Shadow President

I love simulation video games. Especially the "civilization building" types like Sim City.

But there's one game in particular I have a special fondness for that has never been updated or given a modern makeover and it's still every bit as challenging (although graphically challenged itself) as it was when it came out in 1993.

It's called Shadow President.

In this game, you are the Commander In-Chief. Yes, you. You have the ultimate power to create world peace, a roaring economy and make the quality of life in the world a global benchmark. Or you can send us all back to the stone age. You can be a wise peacemaker and a statesperson. Or a brutal tyrant hell bent on world domination. You can force regime changes. Or live and let live. You can test your deepest held ideology. Or define yours through a series of surprisingly accurate situations and how you would handle each of them. Any way you go, there are benefits and ramifications to every decision you make. Just like what a real president has to deal with.

The game starts in June of 1990. If you remember that time (and it seems like yesterday to me), The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union hadn't become Russia again (and it wouldn't until 1991, but the change was already afoot in the Kremlin.) And most of all, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was getting it's dander up with Kuwait and would eventually invade it. This would be your first major test of how you would deal with a major world crisis in the Oval Office.

Like I said, this game isn't big on graphics. And it's not a high action game. It can be pretty tedious at times with all the seemingly mundane things going on. But each situation, no matter how trivial they may appear has some indirect benefit or consequence to your leadership effectiveness, popularity and world standing.  It's one of those games that really belong in a classroom. But if you love a good game of mental chess rather than 3-D explosions and insane graphics, this is for you.

You can also balance the budget, increase or decrease spending in the Military, Social spending, Investment in the country and Foreign Aid. You can raise or lower Personal, Corporate and Sales taxes and well as Tariffs. You can consult with your advisors on which route to take that would ultimately shape your presidency. This means encountering a lot of things you weren't even prepared for. You may be forced to make decisions that fly in the face of your own ideals (like all presidents are forced to do sometimes.) But then again, being President means inheriting a nation and world left behind by the previous President and what you make of it will determine your legacy.

When you select a country (just move the mouse cursor to a country on the map and click on it until it lights up. Another way is to press the ? key and use the up/down arrows to find the specific country you're looking for), move your mouse cursor the the extreme left on the map, the options menu will appear. Click on SOC/ECO/CIA/MIL or NUC for each option menu and decide what you will do to the selected country.

You can decide what to do with each country. You can send them humanitarian, economic, intelligence, military and nuclear aid. You can declare war on them or defend them. Arrange for surgical strikes, issue peace delegations, give them Most Favoured economic status or block trade. Set up coup d'etats  Or blow them up in a nuclear holocaust. But remember, your every move is going to either have success or catastrophic ramifications.

Your popularity level is what ultimately determines if you get elected to another term. A popularity level of 50% or higher can mean you get another term. But anything lower could jeopardize that. A popularity rating of less than 30% can set you up for serious trouble and less than 20% could put you at risk for impeachment or even assassination. It's very very hard to build your popularity, but much easier to screw it all up. You're walking on eggshells - just like a real president.  

The Game:

Shadow President is a DOS game (it's 23 years old.) And while DOS is pretty much the Latin of the computer languages these days, it's not entirely defunct (you'd be surprised at what our own government computers still use in 2016.) But regardless of your computer operating system, you can still play it on DOSBox. Download DOSBox here and install it on your computer (there's versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and others as well as an Android version for your smartphone or tablet.)

Next, download the game here (it's free abandonware as there are no current versions of this game.) Unzip and place the SHADOW folder in your Games folder. When you want to play, just click on the SHADOW.exe file in the SHADOW folder. DOSBox should handle it from there.

And don't forget the manual. You can download the PDF file here. Keep it in the SHADOW folder for safekeeping (it won't affect the performance of the game.) You will need this as there is a primitive security system of quotes in which you must answer with who said them and the answers are in the manual. If you do not answer them correctly, the game goes on a 30 day trial and that's not 30 actual days in real life, but 30 days in the game itself (on average speed, the clock goes at one hour per second.) The manual also goes into explaining the game in deeper detail.

To stop the clock during the game, press the 0 (zero) key. This helps when you need to make a lot of changes. To start back up/ change game speed, press 1 for 1 hour per second, 2 for 2 hours per second, 3 for 4 hours per second, 4 for 8 hours per second or 5 for one day per second. Beware that faster speeds can make interaction very difficult. You'll have to experiment to find the one that's right for you or adjust as you play. (Click on images to enlarge.)

 In the System Menu, there's even an Auto-Pilot feature where the game plays itself for you. But be aware that the game can often make decisions you may not want or even screw it up for you. 

After going through the "security clearance", you will be treated to the opening scenario and a tutorial overview. This allows you to get a feel for the controls of the game options and there's a button on screen for saving the game. Use it - a lot. Because you may want to play for certain periods of time and pick up where you left off. Or try different strategies. Other options include running the game without elections (oh yes, there are elections.), With/without audio (the sounds are also pretty primitive by today's standards.) Or different scenarios, such as a Super Iraq, Virtual Earth, US Economic Decline and others.

 The game also includes the 1990 CIA Factbook, which is useful in determining the history of a certain country as well as calculating potential strategies of each. But bear in mind as you play, you change the course of world history and the entries can become meaningless beyond that if say, you take over or change the regimes of North Korea. Or Iraq. Or even go full Benedict Arnold and actually support our enemies. (Yes, you can even do that. But there could be some pretty big consequences. Just like in real life.)

 The only problem is the game does not have one very important aspect to the real life workings of the President; Congress. In a real life presidency, you have to work with Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate.) And that more than anything else determines your leadership effectiveness. If you can't get anything past them, you're what's called a "lame duck". But since this game does not have a Congress to deal with, you're pretty much a dictator in spite of being an elected President. So for the purposes of simplicity and hypothesis, you're in control of everything. A Congress feature would magnify how difficult the presidency actually is, but it would have also resulted in a game perhaps too big and advanced for the old computers of 1993.
 
Strategies:

My preferred personal strategy to this game has always been the Peacemaker/Good Guy because it's super hard. I follow a sort of Bernie Sanders-like strategy of keeping military conflicts at the barest minimum while keeping a close watch over the economy and spending on Social programs and Investment high. Cut or raise taxes according to what affects common people more than corporations and the 1%. And it works amazingly well. (Click on images to enlarge)

June 1990

November 1992

The changes are pretty dramatic, but they were made very gradually. Just a little bit month by month, but it's given me a landslide election victory the day before in the 1992 screenshot. With massively increased social spending and investment, homelessness is a thing of the past. Everyone has free college, Cannabis is legal. Life is pretty laid back. And it shows.

On the right side of the screenshot you'll see some lines with TEAQ under them. They stand for:

Total Influence
Economy
Ambition
Quality of Life

In the 1992 screenshot, the Total Influence is down because I'm not trying to be world cop and focusing on matters at home. The Economy is roaring, Ambition is very low because we're not picking fights or invading other countries (the legal weed helps too) and Quality of Life is crazy good. And 76% popularity is not too shabby.

On the other hand, you could try other things that are less challenging and more fun, like invading Canada. But I love a hard strategic puzzle.

It's a fun game for the intellectual sort, maybe not so much for the raging gamer. But it's always worth a shot....If you dare.

Cheers!

Fake Lionel Richie

This CD was from the Mount Vernon City Library (WA) and particularly strange because these recordings aren't even from Lionel Richie at all. The singer(s) don't even sound close to Lionel Richie. Or Diana Ross on "Endless Love".
It was released in 1993 not on Motown (Lionel Richie's home label during his '80s hit making streak), but on something called Starnice. That was the first warning sign, along with the crummy, non-descript packaging.

A Googling of Starnice reveals it to be a Hong Kong based label with other titles of presumably similar knock-off material of other acts. Regardless, the CD is a fake and not worth anyone's money unless you like really bad anonymous karaoke covers better than original hit recordings (which I'm presuming most of you don't.)

I'm also sure this wasn't intended for sale in the U.S. where recordings like this are illegal to sell unless they are marked as not the original performer on the packaging. This is how these recordings otherwise get sold in America, as worthless anonymous "tribute" albums. I can't believe there's an entire bastard subset of the music industry dedicated to this crap (I once broke off a budding relationship with someone over the fact that she bought a Glee CD - no joke.) But this disc is a flat out fraud. It promises Lionel Richie, but gives you not one, but two and possibly three, maybe even four schmucks with detectable Chinese accents.

This disc starts out with an anemic cover of "Say You Say Me", bungled up lyrics in "Hello" ("I've been alone with you inside my head".) It's just droning electronic keyboards and lame attempts at sounding like Lionel Richie.     

And since it is a cheap, chintzy knockoff, I've included it for your masochistic pleasure. But most of you probably would rather have a tax audit instead of hearing this garbage.

Enjoy (Or something.)   

CD Front/Inside V Card (Other side was blank)

CD Back

CD Label

"Killing Me Softly With His Song" Lori Lieberman (1972)

This song may be best known as Roberta Flack's signature song, but this was the original version of it, released a year before Roberta Flack's version became one of the biggest hits of 1973.


Now there's two utterly different stories on the origins of this song.  

Lori Lieberman claimed she was inspired to write the song after watching a Don McLean concert. When he sang "Empty Chairs", she was so moved by his performance that the next day, she told her songwriting partners Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, who then composed the song.

Gimbel and Fox however contended that the song was inspired by an Argentinian novel. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. In Chapter 2, the principal character describes himself as sitting in a bar listening to an American pianist friend 'kill us softly with some 'blues'. Gimbel put it in his 'idea' book for use for later with a parenthesis around the word 'blues' and substituted the word 'song' instead.   

However, the dispute was settled when a New York Daily News interview article from 1973 was unearthed with Gimbel admitting that Lieberman's story had indeed inspired the song.

The song was revived in 1996 by the hip-hop group The Fugees, reaching #2 that year and the Plain White T's recorded a version in 2008.

Outsider Music

Ahhh....Another peaceful Sunday morning. Time to put on some nice, relaxing easy going music. Right?

Well I'm having none of it. It's time to crank it up full blast and wake up the neighbours with some truly awesome music. The stuff you just won't hear on the radio. Anywhere. 

Outsider musicians are those folks who simply make music the only way they know how. With very little to no musical training whatsoever. The conventional requisites of stardom are simply unheard of among outsider musicians.

This is not American Idol. There is no competition. Or critiquing. Or even practicing and rehearsals. What you hear is what you get.

They simply don't care about commercial success. Or any musical conventionality even amateur musicians adhere strictly to. They make their music on their own whims and for the sheer sake of their own personal enjoyment. Even if the only one enjoying it is themselves, they wouldn't care.

It also differs from vanity acts. Vanity acts actively look for a commercial breakthrough and exposure to the masses. Most outsider acts would never be heard at all were it not for certain friends and associates encouraging them to take a leap of faith and record their material.

Sometimes a major label finds them, but that's usually a by-product of local press buzz or through chance contacts. The labels never seek outsider musicians and outsider musicians never seek the labels. If planets align, they align. But that's very rare if they do. The major labels want something that delivers a massive return on whatever investment they make. And that's something no outsider act has ever really done. 

Outsider music isn't even a conscientious rebellion against mainstream rock and pop's status quo, which usually drives most hardcore independent lo-fi punk bands. They truly believe in what they are doing in spite of what anyone thinks. They simply let their dim lights shine.

But what may sound like tone-deaf psychiatric patients (some, but not all outsider musicians suffer from some sort of severe mental illness) to the rest of us is technically a sub-sub genre of Alternative rock. It's not even a "new" thing ("Wild Man" Fischer, whom Frank Zappa discovered in the late 1960s, is a pioneer. So is David Peel, whom John Lennon discovered and released a few albums of his on the Beatles' Apple label in the early '70s, The Shaggs and to some extent, even Charles Manson.)

Today, we're going head first into the most obscure of obscure music genres. But like most of my posts here, I don't disclose everything. I like to leave some of it out for you, the reader, to explore on your own. I just merely set up the launch pad for your own journey (it might be one-way.) So this is not a complete list. Not by far. But it's enough to give a basic insight into this strange genre. Google "Outsider music", if you're really curious.

Bingo Gazingo

Sweet dreams, ladies.....

Bingo Gazingo (Murray Wachs, 1924-2010) was an elderly New York City outsider musician and poet with perhaps more punk rock authenticity than any band that ever played at CBGB's. And I mean all of them. He was, perhaps literally, the grandfather of punk.

With song titles like "Oh Madonna, You Stole My Pants", "Up Your Jurassic Park" and "I Love You So Fucking Much, I Can't Shit", you pretty much get the idea this was no ordinary retired postal worker from Queens.

He released an album through WFMU Radio in 1996 and this song, "You're Out of The Computer" was a collaboration with techno artist My Robot Friend (Howard Rigberg) from My Robot Friend's 2004 CD Hot Action! It also appears on the Songs in The Key of Z compilation of outsider music.

Tragically, Bingo Gazingo was struck down by a cab on his way to a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club where he appeared weekly every Monday night in November of 2009. He died of his injuries on New Year's Day, 2010. He was 85.


Wesley Willis

Wesley Willis (1963-2003) could be the most famous of outsider musicians, even garnering some airplay on mainstream alternative rock radio in the 1990s.

His story began as one of ten children born in a dysfunctional family (having so many siblings can throw even the most stable family off - think the Duggars) in the housing projects of Chicago. He spent most of his life going from foster home to foster home with two older brothers as their parents had a violent relationship and split up when Wesley was a child.

In spite of this horrific background, Wesley seemed to be a bright and fairly normal young man. However on October 21, 1989 (there are people who remember this specific date), he began to hear voices in his head, which he called "demons" and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

About this time, he also began making music. Mostly as an outlet to escape the turmoil inside his head. He also made artwork and was discovered by members of Chicago's alternative rock scene, who encouraged his musical pursuits. This led to a collaboration called The Wesley Willis Fiasco and he actually became a sensation in the Chicago alternative underground, gaining attention from major label American Recordings, which was distributed by Warner Bros.

His favourite greeting wasn't a handshake or a hug. It was a headbutt to the forehead. I am not making that up. This left a permanent bruise on his forehead. 

His music was crude, rambling and often profane. One unique characteristic of Wesley Willis is no matter what song he's performing, they all sound identical to each other. They mostly are songs about things that he had personally identified with in his life. Such as his local McDonald's, bands and stars such as Pink Floyd, Foo Fighters, Kurt Cobain and whatever else figured.

Here's a sample of what that sounded like


He eventually recorded 50 albums from 1994 until his untimely death in 2003 from leukemia. He was 40.

Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston, like Wesley Willis, also suffers from schizophrenia and like Willis, also uses music as a way to cope with it. Johnston is also a visual artist as well. However Johnston is different in the sense that his music is more introspective and melodic than either Wesley Willis or Bingo Gazingo. He's been called a "fractured genius" and "the indie Brian Wilson". He quite possibly could have achieved mainstream stardom and in fact, he came quite close to it.

Daniel Johnston began recording music as a teenager on a boombox at home in the late '70s. By the early '80s, he was self releasing his own material. He moved to Austin and appeared on MTV in 1985, which gained him further exposure. He went on to make more recordings, including collaborations with Sonic Youth, Half Japanese and other indie acts, who became fans of his.

But his schizophrenia was also worsening. In 1990, on the way to West Virginia on a small, private two-seater plane piloted by his father Bill, Johnston had a manic psychotic episode believing he was Casper the Friendly Ghost and removed the key from the plane's ignition and threw it out of the plane. His father, a former Air Force pilot, managed to successfully crash-land the plane, even though "there was nothing down there but trees". Although the plane was destroyed, Johnston and his father emerged with only minor injuries. As a result of this episode, Johnston was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

In the early '90s, Kurt Cobain was often seen wearing a t-shirt with the cover image of Johnston's 1983 album Hi, How Are You? on it.

Which lead to even more interest in Daniel Johnston. Even while involuntarily committed at the mental hospital, Warner Music label Elektra Records was interested in signing him, but he refused the deal as Elektra then was also the label home of Metallica, whom Johnston thought worshipped Satan.

Eventually he signed with Warner co-owned Atlantic Records, which released his only major label LP Fun in 1995. The album flopped commercially and Atlantic ended his contract in 1996. 

In 2005, a full length documentary DVD on Daniel Johnston's life The Devil and Daniel Johnston was released.

Johnston is still active in music.


Jandek

To say Jandek is merely an outsider musician just doesn't quite cut it. In fact, he's been described as "The Rock N' Roll J.D. Salinger". Because he's perhaps the most reclusive of all the outsider musicians.

Yet he has released over 70 albums on the mail order Corwood Industries label. A label that while Jandek maintains a certain distance from professionally, has only issued Jandek material. And he has a surprisingly loyal and solid worldwide fan base. With almost no radio airplay or any promotion of any kind.

Most Jandek albums feature a young man on the covers in random photo shots and when you lay them out, you realize they are the same person - Jandek himself? Possibly.

But nothing has been directly confirmed by Jandek - he's only done a few interviews. But in rare recent pictures of Jandek, you do see a very strong, even uncanny resemblance.

Jandek's actual name has never been confirmed directly either, but he's believed to be Sterling Smith and he was born in 1945. Other than that, very little else is known about him. And that's how he likes it.

His music is a sort of psychedelic country-blues. But even that description isn't quite accurate. Jandek is a genre all to himself.

Jandek is an enigma even by outsider music standards. And that's saying something. In 2003, he released Jandek on Corwood, a documentary DVD that doesn't answer even the most basic questions of his life his fans always wanted to know. But then again, that mystique is still a part of his attraction.

He's still active, releasing an album or two a year and occasionally touring.






More:

Curly Toes

Wing Over America

Florence Foster Jenkins

"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" Tiny Tim (1982)

Attention Kmart Shoppers

"OK, I have to admit this is a strange collection. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection.



Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. 

The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. 

The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month. 

Finally, one tape in the collection was from the Kmart 30th anniversary celebration on 3/1/92. This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume. The tape contains oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962. This may have been one of the last days where Kmart was in their heyday - really! 

One last thing for you techies, the stores built in the early 1970's (such as Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart #3066, Harwood Heights, IL #3503 and Bridgeview, IL #4381) orignally had Altec-Lansing amplifiers with high quality speakers throughout the store. When you applied a higher quality sounding source, the audio was extremely good. Later stores had cheaper speakers and eventually the amps were switched out with different ones usually lacking bass and treble controls." - Mark Davis

Listen Here

Also see S.S. Kresge for information and links to recordings of background music from Kmart predecessor, Kresge. And The Seeburg 1000, an earlier store background music system. More on Kmart: Vintage Kmart Memories and Kmart Brand Products. 

10-10 Dial-Around Numbers

In the late 1990s, before cell phone service became affordable and nearly ubiquitous for nearly everyone, there were dozens of phone numbers offering super cheap long distance and other gimmicks via a 10-10 prefix number for land line phones. (Image: Chris Stewart/The San Francisco Chronicle)  

The 1990s were the last decade where home land line phones were still dominant. Cell phones were still prohibitively expensive, very few people had them and they had no features. Just voice.

In the 1990s, there was no unlimited talk, text messaging was still mostly unheard of and there was no mobile web/data access either. Charges for voice calls were still by the minute and at the rate of $2 per minute, they added up real fast. Plus you needed a perfect credit score or a massively huge deposit to even get cell phone service.

So the land line phone was status quo for most people. Which meant if you had to call someone in a different area code, you had to pay by the minute for it, often at the rate of 25¢ to as high as $1.00 per minute (or more!) for international calls. However after 7pm local time and on weekends, these rates came down, but not by much.

In 2015, with the concept of area codes considered nearly obsolete (I live in the Seattle area and my cell phone number has a 415 - that's San Francisco, area code - long story, but no problems thus far) and nearly unlimited everything on your smartphone and zillions of apps you can do nearly everything with for around $30 month, it's hard for most younger people to imagine such a backwards and expensive system. But that's really how it was back in the day.

But to get a further glimpse into our topic, you need to go back even farther.


Making a long distance call in most of the 20th century was a complicated procedure. On top of expensive. Plus, there was only one provider of cross country long distance. It was called The Bell System (it's also been referred to as "Ma Bell" because of the ubiquitously female phone operators and automated voices. Plus it was the "mother" of the entire American phone system and dated all the way back to the very first telephone system in the 1870s.)

There were a few companies that provided local and regional phone service, such as GTE (the predecessor to today's Verizon.) But most long distance calls went through The Bell System.

But in spite of the Bell System's snazzy, friendly commercials and happy brochures, they could charge whatever they wanted if your call went through their lines. Because screw you. That's why. They were a monopoly, they set the rates, they provided the means of communication. There was no competition. So whaddya gonna do about it? Punk.

It frustrated millions of Americans who longed for some level of competition and better rates. So if you wanted to cheaply talk to friends and family across the miles in the days long before the internet, email and social media and today's smartphone services, you had to rely on old fashioned snail mail. Which took days or even weeks to arrive. And breaking family news and emergencies just couldn't wait. But more than anything else, people just wanted to hear the voices of their loved ones far away.


In 1984, the U.S. Justice Department ruled what everyone knew for over 100 years, that the Bell System was indeed a monopoly and ordered the break up of Ma Bell. This led to a flurry of complicated and strange new providers such as US Sprint (later just Sprint) and the now defunct MCI. And Ma Bell became AT&T.

This did lead to more competitive rates, but barely. The initial long distance rates of these new providers were in reality not much different than Ma Bell's. And sometimes, depending on where you were calling, they were even more expensive. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to yet even further fragmenting to the land line telephone systems.

A typical landline phone of the '90s. By this time, cordless phones had begun to overtake corded models.

The 10-10 numbers were created by the newly minted sub-long distance provider US Telecom (then a subsidiary of MCI, now operated by Verizon) as a workaround to your regular home long distance provider. Offering rates as low as 10¢ per minute. Which was actually not a bad rate for 1998 home long distance. Plus they were the same rate, 24/7. No need to wait until after hours.



But by 2004, these services themselves were becoming increasingly antiquated  as cell phone services became more and more affordable and offered far more than the standard land line could provide. And even the 10-10 numbers began increasing rates to compensate. First to 18¢ and now at 30¢.

Surprisingly, some of these 10-10 dial-around land line services are still in business today, even as the use of land lines has dropped dramatically and land lines today are mostly used by businesses, the elderly and the vision and hearing impaired today. But 30¢ is a crazy rate to pay per minute for domestic long distance in 2015 when most people don't even pay for it at all. It just comes gratis with their cell phone service.

More on the 10-10 dial-around numbers 

(Note: I know I'm probably going to hear from those who still have land lines about their virtues and yes, they do have clearer sound and one major benefit. When power is out, the phone lines - with corded phones - usually still work as their source of power is within the phone line itself and in areas that are disaster prone, that's a major benefit. But Seattle rarely has extreme weather or natural disasters. So I can live without one. Just the thought of having to go back to the Luddite old system just gives me the creeps - L.W.)
 

"The Devil Went To Jamaica" Travis Meyer (1998)

Lost stoner classic, often miscredited to David Allen Coe or "Weird Al" Yankovic. Happy 420!

The Lunch Man and Lunch Tunes Lunch Boxes (1986)

The Lunch Man and Lunch Tunes lunch boxes were basic kids lunch boxes with one striking difference; They had built-in radios and headphones.

Unfortunately, they were AM radios at a time when Top 40 radio in the US had largely moved to FM. (They still had several AM Top 40s in Canada until the early 1990s.)

And it's doubtful many teachers or school lunch ladies thought these were a good idea either...