Radio Shack

Radio Shack is going broke, closing about 1,000 stores in a drive to streamline itself back into some sort of shaky solvency. I should feel worse about this than I do, but in my view the company died about 1980.

Earlier, about the time I left the Navy, the fad among young college bucks was to build a hi-fi set with the innards showing, lined up on a shelf unit with our most intellectual-appearing paperbacks. It was supposed to impress chicks, the glowing vacuum tubes an avant garde space-age substitute for romantic candles as Sinatra crooned.

You had two basic supply choices. One was the excellent Allied Radio catalog.

Radio shack was almost as cheap and more fun because you could get your stuff right there on Main Street. Besides, the salesman (and it would be a man)  knew more about audio electronics than you did, and you usually did well to take his advice.

So I spent some money at Radio Shack, 6n6s, can capacitors, tube sockets, and pref-steel chassis. This went on for a decade or so, including a period when I kept a decrepit five-channel mobile CB on the air with over-the-counter RS parts.

Than along came those damned transistors and binary and the furshlugginer Japanese.

Radio Shack and I began an amicable severance of our relationship. It  became fractious the  first time I wandered in asking for a "common" tube I needed to put an ancient and discarded Associated Press Wirephoto telephone amplifier in order. The little creep behind the counter sighed and picked his nose and told me nobody used tubes anymore but maybe he could order it  or maybe not and could he interest me in a bubble packed transistorized solid state radio controlled Corvette instead? All the cats were doing it.

Our local RS went broke three or four years ago. There's one about 15 miles away -- a good place to sign up for overpriced cell-phone "plans," but if you happen to want a 100-ohm +/- 5 per cent resistor, you are SOL, buddy.

So my sadness is muted at seeing Mr. Tandy's dream on extended death watch.


---

Tandy? The hide peddler? Yes indeed. Once, I can't remember where, I was in a large store, half devoted to pre-digital Radio Shack electronics, half to piles of cowhide and leather-tooling supplies. Bliss.


Stephan's Gunslinger was right. The world has moved on.

Follow the ruble

In the great counting house of Moscow, the accountants are breaking out the vodka. Boss Putin's economic enhancement plan is working.

--Russia announced it would charge Ukraine more for natural gas.

--Secretary of State Kerry immediately went to Kiev with a billion dollars in hand to help the peasants pay Russia for higher priced gas. (He added a promise of "technical assistance," price tag unspecified.) So if you want to think of the Ukraine as a big pipeline for whooshing your money to Russia, I will not argue with you.

--The European Union then announced it would add $15 billion to the Ukraine kitty if the IMF also kicks in, which it will. It is useful to recall from time to time that the United States provides at least 17 per cent of  IMF money.

--President Obama is not to be outdone in personally saving Ukraine. He is moving heaven and earth to ramp up exports of  America's new natural gas. It is better, he decides, that the U.S energy bonanza be directed to the benefit of central European peasant hovels. Cold hovels in Minnesota are of less concern. For one thing, he believes, warm American homes are largely responsible for global warming and the concomitant damage to snail darters and spotted owls.

Short the greenback. Go long rubles. Get yourself a wood burner.

---


--The citations are here and here and here.

Be careful what you point, kids

Nathan is 10, goes to Devonshire (Ohio) Alternative Elementary School.

He just drew a three-day suspension for pointing his finger, or, as the school czars call it, a "level 2 lookalike firearm."

I salute the school authorities with a stiffly raised adjacent finger. Call it a level 2 lookalike one-tine pitch fork if you want.

And, just horsing around here, what happens to a sixth-grade guy who becomes suddenly and, shall we say, pointedly aroused when the short-skirted little knockout in the next chair crosses her legs? Maybe an NFA violation?

H/T Joel

Jim's Beauty Secrets

And here you thought I was going to advise you to irritate an authoritarian statist every day, didn't you?  You should, of course, because that makes you smile, and a smile is about the sexiest thing going.

But I'm really talking about skin beauty. This time of year my hands get all crinkly. When I pick up my 1943-issue 1911 A1 in order to irritate an authoritarian statist it sounds like a class of junior high kids wadding up their D-minus English essays. You  don't want  that. For one thing, it might alert the statist and give him time to hide.

My usual beauty aid is Corona, sometimes known as horse liniment. It works pretty well, and if you use it while drinking Mexican beer you might break into a syncopated Corona Corona improvisation. That would be sexy too, especially if your date is named Juanita or something like that.

Last night, however, I found something better. I went to an auction and came home with a professionally done 1903 Remington sporter. It needs a spa day too, but that's okay because dirt cheap. One problem was the sling, high quality leather but drier than high-noon Yuma.

Dry leather requires mink oil, and I used my fingers to smear great gobs of it all over the strap. It's still soaking in, but, ooh lah lah!  My silken hands. I dare not go to the WalMart today lest droves of lady associates swoon.