WALLACE — One of the compensations of being dispatched to Perdition instead of that heavenly music room in the sky is that one might get to confront the inventors of minor and major irritations that have dogged our earthly days.
Not that we're hoping to spend Eternity “howling in outer darkness,” but should we be so consigned, there are a few people we'd like to meet, and we're sure they'll be there.
First is the inventor of Voice Mail. One suspects the inventor of Voice Mail was one of Hell's first occupants, having retired from a career at GTE (now Verizon) where he or she perfected the art of aggravation. Because if you have ever tried to call Verizon you will spend about 45 minutes speaking with a tongue-clicking female-voiced robot while listening to Muzak's greatest hits before you ever get to a human whose first language was not English.
We have it on good authority that the Verizon Voice Mail's female robot was cloned and is now working for Washington Water Power (now Avista). And that a male clone of this androgynous couple now answers the phone for 21st Century insurance and the DirecTV satellite company.
A bit of earthly advice: never, ever commence a call to one of these miserable entities when you are in a public place where your transformation from mild-mannered friend of mankind to apoplectic, drooling, purple-necked, shrieking homicidal manic will be witnessed, and commented upon, by others.
The second person we can't wait to meet is the sociopath who came up with the Compact Disc. From its impenetrable packaging to the lovely way it sounds if disturbed by the minutest speck of dust on its surface, it is designed to push even the most phlegmatic right off the front porch, babbling insanely, hands profusely bleeding from the razor-knife slices sustained trying to remove the CD's Kryptonite-glued “seal” from the package's top edge.
(By the time this wound has healed one has managed to drop the CD case on an overstuffed chair or — God forbid — something as hard as a plush-carpeted floor, whereupon it has burst open the hinge, rendering it useless. Why don't they make the CD case hinge out of the same stuff as that little plastic seal? Those cases would outlive the cockroach.)
Even in the best of worlds, the CD is a failure as a music delivery device, because not even a bifocal-equipped microbe can read the tiny print identifying such things as the title and artist therein contained.
Oh, but we were going to talk about mining company earnings, released earlier this week. We just get carried away, listening to a real long-playing analog vinyl recording through a high-fidelity system that uses tubes through the entirety of its signal path. The playback process begins with something called a “turntable,” which spins a platter at 33.3 (or 45, or 78, or even 16.16) revolutions per minute affixed to which is something called a “tone-arm” holding a cartridge, which holds a microscopic stylus vibrating in the grooves of the “record.”
The cartridge-stylus assembly is connected with blond frog-hair diameter wires running through the “tone-arm” to the tube-powered electronics. Tubes are tall glass devices that glow even in broad daylight, powered by 5-, 6.3-, 7- or 12-volt heaters that cause the music to flow from a cathode through a grid or two to an anode, or plate, whence it departs considerably more juiced-up than when it arrived thanks to the actions of the grids. This output is passed through a transformer and out to a speaker. Tubes used to be made in American, Dutch, German and English factories and are now made in Russian, Czech and Chinese factories. Regardless of country of origin, they are beautiful to look at, even better to listen to. They are visceral and visible, glowing aural monuments to the live symphony or rock concert at the Paramount Theatre.
Tubes, as opposed to transistors and microchips, preserve the sine-wave quality of music that is its natural state. A piano string, a drum head, or a screamin' Fender, does not spit out bytes of zeroes and ones, offs-and-ons the way a CD does. The needle in the record grove vibrates in precise mimicry of the instrument or voice it is reproducing, just like your ear-drum and (with enough tubes in the rack and a decent battery of woofers in the speaker boxes) your (and your neighbors') muscular-skeletal structure. And windows (lower case).
Unlike CDs, you can actually read the liner notes and the front and back covers of an LP album without having to squint. The LP's cardboard jacket (or even its contents) won't shatter upon contact with a hardwood floor. And playing an LP gives one a bit of a heart-healthy aerobic workout every half hour or so, moving from the couch to the turntable.
Oh, yeah, the mining company third-quarter reports: Well, they're doing OK, Hecla, Coeur and most other silver producers. Minor losses, minor gains, nothing to get your knickers in a knot. We'd elaborate, we listened to the conference calls, but it's time to get up and turn the record over.
