Monday, June 29, 2009

What do nickels do to cassette tapes?

I was checking out Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog and found this item. The headline -- "Walkman more cumbersome than iPod, teen discovers" -- sounds like it came from The Onion, but it's not a satirical commentary. It links to an article from the BBC about a 13-year-old British boy who spent a week with an old Sony Walkman instead of his iPod and compared the two.

What I don't understand, though, is this one line from the EW.com post. It follows a quote from the BBC where the boy writes that he used the rewind button to create a makeshift shuffle and his dad warned him that his tape could get chewed up, leaving him with no music that day: "Worse than being musicless for the day, pal, is losing that tape forever. Also, don't store tapes near nickels. Man, the good old days."

Yeah, the good old days. I remember how thrilled I was when I bought my first Walkman. The pictured Walkman EW displays is similar to the one I bought. But, what's the deal with storing tapes near nickels? I never did that, but I still don't get it.

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