Back in 1996, my brothers moved out to St. Petersburg in order to help start up Radio Unbound, an internet radio station. We had big plans, and a guy who would front the start-up costs. Then our backer got cold feet and decided to start a record store. A decision that was made when my brothers were somewhere between the Big Q and Florida.

When my brothers arrived, I explained the situation to them. We didn't have the cash to start an internet radio station on our own, so I did the rounds of the venture capital types in the area. It was a very short tour, and they all told me that I wasn't asking for enough money. The money guys thought we should be all broadcast.com about things. Hey, it worked for Mark Cuban, right? Well, we knew that was a crock. But we didn't get any money from the money store, either.

The summer of our discontent was pretty awful. Toward the end, as my brothers were beginning to plot a retreat to N.M., we hatched Shut Up, I'm Talking. I'm pretty sure Aaron came up with the name, but it might have been Matt. I know that I didn't think of it, but I agreed right away. It was a good name, and it sounded like fun.

The only person to ever make a dime from SUIT was my wife. She wrote a piece about the 1999 Women's World Cup, and a newspaper in Illinois paid us $10 for it. The irony (or maybe it isn't irony, but whatever) is that my wife is a professional journalist. She gets paid for her newspaper writing (or editing) every two weeks. She wrote one column, and she got paid. We wrote thousands, and we got nothin'. Geez.

There was the piece I wrote about the birth of our first son, which garnered the attention of a Canadian reporter who was writing a story about medical intervention in childbirth. She interviewed me, and that was that. I eventually looked up the story. Turns out she cribbed extensively from my piece without giving me any credit. So while I wasn't credited with the writing, many passages from one of my pieces ended up in a Canadian newspaper. Which is kinda cool.

A number of our pieces ran in unintentionally non-profit zines, but that market dried up in the last century. The last ten years or so, the only reason we wrote the columns was because we felt like bitching about something or another. But we're all done with that.

Matt and I (and Aaron at times, maybe) will write semi-collaborative pieces about the 1367 best albums ever (I think he has a longer description, but I've been going with simply "1367" for a while now). Read them, or don't. I can tell you that they'll be a lot better than most of the SUIT stuff. How do I know? I just ran through lists of all the old columns trying to find a "best" piece. And I came up with nothing. Although "Daddy, I'm peeing on your bed!" is a damned good title, if I say so myself. And most of my political prognostications turned out pretty good. There was a piece I wrote about living forever that I remember everybody liking a lot, but I couldn't find it in the files. And that's okay. It probably wasn't nearly as good as the memory of it is.

There is one cool thing about the timing of all this. SUIT came about because of the failure to launch an internet radio station. Next month, I'm going to crank up the A&A internet radio station just after SUIT has finished. The station will be a very small-scale operation, costing less than $1 a day, including the rights fees for the music. Technology has caught up with our old Radio Unbound idea, and so now radio is once again within my grasp. Someday, I'm sure I'll look at SUIT as the 16-year blip between internet radio station ventures.

I could say more, but this rambling has gone on for far, far too long. R.I.P. SUIT. Welcome 1367. We'll never fill in all the blanks, but I'm sure we'll have fun trying.

Jon Worley would like to congratulate his parents on their impending 45th anniversary, which will occur on the day the world ends (or not, if you believe the morons in the U.S. government.) He's awed that they planned it out that way.