Shelly's Lists and Miscellany (The Best from Cyber Chocolate)
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Shelly's Lists and Miscellany 
Radio has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mother put it on with breakfast every morning, and after I got my transistor radio in the early '60s, I carried it with me whenever I could. I listened to it while waiting for the bus to go to summer camp and I had it with me in college in '73 to listen to the Mets' playoff games.
The DJs on my favorite stations made me feel as if we were friends. I've even talked back to them (well, I talk to myself all the time, so why not to the radio, too?). I've hardly ever done that to the TV, but radio is so much more intimate and I mourn the loss of so many local DJs on the music stations. Far too many use packaged programming now.
I grew up with 77MusicRadio WABC. It's gone now, replaced years ago by Talk Radio. It was the home of Cousin Bruce Morrow and Dan Ingram, Chuck Leonard and Ron Lundy, and Harry Harrison, a one-time Good Guy who came over from WMCA-AM.
Nowdays, I mostly listen to WCBS-FM 101.1, which went to the oldies format back around 1972, and is one of the stations, if not THE station with that format for the longest amount of time so far. A number of WABC DJs, among others, got jobs there, tho many have retired. Jack "Jake" Spector who was worked at a number of NYC radio stations, including WMCA (another "Good Guy") ran WCBS' Saturday Night Sock Hop. Unfortunately, he passed away a number of years ago. But I had the thrill of not only meeting him, but spending one Saturday night in the studio as his guest during one of those "Sock Hops."
And with a somewhat different oldies playlist, I also listen to this wonderful station that is available over the internet: WARX.com, from Hagerstown, MD.
What prompted this essay is an obit I read in the NY Daily News today....
Gene Klavan, once one of NYC's premier DJs, died yesterday just a month shy of turning 80. He might be unknown to most of you, but to NYers of a certain age, he was one of radio's finest voices. Along with Dee Finch until 1968 and later solo after Finch retired, Klavan held listeners captive every weekday morning from 6 to 9 a.m. My preference when I was growing up was for the aforementioned WABC-AM's "All Americans" who played top 40 rock 'n' roll and there was nothing quite as wonderful as being woken up by Herb Oscar Anderson and later, Harry Harrison (who recently retired from the morning slot at WCBS-FM).
But my mother preferred the popular and swing era music played on WNEW-AM, so every morning at breakfast, I was a captive audience for Klavan and Finch--and if I had no school, I got to stay and listen to William B. Williams and the Make Believe Ballroom. Klavan was on WNEW mornings from 1952 until 1977, and with Finch playing straight man, he created memorable characters such as Trevor Traffic and Mr. Nat and brought an edgy humor to radio well before the envelope-pushing antics of Howard Stern and Don Imus. An era of radio ended when he left and I have fond memories of how he, along with so many other DJs, kept me company when I was a kid. So here's a salute for Gene Klavan and all the other great radio voices who brought me their own brand of cheer.
As I slide into my second half century, I’m amazed not just by how much things have changed in the world (and how, in too many ways, they’re the same–violence and war never seem to go out of style), but by how well I’ve adapted. Yes, I’m talking about tech. While far from an expert, I and the rest of my generation of boomers have gone from life without computers to all manner of technological wonders such as PDAs, personal computers (and yes, that includes you Mac folks), cellphones that take pictures and do text messaging, laptops and notebooks, ebooks, etc, etc, etc.
When I was a high school senior, I took a relatively new class called Computer Math my last term. We learned how to program a device that looked like what I can only describe now as a calculator on steroids. By using simple, two-character codes, we enticed strings of mathematical functions from it, including the calculation of Fibonacci numbers.
In college, I took Fortran, the computer language of the sciences and social sciences, fitting for a psych major. I learned how to punch cards that I handed in at the college’s computer center. There, my cards were read and sent zipping up to the mainframe in Albany and if I were lucky, the next day my printout would be waiting for me. And if I mis-punched one card or mis-wrote one line of code, I’d have to redo and submit the cards again. One assignment could take days to complete once I’d written the code.
And now I supervise some young people who have never known life before computers. They stare in shock as I describe life back then and they look at me in puzzlement as I explain what keypunching was. At such times, I feel a lot older than I am.
Yet here I am, happily surfing the web. I have a website I designed and created myself with Dreamweaver, and I have blogs I built with templates online through AOL, LiveJournal, and even BlogSpot. I converse over computer networks via IMs and I send and receive email. The fax machine at work is a marvel, yet I fuss when it takes more than a second to transmit or receive a document. And WiFi means I don’t even have to plug in or dial up to access the internet. People with disabilities have more options today, thanks to everchanging tech, than they ever have.
I haven’t used a typewriter in years, preferring to type on the computer–but I’ll never call it keyboarding! I’m mostly comfortable in a world that would have seemed alien to when I was growing up and I wonder if today’s 20-somethings and teens will get to see their world rocked by such dramatic change.
But every technological advance has its downside. The more we can do, the more everyone else can do. We can shop online.... identity thieves have more means at their disposal. We can chat with family across the globe for pennies.... terrorists can recruit and scheme over that same internet. And as more and more of our lives is digitized, we become more and more vulnerable to loss of privacy due to more and more ways for someone to gain access to our most private affairs such as medical or school records. How much freedom are we willing to give up for security? Is that even the question that should be asked?
I don’t have answers. I suppose that’s one reason I love reading science fiction–to see the possibilities played out in novels that work with those themes and settings. And perhaps, that’s part of why I write.... to explore the possibilities, even if subconsciously, because I just can’t seem to plan it much ahead. But before we can try to answer those questions, we need to make sure we’re asking the right ones. And then we need full public debate and leaders who understand the full ramifications. Laws enacted in reaction to events, without careful thought, often do no good and can even do harm.
Previously, I mentioned a coalition that is petitioning to have the Patriot Act modified. Personally, I don’t mind giving up some freedoms if I thought that would do some good. But who am I to say that would be right? And if the best the law can do is provide a false sense of security, what good is it? Letting the government gain access to library circulation records or bookstore sales records without accountability is just plain wrong to me. Worse, it ignores all the other ways terrorists can gain info–online, by paying cash, by sitting at a table and quietly reading without borrowing or purchasing.
The Patriot Act hasn’t made me feel any safer. The world is a dangerous place, moreso now than ever because violence is as portable as everything else today. I didn’t mean this to end on such a depressing note, just to offer up some food for thought, things that have been on my mind recently. Maybe some of them have been on yours, too.
Favorite 25 Chocolate Things (4/04) ***
Twelve Odd and Maybe Not So Odd Things About MeI wasn't going to do anything like this, but then it became some kind of weird challenge, as if I was afraid to come up with something that wouldn't be too personal or revealing, yet be entertaining or of mild interest. So, here goes.
1. I love chocolate. (Now there's a news flash.)
2. I majored in psychology and minored in philosophy.
3. I made pockets for my books when I was a kid and put cards in with due dates when I lent books to friends. (And is it a wonder that I'm a librarian?)
4. The first science fiction book I read was when I was 12--Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. The first one that really made an impression was Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles which I read 2 years later.
5. I started keeping a reading journal in 1965, the year we had to do one in 6th grade as an assignment.
6. My favorite all-time TV show was and is "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."
7. One of my grandfathers was a butcher, the other was a baker. No candlestick makers that I know of in the family.
8. We got our first TV when I was 5.
9. My father, a space buff, made "Star Trek" required viewing. I got my love of science fiction from him, and to a lesser extent, my mother.
10. I started wearing glasses when I was 3, funny looking pointy things.
11. My only pet was a parakeet (unless you count my "Pet Rock") that I got as a birthday present when I was 5. It ("Susie," later renamed "Pretty Boy" when one of my parents' friends told me it was male) never learned to speak human and died a few years later.
12. I've managed to kill more plants than I've been able to cultivate.
***
The Wisdom of Chocolate "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get."
--Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) Forrest Gump
"Put a smile on your face, make the world a better place."
--Hershey's Chocolate
"All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt!"
--Lucy Van Pelt (in Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz)
"I never met a chocolate I didn't like."
--Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) in Star Trek: The Next Generation
"Chocolate is cheaper than therapy and you don't need an appointment."
--Unknown
"There are four basic food groups, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and chocolate truffles."
--Unknown
"Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces."
--Judith Viorst
"Las cosas claras y el chocolate espeso." ("Ideas should be clear and chocolate thick.")
--Spanish proverb
"Biochemically, love is just like eating large amounts of chocolate."
--John Milton, The Devils Advocate
"What you see before you, my friend, is the result of a lifetime of chocolate."
--Katharine Hepburn
"Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits."
--Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) German chemist
"The 12-step chocoholics program: NEVER BE MORE THAN 12 STEPS AWAY FROM CHOCOLATE!"
--Terry Moore
"I have this theory that chocolate slows down the aging process.... It may not be true, but do I dare take the chance?"
--Unknown
"Stress wouldn’t be so hard to take if it were chocolate covered."
--Anonymous.
"Chocolate is nature’s way of making up for Mondays."
--Anonymous.
"There’s more to life than chocolate, but not right now."
--Anonymous.
"Man cannot live by chocolate alone, but woman can."
--Unknown
"I'd give up chocolate, but I'm no quitter."
--Unknown
"There is nothing better than a good friend, except a good friend with chocolate."
--Unknown
***
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