Name That Toon

Something that costs nothing is worth exactly what you pay for it. And so on.

Activities that, for example, our forebears would have risked life and limb to achieve have been made utterly mundane. Australia, for instance, took a year to get to in a rickety little boat, and unless you had a Dickensian grudge to settle, you weren’t seen or heard from again in Old Blighty.

The romance of the sea was not just about discovery, it was also about testing yourself, about winning battles against Poseidon. You came back from crossing the equator a man, or a very good female impersonator. A year at sea with only men for company, accordion for entertainment and boiled shoe for food.

These days, your main challenge in sailing the ocean blue is making sure you don’t end up dead on the floor of your stateroom with a stomach full of drugs. So really, in comparison, the olden days were much more crap.

To be balanced in this argument (can’t say why I start being balanced now), I do feel that most modern improvements are genuinely for the better. I pay homage when I say - If I have seen further, it is because I have sat in the seats of giant planes (apologies to Isaac Newton). However, I saw something on telly recently that made me yearn for a time past. A time where not everything was instantly supplied on a whim. 

For starters, no-one is going to die if they don’t have this application and I can’t see how lives are improved with it. It’s a feature that allows you to hold your iPhone up to a sound source and it will name the tune and artist for you. This is total bullshit, man. I’m a bit of a music fan and I can think of many occasions where I have struggled over the course of years to identify and find a piece of music. I have caught a hint of and liked countless numbers of songs and Sherlocked my way around the traps and tracked these little gems down. I get a real sense of pleasure and achievement when I capture one of these illusive treats. The hunt makes the having more worthwhile.

It took me ten years, in one case, to identify and find a Frontside album. I was sitting in a weatherboard house in Dungog celebrating a christening when I saw the thing sitting in a collection of strange albums owned by an acquaintance. It was like a ray of light on a cloudy day. 

Once, walking past the old Kinselas, I heard a track that I had been after since I'd been a young teenager. I queued, paid my entrance fee, and bought the 12 inch single from the surprised DJ.

These trials, serendipity, happenstance and triumphs by acute observation and memory are now made worthless by a silly little device.

Even though it gets fair up my nose, sideways, with an arm full of deckchairs (I really can’t put my finger on why it has annoyed me so much) I console myself with the thought that if it works as well as a whole lot of other things to do with digital music, it will be total rubbish.