Voice of Bruck News Service

Copyright 2006-present the Voice of Bruck News Service, content may be reproduced with attribution for non-commercial purposes, all other rights reserved. <-- That means you can copy any part of my blog without asking permission, as long as you give me credit and are not profiting from my work. I do ask that you notify me if you use my material.

Want e-mail notices of new entries? E-mail me (address on profile page).

Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Ghost of Walter Cronkite

A few months ago, I revealed to my faithful readers my tried and true methods for not picking up girls. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading that column before finishing this one. One failsafe technique that I should add is amateur radio. I didn’t actually get into that hobby until after I had been married for some time, therefore its relevance to the topic of not picking up girls did not immediately occur to me. But as a public service to those of you for whom the ability to not pick up girls is a more pressing concern, I would offer this: anything having to do with amateur radio - talking about it, encouraging her to try it out, even uttering the two words in sequence in the presence of any red-blooded American girl - will send her to the door faster than you can say tropospheric ducting.

But let’s put on the wide-angle lens for a moment now, shall we? Notwithstanding the fact that participation in any hobby imbues a certain level of geekdom borne of an imbalance of attention paid to one particular pursuit, are there any hobbies less chill than amateur radio? Let’s find out:

Trainspotting

A train is a beautiful thing to watch and can be a pleasant, relaxing form of transportation. But leave it to the social stiffs of the world to turn it into a tedious, unhip occupation. Trainspotters wait at stations, railroad yards, bridges, anywhere trains pass, to catch a glimpse of different kinds of locomotives, cars, and cabooses. They keep precise records of trains they’ve spotted, and compare notes and schedule information with fellow train voyeurs. Photography and sound recording are also a part of this hobby, which adds an artistic dimension, but not a completely redemptive one.

Stamp Collecting

Stamps are intriguing documents: in addition to concisely expressing the terms of a government contract, they chronicle the history of a country, even a civilization - its wars, its leaders, its acheivements - through their diverse artwork and denomination. They can have aesthetic as well as antique value, and a good collection of them can even be a decent investment.

But collecting anything is pretty uncool as a pursuit in and of itself, and stamps are certainly no exception. “I’ve got the complete set of [fill in the blank]. Would you like to come up and see it?” Unless it’s Picassos or deeds for Manhattan real estate, believe me, if she says she wants to see your collection, she’s hoping it’s in the same room as the fire escape.

Metal Detecting

What are they looking for, what are they finding, those lonely, disheveled men scanning the ground for buried treasure? Like me, you’re probably picturing them as brave young men in the 1940s sweeping the French countryside for landmines, clearing the way for the advancing allied troops, and now pathetically reduced to scanning the beaches of Bradenton and St. Petersburg and parks and campgrounds everywhere for dropped coins and discarded foil wrappers. If you go to metal-detecting websites, you’ll learn that they’re finding rare coins, jewelry, historical artifacts, and relics of ancient civilizations. If you ask to see what they’ve found on any given day, you’re more likely to see a small handful of dirty coins, maybe an old key or two, and a rusty pair of pliers.

They do find some cool stuff on occasion, but you have to ask yourself, when’s the last time you saw a bikini-clad doll or buff surferboy with a metal detector, besides in the Radio Shack ad?

Civil War Reenactment

Every summer, crowds of history enthusiasts and aging thespians converge on historic American battlefields. Faux unionists and rebels don period uniforms, arm themselves with reproduction muskets, and shoot blanks at each other in an attempt to relive the battles of the American Civil War. Oops, I live south of the Mason-Dixon line now; I mean the War Between the States. If I lived a couple states further south, it would be the “War of Northern Aggression.” But I digress.

Not looking like they’ve spent too much time freezing and starving in the Shenandoahs, they act out the shooting and charging, the volleying and flanking, the advancing and the retreating, but not too realistically, taking care to keep their uniforms in good shape. When the smoke clears, the dead all rise and walk away, have a nice cookout, climb back into their Winnebagos, and come back next year for the same treatment.

Back to Amateur Radio

Meanwhile, in amateur radio, you can communicate with people all over the world using your own equipment, in modulations such as AM, FM, single-sideband AM, morse code, and even slow-scan TV, over propagation paths including line of sight, atmospheric skip, satellite transversion, and even moonbounce. That’s right, with enough power over a high-gain yagi antenna, you can communicate with other hams via signals reflected from the moon!

And what do they talk about, you ask? Scan around 75 meters lower sideband and total strangers will apprise you of operations past and pending, wives’ operations, recuperation, insurance coverage of operations, dietary restrictions, side effects, and prognoses. You might even be lucky enough to get the details of their adult children’s marital strife, custody issues, and child support, or at least, a weather report for someone’s backyard in Beaumont, TX.

I know what you’re thinking - if ham radio is as cool as you make it sound, do any of my celebrity idols participate? Is Paris Hilton a ham? Is Matthew Broderick on AM and FM? Does George Clooney have fire in the wire? And Lindsey Lohan, does she pound the brass?

No.

But here’s a short list of prominent hams, past and present: Priscilla Presley, Patty Loveless, (the late) Barry Goldwater, Joe Walsh, (the late) King Hassan of Morocco, King Juan Carlos of Spain, (the late) King Hussein of Jordan, plus his wife Queen Noor and several of his other relatives (my guess is that they were just humoring him), (the late) Walter Cronkite, (the late) Chet Atkins, Art Bell, Garry Shandling, and David Letterman, while not a ham, is purportedly a shortwave listener. And of course no list of celebrated amateur radio operators would be complete without mentioning Lisa Nowak, KC5ZTB, the deranged astronautess featured in this previous vobns column.

So… is amateur radio the uncoolest hobby in the world or not? Before you answer, ask yourself, what would the ghost of Walter Cronkite have to say? “…and that’s the way it is.”

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Poison Ivy

Every few weeks during the summer months, I go on poison ivy patrol, and I just went on another one this afternoon. What I do is arm myself with a jug of Ortho poison ivy killer and a pump sprayer, and walk around the backyard spraying all visible evidence of the dreaded three-leaved monster. Before you conjure up an image of Mr. Suburbanite pacing the back half of a quarter acre of manicured sod surrounded by 4’ cyclone fence, please note, my backyard isn’t a conventional yard. It’s actually a section of forest--our neighborhood is composed of houses tucked into forested lots, with trails winding among them. Living in a northern Virginia forest is quite agreeable in many ways, but it has a few downsides, and one of them is a preponderance of pesky wildlife such as poison ivy.

PI is a perennial, which means it will come back year after year in the same place if unmolested. It spreads through underground root channels, and also via seeds which are dropped in the fall, or eaten by animals and distributed in their droppings. It can be controlled via herbicides or physical removal, but it’s persistent - it will come back multiple times after it’s killed or removed from one spot. Meanwhile, the climate in northern VA is ideally suited to the growth and spread of this type of plant.

So keeping the yard of Bruck free of PI is not exactly like falling out of bed. Compounding the challenge are the diverse weeds and other ivies covering the forest floor, which tend to hide or otherwise obscure the nasty stuff. Add to that the fact that there are a few different strains of PI in the forest, and there are numerous “safe” plants that look similar to PI, such as wild strawberries and ash seedlings.

My goal is for my family and me to walk freely around our little section of the forest, along with any guests, without worry of contracting an irritating rash from the indigenous flora. So I have to be at least as persistent as the sultry green devil I’m fighting. Although it’s not easy to objectively measure, I feel like I’m making considerable progress - the big strongholds of PI in the yard are pretty much gone, and my last few patrols have found mainly scattered individual plants in random locations.

I also try to kill the evil herb in the areas adjacent to my property. The south and east edges of my property border common grounds (neighborhood walking trails), so I patrol those areas as well. Also, when I use the walking trails I occasionally bring along my jug of Ortho and kill the PI adjacent to the trail. The homeowners’ association probably wouldn’t approve of this, so that’s why I haven’t asked their permission.

It’s surprising that some people who’ve lived here a lot longer than I are oblivious to PI. My neighbor to the north has a fair amount of it in his front and back yards, and either doesn’t know or doesn’t care or both. I kill it as far as the pump sprayer will reach over the fence. I recently noticed a large outbreak of PI in the yard of my neighbor across the street; she was all too happy to have my son give it the Ortho treatment.

In the process of these poison ivy patrols, of course I actually risk, and occasionally suffer from, exposure to it. Last year I had an outbreak of it, which gave me great discomfort for several weeks. Since that time, I’ve been more careful, but have had a few more minor exposures to it, and get occasional, sporadic PI rashes. Today I killed some very mature PI bushes in the common area behind my yard, and I’m sure I came in contact with some of it. I see it as a worthy risk; I will probably never be completely free of it, but eventually I will get to the point where the occasional bloom of PI in the yard is the exception rather than the rule.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s column on the topic of the global war on terror.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Two Generations: The Entertainment Scene in Jackson, Michigan

The clever and talented daughter of Bruck has started to develop her singing abilities through school chorus and a school musical in which she recently played. She rather enjoys it, so lately she’s taken to singing along with me when I’m playing the guitar. She’s also interested in getting some instruction on playing the guitar and bass, which I’m all too happy to provide, to the limited extent that I am able.

As we were singing the other day, an involuntary associative synapse caused my mind to travel back to a time long ago, in a restaurant in Jackson, MI, where some friends and I went to see some live music one weekend evening. The music was provided by a family band called “Two Generations,” and I would have to say, it was absolutely, positively, the worst band I have ever seen in my life, bar none. If there is a worse band out there somewhere, God forbid, it should be registered as a lethal weapon.

BTW, the dearth of good music was just one symptom of the disease of living in the city of Jackson, MI, whose preposterous motto is, “We Like it Here.” Remind me to deliver a full-blown diatribe on that fair city some day. I think you’d enjoy it, or at least run outside and kiss the ground of the city or town you’re currently living in, providing that it isn’t Jackson, MI.

Two Generations consisted of a father, mother, son, and a guy who looked like an uncle or bus driver or substitute teacher. The son played electric guitar, and since it was the 80’s, played in the loud, screechy style of the big hair heavy metal bands, and himself had big hair and a garish outfit, looking like he’d lost a bet. The father, on the other hand, looked like he came home from work, put down his lunchbox, and headed out to the gig. His contribution was vocals and instrumental backup on the trombone (not at the same time). Yes, you heard right, electric guitar and trombone. It gets worse. The mother played the keyboards and appeared to be a Carly Simon acolyte, dressing like a hippy, and plinking out the artsy, affected pop music of her youth. And the pot-bellied uncle tied it all together on percussion, his style indicating that he may have been more comfortable in a marching band or polka hall.

Nightmare doesn’t begin to describe it.

If they were trying to blend together, they were failing miserably. While Junior squealed away on his Fender knockoff, dad was harking back to the Stan Kenton era with his slide trombone, and mom swooned and swayed on the keyboards like an albino Stevie Wonder, with uncle keeping the ryhthm, or at least a ryhthm. A complex mix of emotions welled up from deep within: squeamish pity for the wretched combo, embarrassment at having brought friends from out of town to witness such a spectacle, anger at having been tricked into doing business under the pretense of being provided music, and a dull, aching malaise at the prospect of living in a city where such dreck could pass for live entertainment. Fortunately there was no cover charge; we would have certainly demanded a refund.

So not to worry, the two generations of Bruck aren’t taking their show on the road any time soon. In fact I think it will be some time before we would even consider playing and singing together for anyone outside our immediate family.

But of course I shouldn’t end the story here. Fighting the urge to poke out our eardrums and eyeballs with cocktail swords, we retired to the one place in Jackson, MI with live entertainment that could be depended upon for a rollicking good time. (No, not one of those places. Actually there were four of those places in Jackson which had exotic dancing, and by exotic I mean naked, but I’m not talking about them. Actually that’s a pretty remarkable number of “adult” entertainment establishments for an isolated town of 30,000, but that’s a whole nother story). I’m talking about the erstwhile Cat and Fiddle saloon. C&F was a little low-budget hole in the wall on the eastern outskirts of town. I’m not sure how I even found the place, but I’m sure glad I did. Your basic blue collar country & western bar, it was de rigeur for out-of-town guests in search of a good time. Actually I’m not sure if “blue collar” quite captures the essence as most of the clientele didn’t appear to have jobs of any kind. There was sawdust on the floor and pickled eggs available from the bartender for 25 cents. It boasted a jukebox filled with outdated C&W disks, a couple of threadbare pool tables, a dance floor occasioned by doughy, drunk housewives and randy forklift operators, and Smokey. Smokey was why we kept coming back. Well, him and the cheap beer and the 25-cent pickled eggs.

Smokey was the thirty- or forty- or fifty- or sixty-something lush who provided music for the docile, unambitious patrons of the C&F. He knew all the country-western hits, new and old, and a few show tunes to boot. His voice was full and raspy, not particularly good, but just right for the venue. And he was a nice guy. We’d chat with him during his breaks, buy him beer, and think up requests. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to buy alcohol for a drunk, but he was already drinking so we were just allowing him to hold onto his hard-won cash a little longer. And occasionally he would let your faithful editor take the stage and treat the crowd to some singularly amateur renderings of Willie Nelson and Hank Williams.

Not too long after my marriage and departure from the fine city of Jackson (Mrs. Bruck didn’t want to live there, go figure), the Cat and Fiddle also ceased to exist, being replaced by the “Rainbow.” I didn’t feel like meeting any Boy George fans so I didn’t bother to check it out. Instead, a fitting closure to that chapter of Jackson, MI culture lies in the words of a prematurely middle-aged hillbilly, with whom I was playing pool during my last visit to C&F, along with her daughter and one of my college buddies: in her unmistakeable I’m-from-Michigan-but-my-momma’s-from-Kentucky accent, to her daughter, she avowed, “If yew let him win, ah swear ah’ll whup you like a redheaded stepchild!”

So there you have it, in the unlikeliest of places, redemption of the concept of multigenerational entertainment!