Vegas Sculptor’s Blog

Now that the Iowa caucasus and New Hampshire primary are history, the battle for the presidential nomination is in full swing. All of this will lead us up to February when more than 20 states will hold primaries.

In all, the February 5th elections will decide 1,081 Republican and 2,075 Democratic delegates. If a candidate does well on this one day, they can wrap up the nomination.

This year the Democrats will hold their convention August 25 - 28 in Denver. The Republicans will follow in Minneapolis, August 1 - 4.

But what’s the point? I mean the nominee will be pretty much decided in February, what’s the point of a nomination convention to be held some six months later?

I remember when I was young, my grandfathers would stay up into the night to see who the nominee would be. There was much speculation, many late night sessions, and finally the announcement, followed by the grand acceptance speech.

The next day, the talk of the town was what a grand fellow the party had nominated this time and all the party loyalist would begin making plans for showing their support.

Nowadays we have months of campaigning during the primaries, leading up to a non-event during the conventions, where we hear the same old speech given by a candidate who was just nominated to a position we all knew he won months ago!

Now I can’t say much about who this system of primaries has selected in the past. It seems to me that when you select the candidate by popular vote you are giving the public too many choices.

When the candidates were selected by the delegates at the convention, they selected the person who they believed was the best qualified and most likely to win. Now the person who can appeal to the most voters in primaries gets the nomination. The people running don’t need to be anything more that able to get their names on the ballots.

The candidates don’t have to be qualified, they don’t have to be long time supporters of their parties, in some memorable cases they can be barely literate!

So what am I trying to say? Well it is my humble opinion that if you give the people too many choices, you get a president that appeals to the lowest common denominator. The results of this kind of rating system can be seen by switching on your TV and seeing what shows are popular these days. Do you really want these people deciding who will lead our country?

Just like with children, the fewer choices you give them the easier it is. I say, go back to letting the party leaders decide who to nominate, then give the public the choice between two qualified candidates. Surely we can’t screw that up too much!

Today I’d like to tell you about my new “gadget”. I know we have several people out there who like gadgets, and I don’t usually buy too many. But I recently bought something that I think almost all of you could probably use.

If you’re like me, you have at least one box of old albums packed away somewhere. You remember “albums” don’t you? You remember, those big, black, vinyl disks that make music when you play it on a “turntable”?

Well my albums have been packed away at least 20 years now. Lately I’ve transferred my CD’s to MP3’s that I can listen to on my portable MP3 player. I got to thinking about all my old albums and started wondering how to get them copied to the computer too.

Every solution that I found involved running cables from a turntable hooked to my stereo to the sound card on my computer, or running a turntable through a pre-amp then into the computer. Now the first problem is that in the last 20 years the belt and needle on my turntable have either been lost or turned to dust! Since nobody under 30 even knows what a turntable is, replacement parts are expensive and hard to find.

That’s when I discovered the new ION turntable that plugs into the USB port on your computer. No need to be near the stereo system, only one cable to plug into the USB. I checked prices and reviews and found the best price on Amazon.

The one I bought is the iTTUSB05 USB. It’s not the most expensive they offer, but it does everything I need. It came with everything needed to hook it up, and a copy of the Audacity music editing software you need to capture your music. For $99 it’s not much more than I would have spent trying to get my old turntable back into working condition. You even get free shipping!

So far I’ve converted 5 albums, and couldn’t be more pleased with the results. Of course the digital music isn’t going to sound any better than the album you are recording from, so cleaning the album before you try to record it helps the final quality.

With Audacity you can clean up some of the noise and remove any “pops” or “clicks” that are on the album. It takes a little practice using Audacity but the results are pretty good. One of my favorite Beatles albums has quite a few scratches on it, but I was able to select the pop made by the scratches and remove it. The final WAV file sounds much better than the album.

You can convert the files to audio CD using software like Windows Media Player, or you can convert to MP3 to put on your MP3 player.

If you’re missing your old albums and don’t want to spend the money to replace them (if you can even find them on CD), you might want to check out the ION turntable.