A Crummy Commercial

This is an interesting article about tape recording in the postwar 1940s: https://spectrum.ieee.org/magnetophon-laugh-track I actually listened to the AI voiced version of the article which was good.  Although magnetic recording must have appeared to be inevitable, I suspect that having someone like Bing Crosby both use and invest in it didn't hurt.  AI also seems inevitable but very few prominent people (aside from the technologists) are touting AI - perhaps AI also needs a champion like Crosby ?  (What am I saying ?  :) I recall hearing that Bing was known as being casual in dress for his radio show but he apparently wasn't keen on doing two versions of the same show for the east and west coasts with hours in between.  I suppose another possible advantage of tape was that Bing didn't have to do the show in the evening, he could do it anytime during the week.  I knew about his investment in Ampex but had never heard about the origins of the laugh track bef...

Mentioned the 1931 Nautilus arctic expedition a couple days ago: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/05/nautilus-radiogram.html Then I came across this term which also referenced 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ?  Point Nemo https://allthatsinteresting.com/point-nemo Apparently there is a lot of space debris at the bottom of the Pacific at Point Nemo.  It's a relatively safe place to direct space junk because it is so remote.  But the Pacific is really deep at Point Nemo: This reminded me of an old time radio show called: Latitude Zero    Here is a brief article in Time Magazine , June 22, 1941: https://time.com/archive/6788665/radio-latitude-zero/ Unfortunately there is only one episode available in mp3: https://s3.amazonaws.com/RE-Warehouse/l/latitude_zero_1941-02-11_first_show.mp3 It was an unsponsored "summer replacement" - that was the summer before the attack on Pearl Harbor - this probably meant that a lot of the people working on the show, including Howard Du...

Saw that someone in Arkansas had won the 1.8 billion dollar Lotto prize December 24, 2025.   Later Youtube served this movie, The Jackpot , coincidence ? source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8fEBzpLICc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jackpot Before viewing I read the article by John McNulty in The New Yorker, February 19, 1949: The $24,000 prize inflated: Only found 1/2 of an isolated episode of the old time radio show:  Sing it Again : https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/quiz/sing-it-again/sing-it-again-1st-half-only-19xx-xx-xx They must have changed the concept slightly in this episode because the show did call the winner in the New Yorker article before the show.  Also the first and third contestants didn't even try to guess who the phantom voice was - maybe they didn't want the hassle of disposing of $30,500 of prizes like the family in The Jackpot ?  Thankfully the show ends after about 21 minutes. One of the prizes was a Rembrant Television ? nev...

Man, those things are called coffin nails for a reason ! One other thing missing from the last coupla blogs was this online archive of Willis Conover tapes: https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/MLCC/browse/?fq=dc_type%3Asound A search on "VOA" didn't yield much though.  Needed to search on " Music USA " (the formal name of the VOA show) to find quite a few hours that were on the VOA.  For example several songs and a brief interview with "the divine one", Sarah Vaughan: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc770492/m1/#track/10 I've never heard Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald perform selections from Porgy and Bess , amazing !: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc800482/m1/#track/4 (BTW someday I'll have to post my story about listening to the song: Summertime  at GTE) Conover also wrote and acted in an Old Time Radio show: Hazel and Harold .  There are six episodes from 1946 here: https://digital.library...

I tried searching for the word: caspetitious    found here: Did you really mean: capricious (Google) or captious (Bing) ?   Why no, if I had meant something other than caspetitious I would have entered it, right ? This is the only link Google found: https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/O-P-Q/Pohl_ed%20-%20Assignment%20in%20tomorrow.pdf Which happens to be a link to the same story I was reading but the title is different: The Frightened Tree , page 163.   Here is the one I was reading:  Protective Mimicry , page 37, February 1953 issue of Galaxy Magazine : https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1953-02 I have mentioned the Luminist archives before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/08/luministorg.html Here is a link to the Luminist site:   https://www.luminist.org/archives/ Plenty of reading material on Luminist. So what does caspetitious mean ?  There is a word: cespititious: Since it's only 2 letters different let's say Galaxy made ...

This article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-eraser reminded me of the time someone got the idea at GTE to re-use EPROMs - maybe there was a supply problem ?  - one problem was that we had been printing the part numbers on the chips with epoxy ink.  So I started looking through the McMaster-Carr catalog to find ways to clean off the ink, we tried soaking the chips in thinner and then used electric erasers to clean off the marking. What a nightmare ! It didn't work very well, they had extra people come in and after using the eraser they had to use a rag wetted in solvent to try and wipe up the residue. We eventually changed from printing the part number with epoxy ink to somewhat expensive impact printed labels from the WH Brady company.  I remember the sales rep for WH Brady was the slowest walker - the plant was BIG, I didn't have time to waste strolling along :) The erasers we used were AC powered and bigger but similar to this: source: https://www.mcmaster.com/prod...

I saw this ad on Face: The question is whether Jack smoked Luckies is answered here: https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2021/04/dispelling-benny-myths.html 15 to 20 cigars a day couldn't have been good for him.  It was interesting that Mary smoked but not Luckies.  I suspect that the sponsor would have been more than happy to provide them with Luckies for free.  Per note 6 on this page: http://www.jimramsburg.com/vicandsadeaudio.html the Vic and Sade cast got a 3 pound can of Crisco a week !  So it seems reasonable that Lucky Strike would have been willing to supply the Benny cast with plenty of free smokes. I remember my Dad telling me that in the olden days in Milwaukee people walking down a downtown street might be given a free small pack of cigarettes.  Considering the habit forming nature of nicotine, yikes !  He also told me that American made cigarettes were the best.  But I'm glad that he quit smoking in the 1960s - I remember that he liked Kent ciga...

I thought the editorial by Bill, AJ8B in the September issue of the K9YA Telegraph was quite interesting: source: https://k9ya.org/ Bill offers his opinions and information on the ARRL cyber incident based on his professional experience of experiencing a ransomware attack at his workplace.   One thing in particular caught my eye:  how do you know that your backups are "clean" ?  In other words, maybe the payload was present for days/weeks/months before it was deployed.  If a restore of a backup along with a thumb of the nose to the criminals is done you might very well be experiencing the same thing in a short time, then what ? BTW, this kind of stuff even happened before ransomware and the internet - worms and viruses would infect floppy drives.  I remember the windows "shop" where I worked the founder and lead programmer continually had to ask for help because he would re-infect his PC with a virus or worm (I recall that one of them was called Stoned), the tec...

I thought this wiki article and periodic table were interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynthesis https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg I would have assumed that the heaviest metals came directly from the big bang or from supernovas but no, they come from colliding neutron stars ! And I had heard that iron was the end of the line as far as fusion in a star.  Above iron, the fusion process requires external energy to sustain the process rather than giving off surplus energy.  And this extra energy comes from an explosion when the star is unable to resist the compressive force of gravity with the outward force of fusion.  The star compresses and then explodes creating heavier elements. Dr. Matt has a video on cosmic nucelosynthesis: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLGeviU8FM I remember an OTR Sci Fi story, Project Mastodon by Clifford D. Simak on X-1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgzWq...