Radio, Amateurishly

  The 1985 Amy Heckerling film National Lampoon's European Vacation opens with the Griswald family competing for cash and prizes on the fictitious game show Pig in a Poke . The Griswalds, having already won some impressive prizes, are presented with a choice: walk away with their winnings or "be a pig" and vie for the top prize. Clark W. Griswald (Chevy Chase) decides on the family's behalf to be a pig. The family go on to accidentally win the top prize, which turns out to be an all-expenses-paid tour of Europe and hilarity, as the saying goes, ensues. The scene pokes fun at a number of clichés found in American television game shows. There's the pedantry and self-satisfaction of some  Jeopardy contestants. There's the creepiness of Richard Dawson's insistence on kissing each female contestant on Family Feud . Then there's the dilemma over whether the Griswalds will quit while they're ahead or "be a pig". In game show after game show— W...

  In  The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie , Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) hatches a scheme to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula, distribute mind-control helmets as a free gift with his knockoff Krabby Patties, and achieve world domination. In a tense scene, Squidward Tentacles (Rodger Bumpass) reveals that he is onto Plankton's scheming. " You may have hoodwinked everyone else in this backwater town, but you can't fool me. I listen to public radio." When the film was released in 2004, National Public Radio (NPR) couldn't resist the temptation to play that particular quote during their review of the movie. I am—and have been for decades—a fan of NPR and public radio in general. My enjoyment of NPR is probably informed by my experiences as a shortwave listener; the pacing and presentation style of NPR more closely resembles the international shortwave broadcasters that I grew up with than that of US-based commercial broadcast...

Full disclosure: I've been on the kiss cam. As it turns out, it was with my wife. We were in San Diego for a Padres game. Between innings the Diamond Vision 1 was showing a live montage of couples kissing in the stands, with a graphic of pink hearts framing the images. A camera operator with a shoulder-mounted camera took a few seconds to set up the shot, pointing his lens in our general direction and gesturing that it was his intent that we be the next couple featured. Like actors on a set, we hit our marks while the operator moved his camera into a proper shooting position. A final hand gesture from the operator and a red light atop the camera let us know we were on, the disembodied voice of some imagined director in both of our minds shouting "Action!" It would be inaccurate to say the moment was staged—thirty seconds before the red light came on we had no idea a camera operator was even in our section of the stands—but we were knowing and willing participants in the ...

  WASHINGTON— More Department of Defense assets are slated to be renamed, according to a press briefing given by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. "I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement in principle for Blockchain Bro Holdings LLC to acquire the naming rights for warship CVN-76, currently known as the USS Ronald Regan. The ship will be renamed the USS BitcoinBonanza.com." As the sound of groans filled the briefing room, a visibly agitated Hegseth continued. "Let's get something straight. In the first place, it is my mission to completely eradicate wokeness from the ranks of our military, and I can think of no better place to start than by removing the name of a globalist RINO from one of our fighting ships. Secondly, you people in the mainstream media are going to bitch and moan no matter what I do, so what the hell, I might as well make a few bucks off the deal." Additional upcoming name changes include renaming Edwards Air Force Base t...

You've almost certainly seen the comic. A man and a woman are seated at a restaurant table on what is in all likelihood a date—a first date at that. Making small talk, the woman asks, "What's your favorite band?" The man replies, "Twenty meters." It's an English-language double entendre that's hard to resist having a little fun with. So let's have some fun. Here is a list of amateur radio bands described in terms of musical bands. The list is incomplete and definitely is not definitive. Feel free to fill in the ones that I missed, or come up with other ideas for the ones I included.  This is also the least serious thing I've ever written, so if I said anything untoward about your favorite band—or your favorite band—it was all in fun.  In truth, all of the bands have something to offer. 6 meters - U2 Six meters disappoints way more often than it doesn't, but we keep coming back to it, just hoping against hope that we'll be there when t...

  I still recall vividly how my least favorite type of homework assignment in the third grade (to be sure, I disliked all homework assignments in third grade) was when we would be given a sheet with a long list of scrambled words that the student had to unscramble. I didn't see the point in it. It seemed to be just so much busywork, a way to prevent us from frittering away too much of our afternoons watching cartoons or replicating Evel Knievel's latest stunt on our bicycles using crude jump ramps made from plywood and two-by-fours. What it didn't seem like was something with any intrinsic pedagogical value. When my daughter was in third grade, she came to me with a homework assignment that she was struggling with. I looked at the sheet she handed me and saw to my horror that nothing had changed in thirty years. Third grade teachers still loved assigning long lists of scrambled words to unscramble, and I still had a hard time discerning the pedagogical value of it all. It w...