The Bombox Season!

[DALederle]

Suddenly its the start of the Bombox Season. We have had two days in a row of 80+ temps. Great weather! Boy does it feel good. And bare legs, of course. Skirts and Kilts and if I really need pants the're shorts.
But that also means a lot of unwanted noise. Usually fleeting. The people with their loud, extremely loud, in car/truck bomboxes to start driving around. They think we all want to hear their music. But music like movies is a very subjective thing. No two people like everything the same. As long as they drive by I don't care. It may interrupt what I'm listening to for a moment but doesn't bother me too much. Live and let live.
What does bother me is like a few years ago and a group moved in next door and began playing their amped up music in their driveway, next to my bedroom window, Why they need to sit outside in their trucks and play music instead of going in their houses I don't know. No matter what I said or did, and I did ask them nicely to turn it down several times, they would turn the sound down for a few moments and then crank it back up again. It finally ended when they were evicted from their house.
So now I watch when this good weather comes along, waiting to see who plays loud music and were. There are people behind us who last year played their music so loud at times I had to go inside to get away from their noise.
I know it's a cultural difference. I never understood the need for loud noises. I don't go to concerts, at least not the ones they do today. I worked in factories, years ago, where no one even thought of the need for hearing protection. So now I have a permanent hearing loss of 51% in the upper ranges. I can still hear low notes but higher ones get by me.
So, does anyone else notice this or am I alone?

Dennis A. Lederle
Live Long and Prosper!

[Big and Bashful]

I count my blessings that I live in a quiet country village, the downside being that we rarely get good weather, when we do there is a chorus of 2 stroke engines as chainsaws, hedgetrimmers and lawnmowers all come out to play before the next rain starts again. Still, I can always go inside and drown out the noise of engines with loud music, as long as it is my choice in music I do like it loud! Not as loud and as often as I used to because it upsets the cats!

[Kirbstone]

I've just enjoyed the best part of three weeks' Summer in March/April. First six days in Lisbon with afternoon temps. in the high twenties, C, then almost uninterupted fine weather here after that with temps up to 22 degrees C. in the last week. The wife was away for five days with her book club ladies touring Hardy Country in the UK last week, so I wore kilts all the time at home & shorts since.
Alas the dreaded weathermen tell us of rain and cooler changeable stuff to come next week, but the whole place is ablaze in bloom and greenery, which is a joy, also the first migratory swifts are here.
We are isolated in the country, with neighbours well away from us, so we have to listen to no intrusive noises, by design! This week end was so glorious that we dined outside and I opened our drawing room french doors to let some serious orchestral classical sounds pervade the terrace & garden nearby.
Tom K

[ziggie]

I live in the faculty ghetto of a college town and most of my neighbors are as old or older than me, so I have very few complaints about loud anything. The one exception is that the alley behind my house ends at our property line. In the Spring on a weekend evening many an intoxicated student finds him or her self at the end of the alley and decides to go though the yard. It's not so bad when the weather is cool, as the windows are closed, but it can be annoying during the later Spring and Summer when I get to hear recapitulations of drunken barroom conversations played out beneath my bedroom window. Such is life.

[Since1982]

I've never heard of Bomboxes. In my 70's, 80's and 90's the big hand held radios were always called BOOMBoxes because of the resounding BOOMING,POUNDING sounds they made. 'Specially from a few feet away.

At first I thought it was just a mistype but after it was repeated several times I assumed it was just another way to say it. OR it might mean something else.

Live and learn. I know Dennis is one of the better spoken folks I've ever met online and I love learning new things.

[Jack Williams]

I think it's the size of them. The smaller ones more of a "bom" and the bigger ones a "boom".
We did have a near nieghbour who would put outside huge boomer speakers, impossible to endure, even inside. All night. Next day I set up a horn speaker and when they started up again, only a few minutes of 3WRMS at 3KHZ was magic.

[Kirbstone]

I dare say you were well equipped to give 'em more than they bargained for, Jack.
Tom K.

[Since1982]

Jack said: I think it's the size of them. The smaller ones more of a "bom" and the bigger ones a "boom".

That's a good idea, Jack, of course if you added one more letter to "bom" it could be really really loud..as in "bomb". hehe

[couyalair]

Why people think loud music is better than gentle sounds I do not know.
In cinemas, they turn the sound up to loud for me, so I have not been in one since being deafened for hours on end to watch "the Titanic"
I have been lucky with my peace-loving neighbours in the various flats I have occupied, and booming cars are a nuisance, but do not stay in one place too long.
What has most annoyed me here in Spain is the way that amplification is automatically turned up to maximum (more so than in France) in any public entertainment. I was delighted to discover open-air music and dancing here during the summer months, but quickly lost my enthusiasm when I realized that it was invariably a deafening, brain-curdling, stomach-churning experience. But the locals never complain; even the older generation will happily sit through these peformances.
When I am in company, I like to be able to chat with the people around me. Alas, human vocal communication is quite impossible. Is this why e-mail and SMS have become so popular?
Compared with chemical pollution, I suppose noise is a minor nuisance, but it can't do us any good.

Martin

[DALederle]

Adding to the noises of the season was my dogs barking at the workmen putting on a new roof behind our house today. I kept waking up having crazy dreams caused by the sound of the nail guns fastening down roof tile. Soon there will be more work being done around the neighborhood and well as the roadwork crews and the marry sound of lawn mowers, weedwackers, and chain saws.
Of course the winter had noises too. Snow Blowers, shovels scraping and plows driving by. But that was when I was inside and the doors and windows shut out most of the noise. The worse noise of winter was the howling of the north winds and the big snowstorms. Hope they are over with!
Good weather= more noise, I guess.
Too bad all the bombox type people don't listen my faorite Old Times radio station, WLSFM, so I can listen to rock from the 50s and 60s. Or even Swing and the big band sound.
But that's just me, I guess!
I like old time radio shows too. The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, etc.

Dennis A. Lederle
Too Infinity and Beyond!
Excuse me, I've got to go find my sonic screwdriver to fix my TARDIS. I think I can catch the Enterprize on her maiden voyage!

[Uncle Al]

Frankly I don't care what kind of music someone listens too as long
as I don't have to hear it in my car, windows closed, A/C on full blast
and the 'source' is 3 cars behind me

As said in the PACE Picante Sauce commercial....
"Made in New Jersey?........Get A Rope "
( A cue for a hanging )

I've had one 'Jerk' pull up next to me at a stop light with 'music' blaring
and the sound waves vibrated my car Frustrating to be sure

Uncle Al

[Since1982]

Uncle AL said: I've had one 'Jerk' pull up next to me at a stop light with 'music' blaring
and the sound waves vibrated my car Frustrating to be sure

Many years ago when I still lived in Fort Lauderdale Fl. where I was raised, I had a friend with the perfect solution to blaring boomboxes. He carried a small cooler filled with small balloons filled with different colors of water based paint and tied at the top. He'd put up with the blaring until they'd open their windows to blast his ears out with even more nastiness and then he'd loft a balloon out and up over their front windshield and splatter it all over the glass, then give them the "finger" and speed away. He was never caught in the 10 years I knew of him doing this...I was in my teens then and this "friend" had taught me how to play winning Gin Rummy, which he learned to hustle the other old guys in his Senior Citizen's Center.

He sometimes picked me up from High School and took me home when my Mom was still working and let me do the LOFTING for him. I'd do it from the front passenger's seat and throw it over our bonnet and break it on the blaster's bonnet.

[Jack Williams]

Yes, you do get cars driving by with boomers going here as well. Although it hasn't happened, I often wonder what it would sound like if all the cars at the intersection were all going full blast on different radio stations or discs at once!

[DALederle]

When my pesty neighbors were living next door and "booming" on their driveway next to my bedroom window, I'd put my stereo speakers in the bedroom window and turn on Broadway show tunes as loud as I could go!
Trouble was it didn't work!
They went right on drinking beer and doing whatever they were doing as if they didn't even hear my music.
Of course that made me just as guilty as them.
I finally started calling the police and so did several other neighbors too. One day they were all arrested and taken away in squad cars. One month later they were gone and all was peaceful. They were Hispanic, by the way, though ethnic is not what bothered me. So maybe they were illegals. Never saw anything to tell me what happened to them. But the neighborhood has been a lot quieter since then.
No matter what their ethnic background they were just plain insensitive. But they paid for it in the long run. So did friends of theirs that showed up one night a few weeks later and broke into the house and to party. I was woken up that night with more loud music and people retching or relieving them outside. We again called the police and when they came several were taken away and the rest left in a hurry. I guess crime doesn't pay, sometimes.

Dennis A. Lederle
Happy Trails to You!

[Jack Williams]

Well yes, we did have similar problems with yobbos who rented house nearby. Leaning on cars drinking piss and even firing a high-powered air rifle at cans, while "music" boomed out. Cops had to be called. Yes, they were "browns" (Maori/Fijian) but so is my friend Charlie, who owns the house behind me and next to the yobbos. He was no more amused than I was. He is of Nue Island/French decent. My close next door neighbour Xu is a really lovely solo mother of Chinese descent. Her daughter was Dux of the girls' college here, and is at University doing serious subjects. Xu said to me that daughter Mimy getting the scholorship saved her thousands of dollars. Mimy was going to Uni regardless.
All are non-white skinned and completely different. The yobbos got the boot, and now a nice family are there.