This Black Fungus! Might Be Healing Chernobyl

This is why I love old vinyl, because the original context is inescapably built in, and that's an important part of the experience for me. But it's like pizza and ice cream - youths make their own context based on what they're given, and that's fantastic too

Loved those - my packet for Can't Stop The Music (1980) is a prized pop-culture artifact - but they were already on the wane when I was a kid in the late '70s... video games, VHS/Beta, MTV, etc. wiped out what market was left by the mid-'80s

It just makes no sense to pay new-vinyl prices for artists/albums where you don't know if you'll still be into them in a couple of years. Digital albums are cheap enough that you can just buy one as a tip to the artist for making something you liked

As critically underrated in FM as Mr. Silly Love Songs was in the Beatles

The only caveat is that it has to sound good. I'm not listening to copies of scratchy 78s

That's about the age I moved here, but I lived in the Quad Cities until I was 13, and it was the same there - can count on one hand the number of times I crossed the bridge to Davenport, Iowa from Illinois (with the exception of minor league baseball games at the stadium right next to the bridge)

A practice that will actually promote loyalty at your neighborhood coffee shop just isn't genuine enough to have same effect at a big chain store.

I'm definitely not rude to employees who do this, I know it's not their fault. But it ignores a) the fact that introverts hate this kind of stuff, and b) customers instinctively know that if an employee approaches you in a store, it's to sell you something.

The last time I was at Target, the whole back aisle of the store - seasonal, electronics, men's clothing - was lined with employees accosting customers about their cell phone plan. Such a great table-setter for an initiative like this.

NYT style: For Means, Too, An End

Just a few of the artists/genres I've grown to love solely from spelunking in the vinyl caves (2/2)