Happy birthday, mousez72…

…and many happy returns of the day!

Musings

• I got two kitchen implements today. The first one is a combination egg boiler and poacher. I have always been crap at poaching eggs and not much better at soft-boiling them. This machine does both perfectly (I tried it, readers). Plus, it is easily cleaned and doesn't waste water. The second is motorised salt and pepper grinders. The manual ones I have are crap, but these (after some wondering how to get them open to insert the batteries) work beautifully. The old wooden ones go to the Church Good-as-New stall.



• There has been a lot of discussion in the UK about the UK joining the US and France in attacking ISIS/ISIL/Da'esh/IS in Syria. The Prime Minister is for it, much of the Conservative Party is for it, but Labour has been tearing itself apart the past few days over it. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is firmly against military action without firm and unambiguous justification, and has been placed under pressure by many of his supporters and Labour's national executive to require Labour MPs to vote against it should it come to a vote in the House of Commons. On the other hand, much of his Shadow Cabinet (ministers-in-waiting) intended to vote for military action, and would have resigned had he issued such an order to MPs. The airwaves have been full all day with pundits opining on what Corbyn should do. He finally decided to allow MPs to vote with their consciences. There will be repercussions on the Left of the party for this. There will be a debate and vote this coming Wednesday, and I'll bet the planes will be ready to take off almost immediately.



• Back in the early 1970's I began to listen to shortwave radio. This was the end of the heyday of that hobby. There were hundreds of radio stations, mostly run by governments, transmitting worldwide in the only medium available for international communications at that time. BBC World Service, Radio Moscow, Voice of America, Radio Canada International, and many many others. Of course, where there was a hobby, there were hobbyist clubs. I quickly joined two of them, the American Shortwave Listeners Club (ASWLC) and SPEEDX (don't ask; I can't remember whether this was an acronym or not). Over the years I branched out into other "fields" of the hobby, and joined other clubs such as the National Radio Club and the International Radio Club of America (both devoted to listening to stations on the AM radio band), an FM and TV radio club whose name I forget, and the North American Shortwave Association (NASWA), which was the biggest and, arguably, the best of all of them. I spent lots of time listening to far-flung stations, getting acknowledgment that I'd heard them by collecting postcards back from the stations after reporting that I'd hear them with proof, and becoming involved as a contributor to the club magazines by collating reports of stations heard by members and getting them printed up, first by mimeograph (those stencils were crap) and then by producing the copy ready to print.
  
  At the end of the 1980's I grew tired of the club politics and more interested in the newish world of computing. So I quit the clubs, discarded all my back issues (I had bound a lot of them and I now kind of regret discarding them, but I was moving from NYC to Chicago and didn't want to take them all with me.), and disengaged from all my club friends except for a very few.
  
  At this time shortwave listening as a major hobby is dead. Most of the large international stations have moved to streaming over the internet, and have closed down their transmitter sites and sold them off for housing. A few still remain in places where it's difficult to get regular radio broadcasts or where the internet can't support streaming or doesn't exist.
  
  A while back I became curious as to whether any of the shortwave listening clubs still existed, and did some internet searching. Google came up with some sites, and I investigated (primarily for idle interest). What I found was invariably dead sites that had not been touched in years, in some cases more than a decade. I just looked at the 2015 World Radio TV Handbook, the authoritative source for information about world broadcasting, and they still list a lot of these clubs. So I shall do some more digging. Not to rejoin, mind you, but to satisfy my curiosity for a remembrance of things past.