Friday Check In

Great update GB. I am hoping Tom gets on top of his health problems. The transfer project sounds big. Are there any Sci-Fi shows we have not heard yet?

Nothing much to report here. We had a surge of cases so are back in full lockdown. Counting down the days till I can get my vaccine and hopefully roll into a better summer.

Work is getting done with no gusto just throwing it out the door to be complete. Walks done, books read, vinyl listening and waiting. We all just waiting.

looking forward to the new updates Space is doing in the Niles Caulder cave of wonders. Everyone jump in and help when you can.

Hoping everyone is doing okay. Stay safe and healthy.

HEY!!! Where'd Friday Go?

Oh well, it slipped past me again. But no real changes. Let's see. I've been rereading the Lensman series by E.E. Smith, watching some anime, played some video games and spent quite a bit of time learning to fly the new drone. I've only crashed it twice so far, with no damage. Trees are a pain in the ass. Here's a pic of the Funny Farm from 400 feet.

I should finally get things moving in Niles Caulders Cave of Wonders in the next few days.


Be well and be happy my friends.

Is it Friday again? Sheesh!!

Tomorrow my Suspense thread will say I'm taking off a week -- and posting Big Story instead for about a week. Some of the Big Story episodes are new and I was able to find all of the underlying stories except one!

This week I finished a massive update of the Whistler set. I don't have time to post the episodes but it would be kind of neat if someone stepped in and started to post the series from episode one based on this set.

Hope all are well!

Great update GB. Amazing to see in 2021 we are still updating OTR sets from so long ago. Such great work done by all involved.

Very chill week here. Still in level 5 lockdown but Covid infections slowly coming down. Had work to do so kind of got lost in that. I am lucky to work my own schedule so I read and listen to vinyl in between work segments. I now officially hate video meetings.

What's everyone else up to?

Stay safe my friends...

Another Friday almost sneaked past me. But I caught that sucker just before it got away. Most of my week revolved around my wife being in the hospital for four days. No, not the BIG C. She's a diabetic, who nothing seems to be capable of completely controlling. And it decided to kick her around the block this week. But she's home now and various doctors are trying to formulate a new daily plan to get her under something like control.

I've been in touch with Bill_Atkins. He's trying to check in on a more regular basis. But he's one of the busiest locked down people I know. He's also sending me a "package" in the not too distant future. I can't wait to get my grubby mitts on that package. The wonders inside are immense. Bill's one of my best and longest term online friends and a treasure in the OTR community. Not to mention a true Cobalt Club legend.

I managed to get through the entire week without crashing the drone. But that was probably due to the lack of flight time, rather than my increasing skills. Yes, I paid for crash protection. DJI will probably regret that.

Be well and be happy my friends.

Space

Happy Friday! Not much going on here right now, which seems to be the trend. I've been doing the "Drive By" tourist thing locally this week. Just getting out and looking around at the new area. One of the major points of interest for me, has been exploring the Muscle Shoals Sound from the recording industry. I can't get into any of the recording studios yet, but I certainly will once I get the chance. Lots of classic greats recorded locally. And a few even began their recording careers here. Aretha Franklin being one of them. And Southern Rock was pretty much invented here.

Here's a list of the output of just one of these small town recording studios: https://www.discogs.com/label/264127-Muscle-Shoals-Sound-Studios

I'll spend quite a bit of my time exploring the history of the new area. And there's a lot to explore.

Be well and be happy my friends.

Space

Space, that sounds like great project. Muscle Shoals had some of the best studio musicians going. I think there is a documentary on Amazon about the studio and the sound. The Stones even lay down some tracks there. Bob Seger and that blues rock sound. Rivals the chess label studio band or the funk brothers. So many great albums in studios that basically looked like hole in the wall dumps. Got to have that sweat and desperation burnt into the walls to get the soul out.

Lot of work for me this week. Had to prioritise my time again. When I get this busy I think this is BS. So next week will slow back down. Read books, listen to vinyl chill time. I am now flipped to 80% life 20% work when it slips out of that I get antsy.

Stay safe my friends....

Being socked in with an Arctic Blast and a good four inches of snow with more on the way, I ventured out to restock the provisions before we got hit. Frigid cold is hugging us like a poorly insulated ice blanket, but we're warm indoors.

We finished watching *The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel* on Amazon--loved it. And so far have made it through the first four broadcasts of *WandaVision* on Disney-Plus, which might hold promise even though I think I have it figured out.

Becoming a big fan of Jasper Fforde, buying up a handful of autographed editions, and received Hank Aaron's authenticated and autographed memoirs the day after he passed on. So book time has been splendid, allowing me to close in on the end of our own novel (with my best man and his twin brother, my best friends since grade school).

Congrats to Space on his mobility around the new grounds. And a special storm warning to Seamus--don't try to traverse the ocean until the temps get up higher than minus seven. May be a few weeks, so we're told.

Peace and blessings to all in Cobaltia. Cheers.
Jeff

Well, it's been an interesting 10 days. It resulted in Mrs GB getting a needle biopsy yesterday. The now-vanquished cyst had some suspicious cells attached that are being evaluated. There is supposed great optimism about their benignness (is there such a word?) but always with the caveat of "we have to wait for the results."

So it's hurry up and wait mode here for a few days and do our best to stay busy. So it's OTR to the rescue for some of my time and various household facts of the life for the Mrs. We finally watched the last episodes of the BBC's Sherlock series. It is so creative but demands so much patience at its bewildering pace and fascinating effects. The episodes can be quite the roller coaster ride. Great cast. That was yesterday afternoon. Exhausted from the day, we preferred finishing up the evening with a lighter, happier, series about premeditated murders, Death in Paradise, of which we're now in season 7.

On the OTR front, still working the Falk reels and found some EC/WC Suspense pairs on reels that had the "sticky syndrome". They are only partially playable but as I type this, they are in the dehydrator staying nice and Florida-warm for another few hours. At least if the reels are not playable they at least let us identify which coasts we have for 2 of the broadcast pairs we have. Another reel had a "missing" east version of "Man Who Thought He Was Edward G Robinson" which brings me to another topic.

Lasombra and chasedad have been doing heroic work identifying which Suspense east or west versions were used to create the AFRS recordings we have. It's an incredible job. Some of them have been in the posts, but there are others that were never done. The summary to date is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tLy_HTkxXRa4NAPw_GCnPlgVqf2zhKjbFUGYkv4W7Fc/edit?usp=sharing

Some marvelous MGM Theater of the Air from Hehn discs are now at https://archive.org/details/MGMTotAJHMC including some new episodes. It would be good if someone started a thread because these finds may allow a pretty good compilation of the series with some of our usual Cobaltian Cooperation.

The Big Story posts went well this week. Back to Suspense tomorrow.

And we wait for the phone call from pathology...

Thankfully pathology found that the suspicious cells were benign.
Great relief in this little corner of OTRdom. Thanks for prayers and support!

Great news GB lots of good vibes sent to Mrs. GB

Thankfully our week became calmer and more sedate after our good news and the energy spent in prepping for the worst begins to unwind.

And there are signs of spring with baseball spring training beginning to begin, and two weeks from tomorrow a first glimpse at a game with three innings of regulars and then six innings of players with uniform numbers in the 80s and 90s, and some with no numbers at all. One of our happy family times was our 2019 trip to spring training, and we saw a Washington Nationals player in left field with no number. We knew he was thinking "here I am in left field and I'm so low in the pecking order of camp I don't even have a number and no one will remember how I play today." Then a ball was hit to him, one of those Florida fly balls that gets caught in the spring wind gusts that tests your vision and your resolve, and he muffed it. We knew he was thinking "thank goodness I'm not wearing a number..."

The "C3Ds" (Cobalt Dialogue Difference Detection Squad) that we have a lot of fun with on the Suspense thread, mainly lasombra and chasedad, have done Herculean work. The latest is the determination that Suspense collections have been tainted by a pretender network recording that had a pasted-on opening, and also that the AFRS recording has more dialogue than the network broadcast. The discovery of such matters and the speculation of why that's the case is part of the marvelous collaboration that Cobalt facilitates. Wish it happened on more series.

This past week we finished more BritBox series Traces which had a lot of twists and turns, and we're waiting for final episodes of The Bay and Pembrokshire Murders to be posted before we binge away. And when we are tired of thinking, the happy series about premeditated murder, Death in Paradise, which if the locale of the series had this much deliberate mayhem would no longer have a population, is still good fun.

I am so behind in OTR writing and such that it's a reminder of what a blessing retirement life can be without true deadlines. Nonetheless, I want it all off my plate and I think I'm finally ready to make the surge of organization needed. Perhaps I'll start tomorrow

Great update GB. We are all happy Mrs.GB is doing well.

To tell you what kind of week I am having I woke up on Monday convinced it was Sunday so went about my lazy day. Did not look at my phone. I read and listened to music. About 9pm look down at my watch it says Monday. I am what the heck. Check my emails. Yup missed whole day people looking for me LOL.

Basically I have just taken it easy this week did not panic that I lost a day. I did run a whole boatload of time travel scenarios and groundhog days. But no, I simply forgot it was Monday. Or my subconscious did.

Well it's been a stormy week here. I do look forward to seeing Wandavision every Friday. That has been a great show.

Stay safe my friends...

It's been a very cold week here.
This morning, it's -38, with a wind chill of -50.

As if Covid wasn't enough to make you stay home.

Warming up next week to close to 0.

Stay safe everyone.

Best regards
Art

Well, it's Saturday afternoon, so it must be time for a Friday check-in.

GB, congratulations for the positive test result. Your results from the C3D's reminds me of issues we discussed some years ago. There were a slew of sellers on Ebay who were selling disks of OTR shows. Of course they constntly grabbed shows wherever they could find them, in order to jack the number of shows in their sets. Then they got the bright idea to mislabel existing shows to jack up those numbers. Next, they started using software to add or remove openings and closings, to make them appear to be missing shows. All in an effort to add greater numbers of shows and make their sets more appealing to buyers, due to larger numbers of shows in their sets. I suspect that this is the source of many of these problem shows you're trying to filter out. Sadly, I just did a search on Ebay for "Old Time Radio Shows" and found 4,273 active auctions for these same sets of radio shows. I'm sure that these shows are then being shared on the various download sites. Which means that these same fouled files are still being repeatedly propagated today.

Boss, don't let losing a day or so here or there bother you. With all the knuckleheadery (I should probably copyright that term) in the world outside today, losing said day is decidedly the lesser of two evils.

Art, I can kinda relate to your weather issues. We're under a winter storm warning here as well. Nothing on the level you're dealing with. But for a sub-tropical born and raised semi-shut-in like myself, three inches of ice and snow and temps barely creeping up toward freezing feels a bit extreme. But we'll push on through and try to enjoy the scenery. The only real issue I have to deal with in this weather, is that my wife has a doctor appointment scheduled for when the peak of said storm is supposed to be passing through here. I wonder if driving a Korean econo-box over unmaintained narrow, winding mountain roads, with up to three inches of accumulated  ice, sleet and snow on em' is a bad idea?

Be well, be warm and be happy my friends.

Space

Happy Friday check in folks. It's spring here in Ireland which of course means torrential rain. But it's warm so that's okay and it's the rain that keeps us green.

Another week of the same old routine. Work, exercising, walks, vinyl and reading. And I managed to stay present for all the days of the week I did not lose any.

Don't really have a clue what new things I will do this year. I am eagerly awaiting my vaccine once I got my two doses I will feel a bit better. So here's to getting it done in 21 my new slogan.

Stay safe everyone....

Hey, check me out. I managed to actually check in on Friday.

This week has been considerably different from most weeks. But then again not. The difference is that we've been snowed in for the past two days. That's pretty unusual for this area. Snow happens. But heavier snow is unusual. That means that local government doesn't really have the infrastructure to deal with it. So, two inches of sleet, with eight inches of snow on top equals shutdown. Oh well, we still have power and it's not like we were really going anywhere anyway. And the view is excellent from the front porch. We're well stocked due to the rest of the current insanity in the world, so no worries there. We have lots of toys and entertainment to keep our minds occupied. Let's just hope that the roads reopen before we run out of coffee. Locked down while going through caffeine withdrawal could be bad.

No long walks but I did fly the drone from the front porch yesterday. I even shot my first dronie. Not being part of the "selfie" generation, it was a pretty uncomfortable experience. The quality of the video was nice. But the goofball in the frame obviously didn't know what to do with himself. So, this is unlikely to become a common thing with me.

I've just started reading Flights of Fantasy The Unauthorized But True Story of Radio
& TV's Adventures of Superman, By Michael J. Hayde. This thanks to Bill_Atkins. So far, it's interesting but seems to be moving toward fascinating. Maybe more at some future date about this.

I may try to slide down the hill in my kayak before the snow melts. That's probably a bad idea, given the number of trees at the bottom of that hill. But it's not nearly the stupidest thing I ever tried.

Be well, be happy and be safe.

Space

Hello Space - Please let us know about the book "Flights of Fantasy". It is on my buy list, but is not cheap. Gotta manage my pennies carefully. - Tom

Finally... a weekend when one can look forward to seeing baseball. The first spring training games start their broadcasts on Sunday. They're all limited in their numbers of games this spring, and the TV and radio infrastructure of people and equipment has been cut back to minimize the number of people around. But we'll never forget how much fun we had when we went to spring training for a few days in 2019. Such great fun... and we hope we can do it in 2022.

Catching up on so very many things now that things have been settling down here health-logistics wise. We had three marvelous weather days for grilling which lifted our spirits and made us so happy we moved here almost 9 years ago... time sure flies when you're not shoveling snow.

Great update GB.

It's been very nice Spring weather here so good walking weather.

Very happy this week as I got a whole bunch of delayed book orders arrive. Some I had completely forgotten about. Now have 40 books sitting on the table. Some I am why did I order that. But all grand. Standard vinyl order came. So its more reading in the future.

Found this new show to me Helstrom on Disney + I really like this show. Spooky show. And of course I am loving Wandavision. Also enjoying the Korean show Sisyphus. Time traveling Sci-Fi very well done.

Stay safe my friends...

Friday check in and its March already. Time is flying along. Spring is here and the flowers are blooming. We went for walk on beach today was very nice day.

Same old routine with books and vinyl arriving. I am shutting down my ordering now as I have 55 new books that I just somehow had to have and about 25 more on my kindle. So I am cutoff lol.

Hope everyone is staying healthy and happy....

It's sunny and warm(er) here in Michigan with an expected high of forty degrees today. Spirits are also high since we finished the baseball novel, clocking in at 434 pages. And now we're in the scrupulous editing phase. Terribly excited and pleased with the outcome with visions of one day finding our epic at the cut-out pile next to the *Natural Perspirer* in the supermarkets.

No new music, but a few new signed copies of Jasper Fforde's books and a nice find of a signed and authenticated Hank Aaron autobiography.

Looks like spring cleaning is around the corner, though we're still expecting at least one more mammoth snow storm sometime before May. It's Michigan, after all.

Hope all are well and blessed with good food, good humor and fine fellowship.
Jeff

Just made it in under the wire. HAPPY FRIDAY!!!

Guess who just snagged a complete but battered first edition of A Princess of Mars? It'll find a place of honor, next to my also complete but far more battered first edition of The Warlord of Mars. Now I just need to find a comparable copy of The Gods of Mars to complete the trilogy. My earliest Tarzan of the Apes is the first G&D edition.

Other than that, it's been a boring existence of late. But the weather's warming and there are a ton of things we want to get started with on the property. We've decided to eventually add a donkey to the menagerie. Mostly because we intend to raise chickens but have coyotes in the area. Believe it or not, a donkey will be more efficient than a guard dog. The wife is still resisting allowing me to hang a sign at the end of the driveway, after we purchase said critter reading, Feel Free to Stop By and Kiss My Ass. She thinks people might interpret it the the wrong way.

Be well, be safe and be happy my friends,

Space

Happy Friday everyone. It's a brilliant warm sunny spring day here. Because it's Ireland I was out in a flash to enjoy the day knowing at the drop of a hat it could be torrential rain.

Still waiting for my vaccine appointment which will take a load of my mind. Good news from countries with high vaccine rates the infection rate has dropped right off.

Work, books, vinyl, walks, exercise this has been my routine for a year now. I had flipped work to home before this crap happened but I would enjoy day trips down the coast again. In time, in time...

Really enjoyed the ending of Wandavision did anyone else watch that show? and is anyone else watching all the Korean shows on Netflix they have some great Sci-Fi shows. So well done.

Stay safe my friends and enjoy every single day it's a good old life ...

Friday, Friday, Friday... It doesn't seem very exciting after retirement. But this Friday is different. Spring seems to be trying to spring and we're getting a lot more warm weather. That means Spring cleaning. Which for me means the garage and the shop is all mine to clean. The garage is mostly finished and the shop will be fairly easy, since I haven't really set it up the way I want it yet. That process starts soon as well.

But the big excitement around here, is that my oldest son and daughter in law will be here for a 10 day visit in just a few days. And we've just learned that two of our grandsons may spend part of the summer with us, world events permitting. Yes, we're extremely excited.

A follow up to last weeks check in. We've decided that prospective new donkey will be named Happy. The sign at the gate will be adjusted to reflect this decision.

Be well, be safe and be happy my friends.
(Yes, I make a Happy of myself almost daily)

Space