One man’s trash is another man’s trea­sure. That say­ing is never more true when talk­ing about one’s taste in music. A cute lit­tle story com­ing down the pipeline recently: Judge sen­tences rap music fan to Bach, Beethoven. Now I sup­pose the les­son in all this is don’t sub­ject oth­ers to your trash or you will be sub­jected to theirs. Words to live by, and really, the cor­ner­stone of civility.

URBANA, Ohio (AP) — A defen­dant had a hard time fac­ing the music. Andrew Vac­tor was fac­ing a $150 fine for play­ing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July. But a judge offered to reduce that to $35 if Vac­tor spent 20 hours lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.

Vac­tor, 24, lasted only about 15 min­utes, a pro­ba­tion offi­cer said.

It wasn’t the music, Vac­tor said, he just needed to be at prac­tice with the rest of the Urbana Uni­ver­sity bas­ket­ball team.

“I didn’t have the time to deal with that,” he said. “I just decided to pay the fine.”

Cham­paign County Munic­i­pal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott says the idea was to force Vac­tor to lis­ten to some­thing he might not pre­fer, just as other peo­ple had no choice but to lis­ten to his loud rap music.

“I think a lot of peo­ple don’t like to be forced to lis­ten to music,” she said.

She’s also taped TV shows for defen­dants in other cases to watch on top­ics such as finan­cial respon­si­bil­ity. As she sees it, they get the chance to have their fine reduced “and at the same time broaden their horizons.”

Tags: Classical Music, Fun, Rap

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 6:01 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.