Radio, Amateurishly

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...

  A three-stage rocket propels a spacecraft and its occupants to a docking with a wheel-shaped rotating space station. The occupants disembark and spend an indeterminate, although presumably short, period of time in the relative comfort of the station's artificial gravity before boarding a second spacecraft. The second spacecraft undocks, makes a single trans-lunar insertion burn, and three days later completes a soft landing on the surface of the Moon. By now you're probably thinking that yes, you've seen that movie at least a half dozen times—maybe even read the book—but this isn't a description of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey , or of Stanley Kubrick's visualization of 2001 . In 1959, nearly a decade before the Clarke/Kubrick book-and-movie combo, Mae and Ira Freeman published a story of an Earth orbit rendezvous Moon mission in their illustrated children's book You Will Go to the Moon . The story's protagonist is a young boy who goes on...

  I haven't flown Southwest Airlines in years, and with each passing year it becomes increasingly unlikely that I ever again will. The open seating plan is a cattle call. They cancel flights at the drop of a hat. They're not really all that much cheaper than the Big Three US-based carriers these days. Then there was that time a Southwest pilot with an open mic was caught deriding California's Bay Area and its people which, as I wrote about at the time , seemed to reveal a bit more than the company would like for us to know about what they really think of their passengers. The one thing Southwest had going for them, the company's longstanding commitment to including two checked bags with each regular fare, is now out the window . It all paints a picture of a corporate culture that can barely hide its disdain for us, like Randal (Jeff Anderson) in the 1994 Kevin Smith film Clerks when he says, "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers"...