Sunday Wrap: 10/17/11-10/22/11

Sunday Wrap: 10/17/11-10/22/11 The weekly wrap-up of posts from Rising’s Rant. A busy week but still no real increase in output. I do feel the muse coming back. Or possibly that’s just heartburn.


Juiced! Catch up on my adventures in the land of Juicing. It’s now almost a month!


Monday 10/17/11

Blog Post Dan Wheldon was a race car driver. It’s what he did. Until he died doing it.


Tuesday 10/18/11

Blog Post Edgar M Villchur R.I.P. – If you have ever listened to amplified music through a speaker, you owe this man a debt

Wednesday 10/19/11

Blog Post Movie Review: Paul – The story of an alien and the men who loved him.

Thursday 10/20/11

Blog Post Radio DaZe: The early years – WRUV

Friday 10/21/11

Blog Post Picture This: Prohibition

Saturday 10/22/11

Blog Post Aggregate Saturday: Posts too short for a full post.

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Aggregate Saturday

Aggregate Saturday

A fairly long entry in the “Juiced” section of this blog. 28 days and going very well.

I cut the fingers of my right hand, right where I type and use the mouse. Painful and slows me down. Maybe slowing down is not bad thing.

One of my favorite authors, Stephen King, always releases a new book around the time of my birthday. This year is no exception. But he is about a month late. I have 11/22/63: A Novel on preorder at Amazon, to arrive 11/08. I will hang on to it and read it during my break, at Thanksgiving. I still have the capacity to get excited about such things.

The Sister-in-law has decided to enter the world of the Internet. She is starting at square one. This is a mouse, level. Should be interesting. I have set up her machine (A nice large screen Toshiba Laptop) with Logmein, so I can take control from here and show her what I mean without getting my lazy ass down to her place.

I have today off. I can’t remember when I have had a Saturday off. I plan on getting a large Olive Garden takeout lunch, drinking far too much wine and then….I will probably fall asleep in front the of the Talladega Truck race. Bus driver’s holiday I think they call it.

The repair work from the Tropical Storm and Hurricane plods along. The guy is slow, but then again he is cantankerous. Gives me the finger and tells me to get back in the F..ing house. There you go. I put up with it because it is mostly not mean spirited. Mostly. And he is cheap and is doing many small jobs that a real contractor would not stoop to.
But the Long-Suffering Wife hates how slow it’s going. I wish it was done myself.

Lemon in hot water. Nature’s most perfect laxative.

28 days without a caffeine fix. Do I think I will go back to coffee, sodas with caffeine? Perhaps in moderation. I have had pretty regular glasses of wine. Still losing weight, still with very healthy blood pressures and low blood sugar readings. Read more >Here

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Picture this: Prohibiton

For some reason the first picture reminds me of the scene in “Animal House” where the college is emptying out the frat house. John Belushi’s character, Bluto watches with horror as the bar is carried out and screams like a girl when a bottle of Jack Daniel’s hits the ground.

How anybody, anywhere, thinks that Government can legislate morality has always struck me as hilarious. It’s never worked for booze, drugs, gambling, prostitution or any vice. Wouldn’t the time be better spent figuring ways to tax vice? Just a thought.

The ratification of the 16th Amendment — the income tax — in 1913 changed all that, and in January 1919 the 18th Amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale or importing of alcohol was ratified. Then a whole new set of problems descended. Prohibition

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Radio DaZe : The early years.

Radio DaZe : The early years.

It was my first radio job. 10 watts. So low on the dial most radios couldn’t receive it. Listenership? Probably me and my dog.

WRUV-FM was student run by the University of Vermont. I worked for the campus bookstore and in the summer of ’69 I was drafted to play DJ weeknights, 8pm to midnight. I was enthralled.

I had less than no experience. That’s not quite true. A buddy and I built a sort of radio station in his basement. A mad scientist neighbor provided an actual transmitter that allowed us to broadcast to the neighborhood. Our on-air schedule was limited. After school. Some Saturdays. But it was a training ground.

WRUV-FM (Radio University Vermont) had two formats. Up until 8pm it played classical music. At night it was turned over to the music that we called at the time “progressive” – a mix of rock, folk and really almost anything except classical.

There was no supervision. After I was shown how to operate the control board and the transmitter – which was up three flights of rickety stairs tucked away in a closet – I was left alone.

Often the preceding announcer had missed the timing on his last concerto so that it ended after my start time of 8pm. For a few nights I waited out the strains of Bach or Debussy to begin spinning the Doors or the Yardbirds. Then I became rebellious and creative. I began mixing odd sound effects and weird swatches of dialogue from an immense spoken word collection the college harbored into the symphonies. I wish I had tapes of those early sound collages. Even more I wish I could have seen the faces of whomever was listening, never expecting Beethoven to meld with the Mothers of Invention.

I had no clue about what I was doing. I barely understood the mechanics of it. I was flying without instruments, landing gear or fear. The library available to me was so wide and varied that I doubt I played the same song twice in three months. I learned what segues worked and with some train wrecks, what didn’t. I stubbed my toes over the concepts of key, timbre, content and theme but couldn’t have named them if you put a gun to my head.

Four hours went by in what felt like moments. I cued up my first song, put my head down and all of a sudden it was midnight. I rarely talked on the microphone. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I was still timid, in the throes of adolescent voice changes. I was afraid my acne-ravaged face would come across the airwaves and I already had enough problems with mirrors.

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Movie Review: Paul

Paul 2010 NR 104 minutes

Director Greg Mottola (More As This Story Develops (TV movie) (filming),2009 Adventureland, 2007 Superbad) has done a spectacular job with Simon Peggs story about two Sci-Fi obsessed Brits (Pegg is one of them) on a vacation to tour the alien hot spots of the world such as Area 51. In their travels they encounter an actual alien (Paul) and the film becomes a basic road trip adventure with the two hapless brits trying to get the alien to the place where the mother ship can pick him up.

Full of sly (and some not so sly) references to other films in the Sci-Fi genre I found it enormously funny, and it had heart galore, on the same note, not taking itself too seriously. Sigourney Weaver was a treat and the “Alien references” were, as the brits say, “Spot on”.

Well worth watching.

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Edgar M Villchur R.I.P.

You don’t know the name, Edgar M Villchur – but you have heard his work all your life.

Many times we take the world around us and the devices that we use for granted. Things just work, right?
But the process of design and invention is what bring us the modern miracles that we enjoy, thoughtlessly.

Villchur, back in the 1950’s when Hi-FI was still a word used to describe the listening to pre-recorded music had some ideas. At that time the state of the art was refrigerator sized speakers to handle the bass notes. Villchur found that by just closing the cabinet in the back that he could reduce the size and came up with a speaker that produced deep rich bass tones in 1/4 the size. It was an immediate success.

Villchur went to produce several more speaker innovations, including the concept of feeding the high frequency signals to a “tweeter”, a special speaker more able to handle the tones than the big bass speakers. Then he did the same thing for mid-range tones.

One of his greatness inventions was the AR (his company was Acoustic Research) turntable, which was “belt-driven” – isolating the motor from the platter and significantly reducing rumble. I still have one somewhere. It was a great sounding unit, but a little hard to keep the belt on at times.

AR went out of business in 2004, then the name resurrected by Audiovox. It stinks.

When he left AR Mr. Villchur started the Foundation for Hearing Aid Research in Woodstock, where he developed a prototype of the multichannel compression hearing aid that has become an industry standard.

Not a bad contribution.

Edgar M Villchur

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Why Dan Wheldon Raced

I don’t like showing this, but it’s key to my point.

Dan Wheldon was a race car driver. It’s what he did until the day he died.

Race car drivers that I have interviewed, good ones anyway, all share a common trait or two. One is the competitive spirit. They want to win, to beat everybody else on that track. Nothing else matters and second is the first loser.

And fearlessness. I have driven a stock car at speed into the first corner at Pocono Raceway. It takes a load of nerve to do it with your foot on the floor, more than I possess. These drivers do it everyday, every corner faced like it’s an enemy to be conquered.

Open wheel racing of any sort has always seemed to me to be the scariest of all. Watching the video just reaffirms my thinking that if racers all have some sort of gene in them that turns off the fear, then the guys (and gals) that race 220 MPH with their heads sticking out of that car in the breeze must have more of it. Whatever it is.

Dale Earnhardt Sr. was quoted once, and I can’t find the exact one so I am paraphrasing.

He said

some people like to talk about racing. I don’t want to talk. I want to race.

Perhaps a fitting epitaph for Dan Wheldon.

Dan Wheldon 1978-2011

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Sunday Wrap:

Sunday Wrap:

That's a wrap

Juiced!


Monday 10/10/11

Blog Post Caption: Have You Seen Frank?

Tuesday

Blog Post Swing and a miss-spelling version

Wednesday

Blog Post Weekender Column: Facebook Friends

Thursday

Blog Post Radio DaZe: The early years

Friday

Blog PostPicture This: Lewd?

Saturday

Blog Post” target=”_self”>Blog Post Saturday Aggregate: That was the week that was

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Aggregate Saturday:

Aggregate Saturday:

So my numbers according to the great almighty gawd “GOOGLE” went thru the roof yesterday. I bet it was the “lewd” post. Show a little T&A and the battle for eyeballs is won.

Maybe I should just throw in the towel and put up a porn site.

With over 350 Happy Birthday wishes on Facebook, you would think I was a pretty popular guy. But it’s just FB friends and I am just a FB whore.

Porn site looking pretty good after all.

Dramatic decrease in word output this week. Just wasn’t in touch with my muse. Concentrating on my health which is paying dividends in spades. Guess which is more important to me?

A separate post, updated daily is “Juiced” – worth a look if you want to be healthier.

Three late nights in the world of regular work for me, culminating in a very late night tonight, well past midnight. Possibly some slack in the Sunday’s endeavors. In any case a rare Saturday off next week. I will hardly know what to do with it. It will probably rain.

Travails, trails and tribulations with putting the In-laws joint to rights continue. Basement clean out to accommodate new furnace installation. Literally floor to ceiling with only a shoulder wide path. Took six men and a dumpster just to to make room for the new furnace, which they don’t like (coal was better) and can’t understand how to use the thermostat. One day set for 46, next day for 98.
New stove fiasco. Old one functional but new one would be better. HAS to be non digital. Found same at Home Depot, was viewed and grudgingly approved (It’s new. It’s different. We don’t like it.) Order cancelled.

Moral:
Don’t have relatives in any sort of proximity.

Enough. Thanks for reading. Sorry, no lewd photo today.

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Picture This: Lewd?

While her outfit is certainly sexy I can’t say that it rises (pun intended) to the level of lewd.

The story: The airline thought it was.

Kyla Ebbert, a waitress in California, appeared on several national news programs in 2007 after she was told by a flight attendant on Southwest Airlines that her skimpy outfit was potentially offensive to other passengers. Rather than go home, change and take a later flight, she draped a blanket over her legs, then did the rounds of morning talk shows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/business/on-youtube-a-debate-over-the-right-to-fly-with-your-pants-down.html

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