in no time at all i'm becoming a little vinyl freak; the main reason i'm listening to a cd right now is because i saw it on vinyl last week & i want to hear what songs i'd be getting if i ran back to the store to pick it up. not that i'm wearing my record player out; the plan is still to burn my records to cd so i don't have to play them at home, only on dj turntables. i'm just caught in the middle of that process now, with a dozen or more records on my hard drive but not burned to cd yet.

one of the better records i've purchased (they're all great, but some only for camp value is from a series called "environments" & contains two almost-30min recordings, "wood-masted sailboat" & "a country stream". it's not as much a sound effects record as it is simply 2 ambient sound recordings. i've listened to it several times already & have used it to fall asleep a few nights as well, perhaps because it's convenient (it's already on my hard drive; i just put the files in my winamp playlist & can play them whenever my computer's on), or just maybe because it's addictive.

don't just listen to me; it says right on the dust jacket (actual quote): "High Times Magazine worried that the FDA might eventually ban Environments as 'highly addictive' and might even wish to make them a 'controlled substance'. Although the comment was facetious, the fact is that many people have commented that environments are a 'natural high' in both senses of the term."

that's just one of many gems on the record's dust cover. it was almost worth the $1 i paid for the record just to be able to read all the dust jacket propaganda. these environments recordings were destined to change the world, it seems. they suggested great psychological benefits from playing enviroments while sleeping, reading, working, eating, screwing, birthing, in utero, in space, & just about anywhere else. "the magic of psychoacoustic sound" they call it. you can find these kinds of recordings all over the place on cd nowadays (new age shops especially) but i don't know about the quality of the cds. the record i have is good, but after reading their marketing info i'd think that everyone in the world would be using environments recordings by now.

but regardless of whether the record is an addictive controlled substance or not, i know now that i can't get arrested for driving around with it. the supreme court announced that today.

it all goes back to indianapolis 1998. then-mayor steve goldsmith & pals institute a new indianapolis policy of putting roadblocks on the streets to check for drug trafficking. unlucky drivers-by were forced to pull over, give identification, & generally deal with pigs bringing a drug-sniffing dog to their cars. very few drug arrests (& virtually no dealers; all they caught were people with personal pot stashes) were made before the challenges hit the courts. (goldsmith, incidentally, is now on the short list to be appointed secretary of HUD by bush.)

i have no idea how such a blatant violation of the 4th amendment ever got passed in the first place, but last month the case made its way to the u.s supreme court & today they ruled 6-3 that the roadblocks were unconstitutional. the dissenters were those bane of the left rehnquist, scalia, & thomas. i can hardly understand how there were any dissenters; the ap article i read quoted one confusing out-of-context paragraph & a couple more-clear paragraphs of rehnquist's dissention & none of scalia's... i guess if i cared that much i could find their opinions to read in full.