In this vintage trade ad for Channel 2 in Baton Rouge, WBRZ, being smothered in crude oil would seem to be the least of Pierre the Pelican's problems.
As a matter of fact, that 100 kilowatts of radio-frequency excitement he's hangin' onto is about to wipe the smile right off his beak.
If you're laughing right now, you just may be a geek.And if, in the lede, you recognized the wording WBRZ used in every on-air legal identification way back when, you may be a double-plus geek. Me? I would be your leader.
I've been away from the blog -- mostly -- for a while doing this delicate dance between my inner MacGyver and my inner MacGruber.
In other words, I was out accomplishing s***. Despite myself. The saga started Sunday, when Mrs. Favog and I bought an old TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck for $30 at an estate sale here in Omaha. Did it work? I didn't know, but I suspected I might be setting out on a journey to the Land of Fix-It -- a kind of road trip of the mind and soul that I'll detail in a bit.
But here's what's important right now about that trip: It feels good -- and I needed that.
It's easy to sit behind the keys here and write about stuff. Some of that output, I hope, is insightful and decently written. Most of it, I fear, falls in the category of "Well, DUH!"
OURS ISan age where I have just committed a branding and self-marketing faux pas. Humility is out, and so is introspection that might lead to honesty.
What I ought to have told you is how dead-on right I've been about stuff, that this is important writing, and that you can't live without reading my take on things. This would be because I am smart, hip, happenin' and. . . .
That's right -- cool.
That's how, apparently, one "markets" oneself. I suck at that, probably because I think it's bull. A lie. Immodest . . . particularly in a world where a little modesty might be refreshing.
Yeah, I could have been waxing eloquently about the bloody obvious fact that Shirley Sherrod got hosed, that the Obama Administration let itself get stampeded by the Big Lie, and that Andrew Breitbart is a far-right ideologue and twit whose actions over the last year or so just may prove him to be objectively evil.
Or at least indifferent to the truth.
All of that, of course, would be bloody obvious, except to certain brain-dead constituencies who -- unfortunately -- have taken advantage of universal suffrage.
But I didn't wax eloquently about that, or any other stuff that might be rattling around the echo chamber this week. Instead, I've been doing something useful -- fixing up that beautiful old TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck, one about 40 years old.
Why?
WELL, for one thing, getting that thing running again -- put back into good use once more -- was something tangible, a sign of contradiction in this increasingly intangible world. I figured I could look at something restored to its former audiophile glory and feel like I'd accomplished something.
That's objective fact. It was broken. Now it ain't. I accomplished something.
Being another schmuck opining on a blog? Feh. Maybe that's an accomplishment, but you just might find it to be a first-class detriment to . . . whatever.
Making a tape deck live again -- making it once again able to pluck lost bits of music . . . and history . . . indeed, ourselves out of magnetized oxide particles stuck to a Mylar backing -- now that's something tangible, and your validation neither adds nor subtracts from the act.
I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind but now I see.
Or hear, as the case may be.
LIKE I SAID, my journey with the old TEAC started in west Omaha last Sunday. The ticket cost 30 bucks.
I don't know why -- I mean, apart from my general geekiness -- I love old reel-to-reel tape decks.
But I do love me some reel-to-reel tape deck, and I have even before I did my first air shift in a radio station, where once upon a time, you could play with top-end (or not) reel-to-reel tape decks to no end.
For its time -- the late 1960s and early '70s -- the TEAC A-4010S was quality stuff. A top performer. Built like a tank.
Today, geeks like me call it a "classic" -- classic in performance, in design and in quality of construction.
When I bought this one -- as I said -- I didn't know whether it worked. Turns out it didn't.
THE ELECTRONICS in the amplifier were fine, as I more or less discovered when I got it home and powered it up, but the tape transport was in bad shape. The pinch roller mechanism, part of what makes the tape move along at the correct speed, was as stiff as a board -- it moved only through brute force.
This was not by design. The whole thing needed cleaning and oiling . . . and a screw in back needed loosening (a little).
And the capstan drive belt? It had turned into tar balls. Really.
Ever tried cleaning tar off of all manner of metal moving parts? Not fun.
Slowly but surely, I got the old TEAC -- it of long-past better days in an Omaha home where its owner used it to listen to Latter-Day Saints conference sessions and some sort of music programming -- cleaned up, lubed up and loosened up.
I scavenged a drive belt and a better pinch roller from another old TEAC tape deck I wasn't using anymore. When I found the belt was too loose to stay where the tape-recorder gods intended, I cut it to fit and super-glued it back together.
And when the torque on the drive motors was too much in one spot and too little in another -- trust me, this can get real ugly, real fast -- I ended up doing some MacGyvering of the taps on a couple of resistors.
IN BRIEF, thank God for old service manuals found on the Internet, an unused tape deck to scavenge from, WD-40, Super Glue and electrical tape. Not necessarily in that order.
And thank God for the tangible things in a self-promoting, subjective and intangible world. Thank God for old tape decks, craftsmanship that stands the test of time, working with your hands and the visible fruits of one's labor.
Thank God for these things, because sometimes they're what keep us sane. And sometimes, they point the way toward what's really important in life.
When this Sony color portable was made in 1971, television sets were not cheap. You had to save up for one. And they were tanks -- solid and heavy.
On the other hand, if a set like this model KV-1201 were to break, which was extremely unlikely, you could get it fixed. And the picture quality was very, very good . . . as you can see 39 years later.
I BOUGHT this set for $7.50 Sunday at an estate sale. If I had bought it brand new in 1971, I would have gotten almost four decades of use out of it, and it would still work like new.
Makes you wonder, doesn't it? It makes you wonder what the real cost is of our postmodern consumer society, where we buy lots and lots of stuff -- gadgets -- and almost none of it will last longer than a few years, at which point you will throw it away.
It makes you wonder whether the flat-panel HDTV you bought for $500 will last four years, much less four decades. It also makes you wonder whether, if it lasts two, you will junk it anyway because it's no longer the latest thing -- and we Americans are all about the latest thing, aren't we?
Me, I'm rather partial to scavenged relics of a lost era of durable goods -- truly durable goods.
And at $7.50, this bit of durability is a bargain you'd be hard-pressed to beat.
And a smart phone! And an iPod! And a digital camera . . . and a laptop, too!
There's a lot of stuff we can't live without today -- despite the fact that we of a certain age all lived quite nicely without every single bit of it just 30 years ago.
TROUBLE IS, says Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column, lots of people in the Congo can't live in peace -- or at all -- because of all the stuff we can't live without:
I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.
Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”
Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.
A humorous new video taunting Apple and PC computers alike goes online this weekend on YouTube, with hopes that it will go viral. Put together by a group of Hollywood actors, it’s a spoof on the famous “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” ad and suggests that both are sometimes built from conflict minerals.
“Guess we have some things in common after all,” Mac admits.
Protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of Apple’s new store in Washington, demanding that the company commit to using only clean minerals. Last month, activists blanketed Intel’s Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals. For a time, Intel disabled comments — creating a stink that called more attention to blood minerals than human rights campaigners ever could.
AS I contemplate this, and reflect on how complicated and pampered our Western lives have become, I'm thinking of Maude. Yeah, Bea Arthur's character in the '70s Norman Lear sitcom.
Whenever her husband, Walter, did something to irk her, she always rolled out what became her catchphrase: "God's gonna get you for that, Walter."
That's it . . . I'm done. As in "done in." Gone. Lost. Incommunicado.
Just bring me some beer and some Carnation Instant Breakfast, then call EMS to hook me up a catheter. I have been reliably informed of the existence ofa website that's the online home of almost every Radio Shack catalog published from 1939 to 2005.
And that's just part of it.
It seems to me that all I need right now is Doc Brown's DeLorean and some period-appropriate cash, and I'll be in bidness. Oh, the places we'll go!
The gadgets we'll buy!
I THINK I'll get me a classic Rek-O-Kut turntable from 1961. And a vintage Harman-Kardon stereophonic receiver.
Maybe an H.H. Scott FM tuner, too!
Oh! And a Tandberg reel-to-reel tape deck! Tapes! I need tapes!
AND WHEN I'm done shopping in the year of my birth, maybe I'll pop over to Radio Shack somewhere during my junior year of high school . . . let's make it Christmastime 1977. I always wanted a DX-160 communications receiver.
And while I'm at it, maybe I'll pick up this, too:
In this vintage trade ad for Channel 2 in Baton Rouge, WBRZ, being smothered in crude oil would seem to be the least of Pierre the Pelican's problems.
