Tikkabik

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman: “The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.”

This cheeky and ultimately illuminating article was written by a British teenager who traded in his iPod touch for his parents’ old Walkman for a week. It’s interesting to me, because the Walkman was the first portable music player I ever owned.

It was a WM-1 model, which, contrary to its designation, was actually the third Walkman model produced by Sony. Similar to the one young Master Campbell used during his trial, but not identical.

It. Was. Awesome.

As I recall, my mother got it for me at Service Merchandise — a defunct retailer and catalog showroom store that went out of business early in this decade. We had a Service Merchandise store near our house, and I’m not sure what, if anything, I did to deserve the cassette player, outside of perhaps playing my music too loud on my boom box, and mom wanting some peace and quiet.

Anyway, I owned one for years, and gradually went through a progression of them. Eventually I’d migrate to portable CD players, and eventually even to MP3 players.

It went with me everywhere — to school, to my after-school jobs, on trips. It came in particularly handy once I dropped out of Stoughton High School and needed to commute into Cambridge each day to attend Manter Hall, my high school alma mater, though shortly after I started (in 1985 or so) I made the switch to CDs — first to a bulky Radio Shack model that consumed D-cell batteries by the barrelful, and then to a slimmer Sony Discman that operated on AA’s, just like the Walkman.

The WM-1 was indestructible, it seemed. While the ink on the buttons and the case wore off and even the silver paint wore to the point where you could see the raw plastic underneath, it continued to operate for years. I think it finally ate it after one-too-many hard drops to the pavement, but I recall that even after a few of those, you could still get it to work even if the door was busted simply by closing the door and hitting play — the tension of the cassette head would keep the entire thing together.

Anyway, good times. Back in the day when Sony produced quality personal electronics.

My first mining barge.

During my last trip to the grocery store I saw — for the second or third week in a row — that the celebrity magazines had Jon and Kate Gosselin plastered on their covers. The celebrity gossip shows and sites are all abuzz about how the couple has filed for divorce.

If you’re not in the loop, they’re featured in a reality-style television show called “Jon & Kate + 8,” documenting their lives as they try to raise eight children, including a set of sextuplets. I find the fact that these people have a television show — let alone a popular show — amazing enough. They’re entirely unremarkable people whose lives and personalities I find summarily uninteresting.

That they’re on the cover of magazines because of their crumbling relationship is even more remarkable to me. It’s certainly no revelation that America is a culture obsessed with celebrity. But it’s the type of celebrity we’ve become obsessed with that I find so remarkable. Andy Warhol’s post-modern ironic quip has really come true:In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

We’ve seen this repeated over and over again over the past few years: American Idol victors (and losers, like William Hung), reality show contestants (Richard Hatch, the famous naked gay Survivor winner), “Octomom.” The celebutants who are famous simply for being famous, like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, “Speidi.”

I’m not suggesting that it’s any better elevate celebrities on a pedestal, like the Hollywood machine would do 50 years ago when they created matinee idols.

But the celebration and worship of the mediocre — parents who have veritable litters of children, heiresses whose claim to fame are clandestinely-recorded blow-job videos, and pop princesses who reveal shaved pubic mounds to the paparazzi when they get out of limos — really don’t give kids much to aspire to, do they?

No offense to my friends and colleagues who have done this in the past few days, but tinting your Twitter avatar green as a measure of solidarity with the protestors in Iran strikes me as a pretty futile gesture.

I’m looking outside my living room window right now at the yard, which is being blanketed by a blustery drizzle. The temperature is in the low ’60s.

I have absolutely no complaint about the weather — I prefer it to be cool and wet, actually. I think I acclimated myself permanently to Pacific Northwest-style rain forest conditions when we spent two years in Seattle when I was four, and never really changed. That’s more or less “ideal” weather for me.

But compared to the June we had a year ago, it’s like night and day. June of ‘08 was oppressively hot almost from the start — I think we ran our air conditioners almost continuously from June through part of August. It was a boon for people who like “beach weather,” but for me, it was horrible. I couldn’t stand it.

Climatically, I know we’re all over the map right now — Seattle’s getting more sun than usual, Florida’s baking like the desert, and so on. But at the risk of sounding a bit self-centered, I wouldn’t mind if this entire summer is cool and wet.

The Frickin’ Minivan’s coolant problem has turned more severe, and it’s exactly what I said the problem was before — the coolant runs to the back of the van to feed a rear heater that runs in the wintertime to warm the back passengers.

Two pipes run the length of the van, under the passenger side, back to that rear heater core — a feed pipe and a return pipe, and they’re both connected to the rest of the cooling system, just as the heater up front is. As the engine warms up, so warms the coolant, and that coolant in turn warms the heater.

One — or both — of the pipes is leaking fluid. Previously I could only smell it as it evaporated, but now I can see it — it’s leaking out over the van’s rear axle and onto the ground. That leak turned from a drip into a torrent some time in the past couple of days. Now I *have* to bring it to the mechanic to have repaired. Not looking forward to it.

I took a vacation day from work today but didn’t hang out or go anywhere particularly fun, though I did have a good time — I spent from nine o’clock to about two-thirty i the afternoon at my son’s school, which had a “Career Day.”

I got to talk about being a video game reviewer, which interested practically every kid who watched it. It was a lot of fun to talk with the kids about what it takes to review games, and many of them were really interested.

It was exhausting, though — by the end of the day I’d done the presentation nine times. So much so, in fact, that I’d worn my iPhone dead (I was using it to remotely control the presentation).

Every so often, you’re in the right place and at the right time for something nice to happen. Yesterday, out of the blue, an old friend called and asked if we wanted to go on a cruise.

Turns out she had some extra tickets that had already been paid for for a benefit cruise around Nantucket Sound on the Vineyard Queen, and asked if we (or anyone we knew) wanted to come along for the ride. Bonnie and I didn’t have any big plans — neither, as it turned out, did our friend Lori — so we hopped on board.

It was a very pleasant excursion on a boat called the Vineyard Queen. During the daytime, the Vineyard Queen shuttles passengers between Falmouth’s inner harbor, about 20 minutes from our house, and Martha’s Vineyard, which is only a few miles from Falmouth.

The tour took us down the coast to Woods Hole, out to the Elizabeth Islands which lie on the southwest coast of the Cape, and then over the the Vineyard and back again. All told, it was about a three hour trip, and very lovely.

The weather was a bit cool — we all brought jackets, and went below deck after the sun went down — but there was a DJ, catering and pleasant conversation, and we even bumped into an old friend — Bob Tippo, the now-retired principal of the Quashnet school, where all three of our children have gone for 3rd - 6th grade.

I took some photos, which I’ll upload to Flickr before too long.

Last night I heard the excellent NPR radio program “Fresh Air,” hosted by Terry Gross. She always picks interesting interview subjects, and she’s had on Geoff Nunberg before. He’s a linguist and his particular specialty is the neologism. He’s written books like “Going Nucular,” “Talking Right” and “The Way We Talk Now.”

Last night Nunberg was on to discuss the subject of his newest book, “The Years of Talking Dangerously:” A study of the evolution of common English during the Bush Administration. Absolutely riveting stuff if you’re a word geek. The interview runs 20 minutes and I liked it so much I downloaded it.

At 16:46 Gross asks Nunberg about a teacher he had in grade school who would correct grammatical errors in a very sarcastic fashion. I firmly believe we’ve all had that teacher at least once, and depending on how you’re wired, he or she either makes you love or hate English.

For me, as for Nunberg, that teacher challenged me and made me love English (it was my 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Levitz, by the way, Mom) — that’s the teacher who gives you the fundamental mechanical skill to really appreciate language is used. But if you’re not careful, that teacher’s lessons can also poison you a bit. As Nunberg says, eventually you have to renounce, then forgive, that teacher’s lessons, in order to gain a mastery of the English language.

Nunberg segues into how Internet forum and blog grammarians — those wretched, hated people who insist on picking on niggling details about the writer’s use of language — are essentially stuck at that level of intellectual and emotional development.

The money shot: “If it’s really a source of self esteem for you that you know the proper use of apostrophes, maybe you should get out more.”

A-fucking-men, brother. Geoff Nunberg, you’re my hero. Some day a 50-foot tall golden statue will be built in your honor. Well, virtually, on the Intarweb anyway.