Okay, laugh, snicker, carp and jeer if you like, but I’ve always enjoyed the Pet Shop Boys. The remixes are always techno exceptionale, and the lads write some fine songs. The vocals put some people off - too twee, too weightless, too . . . gay. As for the last charge, well, duh, but so? It’s like hammering Noel Coward for not writing lyrics that could be chanted by British soccer hooligans. (“We’re modern sorts, our geist has been zeited! / That’s why we support Manchester United!”) Neil Tennant’s voice has a quality you only find in untutored amateurs. He can’t do the big Whitney sob or Garland shout, so he contents himself with wry, measured melancholy, and his voice is perfect for the material. I like it. Sue me. Point is, I was shoving CDs in the car radio the other day, and found “Home and Dry,” a good song off the last album. I thought: you know, this should have been a hit.

And then I thought: how would I know if it was? I pay no attention to these things. Like most people over 30, I live outside the rules of radio. I roll my own. I thought of this again today when Entertainment Weekly showed up in the mailbox. Avril was on the cover, whoever she is. I’d seen her on some teen girls mag cover last month; she was making a face intended to convey outRAGE!ousness, and the headline said that guys dug her and girls dug her and she was cool, so there, the end. Now comes EW; the entire cover is a close-up of her face and her nose is crinkled up to indicate that she has ATTITUDE! Said the headline: she’s pop, she’s punk, she’s in your face.

Let’s take these one by one.

She’s pop! I’ll grant that. No evidence need be advanced; the point is conceded.

She’s punk! On what world? Look at those teeth: straight and white and not a hint of plaque. Johnny Rotten got his name from his abysmal dentition, after all. Sid Vicious’s body odor could make a New York lamppost keel over. The punk movement was not pretty. It did not exfoliate. But “punk” is now defined as being anti-Britney, i.e., just as pretty and young but with an “edge,” which comes from the “street,” which is defined as that smooth expanse your mother drives on before she drops you off at the mall with her credit card. When Avril sticks a safety pin through her ear, pogo-dances all night and throws up seven beers and a handful of uppers in the gutter outside the club, then she’s got a downpayment on punk. But only if the ear gets infected tomorrow.

She’s in your face! If so, then one simple request: get out of my face. The desire to be in my face does not equal the right to be in my face; it does not even mean you have the qualifications to be in my face. Indeed: if you get in my face, I will get in your face, and we will have a contest of in-face getting you cannot win.

In short: all I need to know about her I will learn in 14 months, when she does a Bally fitness center commercial.

In doing some research for today’s Mondale column, I reread his speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. Here’s a real time-capsule moment for you:

“When we speak of change, the words are Gary Hart's. When we speak of hope, the fire is Jesse Jackson's. When we speak of caring, the spirit is Ted Kennedy's. When we speak of the future, the message is Geraldine Ferraro”

Well, at least one out of four didn’t cheat on his wife. What a snapshot of 1984: a time when Gary Hart was the 845th blurry photocopy of JFK to be handed around, when Jesse Jackson was regarded as a bulwark of righteous enlightenment instead of a self-aggrandizing shakedown artist; when Ted Kennedy was a big pickled Care Bear, and Geraldine Ferraro was the future, not a footnote-to-be. I was a hardcore Democrat at the time, and I remember watching the speech and thinking: we are going to lose. We are going to lose 51 states. Puerto Rico will demand statehood just for the chance not to vote for this guy.

Yes, he won Minnesota - but by 4000 votes. Perhaps the DFL thinks that those 4000 voters have died or moved away, and it’s really Mondale Hour now. I just feel sorry for the guy. If he wins, he has to leave home, leave his family, leave his nice job, and go back to the ossuary of the Senate for six years. One night he’ll find himself staring at the lovely ceiling, listening to Robert Byrd drone on - for heaven’s sake he was talking when I left and twenty years later he still hasn’t shut up - and he’ll think: "if I was home I’d be sitting by the fire at the cabin with a book, and I’d hear the wind in the pines, that low whoosh that makes you turn up the heat and reach for the Old Granddad. I’d have my slippers on. The ones the kids got me, the ones with the white nubby fur inside and the rabbit ears. Maybe I’d put “Shane” on the VCR - that’s the only tape we have at the cabin, for some reason. Keep meaning to bring some more, but on the other hand you can’t go wrong with “Shane” . . . . but life didn’t turn out quite the way I intended. It’s odd - one day you’re a happy man, basking in the twilight glow of a life well lived. And the next thing you know you’re a goddamnned Senator again.

"Wha - we’re voting? Find Daschle, find Daschle - well, he’s shaking his head. So I guess it’s a nay.

"Where was I? Ah. Yes. It’s not just the wind in the trees you love to hear. It’s the way the mailbox creaks in a good stiff breeze. See, it’s one of those sounds you never remember until you hear it again; you can go the whole winter and never hear it . . . and when you hear it in the distance as you drop off to sleep, well, it’s one of a dozen different things that tells you you’re home.

"Someone peed on our steps this morning. Peed right on the Post. The bag was dripping when I picked it up. I’d forgotten how much I really don’t like it here."


Finally: one more small piece of the Blade Runner world comes true: meet Darryl Hannah’s fashion daughter.

I like to end my evenings with some TV, and I often don’t care what. Anything to scour away the buildup of flaky, itchy reality. Since I don’t want my daughter jerking away everytime Tony Soprano fires a pistol, I use wireless headphones. For years I’ve had a pair made by RCA - great sound, quite comfy, but if the sound level drops too low for a protracted period of time the transmitter decides well, I guess he’s not listening and blasts STATIC so loud you can actually feel the sound waves collide in the middle of your brain and ricochet around your skull. Recently I noticed that the left side was cutting out - not surprising, since Gnat likes to play with the plug that connects to the receiver, and she’d probably shorted it out. So I bought another pair - not the super-expensive ones that could blast a signal through a battleship hull, but good enough for lounging six feet from the TV in the family room.

If you’ve ever used these things, you know you have two thumbwheels - one on the headset, one on the base station. You twirl them until the signals handshake and you have full, rich, hiss-ridden stereophonic glory. Well, I couldn’t get a signal. I only got one ear. The left ear was dead. Drat. The problem was the receiver jack, then - Gnat was also fond of sticking the plug into the jack and wiggling it around.

What to do? I could have the receiver repaired. Pause. Gales of Laughter! Sure, I’ll give a c-note to Best Buy to fix this thing, and do without family room TV for a week. You know what happens the moment I turn it in to the shop. The war with Iraq starts, and I have to endure it in Mono. Not something I’m willing to risk. So I instantly conceived of a plan: get a new receiver for the family room, move old one downstairs to the Battle Bridge, where headphones are never required. Problem: receiver must also contain a DVD player, since the unit was part of a craptacular Sony Home Theater system I got a few years back. And it must fit in the cabinet, of course.

Off to Audio King, where the staff is smart, knowledgeable, low-pressure, and dressed in ties and jackets - home of the nose-bleed markup, in other words. They had one unit, a clunky JVC with a bewildering interface. The manual probably said “If unit does not work, stab buttons at random until desired function is activated.” No go. With slumped shoulders took myself to the bright loud hellsink known as BEST BUY.

There was a row of composite devices - six models of varying price, size and power. I really wanted the one with the mirrored faceplate and low profile, but I realized I’d be cleaning jam and syrup off the front every morning, and one of my chief objectives in life today is not adding to the number of sticky surfaces I have to Windex daily. A clerk wandered past and asked if I needed help. I told him what I needed: a combination receiver / DVD player, such as they had in this aisle. Which was best?

“Uh . . .” He looked down the aisle as if praying one of the units would sprout legs and arms, clamber down from the shelf, waddle over and say I’m the one, old chap; deucedly simple, and handsome to boot. “Well . . .”

“That’s okay!” I smiled. “I can figure it out. Thanks for your time.”

I had no desire to trail behind a stoner who explained how this unit played, like DVDs, and the green thing here meant it had, like, power. I sized up all the stats, picked a Pioneer that was A) cheaper than the Sony I’d bought three years ago, and B) had more power. While I was studying the model another clerk came by with one of those Nightmare Customers - a cranky old man who didn’t know anything and didn’t want to pay too much and wasn’t going to be sold somethin’ he didn’t need and wanted that one his brother Virgil had with the remote that had the buttons up in the left part, where you thumb can get at ‘em real easy. This clerk had patience, enthusiasm, and knew every product well. When he was done satisfying the old fellow, I buttonholed him and asked his opinion. He said this wasn’t his department, but if he had to choose he’d go with the Pioneer, and he listed off 37 reasons, ending with a vigorous denunciation of the Sony for its cheap construction, proprietary speaker interface and substandard speaker wiring. “But this really isn’t my department,” he insisted. “I can get Daryl.”

I told him I’d talked to Daryl. “You sold me!” I said. “Great job. Thanks.” He grinned and ran off, Robin the Boy Stereo Salesman Wonder, full of Pepsi-fueled eagerness. Bless him.

I got a cart and loaded the box up. Another clerk - tall, wearing a tie - came by and asked if I needed help. I said I’d made up my mind, thank you.

“These units can get hot,” he said. I said I hadn’t thought about that.

“Feel it,” he said. He put his hand over the vent of a Sony on the end-cap. “Put your hand here.”

This felt creepy. I put my hand on the vent. “It’s warm,” I agreed.

“You have to keep them clean, or the dust builds up,” he said. Now he was like some Steven King rustic, issuing cryptic wisdom from the porch to a tourist who just wants directions to the hotel. He pushed the disc-tray button. “You get dust that builds up in here, and it needs to be removed.” I said I would remove it.

“Can I interest you in the service contract? It includes five free cleanings. We’ll remove all the dust inside the unit -”

You know that spinning kick you see in Kung Fu movies? Where the guy whirls around and shoots out a leg and his foot makes instant contact with the guy’s jaw? That’s what I want to do every time I hear the word “service contract.” I buy them for my camcorders, because they are delicate, expensive creatures. But buying them for $200 combo-receivers is like buying a life-insurance policy on a hamster. I declined, bought the unit, dragged it home. Thus ends Act one.

ACT TWO

Gnat had taken a late nap, and was bouncing off the walls at eight; my wife decided to take her to the Mall, let her run around, have a hangiger (as she calls Hamburgers). We’ll be back at 9:30. Fine; I’ll be here setting up the stereo.

I remember from my youth the thrill of unpacking new stereo equipment, how there was always the promise of New and Better Sound with this one, and the unspoken hope that somehow this would help you get a date in the sack, too. (Men seem to believe that about anything they can plug in, just as women believe it about anything they can strap on their feet.) You’d invite your guy friends over to listen to the new system. In college in the dorms, when a guy got a new stereo, he’d invariably use a Steve Miller album to show it off, and I’d have to nod: boy, that crap sounds great. Most of the stuff I listened to was either precious prog-rock meant for late-night low-light headphone sessions, or murkily mixed thrash and punk that sounded awful no matter what you played it on. So the quality of my system didn’t matter. I valued the New System Experience, but I’d made the decision not to be an audiophile, one of those speaker geeks who listens to the system more than he listens to the music.

Still, a new receiver was a blessed event, especially if it had cool dials or nifty VU meters.

Now it just means another X hundred bucks down the rathole.

I removed the cordage from the old system. There’s the TiVo and the VCR and the TV and the receiver, and getting everything to work just right is one of those situations that makes no logical sense; the TiVo video feed has to be run through the VCR, for example. Months ago in a rare moment of foresight I had labeled all the cords, so this time I was spared the hair-pulling experimentation. I yanked out all the STUPID STUPID SONY PLUGS - they defy all known conventions of speaker connectivity; instead of the usual naked wire pair of Mr. Black and Mr. Red, they have these uniplugs that don’t require you to thread the wires into the slots. Very simple, very easy - but when I’d reinstalled the system at Jasperwood, I had to deal with a network of embedded wires in the walls. And that meant cutting the wires several inches from the Sony Plugs, stripping them, marrying the trembling tiny wires to the thick brutish Monster Cable that spilled from the walls, and taping everything back together again. It was deeply satisfying to gather up the stupid plugs, curse them and throw them in the garbage.

It was deeply annoying to remember that the Sony was going downstairs, so I’d need those plugs again, and I’d better get them out of the garbage.

Put everything back, turned it on: huzzah. It worked. It worked! Let’s sit back and enjoy a show -

What time is it?

Good Lord, It’s 10:20.

Where’s my wife and child?

The Mall closed long ago.

Uh oh.

For the next half hour I stood outside on the cliff, waiting for the squad car to come by and deliver the bad news. I’m serious: I was sick with dread. Ten-forty, and they’re still at the Mall? Parking ramp assault, highway accident - take your pick. If they’d gone elsewhere she would have called.

Of course they came home soon afterwards. My wife didn’t have a watch; it was Halloween night at the Mall, they rode on the choo-choo, were you worried?

I didn’t get the starch back in my knees for half an hour.

Later that night I put in a Sopranos disc, poured myself a brown reward, hooked up the headphones and settled in for an hour of Jersey mayhem.

I think we all know where this is going.

The left half of the headphones still didn’t work.