Radio, Amateurishly

  The holidays are once again upon us. After those of us in the United States sit down to our annual Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, the decorating and preparing for Christmas, or any number of winter holidays that people in this country and around the world observe, will be in full swing. If you were to pop in the W6KSR house unannounced, there's a decent chance you would find a Hallmark Christmas movie on the television. It doesn't matter which one. They all follow pretty much the same formula. A woman from the big city goes back to the small town she grew up in for the holidays, falls in love with a guy she hasn't seen since high school, and starts a small business baking Christmas cookies on the small town's charming Main Street—all while the cameras maintain sufficiently low f-stops as to keep the Christmas lights in the background (there are always Christmas lights in the background) softly blurred. No one in the W6KSR house is intently paying attention to these m...

  I used to be an intellectual until I wised up. — Unknown   The words are homespun, folksy, and utterly infuriating. Maybe the author of this bumper-sticker witticism—which appears to date back at least to the early 1970s—deserves the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's a caution against the Dunning-Krueger Effect , the wising up process describing the acquisition of a self-awareness that brings with it a healthy understanding of one's own limitations. More likely, though, is that it's just what it sounds like, a dismissive reduction of the value of the formal and disciplined pursuit of knowledge in favor of a more intangible combination of life experience and good ol' common sense. There's book smarts and then there's street smarts. American society has long had an uneasy relationship with its more learned side. We celebrate the polymathic intellect of Jefferson and the autodidactic intellect of Lincoln, but also the plain-spokenness of Davy Crockett. We put a m...