09:15 – Every once in a great while I’m really surprised. That happened yesterday when I read an article about Charles Barkley’s comments on the Ferguson situation. Until then, I thought of him as just another professional athlete. I was wrong. He’s smart, sensible, and wants to run for governor of Alabama. He has a very low opinion of both the Democrat Party and Republican Party. He supports same-sex marriage, saying it’s no one’s business but the people involved. I emailed him and said that if he ever decides to move to North Carolina, he has my vote if he runs for governor.
My kitchen cabinet–those who comment regularly here–have convinced me to change my mind. I still have a very high opinion of those $3.44 UltraFire flashlights, and I will continue to recommend them as general-purpose lights. (I have two of them on my person at the moment.) But I will recommend using name-brand lights as tactical lights–for mounting on shotgun barrels and so on–on the assumption (and it is merely an assumption) that the more expensive lights will be at least marginally more reliable under recoil.
14:31 – It’s that time of year again. I got two begging emails this morning from WikiPedia. Although I don’t depend on WikiPedia to be authoritative, I do use it nearly every day, as I suspect do most or all of my readers. So I’ll encourage all of you to contribute as I just did. Even $20 will help them a lot.
As an Alabama resident, let me be the first to say that I hope Barkley *doesn’t* move to North Carolina. We could sure use him here.
Yeah, we could use a lot more of him. The good news is that there are millions of Charles Barkleys out there; the bad news is that none of them has the slightest chance of being elected. The game is rigged.
Whoa! Nielsen released their analysis of the November ratings, and talk radio has zoomed up from around 6% to 9.2% of total national listening audience. But not thanks to political talk like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, et al; it is because of sports talk, which has had its best month and best year ever. 9.2% is still a very tiny number, considering that 90.8% of listeners are NOT listening to talk radio. But the trend away from political talk is clear. What with conservatives mostly yelling (literally) these days (especially Savage and Levin), they could not be doing themselves a bigger disservice.
Urban contemporary (rap/hip-hop/contemporary R&B) is the most-improved format by far this year. Country is slipping slowly but surely.
I will never understand the affection of listeners for weeks and weeks of Xmas music, but Nielsen has divided the year into 13 28-day months, so the last period can reflect the format-changing that goes on, as Xmas music becomes the #1 most-listened-to stations by far in every market.
Nielsen analysis here:
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/urban-contemporarys-november-ratings-boom.html
They still have radio broadcasts?
“I will never understand the affection of listeners for weeks and weeks of Xmas music…”
Count me out. Way out. We listen to our own CDs and the local serious classical stations, which play genuine Christmas music, not pop or schmaltz. When I am feeling cynical, which is frequently this time of year, based in part on my long-ago experiences as a cop during this season, I have a bunch of Bob Rivers and Lovecraftian parodies to crank up.
As for the current popular stuff on radio, count me out there, too; most country, rock, jazz and soul music after 1975 sucks. Country has long gone over to rock and pop. The only genre that has remained more or less genuine is the blues, and there are a number of contemporary performers who are very good to excellent.
One of my radio projects here will be to put the Grundig Satellite back to work on the shortwave freqs with good antennas, and meanwhile building a relatively inexpensive component stereo system again, with a double CD/cassette deck, AM/FM receiver/amplifier, a turntable, and a pair of Klipsch speakers. Yes, I’m wicked old-skool on all this stuff; I’m a very long way from Digital Man, unlike our esteemed correspondent out in lovely Tiny Town.
Barkley is another celeb who supported Obama in 2008.
Still wanna vote for him?
He’s perfect! Not just another dumbass pro athlete, but a quintessential politician! What they used to call in the evil 18th-C as a “trimmer.” Another archaic word, now used most often to describe hair trimmers and garden implements.
A guy who backed Obummer before and who now “supports” same-sex marriage (whatever the hell that means anymore)? Count me out.
Ring me up when Patrick Buchanan runs again.
That’ll be never. Seriously, Buchanan’s mental balance needs to be examined. Twenty years ago he made some sense, but he and Perot both went off the rails a long time ago.
I am for anybody who is not a career politician or a lawyer. I can support Barkley, and would love to get the chance.
Barkley supported Obama in 2008 because he couldn’t stomach voting Republican despite the fact that he’d formerly been a Republican. I have many friends who voted for Obama in 2008 because they were so sick of Bush and the Republicans. Few if any of them voted for Obama again last time. Barkley was the same, so why would I think any less of him for doing what many of my friends did?
Barkley self-identifies as Independent, but from everything I’ve read by and about him (which, granted, isn’t that much) he sounds pretty libertarian to me.
I wasn’t enthusiastic about McCain but it was obvious then and is even more obvious now that he was light years ahead of Obama.
I will never understand the affection of listeners for weeks and weeks of Xmas music
When you are talking Manilow that makes all the difference. OH, Mandy.
When I am feeling cynical, which is frequently this time of year
Which begs the question, how does one tell the difference? I thought you were cynical year ’round.
meanwhile building a relatively inexpensive component stereo system again, with a double CD/cassette deck, AM/FM receiver/amplifier
I have got a JVC system, dual cassette, single CD player and a receiver that I no longer use that I will sell you. It all works and I have the remotes. Was driving some custom built speakers from an outfit in Colorado that is no longer in business. Sounded better than JBL L-100 in my opinion (at least when my hearing was better).
Turntable is a Panasonic direct drive DC turntable with a massive platter surface, very light tone arm, anti-skate, Shure V-15 Type III cartridge, manual (no auto load) that I do not want to let get away from me so that is not part of the offer. At some point I want to digitize all my albums.
“…and a pair of Klipsch speakers.” Which ones? I’m a fan of Paul W from waaay back.
Also been looking at their new-age Chinese stuff for use as computer speakers for a while, but I think I can get as good for less money.
“And the people in charge of the system have backed themselves into a corner where there is no way out other than to default– either on their creditors (creating a global financial crisis), the central bank (creating a currency crisis), or on the citizens themselves (creating an epic social crisis).”
http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/five-complete-lies-about-americas-new-18-trillion-debt-level-15661/
OFD predicts they will choose Door Number Three; and we may see this go down next summer. Thus “creating an epic social crisis.” Of which Ferguson was just a small dress rehearsal. Wait’ll the mobs find out the cops can’t control them…at first. I shoulda said “won’t.” They’ll either stand by or back off, pending further orders from On High. At some point the gaulieters On High will get nervous and release the hounds.
“…he sounds pretty libertarian to me.”
Today. Next week he’ll sound like Obummer. The week after that he’ll be Perot. Or Larry Klinton. Or one of the Bushmen. Whatever his krew of “advisers” tell him. If it’s in the interest of Our Lords Temporal, maybe they’ll let him be governor of Alabama. Who cares?
“I thought you were cynical year ’round.”
I am. But this time of year thou may’st in me behold cynicism writ large. I’ll try to tamp it down this time and think of the Good Things in life. That means avoiding the nooz, shopping, traffic, and crappy music.
“When you are talking Manilow…”
Does he do Xmas music? I got a couple of CD’s last year from various big stars like Neil Diamond, Rod Stewart, etc., but was less than impressed. I guess I’ll stick to Bach and Buxtehude and Handel.
Reminds me of joke graffiti I saw a long time ago in a university bathroom:
“The crash bar is Baroque; you’ll have to wiggle the Handel.”
“This phone is baroque; please call Bach later.”
Q – Why did Bach have so many children?
A – He did not have a stop on his organ.
“Which ones? I’m a fan of Paul W from waaay back.”
Ditto. Also the KLH line.
Klipsch RB-61 II Reference Series Bookshelf Loudspeakers
Holderbama speaks: “We’re gonna fix racial profiling in the popo once and for all. So have I spoke, so shall it be done.”
More money, please!
Arrogant much?
I dunno if it’s arrogance so much as a complete disassociation from any common sense of reality. If they plan to “fix racial profiling” in the general pop, they must have a secret underground laboratory somewhere that has scientists on a gigantic breakthrough where they’ve eliminated that pesky trait from human biology. If they mean overt profiling, then I guess they’re gonna institute a truly radical police state a la the late Eric Blair.
You know, a simple balanced budget amendment added to the USA constitution would stop a lot of this nonsense. I give it a 0.00000000000000000000001% chance of ever happening.
I give it even less than your generous estimate, Mr. Lynn.
We’ll have “meaningful” change when the current system falls apart and we reboot with something mostly different. It is patently clear to this correspondent that it is way too big and unwieldy and prone to failure across multiple stress points.
I say break it down into like-minded cultural regions like Garreau had with his “Nine Nations of North America” long ago and let each region work out its own political and economic structures.
We may get a taste of how it’s gonna break down next summer.
I give it even less than your generous estimate, Mr. Lynn.
Yup, too many pugs XXXX pigs at the trough. Need to thin the herd some. Sqeeeeeeeeeeeel!
We’ll have “meaningful” change when the current system falls apart and we reboot with something mostly different. It is patently clear to this correspondent that it is way too big and unwieldy and prone to failure across multiple stress points.
I’m just hoping to keep out of the guillotine lines. Or get a really sharp one. I’ve read that it was common to require three whacks with the blade.
I figure splitting the USA up into 15 to 20 countries is a recipe to model the land wars of Europe in the 1800s. Culminated with a war to end all wars. And then a Great War after that.
It’s that time of year again. I got two begging emails this morning from WikiPedia.
I gave them $50 since they allowed me to advertise my product up there:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_II_for_Windows
“I’ve read that it was common to require three whacks with the blade.”
When it’s being run like an assembly line, sure, as during the lovely French Revolution. Gotta keep them blades nice and sharp. East Germany was using theirs well into the 1960s.
“….a recipe to model the land wars of Europe in the 1800s. Culminated with a war to end all wars. And then a Great War after that.”
Gee whiz, and people call me cynical…
Gee whiz, and people call me cynical…
I am amazed that we (the USA) are not in a land war with Mexico right now. Half of the Eagle Ford shale project lies in Mexico and is not being developed since they do not have the drilling technology. There is another 3 to 5 million barrels of oil per day there. Many wars were started over less…
Twisted Christmas – that’s at least different. Oh, and Grandma got run over by a Reindeer.
OFD’s cynical Xmas tunes:
Bob Rivers variety: (I’ll skip the quotation marks in the interest of not only brevity but my valuable typing fingers): Carol of the Bartenders, The Restroom Door Said Gentlemen, Walking Around in Womens’ Underwear, etc.
H.P. Lovecraft tunes: All I Want for Solstice is My Sanity, Away in a Madhouse, Carol of the Old Ones, Death May Die, Do You Fear What I Fear, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen, Here Comes Yog Sothoth, I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth, I’m Dreaming of a Dead City, O Come All Ye Old Ones, O Cthulhu, etc.
They’re all on the Tube. Merry Friggin’ Solstice to all!
At least Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer plays at a reasonable repeat rate now. Back in the late 1990s I swear it was every other song on the radio the entire Christmas season.
Not only that pos but also those singing dogs. I could have literally strangled the radio station manglers who put that rubbish on the air every year. With utmost relish. And extreme prejudice.
Green Christmas by Stan Freberg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5IXlfJSEi4
A staple on the Dr. Demento show in December. In the 70s Dr D’s home station was on KMET in Los Angeles and every Sunday night we got FOUR hours worth delivered clean over the cable (once upon a time, cable actually transported FM stations). The two hour syndicated show was cut out of that.
We would sit around listening and burning up cheap Mexican weed and drinking lots of beer. Maybe that’s why it was so funny.
We are. They’ve been invading us for decades. The movers n shakers in the US are so corrupt that they refuse to acknowledge it or so stupid that they don’t realize it.
Why can’t it be both?
“TV 3.0 is already here”
http://www.cringely.com/2014/12/01/tv-3-0-already/
Interesting. I’ve been wondering why TV 3.0 was not being used by HBO yet. Turns out that they will be releasing their TV 3.0 subscription model in 2015.
And I had already heard that Netflix is going to add ads soon, very soon.
NYC: The next Ferguson?
(It’s a cbslocal.com page, so be prepared to wait a few seconds for the page to stop doing the bouncy-bouncy.)
“The movers n shakers in the US are so corrupt that they refuse to acknowledge it or so stupid that they don’t realize it.”
I strenuously disagree. I believe they’re fully aware of it and the repercussions and it suits their purposes and objectives very nicely. As far back as the mid-1960s, as spearheaded by the late Chappaquiddick Hero and his devoted minions and RINO accomplices.
NYC as the next Ferguson? No way. Number one, the vic was white. So who cares, amirite? Number two, the NYPD has very extensive experience in dealing with mass unrest/demonstrations, etc. and though they’ll walk a fine line, they will prevail. This time. A bunch of white folks ain’t goin’ out burnin’ down they own hoods, yaknowumsayin? Was the cop’s chokehold on the guy outrageous? Sure. So was getting in his face in the first place. Selling ciggies? WTF? Who cares, amirite?
Again, we have the Low-Hanging Fruit Theory; they go after the wicked easy busts and harassment against regular citizens and actual criminals skate. Or are busted on the Catch-And-Release Program of modern jurisprudence.
The perfect Xmas gift for a certain Aussie?
That would be covered by “so corrupt that they refuse to acknowledge it”, would it not?
Number one, the vic was white.
Um, no.
Looks like you folks north of the Mason-Dixon line are going to freeze for the next 30 years, “Dark Winter: How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell “:
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Winter-Causing-30-Year-Spell/dp/1630060356/
“Casey has studied past solar minimum periods. He argues the last great one sparked the French Revolution of 1789. In Dark Winter, he predicts the new era of cold weather will spark major political and economic upheavals with massive crop destruction, food shortages and riots in the United States and abroad.”
Polar Vortexes every winter, what fun!
At least we don’t have fire ants or killer bees.
My bad, I thought the cigarette vic was an old white guy for some reason, but one look at this dude and as a former officer who learned to pick my battles, I woulda just left the guy the hell alone. Why get into a wrasslin’ match with him on cement and concrete? Well now, a whole different kettle of fish in Gotham; clearly the two white officers are racists and lynched the poor young child, so as the stepdad said out in Ferguson “Burn this bitch down!” Good luck with that.
It must really suck for Jackwagon, Sharpless and Fartinacan to have to keep flying back and forth across a thousand miles of, well, Flyover Country.
“Looks like you folks north of the Mason-Dixon line are going to freeze for the next 30 years…”
Yep, us Yankee bastards will be freezing in the dahk up here…fuh shooo-uh, and don’t it make your black Texas haht glad!
Actually in 30 years I fully expect to be dead as the proverbial doornail. Probably in 10 or less like my old man. Cancer, senility and/or gunshot.
“At least we don’t have fire ants or killer bees.”
Or big fat diamondback rattlers, big fat wottuh moccasins, big fat copperheads and Gila monsters and skinny little coral snakes. And scorpions. Have at it, Cowboy!
Saw this line on Drudge just now:
“SESSIONS: House GOP On Verge Of Breaking Campaign Promises…”
Is this some kind of joke? Posting this as genuine news?
Should I be so disgruntled that I will now vote for HILLARY! or a third term for Obummer? Let me get Sir Charles on my speed dial…
Republican aide resigns after saying Sasha and Malia Obama lack ‘class’
Darnell Dockett Posts Questionable Photo of Malia Obama on Instagram
Does this mean that ol’ Darnell is gonna have to do the honorable thing and resign from the NFL?
No?
Really? Why not?
Nobody has broken promises more than the Tea Party folks. NYTimes has tracked their voting records, and over half have voted for issues they promised they would not in their campaigns. Not that all the others have not done that, but my Tea Party friends claim that they are the true and honest Saviours of the System.
BTW, these avatars are nothing but trouble. Somebody here has one from “gravatar.com” that is keeping every page of recent days from finishing loading. This was a big problem with the old site, and here it is again.
Heating plant problem that started yesterday, and resulted in only slightly warm radiators, resolved by my boiler man this afternoon. Problem was just maladjusted bleed valves, keeping air trapped in the pipes. That caused the system pressure to get too low and prevented the compression tank from regulating the proper amount of water in the system. Although this guy has worked with boilers for 30 years, he never before saw one that used the compression tank to regulate the amount of water in the system. So he bled the system of air, and everything is back to normal, and for the first time since I have lived here in Tiny House, it is quiet as a churchmouse. I have been used to banging noises for about 5 minutes every time the system turns on. “Hammering,” he said its called, and caused entirely by air in the system. This is year 4 for me in Tiny House, and I sure wish I had known that sooner. Of course, every heating plant in Germany is hot water, and where we lived, the systems were dead silent, so it is good to find out this one should have been that way, too.
Nice warm house again. Fortunately, it has not been bitterly cold at night, so I survived the day of less than ideal temps.
Have been contemplating the place I want to build, and asked him about gravity-fed systems with no circulating pump.
http://www.oldhouseweb.com/how-to-advice/gravity-hot-water-heating.shtml
He said no one builds those systems anymore. Our house in St. Paul had a gravity system, and good thing, because we quite occasionally had 3 hour power failures at -20F in a 1930’s house with no insulation at all. The natural gas heating plant just kept chugging away, keeping us cozy. So what does one do to combat the problem of no electricity in a modern design system? Having to generate electricity to run heating for weeks to months in a disaster scenario could be impractical.
Attention linguists: do not — I repeat — do NOT visit this site if you have limited time. This will be the biggest time sink wordsmiths are likely to encounter. Quora requires registration with Facebook or Google. Ignore that linguistics asshole from Berkley who tried to kill the party with claims the original question is faulty. At this moment, 354 other people do not seem to agree with him and have offered their examples anyway.
http://www.quora.com/What-are-concepts-in-other-languages-for-which-there-is-no-English-word-phrase
“Does this mean that ol’ Darnell is gonna have to do the honorable thing and resign from the NFL?”
Naw, what’s the BFD, anyway? So she takes after her mom. Presidents’ kidz have been in media pics before, who cares, amirite?
“Nobody has broken promises more than the Tea Party folks.”
No chit, homes; I been sayin’ that since before those buggers got into office, but all I kept hearin’ was how great they are and how they gon save da nay-shun and so on. All they give a chit about is their money, period. Nothin’ about the endless wars, the crumbling infrastructure, etc. etc. Just their SS and Medicare and 401k’s and bank accounts. Then once they got in, they imbibed the seductive vapors in Mordor along the banks of the beautiful Potomac, all the parties, the soirees, the meet-and-greets at the embassies, and that was it. It’s too bad we don’t have one of them from up here so’s when he or she gets back I could browbeat the bugger from morning till night about his or her broken promises and betrayals. But all we got are the standard-issue libtard-lefty jerkoffs and ass-hats.
“So what does one do to combat the problem of no electricity in a modern design system? Having to generate electricity to run heating for weeks to months in a disaster scenario could be impractical.”
Indeed. Woodstoves.
Thanks a lot for that Quora link, Mr. Chuck; now I can spend even more time on the net when I should be stacking firewood and hauling boxes of books up to the attic on a very steep and narrow stairway.
Can you rig up some sort of hoist? If you have exposed roof joists above the opening it should be a snap. If you don’t, you could probably still do a lash-up with a handful of 2x6s or iron pipes. Nothing fancy, just a pulley, a rope, and a couple of straps should do it. Maybe a cleat you can make the line fast to, at the bottom.
I wouldn’t know anything about old farm houses with narrow, steep attic stairs. Nor would I know anything about carrying endless boxes and furniture up and down the stairs.
I am beginning to understand why my folks, when they had reached my current age, never wanted stairs in their house. Up and down the basement regarding the boiler the last couple days, and the right knee that I bumped on a door the other day, has suffered some setback in feeling better. When we had kids in a 2-story house, stairs were nothing.
Here’s a succinct take on Black Friday from one of my broadcasting trade publications:
The Wall Street Journal quotes National Retail Federation stats saying that “total spending Thursday through Sunday sank 11% from a year earlier.” And there was a 5% drop in the number of people who shopped over the four-day weekend. For one thing, the shopping season is being stretched out. You could score “Black Friday” deals from Target starting 2-1/2 weeks before Thanksgiving, and Wal-Mart’s been doing holiday pricing since November 1. Disney’s Elissa Margolis says shoppers “don’t feel like they have to get out that one day, or miss spending the holidays with their families.” Particularly vulnerable are clothing retailers – the hot items this year seem to be electronics, particularly TVs.
Maybe Black Friday will disappear.
So far, this Xmas does not seem to be living up to the great expectations.
“Can you rig up some sort of hoist? If you have exposed roof joists above the opening it should be a snap.”
Now you tell me. I’ve horsed just about all of it that’s going, up them stairs already. Hell yeah I coulda rigged a hoist off the exposed roof joists. Of course, being the mechanical genius that I am, it woulda taken me longer to do that than to just horse the stuff up the stairs with my Herculean strength and tunnel rat agility.
“I wouldn’t know anything about old farm houses with narrow, steep attic stairs. Nor would I know anything about carrying endless boxes and furniture up and down the stairs.”
Ditto.
“Up and down the basement regarding the boiler the last couple days, and the right knee that I bumped on a door the other day, has suffered some setback in feeling better.”
Yeah, injuries make the fun of hauling stuff around that much more enjoyable. I clipped myself on the left shoulder blade pretty good just carrying a load of firewood the other day. That same afternoon I burned my left hand nicely on the woodstove door, something I had yet to do after having said stove for over a year now. And I’ve noticed in recent years that burn marks last for months and months and months. If not forever, I guess. The burn was of sufficient duration and pain that I easily imagined how you could get recalcitrant prisoners to sing like canaries.
“So far, this Xmas does not seem to be living up to the great expectations.”
Jever notice how it never does? Every year the merchants and bean-counters whine and piss and moan about how sales are down and customers ain’t buyin’ their chit, etc, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And they try every statistical trick in the book and extend the season, etc., anything at all to inflate their numbers. Still falling short.
Just watched “Fury,” the Brad Pitt caper about him running a tank crew in the last days of the Good War inside the Thousand Year Reich. Gee whiz, the Germans don’t come off too good…but that’s OK, ’cause Brad and the boyz mowed them down like late summer wheat. And thus the world was saved for Democracy, Diversity, Affirmative Action and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And since then the Germans have been our best buds, while our former Russian allies are Anathema.
OFD gets a special kick outta that ’cause now the Vietnamese commies are our special buddies, too, and I love telling the youngsters that their erstwhile hadji opponents from the Sandbox will be our great pals in another thirty years or so. I’m such a dick that I tell the other ‘Nam combat vets we gotta quit signing up for this shit, and in return I get….crickets. They don’t wanna hear it. Tough shit.
Mrs. OFD in Philly reports that her class this week is a bunch of obnoxious ass-hats, and her co-teaching colleague is also a PITA, who has a hard time dealing with African-Murkans. Fun times.
I think she has one or two very short gigs or meetings coming up but so far no more week-long assignments this month.
And still no word from my latest phone interview; gee, this is so much fun as one hits one’s 60s.
Black Friday sales might be down because of the business bean counters’ perennial optimism. They might be down because the christmas shopping season is extended. Or, and this is my guess, they might be down because the US economy still isn’t doing that well. When the thoroughly cooked official government numbers* can barely show something the spinners doctors can claim to be good news, then the real numbers must be dire indeed. My own thought, and I’m not alone in this, is that we’re in a depression worse than that of the 1930s, but the US started out so much richer that no one’s starving this time around.
* Raw data from only partially disclosed sources, fudge factors, and results unreproducible by outsiders. I’m talking about US economic statistics, not claims of
global warmingclimate disruption, but I understand if anyone got confused there.Black Friday and the Christmas shopping seasons are tricky. So many factors come into play…
Some years there are 5 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas and some years there are 4 weeks. So, you have a 1 week variation in how much time people have to spend money and the more weeks between the two holidays the more you increase the odds of them getting an extra paycheck in there somewhere.
Black Friday has spilled backwards into Thanksgiving. So, “Black Friday” sales are now a 48 hour thing instead of a 24 hour thing. Selling on Thursday is going to dilute their Friday sales and stretching it out over more than one day is going to take a lot of the hype and excitement out of it for shopaholics.
If consumer confidence is up then Black Friday sales can be down as people don’t feel as much of a need to get a killer deal on something by lining up outside stores at 5AM on Black Friday morning to get, for example, a $99 laptop.
Retailers are never happy with Christmas revenues in the same way that farmers never seem to be happy with the weather. Business news beats the topic to death all through November and December. I find the older I get the less patience I have to listen to the same cyclical shit on the news every year. The second some anchor opens their mouth and starts talking about retailers and Black Friday I change the channel immediately.
Nice speakers, OFD. For a while there I was a bit worried that you were old school enough to have Klipschorns. I have heard them, and they always impress, but with today’s cheap amplifier power their efficiency isn’t needed any more. Still, the sheer impact of large area speakers is special, but so is their need for corner placement. The good thing is we can have low freq response as good or better in a small package.
I have two 1980s Klipschs that have 12″ speakers and port resonators, with horn midranges and tweeters. Good compromise, easy placement and affordable. Retired now, because their surrounds need replacing. Not sure if it is worth it.
One of the best speaker systems I ever heard, was on my grandmother’s 1953 Philco TV. Even Lawrence Welk (which she never, ever missed) sounded terrific on that set.
I have always been partial to Henry Kloss’ ears (RIP). He actually was the first to build a speaker, then tune the electronics to compensate for any deficiencies. Amar Bose is normally credited with that, but anybody who followed Kloss knows better. Amar did build some fantastic speakers, but only the big ones used on stages, IMO. Best speakers I have ever heard were the Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater giants that most movie theaters used back in the ’50’s through ’80’s. A friend whose dad was a cabinet maker, built some home speakers using those Altec’s, making them end tables, with a Crown amp powering them, and the sound was stunning.
I’ve long liked the Altec Lansing lineup from those days. I still retain a couple of A-L Santana I speakers, that I use as end tables, but no longer run music through.
I worked at Bose in the very late 70s for about 18 months, industrial security. I used to see Dr. Bose and his former students/current “kitchen cabinet” of engineers, Joe Veranth, Tom Froeschle, Tom Aho, and others daily during that time. Joe and the first Tom used to come in to work all hours of the day and night, including Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, etc. At the time they had an employee discount program, and I got myself a set of four 901 Series IV’s and their 100 watts-per-channel receiver with the “surround sound” capability. I lived in apartments and small houses for those years and I couldn’t jack the volume up much past 2 or 3, as it was overwhelming. Classical music was stunning. That system is long gone, of course, sold off to pay bills or whatever.
Dr. Amar Bose got his top engineers as students from when he was professing at MIT. Nice man, used to bring his wife in sometimes. RIP, Amar.
He was another Massachusetts gearhead, egghead, entrepeneur like Ken Olsen, both now “passed through the veil,” as the DJ’s at the “album station” here refer to recently deceased rock musicians.
Speakers – I don’t really think of myself as an audiophile, but… I rarely go to concerts, because the sound defects are so frequent and annoying. I’m not talking about the subtleties that Chuck would pick up, but really obvious stuff.
Two examples: Some 20 years ago I went to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert. The entire right channel was dead. All sound came from the speakers on one side of the stage. I kept expecting them to interrupt the concert, but they never did. Afterwards I asked my companions, but they hadn’t noticed. How do you not notice a thing like that?
Just a couple of weeks ago we went to a Piano Guys concert at the premier concert venue in Switzerland. One specific note on the piano caused one specific speaker to buzz. Loudly. How does the sound check not catch something like that?
I remember hearing an incredibly good-sounding monitor speaker on, of all things, an Ampex quadruplex scan video tape recorder in 1964. It looked like a 6″ or so speaker with no separate tweeter in a box barely larger than the driver. It had amazing clarity and decent bass response, especially for its size. This was at WXYZ-TV, and the VTR was already “old,” probably about five years. It was one of two units, and they were our main workhorses. Our only other “studio” VTR was a nearly new RCA that was installed as part of the transition to color. The Ampexes had separate double wide racks or tube-powered goodness, and were much less fussy than the newer RCA.
Anyway, I often worked the second shift, and one quiet evening I asked the lead engineer about the speaker. He had also been impressed, and had already explored the sehematics. He showed me the R-C network that altered the 6V6 (as I recall) push-pull amp. It was fairly complex, but that is all I can recall. My first introduction to such.
Small compensated speakers were by then found in various applications, probably including that Philco TV already mentioned. One advantage was that the smaller speaker could be made to produce good bass without the muddiness of larger speakers of that era. I was inspired enough that I built a 6″ 2-way system in a 0.5 cuft sealed box, not unlike some of the AR systems of the day. It was very cheap, yet sounded pretty good; at the expense of efficiency, of course. I put it on top of my home-built Electro-Voice Marquis (look that one up!), and it sounded surprisingly good, as long as it had some bass boost. I still have the Marquis, but the small box was installed in the back of a VW, and went with the car.
Moving to the 1980s, I heard some Radio Shack Minimus-7 (?) speakers. These were the metal boxes, with 4 or so inch drivers and cone tweeters. By then, I had a dbx auto-equalizer, and could run a curve on them. They were astounding, but obviously couldn’t move much air. I bought them for another car, but never installed them.
Finally, several years ago I bought a Cambridge SoundWorks 765i radio-CD player for my wife, and became a retread fan of Henry Kloss. This little gem easily outperforms the Bose equivalent for less than half the price. It does have its quirks, but that’s Kloss!
Amar Bose was a marketing genius, and a darn good engineer. For instance, his systems installed in higher-end GM cars gave unprecendeted performance. Agree about his big commercial systems being his best efforts. Also, some of his home systems were excellent for their small size.
Finally, it was my extreme pleasure to know an Altec Lansing engineer in the early 1960s. He installed systems in movie theaters and large public auditoriums. He was able to acquire surplus drivers and have them reconditioned at his cost at the factory. His home setup was stunning. On the order of the E-V Patrician, but with two 15″ drivers (each side of the stereo pair) instead of the famous 30W. This was the era of “stereo demos”, and he could make it seem as if a steam train was arriving at the station in his basement 🙂
End nostalgia for now…
Brad, I agree, but our little town’s concert association mostly puts on acoustic concerts. For example, we will have the Americus Brass Band in January. Why would we want reinforcement in a small auditorium? Problem solved.
“Amar Bose was a marketing genius, and a darn good engineer. For instance, his systems installed in higher-end GM cars gave unprecendeted performance.”
I left Bose in early 1980, returning to regular cop work,
just as they were developing the systems for the cars; they had a big tent in back of the main building on top of The Mountain, in Framingham, MA, overlooking a couple of the metro reservoirs and near the MassPike and Route 9 interchanges and above an industrial park. Talk about location.
Bose was where I played my first computer game, Adventure, on somebody’s office terminal in the downstairs cube farm, connected to the HP-UX machines above, where my next-younger brother worked, and had started out in UNIX. He later went on to HP.
After Adventure I went on to the Infocom games, IIRC on the brand name, mainly Zork and its many derivatives. No more games after that until the early 90s, with Windows Solitaire, which I still play, almost daily. Then on to Castle Wolfenstein, the Doom Series, and a couple of attempts at Quake and that was it.
I worked around both Ampex and RCA quad machines, but the tape room at the Indy CBS affiliate (who is losing their CBS affiliation after 50 years on 1 Jan) was so noisy that I would never have known if those monitor speakers had good sound or not. Those machines whined, there were compressors running back in a corner, the Telecine film projectors were on the other side of the room, and it was just a mad-house of guys constantly loading tapes and films. We had 5 quad machines and 4 projectors on 2 film chains, and until we got an RCA cart machine, which sounded like a pants presser in a dry cleaning place, we ran everything as ‘separates’, which means we did not build ‘spot reels’ which edited all the commercials together; thus all breaks required running every single commercial on a different machine one after the other. Legal limits were no more than 4 commercials to a break back then, but you could not do that these days, because some stations run as many as 10 commercials and promos in a single break.
The cigarette companies made the highest quality commercials back in those days, just as cigarette ads were about to be banned. Chesterfield, Marlboro, (both Philip Morris) and Salem (RJ Reynolds) had the best stuff. They shot the commercials on film at 30 frames per second, then transferred it to video, and put the commercials together on tape. Outstanding pictures with the beginnings of ‘sweetened’ sound. Nobody spent as much money on production as the cigarette companies. I never did see quality like that again before I left commercial TV for public TV some half-dozen years after the cigarette ads ban. That loss of revenue hurt our bottom line for years, too.
Most of my time in control rooms and recording studios were spent listening to JBL’s. Now I have heard fine-sounding JBL’s at conventions and trade shows, but the stuff I was around was just not decent-sounding at all. In Chicago, the main control room sound guys were walled off behind us, and they had really decent speakers back there, but we never heard them. In all the other control rooms I worked in, audio was in the same room, so we all heard the same thing.
I really could not stand being in audio recording studios and brought earplugs whenever I was forced into being there. Those guys listen at deafening levels, so they can ‘hear everything’. Mixed a couple of shows at Lucas in Santa Monica, and their THX room was outstanding, but I have no idea what speakers were in it. That was the first control board I was around that had motorized faders. But it was still before computer control and the faders were governed by a track on the 4-track recorder we mixed the 24-track down to. Guy we worked with was actually a concert sound reinforcement mixer, as their main guy was working on a movie. We got very decent mixes on the music, but had to do more post in Nashville to get the talk portions of the show to match levels and compression of the music, as the THX mixer just did not know broadcast compression.
I have long thought that the recording studio guys need some kind of Mickey Mouse-type ears that achieve the same thing as cupping your hands behind your ears. Then you can hear everything without having to listen at deafening levels. Surely I am not the only person who ever thought of that. It would save the hearing of a lot of guys, because many of them go significantly deaf in later life.
Chuck, we had NO automation, unless you consider audio carts! We were very primitive compared to other stations and later in time, and knew it. Not sure why, but it probably had something to do with the union rules. Or, as much as “the way we always did it.” Will say that most engineers were a happy bunch. That was the best place I worked in my work life, and that is saying something.
Our telecine was in its own walled and sound isolated room, and was run by union projectionists. They were friendly, but we IBEW folks weren’t allowed to even enter their room, unless it was to fix a camera. And then we couldn’t touch a projector. Rules. That was the only place I never went.
Our air compressor was in another room, so we didn’t hear it. Or course, there were fans and the constant whine of the VTR heads. It wasn’t very noisy. We didn’t splice commercials together, but ran them separately. Most of our commercials and PSAs were on film; I would guess only about 25% were on tape. We did produce commercials, and all of those were on tape. Lots of tape loading and rewinding.
We didn’t have a separate audio control room. The audio man sat next to the TD, who sat next to the director. Just three people to run on-air programming. Commercial production was about the same, as was live-to-tape production. Our main audio monitor speaker (no stereo for years to come) was an Elector-Voice Aristocrat mounted at the intersection of the back wall and the ceiling. It was adequate, but never played loud. The audio “board” was just a few controls on a sloping panel.
Radio was about the same, although I rarely went there, even though it was just down the hall. Simulcast had recently been ruled out, and FM changed to some kind of programmed elevator music. AM still had jocks, with all their antics. We TV folk looked down our noses at them, although from an engineering standpoint they were just as good.
… Perot both went off the rails a long time ago.
I worked at a software startup founded by ex-EDS employees. I heard a lot of “Ross” stories. Enough to realize he’d be a terrible president. His temper alone disqualified him.
One of my favorite Ross stories was about his takeover of one of the Wall Street brokerages. They were going to install a new EDS-provided data system for the brokers and traders by a certain date that was going to revolutionize trading. The deadline was a hard one. So the software and systems staff lived in the new data center for the last week or so. They brought in matresses and put them wherever they would fit, carried in food, etc. They made the deadline, but the data center looked like a war zone – trash, bedding, printouts, etc. everywhere. The staff looked worse – unshaven, dirty suits, etc. Then Ross decided he wanted to walk through the data center and show it to a few VIPs. Panic ensued. Solution: take Ross and VIPs through the old data center on another floor of the building. Some JCL was written to make the lights blink, tapes spin, printers to print. The manager one or two others shaved, put on clean suits, and led the tour. Ross never knew. (Lesson 1 for working at EDS: always have a shaver and a spare suit at work.)
Brad wrote:
“The entire right channel was dead. All sound came from the speakers on one side of the stage. I kept expecting them to interrupt the concert, but they never did. Afterwards I asked my companions, but they hadn’t noticed. How do you not notice a thing like that? ”
It’s not hard not to notice if you’re not picky about things.
The organist at church once made a howler, I didn’t notice but a woman who was a good keyboard player and learning the organ did. On the other hand, as a good former campanologist I notice bell ringing mistakes that non-bell ringers don’t. I think I had a good ear for it, for when it was being done well. The bell master’s wife and I both heard the bell ringing for the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986. We were both shocked at how poor the bell ringing was for such a high profile wedding. Most people probably never noticed.
No unions at that CBS station when I was there. Working conditions were absolutely terrible. The station was given citations by the FCC for not meeting technical specs with their video, and there was a long series of articles in one of the engineering mags by the incoming CE when the station was sold in the ’70’s, about how the technical plant had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.
Every subsequent place I worked was union, and there is no question that made the later places wonderful to work at. My experiences with unions were all positive, and my raises as management depended on how much the unions got, so obviously I was cheering for them on the QT.
My experience was the same on the ratio of film to tape commercials, but the balance ultimately shifted when we got the RCA video cart machine, over to all tape, as the film spots were transferred to tape, and everything was played on the cart machine. Most stations had 2 of those RCA cart machines, but we didn’t. Had a lot of down time from stuck mechanics. The whole thing was run by compressed air, moving cartridges in and out of the circular belt that ferried them to the playback decks. Had an Ampex cart machine where I worked in Chicago, and it very seldom failed. The RCA was down for an hour or more at least twice a week. That is why so many stations had 2 of them. Our competitors down the street had 2. But then, they were an NBC station and got discounts on all RCA equipment at that time.
My Chicago station was one of the experimental stereo TV stations that tested the various trial methods, including the CEEFAX video system of still frames that England had, but which was never adopted in this country. The first stereo for quad tape machines was developed in our plant, and we produced the first network distributed stereo TV programming: SoundStage and Sneak Previews. The Johnny Carson show was produced in stereo, but broadcast in stereo only to LA, as — until the commercial networks switched to satellite delivery — only PBS was capable of delivering stereo to affiliate stations.
So much has changed in the intervening years, that — except for studios and their associated control rooms — nothing is recognizable. At my old Indy station (the one losing their CBS affiliation), one guy watches as automation from their studios controls and feeds 7 stations here in the Midwest. It used to take a minimum of 3 guys to run just bare-bones residual programming, and many more during newscasts. The number of jobs eliminated over the years is actually shocking.
one guy watches as automation from their studios controls and feeds 7 stations here in the Midwest
I have to wonder about some of the local stations when broadcasting network programming and how they operate. Many times during a commercial break you will see the start of one commercial for a second or two, then the start of a local commercial or some other commercial.
Is that human error or automation error?
Automation these days. I am not aware of anyplace that uses humans to run commercials anymore. Just like in radio, where DJ’s used to slap in a ‘stop set’s’ worth of audio carts for commercials and promos and manually start each one, nowadays they hit the start button on the computer and it plays commercial after commercial until it hits the end, with no human intervention at all. Exactly the same with TV these days, as most commercials are played off a hard drive these days.
Those mis-timings you see are called “cut-ins”. Indianapolis was the premier test market for commercials and products back in the ’60’s and 70’s when I worked in local TV. We had a gazillion cut-ins on network programs every day, as people like P&G, Oscar Meyer, General Mills, and others would run test commercials here, covering up what the rest of the country was seeing.
There really is no excuse for making those mistakes. Even back in my day, the network sent down precise clock timings of the inserts, and by 1970 had developed a cueing technique that flashed a white spot in the vertical interval (which every pro monitor displays) that turned on with 10 seconds to go and went off with 5 seconds to go. Most of our pre-rolls were 5 seconds, so not getting that right was pretty much inexcusable from 1970 on, and is definitely not excusable in this day of computer automation and instant rolls.
So I would say that today, — except for live TV (like sports events), when humans ordinarily run things, — it is an automation screw-up. Something is not set right in the automation software.
So the other morning I’m up at 5:30 with the bedroom tv tuned to a local newscast and not watching but listening. The newscaster was talking in a halting kind of manner and I’m thinking, “Must have been a tough night”. When I looked at the tv however I realized his strange delivery was matching up to the display of the closed captioning (keep that on on the bedroom tv). So I’m thinking how does this all work. I’m guessing they create their cc ahead of time out of the script. Looking closer I now noticed the asides are not in the cc. All that is understandable from a cost stand point. Not sure how local news does all that but I bet they use a service or broadcast group central location. Not watched what they do when they do live location shoots. Just curious and I’m betting Chuck knows.
Well, that gets complex. In different places, it is done in different ways. If the aside comments were not in the closed captions, then most likely they were taking the CC from the actual news scripts that have been composed on computers since the late ’80’/early ’90’s, depending on how rich the station was back then, and how much the owner was raping for himself from his station. The people I worked for in the ’60’s and ’70’s were hauling off tens to hundreds of millions from their group of stations, while saddling us with aging, frequently malfunctioning equipment, low salaries, and terrific overwork. The only thing positive I can say about them, is that they knew EXACTLY when to sell those stations before the profit margins fell from 35 to 50%, down to grocery store margins that broadcasting earns today — those margins in spite of terrific staff reductions during the last decade.
In some cases, the CC’s are done live by the same technology that the court reporters I work with use to transcribe deposition testimony. They have special keyboards that use phonetic shortcuts to capture all the words. These days, their keyboards plug into software that immediately translates the shorthand into complete words and sentences. This is called “real time”. Here is a court reporter demonstrating how this all works in the deposition and courtroom world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__JkYUrIglg
This is the same system used to create live captions on TV programs. Note when she is typing into the shorthand keyboard, that the words appear one, two, or three at a time on the screen. If that is how you see words appearing on CC’s, then it is likely being created live.
If you see them appear a line or sentence at a time, then most likely, they are taking the content from an already-created script, and someone is just hitting a button to bring up the next lines of content being displayed.
I have not worked at the station level for so long that I do not know what the legal requirements are about CC’s. I know when I was working on nationally distributed programs, CC’s were optional. We recorded the weekly news analysis program on Friday mornings, and it was uplinked on early Friday evening and showed throughout the weekend on our affiliate stations. We hired a firm in Denver to do the CC’s, but frankly, I have no idea how that worked. I was the big boss in those days, and did not have to know how stuff worked; just that it got done.
This shorthand method of creating a transcript is done — as the reporter in the above link says — phonetically. It is therefore plagued with errors of words that sound similar to the correct ones, but are not correct. Back in the ’80’s, our normal practice was to make an audio cassette of raw footage, and have secretaries and production assistants use transcription playback machines with foot pedals for fast/slow/repeat, to type a transcript that we used for editing. Those were accurate. We once had a series of programs with a tight deadline, and used some court reporters to get the work done more quickly than our own staff could. The mistakes were so rife, that I never allowed that method to be used again. In the video depositions, we record audio cassettes (nowadays more usually SD cards with MP3’s) of the audio we are committing to video, so the court reporter can later listen to the audio and check the accuracy of the phonetic shorthand.
But if you see lots of errors in the caption content, with words that sound similar to the correct ones or rhyme with the correct word, then you are seeing that shorthand being created live, or some that has not been proofread.
It is impossible to use conventional typing to create a transcript in real time on the fly. It must be done by the shorthand machine method, if there is no offline time to manually type a transcript. There is now software that replicates the old transcription machines with speed and backspace pedals, just like the in the old days of typewriters and audio cassette machines, before there were desktop computers.
Thanks Chuck, that pretty much confirms what I have seen. Since posting about this I’ve watched a little closer. I’d noticed before the live ones and all the errors that occur and that’s understandable. I also guessed the local news was done from the scripts since they were almost perfect and word for word when the newscasters were reading. Yesterday that same station had two different on the scene live segments and neither had captioning. The news guy that had the bad delivery that first got my attention seems okay every time I’ve seen him since, so I guess it was either a bad day or the equipment was screwing up his teleprompter or computer in front of him.
Frankly I usually only watch about 15 min of the local to get headlines and weather then switch to something else or read the newspaper or online content.
I have always avoided all but short news to inform myself. Since I produced and directed TV news early in my career, I could not avoid being associated with it. When I started, our local news was only one-half hour. But then, suddenly it became profitable, whereas for more than a decade of the early days of television, it was sustaining programming (carried by the station at a loss because it was important to the “public interest, convenience and necessity” as mandated by the old Radio Acts). Lo and behold, we extended it to an hour. Then a few years later — even longer. Not because there was more news, but because it was more profitable.
In those days, I listened to ABC radio new for 5 minutes on the way to work, and I knew from that what all the major stories were going to be on that days’ edition of our news.
Even now, I listen to BBC World Service news on the hour when I first get up. That 5 minutes is all I need to know for the day. Usually around 16:00 when I basically end my workday if at my desk, I check a few RSS feeds of various local news sites, some select business sites, and in another 10 minutes, I know everything I want to know about what is happening around me. I try my best not to read stories, but just to get news from the article titles and headlines. Seldom am I benefited from reading articles or listening to those long, long NPR reports on afternoon radio that I sometimes check out, just to see what those stations are doing. I do not need to know that much information to live a full life. So I avoid it. There is too much to be done in life to waste it on being unnecessarily knowledgeable.
For nooz we have the shortwave, a handful of sites on the net, and I just started getting the CSM weekly edition here. We also scan the local libturd rag papers for the nooz on dope busts, DUI busts, land grabs, pit bull attacks, clotheslines snapping, cats running away and any other assorted mayhem.
Ran across another of those annoying audio errors yesterday, this time on television. On one of the BBC channels, the audio was running about 1/4 second ahead of the video. It ran that way for the entire two hours or so that we watched (all the same program). Typical, I seem to be the one who notices; my wife had to concentrate to hear it after I pointed it out.
Is this coming all the way from BBC that way, or does the stuff get reprocessed along the way by the cable providers?
Probably came from BBC that way, but there is sometimes reprocessing going on along the way. That is because reprocessing and changing things is SO easy these days in the digital world.
Even in analog, in later years (about 1985 on) video switchers introduced a 1 frame delay, each time you sent it through a “re-entry” point. If you ran things through special effects, then each effects “bank” introduced that 1 frame delay, which did not affect audio. Which is often why video gets behind audio (audio is first).
With your discerning abilities, you ought to be working in TV. Few people have that talent. In the early days of computer editing, with quadruplex videotape machines, you could not roll things a frame at a time or do slo-mo, so you had to pick a point, then preview it “to black” (black after or before the edit point) and see if there was a frame of the unwanted video, then trim a frame and preview again, rinse and repeat until the unwanted frames were gone. I worked on a contract job back in the early 2000’s with some young guys as editors (editing on computers), and I would occasionally see “flash frames” (one frame of extraneous video) and they were wowed that I could detect that, because they could not see it. They would roll the picture forward a frame at a time to the point I noted, and sure enough, there was the one frame that did not belong there. But in the early days of editing, you HAD to be able to see that stuff, or you did not belong in an edit suite.
I can detect (or used to be able to) when audio is about 2 to 3 frames off either way. Getting it right on the money to the correct frame is a real skill. Only 1 or 2 editors during my whole career could do that. But this thing of it constantly being off is because TV is now digital and no longer analog. There are so many places along the line where it can go askew.
But if it goes wrong and is not corrected within a few seconds, you are likely going to be saddled with it being off for the whole program.
BTW, playing DVD’s on computers often causes the audio and video to be out-of-sync. I am not sure what all the causes are, but we occasionally have clients who watch one of our DVD’s on a computer, and call to say the video and audio are not in sync. We tell them to put the disc into a standalone DVD player, and tell us if there is a problem. There never is.
Chuck, other solutions I’ve found to DVD audio-video unsych on computers is to use a different player (eg, Totem vs VLC), switch the audio tracks and then switch back, skip ahead a chapter and then go back to where you were, and the like. It’s a pain, and I don’t understand the reason, either, but usually one of these tricks works.
VLC has a setting to adjust audio/video synch, but it always frustrates me because I never know in which direction I’m adjusting it. A simple UI indication would help…
What’s Totem? Worth a try?
VLC for Android sucks dead bunnies, don’t even bother. MX Player is what I use.
Totem is the default browser for Debian and Ubuntu, at least up through Ubuntu 12. Interestingly, even though the official name has changed, the name of the executable hasn’t.
On the subject of audio/video, I find Swiss TV’s remote interviews amusing. Like any station, they will hold a live interview with some poor sot who is on site in Washington, or Aleppo, or Moscow, or whereever. I presume these on-site reporters work simultaneously for lots of different stations, since surely poor Swiss TV isn’t going to have that many of its own international correspondents. But I digress…
The reason these are amusing is that you’d expect better in the day of the modern internet. I have a ping of under 100ms to practically any server in the world. But no, they apparently bounce it off a geo-sync satellite, because there’s this … delay between posing a question and getting an answer. Just enough that you think, did he hear the question?