I found Mister Rogers

The Internet is magic. When I was 13 years old, I dug through some old vinyl LPs my parents had bought in the early '70s and came across this:
I love Mister Rogers; one of the titans of the televisual medium. So at age 13, I put this record on, laughed at it, then put it back in the closet. One year later, my family moved and the record was probably converted to suburban mulch, years before eBay made it worth an attempt at reselling

But for no apparent reason, one track floated through my mental transom every few months—under the guise of chipmunk fellow Cornflake S. Pecially, Fred Rogers himself sings "Looking for a Friend." I'd occasionally be curious to hear it again, but the album was light years beyond out of print, barely mentioned on the Internet.

But it was only a matter of time. A couple months ago, the song came to mind again, I fired up the Google machine, I found this page, and seconds later, I'd downloaded the whole album (as you can do yourself), and I finally heard "Looking for a Friend" again. I repeat: The Internet is magic.

The whole album is fucking weird. Mister Rogers may be God, but he sounds like a drunk God. And that particular song, "Looking for a Friend," is absolutely nuts. That instrumental break—a pretty snappy-sounding Dixieland jazz band going crazy—is interesting: The Neighborhood of Make Believe always had an interesting weirdness to it, but it was never this manic. Here:

Mister Rogers

I'm also amused by that other tune, "Three Rodents with Defective Eyesight." See, I thought I'd independently invented the concept for the Pop Music Thesaurus and the Movie Quote Thesaurus, but apparently it was Mister Rogers' influence all along.

Give in to the hype. GIVE IN!

I've begun Twittering. Don't get excited; I'm tweeting about once a day. I still don't completely see the fun/purpose of this, but I don't want to be that annoying last guy who picks up on a trend, the final holdout anti-Twitter guy six months after it becomes the dominant form of human communication. You know, like this guy or this guy.

So I'm trying. I like changing the status on my Facebook profile with some regularity, but somehow that seems less annoying and/or unnecessary. Also, I'm not much of a text-messager; partly because I have a Flintstones-vintage cell phone, partly because I'm a stickler for punctuation and grammar, and texting can be painful for people like me. (I exaggerate only slightly.)

But that brings me to an interesting observation: Part of my wariness with Twitter is that 140-character communication is not at all conducive to proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc. The more power Twitter has, the less power my people have. Yet ironically, the instruction text on the Twitter site itself is well copyedited. Consistent use of the serial comma, the conscious decision to lowercase tweet, use of the phrase 140 characters or fewer, an overall clarity of style that bears the graceful fingerprints of a talented copy editor. It's not perfect—I just spotted a missing period and an em-dash snafu—but it's surprising for a resource that is completely based on noncopyedited text.

Sometimes, it takes so little to interest me. Trivia, folks.

Face the facts

So today, finally, giving in to tedious peer pressure, I acquired that necessity of late-2007/early-2008 American citizenship, a Facebook page. Interestingly, while I'd been aware of Facebook for many years, until I plunged into the registration process, I had never even visited Facebook. I mean, since even before I became a MySpace lackey, I'd been there on a regular basis checking out the poor excuses for websites cobbled together by rock bands struggling and otherwise.

It's kind of shocking how quickly and massively there's been an exodus from MySpace to Facebook, considering that it's pretty much a case of "Meet the new corporate-hipster new boss, same as the corporate-hipster old boss." I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell would have something interesting to say about the changeover.

Anyway, Facebook seems handy to me and all, and please go ahead and make me your friend, or write on my wall, or join my group or whatever. But really, how is this any different from Friendster, which none of us have cared about for three years? And in 2009, what website will people be telling me I'm lame for not being on then? This culture is insane.