What if I forwarded the cassette to the end of “Fire on High,” turned the tape around in the player, and played it AT TOP VOLUME with my headphones on? Maybe, since the other side of the tape was blank, the backward “shadow” of “Fire on High” would play clearly enough that I could hear the spooky voice!

No, no, no! The way to do it (or at least, the way I found the secret message in The Wall) is to unscrew the cassette shell, then flip over the two tape spools, so that the tape is upside-down. The sound is muddy, but it still comes through the tape much better through the tape, than bleeding off onto adjacent tracks.

But having said that, EightE1 is right: the “Reverse” menu option in Audacity works much better.

I would guess the moment will not happen during the next eight years; it likely will have to wait until early in Mark Warner's second term, in 2021.

When the moment comes, evangelicals will simply move on to the next fight, whichever one they can conjure in order to gin up more outrage (and more cash in the collection plate).

The gay marriage battle is pretty mainstream, not just the rubes, not even just the evangelicals, or the strictly religious. Even Mr. Obama, last Saturday night at Saddleback, firmly defined marriage as between one man and one woman. I suppose he's one of the intolerant enemy too, now? Well, I hope you'll be happy in the voting booth choosing Mr. Nader.

My favorite such story, though, is about my college friends Jason Cohen and Casey Seiler, who had a 2-to-4-a.m. radio show on the campus station. Casey (I believe) had arrived on campus with a copy of a book that dated from the '30s (I think) called “Catholic Girls' Problems.” It was a book of do's and don'ts, and they would read hilarious passages from it on the air (in between playing one track after another from the Cure's “Head on the Door” LP).