Category: All Posts

CBS Radio blocks online streams

CBS Radio has started selectively blocking online access to its stations. Radio.com on a browser works, but I use a Logitech Squeezebox Radio in my bedroom. This is what I hear when I try to listen to WBZ-Boston.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Aug/CBS_radio.mp3|titles=CBS Radio blocking stations]

Tunein.com now redirects to Radio.com, which doesn’t work with a Roku media player. I don’t know or care who CBS Radio is making happy by doing this, but it’s not me, and I have no intention of returning to AM radio to hear WBZ in the house.

Follow-up: There’s a workaround. I used the URL that’s been working in the Chumby.

Supersize Me meets The King of Kong

I’m watching Morgan Spurlock’s series, 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die, on Keith Olbermann’s new home, the Current TV cable network. I hope one of those documentaries is Spurlock’s own Supersize Me. Spurlock is a great admirer of a documentary I love, The King of Kong, and for the series Morgan interviewed Billy Mitchell, the bad guy in Kong.

Rescue the Hitchcock 9

My buddy D.F. Rogers’ favorite directors are Frank Capra and John Ford. I too love their classic movies, but my top two director picks are Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell.

Recently it was announced that a few reels of a long-lost early work by Hitchcock were found, from a silent movie called The White Shadow. Here’s a nice mini-documentary surveying Hitch’s career.


And now there’s another find from the silent film era. A cache of sheet music has been uncovered, with cues for a pianist to play for every sort of scene.

As mentioned in the video, the British Film Institute has a project to restore nine Hitchcock silent films. The BFI is preparing the films for a showing with the London Olympics next year.

This post is, in part, my roundabout way to say how dismayed I am by the violence that erupted in England this week. I’m glad the situation seems to have calmed down, especially because by now Prudence Bury has arrived in London for an upcoming reunion at the Royal Ballet School.

Local news

A terrible highway accident happened today, not far from here on a stretch of road that I travel often. It’s always disturbing to contemplate how something like this could happen to any of us, without a moment’s notice.

A woman is dead, another is seriously injured, and so are two children. I assume National Grid’s attorneys are already preparing for the lawsuit that is sure to come.

In living color

RCA CEO David Sarnoff was a ruthless businessman. His great insight and accomplishment was seeing the potential of broadcasting as an entertainment medium and making network radio and television a reality. But Sarnoff didn’t hesitate to steal technology, as he did from Philo T. Farnsworth, and he crushed the great inventor Edwin Armstrong, who had been a close friend.

Having said that, RCA’s engineers did an exemplary job of creating the all-electronic NTSC color television system that was backwards-compatible with existing black & white sets. It was Ampex, however, that introduced b&w video tape recording in 1956. Two years later, RCA modified an Ampex deck so it could record in color, and the amazing results are in this video. If only this technology had been available during WWII, we would have an entirely different historical perception of the era.

Information on the restoration of this historic recording is at this link.

Some Brussels sprouts

What a coincidence that this year two major movies — Smurfs and Tintin — are based on Belgian cartoon characters. Brussels is going green (and, uh, brown) by bringing back horses to the city’s streets…

…and Kristel Verbeke looks into experiments to increase the intelligence of apes (what could go wrong?)…

http://youtu.be/Ub1i9YFf764

…while Josje teaches girls how to dance the K3 way.

http://youtu.be/Cad7TI0P4fE