I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

I remember when my hometown library first replaced the trusty old card catalogue with a computer version. I looked up - fittingly enough - books on computers, and I discovered that the system had three related categories: One was just "computers," another was "electronic computers," and then there was "digital computers." Of course, "electronic computers" only rules out the abacus and Charles Babbage's difference engine. But "digital" includes all modern computers, save for some curiosities. So essentially the three categories are the same, and if you're looking up a book on computers, it could be in any of them, you have no idea which.

I bring up this tale from the library of the nineties because I'm amazed at how often the same sort of problems come up. No, not in libraries, but in stores.

You'd think that a modern e-tail store would be able to do better than my nineties small town library. After all, they have decades more technology, millions more in their budget, and they only have to categorize a limited selection of products, not all of humanity's knowledge.

But still, they have the same inability to clarify things. Similar to that nineties librarian, whose classification system was technically correct, but worse than useless, they have difficulty classifying their wares in a way that helps people find things.

Again, I'm having difficulty shopping for an external hard drive. Hard drives can be internal or external. They can also be solid state or, um, the spinny kind. So you'd think I'd just have to make my choice on those two dimensions and look at what fits the category. But often there are weird, imaginary dichotomies, like they have categories for solid-state drives or external drives. So if I want a solid-state, internal drive, I don't know where to look.

(And this is fun: when I typed, "spinny" into my phone, it interpreted it as "spiny" and suggested the hedgehog emoji.)

Another weird aspect of that early computer catalogue were the dates. See, on a lot of old manual typewriters, there were keys for digits "2" through "9," but no "1" key, since that was identical to the lower-case "L" in the old Courrier-like font they used, and apparently keys were incredibly expensive. So I would occasionally see that a book was published in "l985," because it was typed by someone who was still used to those old typewriters. Those entries must have been fun for anyone who had to search for a book by year.

But even today, we're at the mercy of whoever types in the information, just hoping they get it right, and are consistent. When I was looking for the game controller previously, I found Walmart had only four Xbox controllers. Actually, they have hundreds, but there were only four where the underpaid stock boy who enters the info had bothered to add the Xbox tag.

And when I went looking for earbuds, I found that when filtering the brands, there was an entry for "Sony" and another for "SONY" from someone who must have thought it was an acronym. Or I suppose the problem could have been they just didn't know their caps-lock was on, but that just adds to the 90's computer system ambiance.

I'd like to think that we will eventually build up a better understanding of how to organize things. Like maybe once databases are as old and commonplace as that card catalogue was to the librarians in the l990's. Maybe then the understanding will be so innate that people will just naturally organize things in a nice efficient way, and when I'm shopping for my nanobot farm, I'll only have to think "indoor nanobot farms" into my neural interface, and not worry that it will exclude the new transquantum nanites just because the warehouse cyborg entered them separately.

Ink’s Awakening

You know what’s weird? I never got used to symmetrical nose piercings. See, as a kid in the seventies and eighties, piercings never strayed from the earlobe, unless you wanted to completely leave society behind. Then in the nineties, people started piercing the side of the nose. That was pretty unprecedented in western society, but I thought it looked good. Some time around the turn of the century they moved to piercing the middle part of the nose, and I never could get used to it. I’d like to think that there’s some aesthetic principle at work here, but more likely, it’s just the old fact that adults aren't able to accept new ideas that the kids come up with. If that is the case, it’s a strange example, since middle-nose-piercing became common only a few years after nose-side-piercing, which would imply that I went from open-minded free-thinking youngster to grumpy and intolerant adult in the short space between the two trends.

To be clear, this is just the gut reaction I have. I realize there’s no good reason that one type of piercing is acceptable and the other isn’t. I don't look down on people because of piercings, I'm just being honest about my emotional reaction, and hoping young people will understand that it's a nonsensical habit cast years ago, now continued unconsciously and with some regret. Same with putting two spaces between sentences. I know it makes no sense; but I had to learn to do it to pass typing in grade nine and now I can’t stop.

Tattoos had a similar story. In the nineties, tattoos started getting wider acceptance, but people were just getting small tattoos. Again, this was something I found easy to accept. And then tattooing went from a minor accent on the body to something you turn your entire body over to. Again, this came after I became an adult.

So there're still some aspects of tattoos that I  struggle with. First, tattoos don’t fit the person. I mean, the stereotype of the person. You know, everyone has a picture of what the heavily tattooed person looks like. And yet, so often it’s their polar opposite who has the full-back skull tattoo peaking over their neckline. I’m used to seeing large tattoos, but less-so when they’re peaking over the neckline of a conservative sweater, rather than a Slipknot T-shirt.

And this leads us to the odd fact that the need to conceal hasn’t gone away. In my previous post about tattoos, I referred to the nineties trend of small, easily-concealed tattoos to let people feel badass without anyone actually seeing that you have a tattoo. What’s weird is that people still place a value on the idea of tattoos you can cover up. The difference is that we’ve gone from a tiny tattoo on the ankle that can be covered with a boot or a sock, to a full-body tattoo up to the neck that can be covered by a full set of clothes. But the principle remains bizarrely the same. That's a commentary on today's society: we want to stick it to the man, as long as the man doesn't find out.

Of course, there are people who bravely cross that threshold and get a tattoo on the side of the neck or back of the neck, or maybe behind the ear. But  there’s still an aversion to tattoos around the face and front of the neck. Yes, there are a few who cross that line, but they're rare compared to the total number of people who have tattoos. Mostly, the parts of a person we interact with are off-limits. I’m sure there’s some cognitive scientists who could explain that because we see faces in a different way than we see others objects, we prefer to avoid artificial changes to that area. Or it could be that the face is the ultimate uncoverable place. If it's on your arm, a long sleeve will cover any embarrassing testament to an ex, or The Bloodhound Gang, or the Sega Saturn or something. But the face is the ultimate commitment.

And the fact is that people aren't really committed to anything that much. Another thing that hasn't changed is that people want a tattoo, not a tattoo of something. In another old post, I mentioned that a big reason I have no tattoos is that there is nothing I’m so dedicated to that I would want it permanently on my body. But that clearly doesn’t stop most people. There are so many tattoos of generic things that it’s clear that they want a tattoo, and the subject matter is less important to them. I suppose that's a strange commentary on our society too: people want to make a public, life-long commitment to something, but they aren't sure what.

Mmmall Mmmemoirs

Today I was looking through news headlines and I was surprised to see a Toronto Star headline, "The Rise and Fall of the 90's Muffin." That intrigued me, because it combines two favourites of mine (the 90's and muffins, that is; not so keen on rise-and-falls.)

It turns out to be the story of the MMMuffins chain. If your personal journey through time and space hasn't taken you near that name, I'll tell you that they were a chain of muffin shops, predominantly in malls, in Canada, through the 80's and 90's. If you haven't heard of them, I'm sure you can think of a similar example of a chain that used to be ubiquitous but is now gone.

The chain is, surprisingly, not completely out of business: according to their website, they have precisely two locations left, one in Toronto, one in Montreal. Also strange about that: they have a website. It looks kind of weird to see an older name with "www." & ".com" around it. Just watch:

www.k-tel.com

www.fotomat.com

www.pan-am.com

www.americanmotors.com/gremlin

www.ptl.org

www.coleco.com/cabbagepatch

And that leads to my realization: stores can come and go without you even noticing. They're sort of like TV commercials. Sometimes I'll be watching something recorded a few months ago and I'll catch one of the commercials and be like, wow, where did you go? You were everywhere and then, boom, nothing. And I didn't even notice.

It's hard to believe, but entire store chains can disappear from consciousness, like MMMuffins. I'm pretty sure that at least once in the last twenty years, I asked myself, "hey, what ever happened to that MMMuffins place?" But on the other hand, I didn't even notice The It Store was gone until a few years back when I saw it on a Facebook meme of stores that have disappeared. They used to be a regular mall feature, now they're so forgotten they don't even have a Wikipedia entry.

So let's spare a thought for some of the chains that have disappeared unceremoniously from our malls:

Randy River

Northern Elements/Getaway

Big Steel Man

Bata

Thrifty's

Cotton Ginny

Coconut Joe

Lewiscraft

Leasure World

Direct Film

Smart Set

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Who Sells Out

I'm not really comfortable when the music business mixes with advertising. I lived through the alternative music era of the early nineties, when any musician not busking for the money to eat was considered a sell-out. Of course, the pendulum swung back the other way, and by the end of the decade, people were congratulating Moby for licensing all 18 tracks from his album Play. The pendulum hasn't swung back to anti-commercialism again, so we're still in an era when there's little consequence for musicians selling their soul to the ad biz. But even if fans and journalists don't punish artists, there are still some things to consider.

Level 1

Selling your song

This is when you let someone use your song in an ad. This seems like a harmless thing to do, and in the modern world, it's probably the best way to get your song heard. The problem is that the ad will now be by far the number one way people hear your song. So it's no longer your song, it's the song from the Nissan commercial.

This used to be considered selling out, but it's now acceptable to anyone not hanging on to their 90's flannel. The argument in favour of selling your sing for commercial use is that you have the song, what harm does it do if you let someone else user it? My response is to ask, how sure are you that selling this song won't influence how you write your next song? Which brings us to...

Level 1b

Selling your next song

X Ambassadors really cashed in when they had the luck to write a song called "Renegades" just as Jeep was introducing a new SUV called the Renegade. I wonder how many struggling bands have started reading the car mags to find out what models are coming soon.

This is also the level Fitz and the Tantrums are going to for their song, "HandClap," which is quickly infecting stadium playlists everywhere. I mean, it's great that it's displacing DJ Casper's "Cha Cha Slide" who's "Everybody Clap Your Hands" soundbite has been a crutch for hack stadium DJ's for years.

Level 2

Letting them change the lyrics

At this point you're really tarnishing your song's memory, since you're making the song literally about the product. This means that people will forever hear the commercial version in their heads when they think of your song. This still happens to me for "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" (Minute Maid) and "I Can't Help Myself" (Duncan Hines) even decades after those ads were on the air. My point is, you only resort to this when you are truly done with the song, and never expect that you or anyone else will use it for its original intention ever again.

Level 3

Changing the lyrics to something completely different

A few years ago I heard them play "Your Love" at a baseball game. It's one of those songs you know you've heard, but you can't place it, so I had to look it up on to identify it. It's by The Outfield, which I discovered is a British band, even though they're named after a baseball term. That's weirdness I can appreciate.

But in the Glee aftermath you're allowed to like eighties music as long as you pretend you're only liking it ironically, so the song has a huge value to advertisers. That's how "Your Love" becomes a baseball anthem, and how advertisers get interested in putting it into a commercial, thus looking hip and appealing to old people at the same time. But by allowing an ad to re-write the song to tell the story of a loser with a wrinkled shirt to sell Bounce sheets, the song becomes a punchline.

At this point, you're not merely damaging the song, you're turning it into a joke. I can talk about "Sunshine of My Life," and you may remember it as a great song, as long as you don't try to hum along with Stevie Wonder and find yourself singing about orange juice. But once your song is a punchline, people can't even remember the existence of the song and take it seriously. To put it another way, changing the lyrics is like killing the song, this is like killing the song and then erasing all evidence it ever existed.

Disaster Area Is On Larry Sanders Tonight

I've always found it interesting when there is some sort of media within media. I mean things like Itchy and Scratchy, which is a fictitious show within the Simpsons universe. It just seems kind of sureal when pop-culture has to look inward and create fake versions of itself. I mean, Itchy and Scratchy is probably better remembered than many actual TV shows, even though it never really existed. It was a great satire of American cartoons, but it's also fascinating when they do a bad job of creating the fictional media, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. That often happens when they need to create a musician that exists within the story. You can read about plenty of them in the Rocklopedia Fakebandica.

I had that experience recently while watching a Frasier rerun. There was a brief scene with Dr. Crane dealing with noise from his upstairs neighbour, who turns out to be a rock star, I believe named Johnny Chainsaw. It's kind of surprising he'd have such problems, since people have speculated about how preposterous expensive his condo must be, given its spaciousness and perfect view of the Space Needle. I assumed that such expensive digs were immune to these mundane troubles.

But there were plenty of unrealistic aspects. For one thing, the music was rock, and it was coming through fairly clearly; as someone who's had troubles with loud neighbours I can tell you that it's really only bass that gets through building materials, particularly with dance and hip hop. But it made me think about how rock was depicted in 80's and 90's sitcoms. It was always shown in a very superficial way, only used for cheap jokes about noise or uncivilized teenagers. To be clear, I wasn't expecting a backstory about the upstairs neighbour. And no, I wasn't expecting a nod to the Seattle Scene, as that wouldn't really fit with the show. Though strangely, that's the first time I've ever realized how weird it is that the city's two claims to 90's pop-cultural fame were so different. Great, now I'm going to be thinking about that all day.

But back to my point: this isn't the first time I've encountered this sort of vague, inaccurate depiction of rock in other media. In particular, there seems to be a specific type of rock that never existed anywhere outside the imaginations of Baby-Boomers. It's a kind of atonal blending of punk, glam, and heavy metal that clearly exists for no reason than to annoy others. Of course, the interesting aspect to this fake rock is that it tells us how older people saw the rock of the 80's and 90's. It was kind of a vague vision of unfocused rebellion, with no notice taken of the variations or nuances.

I don't know if early rock got a similar treatment from the media of the 50's and 60's. I haven't seen many episodes of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners; did they have references to the music young people were listening to? The impression I get is that in that era people preferred to ignore what they didn't like rather than address it or even ridicule it.

Also, I haven't noticed a similar approach to hip hop in recent decades. I guess that's because traditional sitcoms are fewer and farther between. And because it's harder to work it into shows that are dominated by white casts. Too bad, that would have been fun to watch white writers creating a fake rapper every few seasons.

Things The Twentysomething Me Would Never Believe About Life In The Future

It will take over twenty years for them to make a miniseries of the O.J. trial.

Okay, to be exact, there were a couple of made-for-TV movies earlier, but that just doesn't get across the sheer scale of the trial. And I found out O.J. Simpson is Kim Kardashian's godfather. Did I already know that and just block it out?

It's Gotta Be Da Symbol

I remember when the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies entered the NBA and choose their names, they were congratulated by marketing experts. The reasoning was that by choosing animal names, they could easily create a nice recognizable logo that could be put on all kinds of products. Remember, this was the mid-nineties, when Michael Jordan was at the height of his fame, and every teenage boy on earth had at least one item of clothing with the Chicago Bulls logo on it. These marketing experts believed that the Bulls' marketability was due to their colourful, recognizable, easily reproducible logo.

That was the point I realized that most of the self-appointed experts commenting on things in the media are idiots. Really, they expected us to believe that the ubiquity of that symbol was due to the bull himself, with no credit apparently going to that Jordan guy, or the Nike marketing machine.

...and upside-down, it looks like an angry robot reading a book

But there is something to be said for a symbol's ability to, you know, symbolize. I mean, I'm sure the 90's Bulls could have used the poop emoji as a logo and still would have sold a billion shirts and hats, but that's assuming it's a recognizable poop emoji. If a team has a plain, forgettable logo, its hard to convey their fame and adoration into merchandise sales. As an example, the New York football Giants and San Francisco baseball Giants have both won multiple championships in recent years, but their lack of real logos have prevented them from becoming popular on clothing.

This all came to mind recently because the Raptors - in their latest attempt to turn the page on their sorry franchise history - have adopted a new logo, and it's a basketball with the seams shredded, presumably by a Raptor's claws. So rather than show the raptor, it shows indirect evidence of the raptor's presence. It's clever. Not quite Hartford-Whalers-negative-space-H clever, but pretty clever. But the point is, the logo doesn't have a raptor, the distinctive aspect of the team. Those marketing experts from twenty-years ago would be horrified.

I'm not really sold on it either. It's nice and simple and reasonably attractive, but not real distinctive. As many fans have been pointing out, it looks quite reminiscent the symbol of the Brooklyn Nets, who are not only a hated rival, but also one of the ultimate how-the-hell-do-we-get-a-logo-out-of-this nicknames.

I've found a number of fan-made logo proposals on the net from the last few years. Some are amateur, some urge new nicknames altogether (especially reviving the "Huskies" name.) But some are actually pretty good. Good enough that I'd choose them over the new logo.

Back To The Dystopia

Information Superhighway. Bet that phrase takes you back. It's now old enough that it's become "retro-futurism," a past vision of the future, akin to Airstream trailers or The Jetsons.

Buy what a lot of people forget (or never knew) is that the phrase "Information Superhighway" didn't originally refer to the Internet. When the Internet was first entering the public consciousness, causing people to consider the civilian application of multipurpose information transmission, they assumed that some new version of the Internet would be built with the public's needs (and size) in mind.

Of course, the public internet never got built. More ordinary people started using the actual Internet, entrepreneurs started seeing up shop there, and it would have taken years to get government and corporations to agree on the format for the new system.

But I wonder what that consumer Internet would have been like. I'm sure it would have been a nightmare. Consider who would have made it:

• Media corporations that were just waking up to the power of intellectual property and the threat of piracy.
• The Clinton administration, which was desperately trying to look business-friendly, and ham-handedly trying to deal with the inconvenience of modern encryption.
• The Gingrich Republicans, who had adopted business-is-good-government-is-bad as their new philosophy.
• Technophiles, whose libertarian ideals were even less pragmatic than today.
• A public that was far less technically savvy, including youth that were much less reliant on modern technology and communication.

So we would have ended up with an internet with copyright protection and surveillance built in, no opportunity for public participation, not even a hint of net neutrality.  I'm betting a lot of what we now see on the net would be different: Startups would be difficult on a net built for large-scale broadcasting.  Innovations that started off with legally-questionable origins (like digital music) never would have happened.

Even though I believe this purposely-designed Information Superhighway would have been much worse than the haphazardly-evolved one we ended up with, I still wonder how we could have designed it better. The fact is, the Internet and its basic services were designed under the assumption they'd be used by a few thousand people in academic and corporate settings in the western world. For instance, if you knew e-mail would be available to everyone on earth, you would have designed it to discourage the sending of millions of messages at once. Perhaps you could also have made a better balance between anonymity and anarchy in online discussion.

This is purely an academic exercise of course; if we were to overhaul the internet today, it would, once again, end up as a corporate and surveillance-state wonderland. I suppose there was a moment in there, say around 1991, when netizens might have realized the Internet was going mainstream, and rebuilt things in preparation.

Why am I thinking about this? I saw a recent story about people implanting microchips in their bodies for identification or information storage. A promoter of this technology made a similar point: we can either initiate this technology now, on our terms, or get forced into it by rules dictated by government or business.

Warping Time And Taste

When the portal from the Nineties opened up on the street in front of me, I eagerly anticipated what could be sucked through into the present. A quaint relic of the early Web? A long-lost Nirvana single? Some day-glo clothing?

But no, the only thing to come through that hole in space and time was a car. Here it is:

Still No Love For Bismarck?

So the latest premium-cable show that everyone is going to talk about (whether they've seen it or not) is Fargo, more or less based on the 1996 movie. That plot didn't really lend itself to an ongoing story, and this is apparently just in the same setting and style.

I'm kind of surprised. Not just because it's been so long since it first came out, but also because it doesn't seem to be as fondly remembered in the pantheon of nineties movies. Personally, I thought at the time that it was overrated. It wasn't a bad movie, but it seemed like it was jumping on the post-Pulp Fiction violent-thriller bandwagon, and mostly carried by Frances McDormand's excellent performance. The movie was regarded at the time as a masterpiece, but its reputation has faded to the point it only gets three stars in the newspaper TV listings.

But now it is back, sort of, without that character that everyone remembers, and starting guys from England and Arkansas in the Midwest. And I thought the accents were annoying in the movie.

I would watch the opposite of this show; that is, bringing back McDormand's character but removing everything else. But I probably won't watch this show, unless it's out of curiosity as to how they'll drop a woodchipper reference. But here are some nineties movies I would watch a TV series of:

• Pulp Fiction: The Early Years
• The Shawshank Redemption - you thought Andy and Red were an odd couple in prison, wait 'til you see them running an accounting firm together.
• The Truman Show - seems like a natural for TV
• Office Space - you wanted another season of The Office?
• Pretty Woman - revisit the same couple twenty years later.
• A Few Good Men - remember, it was about lawyers at Gitmo; it'll write itself
• Run Lola Run - it'll be really cheap; you just do the same story over and over
• Titanic - takes place in the decades between the movie's present and past time periods.
• Fight Club - you could focus on one of the Project Mayhem cells, and make lots of Men's Rights Activist jokes.

Changing Clothes

Apparently the 90's are back. I noticed a months ago when I passed a clothing store and realised it was completely day-glo. This after all the day-glo material in the world had disappeared, except for that little bit the Seattle Seahawks have on their uniforms. So congratulations, Seahawks, you not only won the Superbowl, you've also lived out the male fantasy of keeping clothes long enough for them to come back into style.

And I recently saw an article about the Hypercolor shirts, the ones that changed colour depending on their exposure to heat. At the time the workings of the shirts was a mystery to us all, but now such secrets are just a web search away. What old mystery will the Internet ruin next, showing us how The Noid was animated?

Hypercolor shirts weren't that great. They really just looked like moody tie-dye shirts. Of course, now that I write that, I suppose it was apropos for the times. But it seemed kind of disappointing for the latest in clothing technology. About the only time you saw the shirts do anything interesting was when you could see the outline of a chair on someone's back when they stood up. I suppose you could have done some interesting things on conjunction with the Magic Bag which came out around the same time, but we weren't that clever.

Here's the question I did have about Hypercolor shirts at the time, and I would have asked on my blog then if such things existed: why would you want people to know how warm you are? You pay money for deodorant so that people won't know that.