i lifted a couple of old receipts stories from the grave today. on the old receipts site i sometimes added stories to go with the receipts, but i imagine that very few people noticed, owing to the cluttered and crowded layout of the pages. the old receipts site deserved to die, though its death by disk failure blowout was a needless flourish for death to have wielded. i could have killed it myself.
i remember when Jack FM died, that automated disk jockey format that swallowed WCBS FM for a couple of years. Jack FM never had any success in New York, and i for one never had any sympathy for a robot at the turntable. so when they announced that Jack FM would be cancelled, and that WCBS would return to a traditional human-announced oldies format, i thought they should usher in the transition by brutally murdering Jack, by torturing him with soldering irons and kicking him in the face repeatedly as he begged for mercy. they should have given him “The Works”, that famous torturechamber ritual from the saturday cartoons… Jack being a comical figure i thought it made sense… alas, he just faded to shutdown and the humans took the helm again.
i listened to that transition with relish. i have an interest in radio, partly because i was a radio guy in college nad briefly purused a career in that field. i did internet radio for a while, and had some success there, enough that i had to stop doing it, since i couldn’t afford the overhead of more listeners than i could accommodate. when WCBS came back to humans i remember being inspired by the production job they did to usher in the new/old, although at the moment i can not for hte life of me remember what they did. a collage of excerpts from classic rock songs, i think, reminding me of the day MTV came on the air, and my sister and I happened to be there, watching the TV, at the very moment the Buggles started singing “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
getting back to receipts, i remember thinking that that project getting zapped was a blessing of sorts, since i was getting confused by it myself. it essentially evolved into an SEO masturbation frenzy, which in a way was coonsistent with the early days of the project on the web. in the early days i posted receipts because i posted receipts, for no reason, or in the spirit of “if you have to ask, then don’t”.
i soon discovered that the receipts were a search-engine’s delight, turning up my pages #1 when Internauts searched for places like Best Buy or Bloomingdale’s, among many others. it was amusing to me, and while i was not trying to fool anybody with my receipts i thought it was fun to get into the game, this game which the searchies entered in to to begin with, to match wits with the searchies and see how high i could rank when humans searched fooooor the places i had been.
the amusement faded but somehow the project’s SEO infatuation grew like wisteria,every page jammed with stupid tricks and increasingly futile attempts to jockey for SERP.
i guess you could say the experience reflects a maturing of the searchies, and their progressively sophisticated ways of filtering out content hooligans of no substance. it also became a time-vacuum for me, not so much in a cynical attempt to keep up with the searchies but because i did, legitimately, want to develop the project. i did develop it, but in ways that few humans noticed or could reasonably be expected to have noticed.
so when i say i lifted some of that stuff from the grave, it is to say that i have been recovering some of those stories from the remains of the blowout.
and one of the tales of today happened to have been about a grave, and an asshole Icelander.
and that summarizes my fascinating day.
i walked around a bit, unintentionally gave some bad directions to some lost tourists from Manhattan, felt my head hurt, contemplated decapitation as a sensible option, took 3 huge dumps, and generally wasted another gift of a day.
