Klatu Barada Nikto (Or Spellings to That Effect)

Yet another frightening aspect of today’s techno-world: W/ the new, harder-slaving animals running the wheels of commerce & industry here, as well as some expanded memory, we decided to “rip” (as the kidz & Windows Media Player like to call copyright violation) several of the CDs lying about our seedy no-rent room here at "Motel No." It‘s disturbing enough to be advised by said media player that further info about whatever had just been dubbed (as the old school says) could be obtained merely by crawling the web & matching whatever the eff was now on one’s hard drive, but when, after next adventuring in the World-Wide Wasteland*, we discovered that every damn one of the albums copied had had a representation of its cover added to the music library. Without our permission ever having been asked. (Even a cheaply & cheesily packaged, Italian-made “Gold Collection” of Charlie Parker tunes, copywrit 1992, purchased for $3.99 or whatever that one wouldn’t imagine there’d be a record of anywhere.) The massive forces of Microsoft & all of cybernowhere have not yet reached total soul-deadening perfection, as the cover provided us for Esa-Pekka Salonen vs. Rite o’ Spring is not the one in our possession, & while two-thirds the size of a postage stamp & apparently not enlargeable (Another good one, Mr. Gates!) the image does seem to say “Stravinsky” on it, but the picture looks a helluva lot more like Lenny Bernstein than Salonen. (Further examination has slightly increased the image, & revealed that it is ol' Lenny, & both albums contain Rite of Spring, but the other compositions are different. Perhaps we needn’t welcome our new robot overlords quite so soon. (Who are we kidding? The robots took over so long ago that there’s little guarantee any of the intelligences consuming this pablum are more than mere human (?) simulacra. Let alone this automaton producing it.) *Thank you, Newton Minow.