Tuesday, November 07, 2006

US Government 'knew CD cases would all break'

Secret files from the 1980s to have emerged in Washington reveal that the United States government knew full well that plastic CD cases would all break, but did nothing to prevent the impending disaster.

The CD which was invented in 1982, became widely commercially available by the end of the decade. But little did billions of music fans know that they were sleep-walking into a broken-CD-case epidemic that would bring misery across the Western world. By the mid 1990s it was estimated that one in three compact disc cases was cracked or didn’t close properly or completely fell apart when opened. The problem was enough to slightly spoil some of the satisfaction of owning a long-awaited new album, but not quite bad enough for anyone to come up with another method of packaging CDs.

Now it transpires that all of this could have been avoided had the American government heeded the warnings of a secret CIA report that acurately predicted teenage bedrooms and student apartments littered with cracked and broken bits of useless perspex.


Conspiracy theorists had long maintained that the US government knew about the inherent design flaw in the CD case but didn’t want to threaten the profits of the major US media companies. Plus billions of dollars had already been committed to designing all sorts of novelty CD racks, shaped like electric guitars or curvy naked ladies, so a thicker sturdier CD case was already out of the question.


‘The bottom line man, is that the big politicians in Washington didn’t think it was very important’ said Jez Eckstein, an anarchist blogger from Oakland, CA; ‘It’s like, they were more concerned about the Middle East, the economy and the end of the Cold War and all that shit than the fact that the tiny plastic hinges on CD cases would snap off the moment they were like, subjected to the slightest pressure. What does that say about their priorities? What are they hiding from us now man?’

A spokesman for the White House confirmed that the American government had indeed been more concerned about these issues at the time.

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