.)

I decided to check it out. I clicked on the link. These are the next three screens I saw. Seriously. (These are cropped screen shots.)

It didn’t do anything bad to my PC, so I mostly just feel sorry for these guys.

UPDATE: Read the comments. Somebody from Friendster visited and proved friendly and responsive. (I’m still not changing the title, though– it’s pretty messed up that anybody had to deal with this sort of thing.)