Charles on… anything that comes along

When I look around MySpace I don’t see much that’s “strange and wonderful” - or “deeply disturbing,” either. I wish I did. What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts. Everything feels secondhand: the pimps-and-hos poses before the cameraphone, the ham-fisted, cliche-choked blog-prose. It’s sad to see so much effort put into self-expression with so little to express. Humanity in the raw? No, this is humanity boiled to blandness in the tin pot of personalization.

Another thoughtful post from Nicholas Carr (actually, he doesn’t do any other sort). Journalists have long experience that writing stuff is hard; that people find repetition easier than innovation. Why do you think cliches get such wide use? Because people don’t make up their own. As he says, what scares him about MySpace is “not how dangerous it is, but how safe”. (Seen at Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog)

So I went to my local music store looking for a cheap MIDI cable. At said music store, they told me they only carry the expensive cables from their supplier because the people who buy MIDI cables demand audiophile quality sound reproduction. WHAT?!?!?!?! Wait….WHAT?!?!?!?

Ok, let’s back up for a second. We’re talking about MIDI; only control signals go over the wire. There is no audio signal transmitted, period. The MIDI notes either get there, or they don’t. The punk behind the counter is just another moron, and I wasn’t about to pay $20 each for a cable.

Following Ben Goldacre’s (not completed I think) examination of “audiophile” power supplies - not signal cables, but mains cables - is there a whole category to be written about the cables sold as “audiophile” which have no useful signal to be deployed over them?