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A half-hour into the season opener for "24," and if you're TiVoing it or waiting for the West Coast airing you won't want to be told that





















Former President Palmer and Michelle Dessler buy the farm within the first ten minutes.

On the bright side, the Idiot Daughter hasn't shown up yet. It's only a metter of time.

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I finally did it- after suffering through Norton Anti-Virus and the way it slooooowed my system down, I swallowed hard, crossed my fingers, uninstalled the whole mess (and, yes, it requires several rounds of uninstalling and deleting) and installed NOD32.

The initial reaction, based on a single day of use:

1. Everything is a little faster. Retrieving e-mail is a lot faster. The system isn't laboring as hard- there isn't nearly as much going on in the background.

2. Norton was supposed to automatically update every day, then they unilaterally changed it to weekly (see, my version, which came with the computer, was 2004, and they want to sell you 2006), and it wouldn't even update weekly- I was constantly having to manually update the virus definitions. NOD32 checks every hour and has already updated a couple of times.

So far, so good. I guess I'll feel that day until a virus seaks through, but so far it works. It's still amazing to me, though, how Norton went from must-have in the old Norton Utilities days to awful today.

'Course, I coulda bought a Mac.

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Well, so much for the "I'm going to write something every day this year" promise.

The ironman string was broken Tuesday when the ambulance came to carry me to the hospital with a torn esophagus. After an uncomfortable three days in lockdown, tethered to an IV and not allowed to eat or drink anything for much of the stay, I was released today and am grateful enough for the favor that I will not even mind the upcoming oatmeal-and-farina diet too much. (I'm lucky I like the stuff, actually)

Anyway, to those who sent along their concerns and prayers, thank you. I'm OK now, shaken but happy to be back home where I can get more TV channels and Internet access and stuff closer to the definition of "real food" than the World's Saltiest Broth (flavor undetermined) and Weird Jell-O-like Dessert (flavor undetermined) and I can take a shower. Okay, so it's not paradise, but it beats where I spent most of the week.

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The L.A. Times has a commentary this morning about the final demise of the independent record store, and it's the usual boomer lament for indie stores gone away, the good old days when you'd find a pristine copy of a rare throat singing album buried in the 99 cent pile. I remember those days, too, and I have my list of record stores in which I used to root around for treasures.

The article carries the subhed "Independent record stores still offer things the Internet can't," and goes on to describe what that is:

I am old-fashioned enough to want to get out of the house once in a while, into real three-dimensional spaces stocked with things you can see and smell and pick up and turn over to see what they look like on the other side.

Proust had his madeleine, but nothing unlocks the seven volumes of my memory so much as handling some LP I bought when I was 13 or 14 years old. There are those of us for whom music is a fetishistic activity, in the primary meaning of fetish: "an object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers." Can one fetishize an MP3 file? I haven't been able to yet. (You can fetishize the player, as Apple accountants can attest, but that is a different thing.)

Er, so what we're losing is the ability for some aging hipster to get a woodie over touching a record?

Yep.

And what we're ALSO losing is the attitude. Remember when you wanted to buy a record that was totally unfashionable, and fearing the wrath of the grad-student-for-life behind the counter, the sneer directed at you, the need to mutter "it's for my cousin" or some other lame, forced explanation? Remmeber when ALL the clerks at every indie record store were variations of Jack Black in the movie version of "High Fidelity"? How you felt like judgement was being cast upon you from on high, even though the clerks were really losers who wielded their eclecticism like a weapon (the only one they owned) against the oppression of bourgeois American society (that would be you)? (And isn't it interesting that the same music that was anathema to those clerks is probably prized by the same people today, albeit in that annoying combination of forced-irony and I-liked-it-all-along revisionism that rock snobs always carry?)

All of that is gone now. Now, you can buy whatever you want whenever you want it. You can hear things first, get recommendations without the supercilious attitude, buy just one song if that's all you want. And you can do that without a) leaving home, and b) filling your living quarters with stacks and shelves and crates of albums and CDs. So you can't look at the cover, feel the vinyl, flip through the little lyric booklet. I miss some of that, but when it comes down to reason, the physical manifestation of music was a waste of space. We have crates and shelves packed with our old CDs and records, and it's really for nostalgia's sake; unlike books, which to date beat any electronic replication of the reading experience for portability and clarity, music might as well be offered without packaging. The packaging may be a separate art form, but one that's outlived its usefulness, just as a beautifully designed buggy whip doesn't mean we need to preserve the buggy whip or even lament its passing from daily use.

So I, too, have fond memories of independent record stores. I even enjoy the experience at L.A.'s branch of Amoeba Records, the mega-indie that's poised to be the last one standing. But we don't NEED independent record stores anymore, and there are more good reasons for them to go away than there are for them to stick around. I'll let the L.A. Times extend the funeral if it wants, but, really, it's time to get over it and move on.

(Although without records, we wouldn't have had this)

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