James Rising

Sunday Wrap: the week of 12/5/11-12/10/11

A look back at the past weeks postings. Many times I forget that people need a little road map to the things that get put up on my blog so this is the best way I know how to catch you up. I sincerely thank you for reading. Both of you!

A mixed bag this week, per usual: Ladybugs are an insect I can live with (and do) – A new favorite TV show courtesy of my Sister’s suggestion – A column about not so heroic men and some who are – A funny radio entry and a look at a little known feature of radio and TV stations.

Monday 12/5/11

Blog Post A post about ladybugs.

Tuesday 12/6/11

Blog Post Tuesday Review – AMC’s “Hell On Wheels”

Wednesday 12/7/11

Blog Post Weekender Column- Heroes are hard to find

Thursday 12/8/11

Blog Post Radio DaZe- WAQY and the IHOP

Friday 12/9/11

Blog Post The Public File

Saturday 12/10/11

Blog Post Saturday Morning Agggregate

Saturday Morning Aggregate: 12/10/11

Christmas shopping with Long-Suffering Wife is the plan today. It’s an ordeal under the best of circumstances, and today will be in the lower 30’s,( It’s 27 now) possibly with snow flurries. Could this be any MORE fun?
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My last visit with the study on diabetes I have been involved with for the last 13 months was yesterday. I have learned a lot about me, the disease and eating in the past year. I will catch up on my blog post Juiced and spell out some of this stuff. Probably not today because (see above).
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We live in the arctic wilderness of NEPA. Downtown all the snow from Wednesday’s storm is gone. Outside our windows it looks like the dead of winter. This does nothing to make us happy.
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The one bonus of the weekend: I do have all of today off due to some schedule juggling. It actually works out for the best as the shopping MUST be done today so the packing can done Sunday so the packages can be mailed to Tn, Ct and Vt on Monday.
Whew! I hate this part of the Christmas experience.
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The MGB is asking to be turned into a trip to Disney-world. In other words I am really, really, really seriously thinking about selling it. The clutch is not working- I tried every fix I could find online. No dice. The solution is a 75$ tow to the MG mechanic. Maybe not until Spring. Stupid car.
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…just hear those sleigh bells ringing…

Odd thing about this song. It’s played every Chrirtmas but has NOTHING to do with the holiday.

The “public files,” a little-known but rich trove of teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing and sometimes heartfelt correspondence that all television and radio outlets must maintain and make available for viewing, under federal law.

Besides letters, the public file includes nuts-and-bolts information about each station, including descriptions of its programs and Federal Communications Commission license, and information on political advertisement spending. At some stations the files fill multiple binders, or several stacks of cabinets.

The idea, perhaps quaint in the era of cable television and the Internet, is to make the stations, which broadcast over the public’s airwaves, answerable to the public.

And in the spirit of accountability, the stations are required to make the files available to anyone who walks in the door and requests them during normal business hours.

But not every station does so.

So want to have some fun with your local radio or TV station? Go in, unannounced and ask to see the “Public File”.

You must, by Federal Law, be allowed to see it and look at all it contains, during regular business hours.

You will find, as the authors of this article did, that you will often be greeted with blank looks, or outright turned down. Doesn’t matter how big or how small that station is. They are supposed to have a smooth, well oiled system for this and often don’t

Not to blow my horn but when I was in charge it was done by the book-we got hit by an F.C.C. inspector once while I was at sea on a cruise and his comment to the G.M. was that we were “in perfect compliance.”

Not a big deal but certainly good to know.

The Public File

Radio Daze: WAQY and the IHOP

This is somewhat ‘inside’ but funny nonetheless.

FM radio has the ability to broadcast more than one stream of programming at a time. (Now with HD radio it’s several more but I digress.) This technology is called multiplexing and uses a sideband or subcarrier of the FM signal to carry the information. It robs the main signal of a certain percentage of it’s available modulation but can be quite profitable when sold to the right client.

WAQY had sold it’s sideband to the MUZAK service in the area. MUZAK is, according to their website:

Muzak was established in 1934 to provide music to businesses, creating a new industry focused on enhancing the customer experience, and for more than 75 years, Muzak has been the industry leader in providing commercial media solutions.

Basically MUZAK was what we used to disdainfully call “Elevator” music. It was background pablum for the masses to listen to in dentist’s waiting rooms and in department stores. I am surprised to see it still survives. Looking at the website they seem to have branched out a bit into all sorts of music-tough to tell but I have to imagine they have gone to web deliverable products.

MUZAK systems were often installed in big stores, and they doubled as a PA system.

But, back in the late 70’s they used FM subcarriers. It was good solid technology at the time (sort of..more in a moment) and could be picked up on an FM radio tuned to that subcarrier, so it was easy to get to the customer.
Outside of the WACKY 102 control room, next to the WTYM automation was a tall equipment rack with two of the biggest reel to reel tape machines I had ever seen.

Normal reel to reel machines can take up to 10 1/2″ inch reels. These were 15 or 20 inches in diameter. They carried the slushy music and it was our duty to make sure they were loaded and working. Ha!

First of all there was no guideline on this. The rack had two of these hulking monsters and the idea was that it would play a song from one deck, a cue tone (inaudible-NOT-more to come) would play at the end of the song, stop the deck and start the other deck up. It worked, until it didn’t.

We were supposed to change the reels daily, and clean the heads. It got done as time permitted. Rarely. The tape was super thin, the decks were slow to rewind and the whole mess was a nightmare. Plus, no one seemed to care. Tapes were ruined, bootstrapped and then roughly edited. Whole reels would be loaded backwards, best case the muzak was muffled, worse case it would play those songs BACKWARDS. The rack unit had NO facility to monitor the output so it was anybody’s guess what was being broadcast.

I discovered, quite by accident, that one of the MUZAK clients was the local IHOP (International House Of Pancakes). I made my discovery while eating lunch there one day. I heard a song play, then there was this horrendous loud burst of static and then another song would begin. It did it all the time I was there. I mean it was LOUD. Waitresses were dropping trays. Old people were fainting. It was horrible to say the least but no one complained. It must have been like that for who knows how long.

I went back to WAQY and asked our crackerjack engineer, Ken Jones (R.I.P) about it. He investigated and discovered that the tone sense was malfunctioning and instead of muting the tone it was amplifying it so much that it turned into the static I heard while trying to enjoy my Chocolate Chip pancakes at the IHOP.

Ken and I both kept mum about it. He fixed it and I went back to IHOP and all was well. Who knows how long it had been doing that, and how long it would have done it if I hadn’t gone to lunch?

WEEKENDER – Column for 12/7/11

Some say that heroes are hard to find. Certainly lately here in NEPA there has been a shortage of heroic behavior going by the newspaper headlines. Heroes that had apparently been hewn out of solid granite have been turned to smoke and ash and left in smoldering ruins.

In the offices and homes of the Penn State faithful there has been a great disturbance in the force. Cherished and hard come by grip and grin photos with JoePa now languish in drawers, leaving clear traces of where they hung on walls or stood on desks. Huge grinning standups have been tossed in the attic. Christmas ornaments with Penn State logos may not be unboxed this year. And up North a bit, it’s doubtful if many will proudly sport Syracuse Orange in the wake of a similar brouhaha.

Our Northeast Pa political leaders and courthouse nobility, those who wore the robes of higher power will spend the holidays in the slammer in state issued finery. The odd (some very odd) religious leaders have been brought down by feet of clay. And on the national scene it’s even worse. Want to find out if your husband has ever had an affair? Have him run for president. Just ask Herman Cain.

Even the world of pro sports has been marred by big names being dragged through the mud. Tiger Woods changed the face of golf forever and now can’t get out of the trap he drove himself into. Where are our hero’s?

Perhaps we look in the wrong places for icons to help us navigate. Maybe we need to change our focus and look around at street level. There are heroes among us every day. Look to the soup kitchens feeding more and more hungry all the time. The workers there are tired and underappreciated but are surely heroes. Look to the homeless shelters, beleaguered, understaffed and woefully underfunded. The selfless folks who dedicate their time to the care of those unable to care for themselves deserve a pedestal.

It’s not hard once you get going. Emergency room workers who care for the sick and injured, ambulance drivers, who risk their lives to get them there, law enforcement, and firefighters, who get in harm’s way to protect and serve.
And the men and women who serve still on foreign soil in our armed forces.

Heroes are not so hard to find.

So I don’t put the heat on in my studio unless I plan on working. It’s complicated and expensive, a gas fireplace and several space heaters. But today I had a client coming in so I did the duty and also threw up the expected microphone arrangements, tested same and got the headphone monitors working. Booted up the computer, lit the candles and made the cookies. All set.

For the second week in a row, the third client cancelled.

Is it me? Does my breath stink? Do I need body wash? Plastic surgery?

Two of them were nice enough to call beforehand and I will expect to do business with them again.

However one of them just was a no show, then called the next day all apologies. Uh huh, yeah, uh huh, call me another time. IN THE YEAR 2525!

Seriously, when did the time of others become so expendable? I am a highly trained professional with a state of the art facility. I am cost effective and certainly priced lower than many of my competitors.

Plus I make cookies. Good ones too.

R.I.P. “Squeal Like A Pig For Me”

Bill McKinney, a character actor whose most recognizable performance was as a menacing hillbilly in the 1972 film “Deliverance,” died on Thursday at a hospital near his home in Van Nuys, Calif. He was 80.

This scene nearly got me fired from my job at WHEB-FM in the 80’s.

We did scenes from movies, recreating the dialogue and sound effects with our cast of five (my, weren’t we ahead of the curve..or behind it) and we chose this one day.

Management was FURIOUS and told us to never to do it again.

I have a big problem with being told what NOT to do so we did it again the next day…in French. And the day after that in German (which was, as I recall REALLY funny) and then in Navaho (one of the writers was Indian).

Management was less than amused. I couldn’t have cared less. It led to one of many meetings where I suggested that they just fire me. But they never did.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/movies/bill-mckinney-actor-in-deliverance-dies-at-80.html

Tuesday Review – Hell On Wheels.

I was a BIG fan of Deadwood. Boy was I pissed off when they just up and killed that show.
Having said that, Deadwood, with it’s pervasive profanity and occasional porn like moments, was a tough show to watch. Especially if there was anyone else in the range of the audio track who didn’t care for swearing. This little link FPM will give you an idea what I am talking about. It’s the F’s per minute in Deadwood. Impressive.

I preface this review of Hell On Wheels (AMC- Sunday night, 9 PM ET) with this because the shows are brother and sisters, sort of. The same gritty realism, the same shot through a camera lense coated with amber, the same general plot lines. It rings very similar and is a big part of why I enjoy it so much.

Hell On Wheels is set in the wild west of 1865. The railroad is trying to move west and the crew of roughnecks who clear the road (blacks) and lay the tracks (whites, mostly Irish) and lay the women are the focus of the story. The language is toned down from the standpoint of Deadwood and the sex is mostly insinuated (just why is the whores’ head bobbing up and down in the background?) not graphic.

The subplot revolves around the former Confederate soldier, Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) who is on the search for the Union soldiers that killed his wife. Along the way he convinces the railroad boss man Thomas “Doc” Durant (Colm Meaney) to make him the supervisor. He is distracted by his search and does only a passable job of it. Meanwhile the pretty widow Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott) is the only survivor of a Cheyenne attack and has her husband’s last survey papers which Durant wants, desperately.

Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., better known as Common, plays bi-racial Elam Ferguson, a recently freed slave who is the straw boss of the cut gang who clear the way for the tracks. Ferguson and Bohannon do not get along to put it mildly.

So there you have it, loads of conflict and intrigue. Stir in the many colorful characters such as Christopher Heyerdahl playing The Swede who is riviting, the multitude of whores and desperate and dirty men and you have the base of the show.

One of the stars is of course the setting. The T’suu T’ina Native Indian Reservation, an Indian reserve in southern Alberta, was the location for most of the exteriors and the depiction of the slime, slop and horse shit that were everyday obstacles lacks only the smell. True Grit this is not.

www.amctv.com/shows/hell-on-wheels

I am not a fan of bugs in my house. I have written before about stinkbugs (Halyomorpha halys) invading our residence. They are useless and smell even worse than a politician. I was not and am not a fan of bees, yellow-jackets and others with stingers. I am compelled to swat, spray and otherwise KILL, KILL, KILL.

Spiders don’t make me happy when they join me in the shower. As a point of reference, and I mean this, all creatures large or small with more than a pair of legs are not welcome in our house. Centipedes, millipedes and howevermanypedes please take note.

But for some odd reason I am unable to work up the same degree of enmity for the ladybug (Coleoptera, meaning “sheath-winged”, and Coccinellidae, meaning “little red sphere”) even though she he it is just as disgusting if not worse than all of the above.

Why do they appear in Fall in my house?

After consuming aphids all summer-long, the air starts to turn brisk, and the Ladybugs begin to seek shelter for the winter. They cluster together by the thousands (for warmth, it’s presumed) under dead leaves, inside hollow logs, and even high up in the eaves of our houses. For still unknown reasons, they tend to prefer light-colored structures with a prominent southern exposure. There they will remain – in hibernation – until the warmer temperatures return, indicating that Spring has come and the aphid population has been replenished. The Ladybugs will then devote themselves to several days of eating and frenzied mating, the females sometimes feeding and breeding at the same time!

Gotta love females who eat and “breed” at the same time.

Ladybugs are back

“Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home….your house is on fire, and your children will burn. Except
little Nan, who sits in a pan, weaving gold laces as fast as she can!”

A look back at the past weeks postings. Many times I forget that people need a little road map to the things that get put up on my blog so this is the best way I know how to catch you up. I sincerely thank you for reading. Both of you!
This week’s offerings are a little on the lean side. I was on vacation and for a change really took some time to reflect, kick back and screw off. A promise to return to form, for good or bad in the coming weeks.

Monday 10/10/11

Blog Post No Reservations-in which we get screwed out of our vacation.

Tuesday

Blog Post Tuesday Review: 11/22/63 A Novel – Stephen King

Wednesday No Post

Thursday No Post

Friday

Blog PostLet’s all get small- I had Micropsia as a kid.

Saturday

Blog PostSaturday Aggregate: That was the week that was