On Eeire Coincidences and the Malevolence of iTunes
I’m not big on the mystical interrelatedness of everything, but once in a while, something smacks me across the face to remind me that, despite living in a big country and a big world, we can run in very small circles indeed.
Several years ago when I was living in New York, I remember a day when I was walking around the city for no clear purpose, as I was wont to do, and kept noticing people who had prosthetic hooks instead of hands. I saw, I don’t know, ten of them in a six hour stretch, which, even for New York, seems like a lot. That night, while riding the subway back uptown, I told my friends about this strange series of observances. No sooner had the words left my mouth than the train stopped, a crowd of people standing in front of us left, and the only person left between us and the door was a young man in an army jacket gripping the hanging strap with a hook for his right hand! Not a campfire story, not an urban legend: this actually happened.
Here are a couple in the “small world” category.
Not long ago, I got back into an email correspondence with my best friend from middle school, who is now a brain surgeon in Washington, DC. I hadn’t heard from him in nearly 20 years. He’s married now, with a couple kids. His wife is a producer for CNN. Turns out she’d been working there for a while, ever since she was an intern in 1989. That fact struck a chord. As it happens, my own long-time girlfriend also worked as an intern at CNN – in 1989! Yes, they were the two students working that summer on Crossfire.
Now think about that. Here’s two women – one from Wisconsin, going to school at the University of Washington in Seattle; the other from the East Coast, never met each other before, not terribly much in common, working on the same show at the same time. 15 years later, on different sides of the country, by complete chance, they wind up in long-term relationships with men who were best friends when they were 13 years old! Go figure.
What got me thinking about all this weird stuff was a letter I got yesterday from my friend Batton, a comic artist (and therefore comic fan) in San Diego. He and his wife were in town a few weeks ago for a convention in Seattle and stayed with us for a couple days. During that time, an old friend of my girlfriend’s was having an art opening at a gallery in the neighborhood. We decided to drop by and brought Batton and his wife along. As we left, Batton was muttering that the artist’s name sounded familiar.
Yesterday, I found out why. Back in the 1960s, there was a black and white horror comic called Eerie Magazine, which featured some genuinely scary stories and great artwork by the likes of Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones. In November of 1966, somewhere in Brooklyn, young Batton picked up his first issue which he read cover to cover, including the letter page. One letter was from another kid in Tacoma, Washington, who happened to have the same name as the character in one of the more gruesome stories (and also said he was an aspiring artist). This struck Batton as weird enough to stick in his mind.
Forty years later, in a city and a place he happens to be in by pure chance, he runs into the guy who wrote the letter – and he remembered! Sure enough, like any good comic fan, he was able to dig out the issue and the number and send me a photocopy of the letter page with our friend’s note (the only letter he ever wrote to a comic, he claims) circled in red. As he wrote to me this morning, “When I saw that letter, I wondered if he ever became an artist. Really cool to know it worked out just fine for him!”
Frankly, I’m not sure that the coincidence is any weirder than the fact that Batton remembered the guy’s name. Still, I would definitely suggest that he start doing a comic on the supernatural – except that he already is.
I’m glad I got that note yesterday, because it distracted me from my latest computer calamity, involving Apple’s celebrated iTunes software.
For the last few years, I’ve been searching in vain for a good way to control my godawfully large digital music collection. I have tried Windows Media Player, WinAmp and almost everything else on the market, but nothing quite combines the features, administrative capabilities and sturdiness that I require. And when you’ve got that many files, you really need an industrial-strength database. The lightweight ones start to groan once you get up past 25,000 files.
My Apple buddies have naturally been pushing iTunes. To be honest, I have resisted because not only am I suspicious of the proprietary-ness of the iTunes format and store, but I (possibly alone on the planet) don’t care for the aesthetics of the Apple brand and didn’t want to have to look at that interface every time I listened to my music. But at last, I gave in.
For the first few days, it worked great. I was able to import my library, standardize ID3 tags (the bane of my existence!), play tunes on the computer in the other room via wireless network – everything I needed. Then it started going wrong. For no apparent reason, my computer started taking face-plants into the sidewalk. No blue-screen, no Windows error warning, just BAM! Screen goes black, power goes off, and a second later, it slowly starts to reboot.
When Windows returns after the obligatory five-minute boot-up period, I am advised that “Windows has recovered from a serious error.” No shit. Microsoft blames my graphic card driver (a likely suspect, since it was just updated), but after hours of noodling around in the damp and clammy regions of the Windows Registry, the IRQ settings, and other places no human being should ever have to explore for something as simple as getting your computer to play music, I was no closer to fixing the problem. To make matters worse, my database is now corrupt, which means I have to start from scratch, assuming I can ever get Windows and iTunes stable enough to make it through the whole import process again.
If anyone has insight into this problem, I’d welcome tips by private email (click on left). I’m running Windows XP SP2, the latest version of iTunes, and have an ATI Radeon 8500DV graphics card.
Update: After an agonizing 5-hour over-the-network re-install of Windows XP, I am now back in business. iTunes is rock-solid (knock wood) and several other annoying, non-catastrophic problems are gone too. Until next time...
8:03:01 AM 
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