Radio

Frankie Laine Rawhide Original Stereo
Out running errands this morning and this tune comes on the radio. Can't remember if I have ever heard this version before. It's pretty spectacular, or at least it was in my car. Sitting here at my computer it's not quite the same. I remember that when I was a kid there was a TV show called Rawhide, but I don't think I ever got to watch it, I was too little or it was on too late or my parents were ogres. I do remember the Blues Brothers singing it, over and over again, at that little watering hole that showcased both kinds of music: Country and Western.

I was tuned in to KQRZ 100.7 FM, a low power station. They are run by radio amateurs, something I haven't come across before. I might have to listen to them a little more.

Kenwood KDC-X494
No longer available

My car radio is a Kenwood faceplate model and while the sound is fine, getting it to do what I want varies from annoying to impossible. There is one big knob on the front panel. Turning it controls the volume as you might expect, but it also works like a joystick. Pushing it to the left or right takes you to the next station on the dial. Pushing it up or down takes you to la-la land from which there may be no recovery. There are half a dozen other buttons on the faceplate. I know what two of them do. One is the power switch and the other is to eject the faceplate from the radio. The others take you to la-la land. I suppose I could sit down and puzzle out what these buttons do, or (god forbid) download the manual and read the instructions, but where's my motivation? Finding a radio station to listen to is a bit of a crap shoot. The advertising on the commercial stations is beyond annoying, and I can only listen to so much jazz before I have to turn it off. So I tap the joystick to the right until I find something worth listening to, or I get tired of this game and turn it off, or I am not precise enough in my tap and the faceplate demon interprets my tap as up or down and sends me to la-la land.

More complaints about my car's radio: the volume control is not a real volume control, it's some kind of digital position sensor, and while it has fine position sense, its speed sense is poor. Trying to spin the knob to turn the volume all the way down only results in turning it down about the same amount you would get from a quarter turn, so to get it to shut up you have to turn it and turn it and turn it. Criminently. I think this radio was designed by and for digital geeks.  The alternative is to turn it off, but that requires pushing on the power button and holding it for 2 or 3 seconds, which, when you are driving can be an eternity. And the power button is right next to the eject button, so if you mis-stab the faceplate falls off. I've learned to be careful with the power button, but when quiet time is over and you want to hear some tunes and you carefully press the power button again (it only takes a fraction of a second to turn it on), then you get to wait while the radio wakes up and goes through it's morning calisthenics even though it was just blasting away a minute ago. Stupid radio.

While I am pulling into the garage, I wonder if having an attached garage means you get to shoot prowlers stealing the radio from your car. I mean, they are in your house, so to speak. The garage is part of the same structure as your house, so you could consider breaking into the garage the same as breaking into your house. Anyway, this is something for the legal beagles to quibble over. I doubt whether the issue had any effect of the decision to start combining garages and houses into one structure. Once they decided that a tank full of hydrocarbons wasn't going to explode every time somebody looked at it cross-eyed, it was probably more a question of lot size and economics.

The whole point of having a faceplate radio is to discourage prowlers from stealing your radio. Whenever you park your car, you take off the faceplate and put in your pocket and take it with you. Any prowlers looking for a radio to steal will pass by your car because a radio without a faceplate is worthless, though I would consider the one I have to be just one step above that, and that is only because the rendition of Rawhide I heard this morning was so spectacular.

Update December 2018 replaced missing video. The tune is from 1958.

Update June 2019 replaced missing video.