We just got back from a week of holiday travel to Arizona with a side-trip to New Mexico. Coming from non-stop New Hampshire precipitation it was strange to be in places that looked rain-free for the last century. Drinking water you feel compelled to spill some and help the cause.
It's been a year since we last flew. The previous image post, Mandelbrots of Kansas, was taken on the flight out. There's some wild scenery flying over the old US of A but it's tough getting a good shot. Maybe airlines could offer a viewing room with a large downward looking window like a glass bottom boat?
Arizona radio stations were running a news story on flu shot shortages and what people could do to avoid catching the flu. Maybe it's the weird way my mind is wired, but I couldn't help obsessing about this one:
Avoid touching your face in public
Although it was still acceptable to Touch the face of God, which we did most of Christmas day. Airports weren't very busy and some flights were downgraded to smaller aircraft. As the sun started setting I got out the digital camera. Only later did I discover that the Moon had snuck into the shots.
If your flying has been simulated in MS Flight Simulator 2004 you'll enjoy reading how they put together the realistic Air Traffic Control audio.
Back in the 70's and 80's we did something similar on the automated radio station. To simulate a live show we'd pre-record time, news, weather, PSAs, and new song intros. The toughest customization and therefore the coup de grâce, were the custom time announcements.
The automation machine used two dedicated cart machines (continuous loop tape like eight tracks), one for odd times one for even. A the end of an odd minute it would cue the odd cart to the next cut, the even cart ready to be played on-air. At the end of the even minute the opposite happened. In this way a cart was always ready to play the current time.
Part timers usually record just the minutes of the hour, like "it's five minutes after the hour" or "it's a quarter 'til". Full timers, or masochistic part-timers, would enter the studio with a pair of huge carts each capable of half an hour of recorded material. Onto each cart you record the odd or even minutes for an entire day. Seven hundred and twenty recordings per cart. If you made a mistake you either started over or decided it wasn't bad enough to worry about.
This was analog tape. Nothing was digital back then, recording or editing. If you did any editing it was with razor blade and splicing tape, and only on reel-to-reel tapes. Cart machines were brutal beasts with torque that ripped splices apart and sent tape wrapping around drive shafts.
Very few announcers could record an entire time cart in one sitting. For some it was like a home fix-up project they never finished. Days when commercial production was low they'd head into the studio to "finish it once and for all." An hour or two later, the studio fogged in cigarette smoke, they come out swearing and jam the unfinished cart back into the to-do box for another day.
The benefit of doing a full day's worth was that the announcer's "show" almost sounded live. Time announcements would say "Good morning it's seven-oh-eight" instead of "It's eight past." Still, you had to be careful and not say too much. Nothing was worse than almost completing the time cart and running out of tape.
Also, saying something witty (or stupid) might sound good the first time, but listeners tend to suspect somethings not right when the announcer says "Get out of bed Fred it's half past six" almost every day for a couple of years.
comment?
permanent link
email this