@Hillary Rettig: It counts as old timey now! That’s the funny thing about time – stuff keeps getting older and mentally I stay the same age.
9.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Anne Frank’s stepsister says Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is “acting like another Hitler.”
“I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism,” wrote Eva Schloss, 86, in a piece published in Newsweek on Wednesday — Holocaust Memorial Day.
Schloss is an Auschwitz survivor.
10.
Soylent Green
An 80s boombox is an old-timey radio? Get off my lawn.
11.
Betty Cracker
@Smiling Mortician: That’s what my sister said! Hey, you’re not her, are you?!?!?
She both has a vagina and asked Trump about his misogyny. She needed to be punished, lest the disease spread.
19.
Betty Cracker
@Soylent Green: It’s playing “Slippery People” (radio, not cassette), so it kinda fits.
20.
Schlemazel
When my folks got a TV the family radio eventually ended up in my bedroom (after my older brothers left) It was a great big old thing and late at night, when it was too hot to sleep I would search the dial for adventure. AM signals travel forever at after sundown. Hearing real rock and roll done by Fats Domino and Little Richard instead of Pat Boone was an experience. “Brother Billy” From Waco, TX promised he would send me a miracle through the mail if I sent him $5 and asked his audience for a round of applause for CH-HE-zuz when he healed the lame. It was a great time that just can’t happen anymore.
@redshirt:
Do you still automatically start singing the next song on the album when a song ends? SHuffle killed that!
I have to call my nieces’ devil woman of a mother to see if she’ll let them come visit during their spring break. I need help psyching myself up for it, because she’s a classic narcissist and I hate talking to her.
“Brother Billy” From Waco, TX promised he would send me a miracle through the mail if I sent him $5 and asked his audience for a round of applause for CH-HE-zuz when he healed the lame. It was a great time that just can’t happen anymore.
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism. — Alexander Hamilton
24.
HinTN
@Schlemazel: WLS out of Chicago got this (privileged) hick through the night in the mid-sixties.
25.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
Well, they sure have moved up to TV and the huckster bullshit covers more than just phony faith healers these days. But the adventure that does not happen any more was the amazing mixture of stuff you could discover, radio stations all over the country that did not sound exactly like every other radio station, regional music and news. It was more the discovery; Minnesotan’s would never have clapped and cheered wildly for God in public! What would the neighbors think?
More likely that Sanders will be told he needs to tone down or drop the whole I promise to raise your taxes thing. He could probably get some decent traction talking about infrastructure and investment while avoiding using the T word.
@Schlemazel: Even better, when a band would blend the end of one song into the beginning of the next.
We’ve lost so much for 99 cent downloads.
29.
Mike E
I have nearly the identical boom box, heh…the whip antenna broke off tho
30.
HinTN
@Mnemosyne: Yes! Nancy Smash is just laying down a marker.
31.
Kyle
Chris Matthews has Ann Coulter on as a guest. The hell?
32.
Schlemazel
@HinTN:
Oh yeah! KAAY Little Rock, particularly after midnight. Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford on the mighty 1090! WLS and I think it was WLW from Cincinnati
33.
Cacti
And speaking of old timey…
Does anyone else find it hard to believe that tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster?
34.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
Santana’s Abraxis was a musical journey with no break between tunes. Good times
35.
Baud
@Cacti: If that happened today, they’d blame Obama.
Well, I am trying to liberate them from the durance vile of living with her, at least for a week.
I’m a little worried she won’t let them come out because my local sister-in-law screwed up last year and let the girls dye their hair without asking permission. That was a freakin’ fiasco.
37.
Germy
@Schlemazel: I remember a Monty Python album with a hidden third side.
@Baud: Can you imagine? He might actually be impeached over it. Two shuttles blew up during Republican administrations. Meh.
39.
jl
@HinTN: I agree. Sanders needs to be much clearer and much more forceful in explaining how he will implement his plans and how average person will benefit.
Otherwise, he risks getting labeled as a tax and spend DemocRAT big gummint liberal.
I’ve been supporting Sanders, but was not pleased by how he rolled out his health plan, and lack of a clear map on how he can push for single payer while continuing to improve PPACA.
Obama, and Pelosi, have had responsibility and experience negotiating the hazards of national electoral politics, and Sanders has not. I don’t mind if they lay down a few helpful markers for the old coot.
40.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: Tell her you personally know and will introduce them to the next president of the United States of America.
I’d avoid getting into details, however.
41.
Germy
Larry David will be hosting the next SNL. Expect a lot of Bernie appearances in that episode.
I swiped that from my brother without knowing about the hidden third side. Freaked me the hell out when I first discovered it.
43.
cat copeland
Hey wait a corn-popping minute here. I just happen to have some of ‘does’ cassette things that work in this here music machine thingy.. The best music EVER Thank You!!!!!
44.
The Other Chuck
@redshirt: Plenty of newer albums do continuous mixes. And for all the 99 cent singles, it’s nowhere near as bad as the bland uniform shapes that radio forced so much modern music into.
45.
jl
@Germy: Maybe others liked it better, but I thought that, already, the second installment of the David/Sanders schtick was pretty tired. Hope they do better this time.
IMHO, tired lazy writing has long been a problem with SNL. Haven’t watched it regularly for years, so not sure how much it is now.
46.
Germy
@Mnemosyne: I remember buying David Bowie and Harry Nilsson albums in the ’70s and they were “flexi-disc” (weird, extra thin, wobbly and sometimes red). I imagine they’d be collectors’ items today, if I hadn’t sold them off in the late ’80s.
I have inherited a lots of old timey Hindi movie albums in cassette form from husband kitteh’s father. Is there a way to easily digitize cassettes?
49.
Steeplejack
The big blizzard isn’t sexy any more, but it’s still a pain in the ass. There’s a shitload of snowpack that’s not going anywhere any time soon. I just started to notice some non-trivial melting today. Area schools (here in NoVa) are closed for the rest of the week, government office schedules vary wildly. D.C. schools opened today, to widespread outrage that the neighboring streets and sidewalks aren’t cleared yet.
I still have enough cat food and rum to get me through another few days, and today I was able to get a pizza delivered from my usual spot. Sheer luxury! The driver said he couldn’t get into the neighborhood the usual way and had to circle around a few blocks to come in a different way. I gave him a big tip.
Yesterday I was sitting by the window reading on my tablet and observing the street below, and I realized that I have become that crabby old neighbor in every cop show ever. “Talk to that old guy across the street—maybe he saw something.”
I accidentally listened to the CBS national (TV) news a while ago, and Bernie Sanders sounds exactly like Larry David. It’s uncanny.
54.
Just Some Fuckhead
Jesus H. W. Christ, this debate nonsense on the Democratic side is reason enough to strip Debbie Wasserman Schultz of her American citizenship and throw her into Gitmo.
55.
lgerard
A lot of the kids today seem to think cassettes are cool. They are particularly popular with west coast 60’s revivalists who record exclusively to cassette.
They didn’t have to live through the cassette era.
And since it’s an open thread and we will never get a You Benign Balloon Juice Butchers Cheered On The Destablization of Libya And Look At It Now post, let’s put it out there so maybe next time these fuckers won’t be so cavalier about intervention.
60.
Betty Cracker
@Steeplejack: Glad your supplies are holding out! I can relate about being the go-to neighborhood chronicler. I serve a similar function here locally as the resident semi-shut-in, i.e., I work from home. Hope the Big Melt comes soon!
“Jim Gilmore,” he said Wednesday morning, picking up the call.
The former Virginia governor is the Republican presidential candidate you probably forgot was still in the running – if you’ve heard of him at all. But he’ll have the chance to introduce himself to Americans Thursday night when he takes the stage in Des Moines, Iowa as an unexpected participant in the undercard Republican presidential debate.
63.
ThresherK
@Schlemazel: There is a website called FadedSignals with all the broadcasting advertising memorabilia you could ever want.
It goes great with spinning around on AM. As a radio geek I have two skills: The sacred art of tuning the analog radio dial, and listening to two AM stations on the same frequency at the same time.
The last one is underappreciated in my home. I’ll be digging some signals out of the mud and my wife will say “How can you hear anything? It’s just static! It hurts my ears.”
Hidden songs were a big thing on cassettes. Kind of a nuisance waiting for them.
67.
RSA
I happen to have asked my classroom of college students about cassettes just last week. They know what cassettes are, and (mainly, I gather, from riding in cars that still have cassette players–factory cassettes were available until 2010 in the U.S.) they know how to use them. I was surprised, to be honest.
@debbie: In the ’80s, if you walked along any heavily trafficked road, you’d see curled up bits of tape on the ground and crushed cassettes from people throwing them disgustedly out their car windows after they jammed and broke in cheap car cassette players.
71.
Jeffro
@Steeplejack: At work today (finally! yes!) those of us who are parents had a good group cry when the school division made the announcement about Thurs and Fri.
Also nice to see some Minnesotan knocking NoVA around in the Post today…sheesh, give us a break folks, we get hit like this once a decade or so…
Praises enthusiasm of his campaign and supporters. Says no way in Hades are House Dems going to run on a platform of raising everyone’s taxes.
I don’t mind her pushing back on Sanders, but I don’t like to see her buying into the right-wing framing about taxes.
I have to admit, the way it was framed by fictional candidate Matt Santos in the West Wing was actually really good — he said something like “If I have to pay for health care, I don’t care if you call it a tax or you call it a premium, all I care about is which one’s cheaper”. That’s an easy framing that Sanders could use but he has danced around it.
73.
Jeffro
@Soylent Green: This post made me go look up my old (80’s) boombox on eBay…the ones that still work (or have been refurbished) are going for quite a bit!
74.
Granite
Donald Trump is pulling off a win/win/win with boycotting the debate.
As Krauthammer said, he’s using reality tv tactics brilliantly in the political realm. He’s unstoppable, baby.
Otherwise, he risks getting labeled as a tax and spend DemocRAT big gummint liberal.
Otherwise? Risk?
More like “Marxist Bernie Sanders and the Bolshevik Democrats are running on a promise to raise your taxes, and give you a healthcare system that even Vermont rejected.”
76.
Schlemazel
@ThresherK:
You can get pretty good at fine tuning when a tenth of an inch makes the difference between all music and a music/static mix. Can’t say I enjoy overlapping stations but it would be a skill.
Hell, they’ll use that attack even if Hillary is nominee. It’s not like they have shame
80.
p.a.
@RSA: Don’t forget, at human scale at least, life is analog.
81.
Patricia Kayden
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: O-o. I can just see Mr. Bulbous Orange Head raging about how she’s such a huge loser with low ratings and a poor excuse for a journalist, etc., etc., etc. The tweets will be fast and furious.
When I was in art school, I constructed an assemblage from chewed up cassette tapes. They were everywhere.
83.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
My kids – youngest is 28 – are very familiar with cassettes. Raffi and Dr. Demento mix tapes were a staple of family road trips. The kids can sing “Fish Heads” and “Down By the Bay”
84.
Germy
@MomSense: Where do you buy needles? Back when I had a turntable (decades ago) I used to walk to my local record store for new ones, but there are no record stores now…
@debbie: Too much work. I don’t recall ever hearing of a hidden cassette song – there’s only so much tape to hide it. Even for REM. My first experience with hidden songs was with the advent of CD’s – Nirvana had one on Nevermind, for example. It makes a lot more sense on CD’s because there’s more storage capability.
But I could be totally wrong here.
86.
p.a.
They make them now with usb’s to rip to digital files.
87.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: That’s his problem — answering on the first ring shows that Gilmore has got nothing better to do with his time and is just lazing around the house desperately waiting for someone to call. Trump would let the call go to voicemail like the winner he is.
I really miss listening to my shortwave radio. Of course when traveling in far-off, non English speaking places the peppy BBC music followed by those six little beeps was the greatest thing.
According to a different Wiki article, the Beatles had the first hidden song on Abbey Road (“Her Majesty”).
90.
Germy
@debbie: On the UK version of Sgt. Pepper there is a weird little track right after “A Day In The Life”
As “A Day in the Life” ends, a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone is heard; it was added at Lennon’s suggestion with the intention that it would annoy dogs.[194][nb 24] This is followed by the sounds of backwards laughter and random gibberish that was pressed into the record’s concentric run-out groove, which loops back into itself endlessly on any record player not equipped with an automatic needle return. Lennon can be heard saying, “been so high”, followed by McCartney’s response: “never could be any other way”.
91.
Schlemazel
@BR:
Nancy has to worry about seats. Since Dems are tarred with the “tax and spend liberal” tag she knows that feeding into that bullshit would cost her party seats. Bernie should and could use the “West Wing” line of attack but it will eter the echo chamber and be sent back as “hid your wallet here come the Dems to steal your money to give to the T-bone buck, Cadillac queen, takers”. Sadly. It works.
92.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
My turn table died & I have been debating getting one with a USB connection and software that would allow me to digitize all my old music. Going through 200 LPs and picking out the stuff I want to keep would probably keep me busy for a few weeks.
[. . .] those of us who are parents had a good group cry when the school division made the announcement about Thurs and Fri.
I can imagine! On the early local news a reporter was talking to a group of tween girls about what they’re doing, do they like being out of school, etc.
My son orders them. He inherited my vinyl collection which I also inherited (and added to)from a dear friend of my parents. The vinyl collection keeps growing and even though we don’t listen all that often, it is really fun when we do.
When I was in art school, I constructed an assemblage from chewed up cassette tapes.
It used to be very common to use cassette tapes for telltales on sailboats. Lighter than yarn, more responsive to changes in wind, and there wasn’t really anything else to do with a bad cassette.
We had a woman in our club complaining that yarn on the shrouds looked too “ghetto” and wanted everyone to only use the masthead windex. I threatened to break out the cassettes.
Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t watch cable news but I don’t see how this Trump debate thing helps him. The others aren’t going to join him. Fox isn’t going to show his debate. He may end up accepting the Fox debate invitation, but he’d have to really spin it to say he won some concession.
105.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
The only connection I remember is “The Bishop” a cop show send up where a bishop tries (and fails) to prevent the killing of priests. The enters one church and sees that the text to be read is from Leviticus and tries to stop the priest from reading it but he does & the pulpit explodes.
Of course, his opponents and corporate media will try to portray him that way. What I meant was that if he does not shape up (Otherwise) he risks having those labels stick with a critical mass of voters.
At least he is in better shape than Baud “We have until November to mess this up” 2916! That miserable inept campaign proudly advertises that its candidate is a frivolous dissolute wastrel, who has yet to propose a single policy of interest to anyone other than a gin soaked chain-smoker chained to the slots at the local c a $ ee n o, wondering if there are any good strip shows later that night within staggering distance.
107.
p.a.
@Schlemazel: I made sure my now obsolete 7.1 audio/video receiver (pre- hdmi connections) had a preamp for vinyl. Now that vinyl is making a comeback I assume preamp fcn will be more common. The Ion digital converting turntable has a preamp built in.
108.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
I will do it but I am cheap & don’t want to spend the cash on such a short-term usage. I’ll do it one day soon.
109.
Gin & Tonic
@Steeplejack: Indeed. Vinyl is making quite the comeback. My son (who lives in Brooklyn, obvs) has been slowly stealing portions of my collection, which, like my collection of CD’s, is best “counted” with a tape measure.
who has yet to propose a single policy of interest to anyone other than a gin soaked chain-smoker chained to the slots at the local c a $ ee n o, wondering if there are any good strip shows later that night within staggering distance.
Primaries are about appealing to the base.
111.
Schlemazel
@BR:
Oh, is old rocks for brains here again tonight? just ignore him, he’ll go away. responding only encourages him.
@p.a.:
The last money I spent on a real stereo set up was probably 30 years ago, it was very high end for the time but now it is a stack of antiques. I have thought about connecting the headphone output to the microphone input on the PC for capture but question if the quality would take too much of a hit. I figure in a couple more years my hearing will be so bad it won’t matter so that is still a possibility.
There are several turntables made specifically with a USB cable to feed digital capture. the run from ~$100 to ~$600 and I am not sure how to evaluate which is any good.
120.
p.a.
@Mike J: Was it here at BJ I saw a laser record player? Wonder if it skips if you dance?
121.
Schlemazel
@Mike J:
Gee, if I sent you a list of album I own maybe you could just send me the mp3 files for them :)
122.
Gin & Tonic
@BR: A troll with shifting allegiances. Some of us (well, me at any rate) like to poke at it with a stick once in a while because the switch from a couple of months ago absolutely positively without a doubt guaranteeing that it’d be Heb! to, now, Il Donaldo is amusing. But Schlemazel’s counsel is wise.
123.
Schlemazel
@BR:
No problem, he just crawled out from under his bridge a night or so ago & was quite the pain in the ass for a bit but toying with him got old so he just gets 86’ed now. He’ll get bored like reich 2 retch and go away.
@Gin & Tonic: Ol rocks seems even dumber than the previous. I seriously think it is Doug J as nobody as dense and silica brain could exist without a handler to help them find their ass with both hands.
@Iowa Old Lady: When we were starting topo, one of the examples was how they measured the circularity of the first-stage exhaust tubey things by spot measuring the diameter of each at three locations. “Now, folks, that can detect a circle, but what else can it detect?”
Entire class face palms. “A triangle…”
WTF, JPL?
Using a color of vinyl other than standard blackish as a novelty goes back a long way. The technology of that even improved over time – can recall one album, (though not the band’s name) which was a creamy white but included come colored pellets in the pressing, so also had random splotches of color*, And then there were (probably still are, in limited release) picture discs. There were even clear albums occasionally produced.
Less prevalent was non-black for singles. Although some children’s 45s did appear in translucent yellows and greens, IIRC.
*Much more difficult on that one for disk jockeys to find the correct groove to cue up
127.
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: In general the cheaper of those USB turntables are pretty poor at being turntables. Better, IMO, to buy a low-end turntable from a company that’s been making turntables for a while — Pro-Ject or Rega are good starting points — and pair it with a phono preamp with digital output.
Don’t feel guilty. Clear communication is very often a life-and-death proposition. Too few people know how to do it well enough, and people need to study the examples of communications failures to learn from them.
Cheers,
Scott.
131.
p.a.
@Schlemazel: I have the Ion ($90) and use it to play, but not yet to rip. Program supposedly filters pops and such.
I still have my Akai cass player from highschool (late ’70’s). Glass head good for 25,000+ hours. No FF or Rew function anymore. Have a friend’s Akai receiver, same era, only issue is synchro lock tuning, not digital. Kind of wanders. Discrete circuits, big heat sinks. It was his college dorm unit. The smoke/resin residue on it may have approached 1/4 inch thick. Good times.
132.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
Thanks – I know I should have asked here it just never occurred to me. there are people here that are expert and anything you can name.
TIL that Marvel Comics produced a KISS comic in the seventies that stated it was printed with the band member’s blood, and yes indeed, vials of blood from all the members of the band were added to the ink.
The 70’s were cool.
134.
ThresherK
@Schlemazel: Time to suss out what those “antiques” would get from the cool kids today. Nothing I spent money on would be described as “a real stereo set”.
There was surprisingly good AM and Aircraft/FM reception on the multiband Radio Shack devices from the 70s. Now I have to convince myself I don’t need to buy one on eBay.
135.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this made me chuckle (to refresh, Jim Gilmore is, I think, a Republican candidate for president, rumored to have once been a high ranking official of a good sized state, some say governor of Virginia but I think that’s an urban legend)
Jane C. Timm @ janestreet 1h1 hour ago
.@ gov_gilmore also told me he only watches @ MSNBC. “I think @ maddow’s really funny + I really like her. I don’t agree with her, obviously.”
gilmore also said he watches “the little guy with the glasses — @ chrislhayes!” and @ Lawrence most nights.
Christopher HayesVerified account
.@ janestreet @ gov_gilmore @ Lawrence I’m 6′ 200lbs, just for the record.
(Hayes and Sam Seder now agreeing that HRC agreeing to another debate before Sanders does is a real problem for Hillary)
@Major Major Major Major: I’m not actually sure what you just said there, but WTF is always a good question. :-)
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Tufte is just brilliant. I used to tell my engineering students that if I screwed up at work, probably no one died, but they couldn’t be sure the same thing wouldn’t apply to them.
138.
Baud
@redshirt: It’s those types of shenanigans that gave us Reagan.
@Iowa Old Lady: one of the theories is that one of the first stage parts wasn’t perfectly circular. The way they did QA for them was by measuring the diameter at three points, and if they matched, they declared it circular. Mathematically though that’s also a perfect definition of a triangle, or at a less extreme end, many ellipses. Dumb move.
I always thought the medium of cassette tape was very limiting on how much you could store on one tape.
Not really. There were standard 60 minute (30 minute per side) tapes, and longer ones of up to 120 minutes were available. Apparently, the longer ones had to use thinner tape to fit in the standard size cassette, which made them more prone to having the tape break.
I’ve now dug out my collection of SUPER AWESOME 80’S MIX TAPES and they’re incredible.
I’d spend days working on a mix tape so that every song was perfect. I’d add artwork too.
Sigh….
145.
Schlemazel
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I worked at KSC in the late 80s early 90s. Mny people there were there for Challenger. They all claimed to never want to go through that again. They didn’t act that way though. They regularly violated launch protocol & launched when winds were too high or temps too low. The political pressure was too great, they HAD to get that shit up on schedule. It was depressing.
I have told other horror stories here before so I won’t repeat them but the pinnacle was that someone tried to kill the Thiecol engineer that first called attention the the issue that brought Challenger down. He was run off the road into a deep ditch where he could have drowned. It was not an accident & nobody was ever identified as the attacker.
@Cacti: No Nancy joins the crowd of those losing the respect of those who once respected them. How in hell do Bernie’s proposals require an increase in taxes on anyone not in the .1% or on a simple elimination of breaks for trust funds an inheritance in general. Confiscate inheritance,ncreate an actual level playing field: all these terribly, terribly hard problems are solved.
I was in grad school in Ohio in the mid-late ’80s. I’d occasionally read AW&ST and see the stories about O-rings being burned halfway through on the SRBs. And how some were saying that was Ok because there was still another 50% left so there was a fine safety margin. I thought it was obviously nuts and obviously dangerous, but it was still a shock to me when it blew up.
How in hell do Bernie’s proposals require an increase in taxes on anyone not in the .1% or on a simple elimination of breaks for trust funds an inheritance in general. Confiscate inheritance,ncreate an actual level playing field: all these terribly, terribly hard problems are solved.
The single payer plan put out by the Sanders campaign calls for an across the board payroll tax hike.
When I lived on Okinawa in the late ’60s, Taiwan was a hotbed of bootleg publishing, i.e., they ignored, or didn’t recognize, international copyright law. You could get any recent U.S./U.K. rock LP for the equivalent of 35 cents, plus the pirate publishers issued “mix” LPs of the latest hits. The covers were crap, but the audio quality was pretty good. And all the discs were colored: red, orange, purple.
P.S. Thanks for the link to the Big Daddy cover yesterday. That was cool.
160.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: Yeah, well, Tom’s a big boy. I’m sure he can speak for himself.
@schrodinger’s cat: I have an old SONY combo box that plays both and lets you copy VHS to DVD, but may not be available now (check Amazon, maybe?). There are also places that do various conversions – which might be better anyway if you have a small number to convert. I’m looking at one to convert old music cassettes made by friends to CD.
@Baud:
Funny story. Challenger had been delayed and it was throwing off the schedule for Reagans precious skylab. The day of the launch HW was in attendance. If the message was not intended it was still received, the launch had damn well better happen. Thiokol engineers told their managers the danger of frozen O-rings. Managers told NASA & there was a big pow-wow. The NASA people passed the buck & said they would not stop the launch unless Thiokol was positive they would fail. Thiokol management made it clear to the engineers the contract with NASA was at stake if they were wrong & the engineers backed down & would not GUARANTEE the O-rings would fail. They launched and people died. The finger was never pointed at the White House for pressuring NASA. Like I said, maybe they didn’t mean to we will never know but had it happened a few years later when Clinton was in office there would have been impeachment hearings.
170.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: That’s the worst if she changed her number and didn’t tell you.
My first tech comm article was on communication failures contributing to the Challenger explosion. I’ve sometimes felt guilty that my career was built on the deaths of these people.
As mortified as I was by the whole thing as a kid, reading about it as an adult was even more chilling. Especially when I learned that the crew cabin exited the fireball largely intact, and that the 7 astronauts were alive until they hit the water some 10-12 miles below.
Thiokol management made it clear to the engineers the contract with NASA was at stake if they were wrong & the engineers backed down & would not GUARANTEE the O-rings would fail.
How could they be proven wrong if the launch was halted?
175.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
Well the wingnuts spread the theory CHallenger was brought down by the KGB so maybe the KGB did it to tie up loose ends.
Anyone here ever read “The Cuckoos Egg?” A very true story about a guy trying to chase down a 25 cent over charge on research computers at Berkeley that ends SPOILER ALERT!!
.
.
With a West German kid being burnt to death in a forest in Germany by the KGB.
176.
Baud
@Cacti: I vaguely recall hearing that they would have all been unconscious because of the loss of pressure or something like that.
Her own son does not have her email address because she’s pissed at him for moving out. Seriously, we’re dealing with someone with a Cluster B personality disorder.
Cacti is correct. Sanders is proposing some taxes on the the whole population. He tried to explain why in a recent debate, but was not clear or forceful enough, IMHO.
Sanders wants to use a social insurance model for some of his policies, where he want to use Social Security and Medicare as models. Everyone pays something (so,people don’t begin to view the program as welfare for some other group), and everyone knows exactly what they are going to get back. Usually, there is some redistribution down to lower incomes in social insurance program, but everyone except those already in the upper 0.1 percent views it as their program that they pay into and they want to defend their benefits.
As I have said, as someone who has supported Sanders and sent him some dough, he really has to move from stump speech mode to persuasion and explanation mode in order to do well in states with more conservative Democratic primary voters. So far, I don’t see him doing that.
But I hope he does. For better or worse, HRC is playing very conventional politics. If Sanders wants to see a real political revolution in the country, he needs to stop stumping and start explaining and persuading those who are skeptical. And there will be many, and their skepticism will be encouraged at every turn by his opponents and the corporate media (we saw an attempt at Monday night’s forum).
Edit: Sanders tried to explain in a recent debate when he talked about HRC turning her back on the very successful policy financing approach of FDR. I don’t think many in the audience understood clearly what he was talking about.
183.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
Hopefully President baud would not misuse the power of the office.
I have been caught in those sorts of situations, though not life and death a couple of times. I backed down except for one time in the late 90s when I was tired of my current employer anyway and told the truth knowing there would be consequences. Not many people can stand that sort of pressure & I know I am not one of them.
Yep. I gave a copy to my parents, who gave a copy to my grandmother, who enjoyed it tremendously. I always find that amusing, since she refused to use computers until the day she died.
Everyone pays something (so,people don’t begin to view the program as welfare for some other group),
That’s not quite right. Everyone would be covered, but it would be paid for by payroll and higher income taxes. Sanders will be attacked for covering “moochers” and “deadbeats,” just like Obama was with Obamacare. He needs to have a response.
186.
Schlemazel
@Cacti:
It was common knowledge that they were alive when they hit the water. All of them had monitors on and the word was they were getting breathing & heartbeats all the way down. Kind people insisted they had to be unconscious because of the concussion. I hope they were that thing fell for a very long time.
Possibly the best clue towards solving the mystery of how long the doomed crew survived lies in what NASA learned from examining the four emergency air packs recovered from the wreckage. Three had been manually activated, which demonstrated that at least some of the crew realized something had gone wrong and had taken steps to save themselves. However, the fourth unactivated pack speaks with an even stronger voice, indicating that most likely realization of the circumstances and loss of consciousness were occurring at roughly the same time.
That was the conclusion of Dr. Joseph Kerwin, director of Life Sciences at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. His July 1986 report was based on an official examination of the debris of the crew compartment, audio tapes and other data recorded on the shuttle, the remains of the astronauts, and photographs of the capsule as it fell after the shuttle exploded.
In the report, Dr. Kerwin said: “The cause of death of the Challenger astronauts cannot be positively determined, the forces to which the crew were exposed during the orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury, and the crew possibly, but not certainly, lost consciousness in the seconds following orbiter breakup due to in-flight loss of crew module pressure.”
In other words, they might well have lived for the full spiral down and might even have been fully conscious for all of that hellish descent. But even if so, this fabricated “transcript” does not preserve their final words.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
188.
Schlemazel
@Roger Moore:
What disappoints me most is how there is nothing hackers are doing these days that are really different than what they were doing in the mid-80s. AS a security guy that is infuriating. It is a fun read though, a great who done it well told.
@Schlemazel: I’ve never heard of this KGB theory before. Why would the KGB take down the Shuttle? That’s an act of war if discovered.
190.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
For the same reason Clinton was bringing cocaine into Arkansas, it fills some gigantic need the wingnuts have to blame people they see as enemies with anything that goes wrong.
191.
delk
I learned about the Challenger at a gay bar having a hamburger.
When I was at UIC I was dating a guy who worked for Montgomery Wards HQ on Chicago and Halsted. The bar was at Halsted and Hubbard (middle of absolutely nowhere back in the day) and I would take the Halsted bus north to meet him.
It was convenient and we’d meet a couple times a week.
The weird thing was that they had a Space Shuttle pinball that we would play while we waited for the burgers to be ready.
We unplugged the machine that day.
192.
jl
@Baud: I’m not sure that you are sure that I am not correct. Depends on what program we are talking about. His family leave plan is from a payroll tax, IIRC, his single payer plan is payroll and higher income taxes, and his college tuition plan is from financial transaction tax. He needs to do a better job at explaining each of them.
And wrt to health care, he needs to explain what he will do when single payer does not pass on DAY ONE (!!) of his administration, and how he will improve PPACA in way that benefits most people and makes single payer more feasible.
@Schlemazel: What? Clinton was a cocaine smuggler? Never heard that one either.
Have I been deaf my whole life?
Maybe.
194.
jl
@Baud: BTW, you seem to be following the Gilmore model of campaigning, except hanging around miserable lefty blogs, rather than lazing on the sofa watching liberal news talkies.
I guess, since you seem to be planning to model your administration on Harding, it doesn’t make much difference. You can play poker with your buddies in your own den as well as in the White House.
195.
Baud
@jl: I was talking about his single payer plan. People who are not employed for whatever reason would not be paying into the system, if I understanding the financing piece correctly, but they would still get the same health care benefits as “workers.”
196.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
You lucky bustert! I wish I could say that. Yeah, it was (I think) where they started the systematic murder of people who got in their way. I don’t remember the details right now but I bet other people here can tell you. I remember there was a landing strip in the hills that was important to the BS
Replying to Baud got me into moderation, due to a naughty word. Do you people see how the Baud campaign threatens the moral fibre of our precious youth? Do you all see now?
Retry:
BTW, you seem to be following the Gilmore model of campaigning, except hanging around miserable lefty blogs, rather than lazing on the sofa watching liberal news talkies.
I guess, since you seem to be planning to model your administration on Harding, it doesn’t make much difference. You can play p 0 k * r with your buddies in your own den as well as in the White House.
198.
raven
@delk: I had moved from Champaign-Urbana to Athens the year before. It was really cold and there was snow on the ground here so I cut through the Union on my way to play hoops. I walked through the TV lounge just as it blew up.
@Schlemazel: Bubba was my second Presidential vote, HW shamefully being my first. Sorry, America! I’m from Maine and the Bush’s are actually from Maine even though they pretend they’re from other states for election reasons, of course. Sorry again!
@redshirt:
I lived in K’Port and drove around town the summer before the election with my “Save Kennebunkport Vote Democratic” bumper sticker. The bike shop owner printed them up. I went to school in Boston so I voted there.
204.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
Oh don’t be sorry, I am so used to everyone knowing all the old stories here that I just assume. It was 20 years ago no reason people should remember it.
I’m pretty sure I saw a German movie about the same case from the hacker’s POV, though the names were different. The ending for the hacker is the same.
That movie is really interesting because the hacker does too many drugs and becomes convinced that he accidentally caused Chernobyl by hacking their computer, which then starts to get mixed together in his mind with his real spying activities and his obsession with a novel about the Illuminati.
207.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
WOW! I am going to have to find that film. THANKS!
@Mnemosyne: @Mnemosyne:
DAMN YOU! :) Now I want to see a movie that does not appear to have gotten out of Germany & probably is not available anywhere anymore. I have to find a DVD of this film, 23.
I saw it quite a while ago, obviously, but it stuck in my memory. I saw it at a festival of current German film within a year or so of its release in Germany. Living in the film capital of the world has its perks sometimes.
215.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne: Huh. I didn’t know you lived in Mumbai.
216.
PJ
@Gin & Tonic: I advise against the Pro-Ject Debut (or Re-Ject, as I termed it) – it was expensive and made a horrible grinding noise after a few hundred hours of playing. Getting the Pro-Ject reps in the US (a company called Sumiko) to acknowledge there was a problem and repair it was an ordeal, and then the problem started again after even fewer hours. Also, none of these new expensive turntables will lift the stylus and return the tone arm to resting, which even the cheapest turntable used to do. I’d recommend getting a decent used turntable from Goodwill and getting a new cartridge.
I dunno if he still makes em, but Stoll use to sell handmade Klein bottles. got one for my brother (who does a lot of topo and computer security work). really nice piece.
222.
Ruckus
@Schlemazel:
Ultraviolet Thunder suggested that Audio Tecnica turntables are pretty good a while back and I bought one based on that. And of course he’s right they are pretty good, far better than the average ones that we used to get back in the day. With USB and all. Are they as good as the high end ones? Probably not but are they good enough? Seems like it to me. And they don’t cost half of what a car costs today. Which of course would mean that you can turn those old records into something you can listen to, which you don’t do now.
223.
Death Panel Truck
@Cacti: Today (where I am it’s still January 27) marks the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. Gus Grissom, the astronaut’s astronaut and an all-around motherfucking badass, is still my hero to this day.
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Cacti
Nancy Smash throws some cold water on The Bern.
Praises enthusiasm of his campaign and supporters. Says no way in Hades are House Dems going to run on a platform of raising everyone’s taxes.
Felonius Monk
Better sleep with one eye open and a ray gun under the pillow. Also too, good idea to warn any houseguests that sleep over.
Felonius Monk
@Cacti:
So does this mean that if Bernie does get the nomination, House Dems won’t support him? Hello President Trump!
Hillary Rettig
hubby has a good eye!
when you said “old timey” I expected something much older!
Comrade Luke
Do you live in a tiki bar?
Betty Cracker
@Comrade Luke: Mostly, yeah.
Smiling Mortician
I can see the ET resemblance. But it looks kinda more like Wall-E to me.
redshirt
@Hillary Rettig: It counts as old timey now! That’s the funny thing about time – stuff keeps getting older and mentally I stay the same age.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Soylent Green
An 80s boombox is an old-timey radio? Get off my lawn.
Betty Cracker
@Smiling Mortician: That’s what my sister said! Hey, you’re not her, are you?!?!?
redshirt
I legitimately miss the creative discipline imposed by Side A and Side B.
A great band/producer would use this to craft an audio story.
Kids today with their iTunes downloads and such…. Pshaw!
redshirt
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Another poll bump!
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Anyone have a lighter handy?
Germy
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I dare Trump to accuse her of “going godwin”
redshirt
So what did Kelley do that’s so bad? Ask a real question? A follow up?
This reminds me of the Grilling of Katie Couric for asking what Sarah read.
WarMunchkin
@Felonius Monk: Kind of a hilarious, in a shitty sort of way, twist on PUMA. That said, if Sanders somehow won, I don’t doubt that he’d get support.
Baud
@redshirt:
She both has a vagina and asked Trump about his misogyny. She needed to be punished, lest the disease spread.
Betty Cracker
@Soylent Green: It’s playing “Slippery People” (radio, not cassette), so it kinda fits.
Schlemazel
When my folks got a TV the family radio eventually ended up in my bedroom (after my older brothers left) It was a great big old thing and late at night, when it was too hot to sleep I would search the dial for adventure. AM signals travel forever at after sundown. Hearing real rock and roll done by Fats Domino and Little Richard instead of Pat Boone was an experience. “Brother Billy” From Waco, TX promised he would send me a miracle through the mail if I sent him $5 and asked his audience for a round of applause for CH-HE-zuz when he healed the lame. It was a great time that just can’t happen anymore.
@redshirt:
Do you still automatically start singing the next song on the album when a song ends? SHuffle killed that!
Mnemosyne
I have to call my nieces’ devil woman of a mother to see if she’ll let them come visit during their spring break. I need help psyching myself up for it, because she’s a classic narcissist and I hate talking to her.
Baud
@Schlemazel:
That still happens all the time.
Baud
@Mnemosyne:
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism. — Alexander Hamilton
HinTN
@Schlemazel: WLS out of Chicago got this (privileged) hick through the night in the mid-sixties.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
Well, they sure have moved up to TV and the huckster bullshit covers more than just phony faith healers these days. But the adventure that does not happen any more was the amazing mixture of stuff you could discover, radio stations all over the country that did not sound exactly like every other radio station, regional music and news. It was more the discovery; Minnesotan’s would never have clapped and cheered wildly for God in public! What would the neighbors think?
Iowa Old Lady
There’s probably a similar radio around here because Mr IOL will not throw anything away. He hides it so I can’t either.
Mnemosyne
@Felonius Monk:
More likely that Sanders will be told he needs to tone down or drop the whole I promise to raise your taxes thing. He could probably get some decent traction talking about infrastructure and investment while avoiding using the T word.
redshirt
@Schlemazel: Even better, when a band would blend the end of one song into the beginning of the next.
We’ve lost so much for 99 cent downloads.
Mike E
I have nearly the identical boom box, heh…the whip antenna broke off tho
HinTN
@Mnemosyne: Yes! Nancy Smash is just laying down a marker.
Kyle
Chris Matthews has Ann Coulter on as a guest. The hell?
Schlemazel
@HinTN:
Oh yeah! KAAY Little Rock, particularly after midnight. Beaker Street with Clyde Clifford on the mighty 1090! WLS and I think it was WLW from Cincinnati
Cacti
And speaking of old timey…
Does anyone else find it hard to believe that tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster?
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
Santana’s Abraxis was a musical journey with no break between tunes. Good times
Baud
@Cacti: If that happened today, they’d blame Obama.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Well, I am trying to liberate them from the durance vile of living with her, at least for a week.
I’m a little worried she won’t let them come out because my local sister-in-law screwed up last year and let the girls dye their hair without asking permission. That was a freakin’ fiasco.
Germy
@Schlemazel: I remember a Monty Python album with a hidden third side.
redshirt
@Baud: Can you imagine? He might actually be impeached over it. Two shuttles blew up during Republican administrations. Meh.
jl
@HinTN: I agree. Sanders needs to be much clearer and much more forceful in explaining how he will implement his plans and how average person will benefit.
Otherwise, he risks getting labeled as a tax and spend DemocRAT big gummint liberal.
I’ve been supporting Sanders, but was not pleased by how he rolled out his health plan, and lack of a clear map on how he can push for single payer while continuing to improve PPACA.
Obama, and Pelosi, have had responsibility and experience negotiating the hazards of national electoral politics, and Sanders has not. I don’t mind if they lay down a few helpful markers for the old coot.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: Tell her you personally know and will introduce them to the next president of the United States of America.
I’d avoid getting into details, however.
Germy
Larry David will be hosting the next SNL. Expect a lot of Bernie appearances in that episode.
Mnemosyne
@Germy:
I swiped that from my brother without knowing about the hidden third side. Freaked me the hell out when I first discovered it.
cat copeland
Hey wait a corn-popping minute here. I just happen to have some of ‘does’ cassette things that work in this here music machine thingy.. The best music EVER Thank You!!!!!
The Other Chuck
@redshirt: Plenty of newer albums do continuous mixes. And for all the 99 cent singles, it’s nowhere near as bad as the bland uniform shapes that radio forced so much modern music into.
jl
@Germy: Maybe others liked it better, but I thought that, already, the second installment of the David/Sanders schtick was pretty tired. Hope they do better this time.
IMHO, tired lazy writing has long been a problem with SNL. Haven’t watched it regularly for years, so not sure how much it is now.
Germy
@Mnemosyne: I remember buying David Bowie and Harry Nilsson albums in the ’70s and they were “flexi-disc” (weird, extra thin, wobbly and sometimes red). I imagine they’d be collectors’ items today, if I hadn’t sold them off in the late ’80s.
Germy
@jl: They did a brilliant spoof last week of the all-white awards shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ospx7tXWYbI
schrodinger's cat
I have inherited a lots of old timey Hindi movie albums in cassette form from husband kitteh’s father. Is there a way to easily digitize cassettes?
Steeplejack
The big blizzard isn’t sexy any more, but it’s still a pain in the ass. There’s a shitload of snowpack that’s not going anywhere any time soon. I just started to notice some non-trivial melting today. Area schools (here in NoVa) are closed for the rest of the week, government office schedules vary wildly. D.C. schools opened today, to widespread outrage that the neighboring streets and sidewalks aren’t cleared yet.
I still have enough cat food and rum to get me through another few days, and today I was able to get a pizza delivered from my usual spot. Sheer luxury! The driver said he couldn’t get into the neighborhood the usual way and had to circle around a few blocks to come in a different way. I gave him a big tip.
Yesterday I was sitting by the window reading on my tablet and observing the street below, and I realized that I have become that crabby old neighbor in every cop show ever. “Talk to that old guy across the street—maybe he saw something.”
Baud
@jl:
Otherwise? Risk?
raven
@HinTN: With the Wild Itraliano and Chicken Man, “He’s Everywhere, He’s Everywhere”!
Germy
@Steeplejack: The cat saw everything. But he ain’t talkin’.
Steeplejack
@Germy:
I accidentally listened to the CBS national (TV) news a while ago, and Bernie Sanders sounds exactly like Larry David. It’s uncanny.
Just Some Fuckhead
Jesus H. W. Christ, this debate nonsense on the Democratic side is reason enough to strip Debbie Wasserman Schultz of her American citizenship and throw her into Gitmo.
lgerard
A lot of the kids today seem to think cassettes are cool. They are particularly popular with west coast 60’s revivalists who record exclusively to cassette.
They didn’t have to live through the cassette era.
Baud
@Steeplejack: Why was Larry David in the news?
Germy
@Steeplejack: This guy does a good bernie impression.
schrodinger's cat
Blog pimping alert:
I finally have a short review of the movie (Bajirao and Mastani) I have bored you all to tears talking about.
Plus a poster inspired by the movie starring my kittehs, Purrjirao and Meowstani.
Just Some Fuckhead
And since it’s an open thread and we will never get a You Benign Balloon Juice Butchers Cheered On The Destablization of Libya And Look At It Now post, let’s put it out there so maybe next time these fuckers won’t be so cavalier about intervention.
Betty Cracker
@Steeplejack: Glad your supplies are holding out! I can relate about being the go-to neighborhood chronicler. I serve a similar function here locally as the resident semi-shut-in, i.e., I work from home. Hope the Big Melt comes soon!
Germy
Looking forward to this:
http://screenrant.com/keanu-2016-trailer-key-peele-red-band/
Baud
Gilmore is back, baby (MSNBC)
ThresherK
@Schlemazel: There is a website called FadedSignals with all the broadcasting advertising memorabilia you could ever want.
It goes great with spinning around on AM. As a radio geek I have two skills: The sacred art of tuning the analog radio dial, and listening to two AM stations on the same frequency at the same time.
The last one is underappreciated in my home. I’ll be digging some signals out of the mud and my wife will say “How can you hear anything? It’s just static! It hurts my ears.”
Anoniminous
@Germy:
Not that record! NOT THAT RECORD!
redshirt
@Just Some Fuckhead: What’s going on in Libya? Islamic stuff?
debbie
@Germy:
Hidden songs were a big thing on cassettes. Kind of a nuisance waiting for them.
RSA
I happen to have asked my classroom of college students about cassettes just last week. They know what cassettes are, and (mainly, I gather, from riding in cars that still have cassette players–factory cassettes were available until 2010 in the U.S.) they know how to use them. I was surprised, to be honest.
redshirt
@debbie: I thought that was an invention of the CD. Which cassette had a hidden song?
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, lets see apple music do that!
Germy
@debbie: In the ’80s, if you walked along any heavily trafficked road, you’d see curled up bits of tape on the ground and crushed cassettes from people throwing them disgustedly out their car windows after they jammed and broke in cheap car cassette players.
Jeffro
@Steeplejack: At work today (finally! yes!) those of us who are parents had a good group cry when the school division made the announcement about Thurs and Fri.
Also nice to see some Minnesotan knocking NoVA around in the Post today…sheesh, give us a break folks, we get hit like this once a decade or so…
BR
@Cacti:
I don’t mind her pushing back on Sanders, but I don’t like to see her buying into the right-wing framing about taxes.
I have to admit, the way it was framed by fictional candidate Matt Santos in the West Wing was actually really good — he said something like “If I have to pay for health care, I don’t care if you call it a tax or you call it a premium, all I care about is which one’s cheaper”. That’s an easy framing that Sanders could use but he has danced around it.
Jeffro
@Soylent Green: This post made me go look up my old (80’s) boombox on eBay…the ones that still work (or have been refurbished) are going for quite a bit!
Granite
Donald Trump is pulling off a win/win/win with boycotting the debate.
As Krauthammer said, he’s using reality tv tactics brilliantly in the political realm. He’s unstoppable, baby.
Cacti
@Baud:
More like “Marxist Bernie Sanders and the Bolshevik Democrats are running on a promise to raise your taxes, and give you a healthcare system that even Vermont rejected.”
Schlemazel
@ThresherK:
You can get pretty good at fine tuning when a tenth of an inch makes the difference between all music and a music/static mix. Can’t say I enjoy overlapping stations but it would be a skill.
debbie
@redshirt:
I wish my memory were that good! I remember there was something by REM.
I found this on Wikipedia which should keep you amused for a while.
MomSense
@Soylent Green:
I still have a record player.
Baud
@Cacti:
Hell, they’ll use that attack even if Hillary is nominee. It’s not like they have shame
p.a.
@RSA: Don’t forget, at human scale at least, life is analog.
Patricia Kayden
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: O-o. I can just see Mr. Bulbous Orange Head raging about how she’s such a huge loser with low ratings and a poor excuse for a journalist, etc., etc., etc. The tweets will be fast and furious.
debbie
@Germy:
When I was in art school, I constructed an assemblage from chewed up cassette tapes. They were everywhere.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
My kids – youngest is 28 – are very familiar with cassettes. Raffi and Dr. Demento mix tapes were a staple of family road trips. The kids can sing “Fish Heads” and “Down By the Bay”
Germy
@MomSense: Where do you buy needles? Back when I had a turntable (decades ago) I used to walk to my local record store for new ones, but there are no record stores now…
redshirt
@debbie: Too much work. I don’t recall ever hearing of a hidden cassette song – there’s only so much tape to hide it. Even for REM. My first experience with hidden songs was with the advent of CD’s – Nirvana had one on Nevermind, for example. It makes a lot more sense on CD’s because there’s more storage capability.
But I could be totally wrong here.
p.a.
They make them now with usb’s to rip to digital files.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: That’s his problem — answering on the first ring shows that Gilmore has got nothing better to do with his time and is just lazing around the house desperately waiting for someone to call. Trump would let the call go to voicemail like the winner he is.
MomSense
@ThresherK:
I really miss listening to my shortwave radio. Of course when traveling in far-off, non English speaking places the peppy BBC music followed by those six little beeps was the greatest thing.
debbie
@redshirt:
According to a different Wiki article, the Beatles had the first hidden song on Abbey Road (“Her Majesty”).
Germy
@debbie: On the UK version of Sgt. Pepper there is a weird little track right after “A Day In The Life”
As “A Day in the Life” ends, a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone is heard; it was added at Lennon’s suggestion with the intention that it would annoy dogs.[194][nb 24] This is followed by the sounds of backwards laughter and random gibberish that was pressed into the record’s concentric run-out groove, which loops back into itself endlessly on any record player not equipped with an automatic needle return. Lennon can be heard saying, “been so high”, followed by McCartney’s response: “never could be any other way”.
Schlemazel
@BR:
Nancy has to worry about seats. Since Dems are tarred with the “tax and spend liberal” tag she knows that feeding into that bullshit would cost her party seats. Bernie should and could use the “West Wing” line of attack but it will eter the echo chamber and be sent back as “hid your wallet here come the Dems to steal your money to give to the T-bone buck, Cadillac queen, takers”. Sadly. It works.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
My turn table died & I have been debating getting one with a USB connection and software that would allow me to digitize all my old music. Going through 200 LPs and picking out the stuff I want to keep would probably keep me busy for a few weeks.
EDIT: @p.a.:
yeah, this
Steeplejack
@Jeffro:
I can imagine! On the early local news a reporter was talking to a group of tween girls about what they’re doing, do they like being out of school, etc.
“Do your moms like it?”
Instant chorus: “Noooo!”
MomSense
@Germy:
My son orders them. He inherited my vinyl collection which I also inherited (and added to)from a dear friend of my parents. The vinyl collection keeps growing and even though we don’t listen all that often, it is really fun when we do.
redshirt
@debbie: The Beatles are a good first candidate. But that would have been on vinyl, not cassette.
I always thought the medium of cassette tape was very limiting on how much you could store on one tape. Again, I could be wrong.
MomSense
@Germy:
Do you remember a Monty Python album where they read Leviticus? I’m starting to think I dreamed this.
Steeplejack
@MomSense:
Those are so old that they’re hip again.
ET
I can say categorically that it doesn’t look like me though it does look like the other ET.
Mike J
@debbie:
It used to be very common to use cassette tapes for telltales on sailboats. Lighter than yarn, more responsive to changes in wind, and there wasn’t really anything else to do with a bad cassette.
We had a woman in our club complaining that yarn on the shrouds looked too “ghetto” and wanted everyone to only use the masthead windex. I threatened to break out the cassettes.
Germy
@MomSense: that doesn’t ring a bell for me.
MomSense
@Schlemazel:
Why not? I have a similar project going scanning photos.
Felonius Monk
@Iowa Old Lady:
My brother from another mother.
tones
@Soylent Green: with a CD player, not a tape deck…
BR
@Granite:
Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t watch cable news but I don’t see how this Trump debate thing helps him. The others aren’t going to join him. Fox isn’t going to show his debate. He may end up accepting the Fox debate invitation, but he’d have to really spin it to say he won some concession.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
The only connection I remember is “The Bishop” a cop show send up where a bishop tries (and fails) to prevent the killing of priests. The enters one church and sees that the text to be read is from Leviticus and tries to stop the priest from reading it but he does & the pulpit explodes.
jl
@Baud:
” Otherwise? Risk? ”
Of course, his opponents and corporate media will try to portray him that way. What I meant was that if he does not shape up (Otherwise) he risks having those labels stick with a critical mass of voters.
At least he is in better shape than Baud “We have until November to mess this up” 2916! That miserable inept campaign proudly advertises that its candidate is a frivolous dissolute wastrel, who has yet to propose a single policy of interest to anyone other than a gin soaked chain-smoker chained to the slots at the local c a $ ee n o, wondering if there are any good strip shows later that night within staggering distance.
p.a.
@Schlemazel: I made sure my now obsolete 7.1 audio/video receiver (pre- hdmi connections) had a preamp for vinyl. Now that vinyl is making a comeback I assume preamp fcn will be more common. The Ion digital converting turntable has a preamp built in.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
I will do it but I am cheap & don’t want to spend the cash on such a short-term usage. I’ll do it one day soon.
Gin & Tonic
@Steeplejack: Indeed. Vinyl is making quite the comeback. My son (who lives in Brooklyn, obvs) has been slowly stealing portions of my collection, which, like my collection of CD’s, is best “counted” with a tape measure.
Baud
@jl:
Primaries are about appealing to the base.
Schlemazel
@BR:
Oh, is old rocks for brains here again tonight? just ignore him, he’ll go away. responding only encourages him.
Germy
@Baud:
Your campaign song.
ThresherK
@MomSense: Not to give my age away, but this is the BBC World Service ident I grew up with.
PurpleGirl
@lgerard: Cassettes aren’t that bad — now, 8-tracks. Those are/were the pits of bad.
ETA: I saved some 8-tracks to use the tape in crochet experiments. Forgot where I put them.
Iowa Old Lady
@Cacti: My first tech comm article was on communication failures contributing to the Challenger explosion. I’ve sometimes felt guilty that my career was built on the deaths of these people.
Mike J
@Schlemazel:
I wouldn’t pick. Storage is cheap. I have thousands of album. All on my hard drive now.
And for anything I already own a legit copy of, I feel no guilt in downloading a digital copy. It’s just saving me the trouble of ripping it myself.
p.a.
@Germy:
It’s also a double-entendre.
BR
@Schlemazel:
Oh, I didn’t realize it was a troll. Oops!
Schlemazel
@p.a.:
The last money I spent on a real stereo set up was probably 30 years ago, it was very high end for the time but now it is a stack of antiques. I have thought about connecting the headphone output to the microphone input on the PC for capture but question if the quality would take too much of a hit. I figure in a couple more years my hearing will be so bad it won’t matter so that is still a possibility.
There are several turntables made specifically with a USB cable to feed digital capture. the run from ~$100 to ~$600 and I am not sure how to evaluate which is any good.
p.a.
@Mike J: Was it here at BJ I saw a laser record player? Wonder if it skips if you dance?
Schlemazel
@Mike J:
Gee, if I sent you a list of album I own maybe you could just send me the mp3 files for them :)
Gin & Tonic
@BR: A troll with shifting allegiances. Some of us (well, me at any rate) like to poke at it with a stick once in a while because the switch from a couple of months ago absolutely positively without a doubt guaranteeing that it’d be Heb! to, now, Il Donaldo is amusing. But Schlemazel’s counsel is wise.
Schlemazel
@BR:
No problem, he just crawled out from under his bridge a night or so ago & was quite the pain in the ass for a bit but toying with him got old so he just gets 86’ed now. He’ll get bored like reich 2 retch and go away.
@Gin & Tonic: Ol rocks seems even dumber than the previous. I seriously think it is Doug J as nobody as dense and silica brain could exist without a handler to help them find their ass with both hands.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, nothing like shitting up a long Levenson post responding to a troll.
Major Major Major Major
@Iowa Old Lady: When we were starting topo, one of the examples was how they measured the circularity of the first-stage exhaust tubey things by spot measuring the diameter of each at three locations. “Now, folks, that can detect a circle, but what else can it detect?”
Entire class face palms. “A triangle…”
WTF, JPL?
NotMax
@Germy
Using a color of vinyl other than standard blackish as a novelty goes back a long way. The technology of that even improved over time – can recall one album, (though not the band’s name) which was a creamy white but included come colored pellets in the pressing, so also had random splotches of color*, And then there were (probably still are, in limited release) picture discs. There were even clear albums occasionally produced.
Less prevalent was non-black for singles. Although some children’s 45s did appear in translucent yellows and greens, IIRC.
*Much more difficult on that one for disk jockeys to find the correct groove to cue up
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: In general the cheaper of those USB turntables are pretty poor at being turntables. Better, IMO, to buy a low-end turntable from a company that’s been making turntables for a while — Pro-Ject or Rega are good starting points — and pair it with a phono preamp with digital output.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: Guilty as charged. Mea maxima culpa.
WereBear
Not only that, I automatically start to get up with it is halfway through, to flip the record over…
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Iowa Old Lady: Neat!
No doubt you’ve seen Edward Tufte’s critique of the Columbia Shuttle PowerPoint Presentations. He’s famous for his takedown of NASA’s Challenger PowerPoint presentations, but this shows that they still hadn’t learned the necessary lessons years later.
Don’t feel guilty. Clear communication is very often a life-and-death proposition. Too few people know how to do it well enough, and people need to study the examples of communications failures to learn from them.
Cheers,
Scott.
p.a.
@Schlemazel: I have the Ion ($90) and use it to play, but not yet to rip. Program supposedly filters pops and such.
I still have my Akai cass player from highschool (late ’70’s). Glass head good for 25,000+ hours. No FF or Rew function anymore. Have a friend’s Akai receiver, same era, only issue is synchro lock tuning, not digital. Kind of wanders. Discrete circuits, big heat sinks. It was his college dorm unit. The smoke/resin residue on it may have approached 1/4 inch thick. Good times.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
Thanks – I know I should have asked here it just never occurred to me. there are people here that are expert and anything you can name.
redshirt
TIL that Marvel Comics produced a KISS comic in the seventies that stated it was printed with the band member’s blood, and yes indeed, vials of blood from all the members of the band were added to the ink.
The 70’s were cool.
ThresherK
@Schlemazel: Time to suss out what those “antiques” would get from the cool kids today. Nothing I spent money on would be described as “a real stereo set”.
There was surprisingly good AM and Aircraft/FM reception on the multiband Radio Shack devices from the 70s. Now I have to convince myself I don’t need to buy one on eBay.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this made me chuckle (to refresh, Jim Gilmore is, I think, a Republican candidate for president, rumored to have once been a high ranking official of a good sized state, some say governor of Virginia but I think that’s an urban legend)
(Hayes and Sam Seder now agreeing that HRC agreeing to another debate before Sanders does is a real problem for Hillary)
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: Don’t do it again! At least in a Levenson thread. I bet he was deeply disappointed in all of us for that travesty. I know I was.
Iowa Old Lady
@Major Major Major Major: I’m not actually sure what you just said there, but WTF is always a good question. :-)
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Tufte is just brilliant. I used to tell my engineering students that if I screwed up at work, probably no one died, but they couldn’t be sure the same thing wouldn’t apply to them.
Baud
@redshirt: It’s those types of shenanigans that gave us Reagan.
MomSense
@ThresherK:
That’s it!! Oh I love that so much.
ThresherK
@NotMax: It goes further back than you may know.
Major Major Major Major
@Iowa Old Lady: one of the theories is that one of the first stage parts wasn’t perfectly circular. The way they did QA for them was by measuring the diameter at three points, and if they matched, they declared it circular. Mathematically though that’s also a perfect definition of a triangle, or at a less extreme end, many ellipses. Dumb move.
Roger Moore
@redshirt:
Not really. There were standard 60 minute (30 minute per side) tapes, and longer ones of up to 120 minutes were available. Apparently, the longer ones had to use thinner tape to fit in the standard size cassette, which made them more prone to having the tape break.
Iowa Old Lady
@Major Major Major Major: That makes sense.
redshirt
@Roger Moore: Cool knowledge.
I’ve now dug out my collection of SUPER AWESOME 80’S MIX TAPES and they’re incredible.
I’d spend days working on a mix tape so that every song was perfect. I’d add artwork too.
Sigh….
Schlemazel
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I worked at KSC in the late 80s early 90s. Mny people there were there for Challenger. They all claimed to never want to go through that again. They didn’t act that way though. They regularly violated launch protocol & launched when winds were too high or temps too low. The political pressure was too great, they HAD to get that shit up on schedule. It was depressing.
I have told other horror stories here before so I won’t repeat them but the pinnacle was that someone tried to kill the Thiecol engineer that first called attention the the issue that brought Challenger down. He was run off the road into a deep ditch where he could have drowned. It was not an accident & nobody was ever identified as the attacker.
redshirt
@Schlemazel: WOW! Do you have any possible suspects? You must have a guess or a hunch.
MomSense
@Schlemazel:
Woah!
Steeplejack
@Schlemazel:
It’s the same troll.
Baud
@Schlemazel: Wow. They definitely would have blamed Obama.
Wrb
@Cacti: No Nancy joins the crowd of those losing the respect of those who once respected them. How in hell do Bernie’s proposals require an increase in taxes on anyone not in the .1% or on a simple elimination of breaks for trust funds an inheritance in general. Confiscate inheritance,ncreate an actual level playing field: all these terribly, terribly hard problems are solved.
redshirt
@Wrb: LOL. Bernie Uber Allies!
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Schlemazel: Wow. :-(
Thanks.
I was in grad school in Ohio in the mid-late ’80s. I’d occasionally read AW&ST and see the stories about O-rings being burned halfway through on the SRBs. And how some were saying that was Ok because there was still another 50% left so there was a fine safety margin. I thought it was obviously nuts and obviously dangerous, but it was still a shock to me when it blew up.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Wrb: but that’s not what Bernie is proposing.
Chip Daniels
Good God.
First, I discover that Abe Vigoda was only a couple years older than I am now, when he played the “Old Man” Det. Fish on Barney Miller.
Now I am looking at an “Old Timey” boombox that I may have actually owned as a young man.
Get offa my lawn you punks. I won’t waste my AOL dialup time with you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Major Major Major Major: also: “confiscating inheritance” is a slogan that could put Trump or Cruz in the White House
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
No, it happened before I got there. but it would be like “Orient Express” I’m afraid.
Roger Moore
@Iowa Old Lady:
Don’t think of it as building your career on their deaths. Think of it as building your career trying to stop the same thing happening to others.
Cacti
@Wrb:
The single payer plan put out by the Sanders campaign calls for an across the board payroll tax hike.
You should read it since you obviously haven’t.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
When I lived on Okinawa in the late ’60s, Taiwan was a hotbed of bootleg publishing, i.e., they ignored, or didn’t recognize, international copyright law. You could get any recent U.S./U.K. rock LP for the equivalent of 35 cents, plus the pirate publishers issued “mix” LPs of the latest hits. The covers were crap, but the audio quality was pretty good. And all the discs were colored: red, orange, purple.
P.S. Thanks for the link to the Big Daddy cover yesterday. That was cool.
Gin & Tonic
@redshirt: Yeah, well, Tom’s a big boy. I’m sure he can speak for himself.
Mnemosyne
I called the Devil Woman … and it went to voicemail. D’oh!
NotMax
@MomSense
You’ll likely then also recall the Deutsche Welle interval music, short but insistent.
And NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley news used public domain Beethoven’s Ninth for its entire existence as closing music (there was no opening theme).
Baud
@Mnemosyne: Did you leave a message?
redshirt
@Schlemazel: You don’t have a theory? Not even a guess? Nobody will hold you to it, except maybe the original villains.
redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: I hope he’d never lower himself.
glaukopis
@schrodinger’s cat: I have an old SONY combo box that plays both and lets you copy VHS to DVD, but may not be available now (check Amazon, maybe?). There are also places that do various conversions – which might be better anyway if you have a small number to convert. I’m looking at one to convert old music cassettes made by friends to CD.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Of course! I hate people who call and don’t leave messages. Hopefully it’s still the right cell number.
Steeplejack
@MomSense:
Whoa.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
Funny story. Challenger had been delayed and it was throwing off the schedule for Reagans precious skylab. The day of the launch HW was in attendance. If the message was not intended it was still received, the launch had damn well better happen. Thiokol engineers told their managers the danger of frozen O-rings. Managers told NASA & there was a big pow-wow. The NASA people passed the buck & said they would not stop the launch unless Thiokol was positive they would fail. Thiokol management made it clear to the engineers the contract with NASA was at stake if they were wrong & the engineers backed down & would not GUARANTEE the O-rings would fail. They launched and people died. The finger was never pointed at the White House for pressuring NASA. Like I said, maybe they didn’t mean to we will never know but had it happened a few years later when Clinton was in office there would have been impeachment hearings.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: That’s the worst if she changed her number and didn’t tell you.
MomSense
@NotMax:
Yes, I do remember the Deutsche Welle music. I spent many happy evenings listening to those broadcasts.
Cacti
@Iowa Old Lady:
As mortified as I was by the whole thing as a kid, reading about it as an adult was even more chilling. Especially when I learned that the crew cabin exited the fireball largely intact, and that the 7 astronauts were alive until they hit the water some 10-12 miles below.
Just awful.
NotMax
@ThresherK
Oh, yes.
Also too, because they had to use whatever could be gotten hold of, have seen some of the large WW2-era V-discs in off-colors.
Baud
@Schlemazel:
That’s truly sickening.
How could they be proven wrong if the launch was halted?
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
Well the wingnuts spread the theory CHallenger was brought down by the KGB so maybe the KGB did it to tie up loose ends.
Anyone here ever read “The Cuckoos Egg?” A very true story about a guy trying to chase down a 25 cent over charge on research computers at Berkeley that ends SPOILER ALERT!!
.
.
With a West German kid being burnt to death in a forest in Germany by the KGB.
Baud
@Cacti: I vaguely recall hearing that they would have all been unconscious because of the loss of pressure or something like that.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Her own son does not have her email address because she’s pissed at him for moving out. Seriously, we’re dealing with someone with a Cluster B personality disorder.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
I think there were cockpit recordings that indicated otherwise that we’re released a decade later, but I’m not willing to Google it.
Baud
@Mnemosyne: That’s unfortunate for the kids.
Cacti
@Baud:
NASA says it was possible they might have been. But the wreckage also showed that some of them had engaged their emergency oxygen masks.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne:
If they wanted a response they should have just texted me to begin with.
jl
@Wrb: @Cacti:
Cacti is correct. Sanders is proposing some taxes on the the whole population. He tried to explain why in a recent debate, but was not clear or forceful enough, IMHO.
Sanders wants to use a social insurance model for some of his policies, where he want to use Social Security and Medicare as models. Everyone pays something (so,people don’t begin to view the program as welfare for some other group), and everyone knows exactly what they are going to get back. Usually, there is some redistribution down to lower incomes in social insurance program, but everyone except those already in the upper 0.1 percent views it as their program that they pay into and they want to defend their benefits.
As I have said, as someone who has supported Sanders and sent him some dough, he really has to move from stump speech mode to persuasion and explanation mode in order to do well in states with more conservative Democratic primary voters. So far, I don’t see him doing that.
But I hope he does. For better or worse, HRC is playing very conventional politics. If Sanders wants to see a real political revolution in the country, he needs to stop stumping and start explaining and persuading those who are skeptical. And there will be many, and their skepticism will be encouraged at every turn by his opponents and the corporate media (we saw an attempt at Monday night’s forum).
Edit: Sanders tried to explain in a recent debate when he talked about HRC turning her back on the very successful policy financing approach of FDR. I don’t think many in the audience understood clearly what he was talking about.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
Hopefully President baud would not misuse the power of the office.
I have been caught in those sorts of situations, though not life and death a couple of times. I backed down except for one time in the late 90s when I was tired of my current employer anyway and told the truth knowing there would be consequences. Not many people can stand that sort of pressure & I know I am not one of them.
Roger Moore
@Schlemazel:
Yep. I gave a copy to my parents, who gave a copy to my grandmother, who enjoyed it tremendously. I always find that amusing, since she refused to use computers until the day she died.
Baud
@Cacti: Ugh.
@jl:
That’s not quite right. Everyone would be covered, but it would be paid for by payroll and higher income taxes. Sanders will be attacked for covering “moochers” and “deadbeats,” just like Obama was with Obamacare. He needs to have a response.
Schlemazel
@Cacti:
It was common knowledge that they were alive when they hit the water. All of them had monitors on and the word was they were getting breathing & heartbeats all the way down. Kind people insisted they had to be unconscious because of the concussion. I hope they were that thing fell for a very long time.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Mnemosyne: Snopes:
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Schlemazel
@Roger Moore:
What disappoints me most is how there is nothing hackers are doing these days that are really different than what they were doing in the mid-80s. AS a security guy that is infuriating. It is a fun read though, a great who done it well told.
redshirt
@Schlemazel: I’ve never heard of this KGB theory before. Why would the KGB take down the Shuttle? That’s an act of war if discovered.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
For the same reason Clinton was bringing cocaine into Arkansas, it fills some gigantic need the wingnuts have to blame people they see as enemies with anything that goes wrong.
delk
I learned about the Challenger at a gay bar having a hamburger.
When I was at UIC I was dating a guy who worked for Montgomery Wards HQ on Chicago and Halsted. The bar was at Halsted and Hubbard (middle of absolutely nowhere back in the day) and I would take the Halsted bus north to meet him.
It was convenient and we’d meet a couple times a week.
The weird thing was that they had a Space Shuttle pinball that we would play while we waited for the burgers to be ready.
We unplugged the machine that day.
jl
@Baud: I’m not sure that you are sure that I am not correct. Depends on what program we are talking about. His family leave plan is from a payroll tax, IIRC, his single payer plan is payroll and higher income taxes, and his college tuition plan is from financial transaction tax. He needs to do a better job at explaining each of them.
And wrt to health care, he needs to explain what he will do when single payer does not pass on DAY ONE (!!) of his administration, and how he will improve PPACA in way that benefits most people and makes single payer more feasible.
redshirt
@Schlemazel: What? Clinton was a cocaine smuggler? Never heard that one either.
Have I been deaf my whole life?
Maybe.
jl
@Baud: BTW, you seem to be following the Gilmore model of campaigning, except hanging around miserable lefty blogs, rather than lazing on the sofa watching liberal news talkies.
I guess, since you seem to be planning to model your administration on Harding, it doesn’t make much difference. You can play poker with your buddies in your own den as well as in the White House.
Baud
@jl: I was talking about his single payer plan. People who are not employed for whatever reason would not be paying into the system, if I understanding the financing piece correctly, but they would still get the same health care benefits as “workers.”
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
You lucky bustert! I wish I could say that. Yeah, it was (I think) where they started the systematic murder of people who got in their way. I don’t remember the details right now but I bet other people here can tell you. I remember there was a landing strip in the hills that was important to the BS
jl
@Baud:
Replying to Baud got me into moderation, due to a naughty word. Do you people see how the Baud campaign threatens the moral fibre of our precious youth? Do you all see now?
Retry:
BTW, you seem to be following the Gilmore model of campaigning, except hanging around miserable lefty blogs, rather than lazing on the sofa watching liberal news talkies.
I guess, since you seem to be planning to model your administration on Harding, it doesn’t make much difference. You can play p 0 k * r with your buddies in your own den as well as in the White House.
raven
@delk: I had moved from Champaign-Urbana to Athens the year before. It was really cold and there was snow on the ground here so I cut through the Union on my way to play hoops. I walked through the TV lounge just as it blew up.
redshirt
@Schlemazel: Bubba was my second Presidential vote, HW shamefully being my first. Sorry, America! I’m from Maine and the Bush’s are actually from Maine even though they pretend they’re from other states for election reasons, of course. Sorry again!
NotMax
@Schlemazel
That would be the whole Mena airport nonsense.
FlipYrWhig
@redshirt: Look up “Mena airport, Arkansas.”
Central Planning
@Betty Cracker:
I think it’s got a more Johnny 5 vibe going on.
MomSense
@redshirt:
I lived in K’Port and drove around town the summer before the election with my “Save Kennebunkport Vote Democratic” bumper sticker. The bike shop owner printed them up. I went to school in Boston so I voted there.
Schlemazel
@redshirt:
Oh don’t be sorry, I am so used to everyone knowing all the old stories here that I just assume. It was 20 years ago no reason people should remember it.
redshirt
@MomSense: It’s a lovely town and the Bush’s can’t ruin it – Kennebunkport is bigger than Walker’s Point.
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
I’m pretty sure I saw a German movie about the same case from the hacker’s POV, though the names were different. The ending for the hacker is the same.
That movie is really interesting because the hacker does too many drugs and becomes convinced that he accidentally caused Chernobyl by hacking their computer, which then starts to get mixed together in his mind with his real spying activities and his obsession with a novel about the Illuminati.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
WOW! I am going to have to find that film. THANKS!
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: Cliff Stoll, right?
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne: @Mnemosyne:
DAMN YOU! :) Now I want to see a movie that does not appear to have gotten out of Germany & probably is not available anywhere anymore. I have to find a DVD of this film, 23.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
Yes.
NotMax
@Schlemazel
On YouTube.
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: Might this do in the meantime?
Schlemazel
@NotMax: @Gin & Tonic:
THANKS YOU GUYS!
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
I saw it quite a while ago, obviously, but it stuck in my memory. I saw it at a festival of current German film within a year or so of its release in Germany. Living in the film capital of the world has its perks sometimes.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne: Huh. I didn’t know you lived in Mumbai.
PJ
@Gin & Tonic: I advise against the Pro-Ject Debut (or Re-Ject, as I termed it) – it was expensive and made a horrible grinding noise after a few hundred hours of playing. Getting the Pro-Ject reps in the US (a company called Sumiko) to acknowledge there was a problem and repair it was an ordeal, and then the problem started again after even fewer hours. Also, none of these new expensive turntables will lift the stylus and return the tone arm to resting, which even the cheapest turntable used to do. I’d recommend getting a decent used turntable from Goodwill and getting a new cartridge.
Mnemosyne
@Gin & Tonic:
:-p
redshirt
@Schlemazel: I’ve never really trusted cable news or any news or anyone, really, and so nothing takes me by surprise.
catclub
@Germy:
Nope, if you had not thrown them out, then neither would all the other people who owned them, and they would be as common as dirt.
Likewise for those comic book collections and baseball card collections that you mother threw away.
catclub
@redshirt: Except this, then:
“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
chopper
@Gin & Tonic:
I dunno if he still makes em, but Stoll use to sell handmade Klein bottles. got one for my brother (who does a lot of topo and computer security work). really nice piece.
Ruckus
@Schlemazel:
Ultraviolet Thunder suggested that Audio Tecnica turntables are pretty good a while back and I bought one based on that. And of course he’s right they are pretty good, far better than the average ones that we used to get back in the day. With USB and all. Are they as good as the high end ones? Probably not but are they good enough? Seems like it to me. And they don’t cost half of what a car costs today. Which of course would mean that you can turn those old records into something you can listen to, which you don’t do now.
Death Panel Truck
@Cacti: Today (where I am it’s still January 27) marks the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. Gus Grissom, the astronaut’s astronaut and an all-around motherfucking badass, is still my hero to this day.