The Free Box Tapes

I don't know if I've talked about it much here, but I've really been moving away from downloaded music.  It's probably just idiosyncratic, but recorded music doesn't seem to really work for me if it doesn't have some kind of physical form.  So I've cancelled my subscription to my old online music service and scrapped some of my files.

The new beat around here for the last year or so has been 33 1/3 vinyl records.  You can get a huge variety of recordings at prices from 25 cents to two dollars (or more, of course, by why?), and with a little patience and by trusting to serendipity I've built a fun little library without any particular effort.  With such a low per-item cost, you can take gambles on oddball recordings that usually turn out to be dreadful, but occasionally turn out to be real gems.

Fast forward to yesterday.  As I was setting out on a voyage of adventure, I noticed that the people down at the corner had left out a fairly substantial Free Box with a bunch of gently-used binders.  That got my attention, because for professional reasons I'm all about looking for ways to defray school expenses for refugee youth.  So I jump out and pillage the binders, and underneath them I find this:

It's a well-constructed case for an eclectic, respectable music collection spanning pop, classical, and jazz.  And it's all on cassette, on the second-lamest medium in which music was e'er marketed!  But at least it's a physical medium, right?

Well, talk about building a fun little music library without any particular effort!  Me being me, it was instantaneously obvious what I must do, and that is: listen to one of these tapes every week or so, according to some random system, and then write a short post regarding its merits or lack thereof in this blog, probably late Sunday where it won't get in the way.  Won't that be fun?

That's the plan, anyway.  We'll see about the follow-through, but I'm usually pretty good at that.  Mrs.5000, it's on my sewing table if you want to take a look.