One of the tv moments I often think about is Married With Children’s 1989 Season 4 episode “Dead Men Don’t Do Aerobics.” I’ve often said that the writers of the show are more well-researched than they appear to be. The art of good satire is to make humor that appeals both to serious concepts and casual laughs. Here is the fragment from the original script:

Al Bundy: C’mon, everybody, family meeting. [they all sit] Now, Peg, I know you think you’re responsible for killing Jim. And yet you have no guilt of squashing the life out of me, but that’s another meeting. Anyway, what I’m saying is, you didn’t kill Jim. Good health killed Jim. See, he purified his body so completely, that when finally called on to do so, he couldn’t handle the grease and sugar and toxic waste that we call food. He rendered himself extinct. See, healthy people are like dinosaurs. They’re not fit to survive. Jim’s body couldn’t handle the burgers and bonbons and pastry suckin’s like real Americans. You see, Peg, WE are the truly strong.

PEGGY: You really think so, Al?

AL: Absolutely. See that cockroach over there?

PEGGY: [points] That one?

AL: [points] No, that one. Well, any one of them. You don’t see them carrying of a can of Wheat Germ, do you?

KELLY: Gurm, Dad.

AL: Thank you, Pumpkin. Anyhow, Peg, let’s follow the example of our friend the cockroach. They were before man, they’ll be here after man. You know why? They eat crap. And I say, if it’s good enough for the cockroach, then it’s good enough for my family!

Poliomyelitis (or Polio) came about because of overcleanliness. Because of modern sanitary conditions, infants were no longer exposed to the open sewers. As a result, their natural immunity to the polio virus weakened. It wasn’t until Jonas Salk created a vaccine (one that contained the virus itself – albeit inactivated through a combination of three strains) and injected it into human beings to develop immunity that the epidemic was eradicated.

I feel that way about allergy medication. The more you take, the less antibodies your immune system will develop. It may soothe you now, but medicated America is quickly becoming a weak society, overprotected (over-coddled) and underimmunized. The recent study that peanut allergy cases have tripled in the last decade is good evidence to support my views. Squeaky clean living conditions are nice, but it also leads to a weak race of people, ill-equipped to handle the deluge of germs out in the real world. What happens if you decide to up and go to Marrakech or Mexico tomorrow? So how does one stay clean and strong?

I say take the advice of Al Bundy. Eat a burger. Better yet, eat a White Castle Burger. Nobody exactly knows what kind of meat it is (my theory is that it’s space aliens killed with five shots of laser beams), but it should be no small irony that the franchise was originally developed as an answer to Upton Sinclair’s novel (The Jungle) about poor sanitary conditions in the meat industry. Next time you reach for a box of Alavert or Claritin, think about the next generation and have a burger with fries and shake instead.

Do it for the kids.

Re: modern civilization, one of the greatest concerns I have is the ever decreasing level of returns we are willing to put up with when it comes to Quality vs technology.

The advent of the mp3 / wmv format of music is a perfect illustration of this. I’m happy to hear that music enthusiasts are returning to vinyl to a certain extent. I’m not sure how much of this is a striving for analog nuance and not just a retro fetish for a whimsical past. After all, blind lab tests show that most people can’t differentiate a 320k mp3 from an analog recording.

The incriminating evidence is a little bit more involved than wave forms and social phenomenon. In order to understand the way we have been trained to make do with less, you have to first understand the limitations of digital audio. Hailing from a structure of 0 and 1 binary bits, digital audio – when magnified – generates perpendicular steps in their wave forms, when it should, ideally be smooth analog curves. Imagine yourself on a rollercoaster ride, and instead of smooth steel tracks, or rickety wooden ones, you are bumping down stairs on a painful pair of redden buttocks. It’s like a Sir George Solti recording through the ears of Jackass’s Steve-O.

It was arguable whether an average person’s ears were discriminating enough to pick up on this microscopic detail. Vague words like full and warm have often been used to describe a rich analog recording. When new wave music, with its banks of midi sequencers and synthesizers came along in the 80s generating square waves with digital bits, the compact disc generation found a match made in heaven. I can’t say I didn’t welcome the CD format with open arms. There’s nothing more annoying than hearing pops and clicks during a solo piano performance, but most of you today may not remember the howl of protest over the “cold,” “metallic” range of cd’s. This is an era when people still had Studer Revoxes in their home entertainment centers, and Infinity built their Reference Speaker set (pictured above).

We didn’t think audio quality could get any lower than cd’s. If anything, we thought it would improve. There was the SACD (Super Audio Compact Discs) and XRCD (Extended Resolution Compact Discs). And with Mobile Fidelity still around, there was at least still a chance for discerning audiophiles. But then the computer generation took over, with it’s small PC speakers, mp3, wmv, RA, and ogg formats. (Does anyone even know what FLAC format is?) In order to accommodate these tiny speakers, music started to be “Remastered” in reissues of many classic recordings. At first, I thought “remastering” meant a general clean-up of old recordings, the removal of unwanted artifacts with newer technology, much like the remastering of the original Wizard of Oz movie or Decca Records’ remastering of their Legends series. But what Remastering eventually became, was an overcompression of a recording. This meant that the quiet passages were boosted while the loud passages got reduced. A quiet Mozart Lieder now sounded as as close to a no longer thunderous Mahler symphony. The result was a mid-level drone that never let up. The nuances were gone, but everything came through better when “ripped” to mp3. People reported being inexplicably exhausted by the end of listening to their favorite remastered album. Why did they do this? It was to suit the limited dynamic range of the reduced output devices, namely mp3 players, IPODS, computer speakers, and online streaming music. Music with reduced dynamic range would sound peachy when played through devices with reduced dynamic range. Everyone goes home happy.

Except for the dude sitting at home with his all-tube Macintosh preamp, Crown power amps, and a set of Klipschorn speakers.

Once technology used to serve mankind, but now, we are slowly readjusting our standards to accommodate the limitations of computers. We are lowering our expectations to serve computers. This turn of events is called “The Loudness War.”

I recently wanted to celebrate the rite of Spring with the beloved Bill Evans recording You Must Believe In Spring. I bought my first copy in a vinyl LP format in the early 80s, when still a teen. I fell in love with it immediately. So I thought I’d have an updated copy with a “Remastered” version from Rhino. What I got was a compressed recording that had the acoustic bass pumped up almost to the level of the Evans’s piano, competing with it for attention. It’s not to the point of “clipping,” but it definitely lost the nuance of the performance, especially for a recording noted for its quiet, meditative and ruminative selections.

All that would be even tolerable, IF the parties responsible did not overlook a truncated note from the opening of “The Peacocks.” How, you ask, could this have happened? My theory is that the mastering compression plug-in was set with a level “gate” that reduced anything below a certain level to silence. And since the opening note is very quiet, lone piano note, it got zapped. I am shocked people at Rhino would have missed that. I put it on my remastering software and reverse-engineered the note to be prepended to the head of the song.

Science fiction writers have long prophesied a time when machine would win the battle against man. I tend to think it will happen not in that flamboyant Hollywood way, with the Terminator and Skynet bringing about the end of the world in a gigantic explosion, followed by skull-crushing laser-shooting tanks. I see that as a metaphor for what is really happening. If anything, it will be more along the lines of the frog in a pot of cold water that is slowly being brought to a boil. Look around you: people are physically interacting with strangers less (they are too focused on “tweeting” about their walk across a dangerous intersection in real time); people go out less often, we no longer care about acting, but concentrate more on Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and Wow! graphics with deafening volume levels in our movies; printed matter,once revisable with Orwellian burn markers, are now deletable with ebooks and Kindle books, we can’t even find our way to a new place without the aid of google maps, mapquest, dashboard GPS, and all our credit banking personal information are slowly being surrendered migrated online, controlled by switches, routers, web servers, and frame relays.

This may sound a little like Luddite paranoia, but my point is that we’re literally handing our lives over to a technocentric system. And along with that surrender, we’ve also lowered our expectations in regards to quality.