Flyover Country is good for AM radio

Just figure: frequencies measured in the hundreds of kilohertz will propagate very well over the prairie and fragment (not be received well on consumer equipment) in the mountains. As I drove home from work this evening, the amply-laminated Prairie atmosphere of Flyover Country was throwing to my car's spindly antenna the programming from Las Vegas, somewhere in Iowa, Dallas, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

This is a richer bounty than I enjoyed in my youth as Super CFL tempted me from Chicago during my roller-skating winters.

My sadness is that I haven't the AM receiver to capture it in my own home. Only in my car will the radio catch it. The Onkyo at home won't even pull in KNUS from Denver, through the Terk antenna. So I lack my fix, developed over the last two years of drivetime driving, of Bill Bennett in the morning and Hugh Hewitt in the evening. Glenn Beck is incisive but not that incisive. The local hosts in Cheyenne aren't incisive at all, except for one counter-criticism of the Kelo decision.

Just figure II: is there an internet device that pulls broadcasters in and offers them to my home radio receiver? In that case it isn't good for AM radio per se. But it's great for those talk-show hosts and broadcasters who stream their shows over the Internet. I Googled last night for "internet radio component audio" and came up kinda dry, but I remember such devices, which I considered extravagant at the time but in retrospect now seem almost sensible over a broadband connection, offered at a store staffed by DeeDee who could be cute?

What we had to explain to Firstborn

AMC gave us the remarkable gift this evening, of having to explain to Firstborn what was meant by Dr. Lao in The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. She was grokking it rather well.

Better than her understanding of Joint Committee hearings on oil company windfall profits.

So note well: if a 9-year-old can divine the meaning of a Silent-era made-for-TV movie but not grok a Senate subcommittee hearing's intent, the fault is not with the made-for-TV movie.

O, the weird things one will see on C-SPAN at oh-dark-thirty

Frightening it is to see Ted Stevens of Alaska sucking up to people who don't need be sucked up to.

Pete Domenici doesn't fare much better either.

Lo dark days are these that Republicians must summon from their depths cloaked apologists for the Free Market.