horzepa

Friday, April 27, 2007

Surfin': Hamming on the Go

Mobile ham radio operation is the subject of this week's installment of Surfin'. After you read it, you can leave your comments (if any) here.

I have a mild case of airliner enthusiasm. I caught it from my sister, who has it in spades.

As a an airliner enthusiast (AE, for short), I drop everything whenever I hear a jet overhead to see what it is the source of the sound. Living at 910 feet ASL and 22 miles (as a jet flies) from the runways of Bradley International Airport (BDL), I see a lot of low flying airliners. (I also see other interesting aerial sights, like a tanker refueling a B-52, but that's another story.)

I also read Patrick Smith's weekly Ask the Pilot column on Salon. If you have a mild or bad case of airliner enthusiasm, you should read Ask the Pilot especially this week's installment, which talks all about our infliction.

monster's holiday

My sister remarked the other day how all the rockers from our era have been dropping like flies lately. She's right and another one just bit the dust: Bobby "Boris" Pickett, whose dead-on Boris Karloff impression propelled the Halloween anthem Monster Mash to the top of the charts in 1962. Bobby died of leukemia. He was 69. (from CNN.com)

I was a big monster fan back then.

I remember my mother taking my sister and I to see Godzilla, King of the Monsters at the State Theatre in Waterbury in 1956 (I was 5 years old). My mother liked monster and horror flicks, too, so she didn't mind, but I will never forget how the line to buy tickets to that film wound its way up East Main Street and around the corner down Brown Street.

Godzilla scared the crap out of me and was the source material for many future nightmares, but I was a satisfied customer and kept coming back for more. I tried to see every new monster flick that came out and I watched all the old ones on television. I was also an avid reader of Famous Monsters of Filmland and I built most of the monster model kits sold by Aurora back in the Sixties. So, when Monster Mash came out, I loved it.

In Bobby "Boris" Pickett's memory, I dialed him up on my iPod this morning and listened to my collection of his tunes on the way to work. I only had two: Monster Mash and Monster's Holiday, which was a Christmas holiday season follow-up to Mash.

I actually like Monster's Holiday better than Monster Mash. What can I say! In Holiday, Bobby impersonates Boris Karloff again reciting a monstrous version of The Night Before Christmas. As I was listening to Holiday this morning, it suddenly reminded me of Boris Karloff's narration in the animated version of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

I wonder if Bobby Pickett's Monster's Holiday was the inspiration for hiring Boris Karloff to narrate the Grinch? It's possible because Monster's Holiday came out in 1962 and the animated Grinch in 1966.