necturus

Since I only had to work Tuesday and Wednesday last week, I decided to invite my father to come stay with me for a few days. Since he doesn't drive any more, I drove to Binghamton a week ago Friday and brought him back with me the following day. I gave him my bedroom and moved to the living room couch. We mostly hung out with the Beasts, although I took my father to some of my favorite walking spots to look for birds. Longfellow Pond was frozen over, but there were some anatids of various species in the Charles River in Waltham near my old workplace, and a vast great gaggle of Canada geese on the lawn of a nearby apartment complex. We also went to the New England Mobile Book Fair and to dinner at Masala Art, an excellent Indian restaurant in Needham.

I had to turn down three work requests, explaining that I wasn't free. I got some work done for my RI client via the Internet in Binghamton on Saturday, but couldn't save the opera, which had a nasty hissing noise on it. The technical guy for the opera wants me to reboot the Comrex box, which can only be done physically (I need to complain to Comrex about that), and the box is on Block Island, which means I'll have to go out there next weekend, weather permitting.

I took my father back home Friday, returning Saturday evening. On my way home I scanned the radio dial looking for coverage of the South Carolina primary. There is scarcely any news on the radio Saturday evenings, when the NPR stations all go to music and most of the AM dial to various basketball or hockey games. I finally found a nice clear signal from WBT in Charlotte, NC, which was doing wall-to-wall coverage of the primary in its neighboring state. The program hosts clearly didn't like Newt Gingrich; they were constantly calling the people around him "clowns" and "blowhards, and talking about how incompetently his campaign event was being managed.

Gingrich is a joke; that the people of South Carolina prefer him to Romney speaks volumes.

There are more descendants of Germans in the United States than descendants of English, yet we speak English not German.

Presumably, we speak English because the English spoke English. But unless I misremember, Britain was the only major province of the Roman empire in which a Germanic language came to be generally spoken, most of the former western provinces retaining a Latin-derived language despite invasion and conquest by Franks, Lombards, Goths, or other Germanic peoples. The Visigothic kingdom of Spain lasted from the fifth century until the early eighth, when it fell to Arabs; yet Spain retains its Romance languages today and no trace of Gothic survives. Yet in Britain, Latin was replaced quickly by English, and not even three centuries of rule by French-speakers after the Norman conquest would change that.

In the east, where the empire survived the era of Germanic incursions, Greek not Latin became the dominant language in the areas that were not lost to the Arab conquests of the seventh century. But Iran, which fell to the Arabs at the same time, still speaks Persian.

Yet in one eastern Roman province -- Dacia -- the Latin language survived to become modern Romanian, a Romance island surrounded by Slavs and Magyars.

Weird, huh?

You're not the Newt I'm rooting for.

I want Mr. Gingrich to win the Republican nomination because he's a walking disaster and the perfect personification of the worst that his party represents. Conservatism, or what passes for it in American politics, must be utterly discredited if America is to survive as anything like the country I grew up in, and the best way to do that is to put the nuttiest person possible at the top of the Republican ticket.

The danger, of course, is that he might win the election. But he's less likely than Mitt Romney to beat President Obama, I think.

There's part of me that wonders whether if the nutters got full control of the government again, they might so completely discredit capitalism as to hasten the coming of socialism in America. They've already done an excellent job of undermining public confidence in most of the institutions that support it.

Another part of me remembers that Americans have never known fascism, except for my father's generation that fought it in World War II. The death-throes of capitalism could get very ugly.

... of all the right-wing ranting and mindless paranoia on the Broadcast and Pubtech lists.

Today somebody got spam in what they thought was Arabic, so two other list members advised him to call Homeland Security, while a third railed against "liberal activist judges" for ruling that people proposing to put up new towers have to take into account their effect on migrating birds. He was particularly incensed that the judge wants tower owners to solicit comments from the "ignorant", "uninformed" public rather than relying on "experts".

Oh, and one of them ran screaming out of a transmitter building a couple months ago after discovering a snake in a cable raceway.

Do us all a favor and fuck off and die, and take your beer-swilling tea party friends with you.

Yeah, I'm not in a good mood today.

From the Pubtech mailing list:

"Once at KRBD, Ketchikan Jeff Wold and the Coyote Man read a news story on
the air that a minister was having children burn records with the Mr. Ed
Theme, claiming that if you played it backward you could plainly hear,
"Worship satan Wilbur".  So we recorded the song backward on the Studer B67
with some added reverb and mixed a track of the Teen Angel....well known
character at the station and a great voice mimic.


It got played on the Box of Rain show.  It was so funny.  But some fool that
really needed a life filed a formal complaint with the FCC."

...can be found here.

Time magazine covers, U.S. versus international

This doesn't say it all, but it does speak volumes.

...should run them on steam power!

This link was posted on the Broadcast mailing list in the context of a discussion about the effects of radio towers on birds.

As a shortwave radio enthusiast in the 1970's I became very familiar with Radio Prague's interval signal. Most shortwave stations use a short musical signature to make them more easily identifiable; Radio Prague's was from a song "Kupředu levá, zpátky ni krok" ("Forward, left, not a step back"). I went looking for the song and found this Youtube video; then I went looking for the lyrics. The song is on sovmusic.ru, but no lyrics. I found http://rudoarmejec.narod.ru/texty/cent/kupredu_zpatky_ni_krok.htm, which is in Czech, and Google translates it thus:

( cut for your convenience )

If man is wolf to man, it must be time time to work your arm-lift. :-)

Gotta love Google Translate.