16-XI-2008.
Now since Lena has a new phone, she plays mrz music (v. house dictionary)... which altogether means I inherited the old Sansa player. And recorder, which I promptly used as a memory crutch.
My dear just sent me to Walmart to buy a bicycle, as she saw me itching without one for almost two months since our old pair was stolen. I walked the mile and made... recorded a few notes. Something about the history of music in the car, in praise of the mp3 player without moving parts... This:
When you rely on the radio, it's practically useless because they keep spewing ads, ads and more ads. Then they invented cassette player in the car, which is still not good, because, first, a tape needs to be turned over every forty minutes, and exactly then you're in some situation, traffic light, congestion, and you don't turn it, you forget and then listen to nothing for the next hour... Then they invented, okay, the cassette player which reverses at the end of a side, and it still doesn't work. That is, it works but does it all the time, turns the same cassette fifty times in a row. You get there and drive back and still don't notice that you're listening to the same tipe sixty nine and halfth time... Well, so, we need something longer something we don't need to handle every two, or twenty, or fortyfive minutes, or ninety, or then seventy, because they invented seedees, which are extremely unwieldy to replace in a car, because they say they're sensitive to fingerprints, so take care when taking it in your hand. If you do that, you can't take care of your driving. If you have a shotgun passenger, you can leave it to him, but then you still need to pay attention... nope, man, don't hold it like that! And then there was the empy three seedie player, which was...
Well it was great, until we noticed that the randomizer, aka rndalica (v. house dictionary), actually isn't. It always plays them in the same order. You stop, turn it off, go somewhere to pee, come back, it starts from the same position. You skip four songs, it plays the fifth, and you already know which is sixth. Then you buy another one, which is better, and lasts whole two years just like the first one did. Because its problem is in moving parts. So it breaks, sooner or later, gets dirty, the head, bla bla. So here I am talking into this thingamajig, a four gigabyte plaything, handed down from my daughter when she got her new phone, which is all of a movie theater, theater, phone, tape recorder and whatever you may want, makes coffee fries pancakes, so we'll see. This is my first day of using it. At the moment, I'm walking to Walmart to buy a bicycle. Hoping sincerely it won't be stolen so far this time. We'll see, then.
Didn't buy the bicycle, though, because the kid there couldn't sell me a 18-speed bike with a wide seat. They had wide seats on these newfangled bikes where the handlebars resemble the mower (or rather a kultivator which is the hand-directed single-axle tractor, not sold here AFAIK), which is completely unergonomic, and these bikes don't even have gear shifters. And I know they have to do some assembly when they unpack the bike - the pedals are inwards, handlebars 90 degrees wrong etc - so just switching the instrument of torture called "sport bike seat" aka "prostate destroyer" with a normal wide seat is no extra effort. But this is Walmart, there's no way they would be allowed to do anything nonstandard, like thinking.
"We sell them all as they are. No changes.", the kid said.
"Then I'll walk home" I said, and did.
And then I just went for craigslist. And found a guy - an old guy whose children moved out and left several bikes cluttering the garage. So he was selling four of them for 40$, one of which was a kiddie bike. Okay, I said, I'll give you 50$ if you bring them here. He arrived in 20 minutes. True, the bikes need some work, but hey, I've done so much bike work so far, a bit more won't hurt. So I got bikes again.
Mentions: house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), in serbian