Cassette tapes: where the fun never stops

Because, dammit, somebody is going to read this and think it's cool, like I do.

The chronology of music-that-travels-with-you is a long and lengthy one. Sheet music, cylindrical things made out of wax that probably weren't very good, vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs, mp3s. For a long time you had to actually be able to produce the music yourself; then, for a while, you had really crappy music that you couldn't store anywhere warm. Eventually, not only was the music itself portable, you could even listen to it as you ported it around. The cassette tape, and its bastard technological cousin the Walkman, began the trend towards entertainment-on-the-go that would eventually culminate in my wholly inappropriate feelings of emotional intimacy with my li'l iPod.

That is not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is something I figured out which has no practical applications whatsoever, especially considering nobody uses cassette tapes anymore. But I'm still going to blog about it, because I thought it was cool and it allows me to do something I haven't done since fifth grade: pretend that I have a rudimentary understanding of mathematics.

Now then. Note: any similarity between the terminology below and the actual technical names for what I'm talking about is purely coincidental.

We all know how cassette tapes work. There's the skinny plastic box, and inside is the actual 'tape' wrapped around two spools. The music is on the tape itself -- I am not an engineer, but magnets are involved -- and the music is ‘read’ and turned into sound as it passes over the read head. The tape is drawn over the read head by the drive spindle -- the spindle that turns the tape spool when you press ‘play’. The drive spindle turns at a fixed rate, no matter what, so for each revolution of the drive spindle a length of tape equal to the circumference of the spool is pulled across the drive head.

‘So what?’ you would say if you were still reading this.

Well, each revolution of the drive spindle puts an additional turn of tape onto the spool – hence, every time the spindle turns, the diameter of the empty spool (D) is increased by 2x the thickness of the tape (T). Hence, on the ‘xth’ revolution (Rx), the length of tape pulled across the drive head may be expressed as:

π[D + (2Rx-1T)]

At the very beginning of the tape (when the drive spool is empty) the first revolution (R1) will draw a length of tape equal to πD over the read head. By the thousandth revolution, however, the cassette player will be drawing a length of tape equal to π(D + 1998T) across the read head -- and even though magnetic tape is very thin, a few thousand layers of it add up to many, many times the spool’s initial circumference.

Hence, it can be seen that the rate at which tape passes over the read head is not fixed, but is in fact accelerating from the moment you press ‘play’. Of course, you can’t ‘hear’ this when you listen to a recorded tape, because precisely the same effect takes place during the recording process: tape is drawn across the write head faster and faster as recording progresses, just as it is drawn faster and faster across the read head when played.

What does this mean? Well, it must clearly mean that the ‘density’ of information stored on a cassette tape must decrease constantly from beginning to end. Assuming that the actual quality of the recorded information does not vary, one must presume that the ‘efficiency of tape usage’ decreases dramatically as recording progresses. If you were to unspool a cassette tape and pull it across the read head by hand at a fixed rate, you'd find that the resulting music played slower and slower. The corollary of this is that a given length of magnetic tape could, if recorded and played back at a fixed rate, store many times more music than a traditional cassette tape with no loss of quality whatsoever.

So basically, when you listen to a cassette tape you're hearing three things:

1/ Music being played slower and slower…
2/ …from a tape that keeps moving faster and faster…
3/ …and a lot of tape being wasted.

This is not important at all. I very much doubt that Sony will pay me thousands, perhaps millions of dollars for this revelation. And it’s not as if anybody even uses cassette tapes anymore.

Still.

-A

Heaven Goes to Eleven

Saw ‘For Your Consideration’ last night, and realized that Christopher Guest is basically God.

Or something like that. I don’t know exactly how it breaks down: whether Guest is himself God, or God is Guest, or there’s some kind of crazy Catholic-style two-things-that-are-actually-just-one-thing thing going on -- the point is, for all intents and purposes, Christopher Guest and God are interchangeable.

I don’t mean that in a gushing-fan kind of way. Yeah, I like Guest -- I’ve seen ‘This is Spinal Tap’ a few too many times, I loved ‘Best in Show’, and I thought ‘Waiting for Guffman’ was pretty good. Never saw ‘A Mighty Wind’, but I’d like to. And I enjoyed ‘For Your Consideration’. But none of these are my favorite movies, and Guest is not my favorite director; I repeat, I am not according Guest deity-status out of any personal bias. Rather, I am merely acknowledging the fact that he -- or rather, ‘He’ -- has, in a quietly omnipotent way, demonstrated the solution to one of the more thorny theological conundrums in all of history.

The problem which His Guest-ness has solved is the Problem of Eternal Happiness, which may be briefly stated as “how the Hell can Heaven keep me happy forever?” The operative term being ‘forever’. One demonstration of this problem is the parable of the Immortal Bird:

Imagine a bird that, once a year every year, flies to the top of the tallest mountain on Earth and sharpens its beak on the rocks. Now, this bird is immortal -- after you die and go to heaven, it will continue to sharpen its beak every year forever. By the time that immortal bird has worn every single mountain on earth into dust, eternity … and your tenure in heaven … will only just have begun.

That’s the Problem of Eternal Happiness -- eternity is a long, long time to be happy in. We humans have notoriously short attention spans. I know that I’ve been kept awake many a night by the fear that, a few centuries into my afterlife, my winged chariot will swing by to take me to a coke-fueled seraphim orgy and I’ll think ‘Crap. Tuesday again’.

Oh, me of little faith. I should have known that the Great Cruise Director In the Sky would be up to the task of perpetual amusement -- it’s just that I, with my puny mortal imagination, couldn’t fathom how He’d manage. But now, I think I know. Because now I know that God is more or less Christopher Guest.

Guest doesn’t need endless dazzling variety to keep His audience entertained. In fact, he doesn’t need any variety at all. You could -- somebody should -- splice Guest’s entire oeuvre together into a single monolithic reel about Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and that guy who isn’t Ron Rifkin trying to stage an amateur production of an all-dog hard rock opera. And why? Because I’d watch it. I’d sit down, break open a box of Junior Mints, and when the film ended I would realize that the leaves had changed.

And I would understand Heaven.

Heaven is not a bunch of winged Aryans with harps. It’s not even (and I hope Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t too disappointed to find this out) an infinitely-tweaked sensory overload. It’s a never-ending parade of non-events that draws you in and keeps you there -- you aren’t sure why, but you could watch it forever and ever, amen. And before you know it eternity’s over, the lights come up, and it’s time to go home.

-A

And never, ever, question the masks.

Whatever happened to Bill Watterson?

With his wistful, subversive humor and his wry but unquenchable optimism, the man was the illustrator of countless American childhoods (including mine). He gave us Calvin, a hapless but infinitely resilient everyboy whose indomitable spirit may be seen peeing on things all across our great nation. He gave us Hobbes, a friend and a mentor for the ages. In Bill’s hands, this kid and his tiger-buddy comprised all love, all wit, all wisdom.

And then, Bill disappeared.

Nobody knows the details -- or if they do, they aren't saying. Whether Mr. Watterson was raptured up to heaven, leaving a striped shirt and a pair of ovoid shoes behind, or whether he simply walked into the cornfield of untarnishable Americana and was never seen again, one thing is certain: the books he left us are all we'll ever have of him. It is our duty as gematricians, therefore, to squeeze every ounce of meaning from the too-few pages of whimsical artistry that he left behind. We know that Bill knew the Truth, the real Truth. If only we can divine the underlying secret of Bill’s message, it could save -- not only human civilization, now turning ever more turnily in the widening gyre -- but perhaps our souls themselves.

What does this have to do with California congressman Henry Waxman, you ask?

If you don't know what Calvinball is, you're a terrorist and I don't want you reading my blog. My terror rating is high enough as it is, thank you very much -- look, I need to always have an aisle seat when I fly, okay? I'm 6'6", I have long legs. Do you want me to hook my knees over you all the way from Dulles to Detroit Metro? No, you don’t want that. Nobody wants that. So if you’re still reading this, you already know that Calvinball is a game with only three fixed rules:

1. Everyone who plays Calvinball must wear a mask

2. The set of rules governing play can never be the same twice (apart from these three)

3. No one is allowed to question the masks.

This makes for a game in which skillful play -- masterful wielding of croquet mallets, a strong baritone voice for singing the ‘Very Sorry Song’, etcetera -- is less important than clever manipulation of the rules. Let’s face it, a strategically-located Pernicious Poem Place can undo the fastest bag-flagger who ever lived. In short: playing the rule book is more important than playing the game. The rule book, however, is a fickle ally. Times change quickly, and even the best laid snares have a habit of ganging agley at inconvenient moments, trapping the mice and/or men who set them in the first place.

Enter Rep. Waxman. Small of stature and suffering from an unfortunate case of eyebrow-moustache, this L.A. congressman may seem like an unlikely casus metui -- and yet he is the most feared man on Capitol Hill. And why? Because, as of January, what has gone around will officially come around. Waxman is poised to become the new chairman of the Government Reform Committee.

This is as good an opportunity as any for me to make my solemn pledge never, ever, to perform political analysis in this space. If there are two things I know about politics –- and the over-under is 2.5 -- they are: that I can claim less comprehension of the winds of politicical fortune than anybody else on K Street, and that I'd rather look like an ass talking about things I understand than about things I don’t. So I’ll let Time.com do the talking:

Come January, however, the man that the liberal Nation magazine once called the "Eliot Ness of the Democrats" can do even more, thanks to the two words that strike fear in the heart of every government official: subpoena power. As the new chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Waxman will have free rein to investigate, as he puts it, "everything that the government is involved with." And the funny thing is, Waxman can thank the Republicans for the unique set of levers he will hold. Under a rules change they put through in the days when they used the panel to make Bill Clinton's life miserable, the leader of Government Reform is the only chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote. Then Chairman Dan Burton--who famously re-enacted the suicide of Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster by shooting at what he called a "head-like thing" (later widely reported to be a melon) in his backyard--issued 1,089 such unilateral subpoenas in six years. Since a Republican entered the White House, the G.O.P. Congress has been far less enthusiastic in its oversight. Waxman likes to point out that the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony to get to the bottom of whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas-card list for political purposes, but only 12 hours on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

I won’t speculate about the possible fruits of Mr. Waxman’s investigation. Will he drive corruption before him in a crimson wave, like Kevin Costner in ‘The Untouchables’? Or will he disappoint the nation, like Kevin Costner in everything he’s made since 1993? Only time will tell. But there is one lesson that is clearly to be learned from this whole kerfuffle:

Life is a game of Calvinball. You have just enough control over it to screw yourself royally if you aren’t careful. Everywhere is a boomerang zone if you live long enough, and the petard you end up hoisted on may be your own. Every underdog has his day. It’s easy to shoot yourself in the head-like thing. And the score never stays ‘oogy’ to ‘boogy’ for long.

-A

The Rebirth of a Legend

I spoke today with a man who starts work at 4:30 every morning. Hours before sunrise he's on the phone with China, finding out what happened in the few precious hours he spent disconnected from the world. His life is an ever-unfolding crisis, played out at breakneck speed without pause for reflection. His only past is historical sales data, his only future is this quarter's analyst predictions, and he runs like the wind just to keep up with a present moment that threatens always to outpace him. And yet, is this man any happier than I? Is he any wiser than I? Quite possibly, and he makes millions of dollars more than I do.

All of which is by way of saying that I want to talk about the new James Bond. When I went to see 'Casino Royale' last weekend, I sat down with all the natural trepidation of a man about to witness the future of a beloved franchise surrounded by people who laugh at previews of the movie 'Norbit'. Speaking of which, what is it going to take to get Eddie Murphy extraordinary-renditioned out of our lives? I want him wearing a box of rats in Room 101, and I want the official record amended to state that he was accidentally freebased by Nick Nolte on the set of 'Another 48 Hrs' back in 1995. Incidentally, IMDB claims that Eddie Murphy is sometimes credited as 'Fred Braughton'. And not just when arrested in the company of transvestite hookers.

I digress.

As any Bond fan worthy of the name knows, there has been exactly 1 (one) James Bond. His friends call him Mr. Connery, out of respect, but his mother calls him Sean. Since SC gave up his double-oh status, his successors have ranged from 'lousy' to 'Roger-Moore-take-your-wrinkled-hands-off-Jane-Seymour' -- and though there have been a few good performances (Timothy Dalton is always worth watching) nobody has ever recaptured the essence that made Bond … well, Bond. Until now.

Enter Daniel Craig. The seven of us who actually watched 'L4yer Cake' had high hopes for this young man: we knew he could be cool, we knew he could pout intensely at a camera lens, and we knew that he could summon a wry smile mere milliseconds after shooting a total stranger in the head. But could he be Bond, we wondered? Could he be the lovably sociopathic embodiment of sangfroid we've been pining for?

He could. He is. And he is more than that: he is Bond 2.0, a Bond for the new millennium. He is not 'the next Sean Connery' -- from now on, all new Bond actors (assuming we can't keep Craig in cryostasis between filmings to extend his usefulness indefinitely) will be 'the next Daniel Craig'.

Don't believe me? See the damn movie. And when you do, send Mr. Craig a vial of the tears you wept in shame for ever having doubted him.

-A

If I do not write anything pleasant, I shall at least write something new.

It's a warm day in December, and all the clocks are striking thirteen. Seems as good an occasion to start this thing as any. All thanks and all blame should be accorded to The View from Dupont; she's the one who finally made me realize that you're nobody in this world unless you keep a blog, have a Myspace page, or actually do something. And I don't like Myspace.

Right now I'm seven floors above K Street, the day's first cup of coffee waits beside me, and I have useful work to do. Here we go.

-A