Long time New Yorker readers will recognize that opener as one that used to grace the Talk of the Town section on a regular basis. It was the magazine’s way of including dispatches from such far flung locations as Madison, Wisconsin or Marin County and disguised the fact that the friend in question could be some famous writer or just someone off the map (the New Yorker map that is) who had a good tale and a way with words. (Now the pieces in Talk are all signed and half of them seem to be the by-product of some press release, as if Sidney Falco were now editing the section.)

I always liked the anyomous nature of the setup — whose friend wrote? It implied that Talk’s friend was your friend, which I found oddly comforting. So I was moved to open an email from a name I did not recognize with the subject line “Hello old friend.” (I’ve been feeling in need of a friend lately.)

It was spam. Damned clever spam, I guess (I don’t remember what penny stock it was hawking) but I felt preyed upon. Maybe it’s the loneliness of my middle-aged, internet connected existence but it made me think I’m not that far removed from those grannies who sign their savings over to some con artist selling South African coins just because he was nice to them on the phone.

I was determined not to be had again and almost deleted another email I got just 24 hours later from another address I did not recognize. “Just catching up with you” this one said — right! How many times have you fell for that? But I opened it anyway and this one turned out to actually be from and old friend (okay, an old girlfriend but I’ll take what I can get) who had found me on the internet. And I found that oddly comforting, too. I grew up with the sense that everything had to be taken away from you, eventually — home, family, especially friends — and it’s nice to think that we can all come boomeranging back out of the wild blue yonder.

But you won’t believe what the former president of Nigeria is going to do for me…

I went to the Tower Records on Broadway for the store’s final, going-out-of-business, everything-must-go sale on Thursday and the scene was pretty much what you would expect: A bunch of middle-aged guys like me poring over the CDs and walking around the aisles carrying their payloads in a protective crouch, like pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers carrying their pods.

And I don’t mean iPods.

I wrote about my early love affair with Tower and don’t mean to wax nostalgic anymore for the days of wax and jimmy shands. Technology moved on, like it or not, and the downloading phenomenon (legal or extralegal) separated the men from the boys (and I didn’t see many women or girls in Tower Thursday) years ago. Even Bob Dylan, whose albums were among the first I bought at (yes) Tower in Sacramento, recently gave his jaded blessing to the free download phenomenon. In a conversation with Jonathan Lethem that appeared in Rolling Stone last month, the sage of Hibbing weighed in on the controversy in his own unique way. “I remember when that Napster guy came up across,” Bob told the novelist, “it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothin’ anyway.'”

That’s easier to say when you’ve moved tens of millions of units yourself and your brand is now so ubiquitous that you can get away with doing Victoria’s Secret ads and Twyla Tharp shows without anyone saying boo. But the man, as usual, has a point: I probably could have got most of my haul (eight CDs and one LP, a birthday gift for my friend Jeremy, the name of which I cannot reveal at this time) online for nothin’ — but would I have thought to get the History of Township Music if I hadn’t seen it on display? Or the double album package of Jerry Lee Lewis’s first country records, Another Place, Another Time and She Still Comes Around (To See What’s Left of Me)? Without record stores how will we find the random music we never knew or forgot we wanted?

I know, the Limewired will say you can scroll for your favorites there and there are professional precogs working at the download sites who can tell you what you want before you want it — but what are the chances you will stumble on the Killer in that purple velour nehru jacket? For some action you’ve still got to leave home, providing you can find a record store that hasn’t become a Starbucks.

That’s where I bought the new Dylan.

We went to DC this weekend to see my friend Charles in the Roundabout Theater Company’s traveling production of Twelve Angry Men. You probably remember the 1957 movie version (directed by Sidney Lumet); it was black and white and full of sweat and fury.

It was also a lesson in democracy and like the play on which it was based a sort of ham-fisted yet durable testament to the legal system. What made Reginald Rose’s story so innovative then was its concentration on the jury; until then courtroom dramas centered on the trial itself and the only important players were the defendants, the witnesses and possibly the lawyers. The judge was just an black robe and the jury was just a set of pawns, who filed back into the courtroom at the trial’s end with few surprises and no hint of having suffered in deliberation. Who knew what went on back in that jury room? Who cared?

Rose, a regular writer in the golden age of early TV drama, had served on a New York jury and was moved to recreate the experience in a real-time staged environment. The big clock on the jury room wall ticks for actors and audience alike and the heated deliberations over the evidence that will send a kid to the electric chair for murdering his father reach a boiling point several times in the course of the production, keeping everyone on their toes. “That play’s just like a carnival ride,” Charles — who plays the blue-collar mediator, Juror No. 6 — said after the performance. “Once you get on, it just takes off.”

Despite the rather stock characters — the advertising weasel, the blowhard bigot, the well-meaning foreigner — the prejudice that is at the heart of the play (and the trial) remains a timely topic. The Other on trial is a race of people (Puerto Ricans in Rose’s day) that could just as easily be — I dunno — illegal aliens or suspected Arab terrorists today. In fact, Charles said that the Secret Service had swept the theater the night before because Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez were in attendance. I hope they were listening when Juror No. 9 asks the bigoted Juror No. 10, “Do you think you were born with a monopoly on the truth?”

I had resisted the call of yet another TV series for the last two years because life is too short and Tivo will only hold so much. But lately my wife and I have joined the cult and started watching the first season of ABC’s Lost on DVD. Abandon hope, all ye who tune in here.

Lots of people recommend shows to me but by the time I finally get around to watching them, they seem kind of lame. Fans insist that’s because I didn’t catch the wave early and that the show jumped the proverbial shark back on episode 23, or something. (The West Wing always seemed like on elaborate puppet how to me– one voice, many faces — albeit one done with a steadicam, though fans assure me that back in the day…)

But thanks to DVD, you can now go back and see what the big deal was without waiting or watching commercials. So Peggy and I watched the first four episodes last weekend…and I’m embarrassed to say that we are almost through the first season, one week later. “How addictive is Lost?” the Mephistopholes behind the counter of my local video store said as I came back for the second disc. He was in recovery himself, having watched the first two seasons in about two weeks.

It’s not like we don’t have lives: she runs a magazine, with all the attendant responsibilities (TV, travel, schmoozing and endless meetings with advertisers, partners, bureaucrats and bean-counters) and I’m writing, teaching, running the house and raising our daughter. Maybe our daytime busy-ness makes it easy to hook up to something so otherly other at night. People keep mentioning Gilligan’s Island but I am reminded of No Exit. (Didn’t Bob Denver play Jean-Paul Sartre in Dobie Gillis?)

The hard part now is getting people not to talk about the show even as I Tivo the current, short season. My brother Brian sent me a parody he had written of the “Gilligan’s Island Theme” with new lyrics related to Lost — but I’m afraid to read it again since it might give something away! My son Adam, another addict, already said something I’m trying to forget, and just looking the show up on Jump the Shark (most voters say it has not jumped the shark yet) I read something I wished I hadn’t.

So please, if you have any theories, keep them to yourself. As Maynard G. Krebs said, “The G stands for Walter.”

I heard the Everly Brothers asking that question in my kitchen last night when I remembered: “Heartbreak Hotel” was at the end of Lonely Street. Did it intersect with “Lonely Avenue,” where Ray Charles did some time? (“My pillow is made of lead/My cover is made of stone…”) And is it anywhere near the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” that both Tony Bennett and Green Day have walked upon, though not at the same time?

The “Dead End Street” that the Kinks sang of is close to the “Backstreets” Bruce Springsteen rumbled and wailed on. (The Tenth Avenue of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” was a real street, like the Fourth Street of Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street,” and hence has no place in my mythical miserable musical town.) There is no Sunny Side to any of these streets so tell the the Pogues not to even try.

A lot of these streets could cross in “A Town without Pity”. There’s not much to do there though the “Sad Cafe” would be happy to take your money. Don’t expect any change.

You can try to leave though taking the train will probably leave you “Waiting at the Station.” Best head back to your “Blue Hotel” and don’t worry, you won’t need to set your alarm. She’ll Even Wake You Up To Say Goodbye.