i just heard elton john sing “count the headlights on the highway”,
reminding me that as a kid i thought he was saying “count the headlice on
the highway.” as a kid it made sense enough. now i imagine a dude driving
along on the interstate, plucking lice critters out of his hair and
keeping count of the number of plucks, singing about this particular
episode of headlice because “it’s been a busy day today”.
i guess i’ll have a busy day tomorrow. not on account of lice or scurvy or
crabs but jury duty. i don’t mind going. i have nothing else to do, as i
spent the day lamenting. nothing useful, that is. my main worry is setting
the alarm clock. i haven’t done that in 10 years.
i do not consider myself a weather whiner but this so-called summer has
really been getting me down. the weekend heat was a seductive respite, but
here we are again back to days of clouds and rain and temperatures in the
60s. it’s just so fucking wrong.
i listened in to Nebraska radio this afternoon. it took me a long time to
warm up to the Sangen DDR-63 WiFi Radio that i bought last year, but i’m
getting as much out of that beast as i could reasonably desire. it is an
internet device, of course, so it shares the same Internet connection used
on the computers in my apartment. but i like the separate device. i have
never warmed up to using a $3000 computer as a radio, and i know that this
Sangean is but an extension of the computer in a way, but it can operate
fully without the computer being on and it is a radio, not Winamp or Real
Player or Spotify, all of which i like just fine, but as a faux
traditionalist of sorts i still prefer the actual table top device for
listening to radio stations. and a device that brings in thousands of
stations is pretty cool, even if it doesn’t bring in local obviousnesses
like Yankees baseball or Bloomberg Radio. the Sangean DDR-63 is not the
“all-in-one” it bills itself to be, but it is a pretty impressive
“lots-in-one” device.
its chief flaw is its lack of AM tuner. that, as mentioned before, makes
it impossible for this New Yorker to hear local broadcasts of Yankees
baseball and Bloomberg Radio. Bloomberg Radio has no advertised public
Internet stream, though it is available directly from their web site,
suggesting that Bloomberg Radio may be accessible through
some not-so-crazy URL hack. but Yankees baseball is only available
for pay over the Internet. So your $400 radio comes with an additional
pricetag if you want to use it to hear some local AM radio.
is that even legal? to sell a radio device that would force buyers to
purchase additional services to hear content that the FCC mandates should
always be available locally? and why do these radio makers give AM such
short shrift?
in the modern world of HD radio one could expect to get AM stations on the
FM band via HD3. WCBS 880 AM (which carries the Yankees Radio Network in
NYC) has 3 HD channels, including its HD3 station which is simply the AM
station. (i’m going to double check this when i get home. i have a
Sony HD radio that gets all the local HD stations, but it’s possible that
even their carriage of WCBS’ HD3 station does not carry live Yankees
games.)
i like listening in on local AM radio from faraway places. they talk about
hog futures and sand hills on Nebraska radio. they also talk about the
same shit they talk about on talk radio everywhere else in the country,
since the same nationally syndicated shows echo in Lincoln as rattle
through Queens, Brooklyn, and all the rest of this righteously
self-centered town.
you can’t be too much of an audiophile if Internet Radio is your thing.
some stations sound hearty and full, others sound like butt, and surfing
from station to station can be jarring. thus, the DDR-63’s greatest
quality — its sound — is subject to squalor as an internet radio. local
FM sounds awesome. the iPod sounds as good as it can, depending on the
source of the recording. CDs sound as good on the DDR-63 as any device i
can remember. the network music player, which plays FLAC and MP3 and OGG
off my RAID (look all those up), sounds great but exhibits evidence of
some strange product-development decision-making-processes (so does the
CD player).
blahblahblah. words that will linger unread on the world wide web.