EdmondGuy14

Strawberry Swing || Steven Universe AMV (4:02)

It’s been months in the making, but here- my love letter to this beautiful story and all its magic, and all its relationships <3

The first one in the left corner: It’s a first communion rosary, and it’s not cheap.

The black one in the first line: That’s a widow rosary and it’s old.

The white one in the second line:  is a commemoration rosary. It has a miniature picture in the round part. I haven’t seen that since the 70′s.

In the third line, multicolor one: It’s an Anima mundi, I have only seen those in the hands of Rosary ministery’s old ladies. The oldest ones are from the 80′s after Juan Pablo II came to Mexico for the first time. It’s one of the old ones, I know because the crucifixes are different.  The third one on the fourth line: Red and gold. The style is old, the metal is dark, that’s a 50′s rosary, probably a quinceañera one (or it’s maybe older, from the 40′s when the brides carried red roses with their offerings).

The fifth one on the fourth line: It’s a quinceañera rosary with Ignatius’s tear. The style is old and in my part of Mexico is orphan girls who used it. At least it was when I was young. The third one of the fifth line: the blue one with the anchor. That one I have only seen in Veracruz and it doesn’t look new. The fifth one on the fifth line: That’s a 90′s wedding rosary. Black and white patterns were popular on that date. The fourth one on the last line: That’s a first communion rosary from the 30′s. It’s delicate and most probably silver. The rest wrench my heart too, the humble everyday rosaries with wooden beads and knots. Those are cheap and bear the wear and tear of their user handling. But those  I described are much more.

Those are mother’s rosaries.

We go forward.

image

I think that might have been my handiwork?

One of our primary jobs is that we are responsible for doing preselection of bands for MoPop's all under 21 battle of the bands, and attend all the shows involved. One of said bands has an old telephone handset that they use as a microphone. As a teenager still unable to distinguish between fun gimmick and thoughtful artistic choice, this experience plants a seed that will grow with terrifying rapidity.

I talk about the phone mic I saw a lot. I look up how different kinds of phones are built, and discover that most older phone handsets use what's called a "carbon button microphone", a device for capturing sound so simple that the only way to really damage it is to smash the thing with a hammer. The seed has begun to germinate.

2010 is one of the final, gasping years of the Radio Shack franchise. I think the decline of Radio Shack makes sense for a lot of reasons, but it's also emblematic of a cultural shift that I can't get over to this day. Any child in 2010 can acquire the parts required to fix a toaster, microwave, radio, or to build a Tesla Coil capable of broadcasting electricity 15 or so feet at the local Radio Shack, provided they have the money, time, and sick fascination with electronics or their own narrow understanding of communism. It is downright trivial for that child in 2010 to acquire a 1/4" jack, some wire, and ensure that yes, their father is in possession of a soldering iron. I ask my dad if we have a working telephone headset that I can render inoperable for use with a phone, and he obliges.

The beauty of a carbon button microphone is that in addition to sounding like you're radioing in from the antarctic, is that it's basically impossible to wire up to a jack incorrectly. The humble quarter inch jack doesn't carry electricity to power things, it's only job is to complete a circuit capable of turning mechanical wiggles into electromagnetic ones. I disassemble the phone, disconnect the phone jack present, and dispose of the speaker. To save myself having to drill a new hole in the handset, I install the quarter inch jack into the space where the phone jack originally was housed. I can tell that there won't be enough space on that side for both the inserted patch cable (the thing that plugs guitars into amplifiers) AND the microphone, so the wiring for that part has to be run through the central body of the phone to the other side.

I am then faced with a decision. See, the phone in question opened up by unscrewing the covers for the speaker and microphone, but the threading on the covers was identical even though the covers weren't. I could choose to place either the ear cover (lots of holes, slightly convex) or the mic cover (a few holes, fairly concave) over the mic. In the end, I decided to keep the mic cover with the microphone, which resulted in them being swapped from their original positions.

The mic got used in a few shows, including my senior project, and I had it at least until the end of college. At some point I decided I was done with the thing as I no longer had a band, and didn't have time to start one again. I think I gave it to Goodwill, either in Washington or Oregon.

I forget about the mic.

Thing is, I knew that phone mic really well. I don't want to say it was like, iconic, or anything, but it was a stupid project I was really proud of, and so I knew it intimately. The phone in that picture:

1) is at the very least the same model of handset that I modified.

2) uses a quarter inch jack that is installed in the same location/angle as the phone jack would be.

3) has the microphone and speaker caps switched from their normal positions, assuming there's not a hole for the original phone jack on the side we can't see.

No children are allowed in the Library of Congress.

It's not that kind of library.

In other words...

You are being lied to

In order to read something in the Library of Congress, you must, in order:

1) Be 16+ years old and in possession of ID such as a driver’s license or passport to obtain a LoC card

2) Make an appointment to go to a reading room

3) Know what it is you want to read and which library building it is in so you can fill out a request form when you arrive.

So the chances of a “child” just stumbling over something “inappropriate” that was “put” there by the choice of the head librarian is 100% impossible.