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When Antennas Attack

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My most recent Parks on the Air (POTA) activation, an overnighter at Chino Hills State Park US-1139 on the weekend of 15 and 16 February, 2025, was a blast, but not without its challenges. During the evening hours, US Pacific time, I experienced a mysterious increase in SWR, and a resultant decrease in transmit power as my transmitter automatically rolled back the power to protect itself. It cost me at least one QSO, as I heard a station repeatedly trying to reply to my CQ with me unable to complete the exchange. As I like to say, I'm not a real engineer. I'm a graduate of a liberal arts school and a software engineer by trade. Someone more knowledgeable might be able to expand upon—or refute—my analysis of what happened. For now, here's what I think went wrong. Background Contest The weekend in question was the weekend of the ARRL International DX Contest, CW. The CW portions of the non-WARC bands were wall to wall with contest participants, making frequency selection for ...
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The Flight of the Bumblebee

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  A popular story goes something like this. The bumblebee, according to the laws of aerodynamics, is incapable of flight. The bumblebee is too dumb to know anything about the laws of aerodynamics. She doesn't know she can't fly, so she flies. The story has been debunked , owing to a misunderstanding of how insect wings generate lift, but it still is a fun and sometimes illustrative story. My amateur radio experience, now well into its sixth year, sometimes resembles the story of the bumblebee's flight. I'm not exactly a rookie—I've been a shortwave listener since the late '70s—but I have considerably less experience than a lot of my fellow hams in the art of sending and receiving signals over the air, and doing so efficiently. I'm doing almost everything incorrectly, and yet somehow I manage to make QSOs. I have QSLs from 102 DXCC countries 1 . I've worked my QTH's antipode. I've talked to the International Space Station. Against all odds, I...
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John Mellencamp Ordered to Change "Little Pink Houses" Lyrics

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WASHINGTON—A newly signed executive order will require John Mellencamp to release a revised version of his 1983 hit single "Little Pink Houses" with the reference to "vacation[ing] down at the Gulf of Mexico" removed from the song's penultimate verse, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced today. "When President Donald J. Trump acted decisively to right an historical wrong," Ms. Leavitt said, visibly fighting back tears, "by ordering that the waters between the Florida and Yucatán Peninsulas be renamed to Mare Nos —I mean the Gulf of America, he knew there would be some loose ends. This order merely ties up one of those loose ends." When asked by a reporter from the Bloomington Herald-Times about the appropriateness of a President directing a singer-songwriter's artistic expression by legal fiat, an angry Leavitt replied, "Look. If Billy Mack can change the words to 'Love Is All Around' in a delibe...
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Unplugged

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In 2017, Jonathan Coulton dropped his double album Solid State . I immediately ordered a copy on vinyl. It turned out to be a concept album, but not in the sense of telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was more of a nonlinear set of dystopian sketches of a world that had become too connected, too online. In his epilogue to the album's companion graphic novel, Coulton summed up the mood of the time. "When I started work on Solid State , the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'" .  Coulton's unique style up until Solid State had been mostly catchy, uptempo songs that featured quirky humor—a mad scientist develops a poignantly unrequited crush on his victim, an intentionally larger-than-life portrait of Kenesaw Mountain Landis ends with Shoeless Joe Jackson (of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox infamy) switching careers to become a pop star who "asked the musical question Is She ...
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Of Sinister Slings and Dancing Peacocks

Two things. First, generalizations are, well, general. For one thing, to the extent that I pay attention to football, I like Liverpool, who would never be mistaken for a team with an underdog mentality. I have some very good friends who are Dodger fans. Our interactions are peppered with the sort of good-natured ribbing that makes baseball fun. This isn't about them. This is about Karen and Chad and that special kind of entitled front-runner fan who feels that the world owes them a pennant.   Second, I find meta-media critiques to be tedious. The liberal media are biased. The media are normalizing the presidential candidacy of a man whose loss of mental sharpness is becoming as obvious as is his hostility toward the norms of democracy. The media are motivated entirely by clicks and eyeballs; if it bleeds, it leads. Blah blah blah. It's become tired and predictable. So naturally, I'm going to dive right in and discuss the abysmal coverage, thus far, of the Major League Baseb...
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de Tocqueville's First Editor

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  My first go at cartooning.
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The Portal

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  "Dude, In-N-Out is the fucking Bob Dylan of burger joints." "Bob Dylan?" Sanjay asked. "You know, like how people are all obsessed with Dylan? It's not that he isn't a talented songwriter—he absolutely is—but there's this whole fanboy subculture that's developed around him with an outsized impression of his talent and his contribution to the art form that no songwriter could ever hope to live up to. You see the parallels?" "I guess. I just thought In-N-Out sounded good. You got anything else in mind for lunch?" "I dunno," Colin said. "You pick something." "I think I just did." They both laughed. "Okay. I think I have an idea. It's not great, but we haven't been there in a while." * * * The house was a corner lot, perched on a hillside, with a commanding view of the town below. The only ranch style on a street of two-stories, its corner location in an affluent neighborhood unfortuna...
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