Free Republic

Joe Biden’s suggestion that parents leave a record player on to teach their babies better vocabulary was a head-scratching (needle-scratching?) moment in Thursday’s debate. But it was hardly the first time the 76-year-old Biden has busted out a vintage reference that reveals his age and leaves some in the audience in the dark. Famous for his off-the-cuff storytelling, the former vice president regularly goes deep in the vault to pull out characters and events known primarily to a people of a certain age. Ever heard of Henry Carr? How about a Jerry can? […] “Play the radio, make sure the...

HOUSTON — Front-running Joe Biden stood out the most in Thursday’s snoozer of a Democratic debate — but for all the wrong reasons as he rambled through responses laden with non-sequiturs about record-players and Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. “Play the radio. Make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone … make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background will hear four-million words fewer spoken by the time they get there,” babbled the former Vice President, 76, at one point....

“Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) mid-year report suggested that CD sales were declining three times as fast as vinyl sales were growing. In February, the RIAA reported that vinyl sales accounted for more than a third of the revenue coming from physical releases...This trend continues in RIAA’s 2019 mid-year report, which came out on Thursday. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs...”