scrambled channel

Why use teabags? For a start they are so much more expensive than just buying loose tea. Then they have a shorter shelf life than loose tea because the higher surface area to volume ratio means they lose potency quicker. Furthermore, I just don’t like the idea of soaking that papery, meshy stuff that they’re made out of it my hot beverage anyway. It’s not as if just waiting for the leaves to settle in a teapot or in the bottom of your mug is all that irritating is it?

Obviously this is a bit of a tongue in cheek rant, but I do find the rise of the tea bag a bit troubling. In the tea bag we have a product that is more expensive, more complicated to manufacture, produces more waste and gives inferior results, yet it’s exceedingly popular, all for some minute degree of real (or imagined) increase in convenience.

I guess I should be used to it by now, but it still depresses me. This stupid world is full of people carrying boxes of teabags in plastic shopping bags up escalators back to the carparks where they parked after their 800 metre drive to the supermarket.

Everyone I know is out of town so I finally got around to sorting out and properly tagging my mp3 collection. I was reminded of that scene in High Fidelity where Rob is responding to the disintegration of his relationship by sorting out his record collection. He sorts them into autobiographical order and I was half expecting that going through all this music would be a big nostalgia trip for me too. I was a little disappointed by the whole experience though. You odn’t really get all misty eyed thinking about the night you downloaded The Gourds’ cover of Gin and Juice. It wasn’t exactly a complete collection either being mainly stuff I’d gathered since I’ve been travelling. All in all, not the fascinating, introspective evening I was looking forward to.

Of course sorting a whole bunch of computer files is a different proposition than sorting records. They don’t take up any physical space (although keeping possessions on disk is pretty analogous to storing physical objects on a bookshelf). I found it a lot easier to throw stuff away though and I think this is mainly because there isn’t an actual object to read, hold, smell and taste. Well maybe not taste. I found that as the night went on, I became more and more trigger happy. Can’t find a tag for that obscure track that you’ve listened to once in 3 years? Bin it. Rather than listening to most of a track, I’d listen to a couple of seconds of the intro, a couple of seconds in the middle somewhere… oh fuck it, don’t really like this.

I know this relaxed approach comes partly from the fact that I didn’t pay for most of this stuff. However, it’s obviously easier to throw away pure data. There’s something a lot graver about taking a physical object and removing it from you house, knowing that you’ll never see it again. I know I’ve held on to some really bad CDs for this reason.

I guess that music, and anything that we can consume in a purely digital form, has become essentially disposable. Maybe this is why the kids are listening to increasingly banal crap with every passing year. Or is that just what every generation of 20 somethings thinks of the music taste of teenagers?