January 15 2003, 02:32 AM The Radios

I suppose I should write a bit about the radios.

When in the main room, we are often given to listening to "the stereo". It is the main source of audio in our home: the core of it is a fairly recent model Kenwood receiver, and I like it quite a bit. I tease specific friends about the stereo separation we have, and they tease me back about how the rear speakers are fed by cables that lie in an ugly run on the floor (we don't use the rear speakers for the radio). The unit itself is twined most tightly into a laden piece of entertainment center furniture, with uncomfortable echos of William's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", or perhaps his lesser known "Help! I'm Pinned! Get Somebody!" (good farce - very short run).

In the kitchen, we listen to a battered old G. E. SuperRadio that I've had for a very long time indeed. Two of the knobs are missing; the third is a replacement from some other radio, donated long ago by my friend John. The antenna was ripped off over a decade ago in an altercation with the cat. It is mono-only, and has a built in cassette deck, which in turn has a damaged mechanism behind the record button. It is a tremendous radio. It can pull in stations from across the state. I can still remember how it smelled when it was new. I need to replace the antenna.

In the bedroom, we have a Cambridge Soundworks Model 88, which is a really great table radio, except they seem to have had miserable problems with quality control (we've had two of them die, and they don't make them any more). Sounds absolutely great for a table radio, though. I much prefer the thing to anything I've heard from Bose, and it gets pretty good FM reception.

We have radios in the bathrooms. In one, we have a fairly standard early ninties boom box, which isn't plugged in as there are no outlets near it (there are never enough outlets in bathrooms. Or kitchens, for that matter). In the other one, there is no need for an outlet; the radio is powered by an internal leaf spring that's wound up by a hand crank. It's made by the good people at FreePlay, who also bring us wind-up flashlights and wind-up cell phones (neither of which are in that bathroom) - too much fun entirely! And it's a pretty good radio, too.

On my desk (which is really too small to support such extravagance) are two radios. One is an Oregon Scientific weather radio, which is pretty cool; it can pluck weather advisories for our area out of the air and yell at us. It works fairly well. It was originally meant to serve as a clock radio, but it became fast apparent that it would not be able to stand up to the heavy fist of my sleepy self in the early mornings. It is, for some reason, eternally blinking: a soft green for the all clear, and a very tinty red for an alert condition. It also makes a great clock.

The other radio on my desk is a grand daddy, and a favorite: my late uncle's Grundig Satillit 205 shortwave radio. This radio is a decade older than I am, and we routinely listen to the other side of the planet with it. It uses a comma as a radix mark on the dial labels. We listen to American pop music pumped out of German stations, and Turkish folk music from Ankara. We listen to a very strange side of late night America. We listen to pop music shows from Japan note QSLs. We listen to the news, English service, from Russia. We listen to Chinese Instruction from Taiwan. We listen to Vatican Radio in latin. We listen to numbers stations. We listened to the new year roll across the globe, one offset from UTC at a time. This thing is a treasure.

We have one television.