Geography
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Twos Day
One small test I wanted to know when the transmitter site for Denver radio station KHOW/630 (above), which I shot from an airplane in 2018, was built. So I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Three had the answer, sourcing this report by Scott Fybush from January 2018. (Answer:1979.) The AI that found nothing was Continue reading
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Thrust Day
Some public notes:::: How can one not appreciate AI as a teacher and problem-solver? ChatGPT just taught me how to make a .ics file to put on emails out to people who should attend an event. Here’s my first, for Helen Nissenbaum’s talk next Tuesday. Click on it if you’d like it in your calendar. Continue reading
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Whoosiers!
The last thing David Hodskins emailed to me was “Don’t become a Hoosiers fan.” It was David who made me a Duke Blue Devils Basketball fan. David was an Iron Duke—an alumnus who contributed to the program and bought season tickets. He made me a fan by bringing me often to fill the other of his two Continue reading
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On the Scariest Roller Coaster Ever Built
I just discovered that the original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park has its own Wikipedia article, and that the two photos in it are ones I posted on Flickr in 2008 with a permissive license that encouraged re-use. Above is the first. Here is the second: George W. Searls, at the bottom of Continue reading
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Holiday Findings
Literally Rocks in Canada that are older than dirt. About half the cover price The Intention Economy is now just $13 on Amazon in hardcover. I can't think of a better metaphor Christmas is foreplay. See if you can ace this A list of sixteen contractions a good mind can hold at the same time. HT to Continue reading
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A Wrong Road
An English Ford Consul, such as the one above, was the worst car I’ve ever owned. I got it after rolling my parents’ ’63 VW bug in the summer of ’66. I did that on a backroad outside of Greensboro, North Carolina, when I was about to turn nineteen and trying to get my grades Continue reading
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Speaking as a Great Lakes Megacitizen
In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis notes that the city at the center of a circle containing the largest population within a one-day drive is Dayton, Ohio. You can kinda see that in the map above, which I discovered through Brilliant Maps. They got it from the highly precient Defining US Continue reading
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Sunday, June 29, 2025
EmanciPay. When subscription fatigue becomes unbearable, the answer is one ProjectVRM has had since the aughts. A Solid move. The Solid Project is now at The ODI. Explanation. A question for readers in Vijayawada. Why are statues of Avatar characters gone from Avatar Park? Continue reading
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Items
Death sells. So far today, this blog post has had 13 visits. Meanwhile, Radio’s Death Knells has had 356. Since I need to go out, I’ll call it a day and put a picture on top. See what happens. What was Indiana thinking? These days sunrise in Bloomington is about four hours before noon, and sunset Continue reading
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It’s about time. And space.
This informative video by @lainaminute (L.A. in a Minute) on Instagram expands on something I anticipated when I shot this photo album of the KSPN/710 transmitter site at 12775 Burbank Boulevard almost four years ago: that the land under the transmitter—19 acres of fenced-in grass surrounded by suburbs—would be put up for sale by Disney, Continue reading
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Fire and Rain
Twenty-fifth in the News Commons series Southern California has two seasons: Fire and Rain. Rain didn’t begin this year until a few days after Fire ended apocalyptically, incinerating much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Now Rain is here, with the occasional atmospheric river flowing across the faces of hills and mountains whose beards were just Continue reading
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And Now the #HughesFire
Twenty-fourth in the News Commons series Eigth on the #LAfires 7:35 am January 23, 2024—It’s morning now. The Hughes Fire is 17% contained but no longer interesting. The Sepulveda Fire broke out last night along the 405 freeway. It stopped at forty acres, and doesn’t matter much now. Here’s the path of one fire helicopter Continue reading
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The Blame Game
Twenty-third in the News Commons series Seventh on the #LAfires Disaster coverage tends to go through four stages: Live reporting. TV stations stop all advertising and go into round-the-clock coverage. Radio stations drop the feeds from elsewhere and go wall-to-wall with live reports. Newspapers drop their paywalls. Coverage by the best of them ranges from Continue reading
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What Are Stories?
Twenty-first in the New Commons series Fifth on the #LAfires Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed since the house, Continue reading
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Aviation vs. Fire
3:22pm—Hats off to Miles Archer for the links below, one of which goes here— —showing all the aircraft and their paths at once. You can start here at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/, which is kind of your slate that’s blank except for live aircraft over the Palisades Fire: Meanwhile all the media are reporting one home loss, in Continue reading
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Los Angeles Fires and Aftermath
Nineteenth in the News Commons series Third on the #LAfires 6:50am Friday, January 10, 2025—I will now shift my blogging about the #LAFires from the kind of continuous coverage I’ve done for the last three days to what we might call coverage of coverage. Or something beyond that: shifting to a new kind of news Continue reading
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Getting Us Wrong
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called Continue reading
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A side view of the Ranch 2 Fire
What you see there is a flammagenitus cloud rising to the north above Ranch 2, a wildfire about fifteen miles east of here in the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Asuza (one of too many towns to remember, in greater Los Angeles). If the video works, you’ll see how how the clouds give shape Continue reading
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Digging in Radio.Garden
Radio.garden is an amazing and fun discovery, perfect for infinite distraction during life in quarantine. (James Vincent in The Verge calls it “Google Earth for Radio.”) Here’s a list of just some discoveries I’ve made while mining that Earth with Shazam open on my phone: CIAU/103.1 in … not sure where this is, except in Continue reading
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On renting cars
I came up with that law in the last millennium and it applied until Chevy discontinued the Cavalier in 2005. Now it should say, “You’re going to get whatever they’ve got.” The difference is that every car rental agency in days of yore tended to get their cars from a single car maker, and now Continue reading