Hokum

A collection of ephemera.

The end of the line

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether the day is coming when I stop performing music. The novelty of the experience is what gets a lot of people started, but the hassles of gigging out — and a general lack of talent — flush most players off the stage within a few months. Others will stick it out for a few years, often until they get married or other interests consume too much time. I’m a rare person: I’ve managed to keep it going for more than 20 years, with a few small breaks here and there. But there are times…

Take last night. The drummer had 40 bucks lifted out of a wallet he had left in a shoulder bag. The audience in the tiny bar contained perhaps a half-dozen hard-core alcoholics who literally were stumbling around the place. I got home at 1:30 a.m., reeking of cigarettes and sweat. The pick-up band of which I was a part played fairly sloppily; in the first set, it was all I could do to stay focused and not get angry. I was mildly hoarse this morning; I had the two-pack-a-day voice that I sometimes get after a gig. And, to quote Neil Young, I’m getting old; there’s less appeal in the concept of having my 46-year-old person in a bar at 1 a.m. on a workday than there was 20 years ago.

But a few good moments overcome a pile of bad ones. Non-drunk people were very complimentary last night; the staff seemed to like us; there were moments when we played quite well as a band. That’s what keeps me going. It’s just hard at times.

New again

My pile o’ electronic crap these days includes a refurbished Yamaha receiver, a refurbed pair of Wharfedale speakers, a refurbed Toshiba upscaling DVD and a refurbed ADS MediaLink streaming media box. New, that stuff would have cost at least $750. I paid under $300. Then there’s the refurbed video card (paid $75; was $150 new) and motherboard (paid $50; was $110 new) in my computer.

A lot of people won’t touch refurbished electronics. I love the stuff. Refurbed equipment often consists of returns that people suddenly decided they didn’t want or didn’t understand how to use. The equipment goes back to a manufacturer or a refurb center, gets testing that often exceeds the workout given to new equipment, and gets sold again at a fraction of its original cost.

In return, the buyer usually gets an awful warranty — perhaps 30 days instead of a year. But if we’re talking about electronic goods with no moving parts, a piece of equipment that works for a week is almost certain to work for years and years. The $40 Toshiba, which has a laser and a motor and so on, was a bit of a risk — but at $40, it’s also darn near disposable, particularly considering that it contained a HDMI cable (which often costs more than $40 on its own).

I often rely on Ubid, Computer Geeks or Woot for refurbed goods, or I go digging through the deep recesses of Newegg.com for computer stuff. I’ve been happy and lucky in this hunt — it’s not for everyone, but it can really pay off.

The game, Part II

My favorite television show is The Wire. I did a stint as a cop reporter in Little Rock more than 20 years ago, when the city had one of the nation’s highest per-capita murder rates and crack cocaine had just started making itself known, and I recognize all of the TV show’s characters — cop and criminal — from my days of covering police and courts.

The show’s fourth season just wrapped up, and it mostly showed how inner-city boys become criminals. I particularly admired its depiction of the hopelessness of these boys’ lives. In the end, only one boy beats the hand that is dealt him, and there is plenty of reason to believe that his victory is only temporary.

In the last episode, there’s also an easy-to-miss little appearance by Steve Earle, as the Narcotics Anonymous buddy of Bubbles the junkie. The Wire does stuff like that all of the time — Earle is an ex-junkie who did time, and other bit-part actors in the show have similar little-known ties (for example, the preacher who shows up now and again served decades in Maryland prisons).

There are so many subplots to The Wire that I won’t even bother trying to explain a few of them — in fact, there are too many subplots and a lot of good actors suffer as a result. But for my money, this is the best drama on television these days. A lot of coddled people won’t get The Wire, and a lot of people who are used to white-hat cops and black-hat criminals won’t like it, but it is a show that pays off richly if you’re willing to invest a little time in it.

P.S. — ‘The Game?’ If you watch the show, you understand the reference.

The game

In the last hours of the last day of the 2006 House session, members of the House ethics committee practiced a great Washington tradition: The Friday afternoon document dump.

At 2 p.m., the panel members came to a news conference, congratulated each other for a job well done and presented everyone with a dense 100- or-so-page report on Mark Foley, the ex-congressman with an eye for young male congressional pages. That report (here’s the pdf version) basically said that a lot of people knew what was going on with Foley and a few warned him to knock it off, but nobody really stepped up and pressed the issue until the darn media got tipped off. Hands were slapped, justice was proclaimed and everyone went home for the weekend.

The Friday afternoon bad news dump is a Washington tradition because 1)hardly anyone pays attention to weekend news, and 2)journalism outfits begin scaling back their staff sizes. This makes it harder to analyze documents and harder still to get anyone to pay attention. You almost have to admire the thinking, in a backhanded way.

The ethics panel added an additional twist I’ve never seen before (although people probably have done it): The PDF version of the report was scanned in as a graphic, not a document. What does that do? It makes it impossible to copy and paste the text into easy-to-email documents or easy-to-create web pages. If you want to put up the text of the document, you had to type every word of it — all 100 pages. That’s going the extra mile.