I love my car, but it has a few peculiar quirks. For instance, there are sensors that monitor the air pressure in the tires and trigger a long, annoyingly loud alarm (usually at 7am) when a flat tire is suspected. Except there’s never a flat tire — it’s just the fluctuation in the temperature. When it gets cold the tire pressure goes down so the sensors sound the alarm. My car stereo also refuses to play CD’s when it’s cold.
Try to play a CD in the winter without letting the car warm up and you may as well be playing vinyl on a record player balanced atop the dashboard. The disc skips and stalls and sometimes simply stops playing. The whole thing used to piss me off and that would upset Lori because I was yelling at the car stereo and increasing our chances of an imminent fiery car crash.
Try to play a CD in the winter without letting the car warm up and you may as well be playing vinyl on a record player balanced atop the dashboard. The disc skips and stalls and sometimes simply stops playing. The whole thing used to piss me off and that would upset Lori because I was yelling at the car stereo and increasing our chances of an imminent fiery car crash.
Now I have a “work-around” and I just don’t let it bother me any more. The work-around is a big box of mixed tapes in my closet. Rather than fight with digital technology I just blindly reach into the box of tapes each morning, pull one out, and pop it in. I don’t know what the freezing point of a TDK-SA is, but I do know that tape is less finicky than disc when it comes to playing in the cold.
The upside to all this is rediscovering music I used to listen to years ago and laughing at all the goofy theme tapes I used to compile. Today’s Happy Medium Song of the Day is one of my favorites, not only because it’s a great song that’s weird and catchy as hell — but also because I always associate it with Lori’s college friend, Helen—one of the straightest people I know—drunk out of her mind and singing this song while the three of us searched for our car on a cold night downtown by Dupont Circle after leaving some party. We eventually found it once we started looking on the right street! And eventually Helen stopped singing the song’s refrain.
The upside to all this is rediscovering music I used to listen to years ago and laughing at all the goofy theme tapes I used to compile. Today’s Happy Medium Song of the Day is one of my favorites, not only because it’s a great song that’s weird and catchy as hell — but also because I always associate it with Lori’s college friend, Helen—one of the straightest people I know—drunk out of her mind and singing this song while the three of us searched for our car on a cold night downtown by Dupont Circle after leaving some party. We eventually found it once we started looking on the right street! And eventually Helen stopped singing the song’s refrain.
The Happy Medium Song of the Day is by Camper Van Beethoven and it offers the best advice for what to do if you wake up one night to discover skinheads cavorting on your lawn: “Take the Skinheads Bowling” comes from the 1985 LP, Telephone Free Landslide Victory. (Please use the comments box to share your thoughts.)