Mission Statement: Herculodge: The Essential Guide to Saving Your Manhood in an Era of Shriveling Masculinity.
I can be e-mailed at herculodge@frontier.com
Whether you'd like it or not depends greatly on your intended use for it. The ultralight DX crowd likes it because of the superb selectivity (including 5 filter choices) and good sensitivity on MW AM, and the excellent selectivity (just 1 filter choice) and excellent sensitivity on FM.
Many of the ultralight DXers have installed a 7.5" externally-attached ferrite bar to greatly increase the sensitivity on MW AM. Others couple the internal ferrite bar to more exotic external antennas like FSLs or big box loops.
For casual listening to local MW AM stations using just the internal ferrite bar, there are probably better choices for clean reception (without spurious tones) and speaker sound quality.
For listening to FM through headphones, the PL-380 is quite good, with excellent reception and the potential for very good sound quality. It can be forced to mono reception on FM to clean up weak, noisy signals, which is a big plus.
Carrie and I want our twins to have infinite possibilities and not be squeezed into some pink haze cultural cliche of princesses and other precious affectations. But the damage has been done. Thanks to cultural osmosis, the girls are in princess mode. Julia takes the role very seriously while Natalie takes a more comical approach.
I thought I knew myself and that my watch obsession was evolving and becoming, to my pleasure, more and more defined, veering away from "vain fashion" watches and to watches that screamed Higher Purpose, lume tool divers. But I found out my personality is, to be kind, "complex"; I relapsed recently to Invicta Fever and bought a gray Venom 1406 and a white-dial Sting Ray. And I'm coveting 3 others as well. So much for being a strict follower of the Diver Watch Orthodoxy. Another direction has surprised me. Scary. Obsessions have their own logic . . . or illogic.
I hadn't been to the movies since The Descendents and that was over a year ago, so I didn't want to waste my time on my next one. I had a good feeling about World War Z and it was scary, without all the gore and flesh-eating. Moreover, the film is a smart allegory about mass chaos in the face of drought, famine, disease, things we cannot control. I was scared to the bone.
Brad Pitt played the lead perfectly, a balance of scared and cool, and never overacted.
Plus the zombies were very scary. They looked like crystal meth junkies with a very bad case of gingivitis.
Since posting a link to Jay Allen's Sony ICF-F10 review, many readers here have defended the radio, saying that not only does it offer great sound and performance at its price point but serves as a great emergency radio with long life from its D batteries.
This discussion of emergency radios and batteries is addressed by StarHalo:
The "which batteries sell out first" topic pops up frequently over on my native flashlight forum; thanks to our broad audience there, we have guys who will literally go out and photograph the battery section of their local stores when trouble's looming. Here's what we've deduced over the last several years of disasters, including Katrina and the NY flood - If you're going out to buy batteries because of an impending emergency, *you're already screwed because so has everyone else in town.* It's right around the time that the national news outlets start giving a town/region more attention that the batteries sell out, almost when the coverage starts, that's when the shelves are already empty. Many people who do the very early battery buying are just doing it impulsively, and so they buy impulsively; I remember the story of a woman who took the entire stick of AA batteries off the display and put it in her cart. When asked what she needed them for, she said she wasn't sure, she just wanted to make sure she had batteries. So the bottom line is, you're only as prepared for the emergency as you are before it begins - have a stock of the batteries you'll need ready to go, because they won't be in stores when you need them.
Also, we've revisited the crystal set idea a few times, and the problem there is that even the most rudimentary do-it-yourself kit is now more expensive than a nicely-rounded name brand radio, the F10 being an excellent example. The odds of success with building a crystal set are also hit-and-miss; only about half the folks who have attempted to put one together have gotten anything, most likely due to the extreme diligence needed in winding the coil.
Thanks, Vimal:
Lutus’ review of the Sangean ATX-909X
Posted on June 28, 2013 by Thomas
http://swling.com/blog/2013/06/lutus-review-of-the-sangean-atx-909x/