Author: DOuG pRATt

Brunch with the Beatle Years

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Here’s hoping for a good 2010. There were highs and lows in 2009, with the low being my wife’s illness, and the high being contacted by Prue Bury.

Two syndicated radio shows I listen to are The Beatle Years and Beatle Brunch. Both programs are carried in Boston by WODS-FM, Oldies 103. If you click the link below you’ll find six months of shows available for streaming, and you can even download them. Elvis fans will find something there, too.

http://www.wods.com/Oldies-On-Demand-Audio/4334827

A particularly good example is the most recent Beatle Years installment that’s been posted. From November, 14 — “Works in Progress.”

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JAN/BeatleYears_14Nov09.mp3]

Beatle Brunch from November 8 also has excellent alternate takes of songs.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JAN/BeatleBrunch_8Nov09.mp3]

The Logitechal Song

As Wally Cleaver would say, I’ve been goofing around. The Logitech Squeezebox Radio is so good I was inspired to make a video to show how I have it set up. There’s no remote yet, so you get to see my hairy arm working the controls.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/DEC/Logitech.flv 512 384]

As I said in the video, turn it up and it gets loud. How loud? The meter shows 108 dB, and the sound is clear and solid.

Logitech Squeezebox Radio 108 dB

Something else I mentioned is the music server that’s in the basement. Logitech’s Squeezebox server is running on my spare computer, bought on the day Windows XP was released — October 25, 2001. The music is on a 160 GB USB drive that I outgrew on my primary Windows desktop.

Logitech Squeezebox Server

CD ripping is done with Windows Media Player 11. It’s set up for Carol’s convenience, so that all she has to do is open the tray and insert the disc. It rips and ejects automatically.

Good news for housing: prices flat

This headline has me shaking my head…

Bad news for housing: Prices flattening

By Les Christie, staff writerDecember 29, 2009: 10:20 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Home price gains earlier this year flattened out in October, according to a report issued Tuesday.

The S&P/Case Shiller Home Price index, covering 20 of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation, was unchanged in October, after four consecutive months of gains. The index is down 7.3% from 12 months earlier.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/real_estate/October_home_prices/

It seems that everywhere the emphasis is on a desperate desire for things going back to the way they were in the financial and real estate markets. Don’t these “experts” get it? That’s exactly what we don’t want! I realize that people who bought at the peak got screwed, but why make houses unaffordable all over again? If I sold my house today, I’d get at least $100,000 less than what it was allegedly worth a few years ago, but that would be at least $100,000 more than what I paid for it — which happens to be about what we’ve spent on improvements. So with the mortgage interest being tax-deductible we come out even, and that’s fine with me.

The real estate bubble was another gigantic pyramid scheme, with unqualified buyers and investors being pushed into the bottom to hold up a few who ran the schemes. In a bizarre irony, it was the collapse of Wall Street that forced Bernie Madoff to come forward. In a way, I can almost understand why the SEC failed to nail Madoff. Was there any real difference between what he was up to, and what the deregulated markets were doing?

Speaking of Madoff, there were reports everywhere last week that he had been rather badly beaten up in prison. Since then I’ve seen nothing about it.

Daddy’s got a Squeezebox

Thanks to a couple of Christmas additions, Internet radio now rules. It comes with irony, because WBZ AM in Boston, at 64 Kbps, now sounds much better than the FM stations WBUR, streaming at 32k, and WGBH with its piddling shortwave-quality 24k. [Note: Two days after I posted this item, WBUR went to 64K, and a few weeks later WGBH did likewise.]

I’m tickled to have BBC Radio 2 as a preset in the bedroom on the Logitech Squeezebox Radio. Santa delivered it from Amazon, but it’s on sale this week at Best Buy for the same $150 price. I have quibbles with the buttons that could have been prevented by making the navigation knob a bit smaller, but other than that — and a couple of lock-ups that came up when I was flipping between menus rather abruptly — I give the Squeezebox Radio a rave recommendation.

The other Wifi radio is a fun, but quirky, device in the kitchen called a Chumby One. Being much more demanding to set up than the Logitech, the Chumby is a techie’s delight, but it is not a consumer-friendly product, and its $120 price makes the Squeezebox a better deal when it’s on sale; however, the Chumby is more than an Internet radio.

At first I was worried about the Squeezebox not having a regular FM tuner, but the Chumby One’s tuner is next to useless, and because I installed a battery there’s no place to store the antenna, so I’m actually considering cutting it off. But now that I’ve had a couple of days to enjoy Internet radio that’s been freed from the need for a full-blown computer, I’m OK with letting go of broadcast AM and FM radio.

Mistah Magloo’s Christmas

One of the first animated Christmas TV specials in the sixties was “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” from 1962. It hasn’t been broadcast in ages, so it isn’t as well known as perennial favorites Charlie Brown, Rudolph, and the Grinch. I don’t have Magoo’s Christmas on video, and I’m wondering how it holds up today. So I’ll embed it here, thanks to YouTube user eboWaxx.

Freberg gets nuttin’

Cartoon Brew has this brand-new take on an old Christmas song by Stan Freberg, animated by Doug Compton.

(Does anybody have real silverware that’s worth stealing these days?)

As always, Mark Evanier is on top of the error department:

12/24/09 12:31am

Mark Evanier says:

Hey, tell Doug he got the credits wrong. He says the kid is Daws Butler and the burglar is Stan Freberg.

Nope. They’re both Freberg.

And being a stickler myself, I’ve corrected the video itself by properly cropping it and getting the aspect ratio right.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/DEC/NuttinForXmas.flv 320 240]