Radio, Amateurishly

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...