Totally retro! | Tape Spaghetti and Bibi Blocksberg

Foliage has been piling up since mid-September and we've been getting regular visits by a BSR sanitation worker with noise protection headphones and a leaf blower, emiting a nerve-wracking noise and nauseating gasoline stench. In these times of unemplyment and resource scarcity, I asked myself, wouldn't it be best to return to brooms and rakes?

Pretty much simultaneously, I was shocked by the announcement that the audio label Europa will stop producing cassettes in 2012. I wondered: Will my kids live in a world without Bibi Blocksberg tapes? Will they furrow their brows in incomrepehension at the term “tape spaghetti” (as Bodo Mrozek prophesizes will be the case with the German equivalent “Bandsalat”?) Will they mistake Hui Bu for an extremist Terror group and TKKG for a p2p program? While I can hardly prevent my kids from growing up in a generation that downloads their entertainment media from the internet, I to this day cannot pass a single flea market without buying at least one old audio tape. Seems like I'll be sticking them in my own collection rather than my kids', since evidently they've moved passed speaking elephants (Benjamin Blümchen) towards computer animated construction workers and British trains from Chuggington – as we would say in German, the digital revolution is bearing its fruit. I for myself will continue to love old school Benjamin Blümchen eps – I'm referring to the 80's originals here, of course.

So, yes, regarding certain technical developments and the digital revolution, I do remain starkly conservative. In the heat of this sentiment, I went out and bought a seperate mobile telephone receiver – totally retro! This gigantic plastic device is a real looker, not least because of the two-meter long spiral chord it connects to. You have to consider that most kids nowadays only know “classic” phones from books and movies. Add to this the problems that arise when you combine a chordless phone and a two year old with a knack for hiding things and you'll either run around all day looking for your phone or charging it up because it's been stowed away in a compartment somewhere for two days. So for a while now, we've had a good old fashioned telephone sitting on our corridor commode: it's reliable and it always works – unlike our multifunctional printer-scanner-copier-fax machine with which I have never in two years sent a fax and whose bluetooth connection fails one out of two times that I really need to print something. Hey, maybe I'm just stubborn. But is it so wrong to be appalled at the prophesy that “mobile communication is our future”?

Last Saturday, the utterer of these words – my boyfriend – sacrificed two hours to clean our car. He's not one of those guys that needs to polish his ride in order to feel good about himself – it's more that if you have a car and a toddler you won't get around it. When we get to the car, we witness the results of an overly motivated BSR employee and his leaf blower. Withered leaves stick to every free inch of the car's bottom half, it's fresh lacquer is entirely covered in a fine film of street dirt. I can't help myself from mentioning the obvious: “This would not have happened with a broom and a rake!”

(sjb)