I have this annoying, condescending chuckle that I can't seem to control. Pisses people off. And it comes out at times that seem quite inappropriate. HIM: I really think this is the year the Red Sox beat the curse and win it all. ME: Hyeahhehehe! HER: I know in my heart that Jim Morrison is alive. ME: Hyeahhehehe!

I have no friends.

Same laugh escapes my lips when someone tells me that television is far superior to old time radio because, obviously, you can see it! ME: Hyeahhehehe! I feel bad for those people, because they apparently don't have the big screen in the mind. The imagination should be far more powerful than the eye. When Jack Benny went down to his vault to get a few dollars for a shopping trip, you heard a door open, several footsteps, another door open, steps on stairs, echoes, long distances being traversed, watery noises, and even the growls of the vault guard, Carmichael the bear. By the time Benny reached the vault you were laughing so hard you were holding your side, and you SAW it all in your mind in vivid detail. When Benny's show moved to television, the vault gag was still good, but only for a mild laugh simply because there was no way to make the 2-D image as amusing as the image your mind created for you as you listened to the gag on radio. TV is superior? Hyeahhehehe! As I reported last month, the quest for old time radio recordings has been made very simple in the Internet age. Websites, FTP sites, Usenet newsgroups, IRC channels and a few other resources give you instant access to MP3-encoded programs. The sudden popularity of websites that offer hundreds of megabytes of free storage space has made it possible for people to archive their collections in a place where anyone can download from them. While the record industry has gone apoplectic over similar methods of distributing music, there only seems to be one character out there trying to claim legal ownership of radio shows, and recent court losses have pulled his legal teeth, so to speak. Because of the Internet, it's possible to start at zero and build a nice collection in no time at all, and at no cost beyond your connection charges and however much you pay for blank CDs. And if you happen to have DSL or cabel modem... well, I hate you. My 56k modem takes about forty minutes to download the half hour Lights Out episode that you can snag in three minutes.

Once you figure out where to find the shows you want to download, the next step is figuring out what they all are. Most newbies only recognize a handful of names, like Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, The Shadow, Superman, and The Green Hornet. But what the heck is You Bet Your Life? And just what is The Weird Circle? Or Magic Island, The Cinnamon Bear, Challenge Of The Yukon, The Great Gildersleeve, Baby Snooks or Hop Harrigan? Is it worth your time to download it, or will you get it and find out it's the type of show you hate? Of course, you #$!* cable modem folks don't have to worry because it's just a three minute investment to find out. The 56k crowd doesn't want to deal with that. They, like me, need some guidance. Last month I mentioned a book that is, by and large, the accepted bible of OTR collecting. It's called On The Air: The Encyclopedia Of Old-Time Radio, and it's written by a man named John Dunning who really went the distance to give us a fantastic reference book. It has over 800 pages of shows listed in alphabetical order, and I can't over-emphasize just how helpful it is to collectors, be they rookie or veteran. I'm not sure what the book's list price is, but I do know it's rather high. However, it can be found at Amazon.com for under $40, and it's worth every penny many times over.

Let's assume you're just curious at this point and not ready to drop $40 on a book just yet. Not a problem. The Information Highway runs through hundreds and hundreds of websites where you can learn all about this hobby. I'm going to give you some links from time to time in this column, hopefully at least few useful ones every month, and I recommend you start an OTR folder in your browser's bookmark section. I'm going to start with the most important link of all: Jack's List Of Old Time Radio Pages. This is a fantastic resource with links to pages as broad as OTR overviews and as specific as Shadow fan clubs. There are other link sites that are nearly as good (and some might say better, depending on the contents of their most recent updates), but start with Jack's and, as you follow the links and explore a bit, you'll find the others out there as well.

Now that we have a diving board set up, it's time to start learning about OTR. There are actually quite a few websites out there that we'll talk about over the months to come, places where you can learn a great deal about the subject and all of its minutia, but we're going to start with Old-Time Radio.com. This mega-site has it all. From here you can get the names of books on OTR, read articles about the hobby, find out what radio stations play old radio shows and even link to several of them for streaming audio, find people who want to trade shows, link to radio museums, and find far too many other goodies to name. You can even read articles on how to encode your own MP3s or make tapes with less hiss. A serious OTR buff might make Old-Time Radio.com the default homepage for his or her browser. It's vast and unbelievably helpful.

Another important page is The Beginner's Guide To Old Time Radio. On this site you can find out about the Usenet Newsgroups where people actually post shows that you can download. These groups are alt.binaries.sounds.radio.oldtime and alt.binaries.sound.radio.oldtime. Yeah, I know, looks the same, but in one of them it's "sounds" and in the other it's "sound." A lot of shows are cross-posted to both groups, but each has plenty of shows the other doesn't have, as well.

Ya know what's fun? When you've just discovered a show you love and somebody starts a flood. (What the heck are you talking about, Deej!?) I'll explain. A "flood," in Usenet Newsgroup vernacular, is when someone or some group of people posts a huge number of episodes of a particular show. As I write this there are floods for Lux Radio Theater, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Bob & Ray and The Goon Show, and my modem is bright red from over-work. Looks like someone's just kicking up a Fibber McGee and Molly flood, too. This is a great way to build your collection. Between these newsgroups, a handful of hidden FTP sites and a few transactions with other collectors, my collection has gone from a few scattered tapes to over 3,500 shows on CDROMs. It doesn't take long. If you're already familiar with the Usenet beat, you'll probably head straight to those two groups, but there are a few others you should know about. Though it has less traffic, there are often plenty of goodies in alt.binaries.sounds.radio.misc, including occasional Dr. Who episodes. Quite a bit of old time radio also lands in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.comedy, where the Goon Show flood is being cross-posted. (My collection of 135 Goon Shows is growing by leaps and bounds this week!)

Next month we'll talk about a few specific shows. Between now and then, I hope you find plenty of good stuff out there in cyberspace, and you'll have a good starting point with the links in this article. In the accelerated Internet age, things happen very quickly. By the time the next issue of Cosmik Debris comes out, you might just have a fair sized collection going. If you have questions or would just like to talk about OTR, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me some e-mail at dj@cosmik.com. I'll be back next month, so stay tuned.

(C) 2000 - DJ Johnson