The Lexicographer's Rules

I was reminded recently of the fact that I have used the Internet longer than 95 percent of its current users. That still puts me in the company of thousands, tens of thousands even. But it also means I remember things at the beginning of the explosion that millions don’t. I clearly remember when I could keep up with all the new cool web sites on the web. All of them. I remember when the blink tag rebellion started. I remember Yahoo! from the beginning. Also there’s the memory of the burgeoning New York new media crowd, in its prime in 1994 and 1995. I attended those early meetings. I read their newsletters, scoped their web sites, sent them email. What stands out in my mind was the sinking feeling that overcame me when I read and heard what they had to say: these people were rejects. They were failed advertising account executives, pony-tailed musicians who peaked in high school, middle-level print production grunts, art school grads temping for a living, ex-models of both sexes, a slough of writers who’d yet to find their niche and hoped to create a new market for their detritus, hopeful actors who kept dropping trays. These people believed they would lead the way. They would succeed at last. That they were a whining, noogey splotch of pedants never seemed to bother them. That they were already late-comers didn’t seem to bother them a bit. Their ideas amounted to rebelling against traditional media. Destroy the tyranny. But the ideas were retreads and backed by greed more than business plans. About the time Kyle Shannon gave me his business card for the seventh time, not remembering giving me the first six, I was ready to give it up. That was not the cause of my disgruntlement, only symptomatic. I wanted no part of “new media.” I rejected the glad-handing, dollar-oriented approach, pleated pants and white oxford shirts with sweat-stained collars and cheap running shoes. It was worse than the fakey-fakey world of advertising I loathed, but at least as IT Director of a 60-person ad agency I could avoid the worst of it, and I could stay out of new media. Underlying my rejection was the tendency to avoid something based upon the people who have taken it up, to judge music or a trend or a work of art not by the characteristics of the product, but by the nature of its supporters, by the quality of its fans. I rejected the new media business because I felt fouled by its proponents. After the glut of one-man web site building shops had begun to blur the difference between 12-year-old HTML wizzes in Kansas City and professional graphic designers gone digital, conglomerated agencies of the supposed pros struggled to find a white collar niche that would put them above the blue collar labor of site building. Against all odds (and ultimately doomed to failure), I convinced the old-school ad agency I was working with to seek an alliance with one of these new companies. The Internet, I predicted, would ultimately join print and broadcast as a medium crucial to the advertising business. As much as I loathed new media, I knew it was the way to go. An old-school agency could give a new media group expertise in everything they lacked, and they could provide the digital age component. Originally we submitted requests for proposal to eight agencies; six declined to respond. I knew people at these companies personally and I found out why they declined: they wanted to be seen as something other than web page creators. “We,” I heard in these exact words more than once, “do not build web sites.” What these new media companies laid claim to was the realm of the traditional advertising agency outside of actual advertising itself: branding, media buying, marketing, public relations, anything just short of advertising. They rarely laid claim to advertising because they believed advertising agencies were representatives of Satan. You never heard a mob cheer louder than at a New York New Media Association meeting when somebody ripped into traditional advertising agencies. If they had an effigy, they would have burned it. One reason they didn’t want to be seen as web site builders is because the exorbitant fees could no longer be charged for that service. Anyone could do web pages, and would, for far less than the $80 or more dollars per hour or the $7500 dollars a site some companies were charging. When times were good in the beginning, when talent was rare, these companies squandered that easy cash, over-invested in technology, office space and personnel and failed to foresee the current glut of expertise; even old-school Olgilvy did it. Now that margins were thinner, they saw a need to diversify their areas of expertise into more profitable new media enterprises and so chose to abandon web page creation, at least in name. In truth, they were still building web sites but brushing on a thin patina of branding and marketing lingo. These new media agencies felt they could completely replace “old media.” Completely. There was only one problem. Many of these new media agencies had virtually no experience in the areas they were trying lay claim to: no real branding experience, no media-buying capabilities, no way of launching a campaign in any medium but their own. They had no expertise. I sat in these meetings, both on behalf of my day job and on behalf of a couple of personal IT clients. I recognized what I was seeing, having seen it in the ad world before: they were going to pitch the business as if they could handle it, then hire freelance talent like mad, even job the business out wholesale to other, more capable companies. So they hired more of the failed account executives, the cast-offs. This talent was cheap. Some of the recycled talent thrived. Some brought in competent friends. In time, the new media agencies became traditional advertising clones, the ones we see today. They are indistinguishable from traditional agencies. A dot com in the name means nothing. It amuses me to remember the chorus of complaints against old media in those early meetings, then remember what new media has become. What does this sound like?

I don’t remember where I first heard or read this story. A fakir in India a long time ago travelled from town to town putting on a performance. He had the ability to speak nearly all of India’s 400 or more tongues fluently, as if he was born to them. He would stand in the center of town and challenge passers-by: “Win a piece of gold! I can speak any language in the world! I challenge you to stump me! Price of playing is a hand-full of rice. Speak to me in a language I can’t speak! Nobody has stumped me yet! And you can win ten pieces of gold if you can tell me the language I learned at my mother’s breast. Grand prize! Which language was my first? One hand-full of rice only!” And eventually, people would pay their handful of rice, and try a few words of the language their old grandmother taught them when they were young. The fakir always responded in kind, usually with a clever bit of poetry or doggerel, so he not only won, but was amusing and soon gathered a crowd. Then the old grandmothers themselves would come out, speaking languages out of the mountains, or from across the sea, or sacred tongues they had been taught on the sly by past lovers. The fakir spoke them all! Then one day he landed in a little town in Andra Pradesh where lived a clever little farmer who had a small rice paddy and two oxen. He was very successful but had never been educated. The farmer listened to the fakir tease and win and flirt with the crowd. And he considered the matter. At the end of the day, when the fakir was about to wrap it up and move on, the farmer spoke to him and said, “Please, stay with my family tonight. You are a very educated man and I think we may learn a thing or two from you.” The fakir of course accepted and they spent the night eating bowls of rice and drinking wine and rice beer and laughing at each other’s stories. That night as the village was sleeping, the farmer rose from his mat where he had been resting but not sleeping. He padded down to the river and drew a deep bucket of water. He hauled it back to the tent and threw it on his guest. “Aiiieeee! Oh Shiva!” The fakir called these words out in his birth tongue, a language from people far up the Ganges. “Why have you done this? Are we not friends?” he asked the farmer. The farmer replied, “Last night I fed you my rice. More than a handful by my count. And now I seek the ten gold coins in return. For the language you speak is…” and he named the language. The fakir laughed and laughed. “You are the first! No one else knew the trick, because they forgot a simple truth: we are what we were when we were in the houses of our mothers. And we become it again in moments of unthinking. We can build on top, but we cannot remove the foundation.”

This is based on something I learned to do when I was 13 and fooling around in the back of an old radio. Because the radio was poorly grounded and I did not unplug it, I was mildly shocked, in the same way a cow up against an electric cattle fence is shocked (no permanent damage, I think, or maybe so much that I don’t know the difference). I stress that you take every precaution against electricity. Your best bet is to use a hand-held radio. It’s easier, not dangerous and it’s just as good. BE CAREFUL.

What you need:

A small, easy-to-open AM (same as mediumwave) radio. When choosing a radio to convert, consider the perfection of a hand-held transistor radio. You can theoretically do this with any radio, but desktop or home stereo models are usually more difficult to get into, involve higher voltages and more sensitive parts. I’ve converted more than 20 radios in this way, and have found that US$10 children’s radios with no FM band and a large, friendly thumb wheel for tuning work perfectly. You should avoid Walkmans and anything with a combo cassette player; they usually have inferior AM radios, small tuning wheels and a ridiculous number of screws to loosen to get at parts. Don’t use anything with digital tuning.

Two pieces of 12 gauge or smaller insulated (or shellacked) wire, one about 24 inches (60 cm) and one about 48 inches (121 cm) or greater. Wire typically used in telephone switching boxes works great, but you can also use magnetic wire spooled off of an old motor. For the short wire, the smaller the gauge of the wire, the longer the piece should be. Remember that your wire’s insulation should be good with no breaks or bare places, except for about an inch at each end

Tools. Usually a screwdriver at most. Will vary according to radio.

You may need a good braunschweiger sandwich with mustard and cheddar as reinforcement. Kaiser rolls are best, but a powdery Portuguese roll will work.

Instructions:

1. Disconnect the battery or power source. REMEMBER, if you are using a model that plugs into the wall, you must unplug the radio at least ten minutes before you start to let any charge dissipate. You could get shocked or damage parts (yours and the radio’s) if there is a charge left in a capacitor or transformer. You may want to ground yourself electrically. I recommend doing this while sitting on top of a metal radiator or you might consider wrapping yourself in heavy duty aluminum foil. Just kidding. Be careful.

2. Open the case and look for the tuning coil. It could be on either side of the green circuit board. The tuning coil is on an iron (ferrite) rod, dark in color with a matte exterior, usually cylindrical with flat ends, often with beveled sides. The rod varies in length (usually two to four inches, or 5 to 10 cm), but is easily recognized by the fine orange/copper wire that is wrapped around it, usually on top of waxed paper. There is nothing else like it in the radio. Usually, the bigger the radio, the bigger the ferrite rod.

3. Loosen the rod in such a way as to remove it from the chassis but not disconnect the wires attached to it. Be careful, because these wires are difficult to reconnect. There is usually not a lot of slack in them. Sometimes the rod is held in place by wax; other times it is held in place by a plastic fastener screwed to the circuit board.

4. Starting at one end, wrap your short wire around the coil that is already on the iron rod. For now, leave about four inches of wire free to dangle at each end of your new coil. The coil already there should be completely underneath your new coil. [On some radios, the existing coil is separated into two parts. Wrap your coil around both parts. Later you can test for effects to see what happens if you wrap it around only one part]. Each turn of your new coil should touch the last turn, until you reach the end of the coil already on the rod. Don’t overlap your own wire as you wrap it. If you find that you cannot create a new coil around the old without covering some of the wires leading from the old coil to the circuit board, do so, but be careful not to damage them or short them. Make sure you still have plenty of slack at both ends of the coil you are creating.

5. Replace the iron rod (now containing the overlapping coils), and refasten it.

6. Run the two free ends of your coil from the case. You can run them out holes in the speaker grill, apertures you’ve carved in the back or side, or slip them through the battery compartment.

7. Close the case. Reconnect the battery or power. 8. Connect the two free (and bare) ends of your coil and a bare end of the long wire in a simple twist. The long wire is your antenna. You now have a shortwave radio.

Things to Remember: If you are unfamiliar with shortwave, know that it works best at night in the range typically covered by this conversion. In the evening your dial will be so filled with stations, you will have to tune s-l-o-w-l-y in order not to skip past stations. If there are strong or very close AM (medium wave) transmitters nearby, they may bleed through. There will be repetition when you tune down the band. That is, strong shortwave stations will image themselves in more than one place on your tuning dial. So if you have interference, keep tuning down the band to find a clearer image. The AM stations that bleed through will not show up as multiple images. Also, even though there is repetition, keep tuning to find other stations beyond the range of repetition. The same images will not repeat for the entire the length of the dial. Depending on how many turns you made, your tuning range will vary, but I estimate that it covers from about 5 MHz to 15 MHz, more than enough for decent listening. Your tuning coil will no longer act as a directional antenna for medium wave.

Variations: Try untwisting the two ends of your coil and connecting the antenna to each end in turn. You should notice that during the day one of these connections will boost your AM reception substantially (but may also overload the radio or allow strong stations to bleed excessively). The other connection will provide shortwave reception, but will shift the tuning range of the radio (compared to when both ends of the coil are attached to the antenna) and will allow AM stations to bleed through more than if the two ends of the turn and the antenna are twisted together.

Try just wrapping part of the coil. May change the tuning range.

Try fewer wire turns spread across the length of the old coil. May also change the tuning range.

Try a longer antenna. Be careful not to overload your radio. If you use a really long wire, ground it to reduce static and interference.

Try grounding one of the ends of your coil to a fire escape, steam pipe or other huge metal object and attaching the other to your antenna.

Try a different gauge of wire for your coil.

Try connecting one end of your antenna to one end of your coil and the other end of your antenna to the other end of your coil.

Try replacing the tuning dial with a much bigger wheel (they are usually held on by a single screw). You can make them out of stiff cardboard, or, if your radio case will allow, even a large lever that will give you Super Torque Tuning. Any of these will create more precision when tuning down the dial.

The variations are endless.

In light of the actor’s union strike. An acquaintance in advertising: “We rented a Humvee for the shoot. These are massive vehicles, and they look good. They’ve got power, and that low design, and we figured it would be perfect. “But when we go out there, the mud was several feet deep. There’d been unusual rain, but we had already hauled the crew and gear out there, and the client was showing up any minute, so we figured we had better go ahead and risk it, risk getting the Humvee trapped. “We like to keep our shoots union, when possible. We hire union actors and union crews, mainly because it’s a good way to avoid trouble, but also because we all have friends in the unions, actor friends who always need the money. But the downside to unions is their adherence to job descriptions. They will not and are not allowed to deviate beyond their assigned tasks. That might hurt another union member, take away work or a paycheck from someone else. “So when the Humvee did, in fact, get stuck deep in the mud, spinning and careening around, nobody on the crew would help. These were big guys, used to hauling heavy gangboxes around, or carrying equipment from one place to another all day long. Not a one of them would help dig the Humvee out. “Michael, the account guy, who like me had dressed a bit nicer than usual in anticipation of the client, was forced to do it himself. I would have helped, but I was in a dress and hose, and my shoes weren’t suitable for the shoot, anyway, much less suitable for digging vehicles out of pig-deep mud. “He tucked his tie into his white shirt, took off his shoes ($200 leather, it looked like to me), and climbed into the mud in his stockinged feet with a shovel. It took him almost an hour and a half to clear out enough mud to lay down scoops of gravel and bundles of branches to give the thing some traction. There was no incline, really. It went from solid dirt and rock to mud, straight down, so it was tough going. “But he got it out. The professional union driver sat behind the wheel the whole time, waiting. “Meantime, the client had showed up. At first he was pissed about the delays. Delays mean higher costs. He has his own people to answer to. But by the end, he was glowing in the light of Michael’s can-do spirit. He offered to buy us dinner. We had a very nice meal, the three of us, and the client kept grabbing my leg.”

An ex-girlfriend of a guy I’m working with called him up. She tells him something like this: “You know that Blazer I drive. Remember how when the gas gets low the fuel intake cuts out? I lose brakes and power steering? Well, the other day I’m on the LIE” The Long Island Expressway. “and it happens. I’m merging with traffic at high speed. The power’s gone. I come directly at traffic that roars by in front of me. Here I am, high up in my Blazer, and I’m travelling almost perpendicularly at merge speeds toward automobiles that are crossing my T. I’ve got no brakes, no steering, I’m traveling like a bat out of hell. It’s crash and die. “So I do the only thing I can. I jump out. I fling the door open, jump out into a nice tuck-and-roll, and spring to my feet. One guy asked me later if I’m a stuntwoman. It was perfect. “I’m standing on the little concrete triangle separating the main thoroughfare from the merge lane and I watch the Blazer plow into the side of a car. Two more travelling behind it fail to stop in time and ram into the mess. “I’m all right, but the Blazer is totalled. And I’m being sued by three people.”