Joel Thorner

Last summer we got my old stereo system out of storage and hooked it up with a set of new speakers. The draw was my Dual 606 turntable; we were looking forward to playing some old records again, ones I'd been carrying around for 20 years and hadn't heard in most of that time.

It was great, listening to old vinyl and reliving the naive optimism of high school. About halfway through side four of Rush's All the World's a Stage (hey, I said naive optimism, didn't I?), the old 606 just quit. The drive motor stopped working, the strobe light went off, everything was dead. Shit.

The next day was Sunday and I Googled around for a while looking for advice about what might be wrong and whether it was worth fixing. I found a bunch of positive comments about a place called The Turntable Factory, run by a guy named Joel Thorner. I surfed over to the site and had a look. It wasn't slick or polished, one of those home-made sites where all the text is centered, the fonts are huge, and the background images and colours make your head hurt. But there was a lot of information there, and it felt like a pretty dedicated person was behind it all.

I couldn't find an exact description of my problem anywhere, so I decided to send a question to the email address advertised on the site. Within an hour, I got a response from Joel Thorner himself. In our brief exchange of emails that evening he gave me some detailed advice on the likely causes. And he declined to take any payment for the advice.

I've meant to give fixing the 606 a try, but because tearing the turntable apart is a minor project in itself, and I don't have a lot of experience with a soldering iron, I've procrastinated.

But I visited the Turntable Factory site occasionally. Along with the advice on turntable repairs, the site gave details about some serious health problems that Joel Thorner had. He suffered from emphysema, and depending on his condition, he would have to throttle back repair work. I checked back every once in a while to see how he was doing.

Sadly, Joel Thorner died last Sunday, July 1st, and the Turntable Factory is closing down. Obviously, I didn't know the man, but in my one interaction with him he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy who loved what he did and had a lot of integrity. RIP.

Narcissism

I've been reluctant to start a blog, because I thought it might seem too self-adoring.

Not that I think people with blogs are all narcissists. I've read lots of blogs that are funny or informative, and I wouldn't call their authors narcissists. I've just been afraid that my own thoughts might not be funny or informative enough to justify publishing them, and that would seem narcissistic.

Recently I've been reading the blogs of some friends I saw again after several years, and realized that it was a great way to keep up with the events in their lives. And I also realized that some old friends might be interested in what's going with me, so here goes.