Tech Eye: Brand new boombox
Oh yes, this was an era when men were androgynous stick-thin beings who make today's celebrity anorexics look like fatties at a lard-eating convention. Many is the day TechEye spent pouring itself into trousers so tight they made our eyes water before the ritual bigging up of hair ceremony that usually took a good hour out of our day. Then it was time for our special make-up moments, where a vision brought on by Ziggy Stardust, Freddie Mercury's minimalist mustache and half a bottle of Granny TechEye's home brew meant we had a visage that would scare the bejaysus out of Beelzebub himself.
Curiously, Uncle Gender-Bending TechEye was also at the height of his powers at this time and was only too happy to help us with the make-up and pulling on of drainpipes. However, things weren't the same after Father banished him/her from the house for trying to give the milkman's son a little something extra for delivering his pint of semi-skimmed each morning.
Yes, the morning was almost complete once we had mounted our trusty boom-box on our extra-strength shoulder-pads, rolled our bit of lino under our arm, and set off for the village bowling green, where all the cool kids hung out. There we would unleash that furtive piece of plastic that functioned as our portable dance floor, and body pop, head spin and moonwalk the day away to the awed encouragement of the other hip young things in the neighborhood. Before long, Uncle Preaching TechEye would manifest himself, declare the whole thing the work of the devil and chase us off the green with swipes of his miter. But he could never take away the joy of synthed-up, over-produced plastic pop that shaped our formative years.
All these musings came to our mind and made us all misty eyed after we saw this - Samsung's soon-to-be released K5 MP3 player. Like Sultry Cousin TechEye, it's fantastic to look at and, when fumbled with round the back, it gives up the goods - a slide-out speaker, making it the modern replacement for our beloved Hitachi TRK. It has an FM function, 30-hour battery life and comes in 1GB, 2GB and 4GB versions, and initial reports say it will be priced at between zł.760 to zł.1,200 depending on the version. Plus, it will fit on your shoulder - no pads necessary.
