Continuing this slight hijack, I could never watch “That 70’s show” with pleasure. I grew up in the mid to late 70s, and there was so many anachronisms in that show it made me cringe. Generally a lot of stuff was really from the early 80s.
Actually, I was wrong - according to Google Maps, the distance is 333 miles.
“Alzheimery”: Can I use that? 
Also, I’m embarrassed to admit that all the mistakes in that novel escaped me. Yup, nary a “huh?” passed my lips. 
I think Mr. King would be well-advised to forward his next manuscript to some of you guys and ladies, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.
That said, the story itself hangs together well, I thought, and he did admit to having his son, Joe Hill help with the ending, which, as someone upthread mentioned, sounds like he may have “written himself into a corner”. (I love that phrase, by the way).
And yeah. I hate to admit it, but he wrote better stuff when he was drinking.
Also did I understand correctly that police cars in Maine had only blue lights and never red?
Thanks
Quasi
I’ve never understood Tommyknockers as metaphor for addiction. However Pet Sematary is a metaphor for the relaspe cycle of addiction…the zombies are the addiction coming back and getting bigger and worse every time.
Ayuh, blue and only blue.
Well, it’s not really a metaphor as it is subtext. And it’s not really subtext as it is text. And it’s not really text as it is IN YOUR FACE, SCREAMING. 
The first third of the novel dealt with two characters, one (Robby Anderson) losing herself in her new addiction to the saucer, the other (Garth) ‘coming out the other side’ after a near life-destroying (and career-destroying) bender, the culmination of years of alcoholism.
“Shot your wife, eh? Pretty cool.”
Another example of cop cars with both:
Growing up in the 80’s, red and blue lights were common with LAPD cars. I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) that this was the practice after the Caryl Chessman case. That was the late 40’s so were blue light’s not common practice in the timeframe of the book?
My memory is that the term was already so common that it was already a cliche by the time Shatner used it on SNL. I don’t think that sketch cause it to take off at all. In fact, I would suspect that it was already losing its momentum by then.
I think you’re confusing the commonness of “get a life” among your hip friends and the later popularity of it among the general public. Take a look at the Google Ngram that I linked to. It clearly takes off in the late 1980’s. There are hardly any written uses of it before then. You and your hip friends may have considered it a boring cliche by the time of the Shatner sketch, but that doesn’t mean that most people had even heard of it by then.
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Neither I nor my friends were hip in the 1980s.
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Written references always trail cultural use, often by years, so while the statistics are interesting, they don’t establish a definitive historical usage pattern outside of written references.
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Correlation is not causation. Even if the Ngram is taken at face value, that doesn’t establish that the Shatner use was the one that sent the phrase into orbit.
Written uses don’t trail spoken ones by that much, actually. These days so much is written down, even things that seem to be strictly casual spoken-only usage, that it’s generally not that much later that they’re seen in print. Yes, this isn’t any proof that the Shatner sketch was what brought it into general popularity, but it does look rather suspicious. What do you mean you and your friends weren’t hip? I clearly remember that TV show that you guys did back in the early 1980’s where you and your friends would sit around showing off your hip clothes, talking about the currently hip music, and using incomprehensible (to me) hip expressions. Don’t you remember that cover of Time (or maybe it was Newsweek) that said, “WHY AREN’T YOU AS HIP AS ACSENRAY?”? Man, we all wanted to be like you back then.
Okay, that made me laugh.
Also, there aren’t 22 months in a year, not even 1963
Yes, different places have different conventions for writing the date. You’re very clever.
And I missed the edit window but wanted to actually contribute. I think the Dark Tower series is a good timeline for his writing falling apart. This is your spoiler warning. He goes from building up this detailed world with well-developed characters, and showing how they all tied together, to just weird, to author self-insertion (and he saves all of reality), to blatant copying of other works, to handing out deus ex machina like candy, and then OH WAIT DO OVER!
As big of a fan of King as they come, and especially the Dark Tower series, I couldn’t agree more; although I blame it on his accident. It shook him to his core.
I did absolutely love the ending, however. It was perfectly fitting, couldn’t have ended any other way, IMHO.
I will say, I find his writing of the past couple years to be his best stuff he’s written since the late 80s. I really enjoyed Full Dark, No Stars, Under the Dome, and 11/22/63 (although I’m still in the middle of it).
It’s amazing how many of these errors occur in short succession, but then maybe it’s what I’m familiar with: the phrase “Don’t Mess with Texas” was NOT around in the 70s or late 60s as a slogan or catch-phrase, and I’m going to guess also not around in 1960. I do recall it suddenly becoming a clever PSA slogan in the mid 1980s, and delighting all of us with its cleverness (as an anti-litter campaign).
I could be wrong but I think “don’t mess with Texas” is as old as Texas itself. Heck, ISTR it was on one the state flags at one time.
When I put the phrase “mess with Texas” into Google Ngram, this is what I get:
It appears that the phrase comes out of nowhere in the mid-1980’s. Incidentally, for some reason, Google Ngram wouldn’t accept the phrase “don’t mess with Texas.” I’m not sure why. Does it not like contractions?