Tiki Bar’s Top 20 Christmas Movies & Shows, for Mod Movie Monday

Tiki Bar's Top 20 Christmas Movies & Shows, for Mod Movie Monday

At Tiki Lounge Talk

International Exotic Cocktail Day, October 1

Mark your calenders, kids, there's a new, totally Tikitastic Holiday and it starts this year, 2010. International Exotic Cocktail Day will commence on October 1st, 2010. It's a fantabulous holiday for everyone to recognize how lucky we are to live in a world where Rum and fruit juice can be celebrated by millions as an actual holiday.

Share recipes with your friends, gather in crowds and drink exiting concoctions around your Tiki bar, or meet up at the Mai Kai. Whatever floats your boat. Be sure to garnish everything you drink that day with a cocktail umbrella, pineapple slice and a cherry. Drink virgin frozen drinks at work and add the booze later on. Go ahead, after all, it's International Exotic Cocktail Day, so have a ball.

International Exotic Cocktail Day was conceived by yours truly, Tiki Chris Pinto of Tiki Lounge Talk and The Retro Tiki Lounge on Facebook in an effort to spread the good word about our wonderful Tiki Lifestyle.

Bathroom Remodling, vintage style

Adding a Retro-rock wall look

The old look

1970s countertop

When I was a kid none of the men in my family ever paid a plumber, contractor or mechanic for anything. They did everything themselves, from replacing rusty pipes to remodeling entire rooms to replacing transmissions on cars. What they didn't know how to do they learned while doing. There was always someone to help, a friend or family member who had done the job before and learned the hard way.

Today I only know one guy (other than me) who can fix a running toilet or do an oil change himself, my buddy Steve up in Jacksonville. All the other fellas I know don't know the difference between a valve cap and drain shoe. But I do.

So I get to save a lot of money by doing things myself. The trade-off is the time. I've been renovating our guest bathroom now since August. So far I've probably got about 25 hours in the job and it's about half finished. But the whole thing will cost me about $250 in the end including new faucets, tile floors, new countertop and new wall treatments. I estimated this job at around $6000 to have it done by a contractor.

This is a drain shoe.

This renovation includes plastering the walls with an old-style stucco look, doing a black-on-black rock wall in the tub area (including the tub itself), new plumbing including valves, faucets and drain, tile floor and tiled vanity and sink. If all goes well it should be mostly finished by the end of September. I say mostly finished because as you all know, these jobs are never really done.

Wish me luck.

The hole to hell...through the 6" thick concrete slab

1950s & 60s Car Commercials, MAD MEN style

New Post over at Tiki Lounge Talk with videos and images of great old car ads from the golden days of advertising. THIS is the kind of stuff Don Draper would have been hawking back in the day. Check it out at TikiLoungeTalk.com.

Spilled Oil, and Oil Spills

Me (Chris P) with my 1940 LaSalle in 1981. I was 13.

When I was a kid back in the 1970s, my dad and I used to buy and sell vintage cars. By vintage I mean cars like a '29 Studebaker, a '31 Willies-Knight, a 1940 LaSalle and numerous Cadillacs and other tanks from the '50s and '60s. We changed a lot of oil in those cars, and a occasionally some transmission fluid. Back then, there were no "recycling" places to bring the used oil. So it either went into the trash, or in most cases, it went into a hole in the ground next to a tree at the back of our yard.

I'd say we probably dumped about 250 quarts of 10W-40 into the ground over the span of about 20 years. Nobody cared back then. Even the hippies didn't think anything of it. It's just what you did...after all, oil came from the ground, so Mother Earth would find a way to reclaim it.

Sometime in the mid 1980s we got a notice that they were shutting down several of the community wells that served out neighborhood. It so happens that once the EPA got the authority to start testing the quality of the drinking water, they found extremely high levels of contaminants, including mercury and lead, in the underground stream from which we got our water. They weren't sure how the contaminants got there, but mainly blamed it on fact that New Jersey was basically a toxic waste dump for years. They also said that some of the contaminants probably came from motor oil and anitfreeze seeping into the ground over the years.

So we stopped dumping oil into the ground. We collected it up in the old oil bottles and dropped it off at a gas station that had started recycling it. We stopped letting antifreeze drain off into the ground, and made sure no more transmission fluid leaked down. I've been doing that for almost 20 years now.

Then BP went and dumped a couple of bizillion gallons into the water. Dammit.

Dig Retro stories and Tiki drinks? Check out the Retro Tiki Lounge on Facebook!  http://www.facebook.com/RetroTikiLounge
And my swingin' Tiki & Retro Blounge (Web Lounge), http://www.Tikiloungetalk.com

The Hukilau 2010

We had a great swingin' time at the retro-fab, tikirific Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. See lots of pix, video and read all about it here at Tiki Lounge Talk: http://tikiloungetalk.com/2010/06/14/memories-from-hukilau-2010-fort-lauderdale/

Remember When...

Remember when the Internet was just the Internet, and there was no World Wide Web?

I still remember dialing up on AOL, getting that "You've Got Mail" message, and then getting the big giant button that said "ENTER THE WEB" or something like that. Then you'd click on and say, now what?

I also still remember the first website I ever saw. It was www.dunkindonuts.com. It was a single page, with a small clip-art of a pink glazed donut in the upper left corner, and two paragraphs on how wonderful their donuts and coffee were. Of course you couldn't order bags of coffee beans or anything on the site, but it did say to visit you local Dunkin' Donuts store to purchase some.

That was 1996. It took several minutes to load the page, and then the connection went down.

Two years later I bought my first collectible on eBay. It was something I'd looked for, for around 20 years. Found it on eBay in 15 minutes, paid for it with a money order and had it in ten days.

Jump to 2000. I buy a book on html. I never get passed page four. I download an mp3 for the first time. It takes twenty minutes.

2004: my 350 Ghz Mac G4 Tower can't handle the web fast enough to keep up with websites that have photos, buttons, ways to buy things, and some fancy-assed animations called Flash. I buy a 1.8 Ghz G5 iMac, and use the G4 as a doorstop.

2006: All of a sudden I'm getting angry because it's taking almost an entire minute to download a four minute video while I'm shopping for car parts for my 1953 Chevy and watching cartoons made entirely in Flash.

2008: The economy goes sour, but I don't care...I rarely go out anymore because all the time I spent socializing at bars and parties is taken up by commenting on MySpace, Facebook, and Weblogs.

2009: I have a light week at work so I decide to start a blog and build two websites, without having any idea what I'm doing. Technology has caught up to me, and they are set up in three weeks.

2010: Between writing for my two personal blogs, my work blog, four twitter accounts, two Facebook fan pages (or I guess now 'Like' pages), work fan page, myspace page (for nostalgic purposes), eight email accounts, and commenting on other blogs I have less than 30 hours a week to eat, sleep and work. I'm broke, so I'm still using my 2005 iMac which sounds like a lawnmower and crashes everytime I click on anything that remotely resembles movement. I haven't seen my wife in weeks, although we IM each other from different rooms in the house often. Something furry just walked by; I think it may have been a cat but without a word-bubble attached that says "lolz" I can't be sure.

2020: Now that computer chips are implanted in our heads, it's easier to work online. But I'm still getting emails from South African dictators telling me they have two million dollars waiting for me if I send them my bank info, and I still haven't seen a dime.

-CP