Radio, Amateurishly

  I wrote this Borowitz/Onion-style satire several years ago. A friend brought up the topic of the poor, unloved Third Amendment, so I'm republishing it here. Breaking: White House Unveils TroopBnB WASHINGTON—The White House today announced an innovative new approach to military housing. Dubbed TroopBnB, the plan will require all US homeowners to register and fill out a questionnaire on the number of residents in their home and the number of bedrooms. Any bedrooms deemed to be spare would be made available on an as-needed basis for temporary troop housing. "Americans routinely open their homes to exchange students and minor league ballplayers," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained in a press briefing earlier today, "the least they could do is to support our troops by extending the same courtesy." When asked if the administration considered the Third Amendment before drafting this plan, Ms. Sanders said, "You bet your sweet bippy we d...

  A young man from the hinterlands became the first in his family to attend university. When the son returned home around Christmas time at the close of the fall semester, the father asked the son if he had gained any knowledge from his first term in an institution of higher learning. "Uh," the son replied, "pi r squared." The father reached across and smacked the son on the side of the head. "Ain't you learnt nothin'?" he demanded. "Pie are not square. Pie are round. Cornbread are square." I first heard that joke from my dad decades ago. Today, with the benefit of more than half a lifetime's experience as a dad/stepdad, I can tell dad jokes with the best of them. It is this spirit that I offer a sequel to the original. The town was too small to rate a bus station. The Greyhound busses that stopped here did so on the side of the highway. Or at least they did on those rare occasions when someone actually wanted to get on the bus here—a...

Author's note: I am not a medical doctor. If you have a specific question about the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of any illness, please talk to a medical doctor. That's not just an attempt to shield myself from liability; it's a genuine statement of my views on how we delegate responsibilities in society. I wouldn't want anyone taking medical advice from me any more than I'd want them taking medical advice from some quack with a YouTube channel. This article is presented not as a medical article, but as an article on risk management. And baseball.   A summer afternoon in the ballpark has a way of engaging the senses. The grass is an impossibly deep green against the muted red of the infield dirt. The home team uniforms are crisp white, accented with the team colors. The road team's grays are similarly accented. The warm air carries the scent of steaming hot dogs. Fans shell peanuts and wash them down with ice-cold cups of foamy beer.  There are no outs an...

Twenty-nine years ago today, a couple of college sweethearts said "I do", drove away from the church in her little white Ford Escort, and started a life together. For our honeymoon, we drove slowly up the California coast, ultimately to Napa Valley. On the second night, we stayed in a little hotel in Monterey. This was in the days before on-demand movies or even satellite TV. A selling feature of this particular hotel was that it had in-room HBO. The movie that happened to be on that night was Sleeping With the Enemy . Neither of us had seen it, so we watched it. It's become a running joke with us that we would have watched a thriller about an obsessive psycho husband on our honeymoon, and it has become a tradition in ensuing years to watch it on or near our wedding anniversary. It's also somewhat traditional for us to enjoy a meal together of pizza and champagne (it's actually a really good combination). Tonight, we'll be enjoying Dom Perignon, pizza from our...

  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...

  On my first Parks on the Air (POTA) activation, in April of 2021, I logged eighteen contacts. Seven of those were on satellite, which is only slightly better than I do on a typical satellite pass. If it had been an HF-only activation, as many POTA activations are, it would barely have been a success. In September of the same year, just five short months later, I activated Crystal Cove State Park , K-1141. Technically, I activated it twice, since midnight UTC rolled around partway through the afternoon (US Pacific time) that I spent there. On that visit to the park, I logged 104 contacts. I'd like to think that the increased success in completing QSOs can be attributed to the great strides I've made in my skills as an operator. I'd like to think that. More likely is that the activity itself is growing, and with that growth comes ever-increasing opportunities to make contacts. On-air activity for POTA has spent the last two years growing by leaps and bounds. We hear anecdo...