|
|
FEB.
28, 2018 BEYONDLY
The
Pittsburgh classic rock station WDVE-FM has been playing the same
music for almost half a century, since 1969. Their well-worn
playlist includes a hit from 1980 by local performer Donnie Iris,
whose 75th birthday is today. (He was born just three days
after the late George Harrison.)
I
hear this
song almost every week. To me, it sounds like he's singing
Beyondly over and over again. |
|
Allegedly,
the actual title is Ah! Leah! I doubt that.
How many Leahs
are out there really, looking better than a body has a right to?
|
In
other news, I have an update to my note from the 1988 Olympics,
concerning the fate of millions of Korean dogs. Click here.
|
And
I wanted to pass along a five-year-old article
from yet another thoughtful writer. He posits that a good
guy with a gun also known as the only thing that stops a
bad guy with a gun is a heroic fantasy we've learned from Hollywood.
|
|
FEB.
25, 2008 PREDICTA
|
Fifty
years later, its shape still spells television.
However, I never knew anybody who owned one. All the TV sets I
encountered were rectangular pieces of furniture.
The
Philco Predicta, with its futuristic space-age look, was produced
only from 1958 through 1960. The controls and electronics were
enclosed in one box. On top of that sat the CRT, a rounded
picture tube enclosed in a streamlined housing that could tilt and
turn to face the viewers.
One
commentator noted that despite the radical styling that
endears it to collectors, the Predicta had an unhappy history in the
field, causing some to dub it the Edsel of
televisions. Quality control was poor, leading to an
excessive number of returns and warranty service calls. Some
people blame the Predicta for the demise of Philco, which declared
bankruptcy in 1962.
|
Yet
even today, it lives on as an icon. Telecasts about television
use its profile, as on the left. |
The
Predicta remains more recognizable than the actual shape of a
21st-century TV a flat rectangular screen.
|
|
FEB.
22, 2018 THE
COW IN THE SCOW
Richard
Wilbur passed away four months ago at the age of 96. You may
not remember his name; I didn't. But he was once a guest on my
college radio station.
How
do I know? I found a couple of columns from an old WOBC Program
Guide, which I've posted here.
In addition to our Top 20 songs, there's a list of topics that had
been featured recently on our news department's Oberlin Digest,
beginning with the program of 51 years ago tonight, February 22,
1967. Mostly we discussed the top two non-academic concerns of
Oberlin undergraduates at the time: student housing, and the
threat of the military draft.
But
in addition, according to the Program Guide, we obtained an exclusive
interview with Mr. Wilbur. At the time he was a
Pulitzer-winning poet who had translated Molière's The Misanthrope
and Tartuffe from French into English.
Most
of his own works were serious-minded, but he had also written lyrics
to songs like this
one from Leonard Bernstein's Candide. And there were
silly verses, too. If you click on this
one, you can hear him give a solemn reading about the carp in your carport.
After
his appearances on our campus, Wilbur went on to even greater fame
20 years later, when he was named Poet Laureate of the United
States! Two years after that, in 1989, he won his second
Pulitzer Prize. And I'm sure he gave all the credit to WOBC. |
|
FEB.
20, 2018 POSTCARDS
FROM THE EAST
I
didn't travel to the Olympic Winter Games in Korea this year.
I've been there, done that. I was part of the
Emmy-winning NBC-TV team for the Seoul Summer
Olympics 30 years ago. But many of my graphics colleagues did
make the trip, and they've posted some pictures on social media.
They've even had a little time for sightseeing.
For
example, Becky Hawranko-Wood reports that the nine-story stone
pagoda above is a Korean national treasure. It's believed to be
over a thousand years old.
She
saw it at one of the many reconstructed Buddhist temples of
Woljeongsa, not far from PyeongChang.
Turning
this wheel full circle clockwise, she reports, signifies
that you've read the Buddha scriptures and fills you with
wisdom. I feel smarter already. |
|
Becky
is on the TV crew that's covering ski jumping. But it's
obviously not all work and no play. Here she is in the catering tent.
Below,
she shows us some of the more exotic fare she's encountered elsewhere.
|
|
|
The
cooks even let Becky try her hand at stirring up some of that Korean cuisine.
|
Lisa
Cirincione is there, too. She boarded a bus to go to her
curling venue.
Back
in the States, Lisa C. and her husband Mark Lynch make their home in
State College, Pennsylvania, known to the natives as Happy
Valley. And Mark managed to find a Korean waffle house to
remind him of home.
Below,
another graphics operator, Linda P., wore Predators gear because
she's from Nashville. She got on a different bus to head to the
Olympic Sliding Centre. (In Nashville, sliding is
what motorists do during a rare snowstorm. At the Games,
however, the sliding events consist of luge, bobsled, and skeleton.) |
|
|
Linda
P. has augmented her outfit by collecting a bunch of Olympic pins,
of course.
And
on the right below is yet another graphics person with whom I've
worked, Julie Stocker, in her NBC stocking cap. |
Finally,
Ken Childs posted a picture of his spacious
suite
in the Press Village. Look at those luxurious
accomodations!
One entire wall of his cell is nothing
but
windows!
|
|
Here
in western Pennsylvania, maybe I'll open a jar of kimchi for supper
this evening. It is a time for celebration, after all. I
turned 71 today.
I
may no longer be Olympicizing, but I haven't completely retired
yet. This morning, I was booked for ten telecasts during the
early part of the upcoming baseball season.
And
there's other happiness: the weather around here is by far the
mildest it's ever been on my birthday. This afternoon, the
digital thermometer on my porch reached 80.8°!
Here
comes the sun
Here
comes the sun
And I say
It's all right
FEB.
19, 2008 RADIO
REQUESTS
WOBC-FM,
our student-operated radio station at Oberlin College, sometimes
took music requests over the phone. We had an all-request
classical music program on Saturday nights, just as WQED-FM in
Pittsburgh has today. The name of the WOBC program was our
campus phone number, 3157.
Our
pop music DJs also got requests. Imitating what they'd heard
on big-time Top 40 stations, they sometimes tape-recorded the
calls. Then they could rummage around to find the requested
record, cue up the tape, and let the magic of radio happen.
Um, could you play No Milk Today by Herman and the
Hermits? Your wish is my command! No
Milk Today plays immediately.
That
technique is commonplace now, but in 1968 it felt as though we were
pushing the envelope of possibilities.
One
night Marc Krass and Randy Bongarten took it a step further.
They arranged for the Rathskeller, a tavern in the basement of the
Wilder Hall student union building, to play WOBC through its sound
system. At one end of the Rat they set up a microphone
stand. To raise its signal to line level, the mic was connected
to a small amplifier the same one that I took to basketball
remotes. The output of the amp was connected to a pair of wires
in the stairwell that led to our control room up on the third floor. |
|
A
sign invited Rathskeller patrons to speak their requests into the
microphone. It almost looked like a prank. The mic was
not connected to a loudspeaker, and patrons got no confirmation that
they were being heard. The mic might not have even been
on. But a few brave souls risked looking foolish. They
dutifully walked up and spoke their requests.
Upstairs
at the radio station, we had no idea when someone was approaching
the mic, so Randy and I threaded a reel of tape onto a deck and
started recording. There would be long minutes of nothing but
background noise. Eventually we'd hear a request. I'd
mark it by inserting a scrap of paper between the layers of tape on
the takeup reel while Randy scurried off to find the song.
After several requests, we'd start a second recording on another
machine. Then we rewound the first tape to the most recent
request, while my scraps kept tabs on the older ones. We cued
the request up for Marc.
Uh,
hello? Is anyone there? Yes, indeed, this is
Marc Knight, your WOBC disk jockey. What would you like to
hear? Uh, can you play Tighten Up by Archie
Bell and the Drells? Sure can! Here it is.
Off-duty
DJ Dave Webster was in the Rat that night. He made another
request. Your assignment, should you decide to accept it,
is to play Takin' Care of Business. This tape will
self-destruct in five seconds!
FEB.
18, 2018 SIGNS
OF SPRING
Pittsburgh
is located at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela
rivers, where they merge to form the Ohio. Normally there's a
fountain at the Point, but it's been submeged the last couple of
days. We now have a hyperconfluence, resulting from
upstream rains and snow melt. A low-lying stretch of Interstate
376 called the bathtub has been closed by flooding.
Ah,
but better times are ahead. We can recall when every bath
toy was in its proper place.
|
FEB.
17, 2018 WHY
SUE? |
|
Yablonski,
Costello & Leckie are a group of attorneys working out of the
Washington Trust Building in Washington, PA, specializing in worker's
compensation claims. They abbreviate their name as YCL Law Firm.
Maybe
they should get a new Internet site. Their current web address
is ycllawfirm.com,
and unfortunately the adjacent L's make that hard to decipher in
print. Yellow claw?
And
in their radio commercials, YCL Law Firm dot com sounds
like Why see a law firm? Dot com! |
FEB.
15, 2018 A
SIGN FROM HEAVEN
Let's
flash back to five years ago this morning. Minutes before
sunrise on a road near Chelyabinsk, Russia, a motorist was on his way
to work. |
|
His
dashcam captured seven stunning seconds of video. |
|
An
asteroid, as heavy as the World War II troop ship that brought my
father home from India, was crashing into the earth's atmosphere! |
|
Streaking
across the sky south of the city at an altitude of more than 18
miles, it exploded into a superbolide meteor. |
|
The
light was blinding, three times brighter than the sun. A
couple of minutes later it would be followed by a huge boom like a
bolt from Zeus. |
|
Some
people would fall to the ground, knocked off their feet by the blast
wave. Shaking the ground like a 2.7 earthquake, the blast would
damage 7,200 buildings. |
|
Now
let's flash back a little further, to about 1,983 years ago.
Minutes before noon on a road near Damascus, Syria, a man named Saul
had a similar experience.
Below is an edited-together version of three accounts of the event
from chapters 9, 22, and 26 of the Biblical Acts of the Apostles (NIV).
|
After
recovering, Saul stopped persecuting Christians. Instead of
his Jewish name, he began using his Roman name Paul and became a
major force in spreading the new religion throughout the Roman Empire
and thus the world.
Is
it not possible that the men on the road to Damascus saw an
incoming meteor?
Then
is it not possible that they heard a thunderous sound like
the voice of God? And Saul, as he fell to the
ground, took that sound personally, imagining it to be a
reprimand from Jesus meant for him alone?
Perhaps
a random space rock has played a major role in determining the
course of history, writes
Jacob Aron in New Scientist. That's not as strange
as it sounds. A large asteroid impact helped kill off the
dinosaurs, paving the way for mammals to dominate the Earth. So
why couldn't a meteor influence the evolution of our beliefs?
William
Hartmann, co-founder of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson,
Arizona, believes we need to think seriously about the implications
of this idea. My goal is not to discredit anything that anybody
wants to believe in, he says. But if the spread of a
major religion was motivated by misunderstanding a fireball, that's
something we human beings ought to understand about ourselves. |
FEB.
12, 2018 I
WAKE UP TO THE SOUND OF MUSIC BLEEPING
The
year was 1972. I was on the lowest rung of the television
industry, local cable, but my colleagues and I naturally looked up to
the higher rungs.
NBC's
Tonight Show had just relocated from New York to
Burbank. We learned that it was actually recorded in the early
evening, a few hours before airing. That schedule was a
convenience for Johnny Carson and the other performers.
It
also allowed time for the guys in the tape room to make any
necessary edits in the video tape before it was broadcast, for
example to bleep out obscenities.
That's
the job I want to have! joked Jude Clifford, one of our
technicians. Bleeping engineer. |
|
The
year was 2017. Surfing through the channels, I had fallen
asleep in front of my television as I often do. The TV happened
to be tuned to the E! Network.
Eventually
I vaguely became aware of an annoying series of tones, every couple
of seconds. The beeps weren't in a regular rhythm, like a truck
backing up, and they weren't loud, like an alarm clock. But
they were insistent enough to rouse me from my dreams, at which point
I noticed another sound: a group of women all talking at
once. My father used to call such a gaggle a hen party.
|
I
opened my eyes to discover a roomful of Kardashian types on my
TV. These women were curvy, long-haired twenty-somethings, most
of them in outfits revealing an incredible amount of cleavage,
telling each other things like I don't know why the [bleep] you
would say that [bleep]. I was on the [bleep] practice squad!
A
little research revealed that I was watching a reality show called WAGs,
which stands for Wives And Girlfriends of professional athletes.
There were lots of bleeps. Even some conversations in
the background had to be cleaned up. Editing this program would
be a major challenge for the bleeping engineer. |
FEB.
9, 2018 OPENING
Tonight
is the official ceremony to begin the 2018 Olympic Winter Games.
The
previous time that South Korea hosted was 30 years ago, and I was there! |
|
I
was an NBC employee for a month in 1988.
Since then I've worked two other Olympics, helping provide the
international television coverage. But it's been 16 years since
my only visit to the Winter Olympics.
|
There,
inside a remote truck preparing for the closing ceremony at a Salt
Lake City stadium, I recall seeing an unusual image on a
monitor. I've simulated it on the left. Probably the
white dots were even tinier.
One
of our cameramen with an extra-long lens, looking for "beauty
shots," had noticed something glowing in the late-afternoon sky
and zoomed in tight. |
To
me, it was obvious what we were looking at. I recognized that
striped ball of gas. I had seen it on May 30, 1969, just before
graduating from college. Jan Olson and I climbed to the
observatory dome atop Peters Hall where, for 35¢ a head, the
senior class was selling looks through the telescope at Jupiter and
two of its moons.
|
|
|
My
Utah encounter with these heavenly bodies in 2002 is mentioned near
the end of this month's 100 Moons article. |
|
|
FEB.
6, 2018 ITE
IN UTERO
The
younger generation likes to retreat from the outside world by
crawling inside plastic balls like this. And what do
they do in there? They study!
At
least that's the case at my alma mater, as I explain in a new little
dialogue called Bubble
World. |
FEB.
4, 2018 DARE
I CONSUME THIS? |
|
The
package is labeled LIGHTLY
SMOKED PORTUGUESE SARDINES IN LEMON FLAVORED EVOO.
Sounds
good until I get to the last word. What kind of goo is
evoo? Never heard of it.
Elsewhere
on the label, however, I learn that it's an abbreviation for Extra
Virgin Olive Oil. I've got a bottle of that stuff on my
shelf. It hasn't lost its virginity,
and it hasn't killed me yet.
All
is well. |
|
FEB.
1, 2018 ANT
TRIP CEREMONY? GEE HAW!
|
My
colleagues at the Oberlin College radio station included two classical-music
announcers who were destined to graduate to greater fame.
Meanwhile, my colleagues in the physics laboratory included a young
lady with whom I would exchange February gag gifts.
Click here
for my latest installment in the 14-month series recalling my life 50
years ago. |
|