Upon reading this, you might jump to some wrong conclusions. Let's clear the air: Hallmark sucks. Yes, they dub themselves the "world's largest personal expression company," which should, upon no more than two moments of reflection, make you say:

...wha...?

But maybe I'm being nitpicky when I expect "personal expression" to entail personal...expression...Is no one at Hallmark aware of this? If I were to give any friend a two dollar card that has on its cover a soft-focus picture of two young pals playing catch and the word Friends embossed with a super-frilly script font, I hope he'd deck me.

Hallmark's founder, Joyce C. Hall (a man), said "Good taste is good business," a statement that doubtlessly adorns the halls and offices of Hallmark HQ at every turn. Good taste, he said. Okay. Whatever you say, Joyce.

When on the rare occasion that someone who doesn't know me well gives me some of Hallmark's vapid canned sentiment to go along with something I don't need, I say thank you. After all, civility to the last. But come on...

Hallmark "poetry" is so mawkish, so utterly horrid, just about anyone is qualified to criticize it, yet no one even bothers. It's that bad. I've never set foot in a Hallmark store, I've never purchased a Hallmark card, and I've never allowed a Hallmark product to adorn my refrigerator. I say all this to give my disclaimer a solid foundation. In case there is still any doubt, Hallmark is to sentiment as Justin Timberlake is to music. If he's lucky.

Okay then. I admit, I have contributed to Hallmark's mediocrity machine, regularly, for the past eight months. I had randomly discovered that they play M*A*S*H* re-runs from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., EST. I'm an intermittent insomniac who grew up on M*A*S*H*. When I first saw some of those old episodes for the first time since about 1982, the memory flood just felt good. My family watched it religiously. That and Taxi and Barney Miller were the shows in Chez Heffernan at that time. I can remember vividly the unusually high cackle from my father when Frank Burns, lost from camp and speaking into a dead walkie-talkie, desperately tells any would-be-listener to look into the night sky and locate the brightest star. He's directly under that one.

They aren't always funny. In a single episode you can sometimes see how humor has evolved in this culture of ours. But by and large, it's still great, and I haven't tired of it yet. Of course I don't watch every episode, but just knowing it's there is a strange comfort. I guess I have to thank Hallmark for that. Damn.

There's more in store, too. I Just learned a few days ago that the Hallmark channel is going to re-run one of my favorite programs of all time, Northern Exposure. Every weekday at 1 a.m. That's right about when I call it a day, so it'll be a nice thing to fall asleep to. To my knowledge, no other channel has re-released that diamond in a pit of coal. It gives me great pain to say, Thank you, Hallmark...

Labels: at home

I saw this on CNN.com. It's an Associated Press story. In a nutshell, a Northwest Airlines flight heading for its scheduled destination in Rapid City, South Dakota, landed at Ellsworth Air Force Base instead. That's strange enough as it is. But the captain ordered all passengers to “close their window shades and not look out.”

Now that's strange. I don't know about you, but if I'm on a plane and the captain “hems and haws” about what's taking place, and tells me to close my shade and not look out, I'm going to pretend to obey—maybe. Who is he to tell me I can't use the window I've rented? Did no one so much as peek? How could you not look? On whose authority would you assume it's your duty to not look? Did anyone look? If so, what did they see? Why didn't the Press ask simple questions like these?

Maybe it's just the military being careful. Okay, maybe. But why was the plane diverted, and why was the staff questioned for three hours while passengers sat and wondered and (hopefully) peeked? I find it hard to believe that the military would order passengers to close their windows and not look out just because they were (approaching or on) a military base. What were the passengers not supposed to see? I'm not even going to hazard a guess.

Maybe it was really nothing, but wrapped in an intriguing candy-like wrapper, so to speak. Maybe it was merely pilot error, and the military was just responding in a “what the hell is this” sorta way. Maybe the “don't peek” thing was just military paranoia. Or maybe it was smart policy for these terror-filled days, but in an odd context. I'm an Occam's razor type of guy, except when that blade is too dull. I'll go with pilot error and keep my eye out for an evolving story.

A safe prediction: This story will disappear as quickly as it arrived in the news circles, and there won't be any answers. But hey, at least CNN picked it up. I guess they've run out of news about Jennifer Lopez or Ben Affleck.

Update: Hey. I was right.

I hope I don't need to convince anyone that journalism is dead. I'm not interested in spending the kind of time required to assemble a timeline of proof. If you've paid attention to the news and trends in the media over the past, oh, decade at least...then you know what I'm talking about. I don't know what happened to journalism. I don't know what disease got a hold of it. But it's doornail dead.

Sniff the corpse:

Today, CNN decided not to tell us about a house-sized meteorite, the successful teleportation of atoms, and what the head of Shell oil has to say about climate change.

CNN does, however, tell us that the major headlines of the day include Madonna's new name (Esther), Kobe Bryant's defense team being allowed access to text messages, and yet another one of ABC's "Bachelors" has dumped his mate. Two months after telling the world that she was his destiny. Yawn then, yawn now.

And while we're all inundated daily with news about vacuous celebrities and irrelevant local-interest articles, whatever happened to this amazing, and amazingly uncovered, story?

It's dead, dead, dead.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the following headline on today's front page of CNN.com: Teacher washes boy's mouth with soap
Yea? So? What's more dangerous to children: coddling bad behavior and applying ineffectual methods of discipline, or a drop of soap in the mouth? Please tell me, won'tcha? Is there anyone out there who believes this kid is going to be irretrievably harmed by a little bitter taste and embarrassment? This is the same puss-ifying that removed dodgeball from middle and high schools. (Here's an idea: if a kid doesn't want to play, say 'okay' and provide options. Tough, this thought stuff.)

But that's not what really gets me. The story is doubly triply frustrating because it's from Rochester, NY. Home, to me. Not only am I embarrassed for the Rochester school system for their reaction (they're "investigating"...are you kidding me?), but once again, CNN. com is elevating a non-story to national importance. Yesterday the front page of CNN.com brought us news that Britney Spears hurt her knee. (No, I won't provide a link for that.) I'm used to seeing non-news stories on the front page of CNN.com—they've cornered the market on frivolous headlines. But to give this headline status is yet another low. This story doesn't merit attention outside of the teacher's lounge. What the hell has happened to journalism?

But back to the soap. When I was in fifth grade I said "shit", loudly. A biggish deal back then, hardly noticeable today. Within a few seconds I was being led ear-first by my teacher to the bathroom where she ordered me to open my mouth wide enough for her to cram in a full (fresh) bar of Ivory. She twisted it around and yanked it out. The bits of soap stuck in and between my teeth provided an effective reminder that stayed with me. She never had to do anything like that to me again.

Don't get me wrong—I do my fair share of cursing. I don't think there's anything wrong with "swearing" because, after all, they're just words (sounds, really) for which different cultures arbitrarily evolve an "official distate." But many of those words are damn effective. And "shit", in particular, is pretty fucking harmless. Anyway, did the soap experience damage my oh-so-tender-and-offendable psyche? Did it (or could it) do anything more than embarrass me temporarily? Embarrassment is, after all, the most effective deterrent to bad behavior at that age. No kid wants to be laughed at. But inevitably, at some point, every kid is. And it's an important and unavoidable part of growing up.

Would my teacher have been placed on Leave if the school had found out about it? This was the late 70s. How is it that mouth washing was run-of-the-mill pedagogy only 20 years ago, and now it's some shocking story that commands national attention? If there's anyone out there who feels confident calling this Progress in Education, whoo-boy, I'd like to hear from you. Don't forget to acknowledge that the school district handles these problems by suspending the kid for a week. That's right, they give the kid a free vacation from school. A nice incentive for a repeat performance. Meanwhile, the kid isn't in school, falls further behind, and the official policy of Lowered Expectations (Read: Idiot Production) rolls on. What ever happened to common sense, reason, and critical thinking?

There's hope, however:

"More than 40 relatives of children in Thomas' class have asked for her to be reinstated."

These people get it. The Rochester City School District lost it a long time ago.

My friend Tim Poulsen is an amateur astronomer with some PST. (Pretty Slick Tools.) He got up at 4:15 this morning to capture these great photos of the transit of Venus.

Says Tim:

I was very surprised that Venus was visible with the naked eye as the sun rose through the morning haze. Views through telescopes and binoculars were great, too. Venus will transit again in 8 years, and then not again for over 120 years. Until today, no one alive had witnessed a transit of Venus because the last one was 122 years ago.

I'm guessing that last fact made the hair on his neck stand at attention as he watched it pass. This is quite a bit better than watching Good Morning America.

For those who missed it, and most of you did, the long-gone 91 Argyle Street Web site was more than just a Web site that briefly enjoyed au courant status somewhere between 1996 and 1998. (Its URL was twogoons.com, but don't bother trying now. It's a squatter's junk "portal". Oy.) The 91 Argyle Street geekhouse might have been the First Blog. Well, okay. It wasn't. But it might very well have been the first Group Blog. We just didn't know it. And if Sherlock were to prove that it wasn't, then one thing is for sure: In the early days (1995-1997), it was the only Web site of its kind at that time. This isn't as bold a claim as it might seem. There wasn't much in the way of purpose.

In 1995, four guys named Todd, Brandon, Jason, and Andy lived in that house there on Argyle Street in Rochester, NY. [Side note: there was also Cindy, but she was just...Cindy. She was busy with (many) boys. And there was Bob for a year, and Bob was funny in his way but he was also a luddite—openly—and didn't care to participate. He also had a horribly annoying Parrot.] We all had the latest and greatest PCs of the day...if I recall, Pentiums running at about 66 MHz. Blazing speed, baby. They were all connected via Ethernet, in spite of some bizarre network card incompatibilities that were, in time, successfully sleuthed by our resident Übergeek, Jason.

I don't think any of us would care to reveal the number of hours we spent killing each other from our bedrooms in games like Duke Nukem and Quake, so we'll leave the tally at untold hours. We were 4 post-collegiate, single geeks fortunate enough to share the same sense of humor and a keen interest in that "new thing" called the Web. We had upstairs and downstairs refrigerators, both reserved for two things: beer and condiments. Todd was into graphic design and farting, Andy was the shy-but-emerging engineer, and Jason was and is one of those programmers that could probably build an application that could write a novel—if he just had the damn time.

If salad days existed, these were them. It was Sunday mornings at Nick Tahou's, an hour or so of recovery with cartoons or sportscenter, or (untold) hours creeping around digital corners to fire rocket-propelled grenades at each other and vie for the winning frag count, which was sometimes 20, sometimes 50, and sometimes (untold). Fridays at the Bug Jar was an iron-clad routine because they served the best music, the strongest drinks, and they had the hottest chicks.

There were historic parties, historic injuries, a rotation of couch squatters, three or four now-defunct bands, a lot of empty bottles, and not much in the way of housekeeping. One day Jason picked 4 of the least flattering pictures he could find of each of us, and the Web site was born. He quickly wrote a guestbook, which was actually novel at the time, and the engine of interactive inanity beganeth.

Those days, you could still hear some of the major publications and television networks refer to the Web as the "Information Superhighway". I have a vivid memory of the first time I saw a company's URL on the side of a delivery truck. We would chuckle at these sights, as if to say, "look at all these people just now catching on..." Only a year or so before this, having caught on meant you had Netscape 2.0 and you were beginning to tire of the dull gray background that every Web site had.

The guestbook became a global dialogue about nothing. We had visitors from all over the world, and our server stats were fairly impressive for that time. We all quickly became Web wonks—coding and tweaking and trying this and that and surprising each other with the newness and strangeness of our individual ideas and designs. Then the Web started growing and evolving faster than our little Hub O' Geekdom did. Mainly because we were enjoying what it already was and had never once considered it an ambitious endeavor. Our mistake perhaps.

We tried to facilitate a little growth and flexibility by moving to a more dynamic, ColdFusion-based site. Our "Incidentals" corner was popular—it was the bloggiest part of the site. In it, we each took turns—not often enough—spouting off about what's going on, and so on. By late 1998, however, we were each pulled in enough different directions that the positive creative chemistry started to wane. When Jason decided he wanted his own space (just down the road), it was like a key carboxyl being removed from a polymer: we ended up with a different substance. Collectively, we had always been slackers. When the chemistry changed, even the slack was different. It was more like neglect. It wasn't the new jobs or the new girlfriends or the new concerns that inevitably arise in life. Well it was, but it wasn't only those things. It was also the fact that the things that we would have wanted the site to be had already been done, right under our noses. We were just a little too early to the game.

We had gone from tens of thousands of new visits per month to about, oh, six. New stalkers stopped emerging, which was ironically depressing. We got on with other things. It wouldn't have been the same unless we were under the same roof, and we certainly couldn't live together forever. Everyone ended up getting married and buying houses. It was a natural progression. None of us have any real regrets about it for that reason. Just a collective, slightly wistful sigh...for days of auld lang syne.

I still have some of the old content. A lot of it is still damn funny. Some of it's funny but needs its proper context, otherwise it only makes sense to approximately four people. Ergo, Thingy will soon feature a sort of anthology of old content from the 91 Argyle Street geekhouse. I Hope you spend some time with it.

I'm hoping to find a few friends in affliction out there who can help make some sense of it. The phone rings, you answer. You find the nearest writing utensil and start doodling on the nearest napkin, receipt, calendar—whatever's available. In my case, these are never slow, deliberate sketches with purpose. They come from a certain zone—only half paying attention. They are drawn lightening-fast, I never know what's going to come out, and there's never any goal or design in mind.

It wouldn't be much of an issue if it didn't affect the integrity of my phone conversations. But as soon as I'm on the phone, my attention is divided. Not in half, but about 80/20 phone. But that 20% attention given to the crafting of an enormous underbite on a...I suppose it's a legged mollusk...is just enough to require the voice on the other end to repeat itself from time to time. It's not easy picking up every last detail of your friend's upcoming trip to Poland and prior availability to hang when you're staring down at something like this:

When I was younger I would write my signature over an over again—any onlooker might have concluded that I was either a narcissist or a budding young forger. It wasn't about legibility, it was about speed. Today, my cursive signature looks like an EKG reading. That evolved into obsessively writing individual words or phrases culled from the conversation.

There's only one thing that I think I understand about the ultimate progression from words to doodles which took place somewhere around 1993: Signatures and randomly repeated words will never produce a keeper. About one in five doodles survive. There are countless handfulls that I never see until I move and am forced to consolidate space in cardboard boxes. It'll be my legacy.

If you also have this problem, let me know. There might be a subconscious language in all this.

Labels: ponderage

Note: I found this in a folder I almost deleted, dated 12/5/01, the day George Harrison died. Thought I'd wedge it into ye olde archive.

George. Today I did something I never would have believed yesterday. I bought an issue of People Magazine, the same starfucker rag I've been lambasting for years. I pardoned myself on account of you being on the cover and all. I recall you once said, "How can I keep up around the genius of John and Paul?" Maybe you viewed them on a plateau for being as prolific as they were, but you're eye to eye in genius.

And I shudder at the word "genius" because shitheads everywhere have thrown it around so loosely it has devolved into something tantamount to "successful".

I could tell you that While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something, and Long Long Long are among the best songs ever written, this according to me. But I bet not even you would give a damn about that. What's more important is the intangible reason that I deliberately left your picture, cut out from the White Album's poster insert, on the back of my college dorm door the day I left. I Thought I'd leave something for the next guy to leave for the next guy—if the summer cleaning staff had any vision.

I've never read that this is the case, but I've always wondered if While My Guitar Gently Weeps is related to your aforementioned reference to John and Paul. It doesn't seem particularly encrypted. I understand you were reading the I-Ching at the time and the first words you saw when you opened it were "gently weeps", or so the story goes. But it's hard not to see the "I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping, while my guitar gently weeps" as a reference to John, Paul, Ringo, and George Martin overlooking your songs amidst the eclipsing John/Paul thing. I could be wrong, but that song always makes me sad for that reason.

Taking nothing from John, Paul and the others (how could I?), it makes me wonder if your ideas were discouraged at the outset, much like While My Guitar Gently Weeps itself was ignored, until you brought in Eric Clapton and replayed it.

I admit I never bought any of your solo CDs. Your later influences got past me a bit. I admit I didn't like the Wilburys much, and your 80's solo tunes went in one ear and out the other...but it's hard to compare all that to what you did with the Beatles. Those songs are all that was necessary to lift you into the canon. Sorry death came so soon, though I'm glad you were unafraid. You were always invisible to me, so it would be a hollow phrase to say that I'll miss you. But if I did, I'm sure you'd know what I mean. Bye, George.

Labels: tunes