Stereo land antics

Meet Seth Lopod. He is currently on his vacation, but he is employed full time by boat builders. Seth is specialist in the installation of boat gear in places that are just impossible to get to. With eight long flexible tentacles he can squeeze in to the most cramped locations. He saves boat builders a lot of money in both design costs, and access plates.

My theory is that boat builders are all secretly worshipers of the Hindu god Vishvakarma, the primary deity of all craftsman, engineers, and architects.

They celebrate Vishvakarma by festooning the boats they build with colorful pleathers, fabrics, burl wood looking plastics, and that monkey fur stuff. By doing this they believe that everything they install on their boats will last forever. This makes it okay to employ Seth to install things where you can't ever get at them, for all eternity.

I have had several adventures in stereo land lately. It begs the question, why people just won't put their Ipod into a pocket, and plug in their ears? Why you need an amp, sub woofer, and twelve speakers all in a space the size of a guest bathroom is beyond me. 

Even if it was Orff's Carmina Burana, I wouldn't need all that audible horse power, and for songs whose lyrics seem to only consist of "Put a ring on it," it seems to be a waste of dinero, and or diminished intellectual capacity. 

But back to stereo land, and Seth. The stereo is mounted inside the center console of a smaller boat. That was a good decision. It keeps the majority of nature's elements away from it. To make easy use of the system, a remote control was installed in the dash by Seth at the factory. How do I know? Easy, for love or money I can't get to the back of the remote to remove it.

You can't get to it from inside the console, so trying to get through from the front seemed viable. A crazed tie wrapper had just been released from his halfway house and had been put hard at work. Two inches was as far as I could pull it out.

Since the remote was going to end up at a farm that was so far away you couldn't ever go and visit it, I tried to pry it out of the console. My hopes that it was a cheesy device, and would fall apart at my merest prodding with a large screwdriver were promptly dashed.

I'm more than a little aggrieved now. In a fit of peak I grab my slicer of thumbs, and a pair of side cutters and gnaw the edges into oblivion. If have done this right, I can smite the offending device and send it into  the depths.

After two mighty blows with the palm of my hand, and one bandage, the apparently nuclear hardened remote has been consigned to the console interior. What's left is a fiberglass sinkhole. Some hacking and slashing allows the remnants to be removed from the inside of the console, along with some of the excess wiring. The crazed tie wrapper had been at work here also.

As remote cutouts go, this is a large one. Nothing I can procure will fill this yawning maw. A square cover plate has been ordered to fill the hole. A new now square remote will be mounted in it along with an Ipod jack. Since the new plate is screwed to the console someone else won't have this struggle. 

All of this is enough to turn me into a psychopath, if I haven't become one already. I signed this nasty piece of work inside the console after taking off the bandage.