On my Kindle Keyboard I’m in the middle of reading Larry Tye’s excellent book about the ultimate illegal alien, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. The Boston Globe has a piece by Tye about Superman’s moral compass. The article is at this link, and it requires a login. If you have trouble logging on, click here.
The Superman radio show of the 1940′s with Bud Collyer led to the Superman movie serials with Kirk Alyn, which in turn led to the 1950′s TV series with George Reeves. On occasion the radio series took Superman back to his original comic book roots as a social crusader, and in Tye’s op-ed he points out a 16-part 1946 story called Clan of the Fiery Cross. It can be heard at this page on Archive dot org.
Without Aereo’s DVR feature I probably wouldn’t have tried the service, but I am so impressed with it that I think I’m going to be a paying subscriber, despite the fact I don’t have compelling need for it. A key aspect of Aereo’s technology is its amazingly effective tiny TV antenna. Each customer gets one assigned to them within a huge array of tiny antennas. That way, Aereo can say they aren’t rebroadcasting TV stations for public use. It may sound clunky, but it isn’t at all. Assuming you have good Internet throughput, it’s all quite seamless and elegant. (Aereo’s opponents claim the antennas act in unison. Read this for more.)
How Aereo works – note: base price is $8/month for 20 hours of recorded video
When I started this blog in 2006 I had Comcast analog cable SDTV hooked into an ATI TV Wonder Elite DVR on my desktop computer. I lost the use of that cable tuner when I switched to FiOS digital HDTV. Since then I’ve seen the start of the Netflix streaming video service on Web browsers, then later it became available on the Roku player, and now there’s Aereo to put live TV back on my computer with dual monitors. Technology marches on!
Boston is the second city to get Aereo, the new “DVR in the cloud” service that puts local broadcast TV over the Internet. I’m giving it a try, and there is nothing rough or difficult about it at all. It’s slick, smooth, and clean. It works great on the Roku, but that’s not where I see Aereo being the most compelling. Where I’m really impressed is on the Acer netbook I’m using right now, with its 11.6″ 1366×768 screen. I’ll leave it to you to look up all of the details of the Aereo service, and the lawsuit by broadcasters.
In the first row, second from the left, is Charles M. Schulz at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, in 1943. Schulz was in Company B of the 8th Armored Infantry Battalion, which is why I picked this cartoon by Sparky’s good buddy Bill Mauldin.
This week Fresh Air re-ran a fascinating 1998 segment with Ray Manzarek talking about the Doors and the creation and development of Light My Fire.
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In 1967, when I was eleven years old, Light My Fire was a huge hit on 77 WABC radio, the leading AM station in New York. One day, while at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk, Connecticut with my family, I happened to hear the complete song for the first time. Before that moment the concept of an “album version” of a song hadn’t existed. Unknown to me at the time, at the start of 1967 an FCC ruling had taken effect, forcing radio stations with simulcasted AM and FM signals to offer unique programming on their FM stations, and so “underground” FM radio was born.
That first time I heard the complete version of Light My Fire I declared to my brother Jeff, “this is the greatest song of all time,” and my opinion hasn’t changed since then. To this day if I come across Light My Fire on the car radio I let it play through.
