Good word

"Everyone hates a sad professor."

-- R.E.M.

Lone voice

On the Daily Page earlier this week I reviewed the celebratory new documentary Welcome to Macintosh, which premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival. My review wasn't altogether positive, so I'm disappointed not to have inspired any online vitriol from Apple Inc. fans, who notoriously go after Mac naysayers with pitchforks.

But there's still time.

For the record, I'm the proud owner of an Apple IIc, which I sometimes use to play hangman. Otherwise the thing mostly sits in a closet.

You do that Hulu

I've been sampling the wares at Hulu, the new web-video effort by the NBC and Fox TV networks. So far, I like it. There's a bounty of full-length television and movie offerings -- though many titles are, unfortunately, available only in short clips. Who wants to watch mere excerpts of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"? Someone with a very short attention span and a love of Mariska Hargitay, I suppose.

The site has its critics. Compared to the bounty of YouTube, the offerings can seem scant. Episodes of the wondrous "Simpsons" are available, for example, but only five of them. The site is free, but unlike other web offerings, the clips come complete with commercial spots that can't be skipped. All of that adds up to an experience that may not appeal to web-video fans.

My Hulu experience has been positive, though, in part because I've been watching old television shows not on a computer monitor but on a television. Sometime back I connected a spare PC to the TV in the bedroom, and I've had great fun using the machine as a TiVo-like device, thanks to the Beyond TV software. So it didn't take a great leap of imagination to try watching web video on that TV, too.

Which brought me to Hulu. The site is easy to navigate, even using the PC-based remote control that came with Beyond TV. (It's an awkward method, but it works.) Hulu's full-screen moving images look fine on my standard-definition set. And although Hulu's offerings are pretty slim when it comes to new programming, the site is rich in the sort of classic -- I use the term loosely -- TV programs that in some ways I enjoy the most of all.

So I spent my first hours on Hulu sampling shows like "Dragnet 1967". (One "Dragnet" episode I watched featured the LSD-addled hippie kid known as Blue Boy. Let's hear it for Blue Boy!) I also watched the first episode of the 1979 sci-fi series "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", which I loved when I was 8. It's not holding up well. And I was pleased to find a show I've been meaning to catch up with: "Picket Fences", whose 90-minute pilot proved gratifyingly quirky. I'll be watching more of that -- the entire first season is available on Hulu -- and also some of the episodes of "Hill Street Blues" Hulu offers. That show has been on my list ever since Terry Teachout blogged admiringly about it a few months ago.

All of this I watched, not squinting at a computer display, but reclining in bed. It's a good place to enjoy the mildly narcotic effect of old TV shows, whether they're coming in over the airwaves or via the cable modem.

Front page news

New York Times to would-be competitors in the blogosphere: If you blog, you might die.

Give them what they want

During a six-month hiatus from writing here at Back With Interest, I was amused to note that, according to my Site Meter stats, my hit counts only went up and up. Here's why:

• I once linked to a picture of a nearly naked Juliette Lewis.
• I once linked to a picture of a nearly naked Rachael Ray.

Let this be a lesson to any web scribe trying to attract readers.

Hailing frequencies open

One of my favorite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stories is recounted by -- wait for it -- William Shatner in his memoir Star Trek Memories. It was told to him by his "Trek" costar Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura:

I was sitting at my table and I was chatting and saying hello to people when all of a sudden a man comes up to me and says, "Miss Nichols, I'm sorry to bother you, but there's someone over here who would really like to meet you." And I said, "Well . . . uh, I guess that's okay," at which point he leads me across the floor and up to a table that's surrounded by a lot of people, and he says to me, "I must tell you, the man that wants to meet you is a big fan, a really great fan."

And now I'm thinking to myself, "Well, that's nice," and suddenly the man that's led me through the crowd sort of squeezes in through the people around the table, and the next thing I know, the crowd sort of parts down the middle, and sitting there smiling at me is Dr. Martin Luther King.

So now I'm immediately thrilled. I mean, Dr. King is a fan? Of MINE? And we exchanged greetings, and he told me how much he enjoyed "Star Trek," and about how happy he was that I was part of the cast.

And so I told him about what had been happening in regard to our scripts, and about my meeting with Gene, and that I had actually decided to leave the series.

And he looked at me and said, "Don't do this. Nichelle, you can't do this. Don't you know that the world, for the first time, is beginning to see us as equals? Your character has gone into space on a five-year mission. She's intelligent, strong, capable and a wonderful role model, not just for black people, but for all people. What you're doing is very, very important, and I'd hate to see you just walk away from such a noble task."

That just floored me, and I realized that there was a real responsibility attached to what I represented each week. So I came back into Gene's office Monday morning, told him the whole story about me and Dr. King and I told him that I was absolutely, positively staying. And from that point on, Uhura's importance became a little more clearly defined, and the scripts featured her a little more prominently . . . not always, but at least on a more consistent basis.

All good things

October marks the fifth anniversary of Back With Interest, and it seems a good time to take stock. You probably can see where this is going. I have decided to cease blogging here for the foreseeable future.

For five years this blog has been many things to me. It has been a journal, a chronicle. It has been a great way for this ever-budding writer to practice his craft for actual reading readers, to whom I am so grateful. (Is it a coincidence that I started the blog at more or less the same time that I decided to try writing for a living?) Most importantly -- and this is what I think of when I reminisce over past Back With Interest entries and comments -- it has been a superb way to stay in touch with family and with friends, old and new.

But for now I have, as Dick Cheney might say, other priorities.

Of course, you still can read my web writings at TheDailyPage.com, and you Madisonians also can read my stuff in the pages of the fine newspaper the people call Isthmus. And should the urge strike, you can, God help you, read the Back With Interest archives, which aren't going anywhere.

And so till I see you again: Keep smiling.