I’ve recently discovered that TVLand is showing Star Trek at 5am on weekdays. Why is that evil? Well, it’s slowing me down in the morning!!

There I am, minding my own business eating my Cocoa Pebbles, and the good Captain showed up on the screen, transfixing me and ensuring that I don’t stray too far away. Bad ol’ TVLand! 🙂

Tonight, there are big thuderboomers rolling across the middle part of the country. For us, there’s been some boom, rain at work, but dry conditions here at the ol’ ranch.

So what’s the “end of and era” about?

With these big storms, I am seeing analog television signals from Montana and South Dakota. Unfortunately, the only two open low channels we have here are 3 and 6, so the pickings are a little slim. The locals are getting pounded though!

But in a couple of years, this will no longer be possible. DTV will have roosted all the analog stations out, and I expect it’ll be very hard to figure out when these kind of openings are taking pace, and frankly, I’m not even sure how well HD will work with E-layer and F2-layer propagation — so many of the HD signals are higher in the UHF band, and those just don’t get affected in the same way.

So enjoy the racket while you can kids — just like the opening itself, this ain’t gonna last much longer.

I’d been eyeing the 30th anniverary release of Steve Miller’s Fly Like An Eagle since I first saw it in Best Buy a month or two ago. As a kid, this was one of my favorite pieces of music, and I wore the grooves off the vinyl I’d received as part of my six-for-a-penny intro offer from one of the mail-order record clubs. When I saw the 30th anniversary release, I figured it was time to put it back in my collection.

I popped it in Smokey’s CD player, and was transformed back 30 years… man what a piece of music! The powers-that-be did a great job remastering it — I’d never heard it sound so clear. The best was yet to come though…

Along with the remastered CD was a DVD containing a 5.1 mix of the album. I plunked it in, sat in the center the room, cranked it up, and was immersed in the most incredible re-run from my childhood that I’ve ever experienced. It was like being wrapped up in the music, it swirling all around me. What a fabulous treat!

I didn’t start listening to much of any kind of country until my father died just over four years ago. Growing up in the South, I’d always been around it, but I tried my best to tune it out. When Dad died though, something in me yearned for home, heritage and a sense of times long ago passed. Before we left Chattanooga and his funeral, I had by sheer accident locked onto a country station, and found the voice for so much of what had just happened in my life.

When I got back to St. Louis, I started listening to a wide swath of country music, and one of the first CDs I picked up was Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which featured Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Cash’s mother-in-law. I was drawn into the fabric of the music I heard on those CDs, and started listening to Cash’s music as an extension of that.

As part of that exploration, I picked up a second hand copy of Cash’s autobiography a couple of months ago and devoured the first part of it, before being interrupted by work and life, and only just picked it back up to finish it. I don’t think I’ve read too many biographies (auto or otherwise), but taken on its own merits, this book was an awfully good read. I don’t know how to better describe it other than saying that it was brutally honest, and was written in such a way to make you feel like Cash was right there, telling you the story of his life. It’s amazing how well his (apparent) manner came across in the writing of the book.

I highly recommend this one — it’s outstanding. It won’t make you cry or experience any great revelations… well, aside from the section detailing Cash’s self-destructive time spent in the caves at Nickajack, not far from where I grew up — if you can’t see the hand of God in that, then you’re just flat blind.

Go get this one and read it. Trust me, you’ll enjoy it.

OK, so I’m a Star Trek geek. Always have been, always will be. And what was the first ST I could see regularly? The much-maligned, apocryphal animated series from 1973-74. Still, it was good stuff to a fledging nine-year-old geek-in-training who hadn’t yet seen the 79 episodes of the truncated five-year mission.

So there’s rapture and joy — Star Trek: The Animated Series is coming to DVD in November! Like a lot of things, this collection of work had made it to LaserDisc in the 80s or early 90s, but I never picked it up — I think it was $125 or so, and I needed that money for making rent or macaroni dinners. For a paltry (by comparison) $35, I’ll be able to place this little dab of history on the bookshelf, and share it with my daughter and wife.

Yeah, not a big thing in the big scheme of things, but for me, it’s a little piece of my childhood boomeranging back to whack me in the skull. 🙂

This afternoon, I got back to some of my roots — long distance TV viewing.

I noticed that the local channel 2 was being clobbered by something — I never did figure out what. With us having a channel 2, 4 and 5, that leaves only channel 3 to play with for any Es openings. I quickly tuned to channel 3, and started seeing an informercial for some housing communities that had all kinds of southwestern names. I spun the antenna around, and watched most of the infomercial.

And, as the program ended, and the station slide was expected….. it was gone. Twenty minutes of great viewing, and then it was toast. That’s the nature of Es though. I started doing some research, and found the program listed on the schedule for KTVK, channel 3 from Phoenix, AZ. I believe that’s what I was seeing, but without an ID slide, it’s just a guess. However, Phoenix is at double hop range from here, and that’s the first time I’ve caught some of that kind of action.

Unfortunately, in a couple of years, analog TV will disappear, and everything will be digital. Most of those transmitters are currently up in the UHF band, which means Es will be a thing of the past. Tropo will become king, and the lower channels will be the homes of a very few stations broadcasting VHF digital signals. I suppose that will be interesting, but somehow, some of the magic will be gone. There’ll be no CCI, no pictures fading in and out of the snow, and little to go on to figure out where the openings are coming from. When that chapter of American broadcasting closes, so will a chapter in my life, as I’ve been doing this since I was a kid!

Tonight was the American Idol finale.  I’m glad, as I need more addictive TV around like I need alligators snapping at my trousers.  It’s far too easy for me to be sucked in by stuff like that.

Anyway, just before watching it, I noticed that there was some strange stuff going on on the TV.  Channel 3 had some BBC news broadcast on it.  BBC over the air means PBS, and that meant for some searching.  It looked like the stray signal was coming from Florida based on what I could find after cross referencing the stations and their schedules at that time.  So, we watched Idol with the split screen showing that and channel 3.

A little before 8pm, something on channel 3 started getting stronger and stronger, complete with color.  And then it was clear — it was Fidel Castro, giving some kind of speech.  Now I don’t speak Spanish, and even if I did, the E-layer clouds only aligned for about two minutes, so I don’t know if I would’ve had any context anyway.  However, I did snap a bunch of photos.  Cool stuff.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen TV from Cuba.  The last time that I remember was when I was a kid, maybe around 1978.  I was living in Chattanooga at the time, and there was a particularly strong Es opening, with signals from both Canada and Cuba beating each other up.  That was cool stuff, and was a precursor for showing me how much fun the VHF bands, and 6m in particular, could be.

Nowadays, it’s just a passing thing, a kind of novelty, to catch these stray signals from far away.  It’s still facinating to me that while folks can explain what happens to make these far off signals hit my antenna, no one can accurately predict the occurrence.  When the magic’s there though, it is magic, and it’s loads of fun for me.

I have held on to a laserdisc player for years — waaaaay beyond the time when you could buy discs for them.  Why?  Two words:  Star Wars.

I have a set of the Special Edition discs that were released in the late 90s — probably one of the last big new releases on LD — and I have a set of The Definitive Collection that was released maybe five or ten years earlier.  George Lucas had insisted that these would never be released on DVD, as they weren’t the movies as he saw them.

I think the public outcry for these editions finally won — or it could’ve been the sound of the cash register jingling come Christmas time.  Maybe George has a new house payment he has to make.  No matter.

According to starwars.com, both editions will be released in September, for a limited time that happens to include Christmas.  Can you say ka-ching!

After playing some sequences of the DVD-released trilogy alongside my LD-released trilogy, I was convinced that I needed to convert my LD versions to DVD — what’s the good in having a giant Quad, if I’m not gonna work it day and night importing and converting video?!  Now that exercise is no longer on the books for me, and I’ll stand in line with the other lemmings come September, feeding George’s family once again.  🙂

No grumbles, though — I’m happy to see the right thing done, and the glory of the originals as I remember them.

I gotta tell ya that this is one of the more amazing books I’ve read in a while.  Warm, touching, sad, joyous — it covered the whole gamut.  It details the journey of Jon Katz (of Slashdot fame, as well as other things), his two yellow labs (Stanley and Julius), and the introduction of a quirky border collie (Devon) to the mix.

This is first book of Jon’s I’ve read, and I’ve got to say I ws impressed.  His writing is not in the least bit presumptuous, and is jsut like you’d expect someone to think and talk.  That goes a long way with me.  And you feel every twist and turn in the book.

Spoilers ahead…

I try to bring books to work, and read during lunch when I can or care to.  This is the only book I’ve had to take home to finish.  The chapters in which Stanley and Julius are put down due to illness were waaaaay more than I could handle.  I guess with the all the close calls and work on Molly over the last four years, it just rings too close to home.  The description of the hereafter his labs have earned is so amazingly detailed, and sounds like so many of the descriptions of The Rainbow Bridge many pet sites mention.  Dunno if that was the inspiration for that, but, man does it strike a heart-wrenching picture, joyous and somber, celebratory and mournful.

So who’s the fourth dog?  Well, that would be Homer, another border collie, and another adventure in dog integration in the household.

I can’t begin to say just how hard this book hit me, and how much it resonated with my relationship with the dogs in my house.  Like I said, this is one of the more amazing books I’ve read in a while.  Highly recommended!