Listeners of Shearer's Le Show will recognize a fertile mind, an
attribute of which is natural curiosity. Isn't that what compelled
most/many/all of us to shortwave listening?
I am amused by his comment about the page memory feature of the 909. I
have never used mine, either, though I do know how it works.
Fred
David Goren wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/fashion/06POSS.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/fashion/06POSS.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>
The New York Times
January 6, 2008
Possessed
Comic Relief via Shortwave
By DAVID COLMAN
“THE great joke of our era is that this is called the information
age,” said the actor and humorist Harry Shearer. In other words, if
information is free, you get what you pay for. Since childhood, Mr.
Shearer has tried to get the genuine article, even if that has meant
spending a little time and effort to do so.
It was at the peak of radio’s popularity that Harry Shearer was born
in 1943 in Los Angeles. He tuned in quickly: not only was he a child
actor whose first gig was on Jack Benny’s radio show (“I was passing
as a child,” he said), but he had a feverish fascination with radio
itself. As a boy, he looked down on the Art Deco carved-wood radio
console in his family’s living room, preferring the more sensitive
RCA model in his room (“an early vomit-green plastic radio”), which
he fiddled with nightly like a junior Marconi.
“I would try and find the most distant station possible,” he said. “I
knew something happened when it left Hollywood and then came bouncing
back from across the country a half a second later. It sounded
weirdly magical to me. If there was stuff in the air, I wanted to
receive it.”
Today the vomit-green RCA exists only in the Smithsonian of his
memory. A dedicated hobbyist in the radio tradition, Mr. Shearer has
gone through 40 to 50 radios: a Hallicrafters table-size shortwave,
an early Sony ICF and countless others, big, small, portable and
pocket-size.
He even forsook the exploding world of television in the ’60s for the
increasingly anarchic world of radio. “I never saw ‘I Dream of
Jeannie,’ ” he said. “I think of it as an enhanced childhood.” Even
today, though he writes and acts as prolifically as he always has, it
is his voice (of a dozen or so characters on “The Simpsons”) that is
probably most familiar to us.
Although he gets romantic talking about his lifelong love of the
medium, it is always his latest radio that gets pride of place in his
heart and on his desk.
“I didn’t call any of them ‘Steve,’ or get attached to them as an
object,” he said in the anchorman deadpan for which he’s known. “If
they stopped working, I didn’t keep them.”
For some eight years now, his flame has been a Sangean, model
ATS-909, a digital shortwave radio. The 909 may not have the reach of
fancier shortwave radios, but for Mr. Shearer’s purposes, it is
nearly perfect. It is simple enough to involve little in the way of
instructions, yet allows for the obsessive tinkering and tuning that
is the hallmark of the radio hobbyist. (An optional 30-foot shortwave
antenna boosts it to another level of sensitivity.)
It’s not the most attractive radio on the market, but Mr. Shearer
does not care. “We have a Tivoli, we have a Bose, all the famous
radios,” he said, ticking off high-design brands. “This is my
companion. I’ve always been more about functionality over looks. This
has all the buttons I need and not much else. There is one that says
‘Page,’ and I’ve never pressed that. I don’t know what would happen.”
Though he loved searching out new music back in the ’60s, he has
settled comfortably into the armchair of the fanatical global-news
enthusiast, for which the Sangean is ideal. Though the BBC stopped
broadcasting shortwave to North America in 2001, a move that still
pains shortwave fans, he has figured out how to receive the
transmissions on his own radio via the Internet.
Getting his news from the most reliable (and often most remote)
sources, Mr. Shearer said, gives him great satisfaction. As even a
cursory overview at the Information Age will tell you, nothing is
really free: you pay the price when you don’t get the real story.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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