Snow and Cold
We’re supposedly getting 1 to 3 inches of snow tomorrow, around here.
Now, that wouldn’t be unusual, in most years, for the first week in December, by any means. Matter of fact, this year we actually got a couple of feet just west of us here, in the middle of October. By this time we’re usually up to our pipiks in snow,and claiming we love the stuff.
But, in reality, for all but a few diehard winter types who like strapping expensive boards to their feet and sliding down hills with the expressed purpose of breaking their legs, arms and other body parts, we really hate the stuff, if we notice it at all…. Except at Christmas, when we tolerate it, because it covers all that brown and gray with a white that’s a lot prettier to look at…. until the neighborhood dogs get ahold of it, at which point is becomes the makings of a Frank Zappa recording.
So, don’t let anyone from the northeast kid you about this snow stuff. Trust me, we simply put up with it. I mean, think; Why on earth would people who have lived here all their lives suddenly uproot themselves once the kids are out of the house, and move to Florida (hurricanes, bugs the size of Buicks, gators with attitude, and a requirement to speak Yiddish or at least Spanish) or Arizona.. (125 degrees, but it’s a DRY heat…)? Simple, they’re trying to escape from all of this ‘winter wonderland’ crap. It’s not at all unusual to see cars with older people driving them with Florida plates or Arizona plates or maybe California, with license plate frames from dealers here in western New York… particularly during this Christmas season. And don’t get me started about how they forgot how to drive this kind of weather. I wrote an entire column on that once; maybe I’ll run it again sometime this winter.
I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I’d considered moving out of the neighborhood. For us, our oldest just turned sixteen. We have one more behind him. It’s going to be awhile before we consider whether we’re be among those making the skate from this winter paradise to somewhere we don’t have to burn several hundred dollars in fuel just to keep our blood from freezing. So, here we sit. Doing ‘inside’ activity.
MP3’s
What am I doing, inside? I’m currently re-scanning my MP3 collection. I think I’m going to have to do this more often, given that the size of it is becoming somewhat unwieldy. I have somewhere on the order of a half a terabyte worth of MP3’s, Most of which were transferred from their original LP’S. For all that it is a bit of a maintenance headache, I find that I’m listening to a great deal more music, then I have in a long time. Mostly because the computer does all the work in terms of setting them up, mixing them, and putting them away.
The end result is, that I have three or four very high quality professional great turntables for playing LP’s on, that I haven’t touched in about a year. I have sitting within arm’s reach of me here at my desk a very high grade professional quality CD player, which is still early neglected. Rather sad really… I only got about five years worth the use of it before making the transition.
I do have a larger collection to consider then I think most people do. I started big. Being in the radio business means never having to say “I don’t have anything new to bring home to listen to tonight”. That resulted in a large collection all by itself, which I added to from the stores. Time was that is a frequent visitor to the used record shops, often bringing home 30 and 40 LPS a session. By the time Donna and I got married back in ’89, I had something like 25,000 albums and I don’t know how many singles on file. Along with a grand total of ten CDs. Since then I’ve added perhaps 150 to 200 CDs over the years. All of the CDs and most of the opiates are now residing as data only, on my big server.
One of the things I found, with this new style of listening to music, is that I’ve lost a physical relationship with it. Back in the day, there was a physical relationship with the music in that you had this piece of plastic 12in. in diameter, black, generally… With colors and textures and smells unlike any other. I’m a very visual/conceptual person. Back when I was playing the buyers someone would ask me if I had a particular song. Instead of looking at last I would think through the list of records that I owned in my head. Once I had a picture of it in my head, I could tell you where it was whether not I was carrying it that particular evening and what other songs on it there were. It had physicality, substance. The covers and often the labels had unique pictures on them and the writing on the cover could be basic or intense. We lost a lot of that, when we want to compact discs. Granted, we lost nearly the same amount when we went to Cassette tapes. But with MP3’s, now, that connection is completely broken. There is no more physicality to the recorded music experience.
I haven’t decided whether not I think that lack is a good thing. Certainly, it is the kind of convenience level and certainly the kind of quality level that was only a dream say, 50 years ago. And yes, I said quality level; I grant that with MP3’s one can hear the encoding at work. I certainly can, anyway. I can hear, particularly in recordings of less than 128 kilobits/sec, reproductive errors in the encoding scheme, that reveal themselves as phrasing errors, particularly in the higher ranges. And yet, for all that, for all that the MP3 encoding scheme does to the recorded material, it still ends up being a cleaner audio chain than most other analog delivery systems at the consumer level, including my beloved LP collection. And the ability to play the things wherever… including while jogging through the snow… does have it’s selling points. Tried that with an LP lately?
Whereas when I was DJ’ing at parties, I used to go to parties carrying perhaps 250 to 300 albums in big heavy black cases, along with two turntables and and the table to set them on, people in that business nowadays show up with a couple of laptops, and a mix board… Or perhaps, they eliminate the computers, and carry a couple of MP3 players instead, such as an IPOD or two. Somehow I suspect their backs will probably last a little longer in the field than did mine.
In an unprofessional environment, the listening experience ends up being more like listening to the radio than anything else, what with the player mixing from track to track and doing some fairly decent song selection, from one song to the other, given I have a plug in to Winamp that does that for me.
As a matter of fact, these days, the only thing I shut the music off for one am here in my office, is when I open up my voice dictation unit. Music tends to confuse it.
I enjoy dealing with MP3’s as such, but I must tell you that I miss the joy of opening a new record album for its first play. It amazes me that there are now people who are 20 and 25 years old who’ve never seen a new album, nor seen or heard one played.
The Grill
Dinner tonight, with the weather being what it is… 33 degrees… was an exercise in “To hell with it, I’m doing this.” We used that little gas grill I bought the other night to grill a Turkey Roll, and some Shitake Mushrooms. The neighbors probably think I’m crazy, but I think that I convinced them of that some years ago anyway, so who cares? This likely will not be the last time I mention this, but I miss having the trailer.. and food grilled outside, is just a reminder of that, as I sit and watch the snow moving in… huddled over my little gas grill.
A final thought:
There is, perhaps, something of the sound of gears meshing between these nightly ramblings of mine, and the comments from Fran as I mentioned last evening. The upshot of that was that he wasn’t going to concentrate quite so much on politics because it was driving him crazy.
I, meantime, have decided that if all we were to write about for the next however many weeks it is between now and the next election, we’d not have a heck of a lot to write about for most of that time. And anyway, if as I told Fran last night, politics isn’t the end all and be all but rather a REFLECTION of one’s deeply held beliefs, then perhaps a nightly focus on life itself isn’t such a bad thing, since it puts that life in the foreground, for a few paragraphs.
This nightly, non-specific rambling is a fairly new thing for me. I didn’t start writing these explorations of daily happenings because of a conscious effort on my part… rather, I simply sat down a few nights ago, and started writing… as I often do… and decided it all fit, somehow.
I guess all I can do is hope someone finds it mildly interesting. I can guarantee you that there’s going to be nothing earth shaking in anything I right in the nightly rambles . For those, look at the topic specific stuff that myself DavidL and Fersboo post daily. but since I’m paying for the web space, I guess I can indulge myself for awhile, and see what kind of a response I get out of it. Come to think of it, it’s worked for other people… Though emulating them was not my purpose. (Shrug) As Billy says… Onward.
Tags: Life, Nightly Ramble
