Monday, January 26, 2009
Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo
I
was walking down the aisle at Best Buy, and I stopped and asked, "Do
you have anything that plays cassette tapes?". The kid looked at me like
his grandfather had just dropped in for a visit. I could have asked,
"Do you have a Victrola that plays wax cylinders?", and got the same
reaction. “Everything we have is on the shelf.” he said, and wandered
off. On the shelf were these things that looked a little like speakers
with a slot for plugging in an ipod. Once again technology has shoved me
aside and sped right past. 
When I was a kid the technology was simple. My sister, brother, and I, shared a little record player that was no more than a turntable with a speaker. On that record player we would spin our collection of red, and yellow, children’s records, including ‘Old MacDonald’, and my favorite, ‘Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo’ from Disney’s Cinderella. The only problem was that we didn’t have a proper needle for playing records so we found a small nail on my dad’s work bench and used that. The nail tended to skip so we rectified that problem by taping a nickel on top of the tone-arm. You could actually see the vinyl being
shaved
off of the record as it ground away under the “needle”. By the time I
was about five years old, all of our records sounded like they had been
recorded by Edison himself, lots of static with bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,
barely audible in the background.I guess I will have to give in to progress and eventually get myself an ipod or some other mp3 player. I’ll have to download all my music off of Amazon.com, but something about it just doesn’t feel right. I miss reading the back of the big LP’s, and the cover art. Even the cassettes and the CD’s had inserts and tiny little cover art. You just can’t replace something like the cover of The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, with some downloaded picture that you printed out on your inkjet. By the way, I went to BestBuy.com, and although I couldn’t find a Victrola, they do have cassette decks for us old farts. Five to be exact, out of 227 results for my stereo inquiry.
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