Before there was Spotify, there were jukeboxes

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18

I saw something a while that I hadn’t seen in years: a jukebox. I don’t mean one that plays CDs. I mean a real, honest-to-God jukebox that plays 45 rpm records.

We were a ways outside Nashville, and we’d stopped for lunch, and I knew there was a real jukebox as soon as I walked in and heard Alan Jackson singing “Little Bitty.” I knew it, because the song sounded grungy and a little wobbly, like maybe the band had been out partying too late the night before and hadn’t quite sobered up.

Old jukeboxes sound that way because of bad speakers and because of the records themselves. I know guys who wear that vinyl sounds better than CDs or MP3s, but I don’t think anyone would defend the 45.

When I was 14, I got a job as a disc jockey (it was a small town, and there was only one station), and I don’t think there was a lot of quality control when it came to 45s. You’d pull a 45 out of the shuck and it might be a little warped, or the hole in the middle might be a little off-center, so even new records sometimes sounded bad.

On top of that, a record dies a little every time you play it. When the needle rides along the groove, it erases a little of the music. The sounds start to fade, the highs and lows giving way to a murky middle.

That’s the sound I heard when we walked in the restaurant.

“Look at this!” I said.

The jukebox had a window, and I wanted Things 1 and 2 to see how it worked, how pressing A-6 makes the mechanical arm slide down a rail until it finds the record you want and grab it and hold it upright against the turntable, but they couldn’t have cared less.

We were the only ones there besides the owner, so I played whatever I wanted – some Brooks & Dunn, some Alan Jackson – and I suddenly remembered the peer pressure that goes along with playing a jukebox.

When I check Facebook, I see what my friends are into on Spotify. I know, for example, that my friend, Andrew, has a previously undocumented weakness for Daryl Hall & John Oates.  

Well, when you play a song on a jukebox, you’re telling everyone within earshot, friends and strangers alike, who you are.

Every song you play on jukebox is a statement, and there is absolutely nothing as embarrassing as pressing the wrong buttons and playing Barry Manilow instead of the Boss (which I did once, back in high school, when a buddy and I were at Pizza Hut).

You hear a lot today about social media, of sharing your likes and dislikes with your friends online. Jukeboxes let you do that, too, one quarter at a time.

Photo by Anonymous Account (Flickr)

First, they came for the Cougars…

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In case you missed it, a Utah school system says it won’t use a cougar as the mascot for a new high school at least in part because it might make people think less of a fierce predator and more of women in their 40s who like younger men.

I’m not making this up.

According to a story in Education Week, the superintendent says his office has heard from “parents and patrons … asking us to reconsider the inclusion of Cougars as a mascot option,” and some of them “have commented on the negative double entendre of the word ‘cougar’.”

I can understand people with strong religious conventions being offended by having a devil for a mascot, and I completely agree with the drive for teams with Native American-related names to pick another mascot, especially when the name is patently racist, like the Washington Redskins. I can understand a team wanting to call itself something that sounds proud and strong, like the Chiefs or the Braves, but this is the 21st century, and Washington’s NFL team really should know better.

I think, though, we’re crossing a line with the Cougars.

If you can’t use the Cougars out of deference to Courtney Cox, we’re going to have to retire a lot of other team mascots, such as:

  • The Angels/the Saints, because it might offend Satanists.
  • The Pirates, because it might offend the movie and record industries.
  • The Eagles, because it might offend record-store clerks and rock music critics.
  • The Huskies, because it might offend heavy-set guys.
  • The Chargers, because it might offend advocates of fiscal responsibility.
  • The Tigers, because it might offend Amy Chua.
  • The Trojans, for obvious reasons.

Someone, please build this: the zero-gravity roller coaster

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18

There’s a point on all roller coasters when you crest a hill and, for a heartbeat, you’re weightless. It’s the reason we ride coasters.

Well, I saw a story the other day in Popular Science about a new kind of coaster where you’d be weightless for eight seconds.

Count it out: one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi….

Eight seconds of weightless would last forever.

Right now, the zero-gravity coaster exists only on paper, but according to Popular Science, there’s a company in Southern California called BRC Imagination Arts that’s ready to build it. Cut them a check today, the story says, and you’ll have your coaster by next Christmas.

BRC isn’t some fly-by-night outfit. When I worked in newspapers, I covered the theme-park industry, and I met BRC’s founder, Bob Rogers, a few times. He’s whip smart and really clever. BRC’s worked on everything from the Test Track pavilion at Epcot to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. These guys know what they’re doing, and if Bob Rogers says he can build a coaster where you’re weightless for eight seconds, I believe him.

Here’s what he told Popular Science about the proposed coaster:

You’d sit in a capsule rather than an open car, so there’d be no wind and no visual cues telling you you’re moving. You’d be strapped in, but loosely.

Superman: Escape from Krypton

The track would be shaped like a giant letter “L.” You’d rocket along the track then curve straight up, like the Superman coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain (see picture).

You’d climb at about 100 m.p.h., and as you neared the top, the capsule would slightly but suddenly decelerate. You’d be thrown out of your seat, like a stone from a slingshot, but the capsule would instantly match your speed.

You would, in effect, be floating inside the capsule.

After a moment, you’d begin to fall, but so would the capsule, matching your speed on the way down and eventually slowing so that you settled back in your cushioned seat.

By the coaster came to a stop, you would have experienced weightlessness for eight long seconds.

If you were to fly NASA’s “Vomit Comet,” the plane the space agency uses to train astronauts, you would experience weightlessness for 25 seconds.

Popular Science says ordinary coasters cost about $30 million but BRC’s zero-gravity coaster would cost $50 million, which sounds like a lot — heck, that is a lot — but Disney spent a reported $100 million to Expedition Everest at Animal Kingdom a few years ago. Fifty million dollars to a theme-park developer is nothing.

I have no idea whether when or whether anyone will actually build BRC’s zero-gravity coaster. I have no idea whether it’s a smart for untrained civilians to be subjected to eight seconds of weightlessness.

But if someone builds it, I’ll volunteer to test the thing, as many times as it takes.

The trick to bowling the perfect game: Lie about your score

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7

Bowling ballThis is a true story. It happened years ago, before I was born, but I know my dad, and I take him at his word.

Dad was a bowler. Today, you don’t know how to keep score to bowl. You roll the ball, and computers do the rest. In the early-60s, though, you kept score by hand. You placed a scoresheet on a table with an overhead projector, and it was projected onto a screen so everyone could see it.

One time, Dad decided sit out, but he kept score, and for no particular reason, he wrote his name last on the scoresheet. He kept everyone’s score, and when he got down to his name, he marked an “X” on the scoresheet, meaning he’d gotten a strike.

He did that for 9 straight frames. He wasn’t trying to cheat. His friends knew he wasn’t really playing. He just did it. He thought it was funny, like he could bowl 9 strikes in a row.

Then he noticed a crowd gathering. People had noticed the score on his screen and thought he really had bowled 9 strikes in a row and was about to bowl a perfect game.

His friends noticed the crowd, too, and played it cool.

When the scoresheet showed it was Dad’s turn, he stood up solemnly and picked up one of his friends balls and tried to act like a guy who was trying not to act nervous.

No one said a word.

Dad took a deep breath and bowled.

Dad was a decent bowler in his day, but that night, he was just OK. He knocked down 7 or 8 pins.

Everyone in the bowling alley groaned.

They thought he’d missed his chance to bowl a perfect game, and Dad, God bless him, tried to act like a guy who’d just blown it.

He managed to play it straight until he got to the car, when he and his friends finally laughed about it.

Without cable, the kids discover their television heritage

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I wrote something the other day about how we’ve become a family of cord cutters. We don’t have cable or satellite. We have 19 local channels and Netflix and Hulu.

One of the neat things about this is that the kids don’t end up defaulting to the bratty-teens-talking-down-to-adult shows on Disney. (God, how I hated “The Suite Life  of Zack and Cody.”)

Instead, they’re finding some shows they probably would have missed, otherwise.

I introduced Thing 1 (the 11-year-old) to “Fat Albert,” and that led her to “The Cosby Show,” which she watched until Rudy grew up and they brought in Raven-Symone as the replacement cute kid, Olivia, which, I think, is when a lot of people started tuning out.

Over the holidays, Netflix had a special category of Christmas-themed episodes, which led Thing 1 to discover ”Malcolm in the Middle,” which is a lot more demented than I remember, but in a good way.

Sometimes, though, she finds shows on her own.

I was in the kitchen the other night when she yelled, “”Hey, you know, ‘The Twilight Zone’ is pretty good!”

Thing 2 (who just turned 6) tried watching it with her and gave up. He yelled, “This doesn’t make any sense!” Of course, they’re both right. “The Twilight Zone” is pretty good, and it doesn’t make any sense.

Thing 2 is more into old “Spider-Man” cartoons and “Speed Racer,” and he likes “Fudge,” which is a better-than-you’d-think kids sitcom from the early-90s based on the Judy Blume books about a tweenage boy and his 4-year-old brother, Fudge.

Eve Plumb plays the mom, and Florence Henderson is the grandmother, so, hopefully, that’ll be a gateway to “The Brady Bunch,” once it finally turns up online.

I like that the kids are finding these old TV shows. Some of them are pretty good — seriously, check out “Fudge” — and it’ll give ‘em a yardstick to measure new shows against.

Hopefully, when the time comes and they’re exposed to the next “Suite Life,” they’ll see it’s crap and turn it off.