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.))27 responses total.
another argument for wiring the battery to the body of the car, with a wireless remote kill switch.
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.
What a bummer. I know how much of a pain it is to try and figure out what you had in the car and track down replacements (there were a couple of albums that I just couldn't replace..) I hope you're in a better situation than I was insurance-wise -- my auto insurance would pay for the CDs I lost but after the deductible was paid it wasn't even worth filing a claim. Wouldn't pay for the other (more valuable) stuff that was taken - it wasn an ugly discovery to find out that that was covered under renter's or homeowner's insurance (which I didn't carry..) Anyway, you can console yourself with this -- at least you were lucky enough to not be in the car while it was happening.. :-) Wish I could say the same.. :-(
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.
Also another argument for some sort of car alarm, or a reason to never leave CDs in a parked vehicle. But I'm sure you thought of that.. I am surprised as well as Steve is that they didn't try to steal your stereo too.
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.
By all means do so but don't expect a lot of luck.. I gave the local used record stores a list of what had been taken and had widely varying responses.. Some stores promised to be very cooperative, others weren't even interested in taking the list (wish I could remember at this point which were which..) The only thing they all had in common is that none of them ever turned up any of my CDs (nor did the police when they found the guys so presumably they got rid of them somewhere..)
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.)
My uncle, who currently lives in the family home, recently got broken into and had everything of value taken (including a family heirloom or two). The Thieves had evidently been watching the house and knew when to break in. It still gives him the willies.
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.
Well, Ken's theif will at least receive an modest musical education. Maybe he'll give up crime and become a folkie instead.
Or maybe he'll develop a fondness for stealing obscure, hard-to-replace, musical imports..
"violated" is precisely the correct word. vsorry to hear about the loss krj - this was during the daytime? (yikes!)
No, most likely after dark.
Re#10: Sounds like a story. :)
Yeah, it is. I'll tell you later.
Argh. This time I don't even know if a batch of CDs was stolen or lost. Getting old is hell. Missing is my faded blue Case Logic CD carrier, the one I use to ferry stuff among home/car/office. Usually this rides in a Whole Foods tote bag; I remember thinking on the walk into work yesterday that the Whole Foods bag seemed light, but I thought I looked in it and saw the blue case. Anyway, I realized when I left work last night that I didn't have the blue case; so far I haven't found it at home or in the car either. Annoyingly, it contains a large number of recent items imported from Europe, either great favorites like Kristi Stassinopolou, or else unplayed items like Tallari and Folque. So far I've only been able to think of about half of the 15 discs in the box. Argh.
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..
That sounds like a good idea. Agk! Ken, I hope you find it!
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.
I can think of a great number of reasons to prefer CD-Rs to homemade
cassettes but mainly...
1) there're lots of reasons I prefer the CD format: higher fidelity,
random access, recordings are more durable under car conditions, etc
2) I don't have a cassette player in my car and never plan to listen
to anything on cassette ever again if I can help it..
3) I haven't priced tapes lately but I'm pretty sure CD-R blanks
have to be cheaper than blank cassettes -- even without a special
sale promotion it's not hard to find 50 decent CD-R blanks for $30.
the last time I checked tapes cost considerably more than $0.60
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.
Nahh.. Mike would advocate getting an in-deck car CD unit that understands MP3 as well as CD-audio.. ;-) Even I don't back up everything that I listen to in the car but I try to make sure to do it with anything which is out of print or import-only. You've got so many obscure folk recordings that would be impossible (or at least prohibitively expensive) to replace that I think it'd be a reasonable solution for you. Duping CDs isn't that much of a hassle if you stick a fast CD-R with good DAE speed in the same box with your CD burner..
(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. )
To get back to the theft/backup issue... how do you protect the CDs in your home? A theft loss from a car is probably going to be limited to 15-20 CDs at worst... but your home, a thief could clean it out pretty well... or what if your house burned down? Paranoia runs rampant. In October 1982 I was quite thoroughly cleaned out in a home burglary; the thieves must have used a truck or something, because they took nearly every piece of electronics in the house, including an old radio-cassette portable which rattled when you shook it, and whose tape section had not worked for over a decade. However, they didn't touch the LP collection. I assume the fencable-value/weight ratio of LPs is pretty low. I've been nervous ever since the recordings became objects worth stealing as we moved into the CD era. (What if someone steals your PC with all your MP3s on the hard disk?)
I've always assumed my CD collection long ago left the easily portable / easily fencable danger zone for theft, but it would indeed be a tremendous blow if someone walked off with my whole collection. Homeowner's/renter's insurance would replace much of it without too much additional hassle and many of my irreplacable discs are already duplicated so the thieves would have to get both copies, but that's not too farfetched; if they're in my house long enough to carry off my entire collection, they've got plenty of time to ransack thoroughly.. Bottom line, you can't protect everything, but I think items in the car are much more at risk. Perhaps I just think that because the only time I've ever had any CDs stolen (during the infamous trunking incident) it was a small stack (about a dozen) from my car and it took three years before I could replace two of the items taken, and only then because I was lucky enough to have a used copy of one show up in Encore..
I agree that items in the car are more at risk. I too listen to music more in the car than anywhere else (one reason I fell out of touch with a lot of music was that for a couple years I had a really short commute), but I still don't take my more cherished CDs in the car. Mike's reasons for preferring CD-Rs to cassettes mostly don't apply to my circumstances: let's leave it at that.
You have several choices: