This and That
Nov. 22nd, 2009 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
Radio
When I was younger I loved to tune into AM radio at night to see what I could get. I felt wonder that I could tune in cities all over the USA, using nothing more than my ordinary pocket-sized transistor radio. Later I got into shortwave listening and found that you could tune in the whole world.
I still explore by radio at night. I don't do it so much as I used to. In the first place, AM little more than syndicated talk shows any more. The interest of DXing was to be able to listen in on the lives of people all over the nation; hear what restaurants or stores advertised in their towns, what music they listened to, what the local news stories were. Instead, now you get twelve copies of ESPN Sports Radio, Radio Disney, or whoever that late-night whack job is. And with the end of the Cold War, the shortwave signals aren't as powerful or as strident as they were-- except for the flat-earth evangelists, of course.
But you can still listen in on other worlds sometimes.
Here is the most exotic world I've been able to listen to in a long time. A foreign country in another world, that world called 1939. WJSV
On September 21, 1939, the folks at WJSV, a CBS station in Washington, DC, figured that the day might be of historical interest. They knew that President Roosevelt was going to address Congress about the Neutrality Act, and they planned to carry his speech live. So they went a step further; they recorded the entire day, on phonograph discs, and sent them all to the National Archives. I'm not aware of anything else like this, anywhere.
Clothes
I have lost a little bit of weight over the past few months. Now, Tephra has always complained that woman's clothing sizes don't make any sense, and that a Size Whatever as made by one company isn't the same as another's. Let me state here that is also true for men's clothing sizes, even though they are stated as a fixed number of INCHES... a unit of measure which, however obsolete it may seem to the rest of the world, IS rather precisely defined legally, technically, and scientifically. One would think it would be difficult to mess up.
Specifically, I have two pairs of cheap jeans I bought over the years in sizes too small to wear, in hopes that I would lose enough weight to wear them. One of them is in size (x-2) inches, the other in size (x-4). Guess which one I can wear, and which is too tight? If you guessed I could wear the one which is supposed to be the larger of the two, try again.
When I was younger I loved to tune into AM radio at night to see what I could get. I felt wonder that I could tune in cities all over the USA, using nothing more than my ordinary pocket-sized transistor radio. Later I got into shortwave listening and found that you could tune in the whole world.
I still explore by radio at night. I don't do it so much as I used to. In the first place, AM little more than syndicated talk shows any more. The interest of DXing was to be able to listen in on the lives of people all over the nation; hear what restaurants or stores advertised in their towns, what music they listened to, what the local news stories were. Instead, now you get twelve copies of ESPN Sports Radio, Radio Disney, or whoever that late-night whack job is. And with the end of the Cold War, the shortwave signals aren't as powerful or as strident as they were-- except for the flat-earth evangelists, of course.
But you can still listen in on other worlds sometimes.
Here is the most exotic world I've been able to listen to in a long time. A foreign country in another world, that world called 1939. WJSV
On September 21, 1939, the folks at WJSV, a CBS station in Washington, DC, figured that the day might be of historical interest. They knew that President Roosevelt was going to address Congress about the Neutrality Act, and they planned to carry his speech live. So they went a step further; they recorded the entire day, on phonograph discs, and sent them all to the National Archives. I'm not aware of anything else like this, anywhere.
Clothes
I have lost a little bit of weight over the past few months. Now, Tephra has always complained that woman's clothing sizes don't make any sense, and that a Size Whatever as made by one company isn't the same as another's. Let me state here that is also true for men's clothing sizes, even though they are stated as a fixed number of INCHES... a unit of measure which, however obsolete it may seem to the rest of the world, IS rather precisely defined legally, technically, and scientifically. One would think it would be difficult to mess up.
Specifically, I have two pairs of cheap jeans I bought over the years in sizes too small to wear, in hopes that I would lose enough weight to wear them. One of them is in size (x-2) inches, the other in size (x-4). Guess which one I can wear, and which is too tight? If you guessed I could wear the one which is supposed to be the larger of the two, try again.
