I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas

I mentioned Yogi Yorgesson in yesterday's essay -- and it occurred to me that not everyone would catch the reference. If you press play, you'll hear Mr. Yorgesson's magnum opus, "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas." For you young people in the audience, the spinning object pictured in the video is called a "record." It is spinning on a device called a "turntable," in this case at a giddy 78 revolutions per minute. The instrument through which the music is picked up off the record and fed into the speakers is called a "tone arm." At the end of the tone arm is a needle. Seriously. It is riding along in the "grooves" on the record, where the data (the music) is stored.

Yes, really.

There is one song on each side of this record. For those of you who wonder where why the word "album" is used for music collections, imagine four or five of these 78's, in their respective paper envelopes, bound up in a binding: It would look like a picture album, at least a little, on the outside, but it would be instead a record album. By the time that multiple songs could be put on single 12" vinyl discs, the term "album" had come to have its present meaning.

You kids still use the word "album," right?