Stream Coast to Coast AM with George Noory from Guam and Get Your Late-Night Paranormal Fix in the Morning

I've always enjoyed listening to far-away places on the radio, ever since I was a child going to bed with a transistor radio up to my ear. If you can find local programming when DX-ing (increasingly difficult with national syndication), it's like taking a trip to a place you will likely never visit, nor probably want to since that often dulls the charm. You get a feel for the people, the problems, the politicians, the food, the ways they entertain themselves.

With the advent of the Internet, the world is no smaller, but much of it is now as close as your keyboard. I found 567 K-57 KGUM out of Guam while finding a way to stream Coast to Coast AM from my desk at the office. I was recording it from a local broadcast on my PC and carrying it with me on a USB stick, but that became a nuisance, and this way is much more interesting. K-57 does do a great deal of syndication but there is still enough local color to make it interesting during commercial breaks and local news.

You can tune in at 10am ET.

TuneIn Stream (formerly RadioTime.org)
http://tunein.com/tuner/?StationId=32909&

Direct Stream from K-57 (more reliable for me, I have it bookmarked)
http://radio.securenetsystems.net/radio_player_large.cfm?stationCallSign=KGUM2

Station Homepage
http://www.pacificnewscenter.com/

Streaming OTR / Old Time Radio

If you want to stream OTR / Old Time Radio at your computer, you may be interested in these links that I use routinely. Not all are reliable all the time, and I find myself changing channels a lot. I'm especially fond of half-hour comedy (in those days a half hour show lasted a half hour!), so if something comes on that will require some investment of time that I can't afford, I will change the channel.


You may want to start with TuneIn, http://tunein.com/ (formerly RadioTime.org); some of my favorites are below, but a quick search yields a lot.

OTR Now Radio
http://tunein.com/radio/OTR-Now-Radio-s8370/

CRN Channel 1
(mostly drama / longer formats)
http://tunein.com/radio/CRN-Channel-1-s99055/

CRN Channel 2
(mostly comedy / variety / adventure)
http://tunein.com/radio/CRN-Channel-2-s99056/

AM 1710 Antioch
http://tunein.com/radio/AM-1710-Antioch-s50924/

I've also used Live365, but not crazy about the ads so don't go there much; but if you search for OTR you'll find a lot to choose from.
http://www.live365.com/index.live

Rest in Peace, Lt Columbo

My favorite picture;
"I know he did it, I just
don't know how."

This is very sad. I have been a fan and collector of the Columbo movies for years when all that was available was do-it-yourself VHS. They were on so much across ABC, ABC Family and I think USA that I eventually didn't need to record them to get a fix, I just needed to turn on the TV.

(Waaay back when they were run on CBS Sunday nights IIRC at 11:30-1:30, I would actually schedule Monday a.m. classes in college late so I could stay up and watch it [after thinking about this more, I believe it was Monday nights; this would have been in the 1981-82 school year, and it was Tuesday mornings I scheduled late]; poor college students couldn't afford VCRs in those days, or even TVs. I watched in the game room; fortunately no one else but me was interested in TV at that hour.)

I no longer have my VHS tapes, but I have a number of paperbacks, one from the 70s that probably was not a Columbo novel to begin with; it reads like the they changed some names, put Peter Falk on the cover and took advantage of the popularity of the show.

In the 90s they began releasing new paperbacks that tied with Falk's return to the role for ABC. I bought and read most of those, eg http://www.amazon.com/Columbo-Skelter-Murders-William-Harrington/dp/0812530268/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309170723&sr=1-3 

Nothing compares with the show, however, and there is only one Peter Falk and he owned this character.

I feel the same way about Tony Shalhoub and Monk. I anticipated every show every Friday and couldn't help but be saddened at each commercial break when I'd look at the clock and think "Only 50 minutes left tonight... only 40 minutes left..." etc, every season until the show ended. Only one other show did I savor in this fashion, that was M*A*S*H, and I remember vividly as a child feeling the time drain away and wishing I didn't have to wait another week for these friends to come back into my living room.


Of course, one aspect of the reverse whodunit is the enjoyment comes from watching our hero solve the crime, not finding out who committed it, so most episodes can be enjoyed many times.

I have a signed autograph from Falk. I wrote to him and he sent it to me. No personal message. I suppose he had a secretary that simply sent them out when the fan mail came in. I am very fond of it.

I'm just beginning to need and use an audio editor. Found this open source application, Audacity, and am very pleased. Bit of a learning curve if you're new to it, like I am, a bit of an adjustment from video editors, but it's free and does basic editing

Get Audacity here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

If you want to save to mp3, you'll need the free LAME library; it's available for a variety of platforms.

The download page is kind of confusing. Below is a direct link to the Widows exe as of 2011-06-25; you'll want to check the main page if you are reading this much later than 2011-06-25, since a more recent version may be available.

Lame_v3.98.3_for_Audacity_on_Windows.exe
http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/Lame_v3.98.3_for_Audacity_on_Windows.exe

Main LAME for Audacity download page
http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/

Bing Crosby and Judy Garland Sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

I listened to a delightful Bing Crosby radio show last night. Early December 1955. What struck me as very interesting is that while we now start Christmas right after Halloween, there was not much talk about the holiday yet, and Christmas was less than 3 weeks away. In fact, Bing says the song  was a big hit last year and it looks like it will be again this year, which tells me that the season for listening to holiday songs was still young.

Here is Bing and Judy Garland singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I'd never heard this rendition before, and I really do immerse myself in Christmas songs well before Thanksgiving, so this little quirky gem was a wonderful find.

Listen:



You can listen to the whole show here:

[Originally Buzzed by me 2010-12-07]

I heard a Jean Shepherd radio show recently, from Christmas Day evening, 1965. He was speculating that only handful of people were listing to him at that point, the world feeling tired and greasy and bloated with celebration. He recounted a time he had tuned into a show one Christmas Day evening, only because he was on the road and the weather was bad and wanted the company. The show was out of Chicago and the DJ obviously bored, realizing only a handful of people were listening.

Shepherd was critical of the music of the season, poor European medieval stuff from musicians no one heard of or cared about but made an appearance once a year. He wondered why everyone is compelled to live in a Dickens novel this time of year.

He was even critical of the radio shows that ran ad nauseum every year and weren't very good (I think he was thinking of Lionel Barrymore's A Christmas Carol). He said TV doesn't have anything like that, but he didn't say it would or should, and he didn't realize that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058536/), which had first aired the year before, would do just that, among a handful of others.

Don't know who Jean Shepherd is? He wrote the story that A Christmas Story is based on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/, which has become a perennial classic (in my opinion a very good one), and in recent years has run for 24-hour Christmas Eve/Day marathons on TBS.

I initially thought his feelings about Christmas were oddly opposed his own recollections, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. Christmas to Shepherd wasn't Dickens or European flutes or reruns of old radio shows, it was the sights and sounds and smells of his childhood, which I connect with very viscerally; he's my father's age and captured my father's childhood very accurately; in fact, much of it was distilled into my own Christmases, and I'm sure some into my children's. I haven't read Shepherd's book, but I know the images in the movie well. I grew up around houses like that, saw appliances in some folks homes like those in the movie. The decorations, the incandescent lights on the tree (a real tree), they could have been lifted from millions of children's memories, which is precisely why something becomes a classic.

BTW, look at the movie art for these two pictures, 10 years apart. I can see someone shrugging and saying "Hey, it's been 10 years, who's gonna notice?"

A Christmas Story (1983)





http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/


The Sting (1973)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070735/

Wartime Halloween OTR Old Time Radio

[Originally Buzzed by me 2010-10-27]

You can get a very deep (if gauzy) glimpse into another time by receptively engaging what it left behind in its entertainment. Not just listening. And "engage" is filled with too much buzz to really convey what I mean. How about "dialog." Listen and respond.

I've been listening to wartime Halloween radio, and wonder at how close it reflects today's sentiments, and yet how far away it is.

What are ration credits? I don't know, but you get them when you buy Kraft foods. (I could find out, but I kind of like not knowing, instead feeling by context.) Ads encourage you eat every scrap of food, and nothing helps more than an attractive and tasty presentation, like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (with "grated" cheese). Your family will eat every bite, especially if served in a molded ring with steamed vegetables or a little fish or meat in the center (notice, a "little").

That was 1943, the war was not going well, basic staples were scarce. My Grandpa Cairns, who retired as a district director for Loblaws back when they had US operations, was a Loblaws grocery store manager in 1943, and neighbor women - women that knew him and his family - would beg him for baby formula, but he had none to sell. Grandma Cairns' maiden name was Bauer, and some folks shunned her because it was German. She was in fact German. Her father was a first generation immigrant. I have seen his birth certificate. He was a bible-believing Lutheran, a carpenter, and smoked a pipe. Grandma says she remembers watching the smoke curl up from behind his bible as he read. While listening to the radio perhaps.

My dad remembers radio. And families really did gather round it and listen together. In 1943 he was 5 years old. A new Zenith console cost $425 in 1947 http://bit.ly/94r7pU. That's over $4,000 today according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://bit.ly/276heh.

Kraft aired that Macaroni and Cheese ad during The Great Gildersleeve on October 31st. In the same show Gildy's nephew Leroy scoffs at jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treat as old fashioned. Instead, the kids plan a dance, though Leroy learns to have some Halloween fun.
Halloween 1944: a ghost in an old house turns out to be a war widow who can't bear the loss of her husband. Chester Riley (Life of Riley's William Bendix, who was a star of war movies at that time) encourages her to go on, because her husband would want it that way.

There's also often a not-so-subtle sexual subtext in family radio entertainment; a puzzling difference is, this is often followed by another punchline. The audience doesn't laugh at the first (perhaps I am just sensitized to it and expecting a laugh) but they do at the second, which is not sexual, or not as sexual. It's also possible that the audience is laughing but it was muted for broadcast. Remember that everything was live in those days, and even though the actors were mostly adults, many portrayed children, and were believed to be children by the audience at home.
(Something I'll bet you didn't know: Fibber McGee and Molly's maid Beulah was neither black nor a woman; Beulah was portrayed by a white man, Marlin Hurt, and subsequently anther white man after Hurt died ; not until the character was cast for TV did a black woman assume the role; that was Ethel Waters, the first African American to star in a comedy TV series http://bit.ly/9syriO. If you listen the Fibber shows, Beulah's radio persona was respectfully played; I've yet to hear an insensitive segment, even by today's standards, where such things are easily and painfully identified.)

Back to sex (who doesn't like talking about sex?) - one of Gildy's guests at his 1943 Halloween party suggests playing a game in the dark, and Gildy asks what fun that would be and someone says they should be able to find something interesting to do in the dark (notable absence of laughter). They settle on "sardines," which is played in the dark. The game is a bit like tag, but the object is for partygoers to walk around looking for the person who is 'it,' and upon finding them, get especially close, like sardines in a can. As more and more partygoers find who's 'it,' the metaphorical sardine tin grows accordingly. Of course it leads to harmless fun resulting from who ends up hugging whom, and some painful encounters between shins and coffee tables.

There is often an unfortunate simple perspective to how one media grows out of another. Too often we hear observations presented as self-evident truths - radio started as little more than broadcast stage plays, TV started as little more than radio with pictures, the Internet started as little more than electronic books (the analogy "page" persists today).

(People often forget that TV began when film was a fully developed medium, yet the common [and trivializing] comparison is between TV and radio, not TV and film, perhaps because like radio, TV assumed the role of electronic hearth.)

But let me expose the poor logic with an example: I am little more than a bundle of my father's and mother's DNA molded by the experience of other DNA bundles in my circle, which happen to talk to me, touch me, or create artifacts that remain and influence me in their absence.

Yet that says little more than there is no thing that is not built of other things, and that seems to say nearly nothing that we don't already know.We know that children are something quite apart [from their parents], and what they are apart from is something very unique itself, and so is the page, the stage, radio, TV, etc.

Simple answers bother me. Not Occam's Razor simple, but under-thought, simplistic. Radio is more akin to the campfire and the kitchen, and TV to the stage, even though we might briefly forgive TV's comparison to radio because it involves similar technology and some of the same personalities; indeed, some of the same story lines were lifted nearly intact for TV. Lucille Ball did this from "My Favorite Husband" to "I Love Lucy."

There is something primal in the oral tradition. Something very old, woven into our DNA through hundreds of thousands of years of storytelling around a fire, connecting through flames, together exploring the singular capacity to hear and simultaneously supply the pictures in our minds. 

Unboxing the Wouxun KG-UVD1P Dual-Bander HAM Radio

KD8OSB unboxes his new Wouxun KG-UVD1P dual-bander HAM radio. The annunciations are in Chinese but can be turned off. This is a recent offering from Wouxun; I've listened to it some, but haven't had any time talking; I'm new to the hobby.