How 'bout a monster for breakfast today?

[austin_dern]

Misread loose sheet of paper laying on the couch for no good reason except my father refuses to have the entire couch clear for sitting uses of the day: I thought the flyer said ``1996 World Champion New York Vampires.'' It was actually about a different team, as I learned when I looked closer to figure out the context for that. Still, if I had any talent as a storyteller, I'd think there was a story in there. Maybe several.

A little other footnote about my car. When I finally secured a ... job isn't quite the right word, since I'm not actually doing work, but it's something job-like ... I wanted to fix something my car was missing. The radio reception for the channels I like gets a little too staticky to be really pleasant on the ride to my extruded office product, so I thought I could use a CD player and enjoy books-on-tape and thus in an odd fashion double my ``currently reading'' work. But as the car comes to me from the mid-90s it has a cassette player, not a CD player. Given the library selections that's not too limiting. I started out, for example, with the tape version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I thought would be a puckishly amusing thing to ``read'' on tape (I never read the book, though I've leafed through it many times). I was shocked to learn the scene I remembered best from the movie, of the book people wandering around a sylvan glen, was an invention of the movie and has only the vaguest relation to any scene in the book, so my joke was spoiled.

I also got a tape adaptation of Shakespeare's King John, which is one of those plays you never hear anything about because it's not really all that interesting, since it's one of the English History plays and it doesn't have Falstaff and it isn't Henry V. Plus the only quote anyone remembers from it is that one about gilding the lily that everyone misquotes anyway. On top of that in Elizabethan days everyone on stage talked like an exceedingly detailed lease agreement, so in the lack of any really stirring speeches to rally to it just staggers along.

Trivia: The United Kingdom's 1714 Longitude Act was drafted by 17 June, when it had its first reading). Source: The Quest for Longitude, Ed. William J H Andrewes.

Currently Reading: A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, Edited by Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

so I thought I could use a CD player and enjoy books-on-tape

I'm not sure that's how the technology works.

But as the car comes to me from the mid-90s has a cassette player, not a CD player.

I fail to see the difficulty here, then.

--Chiaroscuro, whose car came with AM/FM only. Meefer now has a CD player that transmits over FM; most days I just use my iPod and headphones, though.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, if they want ``books on CD'' to catch on they're going to have to give it a less goofy name. ``Books on tape'' is just going to last in a way that other anachronistic words like ``album'' have in this context.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

'Audiobooks' has been the word growing popular.. since that applies to books on CD, tape, and mp3.

And yes, 'album' is the lingering term, though 'record' has been phasing steadily out. Which seems sensible, as a CD or other-media recording group is considerable as an album of songs, in the way you have a 'photo album'.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, but then ... ``Record'' is a perfectly appropriate word since no matter how long or short or how many files are put into the CD set, they are indeed a record of a performance. (Or probably multiple performances selected and distilled into the best versions.) And ``album'' loses its historic origins when everything is put onto a single CD ... yet, for a book-on-disc, where you may have something sprawled over thirteen discs (my high so far), ``album'' becomes literally correct all over again!

So if we were going to start imposing logic on the language, ``record'' would be the obviously preferable term, ``album'' too often wrong or misleading, and the whole thing just a mess. It might be better if I just got a better antenna to pick up the New York City stations with less static.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

True, a 'record' is, well, something that's been recorded. You can have a one-song record, though a one-song album seems quite silly, unless it's something by Pink Floyd or ELO. And you'll still hear it bandied about, though 'album' is the one that seems to conversationally gain. Until/unless electronic music rather completely replaces physical media, and I don't see that happening for a good 10 years or so-- we'll have this quandry.

At least we've got 'Audiobooks' though.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

All things considered, it might be easier if I went on to the 1940/41 season of Fibber McGee and Molly.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

Audiobooks and such are (were? I'm not up to date) the last great use of tape. It seems consumers preferred their books on tape because you could stop them and eject them and take them from car to home and continue where you left off - something CD can not do.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm. I hadn't considered that, although I so rarely listen to CDs while inside the home I could be forgiven for that oversight, I think.

Cassette tapes look to be mighty rare in the local Barnes and Noble stores, compared to CDs, but I doubt I live in a typical region.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

There are adapters that allow you to plug virtually any audio device into your tape player. They are pretty cheap, I think around $15 at Radio Shack. You plug one end into the headphone jack on your CD playeer/iPod/turntable/whatever. The other end looks like a cassette tape, you just insert it into the player just like a regular tape.

You can also find FM radio adapters that work similarly. You plug into the headphone jack on your device, then tune the adapter and your FM radio to the same station.

Some devices come with FM adapters already built in (most modern satellite radios have them, as do some MP3 players).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, but to make use of a mere adapter, you need to have a CD player. I do have an MP3 player, picked up for free when I bought a hard drive/DVD recorder in Singapore. That's fine for downloaded MP3s from online, but taking any CD I wanted to listen to, compressing it to MP3, and saving it on the player would quickly drive me mad.

See today's entry, though, for more about the story ...