Just some random thoughts about the spam I deal with every day:

If it says, “Legitimate Loan Offer,” it ain’t.

I trash unopened anything that comes in in a language I do not speak. Might sound politically-incorrect, but it sure saves a lot of time.

Ok, one that cracked me up was the spam from “BBC English” that was in Spanish.

No one is going to offer anyone a job out-of-the-blue via email. No, seriously.

“Scam Compensation Alert” means this email, not older ones.

Actually got spam email from “Captain James T. Kirk,” supposedly an American captain in Afghanistan. How stupid are these spammers?

If the subject of an email is “Hello” I say goodbye.

Political spam is really annoying. The odds of you coming anywhere near what I believe is negligible, and the odds you’ll tick me off are really high. When you’re running for office in a state I don’t even live in and send me spam, you are just pathetic.

Although one political spam made me laugh; it complained that bad politicians, “pander to the views of their voters.” But…um…isn’t that the job of an elected representative?

No, you can’t trust me with your fortune of $21-million. I won’t give it to the poor, I’ll just party it all away.

Look, knuckleheads…Robert Mueller, III is not going to be emailing me for anything, be it an arrest threat or to pick up the millions left to me in some Nigerian bank account - he has flunkies for that, and is far too busy sucking up to Congress and his boss at the White House to waste time emailing me. And while we’re on the subject, try not to put the entire threat letter in the Subject: header field…makes you look even more foolish than you do already.

Feel free to post your own thoughts about spam in the comments section.

From CNN: Why reining in Google is good for us

From the opinion piece: “I don’t like feeling stuck in a particular operating system, social network or piece of software. It’s not that I won’t commit to a product or company — it’s that I don’t trust any of them enough to get married to one of them. Once they own me, they’ll start either selling my data to other companies, limiting my Web experiences to the ones that help sell their clients’ products or otherwise screwing with me as a consumer and person.”

This is what I have been saying for quite a while now; surrendering our privacy to any company, be it Google, Apple, Microsoft, or any other, is a really bad idea. Really bad.

Look, I don’t spend a whole lot of time watching videos on-line…I admit it, most of them are a massive waste of time and I don’t have enough time left in my life to waste it that way, so Google’s Tube site isn’t one of my bookmarks. But this, folks, is not only legitimately funny, but services a great cause while getting together (or at least mostly together, as I suspect Sheen’s scenes were shot separately) a whole passel of peeps from one of my favorite series (at least the first few seasons before John Wells tanked the show). The first time I watched C.J. exasperate, “Oh, lord…” I almost wet myself.

Go ahead. Waste two-and-a-half minutes of your life watching this reunion video. Trust me…it’s worth it.

And before you ask, no, I don’t walk that much…lately I’ve only been walking a half-hour four times a week, not five. Gotta get on that…

From the Associated Press: Jonathan Frid, actor in “Dark Shadows”, dies at 87

From the article: “Frid died Friday of natural causes in a hospital in his home town of Hamilton, Ontario, said Jim Pierson, a friend and spokesman for Dan Curtis Productions, the creator of ‘Dark Shadows.’”

I met Mr. Frid once, many years ago; he was unassuming and kind, polite to a fault. He was gracious enough to sign the poster from my Dark Shadows soundtrack album, something I treasure. I truly despise the idea of Johnny Depp spitting on this show, just as he has already decimated Willy Wonka and will soon destruct The Lone Ranger; for all its many faults, it was one helluva soap opera. And while Mr. Frid is gone, with television reruns, DVDs, and whatever future media will exist, he will be almost as immortal as his character.

From CNN: Facebook strips ‘privacy’ from new ‘data use’ policy

From the article: “Facebook posted a draft version of its revised terms on March 15 and gave the site’s users a one-week comment period to weigh in with questions and suggestions. The changes include many semantic tweaks, like stripping the word ‘privacy’ out of Facebook’s ‘privacy policy,’ which is now called a ‘data use policy.’”

If you use it, you should expect this.

On the evening of the 14th, at 11:59p.m. as is my habit, I turned off the monitor in my office and walked out, free of computers and the Internet for the next day. I took a shower, grabbed a small snack, and decided I wanted to listen to some talk shows I had recorded from the Net and placed on my SanDisk Sansa Fuze. So I plugged it into some speakers, fired it up, selected the shows, and started listening.

Then I slowly looked down at the player, staring at the color screen with the acceptance I was looking at…

Yet another computer.

Ah, well, what’cha gonna do? Had a great day otherwise (going “old-school” taking the SIM card out of my Android phone and putting it into the old Sony Ericsson Z520a which you will see later this week when I get the explosion of my father’s Z520a posted here on the blog), read a hardbound version of Robert Vaughn’s memoir, A Fortunate Life turning real physical pages and everything, and this weekend my family took me to the most awesome Chinese restaurant I’ve ever had the delight to sample in Williamsburg, VA. A friend told us they had the best General Tao Chicken anywhere, and d*mned if he wasn’t right.

I had an excellent birthday anniversary and weekend, so the concession of touching a few computers to listen to audio or make coffee doesn’t seem to be such a big deal. I did, after all, wait until Friday to catch up on my tweets…

Every year on the Ides of March I try to avoid computers. Of course, every year it becomes a more and more impossible goal. When I started this yearly tradition, I knew what a computer was…it was the thing with the keyboard connected to a modem connected to the phone line connected to the outside world of BBSs and maybe CompuServe.

But now my phone is a computer. I read books on the tablet. My television watching is done on a linux box, playing programming served through the network, on an overlarge flatscreen computer monitor. Even my coffee maker has a microprocessor in it, nevermind the microwave and automobile.

I did find a paper book I haven’t yet read, which considering the number of digital books I bought in the last year is a bit surprising, but I have no idea how I’ll handle the phone and television. Truth is,this tradition is getting so hard to maintain, it’s losing a bit of its appeal. Still, I want the Ides of March, this year where my age matches the two-digit year of my birth, to be special and different from every other. So I’ll avoid the “big’ computers, those with keyboards and monitors, and skip getting on-line for mail, tweets, and such, and try to relax for an all-too-short 24-hours before re-joining the rest of you in the cyber world. I’ll probably fail miserably in my quest to avoid computers, and I won’t be too hard on myself when I do.

But I still miss the days when it was easy…

From CNN: How not to annoy people via e-mail

From the article: “We’re addressing the very way you use e-mail, the logistics of hurtling e-mails into the tangled switchboard of the Web. Here, three blatantly annoying sins to avoid before hitting send.”

Dear lord, please read this article, and email the link to your entire address book…er…wait…um…nevermind that last. Instead, the next time someone sends you a chain letter with a few hundred email addresses in the To: header field and pages and pages of FWD: headers in the body of the mail, point them to this commentary on CNN so they knock it the heck off.

From the Associated Press: Google to merge user data across more services

From the article: “Google Inc. is overhauling the way it treats user data, linking information across its array of email, video and social-networking services so that information gathered in one place can be used in another.”

You wonder why I remove all the Google applications from my Android tablets and turn off GPS and other location methods? If this doesn’t spur the creation or at least the fork of a truly open and free phone/tablet device operating system, one that is not giving every bit of your personal information to either the huge Apple or the mammoth Google, I will have lost my faith in the geeks of America, and know they have completely and totally drunk the corporate kool-aid.

From the REPS Online Twitter feed comes the news that Yuri Rasovsky, contemporary producer/author of radio drama, has died of esophageal cancer at his Los Angeles home. He was 67. You can find the full obit at The Hollywood Reporter, and visit Yuri’s website.

Yes, I realize it’s odd for me to be posting about a contemporary audio dramatist, but Yuri adapted for radio, directed, and produced one of the precious few contemporary audio dramas I believe is on a par with the very best of classic Old-Time Radio; a 1983 production of “By His Bootstraps,” starring Richard Dryfuss. Dryfuss in this production has that magical “it” that only the finest of the workaday radio actors had…the ability to sound completely and utterly natural while performing using only the voice. The supporting actors in this production do not exemplify this mysterious “it,” IMHO which allows one a contrast to explain what it is I do not like about almost all Modern Audio Drama (summed-up I think as, “Ohmygod I can hear that actor ACTING!”), but since this play is based on the time-travel short story written by Robert Heinlein, Dryfuss doesn’t need to share the microphone with many other than himself. Dryfuss’ performance, coupled with Yuri’s direction and technical skill in layering the performance, creates a tapestry one can easily get lost in.

Yes, this is actually the old curmudgeon praising a program of MAD.

If you can find a copy, I urge you to give it a listen, especially if like me you are an unabashed Heinlein fan. And another “thank you” to Richard Fish for both introducing me to Yuri via email, and providing a copy some years ago when my self-recorded copy went missing.

Man, I am running way behind. Bob Burchett, he of all things Cincinnati Nostalgia, provided the flier and registration form for the 26th annual soiree last week, but I was so busy I didn’t get it posted. So here ’tis, right below. (And I’m really sorry there’s no scheduled dinner again this year…the Katester loves little more than getting dressed-up for a hotel-based rubber-chicken dinner.)

We received the sad news today that this will be the last Cincinnati Convention…after the end last October of the Newark Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention, I’m afraid there’s nothing devoted to old-time radio on the east coast…let’s hope the folks on the west coast, SPERDVAC and REPS, can keep OTR-focused conventions going for a precious few more years.

 2012 Cincinnati Convention Registration Form: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I rarely make New Year’s Resolutions…they are far too easy to ignore on January 2nd. But this year I did think it would be a great idea to blog more, posting more podcasts of Old-Radio Shows and sharing my pearls of wisdom about arcane subjects no one cares about.

Well, that worked out well.

But as I desperately hold on to the Winter Holidays for the last remaining days (we celebrate Christmas here, and the tree is starting to lose its needles), I’m looking around for a Christmas show to run this weekend, just to remind everyone that the holidays are more a frame of mind than a calendar date, and awesomeness doesn’t need to be limited to only a week or two at the end of the year.

The podcast, sparse as it might be, might not last much longer, though. If the Congress of the United States decides to pass the terrible bills SOPA and ProtectIP, anyone with a burr in their saddle could shut down pretty much any website, turning off the DNS and in the extreme taking away the domain name…much of this without the need for anything so trivial as a judge.

We’ll ignore my feeling that “intellectual property” doesn’t exist (the framers of the Constitution were very careful to separate out property and copyright). We’ll ignore that the rest of the world must look at the U.S. as a bunch of thugs who believe we can completely control the Internet, like some gang demanding protection money from the shop-holders on a street. No, my objections to this set of bills written in toto by the entertainment industry is simpler than that.

It won’t work, and will cause havoc on the Internet.

Look, I’ve been working in IT (Information Technologies) since the 1980’s (using a VAX and a Bitnet-to-Internet gateway to get information from the Net!), and over the years have needed to go to…less than savory corners of the Internet for information and sometimes hacks to get clients’ machines working again. While certainly no expert, I do know how to get around the minimal and silly restrictions these bills detail; now imagine how trivial getting around these restrictions would be for your usual fourteen-year-old kid. Nope, if someone wants to share a copy of Harry Potter and the Milking of the Movie-going Public, they will, and this bill ain’t gonna stop ‘em.

No, but it might cause people to be attacked by the Industry for posting videos of their children’s birthday party if “that song” is in it, or a podcast like this one because of some obscure theme song. Right now, there is a financial cost to taking serious action against a website or family, which would (by design) be eliminated by these bills.

The most reasoned dissection of these bills and their likely effect on the Net is in this TechDirt article. Take a moment and read it (you can skip the comments, which tend to be…er…less considered and measured), and then take another moment to contact your congrescritters today and point them to that article.

And once you’ve done that, grab a glass of egg nog and hum softly a holiday song. You’ll feel much better, I promise.

 
…the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor, I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth St.

VIRGINIA, Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

— Editorial page of the New York Sun, September 21, 1897

From our entire family to yours - Annie, Katie (who knows perfectly well there is a Santa Claus), and yours truly; no matter what you are celebrating at this truly amazing time of the year, Happy Holidays!

On the Amazon Free eBooks: Collections page, Amazon used to list two collections - their classics and out-of-copyright collection (which, FWIW, is available from Project Gutenberg without the hassle of using Amazon), and their Limited Time Offers collection, a list of books that are for a limited time available free.

They have changed that page to remove the Limited Time Offers, which, frankly, is the only collection I care about (see above Gutenberg comment), so I’m placing it here so others can use the page…at least as long as the Big A decides to allow their computers to maintain it.

Darned shame they felt the need to remove that link. Granted, some of the Limited Time Offers aren’t great (sample chapters, short stories not books, etc.), but I’ve still scored a bunch of stuff from there. I “bought” bunches of free cookbooks and am always watching for new Gooseberry Patch titles to show up there, some novels I really hope to find time to read someday, and even some 2012 calendars. I sort the Limited Time Offers page by popularity, which generally percolates the newest stuff up to the top, and when I see something I’d like, “purchase” it immediately since tomorrow the book’s price might be back up to $9.99. (Of course I have also purchased ebooks from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble for real cash money, but free is too nice a price to pass up.

And no, I don’t own a Kindle, I own an Android tablet. And no, I don’t use Kindle for Android since it’s pretty buggy, I use another ebook reader. And yes, I know the Digital Rights Management imposed on the ebooks is supposed to prevent me from doing so, but all of us here know how much I loathe DRM and so remove it at my earliest opportunity on general principle.

Anyway, if you read ebooks and have an Amazon account, check out the free ebook list. Frequently.

From CNN: Carrier IQ: Your phone’s secret recording device

From the article: “Carrier IQ is a piece of software installed on millions of mobile phones that logs everything their users do, from what websites they browse to what their text messages say.”

Yipe.

Apparently a bunch of small providers are using some brain-damaged outfit called Synacor to “spam-protect” their email (Embarq is one example), and this outfit has decided the most recent issue of the Internet OTR Digest has, “spam-like characteristics.” This is geek-speak for, “our filters are too broad, and while they still allow spam to get into your mailbox, we’ll false-positive legitimate email just so we can up our rejection stats.”

Yeah, I know, I’m being a wise-guy, but it’s annoying. If you missed issue #187, you can try to pull it from the archive server but that will probably fail, too. I can’t do anything about bad code generating a false-positive for the Digest, so please complain to your provider and suggest they find some other solution to the spam problem.

Ah, well, at least this issue isn’t being rejected by AOL or the Barracuda appliance…

Don’t know how I managed to screw it up, but my short report with pics from the appearance of Bob Edwards at my favorite inside-the-beltway bookstore Politics and Prose seems to have been set to Private…which means, apparently, that no one could see it.

I’m pretty sure I repaired the problem now, but if you can’t get to it, let me know with the contact form over there on the sidebar, please.

From BBC News: Danger Mouse co-creator Mark Hall dies

From the article: “Animator Mark Hall, co-founder of Cosgrove Hall, responsible for Chorlton and the Wheelies, Danger Mouse and The Wind in the Willows, has died of cancer at the age of 75.”

“Caw! Crumbs, Chief!”

A while back, our living room rear-projector TV burned out a bulb; since the replacement bulb didn’t work, I’m assuming the bulb ballast board died, a non-trivial repair best left to a time when I’m not rushed dealing with other domestic and business stuff. So we’ve been watching on a largish 28″ tube set; at least when there’s electricity here at Chez Charlie. Until yesterday that is, when it started to flash on-and-off like some damaged neon sign.

No problem, thought I, and entered the black hole I laughingly refer to as a basement, arising with an old 19″ that has spent decades down there waiting for a time of need. As I turned it on and tuned it to the media player, I laughed with my daughter that if the screen sizes kept getting smaller, we’d soon be watching television on her netbook.

Laughing, that is, until a flutter, darkness, and the smell of ozone combined with burning insulation…
(more…)

Rosemary Rice, Louise Erickson, and George Ansbro take direction; from the 21st Annual FOTR Convention in 1996

Jay Hickerson brings us the unhappy news that George Ansbro, radio and television announcer, author, and great friend to the Friends of Old-Time Radio has died. George is probably best-known in OTR circles as the announcer for Young Widder Brown, but he also announced shows like Treasury Salute, Wake Up, America, and FBI Washington. He also announced for ABC television, most notably Dr. I.Q., and at his retirement he achieved the record for the longest-tenured employee of any network in the history of American broadcasting. He was also a great friend to the Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention, appearing every year his health permitted. Even while physically frail, his voice contained an amazing youthful quality, and he was a favorite of all the directors for announcing duties.

Permit me two personal memories about a man I was pleased to call my friend.

Back in 1999, I was honored to receive the Allen Rockford Award from the Friends of Old-Time Radio for my service to the hobby. It was unexpected yet deeply appreciated, and after the evening performances a few of us (my wife, Max, Ann-Marie, Steve, others) clambered onto bar stools and celebrated my initiation into the “club.” George was, that year, without his wife who routinely attended the convention with him, and so entered the bar to wind down from the evening’s performances…we immediately invited him to join us, and for hours he regaled us with the stories fresh-in-his-mind that would be in his soon-to-be-released book, I Have a Lady in the Balcony: Memoirs of a Broadcaster in Radio and Television. We closed the bar that night, and while the following year I purchased and had him inscribe a copy, it’s the personal telling of those stories I will always remember.

In 1998, Elliot Reid, George Ansboro, and Mason Adams prepare for the thrilling adventures of Superman!

The year before, George was selected to perform the title role in The Adventures of Superman adventure, “Superman vs. the Atom Man,” to be performed in 15-minute segments throughout the convention with the original Atom Man, Mason Adams. The final episode of this storyline is a titanic battle over the streets of Metropolis, with Superman fighting for his very life. The story winds out with the narrator, the great Jackson Beck, detailing the action while the sound effects men provide the sound patterns to allow the listener to “see” the action.

There’s very little dialog here for the principles, but there is a good bit of “grunting” as the effort of the battle takes its toll on both hero and villain. After the rehearsal proper, Mason and George remained seated on the stage…I had taken some photos of the rehearsal, and was off in my corner packing up the camera equipment and preparing to videotape the performance, silently observing out of the corner of my eye while Mason Adams and George Ansbro, working in concert and carefully marking their scripts, rehearsed and fine-tuned the grunts, groans, and family-friendly expletives they would be giving during the performance.

Two thoughts struck me. First, it was really silly to see two grown men grunting at each other, occasionally saying, “No, that won’t work, let me try, ‘Ooof!’” and the like. The second thought came immediately on the heels of the first…these two professionals were working overtime to make absolutely certain their performance would be the best possible, for the fans seated out in the audience. The extraordinary care they took with something as silly as their grunts and groans would always for me define “Professional,” and any time in my own career I feel myself doing less than the best I possibly can for my client, I remember George and Mason so determined to improve their performance they ignored the silliness, and am determined to do no less.

One more little thing; a recording George made for me one year during the cocktail hour, to say hello to the folks on the Internet OTR Digest. Thank you George, and rest well.

 George Ansbro Says Hello to OTR Digest Subscribers [0:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download