MISCmedia for 3/16/00
What I Don't Know
(A Partial List)

YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW what it's like to be constantly mistaken for someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything.

Phone calls in the wee hours from obsessed acquaintances demanding I relieve their self-made mental torture by telling them the answers to obscure conundrums I've never considered.

Couples spotting me from a block away and chasing me down, yelling at me to tell them the directions to someplace I've never heard of or the name of the best sushi restaurant in the neighborhood.

Guys in bars enlisting me to settle burly drunken men's disputes over the most arcane sports or movie trivia; as if I (1) knew the answer, and (2) wanted to make either burly drunken guy mad at me.

For the record, let it stand that I do not know everything.

If I did, I sure wouldn't be stuck with some dorky little website now, would I? I'd be independently wealthy from prescient stock trades and/or sports bets, which I'm most assuredly not.

(Okay, I did have one dream three years ago that focused on the office tower of a major company that, upon wakening, turned out to have suddenly announced a big merger; but that's never happenned before or since.)

So, here's but a very partial list of the many, many, many things I don't know:

• A cure for cancer.
• What happens to you after you die.
• The answer to 53 Down in last Saturday's NY Times crossword.
• How to solve acrostics.
• The proper compression ratio for a '67 BSA motorcycle.
• How to solve the central African or Balkan conflicts.
• Why the celebrity media continue to refer to Quentin Tarantino as an independent filmmaker, Madonna as an icon of female self-empowerment, or Linda Ronstadt as having ever been a rock singer.
• The name of any individual member of 98 Degrees.
• Why the band KORN could have the same name-source as the band BR5-49 (Hee Haw catch words) but sound so different.
• Why the Grammy Awards still suck.

(On the other hand, I have known most of the answers on that TV show, even the toughies. I keep calling the hotline but I never get the random call-back. Oh well, maybe I can still learn day-trading....)

TOMORROW: Retro-progressivism.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Some Canadians are accusing Coca-Cola of putting subliminal female-sihoutette designs on the fronts of its vending machines. Like the "Contour Bottle Design" wasn't a subliminal female-silhouette design to begin with. (That great Canadian Marshall McLuhan, you might recall, once called the U.S. a nation of "Coke suckers").

ELSEWHERE:

• Now we know why the respected former Atlantic and U.S. News editor moved to Seattle....
• "Newspapers are the scolds of the Digital Age, shrieking and clucking about a changing world like Temperance Ladies wandering into a bar" (found by Media News)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• The channel formerly known as The Nashville Network.
• The singluar joys of single-artist Net radio.
• A magazine "celebrates" the global-marketing monoculture.
• The Net needs more fat guys and fewer tall guys.
• The limits of bohemianism as a "revolutionary" stance.
• More old buildings getting "restored" beyond recognition.
• What's in a (corporate) name?
• MTV, one million videos or so later.
• Requiem for an afternoon newspaper.
• Parts one and two of a Microsoft refugee's confessions.
• Highlights from our most recent MISCmedia questionnaire.
• Parts one, two, and three of our exploration of improv music as a social and political metaphor.
• More search-engine keywords that mistakenly bring people to this site.
• Yes, KFC still serves chicken.
• The long-awaited return of D.I.Y. glamour.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, monfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• The origin and future of MISCmedia