2290 Lasting Media, lasting fur

Sunday, March 1, 2009

I yell at the TV a lot. I yelled at "Sunday Morning" today. They'd done a piece on how a lot of material produced only a decade ago cannot now be read, because the program under which it was produced no longer exists, or the device for reading or playing it is obsolete. They called it "data rot". ***

And then the reporter said, "There never has been and never will be a format that lasts forever."

I exploded.

I have actually TOUCHED the Rosetta stone! I have seen prehistoric cave paintings in Europe, and traced runes carved into the walls of megalithic tombs. People are still reading Sumerian clay tablets. I personally own 150-year-old books and photographs, and by damn I can still read them.

"Never has been" indeed. Stupid child. What is now is not what has always been. Once upon a time we did it better in terms of lasting through eternity.

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***Actually, that's not "data rot". Data rot is when the data on the storage device weakens, deteriorates, disappears. For example, the data on a well-stored vinyl phonograph record does not deteriorate, because it's physical, on a stable base. The data on well-stored magnetic tape or disks will deteriorate all by itself. That's data rot. That's what Jay's father was working on before the Alzheimer's hit him - trying to find the least expensive way to preserve the data on CDs and DVDs, which also deteriorate over time.

What the reporter was referring to is more properly called "technological creep".

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I wore my fake silver fox jacket to the deli today, and the clerk asked if it was real. (I have two fakes, and the silver is a pretty good fake. The other is a longer brown fake beaver, and that one is very frankly fake.) The clerk agreed that the fox was a good fake, and asked if I ever had people get nasty because I was wearing "fur".

It's funny. The only time I've had any problem was when I was wearing a very frankly fake. I mean it was so fake it was dull, fuzzy, and matted.

One day I was standing in line at the grocery store, wearing that jacket. The woman behind me in line was being very loud, saying things like that the smell of death was nauseating her, that she despised people who killed for vanity, blah blah blah, and - note that she was wearing leather shoes and had meat in her basket, and that (um, I forget the word, but it's when you say one thing and do another) annoyed me.

She kept getting louder and louder.

Anyhow, after I'd paid the bill and was about to leave, I turned to her and said, very loudly, "Hey. A little respect here. Twenty polyesters died to make this coat."

She reared back and blustered a bit, and said,"And I'm sure it looked better on them!"

The entire grocery store cracked up.
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