First week of listening to shortwave has been a bit disappointing. I was expecting something a bit more exotic, that there would be evocative snatches of music and speech from the places around the world that haven't succumb to Western homogeneity. What I really should have got was a model with some kind of time machine built in, I guess. Not because every radio transmitter from Afganistan to Zimbabwe has been blasting out Michael Jackson tributes but because no one aims their transmitters at the USA anymore. They've all stopped over the last decade, assuming I guess that all North Americas have web access to their streaming internet broadcasts or own satellite radios. The BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio France International, Radio Netherlands Worldwide and doubtless many others can only be heard if you've got a more than decent antenna rigged up and equipment powerful enough to pick out stray signals meant for, say, the Caribbean.

I guess this explains why most websites about radio talk about equipment rather than what can be heard.

You can get plenty of Chinese broadcasts. Radio China International in particular seems to occupy half the world band airwaves. Plenty of Christians too, if you can't get your fill of crazy evangelists and their unsavory friends elsewhere. (I assume they're all over the SW in preparation for the end times they're always on about, ready for the days when they head up into the hills with their wind-up radios, ammo and jerky.) Plenty of Alex Jones, Texe Marrs and their like, frothing about Obama and his Zionist thugs amongst the merely ranty. I did spend some time listening to Radio Australia last night and also picked up Radio New Zealand, Voice of Russia, Radio Habana, Radio Prague and Radio Japan, which is pretty good to say I was listening in bed and not hanging out of the window waving the arial at he sky. No numbers stations yet but I gather they mostly broadcast in Spanish in the USA....

Looking after both kids today. Since they are both napping right now I shall do something I hardly ever do: post to LiveJournal. Maybe even read your entries too.

By the way, if I've "unfriended" you or whatever the LJ version of that dire act is called, it's probably not because of anything you've done but because I rarely get time to use the computer these days and read LJ on my internet-enabled but clunky phone. (Or I did until Nick decided to use it as a teether and get infant slobber into the works. It's en route to the repair shop right now.) And scrolling through the entries of certain longwinded folk had become rather a pain in the thumb. If you can deliver an interesting cat anecdote in ten lines I've kept you but if I felt that some potential lifelong injury awaited me in order to get to the end of your 50,000 word account of what Mister Puddypudkins the Third did in your beret then we must have a temporary parting of the ways. Until my technology improves.

Also, my laptop is now totally junk. Add that to the list of things to replace when I get a job and------

Both kids awake now... end of transmission...

Hello, my little beings, I've been away and now I'm back. Still jobless, hapless but not listless as here's that meme that never goes away - the WinAmp shuffle.

1. A. R. & Machines - Globus
2. The Advisory Circle - Eyes Which Are Swelling
3. The Three Suns - I Can't Stop Loving You
4. Juana Molina - Hay Qua Ver Si Voy
5. James McMurtry - God Bless America (Pat MacDonald Must Die)
6. Marc Wilkinson - Blood On Satan's Claw Soundtrack
7. Franck Vailliant - Jioeke
8. Davy Graham - Both Sides Now
9. Black Mountain - Queens Will Play
10. Fennesz - Glide
11. Black Mountain - Stormy High
12. Sir Edward Elgar - Sospiri
13. Half Man Half Biscuit - Used To Be In Evil Gazebo
14. Simon Haseley - Dawn to Dusk
15. Stereolab - Pop Molecule
16. The Mike Sammes Singers & The Ted Taylor Organsound - O Worship The King
17. Gerald Finzi - Introit for Small Orchestra & Solo Violin
18. Enoch Light - The Third Man Theme
19. Terakaft - Ewor Imdane
20. It's A Beautiful Day - Time Is
21. John Renbourn - Forty Eight
22. Murcof - Cuerpo Celeste
23. Peter Warlock - The Curlew
24. Shogun Kunitoki - Ratalintu
25. Amiina - Feldur
26. Minotaur Shock - Luck Shield
27. Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
28. Paavoharju - Kuljin Lauas
29. The Chap - Surgery
30. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Suite from No Exit

One day I'll figure out why the seemingly simple "LiveJournal cut" button defeats my every attempt to use it.

Overwhelmed by posters wanting to say something profound or rude about Michael Jackson, LiveJournal ate my post on Thursday afternoon. So here it is again, simply because I have become so lazy around these parts that I can't afford to let anything go unposted.

June 25th 2009, some time in the afternoon.

ONE: Off to Corpus Christi tomorrow. As Wikipedia sez, "The city has been nicknamed The Sparkling City by the Sea, particularly in literature promoting tourism." This will mean I'll have seen the ocean twice this summer, which is twice more than last year.

TWO: My laptop has officially turned into a heap of crap, non-steaming variety. Non-anything variety, in fact. Battery - dead. Internet connection - not working. Screen/lid - won't stay upright on its own. And some of the keys have fallen off, helped by 10 month old Nick, who is showing a great aptitude for mechanical destruction and misuse of technology. And it takes forever to boot, if it does decide to boot. Bah. You really need a laptop when you're out of work and looking for a job, especially when you've got one or two kids to keep an eye on and can't spent all day at the PC. But you can't justify the expense of a new computer, even a Dell laptop guaranteed to fall apart in a couple of years, when you're out of work. Bah, I say again.

THREE: I'm growing bored with Twitter again. I think I've said everything I have to say that can be said in 140 characters or less. Also, the interesting people don't follow me back and the people that do follow me are either hookers whose accounts get deleted almost immediately or self-proclaimed social media evangelists tweeting excitedly from some conference about social media networking evangelism: "@Bob Scrote says" words are useful" and I think he's right. More wisdom from Scrote to come! #babbleconf #bulltwitter #banality". Bring on the next pretty gimmick, I say.

FOUR: Waiting for the shortwave radio I ordered from Amazon to arrive. Just a $65 Kaito KA1102 Digital AM/FM/SW World Receiver with SSB to test the waters, see if this is an obsession I want to embrace as I sink into middle age or merely some spurt of regrettable Luddite nostalgia. I know you can now livestream radio stations from once forbidden and strange places like Albania but it's not the same. I need the hands-on twiddling, the atmospheric weirdness, the swirling babble of encroaching stations.... More on this later, no doubt, if my geeky enthusiasm is kindled.

This is how we got to the moon, kids. Not a computer in sight. The whole of NASA at the time had about half a meg of processing power. Note the pneumatic tube canisters from the era before email.

I went on the NASA Level 9 tour on Friday, a gift from my very lovely wife. This was the highlight, actually being able to lounge around in the real Mission Control, where the Apollo missions were run, an almost mythical place for anyone who was a space geek at the right age and the right time. Those of you who were in our early teens when Apollo 11 landed should get a kick from this picture and the rest when I post them.

Unfortunately the battery in my camera died before I could get a shot of the flag Armstrong planted on the moon. I didn't know they had brought it back. Apparently they took it up a second time too (and brought it back again, obviously).

Three weeks since I last updated? How can that be possible?

Reading too many old JG Ballard short stories from collections I bought in the mid-70s, back when Panther Science Fiction ruled the world, or the nerdy bit I occupied. I'd forgotten most of them, or attributed them to other writers in my mind as a lot of his early world blended in with late 50s American SF a lot more smoothly than many of Ballard's champions would have you believe. He did write traditional SF, despite what his biggest fans will tell you. "The Waiting Grounds" could almost be Arthur C. Clarke, "The Last World of Mr Goddard," early Phillip K. Dick. I'd quite forgotten that Ballard had ever written a story in which humanity is devoured by a cat....

Still working. Sort of. 20 hours a week. Should be making more of an effort to get beyond this, to get entrepreneurial on the world's ass, but I have this morbid dread of again being fodder for some bunch of penny-loafer'd MBAs with fraternity rings and IPO dreams - and ending after four years with a faux sincere phone call and two week severance package. Although I'm sure the next time I get laid off I'll be told over Twitter.

Faust have finally made an album that sounds like Faust used to as opposed to how some influential fan thought they should sound. There's only two original members but as there's only one unoriginal member that ratio is (I think) better than any of their comeback albums.

Um, that'll do for now.

The waning crescent Moon and Venus very close together this morning in the eastern twilight sky when I got up at 6.05am. Yes, I am still impressed by such things. My teenage nights were spend on my parents' lawn with a six inch reflector rather than trying to get inside Mirabelle Madeupname of 5.2's bra.

The thing with having no contact with the people I went to school with all those years ago is that they all remain 16 and 17 to me, rather than the grannies and geezers I'd know then to be if I made an effort on Facebook.

But I don't want to be reminded that I'm older than Susan Boyle....

Although my eyebrows are in better shape, thanks to a caring an patient wife.

CURMUDGEONLY RANT AHEAD....

Talking of Boyle, I'm surprised people act like I'm peeing on Mother Theresa when I suggest there's something a little distressing and not quite right about the wave of self-righteousness washing over various nations. All I'm saying is that I'm old enough to have lived in communities where there were always a couple of women like that, who had no connection to what is commonly regarded as the norms of even the outskirts of modern culture, but who lived to sing and often could. They'd turn up on shows like Opportunity Knocks and maybe go on to Batley or Blackpool. I bet even now if you went to a church in some out-of-the-way village in the north of England or Wales or much of Scotland, you'd find women like Boyle, and you'd be astonished by their voices but only because you've forgotten that singing is what ordinary people used to do before we all became consumers and wanted to sit back and watch sexy young things with a studio of effects to do all the work. What I find a bit nauseating is the way people are giving themselves a collective pat on the back as if they've done something marvelous by merely acknowledging this woman, and making out it's part of some marvelous collective rejection of the shallow values THEY have foisted upon us and everything is going to be different and nicer from now on. A couple of weeks and everyone will be craving the underdressed teen flibbertigibbets again and hoping she goes away. I just hope she makes some money and gets left alone afterward.

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Anyway. I'm recovering from two migraines yesterday and am faced by a potential employment dilemma*.

But I'm back to hacking out whole paragraphs of garbage rather than just 140 characters on Twitter. Who knows what I'll do next?
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* Where employment = 20 hours a week at $32.50 an hour for a short period. Would you get out of bed for that?

Fear not, I will post again, just as soon as I have something to say that can't be said in 140 characters or less. Unlike this, which can.

I'm starting to like Twitter. Coming back to LJ after a day away I'm thinking that nearly every post here could be cut down to 140 characters. Except yours, obviously, in which every word is a thing of beauty, juicy of content, etc, etc, etc.

Okay you muffins, I'm giving Twitter one last chance. So if any of you have a, uh, tweeter-thing (what are they referred to as? I seem to have lost the manual), follow me at nerichardson and I'll reciprocate or whatever you Web 2.0 kids say. Unless you're a marketing twerp, obviously. And you're not, are you?

I've turned off LoudTwitter, just in case I ever decided to twitter again.

Sunday afternoon in the park, Zilker Park (a Great Depression era project, incidentally), temperature in the mid seventies. The sun shines, kids play, a children's entertainer bends balloons into animal shapes. People queue for the Zilker Zephyr miniature train, bathers frolic in the constant 68 degrees comfort of Barton Springs Pool, all is right with the world.

And there, in amongst the children in the playground, a fat crack whore in a burnt orange FUCK Y'ALL I'M FROM TEXAS t-shirt. Thank you for that.

I want my kids to discover the power and glory of the F-word for themselves, have it enrich their vocabulary and self-express slowly over time. Not have it shoved in their face by some gross pinhead who probably only knows three other words....

M. was in hospital (Strictly Pediatrics) yesterday to have an inguinal hernia patched up. In at 7.45am, out at noon. I had the same problem when I was his age and I was in hospital for an entire week, so there's positive proof if you ever need it that some things are better than they were 48 years ago. (Actually I had hernias on both sides, the first when I was 18 months old, and this was back in an era when even kids were only allowed an hour or so's visiting time a day. I can't prove it but I suspect some of my social failing and inner sadness can be traced to those two confinements, but that's a story to be wept over elsewhere.)

A migraine came out of nowhere (no prodome stage, straight to the scintillating scotoma, dysphasia and cheiro-oral paresthesias, as we aficionados say) soon after he was wheeled into to post-op room, probably a reaction to the emotion and stress I'd just been suppressing, sitting there reading a J.G. Ballard short story ("You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe") while my three year son was unconscious on the other side of the wall with a laparoscopic camera and tools in him, although I've been a bit lax in my Feverfew and Vitamin B regime lately and that really does seem help. Felt truly awful as I was briefly robbed of coherent speech and vision while the nurse disconnected him with the IV drip, showed me the tiny, heart-shaped bandage on his groin and tried to explain things what to do next. M. enjoyed his second Popsicle and sorted Thomas the Tank Engine stickers out of the proffered bucket for being the day's best patient.

And a second migraine came along soon after we had returned home. I tried to read him a Dr Seuss story but even that defeated my temporary aphasia and some words took three attempts before the word that came out matched the word I saw on the page. Which is scary even after all these years, although not nearly as scary as when I was a teenager and didn't know anything about the condition. Silly daddy.

He's watching Shaun the Sheep now, dozed every five hours with codeine, a Kinder egg ("Überraschung") as a treat if he doesn't climb, jump, bounce around or do anything strenuous. My brain's back to normal unless I shake my head like an idiot, which is a foolish thing to do in the first place. Please see reverse for additional information.

Three days of postings compressed into one....

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It's a bit sad when you can say "It's okay, I'll vacuum the carpets next time I'm out of work" and it doesn't sound like a wisecrack.

Anyway. Spent way too long at the weekend organizing the transfer of my wife's web domain from UK2.NET to GoDaddy.Com. A logical process except for having to retrieve too many forgotten passwords, email addresses and long-expired credit card numbers. All sorted out now though.

Currently my favorite beer is Oskar Blues' Old Chubb. Apparently hand-canned beer is the cool thing these days, if only for the screw-with-the-beer-bore novelty. This is supposedly a Scottish strong ale, but I never tasted anything nearly as good as this in Scotland. Although since I only really sampled the pubs of Dundee I may be disparaging an entire nation. If I was a beer bore I'd go on about "mouth feel" and "smokey undertones" and "chocolately notes" and "an insouciant prune overlay" but as I'm not I'll just smile mysteriously and fall asleep on the couch watching Obama's news conference.

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Meanwhile, the five volumes of The Best SF Stories from New Worlds (US editions, missing volume 5 - volumes 7 & 8 weren't published in the USA, fact fans) that I won on eBay for $2.99 arrived. Berkley Medallion really didn't make books to last in those days (1967-70), did they? Cough too loud and you've got a sheaf of brittle brown pages. There are Gutenberg bibles less friable and pungent. I used to own at least half of the Moorcock era New Worlds in all its changing incarnations. You try finding those large format issues these days - they rarely show up on eBay or bookseller search engines.

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Shall we talk about Dollhouse yet? I see all the True Believers have gone into squeally-squeal mode after last Friday's episode - see, see, Eliza said it would kick in with this episode and the previous ones were deliberately mediocre to satisfy the stupid suits at Fox who aren't smart and sophisticated and into multi-layered story arcs like what we are and oh Joss forgive us for doubting and omg what if everyone is a doll even Paul, Topher and Adelle.... Suddenly all the accusations of exploitative pandering, cackhanded plagiarism and adolescent cynicism disguised as profundity are gone and it's Wheldon worship as usual. But what the heck, it's something for an unemployed guy to watch while he's ironing....

I didn't know Sky Saxon was still alive but he's playing the Spiderhouse tomorrow evening in their free non-SXSW "800 bands in a coffee shop" thing. If I was younger I'd surely be there but instead I'm waiting for the horrible racket to end at midnight or thereabouts. I'm willing to allow that the acoustic qualities of the apartment block across the way (that the sound is bouncing off) can be blamed as there can't be that many bands in the world that sound like Billy Bragg at his most constipated backed by the Shaggs but enough is enough. Put away those electrical guitars and bring out the crumhorns and melotrons, you young pups, and lay down a ballad about elves and fair maidens. In 13/8 time, if you will.

(A shiny penny for anyone who recognizes where the subject line comes from.)

First freelance contract ended today with no prior notice but I should have been expecting it as I finished the job I was hired to do about three weeks ago and was teaching myself various Adobe products that were on my resume but I didn't have any experience of beyond noodling around with the trial versions in my spare minutes. So now I can really use InDesign, Captivate and Fireworks and some of the more serious features of PhotoShop like Layer Groups. Now I know that these skills, nice legs and a thousand devoted followers on Twitter might get an angelic 19 year old an unpaid internship at Thimble Collectors Quarterly but I suspect my future lies elsewhere.

At least I won't have to get through the SXSW mobs downtown tomorrow evening. There's nothing more disheartening even at the best of times than young people having fun or at least milling around aimlessly as they try to get from seeing Thus I Conjugate Ample Prayermats at the Vomiting Duck to the Constipated Monkey in time to see We Expand To Fill The Margin Of A Society Of String. Why do so many bands have complete if meaningless sentences as names these days? And what's with all the beards?

I haven't written much about wingnuts lately. They've become a bit too weird since that baby-eating Kenyan Communist B. "Hitler" Obama stole the presidency from St. Joe the Plumber, what with their tea bag parties and "going Galt" and so on. I thought their heads were going to explode and that would be it. It's easier just to keep on linking to Roy Edroso's Village Voice column, Running Scared.

But this... I couldn't let it pass. I'm sure most of you have seen it by now, but for my pals back in the UK (who might think they're seeing the ghost of Hughie "Stand up and be counted" Green), this is Glenn Beck, Fox News' latest acquisition, making his great plea to the heartland on Friday. There are no words.

I was hoping for someone more obscure, like "P. F. Woods," say, or someone who published a story in Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine in 1954 and never appeared again. Or John Sladek. But I guess Billy Boy will do.... just wish I liked his post-Neuromancer output more.

I am: William Gibson The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Currently listening to Archibold, Lummock and Parker's Tripe-ology.... I mean Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Trilogy. It was the third album I ever owned and over the last thirty odd years pretty much came to symbolize everything that went wrong with early to late 70s rock music before punk rescued it from itself. However, I thought I'd give it a chance today, for reasons I'm still not entirely sure of. And to be honest it's not as bad as I remember. At least the bits that don't involve Greg Lake aren't, particularly the first two and a half minutes of the album, on the unfortunately entitled "The Endless Enigma (Part One)", where Emerson actually pulls off a brief Cecil Taylor impersonation that makes you wonder what he might have done if he'd followed that path and hadn't kept straying into the gawd blimey cockney knees up rahnd the ol' johanna nonsense that led, tragically, to him doing the theme music to a Jim Davidson sitcom. Emerson had his lapses, and couldn't do rock and roll to save his life, but on this album he kept to what he did best, that moody-adolescent-pleasing mix of Keith Jarrettesque "look, I'm using all ten fingers!" piano noodling and full-on bombastic organ walloping. And Carl Palmer was a fairly solid drummer when he was kept away from his truckload of giant gongs and tinkly stuff. Unfortunately Greg Lake keeps popping up with his appalling lyrics and nasal schoolboy singing, slathering the whole thing in smug, self-regarding pomposity. However, his obligatory guitar showcase on this album, "From the Beginning" is probably his least awful song ever, mainly because it's a string of feelgood cliches (rather than the usual labored and rather dim attempts at profundity) delivered liltingly over a lazy, Latinesque strummed guitar instead of convoluted cod-romanticism and God knows what. And there's nothing as ear-gouging awful as Tarkus's "Infinite Space" which I haven't heard for 35 years but still makes me want to put a pillowcase over my head and jump off a bridge. I only meant to play this once, for research purposes, but I think I've listened to it half a dozen times over the last two days. And I don't feel quite so dismissive of my teenage self for falling for this stuff all those years ago. Although I am happy to say I eventually traded it for a cassette of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure and moved on to the headier delights of Captain Beefheart, Faust and Henry Cow.

Back to feeling well just in time to be hit by the season's allergens - elm being today's chief culprit.

Saturday we drove past a Circuit City out in StripMallLand. The place was stripped and they were selling the fixtures and fittings. I'm not sure who wants to buy that stuff though - there's not much use for all those drab shelves and racks unless you want to opening your own big box store. Or maybe there are big box addicts who want to convert their den into their own personal Circuit City. Even now there are probably still geeky guys around who feel the weekend is wasted if they haven't spent a couple of hours ogling a bigger TV, a faster laptop and a more advanced DVD player than the one they bought a couple of weeks ago....

Got our tax rebate. Which is good as I've only managed to do two and a half days of paid work in the last two weeks.

Just noticed a potentially nasty clause in the Cobra Premium Reduction. "Those who are eligible for other group health coverage (such as a spouse's plan) or Medicare are not eligible for the premium reduction." But what if the cost of joining your spouse's plan is much more than the cost of COBRA in the first place?

Five Guys Burgers = good, especially the fries, which get my vote as the best available in Austin. Also liking the choice of toppings, although I've stalled on the cheeseburger with grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, jalapenos and BBQ sauce of late.

I've never worked at a company before that was so small it did not have its own toilets. It's on the same floor as a dentist's office, which gives the corridor an interesting aroma in the morning.

I think I'm done with Twitter. It's charms and merits truly elude me. But it feels like the dead end of something, exhausted and used up, a million voices convinced others are listening. I really don't care that you just had a sandwich. What's the next big Web 2.0 disappointment?

Oh, and SXSW? Please, go away.