I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking a lot about OK Soda this morning. It's been about a decade and a half since it was available to buy in limited test markets, since it disappeared as quickly as it showed up. But I liked the stuff a lot... it was like a "suicide," that yummy weirdness you get from mixing all the fountain drinks together at a convenience store.

But the reason OK Soda is legendary is because of the way it was sold. In 1994, the Coca-Cola Company used slogans and art and marketing concepts that were specifically designed to appeal to "Generation X" types (like me) who had grown up bombarded with sales messages, enough to become cynical about consumerism. It was all very awkward, a zillion-dollar company attempting to speak the language of the disaffected commoner. The populace rebelled. But in this society, "rebellion" means don't buy it and complain.

It's been 20 years, two entire decades. I spent the summer of 1988 holed up in my room, living on bags of "Cajun Spice" Ruffles chips and ashtrays full of Pall Mall cigarettes, wearing out Steely Dan cassettes in my Walkman. I was connected to the outside world with a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem that was, at the time, considered lightning fast. The online service I used back then was called Q-Link, run by a company called Quantum Computer Services with a destiny that couldn't be contained in 64 kilobytes of random access memory. In 1989, the firm changed its name to America Online.

You could connect with people on Q-Link, in a place called "People Connection." You'd type stuff into a text box, others would too, and occasionally you might find someone who was typing things you found interesting. You could then access their profile with a few keystrokes, and read a list of the things they liked -- movies, bands, books and whatnot. If you liked the same things they did, maybe you'd send them an "instant message," or perhaps an "e-mail." If they reciprocated, they'd be your friend. When you'd hit the send button on your e-mail, the word "MAIL" would flicker on the lower right-hand corner of their screen.

Since we talked last, it came to light that several years ago a young man took out a simple mortgage. The collateral consisted of his skills as an basketball player, and the advance (paid out over several years) came in the form of tens of thousands of dollars in cash and goods. The agreement, in principle, was that the creditor would someday collect an agent's cut of a virtually assured professional contract, a slice of a multi-million-dollar pie.

It's an innocuous enough transaction, free of its context and actual signifiers -- it's the same kind of advance on future earnings that happens every day in your local bank's loan department. But the story of young O.J. Mayo is a tremendous scandal in the making, and it'll keep most of the people in my profession busy for the foreseeable future. Set and printed rules were broken, "allegedly" or not... people will be punished, fired, blacklisted for this. It's still in the debate stage, though, and which of them allegedly deserve to take the hit is still entirely up to you.

Nobody involved was really aware of it at the time, but there was a rumbling shudder that coursed across the press-blog continuum this past Tuesday night. A pay-television sports show dedicated a segment to sports coverage on the web. The panel discussion featured America's most popular sports blogger, a Pulitzer-winning author, and some dude who plays football.

From the fallout posted here on the interweb, it would seem that all hell broke loose on HBO's Costas Now. Poor Will Leitch practically lived out that R.E.M. song about talk shows, ambushed by a crazy has-been writer, while an athlete sat in the corner wondering if he was in the right universe.

Me, I didn't get to see the segment until it was posted online yesterday (the show is carried on a channel I haven't received since Flight of the Conchords last aired). It certainly wasn't as explosive as everyone made it out to be, which was a bit of a disappointment. In fact, I'm just surprised how bad everyone looked coming out of it. From Bob Costas (the Voice of the Olympics) saying "fuck-face," to the athlete's description of his own web egosurfing, to the aged one's mouth-froth. Oh, the mouth-froth.