I’ll be bringing this extended Pledge Drive to a close in a couple of days, but I wanted to let you know how things are going. Or not going, because we’re still a long way off from my goal. To those who have donated, some quite generously, I want to express my profound thanks. But I need more of you to donate if we’re going to get to the finish line.
So if you haven’t donated yet, please consider clicking the button below.
You can also give by Venmo at David-Futrelle-1.
Thanks again to everyone who has contributed to the blog–by donating, sending along tips, providing technical help, spreading the word.
I did what I could.
Here’s a topic idea: the latest RW outrage —
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/21/am-radio-evs-electric-vehicles-conservative-talk
@ GSS ex-noob
I did not know anything about this. Although this actually makes something in my past make some more sense now. When I used to do some volunteer work for a rightie Christian charity and drove their vans they were always left with the radio listening to Mark Levin and such.
Thought it was weird and annoying that the reception was crap regardless of which van I was driving, but didn’t want to listen to that anyway and would turn it off. I guess now it was lousy reception because it was AM and had nothing to do with the radios being used.
I’ve donated again bc I admire your work. I’m broke tho so it’s not a lot.
It sounds like it’s time to run ads.
@.45: Being An Old, I just bought a new boombox. The FM works great with the antenna. The AM, not so much. The manual suggested turning the unit to face different ways as the only way to improve AM reception.
I remember when cars only had AM radios and you lost sound under overpasses. I bought a cheap new car in the 90s and it came with just an AM radio, which lasted only as long as the trip to the car stereo shop for a proper radio and tape deck and the time at home to plug it in.
@ gss ex-noob
In the 70s at least one recording studio had a short wave AM transmitter and a car with a communications link back to the studio.
So the producer could sit in the car listening to the mix on the radio as it would be heard by their core audience. Then the producer could talk to the engineer back in the studio to adjust the mix as necessary.
In the 80s a lot of albums had the final mix done on Walkman headphones.
If I can figure out how to reactivate my old PayPal account, I’ll scrounge a dollar or so for you. Money is a tad tight right now, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, a possible story for you to look into – the Oceangate disaster. I’ve heard it reported that some on the Right are blaming that mess on ‘diversity hires’ the company allegedly did for their submarine engineering crews. The late CEO did tweet that he did (allegedly) hire recent grads because they were ‘more flexible’ than the fifty year-old ‘white Navy veterans’ that everyone else said he should hire.
What those on the Right are oh-so-conveniently ignoring are the tweets and at least one interview where the CEO stated he considered all the various submarine safety regulations a major impediment to the engineering innovations his company would produce if they weren’t hamstrung by said regulations. Meaning the actual translation of the diversity hire stuff is ‘newbs freshly out of college are much cheaper to employ and won’t tell me something I think is cool is impossible’ like the grizzled veterans would.
Though I should point out here that, to the best of my knowledge, the racial/gender/age makeup of Oceangate’s tech crew(s) hasn’t been released yet at the time of my typing this. So they could all be middle aged really rich white guys who think ‘diversity’ means eating at a Taco Bell once a month for all I know.
@Alan: Did people hang about near the studio with their AM radios at mixing time?
Must confess my playlist of songs of my youth gets mostly played through the small speakers of my tablet next to the pillow at bedtime, to replicate the tween/teen experience. WLS (AM, then Top 40) in Chicago comes in overnight strongly in 75% of the US, and also southern Canada.
Mine gets played through … a Walkman. Though this Walkman is the size of a lipstick rather than a pair of back-to-back hardcover books, and is correspondingly lighter too. And holds enough stuff that if I hooked it up to a transmitter I could call it a no-repeats station.
It no longer has the original headphones, though.
I wish I could donate. My spouse passed less than 3 months ago and I’m having to use my funds for my child and their emotional support animal.
The weird thing about the AM radio complaint is that, well, the reason there is so much conservative talk radio on AM is that it’s cheaper there after all the big radio network stations that played music decamped to FM after it became available, leaving lots of bandwidth available and small stations desperate for anything to fill up time. So it’s historically ignorant. (Which of course is nothing new for these folks.)
There’s noting stopping conservative talk radio from being on FM, except that there’s more competition for timeslots there and it costs more.
So yes, this is yet another case of ‘conservatives’ being all in favour of capitalism and minimal regulations until it does something they don’t want, and then they start going ‘There oughta be a law!’
Donated what I could spare right now, it’s not much but I hope it helps. This blog has been an absolutely brilliant and important read over the years, and hopefully it can continue to do so.
Coup attempt in Russia:
https://www.vox.com/2023/6/23/23771853/wagner-group-russia-prigozhin-feud
Am I the only one thinking the line “Hydra can grow no further in Hitler’s shadow!” here?
Aftershocks, schmaftershocks. These are foreshocks, probably of World War III.
Cash is still tight, but I’ll see if I can throw something your way, David
@ surplus
It’s only a coup if it’s from the Coup d’etat region of France. Otherwise it’s just a sparkling insurrection.
@GSS ex-noob:
Must confess my playlist of songs of my youth gets mostly played through the small speakers of my tablet next to the pillow at bedtime, to replicate the tween/teen experience. WLS (AM, then Top 40) in Chicago comes in overnight strongly in 75% of the US, and also southern Canada.
Which brings to mind my weird experiences with radio reception in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike (who ought better to have been named Inigo—no one in Ohio was expecting the Spanish Inquisition.)
My lifelines to the outside world were my landline phone and a cheap-ass pocket AM-FM transistor radio I’d gotten as a Black Friday door prize at Big Lots. Unfortunately, the Miami Valley’s main news and weather station was also its main right-wing political blather station, meaning that I had to endure a fair amount of noise—and also meaning that it took me a bit to realize that I was sometimes actually bringing in WSB-AM 750 from Atlanta, Georgia. (Cox Media Group—whose affiliates include WHIO in Dayton, Ohio(1)—is headquartered there; the surrounding electronic silence made room for signals from a far greater radius.)
(A more welcome surprise gift of the power outage was Zoomer Radio 740 all the way from Toronto: a nostalgia station which was then running regular blocks of Old-Time Radio drama, making them a source of nighttime solace when reading after dark would consume valuable flashlight batteries.)
No foreign-language numbers lists or pirate radio—is that still a thing?—though.
(1) Where Cox Media originated, incidentally; along with fellow flagship industry National Cash Register, they’ve since gravitated southward in what seems to be the inexorable gravitational suck emptying Dayton.(2)
(2) So, as of last month, have I, for reasons mostly not of my choosing. But I’m not the protagonist of this website or this comment section.
@Alan: groan I’ll get your coat.
@FMOx: Interesting, but not surprising.
We had an actual honest to gosh AM/FM/Shortwave radio from when my dad was stationed in Europe before I was born. There sure were interesting things on the SW band. The numbers stations (might still be around?), the “Russian Woodpecker” radar, and just stuff from other countries.