And she messaged back: “You have to shut it off in a certain way.”
And I messaged: “What way? Do I press the two buttons?”
“Which two buttons?”
“Well, there’s one on the bottom of the box where the screen is. And there’s one on the thing the screen sits on; I guess it’s called the ‘table.’ I’ve never touched those buttons, though. I’ve left my computer on, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for years. I never turn it off at night. I just let it ‘rest.’ And in the morning I sign on, and I start typing these brilliant columns. It’s a miracle, don’t you think?”
She messaged back: “The ‘table’?”
Then the computer people changed their minds. Or their microchips. DON’T TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTERS! they said in another urgent system-wide message: “Please remember to sign off and close out all of your applications. But leave the power on.”
I messaged Nancy: “My applications? I’ve already been to college. [Insert drug joke here.]”
She messaged back: “Click on ‘File.’ Click on ‘Sign Off.’ DON’T PRESS THE BUTTONS!”
Within seconds I got a message from Don, the computer czar. The message said: “Don’t press the buttons! I’ll be right there.”
(He must have been reading my messages. They can do that, you know. There is no privacy. In fact, they’ve been inserting suggestive lines in this column when I haven’t been looking. Probably to get me fired.)
Get a load of the RAM on that cute new server! Wouldn’t you like to download some of that, humma-humma!
Don showed up and looked at me like he was examining a Cro-Magnon Man.
“You don’t use e-mail?” he asked.
“No.”
“You don’t use the Net? You don’t link?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You don’t do anything with your monitor?”
“Um, I monit?… Look, for years I thought a hard drive was two hundred yards over water.”
He told me to go home. Put on my eight-track. He’d take care of the Y2K test for me.
“Will my computer be on when I come back?” I asked. “Because I don’t know how to rebeat it.”
“That’s reboot it,” he said, sighing. “Yes, it will be on when you come back.”
I smiled.
From what I understand the great Y2K fear is that we’ll all go home on December 31, 1999, and when we come back to work on January 1, 2000, all the computers will have exploded.
I can’t wait.
It’s the Shame Old Songs
I have one word for you.
Just one word.
Karaoke.
Make it go away.
I know karaoke has been around for a while, but last Saturday was my first confrontation with it. I was at a birthday party for a couple of friends who were turning … hmmm, how can I say this delicately? Well, let’s say they were turning a number that rhymes with “pixty,” and by this time next year, I fully expect them to be dead.
Now I am no spring chicken myself. In fact, if I were a chicken, I wouldn’t even taste like chicken—I would taste like mutton. But what is it about otherwise reasonable people that makes them think they can sing along to old rock songs? What makes a guy in his pixties think that because he can read the words off a prompter to “I’ll Be Doggone,” he will sound like Marvin Gaye? When in fact he sounds like the Enola Gay? Without oil!
Is it the margaritas?
Because believe me, they can’t sing along.
They are blackboard-scratchingly bad. They sound like sheep being microwaved.
And the women always want to sing along to the Supremes. They always want to do “Stop! In the Name of Love,” when all you’re begging for them to do is: Stop! In the name of God!
Here is what karaoke does: It encourages people who have no musical talent to shriek into a microphone that amplifies the fact that they have no talent.
And once they get their hands on the microphone, they don’t stop.
They do medleys! It’s horrifying. It’s like watching your grandparents neck.
The last straw was a guy doing karaoke to the Eric Clapton song “Wonderful Tonight.” I wondered how horrified Clapton would have felt if he had heard it. It would have probably driven him to take up the bagpipes. It’s unthinkable that Clapton ever imagined that people at the age of pixty would be standing around a pool butchering his songs in the name of karaoke.
Karaoke must stop.
Excuse me, Tony, it has stopped. The only place it exists anymore is at birthday parties for pixty-year-olds. Nobody else would be caught dead doing it. It is self-indulgent to the point of nausea. Speaking of which, I know that you will be shocked—shocked!—to learn that Kelsey Grammer’s MacBeth closed after just thirteen performances on Broadway. Kelsey Grammer’s Macbeth. Who could resist that? “Out, out damned spot. You see, Niles, this is what happens when we let Dad buy a cheap Zinfandel, and Eddie knocks it over.” What’s next, Drew Carey’s Richard III?
I understand the impulse to perform at a party. You figure: I’m among friends. How bad can I be?
Does the phrase “Neil Young in a hot skillet” mean anything to you?
Everybody wants to sing. Everybody knows someone who has gotten up at one of these karaoke things and, to the amazement of the crowd, has sung a classic Sinatra love song, like “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” in a tenor so warm and so perfect that the room grows still, except for the small, aching sound of tears being cried by the most beautiful women in the room. Everybody knows (and hates) a guy who can sing like that.
But it’s not you, you dope.
When you sing “It Was a Very Good Year,” you sound like a garbage disposal.
Some of us have the good sense to know that. My friend Nancy was at the party, and fearing that as the night went on she would grow bold enough to try karaoke, she said to her husband, “No matter what I say or do, no matter how I plead and beg, DON’T LET ME GO UP THERE AND SING!”
Nancy used to lip-synch to “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes. But, of course, that is not actually singing the song out loud. “My girlfriends and I could lip-synch every song from the girl groups of the ’60s,” Nancy said.
“So could I,” I told her, then quickly added, “Well, what I mean is, I knew the girl groups as well as the guy groups. I, um, used to keep the radio on when I lifted weights and changed the oil in my car—and every once in a while there’d be a Shirelles song, and I’d make fun of it because it was just a bunch of stupid girls who didn’t sing nearly as good as, you know, Johnny Cash.”
My friend Tracee did more than lip-synch. “I used to play my sister’s records and pick up my hairbrush like it was a microphone,” Tracee said. “I did this whole show called Tracee Sings. I was great. I did ballads, then up-tempo songs, then some show tunes. I had choreography. I had stagings. Stagings! But I had the courtesy not to do it when any member of my family was home.”
I, myself, have made the awful mistake of singing out loud. I do each year at Super Bowls. A group of sportswriters gathers around a piano played by Mitch Albom, who was doing this on Super Bowl Eves long before he committed his Tuesdays to Morrie. In fact, I am one of the stars, because I know the words to every song from the ’60s. Yes, every song.
Example: In 1985, the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, and because they were led by Magic Johnson, one of the sportswriters thought it would be nice to quote from the 1965 Lovin’ Spoonful song “Do You Believe in Magic?” But no one remembered the words. So my friend Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News called me at home and said, “Do You Believe in Magic?” and I rattled off: “… in a young girl’s heart, how the music can free you whenever it starts.” And I knew all the words up to “It’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll.”
And ninety guys had columns.
So because I know the words I get to sing. But my voice is awful. I have actually cleared the room. I am like Renuzit.
There will be fondue!
Surviving Y2K
Can you believe those dopes who’ve spent the past six months preparing for the Y2K disaster—as if some stupid computer programming error is going to mean the world will be plunged back into the Stone Age? Give me a break. At the very worst, we’ll go back to, what, 1969? I can live with that. There was that bad brown acid at Woodstock. Otherwise, it was a pretty good time. What I can remember of it.
So I did nothing about Y2K.
Then I looked at the calendar. Six days to go.
And it hit me: I’d done NOTHING!
I haven’t bought a gun. I haven’t learned how to gut and skin wild animals. And I haven’t gotten enough cash back from my Discover card to purchase night-vision goggles. So now I’m panicked. Because all I can do is fill up the bathtubs with water—and I keep forgetting why I have to do that. What am I going to do with all that water, poach a whale?
It’s probably too late to become a survivalist. All the really good tents are gone by now, and I look so dorky in overalls. (I asked Man About Town Chip Muldoon what he thought I would need to survive in the woods. Chip said, “A satellite dish, because they don’t run cable out there. And one of those eternal-burning logs because it rains a lot and regular logs get too wet to burn.”)
Just to do something, I bought five gallons of water and ten cans of tuna. And I went to the bank and got $500 in fifties.
“Why fifties?” my friend Nancy asked me.
“In case I need eggs,” I said.
“I’ve got twenties,” she said. “I’m sure I can get eggs for twenty dollars.”
“Not if I’m offering fifty dollars,” I said.
Nancy had panicked about Y2K long before I did. She’s like Grizzly Adams. She loaded up on firewood, water, candles, batteries, gasoline, and propane for her outdoor grill.
She smiled triumphantly and said to me, “Your Ronco Rotisserie won’t work if there’s no power. You’ll have four chickens sitting on a spit going nowhere.”
Nancy also has “camping” food. She explained: “It comes in a brown paper bag, and it has a rip cord. You pull it, and the contents heat up before your eyes. You can have white bean soup in an envelope.”
White bean soup? I wouldn’t eat white bean soup in an envelope if it was the same envelope Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on.
There appear to be two different Y2K panic scenarios.
In one, there is the fear of inconvenience. Everything that is run by computer will break down. There will be no power, no heat—perhaps even no pizza delivery. It’ll feel like being trapped inside a Kevin Costner movie, except it probably won’t last as long.
(I was particularly anxious about the impending loss of toilets until somebody said to me, “Do you really think there’s a computer in your toilet?”)
In the other scenario, the world ends through thermonuclear terrorist attack.
In which case you don’t have to worry about the white bean soup.
Lately, to my great chagrin, I’ve come to think that perhaps there is some credence to the second scenario. It seems every day some nut job with a suitcase full of explosives is arrested at the U.S.-Canada border.
The border is thousands of miles long. Surely there have to be a few terrorists smart enough to cross over without going through an official checkpoint. It’s wide open. You can walk across the border into North Dakota wearing spike heels and a thong, and the only thing you’ll run into for hundreds of miles is a moose.
Either way, you don’t think these terrorists are going to attack North Dakota, do you? No way. They’re headed right here. We’re the Big Enchilada, baby.
Washington, D.C. (official motto: “The Great Satan’s Home Town!”)
The State Department warns that whatever you do, avoid large groups of Americans. That’s easy if you’re in New Zealand. I’m going to be in a huge throng near the White House. Think there will be many Americans there? By midnight, I could be liquid.
I told this to Man About Town Chip Muldoon, and he said, “Make sure you stand near Regis Philbin. Regis is on a roll. It doesn’t matter what happens apocalypse-wise, Regis doesn’t go down.”
(Not that I’m so sure I should listen to Chip, whose only concession to Y2K so far is that he bought “a couple of extra Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups because they were ten for ninety-nine cents.”)
I asked my friend Tom about his Y2K plans.
“Is that coming up already?” he said.
Hmm.
I worried that my late panic was insane. So I asked the most thorough, most conscientious, most methodical folks at The Washington Post—five top investigative reporters—what they had done about Y2K.
One had bought four gallons of water.
One had bought three gallons of water and a case of red wine.
One said her emergency plan was to buy seventy-five packages of ramen noodles.
One said she had to do her Christmas shopping first.
One politely asked me to go away or he would call security.
Everywhere I went, people seemed to be downplaying Y2K.
Take my boss, George, for example. He said all he’s going to do is take out two hundred dollars in cash.
“In case everything breaks down, I can do Chinese takeout for a week,” he said.
“If there’s a catastrophe, why do you think Chinese restaurants will be open?” I asked.
“Because they’re always open,” he said.
So that’s where I’ll be. I hope they’ve stocked up on ramen noodles.
Whine 2K: Onward and, Well, Onward
I don’t like the new millennium.
I want the old millennium back.
This millennium stinks.
It’s hard to put into words. But I have the sense the new millennium will be just like the last millennium—only more so.
But, Tony, it’s only been a week.
Yeah, well, I’ve seen enough.
I’m still getting Harry and David catalogs. Ivana Trump is still here.
What’s new about this new millennium? Maury Povich hosting Twenty-One? Please.
Sure, there are 40 billion TV channels now. But we somehow still run the risk of seeing Tori Spelling.
Everything interesting was already done in the old millennium.
Printing press. Done.
William the Conqueror. Done.
Bubonic plague. Done.
Sputnik. Done.
Regis. Done.
(My friend Mike is troubled by the glut of products spawned by the old millennium. He told me about an exhaustive record collection, “The 1,000 Greatest Songs of the Millennium.” At No. 264 was Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, edged out by 263, which was Aqualung.)
I’m looking for a breakout thing, something different in this millennium—the appearance of a new giant bird, for example, or a new continent; a brand-new number, say, between six and seven; some lost episodes of Seinfeld; Elvis emerging from a pile of frozen catfish fillets in somebody’s carport freezer.
My friend Nancy feels the same way. “The old millennium had edge,” she said. “You never knew what to expect. In one century, you had the Dark Ages. In another, you had Same Day Blinds.”
So far, it’s all style and no substance.
(Tell the truth: When you were looking at the ball drop in Times Square, didn’t you hope that just as it hit “2000,” all of New York would go dark? Bam! Total blackout. I didn’t think I was asking for much. I’d have settled for Peter Jennings falling off the roof. It was such a drag when nothing happened. Have you any idea how long it’s going to take to get through all that tuna fish?)
The old millennium had great inventions.
Toast. Butter. How are they gonna top that?
Dandruff shampoo.
Air conditioning. I rest my case.
Man About Town Chip Muldoon thinks I am being too hasty in slamming the new mill
ennium. He says, “Your prized invention of air conditioning came nine hundred thirty years in. It takes a while for the personality of the new millennium to establish itself. It’ll look a lot different when Larry King’s contract runs out.”
But I don’t buy it. Nothing will be invented in the new millennium. Things will just be “upgraded.”
We’ll spend our lives being retooled and rebooted, like Windows 95.
Nancy is already feeling crowded in the new millennium. “Too many people came into the new millennium with us,” she said. “I thought some people would stay behind.”
“Yes,” I said. “Like Celine Dion and Kevin Costner.”
That’s why Russia’s Boris Yeltsin should be everybody’s hero for quitting on the last day before Y2K. Bo knows.
(Unless … maybe Bo doesn’t know, or at least doesn’t remember knowing. Maybe he woke up the next morning and said, “I what? The last thing I remember is doing a couple of Jell-O shooters with that hot little Miss Minsk.”)
Remember how great the old millennium was? It had Beanie Babies and the Visigoths. This one has … well, it has virtually nothing. We’re supposed to be excited by a dip in the Nasdaq? Unseasonably mild temperatures? We haven’t even had a decent sex change operation in this millennium!
The last millennium had George Bush and Al Gore.
This one has George W. Bush and Al Gore Jr. It’s so derivative.
Unless we dodge a bullet here, we’re going to end up with a Bush-Dole ticket!
Speaking of political couples you don’t need to hear from again until Y3K, I couldn’t help but notice that the first lady has moved to New York. At first I wondered if the White House was undergoing renovation or if the British had burned it down like they did in 1814. But it turns out she simply moved away to seek employment.
I don’t want to sound overly traditional, but in the old millennium the president and the first lady tended to live in the same house. I sort of liked that. I’m not saying every first couple got along; it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Zachary Taylor’s wife took one look at his mutton chops and said, “Zack, bubbeleh, until you shave those bad boys off, you’re sleeping on the couch.” But it’s disconcerting, having the president in Washington and the first lady in New York. It’s a marriage, not a network news show.
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