radio last night. I saw it on sale on Fleabay and decided to see where else I could buy it. Jeff had it for $20 less. So I “made an offer”. A few vendors on Ebay have “make an offer” on their listing. Sometimes I make an offer, a reasonable one and they reject it, or come back days later with another offer that’s almost the same as the asking price.
It’s tedious even talking about it, but the world is full of time wasters who should be doing something other than selling trinkets and detritus online. To cut a short story even shorter, my offer was accepted and now I have an internet radio, when it gets here from California. To be fair you don’t actually need a physical radio to listen to this stuff, you could use your phone, but the radio makes it a lot easier.
I already had an internet radio which I liked, but for some reason it doesn’t connect to whatever server it used to to gather up all the radio stations. I love intenet radio. I clearly remember the first time I discovered I could listen to a local radio station that was half way round the world. I can almost experience again the excitement of watching it slowly connect and then hearing the same thing that people in Tennessee were listening to that very moment in their cars or houses. It’s probably one of the standout events in my discovery of things of the internet. When I first went to Nashville in the 80’s I met a guy who was the manager of a religious station in Nashville.
Later on when I went back after few years he asked me to do some station promos. I would say things like, “You’re listening to WNAH Nashville”. After the internet came online I was able to dial up his internet feed and listen to myself from the other side of the world. For about ten years, every hour on the hour you could hear my station IDs in Nashville. They took the internet feed down a couple of years ago, so it’s been a while since I listened. I don’t think they’re playing them any more, the tapes were probably worn out. I just checked and it’s back up again. It’s an almost insane cornucopia of religious diversity and inclusion as long as you’re a Christian. You can listen here if you’re interested.
Everyone is blase about all this internet stuff now, but the mid 90’s when it was becoming a thing, it was an exciting time. Sending an email was an adventure. How did it work? Did it get there? You’d send random emails to people you didn’t know, just to send one. Everyone used a dialup modem which made funny electronic sounds as it connected.
Nobody except academics had an email address until AOL came along. It’s hard to imagine how interesting it was at the time. Now we can watch a video online that a robot on Mars took, and it’s almost underwhelming. There’s just rocks there for a start. Why can’t we go to planets where there are dinosaurs or women barely clothed in shimmering outfits?
I was watching a story on the BBC this morning about how people are craving the comfort foods that they had when they were children. The experts said it was because people needed these things due of the cost of living crisis and the modern stresses of today’s dysfunctional world. They didn’t exactly say the last part out loud, but you get the picture. It could even be that they are trying to save the remnants of their own culture as it is slowly eroded by globalism. I dunno mate.
Anyone fancy some spotted dick?
Happy Friday
New video – Playin’ in a Cover Band. Recorded Tuesday (for extra enjoyment read the Ai generated transcript)