Denton Texas, 1964: At the Holiday Inn, my roommate Pat was the dining-room host, and I was the bellboy. We both took Spanish class, so we practiced by insulting the guests sitting in the booths. (“Yo pienso que este hombre es un burro con arreyos largos.” … “Si, yo tambien.”)

This generally worked pretty well, as the guests generally didn’t speak Spanish. One day, however, the guest spoke Spanish very well and, well, that was the end of our Spanish practice.

But back to the dangerous payphone in the lobby. The first dangerous thing was that it was installed only a few steps away from Pat’s station in the coffee shop.

The second dangerous thing was that its phone number was very similar to the phone at McConnell Hall, the large women’s dormatory.

Because if the payphone rang, it meant somebody was trying to reach the front office at the girls dormitory, and that also meant that Pat could answer “McConnell Hall,” and the callers believed they were speaking with the girl’s dormitory. After all, they’d called the dorm, and the dorm office had answered.

This was a source of endless delight to us.

Ring, ring! went the phone, mid-day. Pat answered, “McConnell Hall.”

“Is Gracie Smith there?” asked the caller, an older-sounding woman.

“No,” Pat said, “She checked out to return home due to an illness, a week ago.”

“What?!” exclaimed the caller. “This is her mother! She’s not here! What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry,” Pat said, “That’s what she told us. Do you want to leave a message, in case she returns to school?”

“You bet there is!” said Mom, “You tell her to call her mother immediately!”

“Will do,” said Pat.

Or, in another case, early on Saturday night, Ring, ring! went the phone. Pat answered, “McConnell Hall.”

“Sally Jones, please,” a guy asked.

“Sorry,” Pat said, “She went out on a date.”

“What?”, screamed the boy, “What do you mean a date? Sally Jones?”

“Yes,” Pat said, “Some very handsome guy pulled up in a Corvette and off she went, wearing a long scarf!”

“A long scarf!” choked the unfortunate lad. “A long scarf?”

“Yes,” said Pat, “She looked really pretty. Is there any message?”

“Ask her to call Larry,” said the guy.

“Will do,” said Pat.

My roommate Pat was a real will-do kind of guy. But I’m not sure those girls ever got those messages.

I used to tell this identical story to Adrienne twice every year, to her eternal disgust, and so it’s natural to want to share it with you, too.

But since we’ve got hyperlinks on this website, I’ll just refer you to the Newfangled Daylight-Savings Time story.

Mount Shasta: I’ve tinkered with the layout of “Adventures of Bloggard”, but the design is still flawed: If the browser is too narrow, the grey column on the right gets squeezed down to the bottom of the page, which is nigh on useless.

If you are a CSS-layout guru and think you could improve the stability of this layout, I’d love to hear from you. I keep saying I’ll go study CSS some more, but I’ve become caught up in the challenge of writing a new story every day.

And here I’m clearly losing ground.

In the Nucleus weblogging system used here, there is a ‘draft’ feature, which permits you to write up a mini-story and file it as a draft so that it doesn’t appear until you want it.

Using this draft feature, as I think of events and people from the past I write these notes into a permanent draft called ‘story ideas’. I keep another permanent draft called ‘timetrack’, which is notes on when different things happened. I’m now 59 and have never had a great memory for dates, so dating an event from my youth is kind of like “back in the winter that the pond froze over, that was when Old Man Sweeney …”

Kind of tedious. Inexact, too.

So far, the ‘story ideas’ file keeps expanding faster than I can write the stories! I wonder if some day I’ll pass away with more stories still untold than written down? Of course the challenge is to keep finding time to write one for every day. My life is full, and it’s much too easy to skip a day. Catching up is difficult.

But the fact is, as far as I can tell, this is a completely new artform: writing interlocking stories of the people and places of a life and therefore of an era. I call this art-form “the Autoblography“.

This reminds me that some years ago when synthesizers were just become popular, and affordable for musicians, I got an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. And I thought up a way to create new sounds on an Apple II computer, using a C-compiler to make on-screen software oscillators which could be linked together to add waveforms or to calculate waveforms using Frequency Modulation and other methods. To create this composite waveform (sound), the Apple II had to chug along all night, and the next morning I would pass the completed soundwave from the Apple II to the sampler, and then I could play that sound. This was very cool. It took me a year to write this software.

That same year, out in the world, the Macintosh became very popular, eclipsing the Apple II, and a guy named Donny Blank wrote the same kind of thing on the Macintosh. My idea was left in the dust, and I never bothered trying to market it.

But the point is: sometimes ideas are in the air. “It steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time.“

I suspect that the Autoblography as a new art-form is in the air. I expect we’ll see more of these … not the eternally boring drivel of diaries (“I went to Burger King and had a real big burger, and now I’m really full, and I’m worried about my girlfriend, and I got a B in History …“), but a more crafted, polished view of life and living, sometimes crafted in real-time, though I expect perhaps better crafted in retrospect. (It gives you more perspective, and you feel more creative freedom to tell lies about details as art demands.)

I suspect that within ten years, there will be a hundred thousand Autoblographies on the net.

That’s ten years and counting. We’ll see.

Dallas, Texas, 1985: J.B. (who shall remain nameless) was a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, which is a real big dominant daily newspaper, highly profitable because Neiman Marcus (‘Needless Markup’) advertises things such as diamond-studded his and hers gold bathtubs and other things which every home ought to have.

J.B. wrote a regular column, perhaps on food or travel, I don’t remember. But for fun, he began running a weekly column under the pen name Joe Bob Briggs, in which he reviewed Drive-In movies, mostly horror and B-Grade flicks. His Drive-In column was right-wing and red-neck, and insulted any ethnic group faster than Archie Bunker, and he posted orbituaries for every Drive-In closing in America, labled “Communist Alert”, on the theory that the Communists were wiping out the drive-ins.

Needless to say, he was a big hit in Dallas.

This went on, to everybody’s great and mutual satisfaction, for several years. Everybody in Dallas understood that it was all tongue-in-cheek; there is a kind of Texas humor in which you state the most ridiculous things, but completely serious. Any Texan comprehends this kind of humor.

It doesn’t always play other places. I knew the manager of a Sausalito Fine Art gallery, a wiry and know-it-all New Yorker who wrote in anger to Joe Bob, complaining of some disrespectful reference to Italians. Joe Bob published the letter, and answered, “Michael, my reference to lazy dagos was not meant to be offensive to hard-working persons of Italian heritage such as yoursef, but after all, it’s not like I lumped you in with the kikes and wops and greasers.”

Back in Dallas, about that time, Michael Jackson came out with a song called We Are the World. This inspiring song had many famous singers, and the lyric sung of how all men are brothers.

Joe Bob’s column that week, entitled “We Are the Wierd”, managed to insult every ethnic group and minority in the world, one after another, just like the verses of the song, and of course parodied the song and all these popular singers at the same time.

Well, that was the way it was interpreted. (As Joe Bob told me later: “I didn’t insult anybody in the lyrics to the song, but it was perceived that I was making fun of starvin’ African chilluns.”)

An ultimatum was rushed to the newspaper by John Wiley Price, a Dallas County Commissioner, and about 200 of his supporters. And while Joe Bob was in College Station (home of the Aggies), giving a speech for National Library Week, he was fired.

Now in Dallas, there is an alternative weekly called the Dallas Observer. It’s like the San Francisco Guardian or the San Jose Metro; that is, a 3/4-sized left-wing paper, slanted toward entertainment, personals, service journalism, and young folks.

The Dallas Observer immediately offered Joe Bob column space.

That afternoon, Joe Bob walked into the Times-Herald advertising office and purchased a small display ad, which said, “Joe Bob Briggs column can now be found in the Dallas Observer, a weekly, Non-Communist newspaper.”

The prepaid ad ran for one day before being angrily cancelled by Times-Herald management, on the grounds that Joe Bob was calling them Communists. As Joe Bob pointed out in his Dallas Observer column, he’d done no such thing, and then he lambasted them for violations of Freedom of the Press, Truth in Advertising, and the Mann Act.

All of which was funny as hell.

Like so many true stories, this one had a happy ending. The Dallas Observer’s circulation soared. The Dallas Times-Herald — forever referred to as the “Crimes-Herald” and the “High Sherriffs” by Joe Bob — returned to business as usual, slanting the news and peddling advertising.

And Joe Bob went on to bigger things, hosting a show on cable where he presented B-Grade movies with commentary. He’s written books and made videos, and as of this week he appeared to be selling some stuff on Ebay. But he says no.

“It’s not me selling that stuff on eBay,” he explains. “It’s my legions of fans.”

There you have it. Straight from the horse’s mouth. So remember: Communist Alert! Don’t get complacent! As Joe Bob says, “Eternal Vigilence is the Prize of Freedom.” Don’t say it can’t happen here!

Sausalito, May 1991: Years ago I’d decided to change my name, from Richard French to Arthur Cronos. My then wife Lori didn’t like the idea, and as it turned out, I should have listened to her.

However, I had thought deeply, but not deeply enough, and I was headstrong, so I made up a whimsical name to scare her with, so that she would accept the name I’d originally chosen.

You might think that was clever, but actually I’d got the idea from a Little Lulu comic book, many years before …

It was in the approximate days of the Sleuth Hound Club, when I lived with my mother in the green house out by the graveyard. At that time I read prodigeously, of Science Fiction, of the Hardy Boys, and of C.S. Lewis’s stories of Narnia. But, I still liked comic books.

Little Lulu, as you may recall, was a sharp little cookie who often had to match wits with a gang of boys that lived in the neighborhood. The boys had a treehouse marked ‘Boys Club’ and ‘Girls Keep Out’, for example.

In this case, Iggy, one of the smaller boys, had come grumbing along the sidewalk. Little Lulu asked Iggy what was wrong.

“It’s Tubby,” Iggy said. “He’s decided to change his name to Lancelot.”

Little Lulu asked, “So what?”

Iggy said that it was hard to remember. The boys kept getting it wrong, calling Tubby, for example, “Lumpalot” and “Lunchalot”. You will recall that Tubby was kind of fat, so this caused dissention.

Little Lulu said she’d help out.

Walking along the sidewalk, Little Lulu spied Tubby, standing vacantly outside the candy store, gazing out toward the street, but clearly with his mind elsewhere. Little Lulu reached into her purse and pulled out a penny.

She walked up to Tubby, thrust the penny into his mouth, and gave his ear a sharp twist. Tubby jumped.

“Ow!” he said. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Why did you do that?”

Little Lulu acted startled. “Oh!” she said, “Tubby! I didn’t realize it was you. I thought you were a bubble-gum machine. Did you know that your head is the exact same shape as a bubble-gum machine? I didn’t realize it was you.”

Tubby stared goggle-eyed.

Little Lulu went on. “In fact,” she said, “I’m going to call you ‘bubble-gum-machine-head’ from now on, OK?”

“What??!!” yelled the outraged Tubby.

“Yes, bubble-gum-machine-head?” said Little Lulu. “Is that OK?”

“No, no!” cried Tubby. “Tubby’s my name. Call me Tubby.”

And that was the end of the trouble with Lancelot.

Now, back around 1984 when I wanted to change my name from Richard French to Arthur Cronos, I’d told Lori and she said she didn’t like the name Arthur Cronos, I remembered my Little Lulu comic book.

I made up a name so atrocious that she was sure to like it less than Arthur Cronos.

The name I made up was ‘Traktor Topaz.’

When I told her, sure enough, the Little Lulu factor came into play, and she decided that Arthur Cronos would be just fine. It’s not exactly the same as the Little Lulu story, but the same principle, don’t you see?

So, first, that is how I became Arthur Cronos; I changed my name legally. You don’t have to go before a judge, but I did, because I wanted a paper to show to my business accounts. The judge said OK, and hit the gavel and my name became Arthur Cronos.

Now, some years later, when I was living with Adrienne in Sausalito, in a lovely apartment overlooking the San Francisco bay, I decided that I was going to practice up, and then start playing music in restaurants, on the Chapman Stick. It’s my nature to like smoke and mirrors, and different names, so I wanted a stage name. I thought of ‘Arthur Angel’, but that seemed altogether too nice.

And then I remembered Traktor Topaz.

On my Traktor Topaz website, you can read more about my adventures at that time, and hear some samples of my music.

Now the funny thing is that, as Traktor Topaz, I began buying and selling used Stick instruments, and that lead to my creating a newsletter with free two-handed tapping lessons. And that led to a really stupid lawsuit. And what with one thing and another, there are now more people around the world who know me as Traktor than as Arthur.

So let this be a lesson to you.

I’m not sure exactly what lesson, but it seems like it ought to be a lesson about something, for God’s sake!