The 21st Century is Freaking Me the Heck Out.

But first, My Pianist Adventure. 

Got interested in Glenn Gould. 

I think I'd heard of him before, but I didn't even know enough to answer a Jeopardy! question about the man. But as I was checking out this week's comic book releases via Comixology, I saw Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo by Sandrine Revel, amongst the new releases, and (1) it's an interesting cover, (2) it has a good title, and (3) nbm does some supercool shit. (Like P. Craig Russell's Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, The Jungle Book, and all of those opera adaptations; and the Corto Maltese books; and stuff by Enki Bilal; and lots of other stuffs.

The sample pages looked pretty awesome, too . . . And the descriptive blurb was interesting, describing Gould's piano playing as "revolutionary." And that sounded cool. But I'd never heard of the writer / artist (Sandrine Revel), and $14.99 is a lot more than I usually spend on a virtual thing, so I went over to the Louisville Free Public Library page to see if they had a copy. Alas, no dice on that, but they did have some other items which looked interesting. So I zipped over to Amazon and they had the A Life Off Tempo book, but for the same price as Comixology (not surprising, in that Amazon owns Comixology) . . . and I couldn't help but notice that they also had this lovely item: Glenn Gould: The Complete Columbia Album Collection Box Set, which is an 81 cd set (3 of which are comprised of spoken material, the other 78 all music). For a mere $126. You bet your ass I'm thinking about it. I've been listening to some GG pieces, and they are things of beauty, for sure. And this set is pretty amazing. Every cd is contained inside of a miniature mock-up of the original album cover . . . front and back . . . and the cds are made to look like little lp vinyls. Very cool And there's a book. Shit, I really need this.

But wait. That's not what's freaking me out. 

Whilst checking out the cd package, I saw that the same set was also offered as a USB memory stick. And of course I had to click on that, just to see what such a thing would look like. And there was a picture of a USB drive made to look like a teeny tiny piano. Mmm-hmm. 

Now, let me get this straight . . . you put 78 cds into the little piano, you shake 'em bo' up? 

No. You put 78 cds and a  404 page book into the little piano, and then you shake 'em bo' up. And I think the music is actually on there in two different formats, but I can't look into this any further because my head just blew apart.

And before I could even begin to recover from that, I saw an ad for Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen (as in the complete cycle, about 15 hours's worth) on USB for $52. Fifty-two bucks!!!

All of that music . . . on two usb drives . . . oh, I feel faint. And something else . . . I wont thet.

Both thets, actually.

ADDENDUM: So for some reason I found myself watching a Larry the Cable Guy show. (I didn't even know that he had a show.) And there's a commercial for a show next Tuesday evening called REEL TO REEL: GENIUS WITHIN: THE INNER LIFE OF GLENN GOULD. Thank you, Universe. No doubt you are evolving as you should.