Stephen Mejias

Because, three weeks later, my back, butt, and legs were still">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/080707laziness/">still hurting, I decided to go to the doctor. My doctor is an audiophile. He had had a wonderful time at the Home Entertainment Show last May. He's mostly attracted to the more exotic loudspeakers such as the Proclaim">http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007/051207proclaim/">Proclaim Audioworks DMT-100 and Loiminchay">http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007/051507mandarin/">Loiminchay Mandarin Supreme, but he's also very enthusiastic about smaller, more affordable designs from ZVOXhttp://blog.stereophile.com/he2007/051307zvox/">ZVOX; and Audioenginehttp://blog.stereophile.com/he2007/051407audioengine/">Audioengine;.

Hola Familia.


I hope you're all doing very well. It's an unusually cool and rainy day here in NJ/NYC.

I was in an elevator with several others, coming down from the penthouse floor of an ordinary building on 32nd Street. My companions for the ride spoke in Spanish, lovely currents of flowing sound like:

This might be the hottest day of the year. It feels like a hundred degrees out there. It's really hot. On what might be the hottest day of the year, all of our bus and subway systems — connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and, of course, New Jersey — were absolutely crippled.

It's stupid because I stood there looking at the subwoofer, thinking to myself, "Now, how should I get this thing out of the box?"

"Come As You Are" came to an end, and Billy Joel took its place. I lifted myself slowly, studied the radio, and pressed the button marked "Band." Just as ever, like magic, an AM station came through, covered in static and fuzz. It took me only a few moments to find the familiar voice and the catchy jingle, "Let's go Mets! F – A – N!"

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to become a professional baseball player. I loved playing ball, and all of the adult men in my family seemed to respect it, too. When I wasn't playing ball, I'd be in my room, listening to the radio, and drawing up my own baseball cards. Collecting cards, too, was a wonderful hobby. The photographs on the fronts were nice, but I was more interested in the information on the backs. Even when UpperDeck came out with their glossy, action photos, Topps cards remained, in my mind, the absolute best. Topps cards listed all of the stats for every single season of a ballplayer's career, even going back at times to his minor league years. How can you beat that?