The local crime report

Jul 31 20:28 UTC 1997

I went out to my car to drive home from MSU Wednesday night/Thursday
morning, and the first thing I noticed was the light from the glove 
compartment hanging open.  Uh-oh.  The front passenger window was
smashed; my Columbia nylon shell jacket was gone, and also the 
carrying case with about 15 CDs was gone.  
 
This was less of a shock than it might have been; I do refer to this 
parking ramp as the car stereo thieves' shopping mart.  The trunk 
of my old Datsun was broken open seven years ago, and coworkers 
routinely report that their cars have been burglarized.

I'm annoyed with myself for having gotten sloppy about the case
with the CDs.  I'm further annoyed because I'm having a difficult 
time reconstructing what was *in* the case.  So far, I think the 
losses include disks from Kim Richey, the Peatbog Fairies, 
Runrig, the Old Joe Clarks, and (possibly) a non-replacable sampler
from FOLK ROOTS magazine from back in January.  There was also a 
James McMurtry CD which I didn't like, and a duplicate copy of 
Dave Swarbrick's SMIDDYBURN which I'd been meaning to give to 
Twila.

In the armrest compartment of the car, the thieves had found 
an Iris DeMent CD; disdainfully, they had tossed it onto the 
driver's seat.  If they don't like Iris, they are going to be 
pretty disppointed with the rest of their haul.

The MSU police officer dusted for fingerprints.  He found one 
possibly useful print on the passenger door; it's in a place 
where my hand just doesn't go when I open the door.
It seems to be a small hand.  Kids.

((Summer Agora, linked to Music.))

response 2 of 27:

Jul 31 22:11 UTC 1997

I have yet to have my car broken into, and prior to my recent replacement,
my usual joke was that the thieves would find "nothing worth stealing."  I'm
not sure about the replacement.  What surprises me is that they left your
stereo in there, ken.

response 4 of 27:

Aug 1 06:42 UTC 1997

Ouch.  The few times I've had things stolen, hwat hurt wasn't so much the loss
of things that were replacable, but the sense of having been violated in that
way -- people just coming in and taking my stuff and me being powerless to
stop them.

response 6 of 27:

Aug 1 11:17 UTC 1997

 it occurred to me shortly after disconnecting last night that you 
should call all the local used CD stores, since it is unlikely somebody 
would come in to sell that stuff unless they had just stolen it.

response 8 of 27:

Aug 1 17:35 UTC 1997

We have had only one incident of theft, and that was a massive one. The thief
broke a door window and ransacked out house and then, a week later, kicked
in the front door and did it again. Speak of feeling "violated"! Only one
item was recovered - a jewelry item that was engraved with my name that
the thief hocked (and the pawn shop called the police). The thief committed
suicide while being held in jail. Nothing was ever made public (or conveyed
to us) about the details. Anyway - we now have steel doors in steel frames.
(Oh yes - one other item was recovered - my .357 'police special' revolver
- found in a crack house in Detroit, I was told.)

response 10 of 27:

Aug 2 01:29 UTC 1997

What really bugs me is when you know the people that did it, but don't have
any proof. Especially if you've known the person(s) awhile.

response 12 of 27:

Aug 2 18:11 UTC 1997

  Or maybe he'll develop a fondness for stealing obscure, hard-to-replace,
  musical imports..

response 14 of 27:

Aug 5 21:11 UTC 1997

No, most likely after dark.

response 16 of 27:

Aug 11 15:44 UTC 1997

Yeah, it is. I'll tell you later.

response 18 of 27:

Oct 20 20:42 UTC 2000

  That's exactly the sort of problem which has led me to make copies of
  any CD I'm going to carry around in my car.  I keep the originals on
  the shelf at home and listen to the copies.  I've got too many recordings
  I couldn't replace and I don't hold a candle to you on that count.

  You really should consider investing in a CD-R and a big stack of blanks.
  A lot of office-supply stores seem to offer them as loss-leader items to
  get you into the store, so if you keep an eye out you can get the blanks
  very, very cheaply..

response 20 of 27:

Oct 23 16:18 UTC 2000

Sympathies.  Since it doesn't look likely that you'll get the CDs back, 
I hope the thieves were at first flabbergasted by your taste in music 
and then found something worth listening to.

I don't know much about making CD-R disks, but if I were going to do 
that for playing in a car, why not make a cassette?  I try, in any 
case, not to listen to irreplacable CDs in the car.  My car CD player 
is a portable - easily replaced if ever stolen - and I've taken to 
carting it on plane trips along with a pair of headphones, in 
preference to airline music offerings.  The only catch is that the 
music has to be loud, because my machine has a volume limit which is 
fine under other circumstances but is severely limiting on an 
airplane.  So no Morton Feldman.

response 22 of 27:

Oct 23 22:46 UTC 2000

Sorry to have played falsely on everyone's sympathies.  I finally remembered
that I made a panic stop in the car on Thursday, and this sent the 
blue CD case hurtling forward into the deepest regions of the very deep,
very cluttered Taurus trunk.  
 
Senility is hell.
 
Most of the general CD-R discussion I'll take to the CD-R item I 
started.  The problem with Mike's idea of making backup copies for the 
car is that I would end up making backup copies of just about everything;
the car, and the office, make up the bulk of my listening time, since
I have a two hour commute to work every day.  
 
I used to copy most things I bought to cassette, back before I had a 
CD player for the car.  It was tedious and took up way too much time.
I was glad to be rid of that process.

I'm still wedded to cassettes for recording of long (2-3 hours) stretches
of radio, though I suppose Mike will advocate recording it to a hard 
disk and putting it on 2-3 CDs.

response 24 of 27:

Oct 23 23:02 UTC 2000

  (make that "a fast CD-ROM with good DAE speed"..  (DAE = digital audio
   extraction -- the rate at which the CD-ROM can read audio data off the
   drive without introducing errors.  )