Doomsday dancing

People who are north of age 45 should know, or at least be aware … there IS a way to get your record albums converted into the CD realm. Which can be handy if you’ve been desperate lately to do the hully gully to an old album by Question Mark and the Mysterians.

What’s been available now for quite some time is a turntable that plugs directly into your home computer. Once you’re hooked up, you simply play a record, and the data emanating from the stylus heads into a file onto the computer. Once there, it’s easily burned to a disc. It’s nice.

The sound isn’t exactly the best, because the quality of sound is pretty much dependent on the quality of your albums. This means facts must be faced: Most of the stuff you’ll play into your computer is gonna sound like it was recorded during a grease fire. The turntable/program I have does have a function for “cleaning up” sound, but it’s ability to adequately make up for an album’s horribly misspent youth getting manhandled during toga parties at More Science State College is not what you’d want or need it to be.

But still, for a couple hundred bucks, you can have a great time with those 12-inch vinyl relics once again. The turntable, made by Audio Technica, is a good one. That’s not the problem. The problem is that a lot of those albums of yours have burnholes in them.

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All this jazz about the year 2012 is interesting. But if we really are heading toward some kind of exclamation point for humanity and its social systems, does that mean you should cash in your IRAs early, paying that ornery little penalty and all, just because you’re betting on the Mayans to be the visionary cool cats who finally make the right call about Doomsday? I mean, sure, this was a culture that was extraordinary in many ways, and, from the look of Apocalypto, they had some swingin’ jewelers and make-up people working in their major burgs, but, then again, can’t we also look back at the Mayans and see them as basically a bunch of squabbling fuck-ups who just ran out of corn?

In Daniel Pinchbeck’s book 2012—The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he writes that “On the winter solstice of December 21, 2012, the Sun will rise within the dark rift at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, an event that occurs once every 25,800 years.” OK, cool. But … well … is that bad, exactly?