Why Is It Called Microfiche? Or, Sometimes Google Is Slower Than Books

8 Feb 201121 Feb 2020 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 15 Comments

This particular adventure seems to have taken place in 2011.

I don’t remember what prompted me to think about microfiche last night, but I think it was probably Pawn Stars. I do remember asking my wife why it was called microfiche in the first place, and I think she said “because it’s small.” She then proceeded to pat me on the head and tell me everything was going to be alright.

I know we’re only a paragraph in, but I remember now. It wasn’t because of Pawn Stars, but we were watching Pawn Stars while she was reading some historical newspaper articles online. The quality of their digitized forms was very high, and we supposed that they must have been converted from microfilm by a local researcher in a library. Then I said “maybe it was microfiche” and I started saying “fiche” over and over again until I sounded like the lunatic chef from The Little Mermaid.

Microfiche. One more thing your kids won’t do, Generation X. But your great-great-great grandkids might. In the proper conditions, it turns out that microfiche may be a more stable method of date preservation than digitization. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s Analog Media 2, Digital Media 1.0 × 10¹⁰⁰. But the old school’s two points, one each for document/image storage and audio capture, arguably represent the summation of everything we preserve in the first place. Someone who knows more than I do about the merits of actual film and digital video should weigh in on the most stable ways to preserve The Princess Bride and my Christmas Concert ’89 tapes. Did someone say “time capsule!”?

(Speaking of time capsules, the other day was the Super Bowl. Generic congratulations to all you Packer fans now out of the way, let’s talk for a quick second about Jim McMahon. His Starting Lineup figure (Bears gear) was my contribution to a 7th grade time capsule still buried somewhere behind the junior high. Why Jim? Because I could not part with Randall Cunningham or Reggie White, obviously.)

Back to analog media. A few days ago I got to watch a digitized version of some home movies from the 50s. The originals were taken on Super 8, and let me just say: I’m glad for the ability to watch them without having to break out my projector screen (my house came with one, no lie), but there’s something dramatic and classy about what that film did with color. The fact that no one dressed like slobs back then also helps.

And now to the heart of the matter. Why, exactly, is it called microfiche? I discovered the form through my junior high librarian, probably the same day she enlightened half the class (that would be my half of the class) by explaining what the ROM in CD-ROM was. What an interesting little retro-future moment now that I think of it. I had friends with email and BBS, but most of my digital communications knowledge was based on that episode of Silver Spoons that featured Mister Mister. Anyway, I don’t remember Mrs. Willdonger telling us what fiche was in the first place.

I decided that my wife’s answer was finally inconclusive. Like you’re supposed to do when you get curious, I Googled microfiche. I clicked the Wikipedia link (Wikipedia is way more letters than Google) and was taken to a catch-all page for microform. Bush league, Jimmy Wales. Way bush league. Beer league, even. If you think for one second there were etymologies on a hack job like this one, guess again. If you’re not imagining me pronouncing “guess again” like Jimmy Dugan, you’re missing half the fun.

Back to Google I went. A few more clicks, a few more link farms. Finally I checked an online dictionary. Fiche is French for “peg, slip of paper, index card.” Of course. I have the llama from the cover of Vs. in my brain where junior high French should be. Ask this guy about that one.

Rather than stubbornly insist that a laptop with an internet connection is always the best way to get information, it would have been much more efficient to run upstairs and hold aloft the 10-pound dictionary on my bookshelf for the reason microfiche sounds like such made-up word.

Analog Media: 3.

Upset About the Huffington Post/AOL Merger? Count to Ten Before You Flame Me in the Comments.

7 Feb 20117 Feb 2011 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

I’ll be honest. When I logged onto The Huffington Post around 1 am this morning, my jaw just about hit the floor (the dog was in the way). I’m still thinking about what AOL’s acquisition of Huffington and the installation of Arianna Huffington as editor-in-chief of most (all?) of AOL’s online editorial content is going to mean for everyone involved. A few things it won’t mean, as far as I can tell:

TechCrunch, Engadget, Movifone, PopEater, Patch etc. are going to become repositories for a particular political agenda. No, they won’t.

The Huffington Post is going to, like, change so much, and in all the wrong ways. It might change a lot, and in some ways, I hope it does. But it’s not going to cease being what it’s been branding itself as for sometime now, a “beyond left and right” (Arianna’s words, not mine) general interest destination with a distinctive point of view and activist spirit. Will it continue to lean “liberal”? Of course. Has that been its main focus for the last year? On political and social matters, sure, but HuffPost has grown in that time to include 21 separate verticals, four of which focus on local news in urban areas. Like I said yesterday, it’s just not the case that the corporatization of the Huffington properties means that Ms. Huffington’s priorities have shifted. They’ve been clear for some time, and were made even more explicit by the merger. The Huffington Post, as a company, wants to cover a wider range of topics and engage a wider audience. It’s been doing that for at least the past two years, and the AOL deal means it can go on doing it in bigger, better ways. If you’re interested in seeing a hot media property complete its evolution from political niche to top-of-mind general interest, news, and information, keep your eyes on Huffington. If you’re looking for the Daily Kos, well, there’s always…the Daily Kos.

Click through to read this morning's post.

I wrote a new post for the media vertical right after reading the merge announcement last night. The editors put it up this morning, and I want to thank them for their quick turnaround. Disclosure: like most of the people creating HuffPost’s content, I don’t get paid for what I do there. I don’t have an agenda, though as a content creator, I obviously do want the venture to succeed. More thoughts on all of this as I have them.

AOL Acquires Huffington Post for $315 Million in Cash (thenextweb.com)

Trucker’s Back: Pop Rocks! One Man’s Cover Song Garbage and Gold (Part II)

7 Feb 20117 Feb 2011 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 20 Comments

Last Thursday, I had the distinct pleasure of bringing you Part One of an excellent Guest Post by my good friend Jay Trucker. In Thursday’s edition of “Pop Rocks! One Man’s Cover Song Garbage and Gold,” Jay took out the trash like Sid Phillips circa Toy Story 3. (Anyone else catch that cameo? It’s totally him). Today, we have the Hotness.

Pop Rocks! One Man’s Cover Song Garbage and Gold (Part II)
by Jay Trucker, special to ~~The Grizzly~~ The Daily Cocca

Cover songs are forever. My guess is that the second song ever performed was a cover of the first. Some of these cover songs are inspired, many are horrifying. Artists who cover well-known songs are disadvantaged in that they are immediately judged against the original, though the instant recognition of a popular cover song often paves the way for radio play and concert sing-alongs. The best covers may pay tribute or put a new stamp on an old standard. The worst are soul-crushing cash-ins. Here are just a few of my personal favorites and least favorites. Feel free to add your own. But for the sake of my sanity, try not to defend Sheryl Crow.

Part II: The Gold

Heart – “Love Reign O’er Me” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQhAipNH0lM

This is my Johhny Cash “Hurt.” That is, this is the cover in which I really liked the original, then fell in love with the cover and couldn’t even listen to the original without contempt any longer.

The Who may have been relatively embarrassing geezers at last year’s Super Bowl, but when I saw them in ’02, Roger Daltry still had the pipes to nail the “looooooooooovvvveeeeeee” crescendo as if his drummer and bassist were alive. Then Ann Wilson had to come and just crush the whole thing. Wilson’s voice adds a depth to the entire song that makes Daltry look like an imposter in comparison.

Nancy Wilson in May 2010. — In case you weren't already jealous of Cameron Crowe.

Sister Nancy Wilson tosses in just enough guitar feedback to keep the rock ahead of the classical in this version, and she can pull off hard rock posturing better than Pete Townshend these days. But make no mistake about it—this song makes the list because of Ann’s voice. She sells the feeling of the song as if she wrote it, and when the mixing board gives her a hand at the end, pushing the finale into the stratosphere, we’re all the better for it. Catch Heart live and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Disturbed – “Land of Confusion” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6KXgjLqSTg

Nothing will ever terrify a child of the 80s the way Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” did. With its deranged Reagan puppets that looked just enough like the actual Reagans to frighten pre-pubescents, “Land of Confusion” would be memorable even if the song weren’t. And I’m still not sure why puppet Genesis is funny whereas puppet Reagans probably sent more kids into their parents rooms at night than the bogey man and Freddy Kreuger combined.

Disturbed, not a band one would typically consider subtle, succeed in their rendition by simply amplifying the heavy guitar licks of the original, which in turn makes the dystopic lyrics stand out more. It helps that, unlike many of least favorite cover nominees, Distrurbed was not forced to heteronormatize the song by changing any he/she pronouns. After all, this world “we” live in, and both man and woman will one day be subjected to the great flood the way the puppet Reagans were in ’86.

Disturbed singer David Draiman gives his typical tortured pet performance on “Land of Confusion,” barking through each line like a dog running to the end of a leash. I’m sure this is enough to make many Phil Collins fans unhappy. To be sure, Drummond’s growl scat is plenty annoying, especially when he’s offering the kind of mad at your dad garbage that Distrurbed often deals in, but when he adds asides like “ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah” or, as in “Land of Confusion,” “nyah-ah-ah” it kind of sounds like he’s possibly, maybe, just a little bit, making a gag of his over-the-top angsty rottweiler act.

He is joking, right? Kind of?

Jeffrey Gaines – “In Your Eyes” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7WtavVdBCk

The history of “In Your Eyes,” at least, according to Wikipedia, says a lot about the song. Written by Peter Gabriel, the song was first released in 1986, then again in 1989 after it was featured in the movie Say Anything. Gaines recorded a stripped down version as a B side in 1992, then re-released two different versions of it in 2001. Herein lies the strength of the song, especially Gaines’ version—its timelessness. For this ballad about a guy who sees churches in eyeballs, Gabriel abandoned the giddiness that made 80s hits like “Sledgehammer” and “Shock the Monkey” a lot of fun, replacing it with heart-felt lyrics that are just complicated enough to not scream prom song. The original has some world music instrumentation and African yodeling (that exists, right?), which Gaines’ cover does not. See, this is the type of song that thrives on acoustic interpretation. Minus the bits of Toto-sounding keyboard and backup dancers, Gaines’ take lets his voice and the basics of the song do all the work. He proves that “In Your Eyes” does not need world music or exotic stage shows to succeed; its greatest asset is the core of the song itself.

Gaines stopped by my dear old alma mater while touring the college circuit back in ’98, and my then-roommate went to the show, hanging around afterwards just to get Gaines’ autograph for some girl he had an unrequited crush on. That night, I mistook his nightstand for the men’s room, spraying his Jeffrey Gaines autographed poster with recycled Natty Light. Sorry, Tom.

Best Bad Cover

Guns ‘n’ Roses – “Sympathy for the Devil” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6UsdiJldmo

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an unabashed GnR diehard. But I like their version of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” much more than their more revered covers like “Live and Let Die” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Singing "Salt of the Earth." Irony on lines one, two, AND three, Professor Trucker.

What makes this surprising is that the band itself hates this cover. Recorded for 1994’s Interview With a Vampire soundtrack, “Sympathy” is the last song released by Axl, Slash, Duff, and co. The band hated each other so much at this point, they couldn’t even be in the studio together when they recorded it. Slash said his own rendition of “Sympathy” (ok, his band’s; rumor is Slash’s guitar solo was redubbed by Axl loyalist Paul Huge) sounds like a band breaking up.

But that’s kind of cool, in its own way. A band of junkies covers a song by an older band of junkies featuring Satan as narrator. I’d say there’s a game of one-upmanship going on here, and Guns may have just topped the Stones in debauched sinfulness. Take that one to heart, Keith and Mick.

Oh yeah, and Mick Jagger never could sing. So there’s that.

Honorable Mention

Ugly Kid Joe – “Cats in the Cradle”

Not sure which list this belongs on, but it deserves mention.

Jay Trucker teaches writing at the Community College of Baltimore County and studies Sociology and Education at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He occasionally writes about the Baltimore Orioles for WNST.net and nightlife for the Baltimore Sun blogs.

Jay, I can’t thank you enough for this fantastic double-feature. It’s a huge treat for readers of The Daily Cocca and an ever bigger treat for me. Folks, give Monster Truck some love in the comments so he comes back and see us soon. I bet he’d even take some requests. Oh, and Jay? nWo 4 Life.

AOL to Acquire The Huffington Post

7 Feb 20117 Feb 2011 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

I've missed you, friend.

And so we meet again, AOL. I remember when you were just a Version 3.0 running on my best friend’s Windows 3 PC. I remember your ubiquitous free disks, first floppy, then compact, the sting of still not having you and the joy of my parents’ new subscription. As Alice Munro might say, you were a friend of my youth.

So much has changed for both of us since we last spent time together. The aughts were a strange decade, weren’t they? Remember adult contemporary radio? I want to say, old friend, that I think your current content strategy makes a lot more sense than your famous move into Old Media did. These are the kinds of deals it would have been perfect for you to make back then, had content streams like The Huffington Post and many of the other sites you’ve since acquired existed circa 1999. Back then, DiaryLand and LiveJournal did not look the forerunners of the world we live in now, but 2o11 means you can party like Time Warner never happened. Great internet New Media properties are everywhere and you’re gobbling them up like Pac-Man on a ghost binge.

I really do think your strategy here makes sense, and I’ll write more about this later. For now, though, I’m going to refer to you in the third person if you don’t mind (AOL, remember Norm MacDonald? Remember me trying to load Oasis videos? You just kept right on buffering!) and share a few thoughts with my readers. Thanks, AOL. You’re the best. I want to close this part of my note to you with some clever mid-90’s farewell construction, but I can’t remember any. I do remember most of the words to “Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth (With Change In My Hand),” though, and most of the words to its title.

For all of you non-AOL entities reading this post, I’m curious about three aspects of the acquisition:

Huffington has been positioning itself as a general interest blog for some time now. AOL must value that, and I wonder what that might mean for the editorial slant of the new Huffington Post Media group. Everyone says “HuffPo is liberal,” and maybe its highest profile bloggers are. The general ethos of the site is not a secret, but the addition of many general interest verticals over the past two years really has made HuffPo something other than a political blog. It hasn’t been the sophisticate’s Daily Kos for some time now. But I do wonder if there will be an even further widening of voices and/or interests.
Will HuffPost content be syndicated across AOL’s growing network? If so, how?
Will revenue sharing with bloggers or other kinds of payment become feasible? If so, it will almost certainly be tied to traffic. huffingtonpost.com/christopher-cocca clickety clickety click!

I’ve written a few blog posts over the years about how after everyone stopped using AOL (that is, after people my age went to college and had cable modems and started really roaming the web, only using AOL for email and AIM, and eventually not even those things), we had this sense that we didn’t want our online experience (here comes 2011’s media buzzword) curated by AOL or anyone else. We wanted to get out from under AOL’s channels and interface and boldly surf the web. A few years later, Facebook came along and eventually became a new kind of AOL: it is, for many people, a portal to the rest of the internet. It’s a starting point as much as AOL’s old startup screen, and certainly just as much of a collection of curated media. The key difference, of course, is that this curation is 1) customizable and 2) aggregated by our friends. In a sense, Mark Zuckerberg re-invented the wheel.

Now that AOL is primarily a content company focusing on intelligent, agenda-setting media, it’s recapturing a bit of its old time portal chutzpah. No longer simply a desktop service or even just one extremely useful website, AOL is looking to become, once more, a community where people want to be. Fifteen years ago, AOL was the most successful online Third Place because the nascent social web was about instant messaging in a safe, intuitive environment. With a new focus on bringing together the best digital content and discussion, AOL is reapplying for the job of world’s biggest internet brand. As a communications tool and packaged online experience, AOL was once the place to be. Can its new focus on content, content, content, make it that again? AOL is betting that it can, and betting big. It’s not a bad position. After all, without compelling things to share, what’s the fun of social networks? I don’t care (that much) about what you had for breakfast. I do care, though, about good stories, cogent insight, and the frenetic cycling of news, and I’m not alone.

Whether the generation raised on AOL: ISP as internet aquarium will bite at AOL: content king remains to be seen, but the acquisition of The Huffington Post and the creation of The Huffington Post Media group alongside an ever growing constellation of online properties certainly brings the company closer to its long-lost users than it has been for a while. Even as companies like MySpace, the soon-to-be-jettisoned clunker at Fox Digital Media, also see content and curation as the key to internet survival, AOL seems uniquely positioned to make their version of the model work. Stay tuned, America. You’ll certainly be online.

BREAKING: AOL Acquires Huffington Post for $315 Million (mashable.com)

Book Covers Designed to Trick Men Into Reading Classics (Scroll Down for Images)

6 Feb 20116 Feb 2011 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

I was reading an interesting post on Bookish Us about an article at The Guardian on tricking men into reading more books. The Guardian post links to another Guardian post in which Ian McEwan says the novel will die when women stop reading. The degree to which this project scares or saddens you depends, I suppose, on what you think a novel is supposed to be. On Friday, I collapsed the differences between Jerry Lee Lewis and Grandmaster Flash because they’re collapsible, up to a point. William Faulkner and mass-market popular fiction…not as much.

Do men read less than women? I sort of doubt it, but they do seem to buy fewer books. Since my MFA thesis is a novel, and I have another one about 2/3 finished in manuscript form and I hope to finish and sell them both this spring (agents, feel free to use the contact form), I think about these things. There are probably all kinds of reasons that men don’t spend as much money on books as women do, but it does seem to me that over the last 10 years, the commercial publishing industry has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to cutting its own demographic in half. The devil may wear Prada, but I don’t know many men who read Lauren Weisberger. I know that reference is a bit dated, but you get the point.

Yes, most of the books geared specifically to people who enjoy mass-market fiction aren’t landing in anyone’s serious canon anytime soon. And there are books and authors that do fit into pre-existing market for guys who like to read. But what about making readers out of men who don’t?

I’d start with Hemingway. Sure, it’s like that scene in High Fidelity (ahem) where Jack Black makes fun of John Cusack for going with safe choices, but Nirvana makes Rob’s Top Five for a reason. So I’ll start with Big Papa. If Judy Bloom can get new covers geared to today’s tween demographic, surely a marketing department can come up with some manspired covers for The Old Man and The Sea or The Sun Also Rises. I’m not saying this would transmute every non-reader, but it would be fun. This is a good start, but we can do better. How about Edith Hamilton’s recently re-branded Mythology? (I actually don’t like the new look, but they’re trying. What they need is Zack Snyder’s design team.) You know what I would buy the crap out of for all of my friends who hate their office jobs? A copy of Bartleby The Scrivener with a bleak circa Fight Club office cubicle cover.

Speaking of. I like Chuck Palahniuk. His rhythm makes sense, sounds honest to me. And he gets savaged by genteel critics and then doesn’t have the good sense to not respond. I love all of this. (Speaking of which, I just remembered that last night I had a dream where I was hanging out with Liam Gallagher. He was delightful.) There’s nothing flowery or excessive about what Palahniuk does. He just sort of sounds like the sad, exasperated voice most many live with and don’t talk about. What Updike called “quiet desperation” via Thoreau. I don’t read his more graphic stuff, but I have to say that his nonfiction collection is great and Rant and Diary are two of my favorite recent reads. He also writes great essays on craft.

Faulkner. Before I read The Sound and The Fury, I thought my mission was to sort of be a more hopeful minimalist in Palahniuk’s line. My first novel (still in draft and still in progress) is sort of like that, with some narrative flourishes that Chuck (and certainly Gordon Lish) would excise. But then I took a vernacular class with Robert Antoni and really read The Sound and The Fury and the scope of my quarry (and thesis project) changed. I’m going bigger. Sometimes too big, but I’ll work all of that out by graduation.

Picking up from where Friday’s post was originally headed, I also want to say this: the publishing world doesn’t need a punk moment to reach out to men. It doesn’t need a new rock ‘n’ roll or a new Elvis. It just needs to stop casting the entire literary enterprise as something implicitly attractive to women or the speculative niche. And some good books with a few cus words and nuance. And awesome covers. Like I said, agents should feel free to use the contact form. You know you want to.

And also, I did these:

All base images used are in the Creative Commons on Flickr:
Edward Norton image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/
Michael Phelps image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcopako/
Betty Draper/January Jones image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield

Penguin and Vintage logos are fair use (satire). Book design elements by me.

An Ethical (as opposed to shameless) Plug

5 Feb 20115 Feb 2011 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been approached with advertising opportunities here on The Daily Cocca. All the offers were for legitimate operations; no link farms and nothing MLM or sleazy. Sponsored links and content, and the content has been things I think my readers would actually enjoy. But for now, I won’t be going down those routes. You might know that the good folks here at Automattic (the company that runs WordPress) have a policy against blog owners running ads or sponsored content on WordPress.com hosted sites like this one. Blogs with traffic in excess of 25,000 visits per month are eligible for an Ad Control feature. The Daily Cocca is gaining steam, but is not quite at 900ish hits per day, dear readers. If I ever do run ads or sponsored content, rest assured the ads will only be for things that are on the square, and the content will only be posts or graphics that are engaging and worth your time and mine. I’m not into blogging for the money (sort of like writing). I’m interested in connecting with awesome people and sharing awesome things.

If you know me professionally, you know that I do make part of my living by working on content and social media outreach for groups with the right kind of ethics. Three Pillars Trading Co. is a new company I’m working with. They’ve asked me to help capture the essence of their fair-trade products and three-pillared approach to sustainable, responsible business. I’m plugging them here because I like their mission. I’m going to put a link to their Facebook page in one of my sidebars to help promote them and to pretty up all that white space. For the record, they have not asked me to do this and I’m not being paid to place their content here at TDC. I just want to give them a shout out, and perhaps start a discussion about how we can use our blogs to help ethical, sustainable operations simply because it’s the right thing to do. We’re all in this together. To that end, if any of you have projects that you think might sort of fit in with this idea and you’d like me to put together a graphical link to them and display them on my white space, let me know. I’ll do it for free (though a link back here would be appreciated). If you want to talk about hiring me for other things, well, hey, that’s great too.

Automattic image by niallkennedy via Flickr

His Grandfather Drove a Covered Wagon. He Walked on the Frickin’ Moon.

5 Feb 20115 Feb 2011 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg — You have nothing to say.

“My great grandparents came across the southern United States in the 1870s to start a new life in the western territories. They were in a covered wagon drawn by horses, driving a few cattle to start a new herd. The railroads had not been completed, automobiles had not been invented; the electric light had not been invented. My father was born shortly after the Wright brothers made the first airplane flight — and I went to the moon…In less than a hundred years we went from covered wagons to going to the moon.”

I haven’t read the rest of this article yet, but go ahead and re-read the above paragraph. Forty years ago today, Edgar Mitchell walked on the Moon. His grandparents were honest-to-goodness pioneer pioneers, coming across the US when the US still had continental territories and things like horses and herds. Two generations later, Edgar walked on the effing Moon. How crazy is that? This is something that’s always intrigued me about the 19th and 20th centuries…how someone born before the airplane was invented could live to see lunar landings. Mitchell’s family history makes the point poetically.

In less than 100 years, we went from Conestoga wagons to walking on the Moon. What have we done in the last 40? Focused on the vastness of the microchip’s inner space, which is all well and good, but (and you know I’m serious) where are our jetpacks? Where are our Lunar and Martian settlements? What’s the hold up?

Mark (Where’s Your Jetpack?) Zuckerberg image by jdlasica via Flickr

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