RIIIIIIIIIING!

    It isn't my favorite old-time radio show, but a guilty pleasure that I enjoy is a show called "Crime Club." The budgets were low, the actors were mostly obscure and the plots didn't necessarily make sense, but the writing tended to be solid and everybody seemed to be having a lot of fun. Unfortunately, for some reason, possibly the passage of time since the original shows or possibly the years now that I've had the CD, the MP3 CD that "Crime Club" is on doesn't play all that well. Episodes will end suddenly and the CD skips on to another episode. Every episode starts with a ringing phone. Our gimmick is that our host is the librarian for the Crime Club (sure, why not?) and every week he gets a call requesting a particular story, which fortunately he always has. (There's also a call at the end of the show where he tells what the next week's show will be. When they got canceled, he apologized and told the caller that "Racket Busters" would take over the time slot next week. I think I would have had him say, "Screw this crazy job! I quit!")
    There are also a lot of phone calls within the show. Thus when a phone rings, I can never tell if it's a new plot point in the episode I'm listening to or if that particular MP3 has failed and I've cycled around to another episode. This should be really annoying, but somehow there's a certain surreal accidental art to it that I kind of like. However, there are limits. So I've gone back to my old CD MP3 player, which somehow is more forgiving than my newer one, and have been enjoying complete episodes for the last few nights. I have some other shows which have the same problem (even if without the telephone rings), so I'm going to be enjoying full episodes of those, too.
    The point to this blitherfest is that old-time radio has been getting a lot older lately. We had many decades there where telephone rings didn't change; though the show might have been 20 or 30 or more years old, it still didn't seem old or alien. These days, I'm not sure kids would even know what a ringing phone is. Of course, some people still set their ring tones to sound like an old-fashioned ringing phone, but not all that many. It's not bad; it's not worrying. It's just a little odd.
    Sorry if this was weak; it's too dang cold to blog intelligently today!:)