Greatest Thing of Anything: WEQX

I grew up in western Massachusetts, which was home to a few radio stations and got most of the other signals from Albany. And none of them were all that good. Quite a few fell along the lines of what I heard one comedian describe as something like "Kill Yourself Radio:" a lot of sad dreary songs about lost love, some with the sideshow of minor league baseball broadcasts. The others were your standard pop tripe, with the DJs apparently getting paid to overplay the latest hot single. Ultimately, I had to hunt and peck through the different frequencies, hoping to find something to like and not commercials.

That was how, in the late 1990s, I stumbled across WEQX.

The EQX crew in 2004 or so

I don't know why I didn't discover the station sooner. It may have been because it took me awhile to warm up to some of the harder rock, or it may have just been a little fuzzy until the antenna was pointed in the right direction, or it may have just happened to be on a commercial whenever I went past it. Whatever the case, I ended up tuning in to find nearly nonstop alternative rock, most of which the other stations had never bothered to pick up. The dial stayed there until I moved out of the area.

WEQX was founded in 1984, and has operated since then as an independent radio station. It prides itself on being more about the music than the commercials, and it lives up to the promise. The commercial breaks are short and mostly local, with the on-air talent often providing their voices to promote local events and businesses. So while some stations have commercial breaks that practically outpace the music, WEQX somehow manages to get by on breaks that are relatively non-obtrusive and, incredibly, mostly not annoying. The specialized programs include an all-request hour during the traditional morning commute (including a "Top 5 at 5" based on the most-requested songs throughout the day), a midday "retro lunch," a Saturday morning of acoustic and other more mellow music, and a Sunday night three-hour look at new music. The station has sponsored concerts and won several awards, including Rolling Stone's Best Radio Station of the Year three times.

Rather than some drab downtown brick structure, WEQX is based in a Victorian house in Manchester, Vermont. I've unfortunately never been there, though I'd be interested to see how it's divided up. The studio seems to be about standard size, and I'm sure most rooms are used for advertising and other such purposes. But the fact that they're broadcasting from a house just makes them that much more endearing. They even have pets, for crying out loud. Formerly it was just the EQX cats but now a pug has been added into the mix.

Fred, the EQX cat

Even the transmitting tower is in good company. WEQX broadcasts "from high atop Mount Equinox," a 3,848-foot-high peak in the Taconic Range from which the station gets its callsign. The mountain seems to be a little version of Mount Washington. One gets to the summit via a 5.2-mile toll road, and the tower is located within sight of a mountaintop hotel known as The Inn Atop Equinox that was established in the late 1940s. Assuming Wikipedia is to be believed, the mountain once held a NORAD defense station and also includes the remains of a tunnel system installed in the 1960s by a Vermont company seeking to install a cryonics system to freeze people with high IQs. What's more, the mountain includes a one-of-a-kind monastery on its slopes.

How the magic happens

I'm not sure if radio, like everything else on the planet, is in danger of becoming obsolete thanks to the Internet. I no longer live within listening distance of WEQX's transmission, and if I'm in the mood for rock or alternative I'll turn my radio to a similar station called WCYY. Most of the time I listen to NPR, the other station I heard a lot of growing up and one which, thankfully, has not changed much at all. But I spend a lot of time on the computer, and it's hard to compete with something like Pandora where you can simply plug in the songs and bands you like, not have to deal with commercials, and even skip a song if you don't like it.

So it doesn't have those perks, but WEQX is still something I'll be sure to keep tuning in to; thankfully, they're online too.

Here with you

I've had a girl say pretty much this same thing to me. I wasn't thinking about dinosaurs. I wonder if she was...

The Apex of Crazy

I have a friend who probably never thought he'd have something in common with the fringe of the Christian right: Bible destruction. We were both on the cross-country ski team at our college, which took us on quite a few overnight trips to go racing. On one trip, he was feeling particularly sacrilegious and tore a page out of the motel's complimentary Bible. He may or may not have flushed it down the toilet afterward.

The point? To show that God wasn't going to destroy him for such an infraction.

While the motivation is different, the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina, has decided to do something similar for Halloween. These seem to be the kind of folks who consider trick-or-treating, drunken costume parties, haunted houses, and perhaps even a pleasant church event with hot cider and games to be the devil's work, so they've opted for the old standby: a book burning. Which, in and of itself, wouldn't be too noteworthy except for the fact that they're going to be torching Bibles.

If the Bible hates gays so much, why is it so flaming?

OK. So apparently God wrote the King James Bible, and Satan wrote every other version? Or perhaps the translators of the King James version were all true believers and everyone else was an evil Unitarian? What it boils down to is a church believing that one translation of the Bible is so unimpeachable that they're destroying any and all other versions they can get their hands on, despite the fact that it's all pretty much the same message. Seriously, how far to the right do you have to go to think that the Bible is a book that needs to be destroyed? Political thought might well be a circle, because I think you can see the far left from that vantage point.

I wonder what this church thinks of a project by Conservapedia (a right-wing Wiki) to re-translate the Bible. The idea has gotten a lot of flak, considering how the site has an obvious slant with article subheadings such as "Liberal Hysterical Criticisms." So people have been having fun suggesting how the users will translate the Bible, with well-known passages being horribly misinterpreted to become little more than Republican screed.

They'll be lucky if the project even gets off the ground. Right now, users have only taken a few stabs at a couple of passages. Still, despite the bent of the site, the project at least seems to have the reasonable goal of producing a translation of the Bible based on user input. While it would be more accurate to do so under a site like Wikipedia, which is edited by people across the political spectrum, it's still a worthwhile project and one that will have an interesting outcome.

Even if it's totally satanic.

Read This Book: Last of the Donkey Pilgrims

Snopes has declared that this was not in fact the last photo ever taken by an out-of-control motorcyclist in Ireland.

A month without an entry? Ouch. I'll knock a quick one out tonight and try to keep them coming, since I do like doing them. This time around: a book review!

I had plenty of fun on campus in college, so my excursions into the city usually involved walks or runs in the immediate area of St. Paul. Shortly before I graduated, I took a stroll down Grand Avenue, a line of mostly small businesses set up in residences, to see some of the shops I hadn't stopped in. One of them, Irish On Grand, specializes in a wide variety of Celtic products, ranging from jewelry to books. I was pleasantly surprised to see the above book, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, on the shelf, since it shows that it made it at least 1,000 miles from its point of origin.

The author, Kevin O'Hara, gave me a copy some years after I interviewed him for a middle school project about his parents, who had immigrated from Ireland. O'Hara lives near my hometown and has a column in the local paper every St. Patrick's Day recounting adventures in Ireland. It seems like he's had a lot of them, though the biggest one came during an uncertain period in his life when he was staying with relatives in Ireland after serving in Vietnam. Eventually, he lighted on the idea of touring around the coast of the country using a donkey and cart.

Kevin demonstrates how the oil industry can literally kiss his ass.

Since O'Hara's journey was well-publicized, he had the advantage of an entire country alerted to his idea. As such, he pretty much had to knock on a door once the sun started to go down and politely ask if they could put him up for the night (and give his donkey, Missy, a place to graze, of course). The book is full of his experiences with the kindness of strangers, the beauty of the countryside, and the nervousness of a different time as he carried his journey over the border into the more contentious northern part of the island.

The one downside to the book is probably the opening in which O'Hara and his relatives reminisce on the experience and consider that no one could probably do it again due to an increase in crime and other factors. So it's inspirational if you want to embark on an adventure of your own, just so long as that adventure doesn't involve orbiting Ireland with a donkey. Nonetheless, the excellent characterization of himself, the whole range of Irish folk, and even Missy makes this memoir a real gem.

Roman times

Once upon a time, I did blog entries with a few different sections to address some random topics. I haven't done one of those in some time, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I. THE DOWNSIDE OF GREAT WEEKENDS

When this state is buried under a solid crust of snow or ice, or deluged in rain, or some such thing, I generally don't get out for huge weekend excursions. The nearest hopping city is Portland, which is a good hour or so away, and in general I don't mind just hanging out for the weekend, even in the summer. A typical boring weekend:

• Friday evening: watching TV, chatting online with people, playing video games, reading.
  
• Saturday: all of the above, plus some chores, a bit of exercise, and research for the political scandal blog.
  
• Sunday: church, a bit of exercise, a lot of reading, some scandal research, and TV

I managed to take a trip to see friends in Minnesota and family in Vermont earlier this summer, but that was before we apparently decided to use a weather machine to steal everyone else's rain. In the past few weeks, the sun has returned and the weekends have been like this

• Friday: about the same (July 24); playing some Settlers of Catan with friends (July 31); First Friday gallery walk (August 7)
• Saturday: hiking Mt. Jefferson (July 25); checking out a state park and a free concert in Freeport, then deciding to stay up until the crack of dawn instant messaging a friend in Minnesota (August 1); driving up to East Orland for a wedding (August 7)
• Sunday: about the same, aside from an August 8 journey back from East Orland that included a visit to Fort Knox in Bucksport.
  

This weekend is also set to be nice and productive, as I visit my sister in Biddeford, head to the beach, and go to another free concert. These weekends have all been awesome, and I'm glad to make up for lost time. Unfortunately, it happens to make the whole break go past like a shot, while the lounging weekends only really seem to have gone by too fast on Monday morning. Still, it makes for a better story to tell co-workers when they ask how your weekend was.

II. SOMETHING IN THE WATER

I'm going to be turning 26 next month. A lot of my friends have recently hit 30. The point of this numbers game? It seems like a ton of violent crime in Maine is committed by 32-year-olds. I started to notice this some time ago, and I'm sure the 31-year-olds are implicated as well, since there's a fair amount of time when a person is 32 when they're convicted, not when they committed the crime. In the past few years, people in this age range have been convicted of six murders, some nasty domestic incidents, and burning down most of the downtown of a tiny northern Maine community.

Maybe I've just gotten a mindset about how 32-year-olds are evil, especially since the last few major incidents in the county were apparently committed by people in their late teens or early 20s. So maybe it's something in the water, maybe it only affects the bad apples, maybe there's been a whole temporal shift that's passed me by...whatever the case, I think I need to get out of here within the next five years.

III. STATE JERK NICKNAMES

I grew up in Massachusetts, I moved to Maine, and most people don't seem to hold it against me. There's definitely some resentment toward outsiders that crops up at times, though; I've been told that a "flatlander" refers mainly to Massachusetts, but any other state as well despite the fact that the White Mountains are next door and conceivably make Maine a flatlander state. For the record, I lived in the mountainous western part of Massachusetts that's also known as Lower Vermont.

Anyway, Maine is probably the state where the word "Masshole" is uttered the most. It even has its own Wikipedia article. I've never been called one myself, but have found myself using it on a few occasions. I love the state, but Maine's a popular vacation destination and sometimes the people from Massachusetts can't drive.

The spirit of Massachusetts is the spirit of America...

Most recently, I called someone a Masshole on the way back from this weekend's wedding after a car with Massachusetts tags managed to scoot past an oil truck in the not-really-passing area where the climbing lane ends and the road starts to narrow. Call me crazy, but I'm not a big fan of near-accidents at 60 miles per hour where tanker trucks are involved.

Of course, every state has its jerks, and I think they all deserve some moniker. And no, I haven't sat down and thought of too many, but it might be a project to consider at some point. A Mainer who acts like an idiot, however, is clearly a Maine in the Ass.

Break out the sad tissues: "No Children" by The Mountain Goats

I was going to do a post about how I always seem to be mildly depressed when I come back from vacation. I spent a little more than a week in Vermont, generally indoors out of the rain and reading, working on The Downfall Dictionary, and watching TV, though there were a few trips elsewhere as well. But all things considered, I've come back from trips feeling much sadder; I'd probably just reiterate what I said in the St. Paul entry about how it's sad to unpack after a long trip. I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things. Plus there's an arts festival and bachelor's party this weekend, so one more day of work and I'm set.

But I'm still a little blue, so I thought I'd do another sad post of sorts, this time focusing on the song "No Children" by The Mountain Goats.



All told, it's almost funny. The singer basically seems to be telling everyone and everything to jog on, and the inflection of his voice makes it seem to be joking for much of the song. But the lyrics are pretty depressing, and the way the music is played seems to make it pretty clear that it's serious. What's it about? Well, that's for the people on SongMeanings.com to figure out. An unhappy relationship would seem to be the simplest explanation, and probably the right one.

I first heard this song on this episode of the Adult Swim show Moral Orel. The show, which followed a wholesome Christian boy named Orel and his well-meaning but disastrous attempts to interpret and implement the lessons he learns in church, was generally a hilarious take on Davey and Goliath which nonetheless had a pretty dark undertone related to his parents' unhappy marriage and father's alcoholism. These themes came to a head in an episode where Orel is forced to see his father for who he really is instead of a flawless role model. The song was used in one of the first episodes following that point, and generally highlighted the misery of the marriage. Plus the band's songs were used in a few other episodes, so I guess they specialize in folksy depression.

Well, that's enough of that. I'm going to go watch some of The Big Bang Theory and return to a state of levity.

Solutions to Everything: Government

THE PROBLEM

As far as I can tell, everyone knows a government is needed to regulate various things and pay police officers and pave the roads and so on and so forth. And yet everyone hates governments of all shape and size for various reasons. From some of the shenanigans I've researched in my blog on United States political scandals, I think I can see why. But here are a few complaints I've heard regarding the various branches:

• The federal government: being overpaid; invading or not invading various countries; weighing down every single bill with hundreds of riders appropriating money to fund projects in various constituencies; castrating ministers; taking bribes; giving bribes; endlessly getting mired down in political partisanship; abandoning official duties to fly to Argentina for sex; and so on.
  
• The state government: wasting time debating what the state sandwich should be; absconding with bags stuffed with treasury money; any measure of taxation; taking bribes; giving bribes; and so on.
  
• Local government: graft; conflict of interest; land assessments; funding the fire department, for some reason; embezzlement; and so on.
  

THE SOLUTION

Robot Government!

President Android Jackson and his Cabinet

The solution is obvious, isn't it? Fire all government officials and replace them with robots! That means a robot President, 435 robot congressman (plus 6 nonvoting robot delegates from U.S. territories and the District of Columbia), 100 robot senators, 50 robot governors, and countless lower level state legislators and mayors and boards of selectmen. I challenge you to find any constitution or set of bylaws anywhere that prevents a robot from taking office.

Of course, there will be concerns that the robot government manufacturers will be biased and program them to, say, support gay marriage or ban abortion. So we'd have to wait for the singularity to occur, at which point the robots would create other robots of superhuman design who can come to their own conclusions.

THE BENEFITS

The great majority of complaints against the government, if not all of them, relate to human weaknesses like greed and lust. Unless robots turn out to be like Bender from Futurama, that's not something we'd have to worry about in a robot government. No robot politician would have any use for bribes or kickbacks, or indeed any money at all; that's a huge savings in salaries. Aside from that, robots would probably be better able to analyze budgets and economies and such, could not likely be accused of conflict of interest, and in general would not make as many errors (unless Microsoft designs them).

And, of course, you might have Summer Glau as your governor.

You thought Sarah Palin was hot? Fuck's sake, man, you're amateur...

THE DRAWBACKS

Nothing!!!