[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Announce]- Announce-bounce, Announce-denounce

[Marco McClean]

On 6/23/2019 3:50 AM, Lenor G wrote:
 > Bouncing is the tendency of any two metal contacts in an electronic 
device to generate multiple signals as the contacts close or 
open;*debouncing* is any kind of hardware device or software that 
ensures that only a single signal will be acted upon for a single 
opening or closing of a contact. In other words...it's IT (internet 
technology) related, specifically.


Lenor, it's about any signal. Bounceless switches have long been built 
into audio mixing boards and higher-end guitar stomp boxes and mic 
preamplifiers and so on, to let you switch a source on or off without 
adding a click sound. A poorly designed bounceless audio switch often 
became a radio receiver for CB transmitters, so you'd be running the 
sound board in a music hall and suddenly trucker-accented insectile 
staccato yammering would burst up loud over the proceedings and fade 
away as the transmitter went past out on the road. There were certain 
brands of mixing boards you couldn't use at all within half a mile of an 
AM radio station, and you'd find that out when you set up and turned it 
on, or you'd find out the next day if you'd set up in the middle of the 
night, because they used to turn most radio stations and teevee stations 
off after midnight, because people had jobs in those days and went to 
sleep at night.

But about the IT meaning: when I write to Cindy Swan it's been bouncing, 
because her inbox is full, it says. That means she's not getting email 
from anyone. I'm worried; last time I talked with her she wasn't in 
terrific health. If you know about her, please tell me. You don't have 
to reveal her contact information if she's gone incognito on purpose; 
I'd just like to know she's okay.

Back in the early 1980s, George Anderson, who had a trucking company in 
the Central Valley, bought KMFB, with his wife's rich father's money, 
from Steve Ryan (of Ryan Aircraft) (Ryan Aircraft built Lindbergh's 
famous /Spirit of Saint Louis/ airplane). George, on the advice of a 
radio business consultant named Roger Lang, set about metronomically 
firing all Steve Ryan's hippie deejays, including Rick Bondor, Suzi 
Zipp, Late Night Liz, Rich Alcott*, Sue Miller, etc. --and a guy named 
Jomo, I think, though he might have been gone by then. Cindy Swan showed 
up disguised in a gorilla suit way too big and heavy for her to a party 
George threw in honor of himself and his Chamber-of-Commerce-friendly 
radio purge, and she silently distributed helium balloons printed with 
"GORILLAS FOR REAL RADIO". George went bankrupt in short order, though a 
high-power radio license is a license to coin money, even now with the 
internet and stuff. It's like Donald Trump going bankrupt with casinos. 
It's like KZYX constantly begging for money when they get a $160,000 
grant from the government every year and it costs less than a dollar an 
hour to electrify all their transmitters and studios and offices and 
computers and phone systems full blast all at the same time, while they 
poormouth and claim to have no money at all to pay the local airpeople 
who are doing all the work the station is there to do in the first 
place, preparing their shows, showing up to work, doing their (unpaid) 
jobs. And it's for the same reason as the casino thing: a handful of 
bosses in the office, smiling all the while, suck all the money out of 
the system for themselves, because that's just /business/.

*Rich actually quit before being fired. George came in while Rich was on 
the air and started criticizing him, telling him how to his job, how to 
do radio, you know, from his vast experience of being a Republican with 
a suit and a truck. Rich weighed his options and the situation and his 
feelings, took the record off, bouncelessly switched the mic on and 
walked out into the next chapter of his life, leaving George looking 
helplessly at all the knobs and switches and blinking lights of people 
beginning to call the station on all four lines because of the sound of 
a door closing and then dead air with George breathing. Rich Alcott has 
been all over the world, doing all kinds of things besides radio, though 
continuing to do radio. He's a newspaper reporter, Arctic undersea 
photographer, a painter, interviewer, he taught English in Japan for a 
few years. I wouldn't be surprised if he's an astronaut by now, or has 
sneaked into a Holy City in a burka to document the sheik's hareem.

You might remember Rich Alcott from the ten-hour reading of Mary 
Shelley's /Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus/ he did with filmmaker 
Thomas Roberdeau and bottle of scotch in Helen Schoeni Theater in 1978. 
He also acted in a few plays for what was then Mendocino Performing Arts 
Company. I /half/-remember that one of them was /P.S. Your Cat Is Dead/. 
In case you just want to imagine him, his stage and radio voice is 
indistinguishable from Peter Bergman's, of Firesign Theater. Though a 
few years ago he was involved in a project to evaluate the feasibility 
of sailing plastic-wrapped icebergs to drought-stricken regions, and 
this deepened and roughened his brogue somewhat. What they call a golden 
radio voice.


--
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com