For a couple of miserable years I lived in the suburbs of Detritus, Michigan. It was the Motor City with a vengeance. The Ford kids beat up the Chevy kids. Both of these gangs beat up the few miserable Chrysler kids in the school. My father didn't work for any of the car companies, so everyone beat me up ( Read more... )

Nothing makes me feel self-righteously wise better than finding out that one of my silly superstitions is correct. To wit: Keep your gas tank as full as possible in winter to avoid getting water in there ( Read more... )

I'd guess there are still many places where the fire siren blows to mark noon and 6:00 PM. That's handy for those who don't wear watches, which is more of us than it used to be. It was even handier back in the old days where many people didn't wear watches because they didn't have one ( Read more... )

When I was in graduate school near Chicago, I lived on a little stipend from the University. They deposited my checks on Friday. That afternoon I'd go down to the bank and withdraw a little cash so that I'd be able to buy groceries for the weekend. The bank had one of these new-fangled ATM machines, so I didn't have to make it down there before the ( Read more... )

One of the little towns I grew up in had a Detroit Edison office. You'd go in there and hand the man behind the counter your busted toaster; a week or two later you'd go and pick it up again, perfectly repaired. You'd go in and hand him your burned-out light bulbs; he'd hand you new ones, right on the spot. The charge for all of this was exactly ( Read more... )

In Grandfather's town you carried ( Read more... )

The IBM PC was beneath "Greg." The mapping software would only work properly on a serious machine, like the DEC minicumputer or the Sparc Stations. Still, we had to try to get part of the software to run on the wretched PC because the customers, the users, kept asking for it ( Read more... )

I collect radios. I spend a lot of time "listening to static," as Teph so charmingly puts it ( Read more... )

Some time ago I was visiting a friend, elsewhere in a drier part of the country. I took a sip of the tapwater. "It tastes like it's chlorinated," I said ( Read more... )

I've been reading here and there about radio stations losing money, and what they're trying to do to fix that ( Read more... )