Was that a reference to this? If not, it should have been (Australia go 2-0 up on the Poms)!

 

T'was a reference to the fact that 4 July is US Independence Day, and thus, a work holiday for most here in the land where we don't put the Queen on our money.

Of course, TV doesn't take days off...

Unrelated:

 

That's a low blow Joe. In our defence, we don't pay taxes to the crown any more, and neither do we take their convicts.

When i worked for the govvamint doing trade promotion, we handed out kangaroo stick pins - couldn't keep up with the demand, had to ration them. I always took some when I travelled overseas, not as in-your-face as a flag pin. Mongolia was the only place I had to explain what it was, they thought it was a dinosaur (being a place of many dinosaurs).

Meet Blondie, one of the local residents, she is white but not albino thus not usually mistaken for a dinosaur.

 

 

Dye showing the route of a rip tide, and what they actually look like.

Our local lifeguards shadowing a (probably) adolescent great white shark off Calafia beach.

 

^^ Nope, clearly a land shark

 

We just call them 'rips', they have nothing to do with tides. The dye illustrates the effect of the water channeling out from the beach, it should be accompanied by a eye-level view of that area, which would show that the nature of the wave action in that channel is markedly different to the surf either side, and it is this that surfer need to be aware of in order to avoid the area. It is visible in that photo, disregard the green and you can see there is no/little wave action in the rip channel - THAT is what you look for.

Last summer we had a proliferation of drownings, many at unpatrolled beaches, it is unknown how many were people getting caught in rips and not knowing how to respond (float with the rip until it fades out, and/or swim sideways to get out of it). Presume this is pretty universal where there is beach/surfer culture.

 

Been a beach-goer all my life and live near the beach now. This is the best illustration of a rip that I've seen. My wife was at the beach on the 4th of July and everyone around her was from somewhere else, without beaches. It's good to see something like this before you park your family in front of one for a day of beach fun.


Thanks Dad.

 

 

^ Kinda tasteless, like their subs.

 

 

Remember to wash your SCRs and fuses for a long and happy life.

 

I have, in actual fact, taken a pressure washer to the inside of a 60s vintage 5kw FM transmitter once before.

We removed the solid-state boards, the meters, the tubes, and the 3 phase fan motor first, and then just absolutely went ripshit on the interior of it, soap suds and all.

It'd been running for about 30 years in an open-cooling setup in Florida. So the word "nasty" does not even begin to describe the bugs and lizards and charred snakes and general filth inside that thing.

Then we did a complete rebuild on it. To the best of my knowledge, it is still operational to this day, serving as the backup transmitter for WSRQ-FM.

No photos, as this was the early 90s and I did not own a camera at the time. This is a picture of a nearly-identical transmitter:





Not a very exciting photo, so here's one of the world's smallest cat. (NE555 integrated circuit, for scale.)

 

Just the other day I saw on a Detroit news station that a Chicago news station was having an outage. Couldn't remember which one it was. I don't think it was yours.

Now to be fair, this had already let the smoke out. "Small thermal event" Caused the crappy thin wall glycol tubing to rupture and spray glycol everywhere. Because the glycol is so conductive and the low voltage has to stay on for communication. I kept getting zapped. So I just hosed it down. Water is far less conductive and it dries faster.



As many times as I explain to my guys what "dew point" is, even using "cold beer can on a hot summer day" as an example they still don't get it and insist on running the cooling loop below it. Machine sweats and sends all 1200a across a 5/16" bolt.

 

We did receive a bomb threat at about 10:30am on Jul 4. WGN kept right on broadcasting like it was nothing (they've been through this before), but the News Nation folks chickened out and evacuated (they share the same building, mind you) and so NN master control had to switch to the time-delayed replay loop for about two hours until their ***** grew back.

Turned out to be some ******* in Wisconsin with a history of mental illness. CPD, with cooperation from FBI and WSP, traced the number (dude called from his own cell phone) and made an arrest within a couple of hours.

Here's the stupid thing: the guy claimed he was on the road in a truck full of explosives which he was going to ram into our building.

Think about that for a minute.

Historically, people planning to commit mass-murder via truck bombing do not call in advance. Kinda spoils the whole thing, if you know what I mean.

Timmy McVeigh, Ramzi Yousef, Andrew Kehoe, et al., didn't call ahead to say that they were coming.

Leave a manifesto behind, or drop it in the mail on the morning-of, yeah, those are legit tactics. But calling ahead while you're two hours away? That's just not credible.


Regardless, we had SWAT on site. They barricaded the road at both ends and set up checkpoints.



But Channel 9 hasn't had an actual off-air outage lasting longer than a minute or two in the seven years I've been chief here. I'm proud of that record.



AI recreation of WGN on Tuesday: