Herculodge

Reader Says Sanyo RP-8880 Tends to be Overpriced

Eirikur writes:

It's an interesting and strange radio. I've had three, and having finally found a working one, I disposed of the other two which I planned to merge into a working one. It's case has become fragile over the years and you need to be sure to pack it very well. The audio is not nearly as good as it ought to be from such a large speaker and independent bass/treble controls. It's AM performance is pretty nice, and low noise. I don't think these justify their eBay prices except as collectors items. Antenna trim is a rare feature. Dial calibration is sparse, making "guess what the frequency really is" a common requirement.

Dear Dr. Road Rage

 

You can imagine I must be a very angry person to be a compulsive road-rager. So acute is my road rage that I’ve sought treatment and sit at the alter of your therapist’s couch—yes, you, Dr. Road Rage—and I beg for mercy, wisdom, and effective action.

My anger seems to be part of my hard-wiring. Testosterone. Male aggression. Reptilian defense signals.

As a college instructor, I find myself very conscious of not getting into situations that might cause my students to see me in a compromising situation. I wouldn’t, for example, want my students to see me eating a hamburger or an ice cream cone, food slopped on my face, chocolate sauce smeared on my cheeks, mayo dribbling on my chest and in general me looking like a despicable slob. So you can imagine I don’t eat in my car.

Road rage is a different matter, sadly enough. I make the choice NOT to eat in my car, but the road rage is a compulsion that defies my best planning and resolve. I have about three full-blown road rage “events” a year when someone cuts me off, complete with swearing and honking full blast, enough to get me shot if the offender should be toting a gun, but even when I’m not totally road raging, I’m simmering at a rather high heat during city and highway driving so that there is a general aggression, a bellicosity, and paranoia that informs my driving.

Dr. Road Rage, let me be clear. I am an intelligent man, capable of rational thought. Therefore, I am here so that my rational side may dominate the irrational, so that my free will triumph over my predispositions. I’m all ears, ready to listen to your every word.

 

Road-Rager, let me first say you are not alone. You suffer from Confederacy of Dunces Syndrome in which you think you are the only genius on the road surrounded by a confederacy of dunces. Learn to see that you are, too, a dunce and that shall be the beginning of wisdom.

You also assume that there is something in this world called Justice, a myth, and that to preserve this myth you call Justice you must defend it by raging. You believe you are doing humanity a favor when you rage, preserving the myth of justice, but in fact you are merely contributing to the roiling malignancies that afflict humanity. The sooner you see yourself as one who is contaminating the roads with your angry energy, the better.

 

Finally, let me put the fear of God in you. No, you’re not a big God person, I can tell, but no matter, you love money and your fear of losing money is equivalent to the fear of God, so remember your raging can result in not only a ticket for reckless driving but cause your car insurance to increase tenfold. If that fear of pecuniary punishment doesn’t assuage your rage, nothing will.

 

Reader Encouraged That Some New Good Radios Will Come Out in 2010

Tim writes:

The new CCrane catalog has these encouraging words:

"We don't plan to stop or even slow down in the near future on any level. Please keep an eye out for many new, unique, and exciting radio products over the next year."

Perhaps this refers to the two new Sangean PR's, the new Sangean ATS 909, or even a revived Mini CC Radio. Personally, I'm most anticipationg the new 909, one of my very favorite radios.

Editor's note: The above radio, the new Sangean PR-D8, is now selling on Amazon for $135. 

“If Nothing Matters, There’s Nothing to Save.”

Early in Eating Meat, Jonathan Safran Foer shares an anecdote of his starving Jewish grandmother, fleeing the Nazis and offered pork by a kind peasant. She is dying of starvation but rejects the pork, explaining, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.” While Foer loves his grandmother, the story-teller, the life-giver, and the lover of kosher beef and chicken, he uses her quote as a sort of epitaph throughout his book to pave the way for his conversion to vegetarianism, a conversion that separates him from a lot of his family traditions that define who he is. For him and many others, including myself, the relentless and unspeakable cruelty that animals suffer because they are treated like commodities to be savored for a few minutes is something that deeply matters and we should not willfully be ignorant or deny animal suffering.

 

Eating Animals is a deeply personal book, propelled, Foer explains, by the birth of his son. What kind of person does he want his son to be? For Foer, raising his son to empathize with animals and as a result not eat their slaughtered flesh is the kind of son he wants to raise and of course he must change as a parent to lead in this manner.

 

The book is very nuanced, never dogmatic, but keeps a crystal eye focus on animal suffering, including firsthand accounts of what happens in the slaughterhouses. For me, the book’s most moving passage is when Foer asks the owner of a slaughterhouse if there was ever a time he had difficulty killing an animal. The slaughterhouse owner confessed there was a time a cow licked his face and leaned against him for twenty minutes in a display of affection to his killer that made the slaughterhouse owner pause. But sadly he killed the cow anyway. I shared this anecdote with my college composition students and asked them if they could kill the cow after being licked in the face and 95% of them said they could not. I hope Foer’s book, enjoying lots of buzz, justifiably so, has such an influence on millions and millions of people. 

Reader Not Impressed with the Build Quality of the Tecsun PL-310

Weatherall writes:

I got a Tecsun PL-310 and it doesn't feel very solid. In fact, I accidentally pushed it off the end of my desk, and it landed on my carpeted floor. The case came apart at one corner (easily snapped back together), and the three alkaline batteries were ejected. It feels flimsy in my hands. I've had a Tecsun PL-200 survive a higher fall onto a tile surface while managing to stay together.

Spartan Facilities Mean Slim Pickens for 2009 Radios

(Re-post)

Speculating about the fate of the much anticipated Redsun 3100, I have received the following information from Paul:

Last I heard, directly from Redsun, was that the RP3000/RP3100 project was on hold. As mentioned inhttp://www.passband.com, even the larger Chinese radio manufacturers such as Tecsun or Degen may have only one engineer in charge of designing their radios!

Quote from http://www.passband.com/25th-anniversary-passport-now-available/#comments

"You’ve got to remember just how Spartan these Chinese facilities are. For example, there is reportedly only one engineer who designs all the world band radios at Tecsun, Degen et al. It’s surprisingly rudimentary, but they work hard and they work cheap, like the Japanese did 60 or so years back."

Time Posts the Top 25 Blogs and a List of Overrated Ones

Time gives its list of Top 25 Blogs. There's also an Overrated list. I'm guilty of reading Gawker every now and then. Worse, I was ignorant of about 80% of the highly ranked ones.

Mario of the Slaughterhouse Confesses He Had a Hard Time Killing a Cow That Licked His Face

In Jonathan Safran Foer's provocative Eating Animals, a book that in part chronicles his conversion to vegetarianism, perhaps one of the more moving passages is when Foer interviews Mario Fantasma, the owner of a slaughterhouse and asks the owner if he ever had difficulty killing the animals. Fantasma mentioned one instance when it was very difficult: The cow licked his face several times and leaned on him before he killed the affectionate beast.

The Super Mom Stereotype: The 12 Signs

1.   She is a svelte Nordic blonde of six feet dressed in khaki safari wear from J. Crew.

2.   She drives a dark blue Range Rover.

3.   She has a black belt in martial arts.

4.   Her three children are state champions in gymnastics, softball, and soccer and are primed, by age nine, to go to Harvard or Yale.

5.   Her parties are so lavish that they are featured in the local newspaper and inspire envy in her neighbors (that's the point).

6.   She budgets $10,000 a year to hire professionals who put up Halloween and Christmas decorations so lavish that cars line up for miles to photograph her house. She pretends to hate the traffic but secretly loves the attention.

7.   She is a member of the PTA, the Rotary Club, and other prominent organizations that fulfill her objective: To be feared in the community.

8.   She has a PhD in psychology or an MBA but only works as a consultant for which she makes $700 an hour. 

9.   She doesn’t allow her children to eat anything at school or friends’ house unless she’s checked out the food to make sure it’s organic and not conducive to generating allergies and other pathogens.

10.  She micromanages her children’s day from 6 A.M. until bedtime at 10 P.M. sharp so that her children have absolutely no free time. This includes monitored cell phone calls and TV watching.

11.   She doesn’t so much see herself as a mother of a family as the CEO of a private company.

12.  She is the queen bee of a coterie of brown-nosed sycophants and toadies who have devoted their lives to massaging her ego for the privilege of enjoying the high status that comes with associating with her. 

Sony TFM-8000 Bidding on eBay Today

With a current bid of $10, this Sony TFM-8000 should bid for $120 or so. This is a fantastic radio, apex performance on AM and FM and excellent speaker sound.