Art on Vinyl

While in show-and-tell mode, I have to post this incredible disc I found among my LPs while taking inventory. A true work of art. Artifacts like this I am told have no value as even CDs are described these days as just an intermediary step between an MP3 and your iPod. Pity the poor LP. How can you find beauty like this in an iPod?

George Clinton surfs a circa 1978 slab of vinyl - state of the art at the time  

This is the picture disc from Parliament's Motor Booty Affair. Not the best photo; I had trouble with glare off the vinyl. 

Don't get me going about how the technology business serves itself by continually obsoleting media so you as the consumer have to go out and buy something else to get the same thing. Music is about the sound in your ears, not what you are playing it on, or so I thought. Has the advent of digital everything done anything to increase the quality of the content? Since the 1970s there has been precious little musical innovation, and most of the playback systems I listened on in college were of higher fidelity than what I hear today. But we have been through generation upon generation of advances in technology gadgets, and today you are considered unhip unless you are twiddling something in public. Has anyone in this decade communicated on tenor better than Pres, who barely lived into the LP era? Pres didn't even have a hand phone. 

My laptop screen burned out right as I began taking inventory of my LPs. I had a circa-2000 Mac laptop retired in the closet, perfectly functional but I believed it to be obsolete. On a whim I got it out as backup and took it over to the storage space so I could continue to build my Excel database. Guess what? It worked great, actually faster and easier to use than the "modern" Windows laptop that just broke down. 12 years and billions of dollars in technology advances have added absolutely no functionality to laptops, regardless of what we as consumers have been convinced. Go out and get that iPad 3 today, your iPad 2 is no longer cool.