After a long hiatus I’m bringing back the Best Thing posts. For “Eye of the Tiger” of all things. (Aye, but there’s a twist.) Maybe it’s because I watched nothing good. More than likely I was just distracted by the 27 other things I do every day. I need a “thing” intervention from Thoreau. Maybe I’ll actually finish Walden instead. On the other hand that would be yet another thing I’d have to do today. I’ll check back in after I finish reading the 8-book Women Crime Writers set. I’m almost finished with Vera Caspary’s Laura, which is fantastic by the way. I can’t say enough about this collection of novels. Definitely find a set if you can. But I was talking about the Best Thing I Watched not the Best Thing I Read. That’s an entirely different bl-g series. (Adds that to the list of things to do.) Without any further adieu, let’s bring the Best Thing beat back.
“Eye of the Tiger” on a Dot-Matrix Printer: The Best Thing I Watched This Week
I came across this video on the Interwebs yesterday courtesy of a Facebook group called the Gentlemen’s Guide to Midnight Cinema. The poster of this video, MIDIDesaster, has programmed his Dot-Matrix printer to recreate Survivor’s omnipresent anthem from Rocky. I don’t know how he does it. Or why he does it for that matter. But when I investigated further I found he’d also programmed his Dot-Matrix to play “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Buddy Holly” and a mess of other songs. This is the seedy underbelly of nostalgia. Old songs played on a completely outdated and entirely useless technology. Though I think there are still some rental car agencies that would disagree.
For those of you youngsters that might be too young to recall the wonders of Dot-Matrix printing, here’s a little primer. The Dot-Matrix is an impact printer and functions much like typewriter, except the Dot-Matrix creates its characters (of unlimited variety and size limited only by the paper) with many individual dots. The dots are created by a tiny metal rods called a pins or wires. The Dot-Matrix is unique in its printing technology, as MIDIDesaster has shown, because it creates different tones and sounds when these pins strike the paper. Up to 48 pins can be used to form the characters of a line while the print head moves across the paper horizontally. The various combinations of these pins creates the different tones and sounds heard in the video. Okay. That’s enough explaining away the magic of Dot-Matrix technology. Here’s the video. MIDIDesaster’s “Eye of the Tiger.”