Category: Entertainment

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Afternoon Dance Party

Disco Discharge – European Connection (2010)

I had never heard this track before (weird, I know, right?) but I absolutely love it. It plays me.

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Released 40 Years Ago Today

James Cameron – Aliens (1986)

“Get away from her, you BITCH!”

Opening night, as I was wont to do back in the day. Came home to my apartment and turned on every light in the place.

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Someone’s On Crack If They Think They’re Going To Get That Amount

Insanity.

Yeah, at the time of its manufacture, this was Sony’s top-of-the-line high-end player, and even now it’s legendary and highly sought after by audiophiles and collectors—and even I would love to own one—but not at even a quarter of that asking price. No one in their right mind is going to pay that amount, even if it has the optional wood side panels and comes with the original box.

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Belts Are Important

WARNING: GEEK STUFF AHEAD

Back in April I picked up this beauty off eBay. The seller indicated it was “fully functional,” but like most vintage electronics on eBay the description was…shall we say, optimistic.

Immediately after unpacking and powering it up I noticed it had severe drawer problems. Yes, it worked, so I guess that would qualify as “functional,” but fully? It definitely struggled with opening and closing so I wouldn’t have decribed it that way. As I’m sure I’ve documented before, I’ve seen enough CD deck repairs on YouTube to immediately recognize a stretched drawer belt when I saw one. I put in an order for a replacement with West Coast Belts and not-so-patiently awaited its arrival.

Replacing the belt after I received it wasn’t all that difficult, even though the belt and pulleys were on the bottom of the CD mechanism itself. Thankfully the original belt hadn’t yet turned to black goo and was easy to swap. The belt I received wasn’t a 1:1 copy of the original; it seemed to have a bit smaller diameter and it was about half the thickness. Still, by this point I had it all torn apart and I wasn’t going to put everything back together without first giving the new belt a shot.

There was an improvement from the old sagging belt, but not much. Using a belt that’s too small is just as bad as using one that’s too big. I emailed the company and pointed out the size discrepancy. They said they’d send out a different one.

Another week passed and the new belt arrived. This one seemed to be the proper diameter, but the thickness was still thinner than the original. “Better than nothing,” I said as I swapped it out. The drawer did work more smoothly now, but it still felt off.

I did one more search on the internet and found a another belt supplier in Germany. They didn’t advertise a belt for my particular model, but rather one for the unit directly above mine. These two decks use the exact same transport mechanism; it’s just the higher end unit had a few more bells and whistles in its circuitry. So I ordered it.

While waiting for its arrival, I thought I’d try a tech tip gleaned from all those videos: boil the old belt in water for about 5 minutes to rejuvenate the rubber and shrink it back to its original size.  I did that, and wouldn’t you know, after putting that one back in the machine, the drawer worked like buttah.

All was good until a few days ago when the drawer started lagging again when opening (or closing, I don’t honestly remember; it was annoying in any case). So much for my quick fix. The German belt had arrived a couple weeks earlier, but since everything was working I didn’t want to tear into the machine yet again, so I put the belt away for future use if my fix didn’t hold—and obviously it hadn’t.

At this point I really didn’t want to deal with this belt issue anymore, so I hauled out my “new” deck from a few years ago and put it in the system. What I’d forgotten about this new Yamaha is that something had changed in their implementation of the optical digital connection. Whereas the old Yamaha with the belt issues could dub optically to my MiniDisc deck and create tracks correctly, this new deck absolutely refused. The MiniDisc deck didn’t detect any track breaks so it recorded a CD as one continuous track that needed to be broken up afterwards. This was always a pain in the ass, so I decided to play around with belts again.

I mean, I had nothing much planned today and nothing else really to do, so I disconnected the player, opened it up and for some reason stupid reason instead of installing the new German belt, reinstalled the older, new, exchanged one. Everything seemed to work fine, so I buttoned everything up and put it back in my system.

It wasn’t five minutes before I realized things still weren’t right. Did I miss something when I was reassembling it? Did I over-tighten a screw somewhere?The drawer started shuddering (it’s the only way to describe it) when it opened. This hadn’t happened when it was installed before, but a shuddering tray is a definite sign of a belt being too tight.

Fuck me.

I pulled it out of the system, popped the cover, and removed the mechanism again. This time I installed the new German belt and it’s been working fine all afternoon. That belt is still a bit thinner than the original, but the diameter is spot on and the shuddering is gone.

So what did I learn? Like in many things in life, sometimes girth is more important than thickness.

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Morning Soundtrack

Ray Lynch – Deep Breakfast (1986)

Sometime in 1987 or thereabouts, on one our many little tribe’s outings via ferry from SF to Sausalito (being newly-relocated desert rats we enjoyed any time on the water we could), I first heard this album. It was playing in one of the many New Age souvenir/crystal shops that dotted the main drag at the time and I was immediately enchanted. Fortunately I didn’t have to go far to get a copy, as they had an extensive in-store CD selection for sale.

Playing this always envokes the emotion of that afternoon if even the now sadly degraded memories of what actually expired outside that shop are fleeting.

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The Beginning Of A Mellow Afternoon

Joey Alexander – Warna  (2019)

And believe me, it’s needed.

I took Sophie in for her annual shots this morning.

“Dad! I do NOT like this! Can we please go home?”

She was such a good girl however, that we stopped for a pup cup on the way home.

Prior to leaving this morning, I was about to do my usual breakfast routine, but discovered I was out of the Kate Farms solution (haven’t received my monthly supply from the healthcare distributor and my most recent order from Amazon hadn’t arrived yet), so I combined my iced coffee with two cartons of isosource. All was well and good until right before I left for the vet and the most horrific reflux hit. Apparently I overdid it on the volume and my stomach didn’t like it one bit.

The worst part of not being able to swallow is when you get reflux. If everything were functioning properly, I’d whip up a glass of baking soda solution, swallow it, and  everything would be right as rain. Unfortunately, that’s no longer an option. Yeah, I can still do the baking soda solution via the g-tube (after using the tube to drain the excess stomach contents) to quiet my stomach, but there’s no way of immediately relieving the burn left in my throat from the reflux. And of course there was a certain amount of aspiration, so my O2 (after being 98-100% for weeks now) took a—thankfully brief—nosedive to under 90%. It’s since recovered  to the mid 90s, but damn…it wiped me out and I wanted nothing more upon returning home than to take a nap.

That’s passed now, but it’s still going to be a very low-key, quiet afternoon and Joey Alexander is a perfect accompaniment for that.

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Evening Tunes

Peter Erskine – Transition (1987)

I originally bought this disc in 1987—for obvious reasons—long before I had gotten into jazz. Despite the bear on the cover, after a few listenings, I just couldn’t get into it and ended it selling/trading it at Streetlight Records on Market Street. Nearly 40 years years later I ran across it again and wondered if my musical taste in general or appreciation for more freeform jazz had changed any.

It had. It’s that one disc I always pull out when I can’t decide what to listen to. But to be honest there is still one track on the album that I consistently skip over if the remote is handy.

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“Eight Is Enough” Of Anything

Famous last words.

I suppose there are worst things to spend my money on, but collecting shit is a fun hobby no matter what you collect, be it antiques, Hummel figurines, Beanie Babies,  Candlewick glassware (in the case of my sister), or in my case, portable CD/Minidisc players.

Yeah, I know I should be saving, saving, saving with all the uncertainty in the world right now, but let’s face it: with that madman in the White House everything could go up in a mushroom cloud at any moment because someone disrespected his fragile ego one too many times and the only solution in his addled brain was to start WWIII. And even if it doesn’t get that crazy, none of us has any guarantee of tomorrow—especially if you’re dealing with ongoing health issues—so find joy in what and where you can.

And these little nuggets bring the geek in me much joy.

I’ll admit there is a fine line between collecting and hoarding, however. Fortunately I don’t think I’ve crossed that line, nor have any of my living relatives. My late father, however, was not a collector. He was a hoarder, and no matter how many times we tried to help him declutter (or even so much suggesting that he move into a new apartment) we were met with incredible resistance to the point of outright meltdowns. When he went into skilled nursing and we knew he’d never be going home again, I spent a couple days cleaning his place while I was in town and ended up filling an entire residential dumpster. After he passed it was a Herculean task for my sister (I was back in Denver at the time) to clean the rest of his place out and get it ready for sale.

I hope that when my time comes, whoever has to go through all my shit doesn’t feel like I had crossed the line.

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