A Crummy Commercial

Several items: First, the Brewers manager, Pat Murphy, is NOT afraid to make a decision.  For the second time recently he changed pitchers in the middle of an at-bat !  Thursday afternoon Murph replaced Robert Gasser during the Mariners game: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8qxh4gqJ34 On August 3rd Murph replaced Brandon Sproat versus the Pirates: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYNhK7-CvFM Murph is definitely serious about the end of the season !   But the Brewers did finally win: BTW, the only other time I remember seeing this was in a Cubs game during the 1980s - I'm sure it happens a lot more but gotta figure that it could be seen as a public insult to the pitcher (reminds me of the schoolyard refrain: "but we didn't get our last ups" - IOW the pitcher didn't get a chance to redeem the at bat). Second:  During the afternoon while checking the laundry on the line I saw this: 2026 is a cicada year here on the island.  The ques...

Bing had this as the background pic for August 19, 2026: The USN stubby carrier plane is a Brewster Buffalo XF2a-1 from 1938 in the full size wind tunnel that would later become NASA Langley.  Unfortunately it was torn down but still, amazing scale ! source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-Scale_Wind_Tunnel The Brewster Buffalo wasn't preferred by the Navy, they liked the Grumman Wildcat F4 and Grumman Hellcat F6 better.  But those wacky Finns liked the Buffalo: https://historynet.com/brewster-buffalo-finland/ When I was a kid I built a Grumman F6F Hellcat model plane.  I can't remember the vendor, probably Revell but maybe Monogram ?  It seems to me that AMT was the goto for car models.  Now that I think of it while the propeller turned there wasn't much else you could do with a model plane, except look at them, maybe dust them (or maybe not ;).  The upstairs room in our house in Fox Point had two built-in dressers with small display shelves above...

I was kind of ambivalent about using bait with the cam.  But then I thought about windfalls.  Usually the deer police most of them but not always.  And I have to figure that a pile of apples probably has at least a few worms.  If I get the deer to eat the apples won't that kill the worms ?  See, you can justify anything :) So I tried baits for a couple of nights.  They found them the first night but left 3.  So I redeployed on Monday night - all were taken.  I think by a single deer, appears to be a fawn ?  Here's my attempt at stitching together the stills: source:  https://youtu.be/gd6jSkp1aWM This reminded me of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show (season 1, episode 32) where Opie is banished from the courthouse after school because Aunt Bea thinks it's a bad influence.  So he goes wandering around, kicking a can down the road.  He encounters a kid eating apples on a pickup truck tailgate and trades him apples for the can....

Since the Brewers took a travel day back from the west coast on Monday, I listened to this Yankee / Red Sox game from 1958, just over 68 years ago (almost as old as me !): http://www.otrannex.com/ http://www.otrannex.com/files/Baseball-New_York_Yankees_v_Boston_Red_Sox-580816.mp3 Here are a few observations: No organ at Fenway then, although maybe it was just hard to hear on the roof where the broadcasters were :) The announcers weren't afraid of a little dead air. Fewer commercials just Atlantic Imperial gasoline and Ballantine beer.  Thankfully no adult diaper commercials ! Weird breaking news from the local station after the anthem, 1460 WOKO in Albany, a guy tried to kill his family and then killed himself, yikes !  A moment of silence at the start for Babe Ruth who played for both clubs.  The Babe died 10 years to the day before this game, August 16, 1948. The Negro American League was still playing, Phil mentioned an upcoming game at Yankee Stadium, Detroit Clowns a...

A few recent pictures, first these from the cam: I've been keeping the cam relatively close to the house.  It dawned on me that the deer know about fruit trees, the volunteer crabapple tree sometimes will have a lot of fruit.  I don't see how they can stand the crabapples though.  I may try setting up the cam near some of the apple trees. The only thing about the crabapple tree is that it's hard to see them with the grass so high - that can be remedied, Chuck ! The Town recently repainted the lines on the road.   In addition they painted the four rectangles around the surveying benchmarks: I am suspicioning that these are meant for the aerial Door County photo property maps, previously mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/06/surveying.html Finally I rode by the nearest DSL installation by the side of the road: And by the DSL stuff was this can which I *think* has the loading coils for the POTS (plain old telephone service).  That silver round thingy ...

I've mentioned Northlake and the Northlake Hotel before many times, for example: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/12/northlake-in-my-mind.html This short video popped up on my Youtube feed: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjV5KmQaGPI It mentions that a recent change was made to the southbound exit from the Tri-state Tollway (294) which accounts for the sealing off of the "jug handle" mentioned in the "Northlake on my mind" blog.  Now the southbound motorist exits 294 south on the county line road (between Cook and Dupage counties).  Here is the tollway map: This new exit is in orange on the map.  It's between the sportsmans club and McMaster-Carr.  There are also new traffic lights but the motorist can then get on Lake street to get to the former Northlake Hotel, now Concord Place.  Unfortunately Google Street View is stuck at 2022 so it doesn't have this new exit viewable yet :( Update: I finally found a video with views from the top of Concord...

"why'd you have to say that, impossible,  why'd you have to say that ?" source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC4efdAv1LM BTW, per Heinlein, strap on wings might allow humans to fly: on the Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menace_from_Earth https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/FSF/FSF_1957_08.pdf (note that The Menace from Earth is followed by a 1 pager from Asimov: A Loint of Paw :) Other than being fun, why mention this ? Because I've always found it much easier to do a task if I know that it has been done before.  The real pioneers will either fail or they'll spend a lot of time/money on a problem.  It was so much easier to write a keyer program for an 8 pin PIC microcontroller after seeing that the fellows at Embedded Research had already created the Tick keyers.  (I did add my old favorite, the potentiometer based speed control).  After Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth it was easier for NASA to send John Glenn around 3 times.  S...

https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-your-website-down-outage-hits-hosting-provider-namecheap Unfortunately, my email and website are hosted by Namecheap.  So I happened to try email and got this: Then I tried the WB9KZY.COM site and got this: Thinking maybe it was a browser thing I tried Edge instead of Firefox and got this: Namecheap did have some explanations up: Hopefully this isn't a huge problem for my business but customers have enough reasons to buy from other vendors, don't need this in addition ! Update: sometime between 6:00 PM and 6:47 PM on Thursday, August 13, 2026 both email and the web site are back. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

While pursuing a favorite activity, browsing magazines, I saw this cover: It's from the March 1934 issue of Radio-Craft magazine.  And the Phonosone article is by none other than Hugo Gernsback himself ! source: https://dn760003.eu.archive.org/0/items/Radio-Craft_1934_03/Radio-Craft_1934_03.pdf If you've never heard of Hugo Gernsback before try the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback photo scanned from the November 1967 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine (page 4) by Michael Holley Swtpc6800. The phonosone itself was basically one half of a pair of headphones that were modified to provide for better bone conduction. No, I have not tried building one although the man on the cover does seem to be really happy  !  :) The inflated price of Radio-Craft : I will have to look to see if Mann's Store still has magazines for sale the next time I'm in there. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

Baseball is complicated (skip to 10 minutes in): source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_f8KpkKczQ Apparent 4th out ?  Huh ?  Here is the explanation from The Athletic: What are 'fourth outs'? Let’s set the scene: It’s the seventh inning. Runners are on the corners. Toronto leads Boston 2-0. The center-field scoreboard shows two outs, so both runners go on contact.   Except there weren’t two outs. An earlier play was announced in the press box as a double play, but the hitter (the Red Sox’s Nick Sogard) was the runner on first. As Anthony Seigler crossed home plate, the scoreboard operator realized the mistake.   Watch the very top of this GIF, as the number of outs rolls back from two to one: Blue Jays pitcher Simeon Woods-Richardson and catcher Brandon Valenzuela pounded their gloves in unison, seemingly also believing it to be three outs.   Second baseman Josh Smith knew. But when he doubled up Sogard at first to end the inning, why did the r...

Keeping on the grade school in the 1960s theme, I was reminded of my encounter with the urban phenomenon: crossing guards.  We moved to Fox Point in fall 1961 where I went to first grade at Indian Hill School.  Here's the class picture (I'm at the lower right): source: https://archive.org/details/MapleDale/Maple%20Dale6/page/n3/mode/2up For some reason I remember Mrs. Smith as being really OLD  :)     I HATE the fact that 4 of those 21 kids are dead in 2026 :(   Now except for maybe one time (that was a civil defense thing where school was let out early and we walked home from Maple Dale) I usually rode the bus, at least in the lower grades.  The suburbs didn't have sidewalks or crossing guards or even that many stop lights.  So it was probably asking a lot for a 4, 5 or 6 year old kid to walk 1.8 miles unsupervised to school and back home. Bing chose this route to Indian Hill where I went to 1st grade . Bing doesn't like direct rou...