SIGNALS

Alas, poor Compact Disc! My heart is heavy, I cannot lie. It's come to this. Birds. Angry Birds.

Yes, birds. Nesting birds. Birds that want to build a nest in my porch beams. In the past, I have allowed it. But how have they repaid me? With poop. Copious poop. I cannot let that stand. It must not stand. In an infinity of places to build a nest, why here? Why me? The birds must go hither. Actually as far as I'm concerned, they can go to both hither and yon, whichever is farther from my porch.

So, how to deter them? A quick look at homedepot.com reveals the answer: bird spikes. Fifteen bucks for a 10-foot strip of plastic menace. Twenty-five for the potentially more insidious stainless steel model. Effective? Yes. Humane? Apparently. But spikes? Medieval, at best. What else?

When you search for bird deterrents, what do you think comes up first? Yes, that's right. Compact Discs. Ignominiously hanging by a string, fluttering in the breeze, frightening the bird brains. It breaks my heart.

I remember when CDs were the highest of high tech. The absolutism of the specs made me shiver. The excellence of the engineering made me quiver. In a world dark with wow and flutter, tape noise, surface noise, all manners of distortion, snaps, crackles and pops, these discs were something from the future, a gateway to a new, digital age.

The early days were exciting. Along with other journalists, in 1983 I visited the Sony Music CD pressing plant in Japan. On the plant's front lawn was a newly-installed monument, holding what was purported to be the world's first commercially-pressed CD, Billy Joel's 52nd Street. They were just releasing a handful of their first batches of titles. Someone brought out a small box of CDs still-warm from the mold – freebies for the journalists. I was almost trampled to death by the crush of men trying to grab one of the wonderful things for themselves. True story. I still walk with a limp. That part is not true.

A colleague and I cut apart a CD and tried to see the pits – too small for an optical microscope. We hustled over to our neighborhood scanning electron microscope and finally got an image. Simply amazing. Like seeing craters on the moon close up, but orderly, neatly aligned. Any music, any sound – formed from a small collection of pits and lands of nine different lengths, read by bouncing laser light from the metallic layer, then decoding and converting. Everyone loved to debate the sound quality, limited primarily by the early D/A converters, but no one questioned the incredible brilliance of the invention. To the engineers of Sony and Philips – job well done!

Then, as they say, life happened. The CD's life, that is. From treasure, to commodity, to trash. Finally, birds. What a waste. All of that magnificent technology, hanging by a string. Useful now because, only because, they are shiny. Now the only sound from the discs is when the wind blows, clicking one against the other. High-tech scarecrows. I can tell that the discs are sad.

Compact Discs. So it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.

But hear me, birds, hear me now and believe me later. Respect and obey the discs. Don't make me break out the spikes. Don't make me. You know I will.