-Found while /bicycling/, that is.
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Being as motor vehicles in the US drive on the right-side of the road,
and the driver's seat is on the left side, when a car has the
passenger(right) side window open and makes a hard left-turn, anything
left on the dashboard tends to fly out the open passenger's window.
There's one location in my area that is prime for this, years back it
was common to find cassette tapes lying about every Saturday and Sunday
morning, from semi-intoxicated people who had driven past the night
before at well over the posted speed limits.
Cassette tapes were wondeful for this because even if the shell was
damaged you could carefully gather up the reels and temporarily
transplant them into a new shell to hear what was on the tape. If they
had gotten muddy, you could even gently wash them off, let the tape dry
and then re-wind it and put it into a shell. Most of the
commercially-recorded cassette tapes I found were heavy-metal and rap,
with at least one country tape. Most of the home-recorded (blank) tapes
were country compilations.
CD's do not seem to hold up so well. Most I find have at least one
serious crack, preventing them from being played--and most of what I
find is home-burned disks. There's ways to limit the playing-speed
/factor/ of CD drives (such as limiting it to 1X) but even at 1X, the
RPM still ranges as high as 360 RPM's I thinks, which [for a cracked
disk] is too high for safety's sake, at least in my computers.
I admit I don't stop and look at every CD I see, because some are
obviously already broken and many of the home-burned ones don't have any
decipherable writing on them. I don't recall finding any
commercially-recorded CD's; the last home-burned one I could play had a
rather-suggestive title written on it, but was only a home-made
compilation of rap songs. The only commercially-produced DVD I have ever
found was (apparently) a disk of a Liza Minelli concert.
What have you found?
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