Month: August 2016

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 17

School starts tomorrow. This makes me happy – my brood have had way too much time on their hands.

Some technologically-forward school districts have forms you can fill out online and submit. Our school district isn’t one of them. Fortunately, my clan is now old enough they can fill out their own. Their handwriting is much better than mine.

In the whole debate about whether cursive should or shouldn’t be taught in schools, I fall firmly in the ‘shouldn’t’ camp. It’s a complete and utter waste of time. This time would be better used gluing your fingers together – at least that is what I did when they tried to teach it to me in second grade. For the record, yes, my handwriting is all print and it completely sucks.

My father made me take Personal Typing when I was in high school – I thought that was a complete and utter waste of time.  Twentysome years later, I’ve only had two jobs that haven’t required some sort of typing – dishwasher and bus boy.  I haven’t done either of those in twenty five years. I guess I need to admit he was right.

Yes, I did use algebra today.  In fact, I used calculus as well. I will neither confirm nor deny that I found those useless as well when I was young, although I drew fake album covers during that portion of my life instead of slathering on the Elmer’s.

I hated – h a t e d – my junior English teacher. It took me years to discover she was the best teacher I ever had.  Any great piece of writing that comes out of this blog is as much her doing as it is mine.  I’m very sorry, Mrs. Carmichael, wherever you are.

I get insanely jealous in June when the kids head into summer break, same with snow days. Back to school is a bit of a schadenfreude moment for me.

From the Fan Mail Department:

In my view, if alll site owners and bloggers maade good content as you did, the internet will be much more useful than ever before.(sic)

See, there you have it:  C.L. Boss – making the Internet more useful than ever before. I guess my next move is to click on the link about how he can grow my Internet traffic.

Speaking of good blogging on the Internet, this blog would probably be much better if I actually, well, you know, blogged – something other than a list of random thoughts every couple of weeks.  I guess we could always ask for suggestions from the audience… if there actually is one.

Time for bed – for the first time in months, it’s actually a school night.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 16

So I noticed something when my alarm went off this morning – the sky appears noticeably darker when I wake up.  This morning, it immediately brought to mind that it was August 1st.  August 1st was a significant annual event in my youth as it was the day the AM radio station in town signed off at 8:30 instead of 9:00.  Sharing a channel with a ‘clear channel’ radio station in another country, it was only allowed to be on the air from dawn until dusk.  Most every evening in the summer, you’re sitting their listening to the ball game and suddenly the announcement of ‘this concludes our broadcast day’.  My understanding is that these days, the station is allowed to broadcast at night at greatly reduced power, but is playing Southern Gospel Music.

Why listen to AM radio growing up?  It was almost a necessary evil.  I lived less than a mile from 50,000 watt FM station that played… wait for it… elevator music.  ‘Beautiful music’ is what they called it.  ‘Hell’ is what I called it.  Just about everywhere on the dial… e v e r y w h e r e… you heard this station playing instrumental after instrumental designed to put anyone under the age of thirty into a coma.  Those above 30, like my parents?  They sang along.  Imagine, if you will, being a thirteen-year-old kid lying in bed with the knowledge that the snow was piling up outside and desperately wanting to know if school was on the next day and having to endure the agony of ‘beautiful music’ while doing so.  It almost wasn’t worth it.  There was a reason growing up that I continually stated that I was in the ‘<radio station call letters> Death Z0ne’.

Living where I did growing up, our idea of fun, once we reached driving age, was driving somewhere we could listen to some decent music.  A mere mile away from my house, you could start hearing pop music stations, but that isn’t necessary what I was looking for.  Being in an area that was quite rural, country stations abounded, but I never have and never will develop a liking for that crap – Rock and Roll was what we were looking for.  Evenings like those involved finding a secluded spot on the top of the hill where we could sit in the car and listen to a station sixty miles away for an hour or two.  As we grew older and bolder and more able to secure ‘adult beverages’ we located a hill twenty miles away where we could listen to radio from the big city eighty miles away while drinking ourselves into a semi-stupor.  That was the saying in my home town:  ‘There’s only two things to do in down – drink and <blank>.’  You can probably fill in the blank.

For the record, I grew up with three television stations… four if you count a really fuzzy one.  When my kids tell me they are bored, I absolutely have to laugh.

I recently went back to my little town.  The Rock and Roll station I listened to growing up can now be heard quite well most everywhere in town.  The ‘beautiful music’ station cleaned up their signal and changed to rock and roll shortly after I moved away, but has now joined the legion of country stations in the area.  All of this matters not today – you can listen to anything you want at anytime you want courtesy of mp3s and the internet.