h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

By the way, I stay as far away as I can from Ford products as a rule.
I've had some bad experiences.
That is why I do admit that some of the company's and the founder's innovations were of note.
For all his problems as a person and a public figure, he did use his head occasionally.

Several points I'd like to make but I have to ask Wand'rin about the cast of her plays, on two points.

Firstly, are you really working with three sets of actors, ie: doing thrice the work for this presentation. Lord, I've never known a director to actually work harder than the actors. Shirley, they are in 'repetory', doing roles in each. If not, my hat is off to a rare beast, a dedicated and hard working director. Yes, you ought to have become a professional.

And secondly, are these Oriental actors practising their Engrish or is this an Expats production, a little bit of the ol' sceptered Isle in the oriental wastelands. Either way, you have your work cut out for you.

peace
jwf

The three actors in 'English made simple" are all appearing in one of the other two. Of the four in Last Tango, 2 are not in anything else. Total of 8.
HK players started as expat Brits only (was at one time called 'Garrison Theatre') but I'm quite pleased with myself for having
3 ex pat Brits (two of whom became grandparents yesterday = I don't think there was any connection between that and the air con going up in flames)
1 expat Canadian (works in same department as I do)
1 local expat(he was born and bred here) who reads the local TV news and three assorted Asians. Very racially and educationally mixed. All 3 of them have some or a lot of professional experience, especially the Singaporean. The really good thing about overseas amdram is the fascinating people you meet.
The really good thing about these plays is that they can be done with no scenery and very few props - almost black box.
The burning question now is whether the impending typhoon will let us have any more rehearsals before I go on leave

>> (was at one time called 'Garrison Theatre') <<


Halifax as you may suspect, was/is one of Canada's 'garrison' towns.
Established originally as a base of operations to attack - c1760 - the French fortress at Louisburg farther up the Nova Scotia coast (long since ruined and abandoned except by Parks Canada who have spend almost ten times as much rebuilding it as Louis did originally - which bankrupted the French court and cost them the war).

So growing up in Halifax, where the economy was (and still is) based on a 'hangers on' system of living off the garrison, the government and military expenditure and waste. Sam Cunard, who founded the Cunard line for example, got his start buying at auction a captured American coal carrier during the war of 1812. First he sold the coal for ten times what he paid for the whole ship...

Nothing has really changed. A very regal three storey Post Office building of brick and stone was sold off a few years ago when Canada Post began to moderize and rid itself of most of its facilities built in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era. Again the coal in the basement sold for ten times the price of the building, then all the brass fittings, the oak panelling, the gilt ceilings, the marble arches and counters... etc.

Of course there have been several colonial theatrical efforts over the centuries. The oldest theatre, 'The Garrick', became the first cinema in the 2oth century and was pretty run down and dirty by mid century. Then forty years ago, threatened by demolition, it was revived as a professional theatre called Neptune supported all this time by government grants. I have performed there in only one play. And taught one season of their theater school. My social skills are not up to this sort of thing for long.

Shortly after WW2 the amateur 'Theater Arts Guild' was established by expats and continues to this day, always as you suggest, attracting many fascinating 'forriners' and the few upwardly mobile and socially conscious locals with pretentions to past glories of the empire.

Our CBC radio and TV was always a safe colonial outpost for former Beeb producers and Brit actors. As a child actor I was exposed to much of their cultural values and always found the 'colonial expat' mentality quite amusing.

Hollywood cliches notwithstanding, the image of tea being served in the jungle is the sort of thing that tickles my sensibilities. So thanks for updating my concept of expat society in your colonial barracks town.

I'll leave ya t' your leave with wishes for safe travel and good health.


jwf

I was thinking about the rise of Auto use after WWII today while going to the store to get some oatmeal so that Uvula could make a peach crisp she promised to take to work.

I have had the experience of trying to get the family to listen to taped to old radio taps while traveling in the vehicle. The road noise means that most of the vocal tones are either lost or you have to crank it up so that other frequencies become unbearable.
On the other hand, music is usually recorded and EQed so that it sounds best out of a set of crappy 8 ohm speakers in a noisy vehicle.

I think that as people stepped out of the blackout years and spent less time in the house, where the big clear-sounding radio was, the joy of driving to music was greater than trying to listen to Amos and Andy in a convertible.
It was a mere four years between the signing on the Missouri and the advent of the boob tube in mass production and mass consumption.
So, now people had a reason to rush to the store, rush to church, rush to work and then rush home to park the keister in front of the idiot box with a barely defrosted TV dinner on the creaky TV tray and an almost frozen Blatz in hand to watch Uncle Milty do goofy s***t that no one in their right mind would allow themselves to be caught doing in public.
The voyeuristic aspect of TV has always been with us.
Playhouse 90 and Bell Telephone Hour didn't realize that their ratings when up when they had the heroines in strapless gowns.
The ability to see all those stars, albeit murkily, that they had listened to for decades on the radio was not to be missed, either.
While some lament that people like Fred Allen or Edgar Bergen didn't do so well on the box, it is a fact that many superannuated fossils did survive so much longer on the tube than their acts would have merited on stage or radio.
In fact the money spent on dragging those dinosaurs to TV probably set the future of the industry back thirty years. Jackie Gleason was given a lifetime contract in the late fifties by CBS, I believe. They were soon to regret that.
George Burns probably would have creaked into the early seventies if Gracey hadn't been kind enough to die and basically put him out of business for most of the sixties.
Jack Benny dragged his career out until it was threadbare.
Groucho kept goofing off after "You Bet Your Life" took a dive in 1963. He was offered several sitcom concepts but he said he couldn't do that without a team. Since Chico was gone, forget it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the age of westerns had crept up and horsecrapped all over the airwaves.
The radio western had always been relatively popular, but when William Boyd, star of radio and silver screen discovered that he could chop up his old footage and serve it up a half an hour at a time, then it was time for Hoppalong Cassidy to make a few people rich.
The cliffhanger and the serial were resurrected, only stretched out across two to six days rather than the hour and half on a Saturday afternoon that it took to show them in their original form.
And the ads! The ads!
Ads everywhere. Heroes of the old west running around Griffith Park shooting at each other in long shots and then cutting to a drummy bright set to sell cold cereal to the kiddies with a prize in every box!
The ultimate absurdity of this sort was when the Bonanza cast, in character, displayed the innovative features of the 1964 Chevy lineup on their set in late 1963!

Guess it is kinda hard to sell a car on the radio.

"See the USA
in your Chevrolet!
America is waiting
for y' to call..."


Yes, Dinah Shore sang it best. With real 'feeling' that stirred the imagination and prompted my old man to buy a brand new 54 Chevy Belair. We travelled far into America every summer for the next few years singing 'The Happy Wanderer'.

We had to sing because it didn't have a radio. It didn't have a radio because he was a radio announcer and felt he didn't want to be driving his job around with him. But I suspect it was because he wouldn't listen to anyone but himself.

Our next car in 1958 was a VW beetle. It had a radio. Because, he couldn't believe 'rock and roll' was really happening. As the concerned father of a teenage boy (me) he wanted to keep tabs on all this hip wiggling and jumping and shouting. He said it wouldn't last.

In a lot of ways it didn't. In a lot more it did. He also predicted 'computerised' radio and fully expected to be replaced by a machine at any time. He managed to get out and freelance before it happened. My last regular hours/salaried job at a radio station was baby-sitting machines for a Jazz and Classics FM station. I never got to say a word, just push a few buttons every now and then.


jwf

Been there, done that.
I punched ad carts and twirled knobs for High School Boys Basketball games at a little one horse station in Southern Illinois called WMIX.
When I was there the AM was DJed but the FM was continuous Country on big reels of four inch tape that was traveling at about 1 1/2 fps.

The most fun thing was playing with the sound library, which everyone else had forgotten was there. They had a Mutual Broadcasting Vietnam Combat Sound Effects record that you could play while reading off the latest screed from the Five O'Clock Follies.
Since I was there in 81 or 82, it was a record that had been sitting in there for quite a while.

My father's '60 Beetle, the snot-green one, had only an AM radio in it. For some stupid reason, many of the local stations in Illinois only had dusk til dawn licenses.

The '56 Chevy Biscayne was a POS when he got it. I don't remember it having a radio. I barely remember it moving under it's own power.

To this day, my mother listens to KMOX out of St. Louis. For years it had Harry Carey, Jr. babbling away on it for most of the morning, with ABC news popping in every hour with that stupid sound effect.
I remember the last days of Arthur Godfrey on local radio, when he was doing a syndicated thing.
Major pain in the butt as a person, but the perfect voice for radio.

I was watching an episode of the Craig Kilborn show a year or so ago and Adam West was messing around on there. It turned out that they had both been DJs in college, though Adam was actually a catch-all announcer for some station, I forget where, like Cleveland.
He related a story about narrating a baseball game off the wire, just like the old Ronald Reagan chestnut.

So what did you do with all that "spare time" at the automated station?

"So, now people had a reason to rush to the store, rush to church, rush to work and then rush home to park the keister in front of the idiot box with a barely defrosted TV dinner on the creaky TV tray and an almost frozen Blatz in hand to watch Uncle Milty do goofy s***t that no one in their right mind would allow themselves to be caught doing in public."

Here are my guesses for what those three letters are supposed to represent in Uncle Milty's goofy and censored action:

start
slant
strut
split
short
shirt
stint
stunt

Damn, "stunt" almost fits.

Damn, my splel-checker let me down again.
It should have been s**t.

jwf,

RE: machine djs, have you heard the horror story that's been going around ever since the attempted FCC give-away fiasco last month? As you may know, Michael Powell was trying to allow corporations to own more radio, tv and media outlets than ever before. One of the horror stories that opponents told about big media consolidation was that some town experienced a toxic ammonia spill after a train derailed. People tried to call the local radio stations so they could play the emergency signal and let people know to stay indoors or evacuate or whatever. No one answered phones at the stations for an hour and a half, as poisonous gas blew around the countryside.

"As it turns out, six of the seven local radio stations had recently been purchased by Clear Channel Communications, a radio giant with over 1,200 stations nationwide. Economies of scale dictated that most of the local staff be cut: Minot stations ran more or less on auto pilot, the programming largely dictated from further up the Clear Channel food chain. No one answered the phone because hardly anyone worked at the stations any more; the songs played in Minot were the same as those played on Clear Channel stations across the Midwest."

from http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/bulletin12.html

I'm not old enough to tell any stories about cool cars that my dad worked on, unless you count a Pinto or Vega as "cool." But I can still coax a good story out of it.

Early or mid-70s, my parents had an olive green Pinto. When it finally became a losing battle to keep the thing running, my father either decided that towing it to the scrap yard was too expensive, or else he was just playing, because he ended up cutting it in half with a blow-torch, then into smaller and smaller pieces. I can't remember if we had any vehicles big enough to carry the chunks to the scrap yard, so maybe he was just playing. Or exacting revenge. I never learned how to fix cars or do routine maintenance beyond changing the oil, but from the many times I handed him tools while he was fixing them, I learned that swearing is an integral part of the process.

Vegas were a strange beast.
I've known people who kept one for over a decade, taking care of them and fixing every burp and fart.
I also knew people who trashed them within months.
My stepfather has the first refrigerator he ever bought new, a Norge with the one-armed bandit hand latch that went kuh-lunk, kuh-chunk when you opened and closed it. The handle broke a few years ago from a stress fracture in the pot metal. A brand-new pair of Vise-Grips immediately took it's place.

There are many things I hate about the old man, but there are some that are imminently admirable.

I think sometimes you get so intimately involved with a machine that you don't feel like passing it on. The next person would be either an unwitting victim or a new suitor for the vehicle to compare your performance with.

Uvula used to have a Mazda that I wanted to torch everyday we had it.

My grandfather has a fridge at least 40-50 years old. I think it's older than my aunt, so must be over 50. The handle and trim across the front of it looks like something from an old Cadillac, looks like it ought to have tail fins. I think it ceased refrigerating in the late 80s, but he kept using it as a cupboard and still has it. It has the massive clunky handle still.

>> So what did you do with all that "spare time" at the automated station? <<


I did what the audience was supposedly doing, sipped wine by candle-light, listened to the music and felt terribly, terribly sophisticated. Oh ok sometimes I dozed off when we played a whole side of Mantovanni or the San Simeon Chorale but I learned who Wes Montgomery was and some fella named List.
peace
jwf

>> RE: machine djs, have you heard the horror story ... No one answered phones at the stations as poisonous gas blew around the countryside. <<

Indeed. Similar true stories have been circulating since the first stations started being semi-automated in the late sixties. Back then there was still someone in the station (like me) who was supposed to answer the phone and be prepared to go on air in the case of any serious emergency (from nuclear holocaust to earthquake).

But since the advent of satellite feeds and broadband distribution methods, the giant slow-speed Muzak tape-players, the turntables and the cart machines have been trashed, and there really is no-one there.

During the major ice storm that took out power lines creating a total blackout for over a week throughout much of Quebec in 1999, there was no information avilable to the public because all the major feeds in Montreal were fully automated.

Their automatic emergency generators kicked in and the radio stations kept sending out a signal so that folks shivering in their cars or huddled round a battery powered portable in their fallout shelter could listen to all their favourite tunes while slowly freezing to death. (Very few have TV sets in their cars, the only place of shelter and warmth until the gas ran out - the gas stations had no working pumps.)

Many rediscovered the few remaining local French stations in the rural areas. They were still 'live' but emergency instructions were only being given in French and were only relevant to their specific locale. The police were blocking roads to prevent mass exodi to the few suburban areas with power. The millions in the urban sprawl that is Montreal had no idea what was going on throughout the city.

Here in Halifax in a couple of years ago, a major fire lit up the skies quite dramatically but no one answered the phones at the radio station. Being the weekend, no one answered at the TV stations either. An unexpected storm surge at high tide and record beaking rainfall caused some serious and deadly flooding last year but ask not the radio wither be the high ground or which way the wind doth blow.

There was serious talk about requiring radio stations to return to the old practice of having someone standing by on hand at all times. I doubt if it went much further than talk and some hollow promises from the corp giants that they would investigate the situation and take immediate measures t...

Yes, radio drama and community services information (local news weather sports and crises management) are the heart and soul of radio broadcasting. Sadly, radio in NorthAm has been gutted. Without these the imagination is robbed of its greatest stimulation and the sense of community withers, trembles or shivers in blind ignorance of events on the other side of town or even just down the road.

To a large extent the internet offers someone like me a small taste of how it used to be in terms of Community and Imagination. But most of this is UK-centric, youth oriented, in a supposed global perspective, outside of real time, and with little control or direction over content and presentation. So, very little is immediately relevant to my real world environment. But then, so much is hardly relevant to my real world environment lately.


Hi ho,
jwf

Oddly enough, the last bastion of real person radio in Texas, well, the areas I've been in, are the AM stations and the Christian stations.
We had a serious storm in Austin once and the only station that was on the air with real people talking about the situation were the Fundamentalist Baptists on their own little one lung station.
Even the alternative public access stations from the various colleges were clueless and just running the computerise NOAA weather feed.
During that particular storm, which I seem remember including high winds, ice and sleet, most of the local TV folks were having transmitter and generator problems.
There is an all-talk station here in Temple that is always on top of things. They have no problem cutting the feed if they have to.

Just like the apochryphal child in the well story that is recounted again in Woody Allen's "Radio Days", I sat and listened to the Waco fiasco on the radio. The last two days I listened to Rush Limbaugh, who ditched his usual crud and became a real radio person.
I still have tapes from that day.
The footage I later saw on television just peeved me mightily, as I am still of the opinion that some of those TV news monkeys could have put a stop to the whole thing if they'd only had any guts.

In his magical mystical way, TR has perfectly summed up the difference between radio and television.

>> ..a real radio person. <<

By today's standards words like 'real' and 'person' are high praise for a respected position of trust and social committment.

>> ..TV news monkeys.. <<

Yes once you add the visual, the video element, the monkey's gonna see, and therefore the monkey's gonna do. The "Show and Tell" level of TV communication just seems so juvenile after the golden radio years of "Listen and Imagine".


"Do the monkey!"


~jwf~