In Keep The Change, Steve ventures into the universe of tipping.  Being a poor schmuck myself, my own tipping activities are limited to restuarants with wait staff and my semi-annual haircut.  And I’ll be honest, I’d rather not tip the random woman at ProCuts because I tend to think $12 is too much to pay for a haircut in the first place.  But I do usually fork over a dollar or two.  Why?  Good question.

Almost everything Steve Dublanica talks about in Keep The Change is news to me.  From his stories of the origins of tipping and the anti-tipping leagues to more current times where more and more people wants tips who never got tipped before.  He calls this Tip Creep and sees it as a sign that more and more companies don’t want to carry the burden of having to pay thier employees themselves.

I remember several years ago I read some advice collumn that Evanna Trump was writing where she talked about tipping.  At some point she mentions how much to tip hotel maids, and I was like, WTF?  People tip maids?  Well, duh.  Not just maids, but Doormen, Parking Valets, Blackjack Dealers, Hairdressers, Auto Mechanics, Car washers, Movers, Delivery Drivers and so on and so forth.  Most interesting was the idea that people tip workers in the Sex Industry, but then, I don’t pay to visit Dominatrices or Submissives, so who knew?

For the most part, I don’t use any of the services that Steve says I should be tipping at least 20%, which is pretty much everyone who has their hand out.  I don’t get my shoes shined, I don’t play table poker at a casino, I don’t hang out at strip clubs or ride around in limos or taxis.  I might use a mover or get a pizza dilvered once every few years.  And the motels I stay at are usually the cheapest I can find and I can’t imagine the maids working at the bottom rung Patel Motel are used to getting too many tips.  But I could be wrong.

The stories of tipping are interesting, but they do seem to take place in an alternate universe from the one where my cheap-ass lives.  If there was a modern day Anti-Tipping League I would be a member-as long as it didn’t cost anything to join.  I’m one of those people that want the Minimum Wage to be twenty dollars an hour and employers to offer everyone benefits as well as a living wage.

So maybe it’s just simple jealousy on my part-people who make hundreds or thousands of dollars a week in tips while I make nothing in tips.  After all, for many of these tipped workers $20 an hour would be a severe pay cut.

I have no interest in doing any of the jobs described in Keep The Change, but there was a local story about tipping several years back that made me wonder about some jobs.  One of the local news outfits went out to DFW International Airport to find out who makes the most money.  Those pilots who bring in a quarter of a million a year? Nope.  The people who run the place?  Nah.  The guys loading airplanes?  Get real.  No, it was the Skycaps, who put a bag on a cart and push it to a waiting taxi cab and get five dollars a bag for their trouble.  Do that twenty or thirty times a day and it starts to add up. Work a forty hour week for a year as a Skycap and you could pull down around a half a million dollars in tips.  Or so the story said.  There was a similar story about the women selling cigarettes at the Playboy Club back in the glory days-they would make hundreds a day in tips, back when hundreds a day was a lot of money.

Keep The Change is an interesting book, but I’ve never worked as a waiter so I go around with blinders on to all the many people who expect a tip for one thing or another.  Steve seems to be of the opinion that people who don’t tip suffer from some form of mental illness that makes them immune to the suffering of others. Really?  Steve never mentions the most common form of ignored suffering, The Homeless, many of whom appear to live on tips alone.

Steve wraps up the book with a few guidelines about what to tip people and then goes into the murky waters of race relations in America.  Clearly Steve is scared shitless about saying anything that might in anyway be considered offensive by anyone.  He gets quotes from several people confirming that black people are lousy tippers, but he doesn’t want to believe any of them. So he goes and asks more people, who all tell him that yes, African Americans are lousy tippers.  He then puts forth a couple of theories.  Black people are poor and don’t know how to tip.  African Americans have a history of slavery and, uh, I’m not sure exactly how that makes them bad tippers, but he did mention the whole slavery thing a couple of times.  In all fairness, he then mentions just about every other group of people living in America and said they were often lousy tippers as well.

At several points along Steve’s journey to becoming a Tipping Guru he mentions the one solid fact about all of these people who get tipped-if you can afford whatever service they provide, then you can afford to tip the person giving you that service.  If you can’t afford it, and do it anyway, than don’t be surprised when the person you don’t tip treats you like shit.

Which brings us back to the simple idea of paying everyone a living wage and not tying income to the whims of random strangers.

Yeah, that’s gonna happen.

Both have an evil government putting kids in a battle to the death through random selection.  Both follow the Survivor model of a running tally as the little group gets smaller and smaller.  Both reward the sole survivor of the contest.  And both have too many characters that are, for all intents and purposes, identical and impossible to really care about.

Battle Royale is a Japanese film and the kids are all dressed in school uniforms and have the same haircut.  It seems that all the kids in this future are really rotten and have no respect for their elders.  So the elders kill off a class full of them once a year to teach them a lesson.  Only the kids seem to be surprised by what is happening and there is no TV crew keeping track of the action.  Kind of makes it hard for this to be a lesson to the other bad kids if they don’t know about.  But there was TV coverage as the film started, along with a winning girl who smiled a lot.

The forty kids in the Battle Royale only have three days to kill each other, not quite long enough to starve to death as in The Hunger Games.  The kids quickly get around to slaughtering each other, using the varied and sundry weapons found in random backpacks, as in the Hunger Games. Some of the weapons were pretty useless, such a pot lid and a pair of toy binoculars.  Other packs contained machine guns and handguns of one sort or another.

It was an odd film, lots of graphic violence, lots of hinted at romance, lots of blood packs exploding all over the place, and a lot of stuff that doesn’t make much sense. A lot like The Hunger Games.

So did Suzanne Collins steal the idea of a bunch of kids battling to the death for the Tv cameras?  Maybe.  Battle Royale came out in 2000 and The Hunger Games came out in 2008.  Other notable similar ideas-The Running Man came out in 1987 from a 1982 book.  The Tenth Victim came out in 1965.  The Lottery came out in 1948.  And people were really forced to kill each other in Rome a couple of thousand years ago.  We can assume that people, even kids, have been killing each other as long as there have been people.

Suzanne Collins says she never heard of Battle Royale until her book was in her publishers hands, they told her not to worry about it.  I had never heard of Battle Royale, either.  The similarities are there, but so what?  I have to say that I liked The Hunger Games better than Battle Royale.

As any one who has read If You Write It will know, I tend to think ALL films have ripped off earlier films.  That’s just the way it works now.  It really has all been done before, and usually better.

I love The Hunger Games.  It was original and amazing and gave us just enough information to accept the idea of some bizarre future world where the divide between the super rich and the super poor has reached a point where each group views the other as belonging to separate species.  The people of the Capitol are not portrayed as evil, but as clueless as to what goes on outside the bounds of The City.  The people in District 12 are portrayed as currant era poor people, they are doing the best they can with what they have and feel justified in blaming others for their lot in life.

You did too good a job in making me think the people of the Capitol are just people.  Selfish, silly, and vain people-not intentionally evil people, with the exception of President Snow.  And even President Snow is doing nothing more than protecting his government.  At least President Snow has a job, along with everyone we see working in The Hunger Games.  What does the average citizen of the Capitol do anyway?

Ok, I feel about Catching Fire and Mockingjay the way I feel about Matrix Revolutions and Matrix Reloaded-I just want to forget that they ever happened.  So I have a solution.

Katniss wakes up to find her arms and legs strapped down.  She feels a damp cloth on her forehead.  She opens her eyes and sees Prim looking down at her with a concerned look on her face.  Katniss sees that she is in her bedroom at the Victor’s Village in District 12.  Prim runs out of the room to call Peeta, Gale, and Haymitch.  Katniss’s mother comes in and tells her that things will be better now.

She is told that she was out hunting with Gale when they found a bee hive and decided to steal some of the honey.  Katniss was stung by a bee and fell into venom relapse.  For several days she has suffered from Tracker Jacker venom induced nightmares where everyone she loves is tortured and killed by her addled mind.  In her nightmare she is even forced to compete in another Hunger Game and District 13 was not destroyed.

“Forget about all that.” Gale says. “It was just a bad dream.”

The story can then be picked up right after the 74th Hunger Games and the story can follow a slightly less scorched earth plot-line.  You can still bring in the other Victors, still bring about the fall of the Capitol, still have that whole French Revolution thing where you kill all the rich people, if that really turns you on. But maybe you could make Katniss a bit smarter, Gale a bit less blood thirsty, Peeta a bit less destroyed, and twenty or so great characters a bit less dead.

I know, there will never be a sequel to The Matrix that makes sense and there will never be a squeal to the Hunger Games where you toss out two books of your trilogy.   But hope springs eternal.

Turns out there is more to making black powder-as author William Gurstelle prefers to call his gun powder-than Captain Kirk made it look when was kicking Gorn ass with a bamboo cannon.

For one thing, you need pure ingredients. William advices that you make you own charcoal, since the stuff you use in a barbeque is full of all kinds of impurities. He recommends buying the sulfur and saltpeter. Once you have made the black powder you can go on to make rockets, cannons, and smoke bombs.

Absinthe and Flamethrowers opens up with a couple of fairly dull chapters that talk about risk and Big T, little t thrill seekers.  The Big T’s tend to add their names to the Darwin Awards, while the slightly smaller t’s tend to do just enough dangerous stuff to make the world a better place.

And this is where I have my one major gripe about Absinthe and Flamethrowers-he has a kind of Wuss Test to help you determine where on the Thrill Seeker Scale you happen to fall.  I fell pretty low on the scale, in fact, I fell below the threshold for people he recommends the book to.

Among the questions were such things as have you in the past, or would you like to in the future try-Parachute jumping, Flying an airplane, Scuba diving, Horseback riding at a gallop, Sail long distances, and a few similar items such as climbing Mount Everest or hunting Lions or Tigers.  The list of Thrill Seeking items seems to come out of a time warp from the 1950s or maybe the 1850s.

Climb Mount Everest and hunt lions or tigers?  Really?

There were very few things on the list I have, or have ever had, any interest in.  So I scored pretty low on the Thrill Seeking test.  He didn’t have things like drinking Absinthe or juggling fire or eating hot chilis-which I have done and have an interest in doing in the future.  But maybe those thrills are too small to make the Thrillometer.

Anyway-maybe his test is right about me.  While I like reading about Edgework, as Hunter S Thompson called his own self destructive behavior, I’m not sure that building rockets or smoking cigarettes is really up my alley.  Yes, William Gurstelle recommends the occasional cigarette as part of a thrill seeker’s social life.

Truth be told, I have spent a lot of time in the company of smokers over the years and I have inhaled a good deal of second hand smoke-so far it hasn’t killed me.  But I can’t help but have visions of a young Reverend Jim from Taxi who takes one hit of drugs and it alters the entire course of his life-and not really for the better.

The author does suggest reasonable precautions about all of his suggestions, so if his advice is followed closely, all should be well.  Just a bit more thrilling.

As I worked my way through Absinthe and Flamethrower I found that I have already done more than a few of the things he talks about.  The part of the book with the do it yourself black powder turns out to contain a few items I have not tried-and am fairly unlikely to try any time soon.

So what edgework have I done?  I’ve made my own Absinthe, driven over a hundred miles an hour, played with gunpowder taken from old shotgun shells, learned a few tricks you can do with a Zippo lighter, and I pretty much grew up playing with a bullwhip, throwing knives, eat hot chilies and juggling a bit of fire now and then.  I think the Wuss Test needs a bit of tweaking.

My mother was a person with what I tend to think of as fairly mundane tastes and habits.  So it has always been a bit of mystery to me how she ended up with a twelve foot long whip made of white and turquoise colored leather.  At some point I found this whip and began in earnest to try and break the sound barrier.

This was in the day before Google, and I didn’t find any books on the topic at the library, and basically I just stood in the back yard doing my best to copy people I had seen using whips in the movies.  With only a few minor welts and bruises, and one small scar on my shoulder, I learned to make a whip crack.  But like juggling fire and knife throwing, this is a largely useless skill to possess.  They do get interesting responses from people who read my resume.

Absinthe and Flamethrowers also has a section on dangerous foods-some more dangerous than others.  Casu Marzu and fugu and ackee have real danger in that they can kill you.  Casu Marzu is a cheese filled with live maggots, fugu is the deadly puffer fish, and the ackee is a fruit from Jamica that needs to be completely ripe before eating.  He doesn’t mention almonds, which I have also heard will kill you if eaten before they are cooked-but I’m guessing no thrill seeker would eat something as boring as raw almonds.

Then we come to an odd item in the food section-a hot dog, what the author calls a Danger Dog and which sounds a lot like a Sonora Dog to me.  It’s interesting to see a recipe for food in the same book that has a recipe for black powder.  Still, I’m not sure a bacon wrapped hotdog really ranks up there with blowfish.  But I have eaten a Sonora Dog, they are pretty damned good.

My own living on the edge eating tends to involve really hot foods made with Habaneros and (when I can find them) Bhut Jolokia or Ghost Chilis.  I like going to Hot Sauce Shops and sampling a number of sauces.  Bhut Jolokia is the last item on the thrill seeker food list, and it is an interesting experience.  It’s a good sauce to put on the Danger Dog to make it really dangerous.

Absinthe and Flamerthrowers last project is, wait for it, a flamethrower.  He does all he can to tell you to be careful and the flamethrower design used is for a fairly safe and at the same time quite exciting bit of machinery.  Instead of aiming the flame at something, say a horde of zombies or killer robots, he
has it point straight up in the air where it creates an impressive fireball.  You trigger the flamethrower by means of a ten foot long bit of rope-you don’t want to be too close when you use it to impress your friends and family.

William Gurstelle wraps up with a little rant about how uptight the world is now a days when a young boy can’t experience the fun of blowing things up first hand.  A shame, since so many movies have children blowing up labs of one sort or another.  My High School Chemistry class made peanut brittle-and I don’t recall it ever blowing up.  In short, he says if you want to do Edgework, you had better hop to it, before someone makes it impossible or illegal.

I wonder where I can find on old Zippo lighter?

We start off following a reporter covering the mindnumbingly dull U.S. Memory Championships-which involves watching people memorize all kinds of mundane infomation.  Reporter Joshua Foer becomes seduced by the idea that he, too, could memorize long lists of random items and sets his foot to the path of becoimg a memory master himself.

Along the way he tells the story of S, a man who could remember everything that ever happened to him, and EP, a man who perpetually lived in the moment as he could no longer convert short term memory to long term memory.  He then talks about the classic techiques of recalling, starting off with the Memory Palace.  This is where you remember some familar place and drop items you want to remember in each room, you need to make the objects oversized and outrageous.  Joshua Foer is amazed that the Memory Palace works, just as I was when I first used it.

As Joshua Foer moves through the history of memory, he starts to use newer techniques that I am not familar with.  Among them is the system called PAO-person/action/object-which allows a skilled user to memorieze a deck of cards in a minute or less.  This is where the books title of Moonwalking With Einstien comes from.  He spends hours a day practicing his memory skills and honing his recall times.  The goal of all his hard work is to compete in the US Memory Champisonships.

Along the way he meets two legends of the memory world-Kim Peek and Daniel Tammet.    Kim Peek is the odd little man that Dustin Hoffman spent some time with in order to perfect his Rain Man role.  He memorized phonebooks for fun and had next to no social skills.  Daniel Tammet, on the other hand, is a super genius who appears swave and sophisticated when comared to most Aspebergains.

In fact, the most intriguing bit in Moonwalking With Einstien is Joshua Foer’s suspecions that Daniel Tammet is a fraud who is actively ripping people off by pretending that he has autism, when in fact, he is a very highly skilled mnemonist or mental athelete.  What makes Daniel Tammet’s possible fraud hard for Joshua Foer to get over is that admitted mnemonists are a lot of geeks who make very little money from thier skills and are often treated like weirdos.  Daniel Tammet has been the subject of TV Shows, written a best selling book, and has his own line of educational products-Joshua Foer and mega memory pals, well, not so much.

Moonwalking With Einstein is an entertaining book-if you happen to have a slight memory fetish as I do.  It has been some time since I actively used a Memory Palace or The Peg System or any of the other odds and ends of a well trained memory-because, like Joshua Foer, I found that they were not all that useful in the real world.  Joshua finds that he enjoys the company of his fellow memory geeks-and he does get a book out it-but he is not sure that anyone will ever change the world by teaching kids how to memorize a deck of cards in thirty seconds.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything proves at least one thing-YOU, yes you,  could be the next US Memory Champ, if you really wanted to be.

Geoffrey Gray tells the story of D. B. Cooper, including every bit of minutia, every theory, and every crackpot who has claimed to be Dan Cooper since 1971.  Geoffrey Gray also reads the audio book and he can’t help but ham it up every once in a while.  There is also the occasional bit of music, but it doesn’t really fit the often serious, often silly nature of the story.

SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper is a damned entertaining bit of business.  The story of Dan Cooper has morphed over the years from one of a crook to one of a folk hero who was able to beat The Man.  But D. B. Cooper is not the star of Skyjack, he is just the jumping off point.  Our hero is a reporter who gets a tip on the real identity of Dan Cooper, and this leads him down a number of paths where he finds likely and unlikely candidates.

One problem with Skyjack is Geoffrey Gray’s desire to hop around in time and space as he lays on the backstory of each of his main D. B. Cooper suspects.  At one point he starts talking about a man being prepped for transgender surgery-before he mentions this character anywhere else.  I was totally baffled each time this person was mentioned, until it was eventually made clear that this was yet another potential Dan Cooper.

Everyone that has been touched by the D. B. Cooper case has suffered from the Cooper Curse-which can be as mild as too much media attention or as severe as a life long obsession with solving the case and finding the money.  At the end of Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray wanders off course and tells us that he has been affected by the Cooper Curse.  At the story ends we find Geoffrey living in a cabin in the woods, seeing clues everywhere, and wanting to crack codes like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

I found myself reaching for the book to see if this was a work of fiction, it doesn’t say.  Since the author is reading the audio book, I’m going to assume he is no longer holed up in a cabin in the woods sifting for new coded messages.

Skyjack has a light and carefree style.  The writing is simple and casual and comes across like someone sharing a yarn across the table.  Skyjack is a fun read, but it veers off into fictive elements so often that it doesn’t read like history or journalism.  By the end, I just couldn’t trust Geoffrey Gray.

I’ve been an adventure game addict since I bought my first computer back in the Dark Ages of 1982-the game that hooked me was Infocom’s Zork.  My latest video game love is The Witcher 2, an adventure game with a lot
more fighting and running than puzzling and thinking.  I still find myself completely wrapped up in the world where Geralt of Rivia does his magic/swordplay/ploughing.

Extra Lives:Why Video Games Matter talks about games I have never played and never had any interest in playing-Halo 3 and Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 and the like.  For the most part these are games that I have heard of, but not games that spoke to me.  I think I got burned out on mass killing
games way back in the DOOM days and I have never given the newer breed a
try.  I’m not even that fond of all the killing in The Witcher 2, but there is a certain satisfaction that come from winning a battle that was flat out impossible to win the first five or ten times that I tried it.

Still, I can relate to a lot of what Tom Bissell has to say about Video Games.  They are a kind of art form and at the same time, they are totally pointless.  He talks about the different kinds of games and the popular elements that each game design team steals from other games.

I soon found myself ticking off all the bits and pieces he talks about that are part and parcel of the Witcher 2-all the many elements that were stolen from other games.  I also agree with him about hating the repetitive actions all video games live and die on-finding things, stealing things, dropping things, needing the thing you dropped later, and how even the biggest game world still have forced limits that an addicted player will run up against.

I liked Extra Lives right up until the end, where he talks about his addiction to Grand Theift Auto IV and his simultaneous addiction to cocaine.  As a general rule I like my writers to stay in the background, even though I occasionally like to intrude upon the reader myself.  And for the most part, Tom Bissell is a reporter, he interviews game designers, visits software corporate offices, and gives details about the game play of the many games that he has played and fallen in love with.  But when he spins off into the world of drug use and how much better both cocaine and GTA IV are when used together, it rings an off key note for me.  I suddenly don’t trust a writer who admits to having spent months playing a video game while stoned off his gourd.

At the end of Extra Lives I suddenly had serious doubts about just about everything Tom Bissell has said.  Did he use other drugs while playing other games?  Is that why the experience of the gameworld was so intense for him?  Is that why he could play a single title for over two hundred hours and then take a perverse pride in the fact?  Since a good deal of the book is Tom sharing his opinions and offer up his judgements, can a man who lived to snort coke and play Grand Theft Auto IV be said to have any judgement worth listening to?

The rarified world of video game companies and the countless drones that crank them out is an interesting one-and one that has made a lot of geeks über rich.  Now I need to look for a book about the industry not written by a cokehead, if there is such a thing.

Near the beginning of Change Anything we are told that a recent study found that ALL diets work-if people are willing to do exactly what any given diet plan calls for.  Most of us are pretty good at starting things, but not so good at the follow through.

So Change Anything takes a slightly different tack to the problem-it offers a series of techniques that, if used, can become second nature and we will automatically avoid those things we want to avoid and do those things we want to do.  I usually have a hard time picking the Oatmeal over the Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddle.  One solution to this problem would be not to go to McDonalds in the first place.

Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success is filled with stories of behavioral studies past and present-what happens when a four year old has to delay gratification or a teenager has to save money when the environment is geared to make him spend it all.  The point of all these stories is to show us how we can use these techniques in our own lives-there are six tools and you need to use all of them.

1. personal motivation, 2. personal ability, 3. social motivation, 4. social ability, 5. structural motivation, 6. structural ability.  These are the same basic tools that Madison Avenue uses to make us buy corn flakes and Cadillacs.  They work.   Will they work on individual lives the same way they work on consumers?  Hey, it’s worth a try.

Like many other self help books, Change Anything has a core idea and lots of random stories designed to support that core idea.  You can read the first half of the book and skip the rest and not really miss anything.  Just remember, like a diet, the Change Anything plan will only work if you use it.

I have the better part of a rough draft, which is the easy part for me.  I need to add a snappy opening, slap in a few transitions here and there, and viola! it will be ready for that dread 2nd Draft.  Then I go back and make sure everything makes sense and start to re-write a bit of the dull parts and try to pour some life into them.

Editing has always been my weakness-as the one or two regular readers of my blogs can attest.  But I like the writing part-that’s just swell.  But what do I like even more than the writing?  Why, not writing, of course.

Te help me with my not writing, and hopefully help with my editing, I have gone to the Library.   I found a number of books on writing.  Reading about writing is so much more satisfying than the usually writing avoidance tactics of:getting another cup of coffee or finding a recipe for that meal I need to prepare or cleaning up around the house.  This way I can do both nothing like real writing and nothing like real work around the house!

Books I checked out:

Janet Evanovich’s How I Write.  I don’t read her novels but she seems to bang one out about every three months and they are all bestsellers.  This is a great book with tons of advice-but it seriously needs an index.  The advice would be a lot more useful if I could just look up the info I want without having to flip through the whole damned thing-and still not find what I was looking for.

Bill Walsh’s Lasping Into A Comma.  One of countless books that sets out to help you figure out when to use words like Frig or Fridge and Gender or Sex.  It’s a fun book to flip through and find the random errors that I have making my writing whole life.  On the whole I prefer the Grammar Checker on Word for most things-though do often ignore it’s advice.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife.  One of those nifty little books with hundreds of pages and dozens of bullet points.  He is a man who knows how to use an Outline, and then turn it into a table of contents.  He talks about setting goals near the start-and that I as far as I waded into the tiny type of this one.

Gail Pool’s Faint Praise.  This is about Book Reviews and how most people don’t do them properly and most good books are never reviewed as everyone is too busy reviewing the latest Mega Bestseller that everyone is going to buy anyway.  This is a very serious book with a nice index, a solid bibliography,  and a lot of footnotes.

Jack Hart’s A Writer’s Coach.  How to write book written by a newspaper Editor filled with solid real world advice-for people who want to write for newspapers.  I like his writing tips, but found his many newspaper references leading off in directions that didn’t really interest me that much.

Lee Gutkind’s Keep It Real.  A fairly dry and legal treatment on writing Creative Nonfiction.  It covers topics like Composit Characters, Facts, Guiding The Reader, and Truth.  All of the 41 topics covered are worth reading, but they are given chapters with lengths that are only a few pages long at best.

I have been reading these books, and a few others I have lying around the house, in hopes of getting some insight on how I should structure my book.  So far I have not been overly inspired, and I had not so much as banged out an open statement to warn the reader what to expect.

I have a few ideas now of where to start.

But it is getting a bit late, so maybe tomorrow. . .

One of the local Oldies radio stations has started playing reruns of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.  They were playing one from June 17, 1978 and it was likely one that I listened to when it first aired all those years ago.  This was back when the Top 40 was an amazing mix of styles and artists, before music charts became so specialized that virtually anyone who releases a single will end up with a number one somewhere.

I caught the top twenty or so songs of the broadcast, and I was surprised that I had never heard of a couple of the songs.  One was by the “king of bubblegum pop” Sweet.  I have never heard of Sweet or the song that had landed them in the Top 20.  I’m not sure I had ever heard of Bubblegum Pop either, now that I think about it.  Another unknown was a group called Celebration, which turned out to be a studio backup band for Mike Love of Beach Boys fame.

So there the usual suspects of the time that I remember and still hear on stations like Jake FM and Bob FM and the like-Bob Seager, Meatloaf, Paul McCartney, and Gerry Rafferty.  Mixed in are people who I was surprised to hear-Chuck Mangione, George Benson, Bonnie Tyler, and-wait for it-Johnny Mathis.

Chuck Mangione? With the exception of a few tracks by Moby and the Chemical Brothers, does anyone record instrumentals any more?  And when was the last time a country song was on the Pop Top 40?  Or is there even a Pop Top 40 anymore?

It’s pretty much standard for each new generation to listen to music that the previous generations hate, so I can understand why I hated rap and-what was that other stuff that was sort of like rap only more bubble gum like?  Oh yeah, Hip Hop.

But now, with Lady Gaga doing disco and Madonna impressions and plenty of other groups doing what sounds like soft rock or maybe grudge-I can listen to some newer stuff without instantly wanting to change the channel.  Of course, music is like movies and books-it’s all been done before and will be done again.

So listening to these old songs from 30 years is kind of fun.  But it’s only a sampling of what I was really listening to.  This was when I discovered The Beatles and my little brother discovered Jan & Dean and my Mom was still listening to Johnny Cash’s Greatest Hits Vol 2.

My little brother was really the record hound, he bought a couple of thousand 45s and had them all neatly arranged in those cute wooden crates from Peaches.  This back the dark ages when you had to buy a song if you wanted to listen to it.

Now I have every song ever recorded at my fingertips, just a quick google away.  Free and clear on YouTube, Grooveshark, Rhapsody, and countless other online radio stations.  My brother had to search all over town to find a copy of Bilolboard magazine-now available easily online, with more information about Charts than anyone could possibly want.  But to me, the Charts died about twenty years ago.  They keep track of Ringtones for crying out loud-who cares about bloody ringtones?

So The American Top 40 just isn’t want it used to be, and good Casey Kasem is just a ghostly voice from the past. Think I’ll google Dance With Me and relive the glory days of Disco one more time.

These were some of the first songs I really fell in love with: