Hokum

Over at The Paper PC blog, columnist Robert S. Anthony writes about the demise of Classic CompuServe. This is the old-school, text-based version of CompuServe, the first online service to get any kind of real public traction.

I signed up for CompuServe in 1983 or 1984. It cost $10 an hour and I had to call long-distance to get on (back when long distance cost serious coin). I sometimes spent $100 or more a month using the service at a time when I made about $13,000 a year. My Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem were the gateway to this online world, and I spent hours reading special interest sections or chatting with people.

In many ways, CompuServe was my introduction to the online medium. From there I moved to GEnie (the same sort of service but cheaper), then Prodigy, then AOL, and then I got my own Internet account in the days when the Web had not yet been invented and everything was done by text.

Soon came the Web, and then I got a job in the fledgling online journalism medium, and then 14 years went by and here I stand. But it all started with CompuServe.

Back in the day, I’d try to explain to my friends why I loved the service (or even what it was) and I would get the Thousand-Mile Stare in return. Some of those folks were journalists, and some of them now are ex-journalists, and I suspect that might not be the case if they’d paid a little more attention to CompuServe.

Yes, I have a media computer that runs on Ubuntu, and I have a netbook that dual-boots Ubuntu and Windows XP, but I’m still a Windows guy. I am one of those rare people who actually like Vista — it’s always run with rock-solid stability and no real lag issues for me — but I’m still glad to see a new (and so far, positively praised) Windows OS coming down the pike.

Upgrading to Vista cost too much money, as far as I am concerned, so I certainly wasn’t itching to drop down a hundred-plus bucks to upgrade to Windows 7. That’s why Microsoft’s news that it was taking $50 pre-orders for a Windows 7 upgrade made me happy.

Now, all I’ve got to do is wait until October for the box to arrive. Maybe I’ll be able to open this one, which was the hardest part of installing Vista.

For me, Hokum always has been a bit of a five-finger exercise. I don’t work very hard at writing blog posts — I doubt there’s a post on here that took me more than an hour to draft, and most were written in a matter of minutes — and with the exceptions of links on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I’ve never promoted the blog in any way. It’s just here so I can do a little writing for sport.

I bring this up because Hokum just surpassed 1,000 monthly page views for the first time in its three-plus years of existence and is likely to get about 1,200 views for June. That’s not a number I ever thought I’d see around here and it’s not at all bad for a personal blog, especially a personal blog written by someone of my generation. Thank you for reading!

I.

This is what it was like in Jefferson City, Mo. in 1969: The town was mostly segregated and edgy. There were the white townies and the black Lincoln University kids, and the latter group had rioted in 1968 when MLK died, and that didn’t exactly build up a reservoir of peace and love.

I was a white townie kid and I listened to white townie kid music…bubblegum rock, some old-school country, maybe The Beatles if they weren’t being too freaky. The LU students listened to…well, at the time, I had no idea what they listened to (it would be years before I discovered James Brown and Stax Records and the whole soul scene).

But the Jackson 5 changed all of that.

Everybody listened to the Jackson 5. Here was a family out of the Midwest — black, but that didn’t matter — and if you could sit still after you heard “I Want You Back” or “ABC,” well, something was just wrong with you. And then they got their own cartoon show, and started showing up on every 1970s variety show, and eventually started doing variety shows of their own.

And who the hell was that Michael Jackson kid? His voice still had its prepubescent highs, but his singing in many ways was pure old-school. When he sang love songs, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about from lots of personal experience.

=============

II.

This is what it was like on MTV in 1982: The network had come out of nowhere to rule the music world by showing music videos 24/7. People my age watched it for hours and hours. And almost every featured artist was white.

Michael Jackson planned to change all of that. He recruited Eddie Van Halen — just as Run-D.M.C. would soon recruit Aerosmith — to draw the attention of white rock fans like me. That riff and solo in “Beat It” were among Eddie’s best work, but they weren’t even necessary to drag in White America.

“Billie Jean,” which came out first, was that good.

You heard that beat and it didn’t matter if you couldn’t dance and listened to “hair bands” all day. You were hooked. You went to a club, you heard that beat and you started looking at your feet because they were dancing in place.

Michael Jackson soon was MTV. He even had his own Beatles-on-Sullivan moment, moonwalking on a Motown anniversary special that everybody watched. People didn’t quit talking about it for weeks.

===============

III.

This is what it was like for most of the 1980s: There was Michael Jackson and then there was everybody else, way back in the weeds. Good Lord, he got so big that he even purchased The Beatles’ back catalog. Sure, there were reports that he was flaking around the edges, that his best friends were a tiny kid and a chimpanzee, that he was sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. He even married Elvis’ kid for a while.

But musicians were supposed to be weird. I thought Jackson was weirder than most only because he could afford to be weirder than most. I mean, really, who was weirder in his heart of hearts: Jackson or Billy Idol? Jackson or the Thompson Twins? Jackson or Morrissey?

===============

IV.

This is what it was like after that: People cared less and less about Jackson’s music, and worried more and more about his predilection for young boys.

He had an interview in 2003 with 60 Minutes that upped the squick factor to a whole new level. I watched as he repeatedly told Ed Bradley he saw nothing wrong with sleeping with a bed full of boys.

“When I see children, I see the face of God,” he said. You wanted to buy him a ticket on the Clue Train and walk him to the station.

And then came the inevitable arrest and the trial and the acquittal and that whole mess, and then he took off for Bahrain and it was hard not to feel good about that.

===============

V.

This is what it was like at the end: First, I was surprised to hear that Jackson was living (and died) in Los Angeles. I assumed he had decamped for good. Second, he was working on his comeback concert, a development that would have neatly given him the classic rise-collapse-and-resurrect career arc enjoyed by so many artist/sinners over the years. And third, according to TMZ, he was using a whole lot of Demerol.

The reaction to Jackson’s death was immediate and predictable, and I’m expecting the immediacy and predictability to continue in upcoming days. And while I’ve never been a big fan, it’s still worth remembering: For a long time in the music world, there was Michael Jackson, followed by everyone else.

Now that Ed McMahon is sitting on the Great Guest Couch In The Sky, I want to ask this question. It stems from a conversation I had with some of my younger colleagues earlier this week.

You get older and things hit you in the strangest ways. Example: A visitor to this blog dropped me a comment the other day, reminding me of the summer of 1980 — the greatest summer of my life and the summer we both spent working at Camp Billings in Vermont. That was such an adventure for me, on multiple levels — not the least of which was because I met Ralph Lawrence, who everyone called “Uncle Ralph.”

I was between my junior and senior years in college in 1980. I had grown up in a small-to-middlin’ Midwestern town, never had been more than 500 miles from home in my life, had never seen the ocean, spent the previous summer pouring tar for a road crew and was not about to do that again. I wanted an adventure.

One of my college suitemates had spent the previous summer working in a summer camp in upstate New York, and he suggested that I try to find a similar job. I saw an ad on a summer jobs board at college, looking for counselors to work at a YMCA camp in Vermont. I applied and, to my shock and surprise, I got a job editing the camp newspaper, working in the office and helping out as a handyman. I also had to help take care of a cabin filled with a dozen or so 6- and 7-year-olds.

After a two-day bus ride to Vermont (airlines were regulated in those days and cost a fortune — even a bus ride was $100 in 1980 dollars, or about $350 today), I arrived at the camp — in the middle of nowhere, on a beautiful lake. With the exception of two hard-drinking cooks (who met me at a flag stop and promptly hauled me to a bar), I was the first person to show up to work at Camp Billings that summer.

I helped open the camp as other counselors drifted in from all over the country in subsequent days. When some of them found out I had never seen the ocean, they hauled me across New Hampshire to bring me to Hampton Beach. I could see nothing but people from the north to the south when I got to that beach, but the concept of a body of water that stretched all the way to the horizon was completely foreign to me. I’ll never forget it.

Shortly after that, I met Uncle Ralph. He ran the place and already had worked there for more than 20 years. For thousands of people, Ralph was Camp Billings and he might have been the kindest person I had ever met. He was a natural at the job, and he knew everyone and easily connected with children in a remarkable and personal way.

The summer was wonderful. Much to my utter shock, I found I was fairly good at handling a cottage full of children. It didn’t hurt that the other counselor in the cabin was a longtime camp veteran who gladly showed me the ropes. Since I worked in the camp office, I talked to Ralph almost every day and watched as he dealt with desperately homesick children, parents who passed him rubber checks, recalcitrant plumbers who were sick of unclogging toilets filled with pine cones, and so on.

I had to leave camp early that summer — college in the Midwest begins earlier than it does in the East, and I had to help publish the first edition of the campus newspaper — but on my last night, I was talking to some of my kids when Ralph appeared. He pulled me aside and asked me to come back for the summer of 1981. That wasn’t something he did lightly, and I knew it.

There was nothing I wanted to do more, but I also knew I would graduate in May 1981, and I was fairly sure my parents would kill me if I worked in a camp that summer instead of starting my professional career. I told him I’d think about it, but even then I knew the likely outcome.

I’ve been back to the camp once since then — in 1991, when I crossed over from New Hampshire after covering a Bill Clinton campaign event. It was in the fall and camp was closed, but the place looked the same as I remembered it, with the clock tower in the middle of the campus and the beautiful lake in the background.

After the blog visitor dropped by, I visited the Camp Billings website today and found out that Ralph died last winter. The camp had a memorial service for him earlier this month.

He was the camp’s director for 38 years. I knew him for all of 10 weeks and I still can’t get over how much I admired him and how I still miss the camp he ran. It seems impossible that he’s gone, and the many testimonials on the camp’s website let you know that I am far from alone in the way I feel.

My wife and I are about to buy a used truck from its former owner, and there are a lot of (mostly online) steps you can take to make your life easier. I thought I’d pass them along. Here’s how we did it:

1. The set-up: My wife has wanted a little truck for a while. She has a company vehicle but is only allowed to drive it to/from work, so she’s been stranded at home in the afternoons until I come home from work. Strangely, this bothers her — and a little truck really would come in handy for us, so I supported this concept as well.

2. When we felt we were in good enough of a financial position to buy the truck for cash, we started shopping. I used three primary outlets to search for a truck online: Craigslist, Cars.com and Autotrader.com. All three take ads from dealers, although most of the Craiglist dealer ads come from small-lot outfits that I wanted to avoid.

3. Since my wife is almost certain to drive it less than 10,000 miles a year, I didn’t want to spend too much money on a truck — but also didn’t want a ‘beater.’ I started searching for Ford Rangers, Toyota Tacomas, Nissan Frontiers and Mazda trucks (which are basically Ford Rangers with a different grill) that were less than 10 years old with less than 100,000 miles on them, at a maximum cost of $7,000.

4. We purchased a one-month Carfax.com subscription for $40. Carfax lists the history of major repairs, sales, etc. of almost all vehicles. Thanks to Carfax, we discovered some dealer-lot trucks that might have been title-washed, were rebuilt from salvage after being declared ‘totaled’ in major accidents (in one case, twice!), had questionable odometer readings and so on.

5. As it turns out, Craigslist gave us the best leads. The first truck we pursued belonged to an owner who was leaving town for a week (why would you advertise a vehicle for sale and then leave town?). The second was a 2002 Ranger with 72,000 miles. A quick check of Edmunds.com and Kellybluebook.com indicated his price was in an appropriate ballpark for a private sale.

6. My wife called him up; she said he was a straightforward guy who was just seeking to sell his vehicle and buy a new one — he used the truck as a daily driver — and she went to give the truck a test drive. That went well, and she and said the only problem that she saw was a cut in a sidewall of a tire — which I knew would mean the tire would have to be replaced.

7. We made an offer contingent on a mechanic’s inspection. Now, this used to mean that you’d have to get the vehicle to a garage, which was inconvenient for both you and the seller — but no more.

8. We hired Carchex.com to send an inspector *to* the vehicle, go through it and give it a test drive of his own. It cost $150, and within two days, we had a detailed online report about the vehicle, complete with a list of minor problems (the aforementioned tires and the paint, which is scratched and will need some reconditioning). Included with the report were more than 60 (!) photos of the truck.

These reports are really useful. When you’re negotiating with someone over a sale and you point out a potential problem, it can get personal. Sellers get tired of whining tire-kickers, or they have too much personal pride in their vehicle and have a hard time looking at objectively, or on rare occasion are simply trying to rip people off and are willing to get personal to do it. Having an inspection from a third-party mechanic helps calm everything down when you get to this stage of the deal.

The inspector pointed out the paint issues, almost all of which I felt I could resolve with a weekend’s work, and said both front tires would have to be replaced. Actually, for a seven-year-old vehicle with more than 70,000 miles, those are minor problems. We reduced our offer by a few hundred dollars, pricing in the cost of replacing tires, and the seller accepted.

Now we have to close. This requires going to the seller’s credit union because he’s got a little bit of loan to still pay off. We made sure the credit union, as well as the seller, knew we were coming to do this — and we’re ready to go. Hopefully, by Monday afternoon, the truck will be ours.

Over at Evanston, Patrick opines that existentialism is the only reasonable philosophy for a journalist to follow when covering the Nats. He offers compelling evidence that the Post’s Nats beat reporter, Chico Harlan, is using existentialism as a form of insanity prevention.

Good for Harlan — I think that if I had that beat, I’d have jabbed out my spleen with a rusty fork by now — but let me offer a corollary. There’s a scientific theory that explains the Nats’ performance on the field this year: Chaos theory.

An outfielder chasing a routine fly ball, losing it, turning it into a double, spiking the cutoff throw into the ground? Chaos theory. Routine ground ball hits third base, ricochets into center for game-winning double? Chaos theory. Uniforms that say ‘Natinals’ on them? You know the answer. The entire Nats bullpen? Mega-chaos theory.

Central to chaos theory is this: In a chaotic system, you just can’t make precise long-term predictions. You can illustrate this by thinking about the plot to the classic movie The Fly.

In the movie, a fly slips into a teleportation chamber just as a scientist is using himself as the subject of an experiment. Everything seems OK at first, but soon, the scientist turns into a horrible vomit-spewing fly-man mutant. The fly — the element of chaos — blew all of the carefully calculated physics right out the window.

Now think of the Nats’ vaunted “Plan.” It’s in shambles now. The general manager is gone; the manager’s days are numbered; there are lots of questions about the ownership; there’s no clear stream of good players coming from anywhere; the team could become the biggest single-season failure in baseball history. That’s chaos theory writ large.

At a smaller level, any fly ball headed toward Adam Dunn is an experiment in chaos theory. As a fan, you sit there and wait for the horror and think to yourself: Blinding lights? A sudden cramp? A random bumblebee? Vietnam flashbacks? Who knows?

The white elephant status of NatsTown — remember, the neighborhood was supposed to become an urban wonderland instead of the continuing home to a concrete plant, a transmission shop and a whole fleet of garbage trucks — can be attributed to chaos theory. Who knew the economy would turn to cinders and prevent us from having our own little Wrigleyville?

Chaos theory. It explains everything. The Nats are using chaos theory to become the destroyer of worlds. Well, at least they’re good at something.

I’ve never been a jazz person. I listen to some jazz but I find most modern jazz to be “musician’s music”…music that is played primarily to demonstrate an individual musician’s chops. Inevitably, this boils down to a musican showing how fast he or she can play. Instrumental wanking for personal fulfillment is not my idea of the purpose of music.

But I love Dave Brubeck, and I specifically love “Time Out.” Now, I will grant you that this is like Wimpy saying he loves hamburgers. Any real jazz fan will tell you that this doesn’t represent any real musical taste, because everyone loves “Time Out,” but this is the album that pulled me –and millions of others — into listening to at least a little bit of other jazz.

I bought it when I was in my 20s, at a time when my musical tastes were changing and I was devouring albums by the dozens, but this one didn’t get my usual play-it-a-few-times-and-store-it-away treatment. I still have it in my digital collection and usually keep it on one of my portable players.

It has its share of difficult playing. The time signatures are unusual, with waltzes (in jazz?) and of course, the 5/4 time that made “Take Five” one of the most famous jazz songs of all time. And there are some sneaky-difficult passages…not difficult as in “fast,” but difficult as in “challenging.”

Underneath it all lies irresistible melody after melody. Modern jazz fans claim that the music’s triumph is in its ability to deconstruct a melody and put it back together. To me, though, jazz simply deconstructs, leaving behind a pile of rubble. I’m of the Chuck Berry school: “I’ve got no kick against modern jazz/unless they try to play it too darn fast/and lose the beauty of the melody/until it sounds just like a symphony.”

“Time Out” is older than me, and I’m not young. In fact, it just reached the 50th anniversary of its release. NPR has a bit on that.

A blogger makes a convincing case that 30 Rock “is a rip-off of The Muppet Show.”