Curling up with a warm e-book

Last week was my birthday. Because most of my family was out of town, all merriment was postponed. My sister Karen called to find out how I celebrated my birthday. She was surprised by my response.

I went to the library and took out a book I'd been saving for my birthday, The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg.

Most people are surprised to learn that I enjoy reading more than almost anything else I can talk about in polite company. I'll read nearly anything: graffiti, cereal boxes, fine print on User Agreements, anything. I'll spend hours surfing the web learning about architecture, French Impressionist painters, Ernie Kovacs, nearly anything. I tell people I'm like a magpie. A magpie is a bird which will pick up tiny objects and bring them back to its nest. People who live in the country know better than to leave a window open without a screen, because a magpie will see an earring gleaming in the sun and fly in to steal it.

I was one of the earliest adopters of the Internet, and I understood it was the greatest invention of the 20th Century. I had not known how quickly it would dominate the publishing world, sucking away readers from newspapers and magazines the way a factory trawler wipes the ocean bottom clean. Had I known, I would not have been so overjoyed.

Although I spend hours on my iMac surfing the web, I have yet to fully embrace the world of portables including handhelds. I have a Twitter account, but I'm not a self-absorbed Jersey Shore denizen who believes everyone is interested in what I just ate or where I got my latest tattoo.

I spent a good deal of my working life in bookstores and newsstands. I loved the smell of the old oil-based printer's ink when I cut open a fresh bundle of newspapers. (I don't miss getting my fingers dirty.) I love opening a fresh newspaper no one else has touched, turning pages and folding them over, and then folding them in half again, lengthwise, so I can read it the way commuters do on the subway.

I came to believe some of the best writing was ephemeral; printed on cheap paper that yellowed and got brittle after a few hours in the sun.

Once the Internet took hold, I found I was only buying a newspaper to do the crosswords and sudoku. I'd read all the stories before I went to sleep and I got the latest before I hit the streets.

I wonder if future generations will know the intoxication I feel when I enter a used bookstore and take a deep breath of the intoxicating aroma of mildewing paper and decades-old tobacco smoke.

Talk to me: Kenn@KennFong.com.

Doing the Double

It was possible until a few years ago for professional drivers to “do the double” on Memorial Day Sunday and drive in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Charlotte 600. A driver would finish the Indy 500, hop onto a chopper parked on the infield and transfer to a private jet and fly to Charlotte, changing firesuits along the way. Then NASCAR spoiled the fun; exercising its muscle over the cluster#@$* that was IRL and Champ Cars by moving up the green flag of the Charlotte 600 to make that impossible.

Although it’s no longer possible for the drivers to compete in both races, their loss is the viewers’ gain. By narrowing the gap, NASCAR made it easier for racing fans to catch both races and then sit down to dinner with their families. On Sunday, like millions of other race fans around the country, I plan to do the double! (For me it will be a triple, as I will be recording the Grand Prix of Monaco at 4:30 AM and watching it later.)

For a long time, ABC (which has owned the rights to the Indy 500 the same way CBS owned the Masters) broadcast the race on a delayed prime-time edited racecast. This meant either embargoing one’s self to avoid learning who won the race (which was difficult even in the pre-Internet, pre-ESPN days) or surrender and listen to the Indy Radio Network live and then watch the race later knowing the outcome.

Besides being the first four-color daily newspaper, the USA Today revolutionized the special section. From the time it started publishing the special Indy 500 pull-out on the Friday before the race, I started buying it. They printed a full page with full-color illustrations of each car and a head-shot of each driver. It was a lot easier to follow the race when you had not only a list of the cars, drivers, numbers, and teams, but also full color illustrations. I took that page and cut out each car and pasted each to a file card. When the race telecast was still delayed, I would listen to the radio call at my kitchen table with the cards lined up in starting order. Then as the race progressed, whenever they gave a full-field list of the running order, I’d move my cards around to match the positions. When a car went to the garage, I’d turn the card so the image was upside down.

(Some years later, the USA Today added the Charlotte 600 to that section, with the same, full-color illustrations of each car, head shots of the drivers, numbers, and teams.)

I’d listen to the voice of Paul Page and his classic station break cue to the engineers at the stations on the network: “You’re listening to the greatest spectacle in racing!” (That was their cue to insert their local commercials and do the station ID.) I remember how he’d hand off the play-by-play to his reporters stationed around the track who would describe the leaders as they approached and passed their vantage points and then handed off the play-by-play to the next track reporter. I could almost picture the full grandstands at the Start/Finish line with the cars lined up in rows of three. Then Jim Nabors would sing “Back Home Again in Indiana” and we’d hear, “Gentlemen, START YOUR ENGINES!” That night I'd watch the race again, for real this time.

I no longer buy the USA Today the Friday before Memorial Day, prepare the index cards and shuffle them for lead changes and every ten laps. Now that I have the Internet, I can sit here with a hot dog and a Coke (of course!) and watch a leaderboard updated in real time using official scoring while I watch the actual race, live. (Thanks to the Internet, I met someone who has known Paul Page and Chris Economaki, and I secured his promise that sometime this weekend he’d shake Mr. Page’s hand and say “Thank you” on my behalf.) Although I get to see the race live and have access to more information now, I feel less involved with the race than I did when I was shuffling my cards around. Now I understand my friends who are a generation older than me when they tell me they felt closer to the action in a baseball game when they only listened. It forced them to pay closer attention.

I wish I could go back.

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Talk to me: Kenn@KennFong.com.

The cacophony of idiots

has a feature on its splash page today. “How should Japan avoid a complete nuclear catastrophe? Send us your ideas and we’ll run them past nuclear experts.”

In a lot of ways, the Internet is wonderful. But this is yet another case of the frivolous cacaphony of nonsense created by the vox populi. A lot of what I see on the Internet is like this. The small "d" democracy of the Internet gives license to anyone with a keyboard and a loud opinion, without the necessary common sense to go along with it.

Stop for a second... How do you think people get to be top of their profession in a hard science such as nuclear physics? By spending their days playing golf or watching Star Trek episodes? They work hard studying their discipline and we should respect that.

When I was working in an urban movie theater, from time to time there would be a story about how difficult it was for us to survive because of the competition from Netflix or the monsterplexes in the malls with 20 screens and ten different movies and free parking. I worked in a small, pre-WWI neighborhood theater with only four screens, surrounded by one-hour parking meters with the only free parking two blocks away in a dark lot under a freeway overpass littered with shards of broken autoglass on the asphalt. (A sure sign if you park here, some crack addict is likely to break into your car to steal your stereo.)

We were also losing business because our customers would have to interrupt their movie after 55 minutes to run out and feed their parking meter or risk a $40 ticket. Our city was using parking citations as a major revenue source, consequently they had parking officers constantly patrolling our neighborhood hunting for violations.

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❝Yet another case of the frivolous cacophony of nonsense created by the vox populi.❞

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It only takes one forty-buck parking citation for a customer to decide to drive half an hour to a mall theatre with newer, stadium seating, a dozen different features playing, and best of all, free parking so you don’t have to risk a parking ticket. Even if you’re careful, it means frequently checking your watch and then interrupting your movie (and the people around you) to go out, feed the meter and come back. Meanwhile you miss five or ten minutes of your feature.