This month sure went by fast for me, although I don’t know why.  How about you?  It’s only 3 weeks until the first day of summer.  And high school graduations are all scheduled and planned. 

My #2 grandson gets sprung out into the world in a couple of weeks.  I got the announcement card yesterday and immediately noticed that his graduation exercises are going to be held at 9 am.  What’s with that?  Is it so they can start partying sooner?  I need to check this out.

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While searching for some “digital audio” grade blank CD’s I learned that they are not too common.  I did find some at Best Buy, but the selection was very limited.  And the only ones available came with their “jewel-box” cases.  I was hoping to buy one of those stacks of discs on a spindle because I already have plenty of the empty storage cases.  But no luck with that.

I haven’t checked the internet yet because I wanted some right now, but I’ll do that this weekend.  I stopped in an Office Depot store for a comparison, but they don’t stock any at all.

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Last week the FCC chairman told a group that the Commission’s decision on the proposed merger of the XM and Sirius satellite radio services will be announced by the end of June.

The two competing companies are bleeding red ink and have been waiting for a long time to get the government ok to merge their networks so they can eliminate any duplicative (is that a word?….ed.) operations expenses.

Already, a gaggle of greedy Congressmen have checked out their “campaign ” bank accounts and are meddling in the process again.  Some are wanting to force the two companies to give up some of their spectrum so that there will be bandwidth for future competitors.  It hasn’t occurred to those dunces that if these two can’t make it, then nobody is going to try and build out a competing satellite fleet and take them on.

Others that already have the terrestrial radio industry in their pockets are trying to block the merger outright.  Their claim that it would eliminate “competition” rings a little hollow when you point out that they have plenty of competition already.  It’s called “AM and FM radio,” “internet radio,” “iPod” and lots of other names.

Myself, I haven’t gotten on the satellite radio train.  Mainly because I just don’t listen to the radio at all.  But I have heard the XM service and I have to say that I’m impressed with it.  For people who spend a lot of their time in their car because of their work, etc., then that’s the way to go.  Regular radio is crap anymore and if the satellites are allowed to prosper, then the terrestrials’ days are over.

But our day is just starting, so let’s get this equipment checked out and I’ll go start the coffee.

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They Come In Three’s, Don’t They?

Late yesterday afternoon the word came out that famed TV comedian Harvey Korman had died at age 81.  Back in January he was successfully operated on for a non-cancerous brain tumor.  But a couple of days later he suffered an aneurysm and despite several operations to fix it, he passed away yesterday.

For years he was a struggling comedian, trying to find success in New York and then later in Hollywood where he finally caught on with Danny Kaye and did sketches on his TV show in the early 1960’s.  The cancellation of Kaye’s show in 1967 was a Godsend for Korman because he bounced right onto the regular cast of the Carol Burnett show during its first season that same year.

His memorable roles on the Burnett show with co-stars Tim Conway and Vicki Lawrence are too numerous to try and list.  The spontaneous skits with Conway had millions of people literally doubled over in laughter every week.

And who could forget his movie role as the crooked politician Hedley Lamarr in “Blazing Saddles,” one of the true film classics?

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Korman’s death followed by only four days the passing of another stand-up comedian who helped shape television comedy in the 1970’s, Dick Martin.

Martin was the zany half of the team Rowen & Martin, an established nightclub act that had perfected their joke lines and timing over the years.  In 1968 they were tabbed to headline a new type of TV comedy show, “Rowen and Martin’s Laugh-In.”

It was an instant success that broke all the established rules of television comedic production.  It relied on a fast-paced track of one-liners and mini-skits that made stars of people like Goldie Hawn, Lili Tomlin and Ruth Buzzi.  Their clever development of catch-phrases left our culture with lines that are still heard today, “Sock it to me!”, “You bet your Bippie,” and “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall’s.”

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Each week, Dan Rowen (l.) and Dick Martin (r.)
would award the Fickle Finger of Fate to
a hapless recipient who had made the news recently.

Rowan and Martin amicably dissolved their act in 1977 and went wherever fortune would take them.  Dan Rowan died in 1987 of complicatins from diabetes.  Dick Martin started a new career as television director, most notably on the “Bob Newhart Show.”

Martin had lost a lung at age 17 and suffered severe respiratory distress all of his life.  It was that problem that hastened his passing on Saturday, May 24.

For a while anyway, let’s hope that they just come in “two’s” this time around.

Ok, let’s get this equipment checked out.  I’ve got to start the coffee.

The eBay sales deadline for Donna’s pumper has come and gone and there were no bids at all.  What a surprise, eh?  Keeping a $3,500 reserve on a piece of junk wasn’t really a wise decision.  I can’t imagine anybody even going to the time and expense of picking it up for free.  Even a scrap dealer wouldn’t get enough brass off of it to make it pay.  With this loon you can’t begin to guess what he’ll be doing next with it.

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Keep your eyes open, folks.  If you see this junker driving through your neighborhood looking for a parking place, call the cops and clue them in.

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My phono/tape-to-CD recorder was delivered yesterday afternoon.  That was pretty fast service.  I ordered it during the holiday weekend (It was on Friday night, to be exact), so I didn’t expect any action on it right away.  But Tuesday morning when everybody came back to work, they processed the order and shipped it out.  And yesterday, Wednesday, the Fed-Ex truck left it on my porch.  Good ol’ Fed-Ex.

I was surprised to find that this machine is bigger than it looks in the pictures.  It’s 19 inches wide, 13 in. deep and 12 in. tall.  The cabinet is solid wood and the whole thing weighs 35 lbs.  I definitely have to find some dedicated space for this thing.

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Last night I looked through the instruction manual and got another pleasant surprise…..it’s all in one language. 

Something that I learned while reading through it, is that my blank computer CD’s won’t work.  Nuts.  And I’ve got plenty of those, too.  You have to use discs that have the phrase “digital audio” printed under the CD logo.  They’re similar to the blank DVD’s that have to be initialized and then finalized after you’re finished recording on them.  So I’ve got an unplanned trip to Best Buy today to pick up a pack of those.

Another interesting feature is the way you can separate the tunes onto separate tracks.  A cassette tape is continuous and one song runs into the next without any separation other than a pause in the audio.  But when you are recording onto a CD, there is a button on the machine, and the remote control unit, that you can press and it will create a separate track on the disc.  So at the end of a song, and before the next one begins, you just give a quick press and a new, individual track is created on the CD.

If you cannot sit around while the recording session is going on, then you can set it to an automatic mode and it will make the track separations itself whenever there is an audio gap of 2 seconds or more.  That’ll be fine when doing the old LP’s, but I don’t think my home-made cassettes have that big a time gap between tunes.

This is going to be interesting, but I have to get out and buy some blank CD’s and a couple of extra phonograph needles.  First, though, we have to get this equipment checked out.  And I’ll go start the coffee.

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