WOEBOT

Came across this browsing through a junk insert from a newspaper. S'funny how the mainstream represents vinyl as manifestly, unequivocably outmoded, when for so many of us it's the cutting edge. It's that same curious impulse which manifests itself in middle-aged people "regretting" the fashion they chose to wear when they were young. Why do people have such difficulty connecting with their previous selves? It's as though they're locked in a permanent process of brain-washing. Some would blame capitalism, me I just think people can be lame.

In this device's favour it does offer 78 rpm which is incontestably bordering on the recherche (at last Jim Clarke can play that Vincent Gallo 12"), but I'd bet good money on almost no-one who buys this owning anything other than 33s and 45s. More prosaically I suppose what happens with record players these days is that the needle or the cartridge break and the owner never gets round to getting it fixed.

Discovering this advert coinciding with me overhearing a snippet of a Radio 4 programme with Stephen Fry talking, his tone pure young fogey, about his love of the "gramophone record", again as if vinyl were some neolithic phenonenon. I wanted to link to the show, but can't seem to dig it out of the Radio 4 archives, my questions on the Radio 4 forum (don't laugh) falling on deaf ears.