trainman's New Writeups

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: A Los Angeles Nodermeet (thing)

2004-11-02T07:41:46Z

As it turned out, Heisenberg wasn't really all that uncertain about where he was and what time it was, thanks to a business class upgrade coming from New Zealand, so we didn't get to see much of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in action.

What Heisenberg, panamaus, and I did have was a couple of hours of good conversation and a few beers apiece in the back corner of the lobby bar of the Los Angeles Airport Hilton. We discussed this place, of course, and also a diverse array of topics ranging from Amtrak to the University of West Florida to the American health care system (or lack thereof) to moving to New Zealand to lowendmac.com.

It was a nice, low-key evening, just the thing to kick off a nice, low-key Thanksgiving for some of us (those of us who weren't flying to Cancún on Thursday, at least). Best of all, we talked long enough that the traffic going back north to the…

DirecTV (thing)

2004-02-22T22:53:31Z

DirecTV is one of the two direct broadcast satellite companies beaming television programming to the United States (Dish Network is the other). The history of DirecTV is a history of television technology, a history of American Federal law, but mostly, it's a history of Rupert Murdoch.

The Birth of Direct Broadcast Satellite

In the U.S. in the mid-to-late 1970s, cable television began to change from being "community antenna television," merely a method of getting better reception on existing local broadcast channels, to being a true value-added entertainment option, with channels such as HBO, USA Network, and WTBS being uplinked to a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit and received by local cable companies on their own satellite dishes. Electronics hobbyists were, in fact, setting up their own satellite dishes in their backyards in order to try to get everything that was out there; dishes were also popular…

New England States (thing)

2003-07-26T04:54:49Z

Serving Boston, Buffalo, Toledo, Chicago and intermediate points

Assigned Amtrak train numbers: 38 and 39

Predecessor railroad train numbers: 27 and 28

When the newly streamlined Twentieth Century Limited made its debut in 1938, in order to speed up its schedule, its Boston-Albany section was discontinued, thus avoiding a delay in Albany to either switch out or switch in the cars to or from Boston.

Lost in the hoopla over the inaugural of the upgraded Twentieth Century Limited was the New York Central's simultaneous inaugural of the New England States, a new Boston-Chicago train to replace that discontinued Boston-Albany section. As the crack overnight train over that route, it made only limited stops along the way, not even including Albany; however, unlike the all-Pullman consist of the Twentieth…

broomball (thing)

2003-05-13T04:03:48Z

Broomball first came about in Canada somewhere around the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th, either as a hockey variant for people who couldn't skate, or as something for women to do while the men played the much more violent hockey. The exact origins, however, are lost to history.

Just like ice hockey, it is played on an ice rink by two teams of six players each (generally, three forwards, two defensemen, and a goalie), and the object is for one team to shoot an object into a net more times than the other team within a certain time limit. But there are some differences:

As the name implies, the implement in the players' hands in broomball is a broom. While it most likely would have been an actual broom in the early days, these days, it's a wedge-shaped piece of plastic on the end of a wood or fiberglass stick, so it only looks like a broom if you squint.

…

Little Shop of Horrors (thing)

2003-03-01T22:54:23Z

"On the 23rd day of the month of September, in an early year of a decade not too much unlike our own, the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence. And this terrifying enemy surfaced, as such enemies often do, in the seemingly most innocent and unlikely of places."

-- Opening narration from the song "Prologue/Little Shop of Horrors," heard in both the musical and movie versions of "Little Shop of Horrors"

The Movie

Throughout the 1950s, director and producer Roger Corman made a succession of low-budget horror movies featuring teenagers and young adults as the main characters, exhibited to audiences consisting mainly of horny teenagers.

In 1960, Corman made his cheapest movie yet, "The Little Shop of Horrors." Principal photography (actually, all the photography) lasted only about 36 hours: two days and one night. In glorious (cheap)…

Dragnet (thing)

2003-01-22T05:00:15Z

"The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

The Original "Dragnet"

In 1948, radio disk jockey Jack Webb landed a role in "He Walked by Night," a film noir about a murderer in Los Angeles, told in documentary style, focusing on the police investigation of the crimes.

A year later, Webb created a radio series with its roots in the film. "Dragnet" first aired on NBC on June 3, 1949. Produced with the full cooperation of the Los Angeles Police Department, each episode dramatized a case from the LAPD's files, albeit heavily fictionalized by Webb or another writer. The only recurring characters were Sergeant Joe Friday (played by Webb) and his partner Sergeant Ben Romero (played by Barton Yarborough), serving as the police investigating each case; since the cases the episodes were based on covered a wide variety of crimes, Friday and…