Old Timey Unpacking Drama

We've reached the phase of moving in that I like to think of as stage Zork, where every household quest seems to fail for the lack of a single, crucial item – usually one that I just saw the day before. Today, while looking for my grammar and usage dictionary, I finally found the ruler I needed for assembling the wheelbarrow, right in the closet where I noticed it last week. When I was first looking for the ruler, I found and set aside our printer paper; yesterday I gave in and bought a new pack. And so it goes.

It's not all as frustrating as this sounds, though. Hank Goldberg is getting to know the other puppies in the neighborhood and the congregation; he gazes mournfully at us as we eat, even though I've never asked for a single kibble from him. Evenings we all cuddle up on the couch, fire up the woodstove and sometimes listen to the archives of our local NPR affiliate's Old Time Radio Drama program. It's quite cozy, but it raises the question:

Who was the talent scout that saw Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy performing in the Catskills and said, "This is an act made for radio!"

AM Renaissance?

I should be getting ahead in Greek so I can keep up with Annie... third day and I'm already pruning some of the homework exercises to get to bed at a reasonable hour. This is an intense course. I've managed to tackle some of the vagaries of typesetting ancient greek with the babel and teubner LaTeX packages, though.

Saw an interesting ad on a SEPTA bus the other day. It seems we've got a new alt. rock radio station: WHAT - Skin Radio. Basically trying to claim the mantle of WDRE, Philly's late, great alternative station. XPN, our college rock & singer/song-writer public station has been doing this lately, too, with their new Y-Rock programming. What's interesting about this newcomer, though, is their broadcast frequency: 1340 AM.

AM radio -- that's pretty alternative these days.

At first blush, this reminds me of when I was in high school and thought myself so frugal for blowing all my deli money on cassettes instead of cds. Sure, Philly's FM dial is pretty crowded, but is this really the best long-term strategy? Actually, WHAT's making a pretty smart gamble. AM can broadcast digital signals for HD radios, which, at a theoretical 36kb/s is supposedly equivalent to current FM quality. And if car manufacturers* pick up HD, adoption should be faster than the subscription-based satellite radio has been. I'm guessing we might even see some AM spectrum speculation if HD radio starts to gain momentum.

*Here I'm assuming that most radio consumption takes place in cars, where there's far less media competition than elsewhere. Annie and I almost always have NPR on at home, but even public radio, with its rabid fan-base, refers to their best pieces as “driveway moments,” acknowledging that their audience is captivated in more ways than one.