Author: DOuG pRATt

Nifty gifts

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly good gift giver, but a couple of my sisters can have a knack for finding fun and/or unusual presents. For Christmas my sister Jean gave me a Peanuts wall clock that plays the “Linus and Lucy” theme on the hour, but not when it’s dark. It’s hanging in my office now.

My sister Marianne found some cool things this Christmas. 3D Holiday Specs look like 3D glasses, but when you look at Christmas tree lights with them you see them transformed into Santa’s face, or snowflakes, or stars, etc. It’s fun seeing which patterns give the best effects.

Something else Marianne found, that’s both fun and practical, is a type of wallet I’d never seen before, made of a folded sheet of Tyvek. Mighty Wallets come in all sorts of designs, including some with Star Trek themes. Highly recommended!

Party like it’s 2009!

It’s already New Year’s Day in Belgium and the Netherlands. Three years ago K3, the Flemish Europop queens, recorded this New Year’s message.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2011/Dec/K3_2012.flv 640 360]

“United As One”? Well, no, because a few months later in 2009 Kathleen Aerts quit. She was replaced by “Josje” Huisman, who seems to have been the perfect choice for the girl group.

For you K3 fans here’s a recent picture of Karen, looking sort of like Lindsay Lohan did before she discovered meth, or whatever it was that wrecked her.

This was Karen about twenty years ago.

Ho, ho, ho Nöelco

One of the Christmas gifts for my son this year is a Norelco rechargeable razor. Norelco is a unit of Philips in Holland, the company that introduced Compact Cassettes, LaserDisc video, and co-developed Compact Discs with Sony.

In the 1960’s Norelco started to advertise using a stop-motion animated Santa in their holiday TV commercials. When I was a kid I looked forward to seeing the Norelco Santa. Here’s a video survey of his appearances through the years. The first voice you’ll hear is one the all-time great announcers, Peter Thomas, born in 1924 and, from what I can tell, still working.

Norelco’s Santa disappeared in the 1990’s, but this year he made a digital comeback.

Christmas Eve!

This is me, Christmas 1976, shortly after I had my first paying radio station gig. My brother-in-law Marc is in the background…

… and this was what I was reacting to. A beautiful, old Zenith console tube radio that my brother Jeff gave me. He traded an enlarger for it. (Back in the age of analog photography there were these little things called negatives and to make a print you had to… oh, never mind.) Years later, I had it refinished and restored.

The radio was one of the last made before war production took over, so it was 35 years old on that Christmas Day, which was… 35 years ago?? Yike! I’m not going to think about that and instead I’ll go get some ‘nog.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Fe Fi Fo FiOS

I’m one of the lucky ones who has Verizon FiOS. Not only is the Internet service the best there is for American consumers, HDTV is also the best it can be, because the system delivers the signals exactly as they are received, with no re-compression. I do have one quibble, however, and that’s the HDTV DVR. It pretty much sucks. So it’s good to see that Verizon is working on improving their set top boxes, with an eye toward eliminating STB’s all together.

http://youtu.be/QogfVxtsOP8

And I want FiOS TV to carry BBC America in HD.