New Kensington PA.

Robin McKelle
Abracadabra (2008)

Any article that begins with “A gun collector who introduced several weapons into sexual play” is pretty much guaranteed not to end well.

Anything that happens after “three men had been smoking pot, drinking beer, huffing aerosol inhalants and having sex over a 12-hour period” is almost certainly not going to be something good.

Anyone who asks someone else “to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger to intensify his pleasure” is, in my view, somewhat unclear on the concept of pleasure.

This is why I don’t do drugs, in case anyone was wondering.

It was a cold and snowy night somewhere on 13 January 1996, but not in San Francisco. There might have been rain. I don’t remember. I might have been drunk. I don’t remember. All I remember is that sometime that night, I uploaded the first version of the website that became this one. Using FTP. And actual HTML files. And the URL had a tilde in it. It all seems rather quaint now.

What’s really frightening to me is that I’ve lived almost a third of my life since that night. What’s also frightening to me is the realization of how long it’s been since I’ve written anything of substance here.

All the same, thanks for sticking around. I make no promises that there will be a fifteenth anniversary, although there probably will be. The five year multiples are milestones, after all, and are hard to resist.

Who the fuck cares?

Seriously. Is the fact that another overpaid jock used steroids really newsworthy? Don’t they all use steroids? And even if the do, is there any reason I (or Congress) should give a flying crap?

However (and hear me out on this one), I do believe the current battle of the late night talkshow hosts is worthy of considerable attention. It’s not because I care about whether Jay or Conan (or Mark McGwire, for that matter) ends up being on the air at 11:30, but because this is about a significant change in the way one of America’s biggest industries does business. For those who haven’t been paying attention, a lot of people who know what they’re talking about are suggesting that this is an early sign that the commercial broadcasting model is starting to break down.

That’s what I was thinking, in fact, the moment I first read that NBC was essentially giving up on the 10-11 time last fall by giving it to Leno. I couldn’t believe it. I’m not at all surprised that it backfired, but I’m really alarmed that NBC is pulling the plug even though they have no real programming ready to take over the hour. It wouldn’t surprise me if NBC weren’t programming 10-11 at all by this time next year. Fox, The CW, and My Network TV already don’t–and never have.

Programming issues aside, though, I think the next year is going to bring at least one major surprise with respect to broadcast television. I don’t know what it will be, but when it happens, it should be recognized as the major business story it will be rather than dismissed as pop culture fluff.

Oddly enough, I’m bucking the trend by having gotten rid of the cable and the satellite. Local broadcast is all the TV I have now.