So there's an object that has haunted my life.

My father bought my mother a calculator in 1980. Many an hour was spent in the back of a volkswagen, waiting in parking lots (back when you could do that shit without a criminal record), messing with this calculator. Because, you see, "by pressing on this special key it played a little melody."

Casio made a line of "melody" calculators that had major notes assigned to the number keys. It was far and away the most awesome thing in my mom's purse from 1980 until 1985, when she lent it to one of her burnout hitch hiker friends who stole it, the fucktard. And ever since, it has haunted my dreams. It's no exaggeration that my taste in music is largely due to the effects of running square roots of random eight-digit numbers until you were left with 1.00000whatever, as evidenced at about a minute 30:

Anyway. It took me about six months to figure out what the model number of that ancient, 34-year-old calculator happened to be, and to wait patiently on eBay for one to show up for less than three hundred dollars. Last week, I bought one out of Turkey for $35.

Unfortunately, that was only five months and three weeks into my six month journey, because the one I bought was a UC-365, not an ML-80, which doesn't have the aggro square wave synth on it and DOES NOT DO SQUARE ROOTS. Yeah, it's still a cool little gadget but my quest must now continue.

If nothing else, I now know that one of the most formative pieces of my youth was "tarantella napoletana."