Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Tecsun PL-880 Fulfills My Expectations

    The Tecsun PL-880 Fulfills My Expectations

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    I wanted a Tecsun in my bedroom—not some soulless streaming device, but a real radio, one with warmth, charm, and that inexplicable magic that only live broadcasts can offer. The idea was simple: a companion for afternoon naps and late-night reading sessions set to the soothing sounds of classical or jazz. After all, what better antidote to our algorithm-driven existence than the analog embrace of a good radio?

    Back in my radio-obsessed heyday around 2008, I foolishly sold my beloved Tecsun PL-660. Call it hubris, call it a lapse in judgment, but I’ve regretted it ever since. To atone, I snagged a used PL-660 for the kitchen and, for my bedroom sanctuary, opted for a Tecsun PL-880—a model lauded as a minor deity among radios.

    Now, let’s talk about my brief but painful dalliance with the PL-990. I ordered it from the reputable Anon-Co, expecting greatness, only to be greeted by an AM band as dead as a doorknob. Heartbreaking. Back it went, and in its place came the PL-880, slightly used but fully tested. And let me tell you, the speaker on the 880 is a revelation—warmer and more inviting than the 990’s. It’s like stepping into a cozy jazz club versus a sterile concert hall.

    The 880 arrived ready for action, with AM and FM defaults already set to North American standards—no fiddling required. On “DX” mode, the AM band delivers stunning clarity with zero floor noise or interference. It’s a joy to listen to, unlike 95% of the radios cluttering the market that barely rise above the status of glorified paperweights. FM performance is similarly impressive, though 89.3 gave me a little attitude when placed too close to the wall. A quick relocation to the bed or a spot away from the wall solved that, but the rest of the FM dial? Flawless. KCRW 89.9, in particular, comes through like it’s broadcasting from my nightstand, even while the battery charges.

    Speaking of AM, charging compromises its pristine reception, so I stick to battery power for those late-night AM sessions. Setting presets and navigating pages took a bit of patience—about 15 minutes of trial and error—but the interface is intuitive enough that even if you mess it up, direct entry is a breeze.

    In short, the PL-880 does exactly what I hoped it would: it fills my room with rich, crystal-clear sound, providing a listening experience that feels both luxurious and intimate. Sure, the PL-990 looks great and has fantastic build quality, but for my purposes, the 880 checks every box at a fraction of the cost. Why throw extra cash at a feature set I don’t need?

    Here’s the thing about being radio-obsessed: a radio isn’t just a gadget. It’s a companion, a quiet presence that connects you to a wider world while anchoring you in your own space. The PL-880 is just that—a welcome friend who’s already earned its place in my home.

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  • Sangean PR-D12 Is Solid on FM and AM in the Right Environment

    Sangean PR-D12 Is Solid on FM and AM in the Right Environment

    The following is from my now defunct Herculodge blog. I realized when I did radio testing again in 2025 that RFI (radio frequency interference) is a far greater challenge than it was in 2008. I need to play my radios on batteries, not AC adapters, and keep them away from walls, which is a shame because I really want the Sangean HDR-19, a wall adapter-only radio, which has gone up in price about $80 since even a couple of months ago.

    Since the Los Angeles Fires tore through Southern California in January 2025, I realized my household was embarrassingly underprepared for live news coverage. Streaming devices and smart speakers suddenly felt flimsy when the sky turns orange. I needed something sturdier, more reliable—like a good, old-fashioned radio.

    Enter Sangean, a brand I trusted a decade ago. I fondly remembered their radios delivering a warm, bass-heavy sound—pleasant, if not exactly hi-fi. My ancient PR-D4 still hums along in the garage, proof that Sangean builds workhorses. So, naturally, I picked up their new DSP-chip PR-D12, curious to see how it stacked up against its analog ancestor.

    The verdict? The D12 is brighter and more balanced than the D4, though the warmth I loved has cooled a bit. FM reception is a mixed bag. From Torrance, Pasadena’s 89.3 comes in strong with three bars and crystal clarity on the D12. On the D4? Same signal strength but with a thin veil of static, unless I awkwardly angle the antenna like I’m searching for alien life.

    But then things get weird. 91.5, my go-to classical station, sings smoothly on the D4 but sputters on the D12—two weak bars and static, no matter how I threaten the antenna.

    AM? Forget it. 640 AM is listenable but laced with floor noise on both radios. I twist and turn the radios to align the internal ferrite antennas like I’m cracking a safe, but the noise stays. Worse, AM talk radio voices sound like they’re broadcasting through a burlap sack. Long-term listening? Not a chance.

    What the D12 does have going for it is user-friendliness. Four preset pages with five slots each make navigating stations painless—perfect for my wife, who refuses to wrestle with complex manuals that read like an SAT prep book. She’s happy with 89.3 and 89.9 blasting clear and loud, so the D12 earns its spot in the kitchen.

    Still, I can’t shake the feeling I need something more commanding, like the soon-to-arrive Tecsun PL-990x. Maybe it’ll crack the code on AM audio bliss. Until then, the PR-D12 holds the line—solid, if not inspiring.

    Moderate recommendation.

    Update:

    I told my fellow radio enthusiast friend Gary about how I could not listen to the AM sound on the PR-D12 or my PR-D4, and he expressed the same sentiment. He said the only AM he can listen to from his vast radio collection is his now defunct C.Crane CC Radio-SW, which is a clone of the Redsun RP-2100. This made me sad because many years ago I enjoyed listening to AM on my Redsun RP-2100, but I fried it when I put the wrong AC adapter in it. Getting good AM sound out of a radio is hard these days. 

    Second Update:

    Three days after writing this review, I moved the PR-D12 to the garage where it sounds great on AM so I blame the kitchen, not the PR-D12. 

  • Qodosen DX-286: Purchased Twice, an Update

    Qodosen DX-286: Purchased Twice, an Update

    (originally posted on my Herculodge blog (on the defunct Typepad platform. I’m including an update on this post.)

    The Qodosen DX-286 arrived last Sunday, Day 5 of the Los Angeles Fires, and I wasted no time putting it under the microscope. I scrutinized its build quality, tested its FM and AM performance, and after some thoughtful listening, I decided it was going back.

    To be fair, music sounded pleasant enough on the small mono speaker—soft, inoffensive, like background noise in a coffee shop. But voices? Hollow, thin, and oddly distant. It quickly became clear that this radio would only be tolerable if tethered to a pair of headphones. As for the physical design, the kickstand and battery door felt flimsy, as if one wrong move would snap them clean off. They inspired about as much confidence as a paper umbrella in a hurricane.

    AM reception? Surprisingly solid. FM? Good but not amazing. Despite all the hype about the Qodosen’s so-called super-powerful radio chip, it was no better than the Degen/Kaito 1103 I had over a decade ago. Sure, it effortlessly locked onto 89.3 from Pasadena, but it fumbled with the weaker college station 88.9, struggling like a kid lifting his first dumbbell.

    That’s when it hit me: I was never going to fall in love with this pint-sized radio. It felt like driving a rattling Mazda Miata through a wind tunnel—fun in theory, but exhausting in practice. So, I packed up the Qodosen and sent it back. I don’t blame Qodosen. I blame my unrealistic expectations and my failure to realize I didn’t want a radio this small for my bedroom. 

    In its place? The Tecsun PL-990X. Seven and a half glorious inches of luxury radio, a true cruiser compared to the jittery compact Qodosen. Don’t get me wrong—the DX-286 is a decent radio. I just realized I wanted something bigger, smoother, and built for the long haul. 

    Update:

    I rebought the Qodosen about a month after writing my original Herculodge review. I realized the speaker is excellent, its AM is superior to my Tecsun radios, and that it’s a keeper. One issue: The kickstand broke, so I play it flat on its back.

  • SZA in Our House: Why My Daughters and I Sigh When Taylor Swift Comes On

    SZA in Our House: Why My Daughters and I Sigh When Taylor Swift Comes On

    In my freshman writing class, I recently staged a little spectacle about thesis statements. To illustrate contrast, I pulled out two cultural heavyweights: SZA and Taylor Swift. Hyperbole was the hook. My admiration for SZA was real; my critique of Swift was exaggerated for theatrical effect. Still, my tirade sounded more like a roast than a teaching tool:

    “While Taylor Swift may rack up 25% more Spotify streams than SZA, numbers don’t tell the whole story—unless, of course, you mistake a stadium chant for art. SZA sings with depth and raw emotion, while Swift wheezes through her catalog like an underfed Victorian orphan. SZA’s sound is bold, kaleidoscopic, and alive, drawing from the lush soul of the ’70s. Swift, meanwhile, serves up limp sonic garnish—music with the texture and excitement of a wilted celery stalk rescued from beneath the fridge. SZA makes adult art; Swift makes musical mac and cheese for the kid’s menu at Chili’s.”

    In reality, I don’t think Swift is a wasteland of celery stalks and Victorian wheezing. I admitted to my students that Swift is likely a good person, a competent artist, and that I wish her well. My guilt lingered, though. Bombast is a teaching trick, but sometimes the fire singes the wrong target.

    That guilt sharpened when I stumbled across Spencer Kornhaber’s “How Did Taylor Swift Convince the World That She’s Relatable?” over morning coffee. One line hit me like a cold shower: “The most consequential American singer of the past 20 years, Swift can claim commercial achievements that equal or surpass those of the Beatles, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.”

    Relatability is her true superpower. Swift has broadcast her heartbreaks, doubts, and longings in ways that make her sound like a big sister or Greek chorus to her fans’ lives. Her brand isn’t just pop—it’s therapy with a backbeat.

    Kornhaber nails it: “Listening to a Swift song is like eating a candy bar that transmits a personal essay into your memory. If you eat enough candy bars, it becomes a novel, and then a series of novels, and then (this is when you become a Swiftie) a virtual-reality, open-world video game you play with friends and strangers.” It’s a metaphor that could apply to any great artist. I thought of The Truman Show, where daily life becomes the commodity, the spectacle, the art.

    Swift deserves her accolades. She is a master craftsman of polished, radio-ready memoir-pop. But her songs still strike me as a touch bland, like a dependable frozen dinner—satisfying but forgettable. My twin daughters agree. When a Swift track seeps out of SiriusXM Coffee House, we sigh in unison and silently wish it were SZA.

  • When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    The documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) are searing indictments as much as they are testaments to survival. They tell the story of a singular city—New Orleans, a cultural jewel—betrayed and abandoned by its own nation.

    Told through the voices of those who endured the storm in 2005, these films lay bare a fourfold sin against the people of New Orleans.

    First sin: red-lining. Decades of discriminatory housing policies corralled Black families into neighborhoods below sea level—neighborhoods left exposed to catastrophe—while white families secured higher, safer ground. Yet out of this coerced geography bloomed community, kinship, jazz, art, and a way of life so distinctive that New Orleans became not just a city but a state of mind.

    Second sin: neglect. The protective marshlands were carved away, the levees shoddily built, the safeguards ignored. What should have been natural resilience was dismantled piece by piece, until a storm became a man-made massacre.

    Third sin: abandonment. When the waters rose, thousands of citizens waited for rescue that never came. They suffered hunger, thirst, illness, despair. Bureaucracies paralyzed by incompetence and poisoned by political rivalry left them stranded—leaders too intent on humiliating one another to save lives.

    Fourth sin: defamation. Media outlets, infected with racism, painted Black survivors as looters and criminals while white survivors were depicted as resourceful and brave. Rumors of sniper fire and marauding gangs turned aid missions into militarized standoffs, with the National Guard pointing rifles at the very people they were sent to save. These lies fueled white vigilantes who hunted Black residents as if the collapse of law gave them license to kill.

    This fourfold betrayal is almost unbearable to watch, yet threaded through the grief is a resilient beauty: the music, the food, the language, the humor, the love of place that make New Orleans irreducible. Katrina remains one of America’s most shameful chapters—but also a reminder that the soul of New Orleans is larger than its wounds.

  • The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    Last night, I slipped into a dream where I was less man and more detective cliché: trench coat, team at my side, the whole noir package. We prowled the tiled underworld of a health club, where women lay dead in the shower stalls. The air carried a rank perfume—pungent, briny, unmistakable. It was the signature of our quarry, The Alligator Man, a serial killer who apparently marinated in fish guts before slaughter.

    Our trap was absurd but effective. We laced another health club’s showers with his own scent, as if baiting him with eau de swamp monster. Sure enough, the predator slithered into the stall, and I lunged. But instead of the hulking brute I expected, I clutched a young, handsome man, small enough to vanish in a crowd. His boyish face said innocent; his stench said otherwise. I locked eyes with him and announced, with grim satisfaction, that he was evil—and that evil was about to rot in a cell forever.

    Then, with dream logic’s usual whiplash, I found myself at a holiday party with my family. My wife had crafted me a lobster costume: claws for hands, a scarlet exoskeleton, and a hat shaped like a boiled crustacean’s head. I looked like a seafood platter at a masquerade ball. I ate cake while dodging feline landmines—the hosts’ cats had redecorated the house with cat mess. The carpet was stained with these “accidents.” With cake fork in hand, I declared this exhibit A for my lifelong “no pets policy.”

    The party oozed past midnight into the pale gray of morning. Bored stiff and craving endorphins, I trudged home. Still zipped inside my lobster suit, I cranked up a kettlebell workout in the living room. My claws clacked as I swung iron, the sweat pooling beneath my polyester shellfish skin.

    Headlights swept across the window. My wife and twin daughters walked in. I assumed they, too, had abandoned the litter-box bacchanal. She spotted me mid-squat, lobster claws snapping, and didn’t so much as flinch. I worried she’d rage over my soaking her handmade costume in salt and sweat. Instead, she simply yawned, brushed past my lobster theatrics, and announced she was going to bed. Evil had been vanquished, cats had soiled carpets, and the lobster workout was apparently just another Tuesday in her world.

  • Typepad, R.I.P.: Obituary for a Dinosaur

    Typepad, R.I.P.: Obituary for a Dinosaur

    In 2006, I wandered into the Wild West of self-publishing and signed up with Typepad. Back then, blogs felt like a revolution: you could pour your obsessions straight into the digital void without begging gatekeepers for approval. I created three: Herculodge, where I indulged my radio fixation; The Breakthrough Writer, course content for my freshman comp class; and The Critical Thinker, the companion for my critical thinking students. Typepad cost me about $150 a year—a fair price for a soapbox in the dawn of the Blog Era.

    But by April 2025, my soapbox had turned into a rickety stool. Typepad was wheezing like a geriatric dinosaur stumbling into an unfamiliar world: constant downtime, glacial load times, the unmistakable stink of neglect. Research confirmed my suspicion—it had been sold, stripped for parts, and left to rot. I canceled my subscription. Out of nostalgia, I kept Herculodge in basic mode, mainly because its archive of radio reviews was still linked to Thomas Witherspoon’s venerable SWLing Post, a site that embodies everything good about radio: community, continuity, and voices across the airwaves.

    But in truth, Herculodge had gone dormant long ago. After the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, I went on a spree, bought a dozen radios, reviewed them all, and then, slowly, stopped. The flame flickered, and I moved on.

    Yesterday the official death notice arrived: “We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025.” Translation: pull the plug, bury the dinosaur.

    This little obituary for Typepad drags me back to the Blog Era, when voices as sharp as Andrew Sullivan’s rose to the level of public intellectuals, while hobbyists like me tinkered in the shadows of niche obsessions, broadcasting to niche audiences. Blogs felt cozy, almost literary: you in a robe, cat on your lap, coffee steaming, ruminating about Virginia Woolf before hitting “publish.” Compare that to today’s Hot Take Era: dopamine-charged combatants spewing rage, preening for likes, and mistaking tribal points for thought.

    The end of Typepad is the end of that quieter world.

    I’ve since migrated to WordPress, which works better, loads faster, and hasn’t collapsed into irrelevance. I have mixed feelings about AI image generators: sometimes they hit the mark, but mostly they’re garish clip art pretending to be art. Still, I pay two hundred bucks a year to carve out a little order from the chaos, and it’s worth every cent. Cheaper than therapy, and with fewer platitudes.

    Typepad’s death isn’t tragic—it’s just the final shovel of dirt on an era already gone.

  • The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    “The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” Guilty as charged. Case in point: my tortured relationship with FKM Divecore straps.

    The Notre Dame study had me spiraling—researchers tortured the material with solvents, heat, and abrasion until they squeezed out PFAS “forever chemicals” and then warned these might leach into human skin. Ever since, I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth, like a malfunctioning metronome, on whether to keep wearing the straps I love more than any other rubber I’ve tried in two decades of watch collecting.

    Of course, no one wants to think of their wristwear as a poison delivery system. But context matters. First, FKM is highly stable under real-world conditions; the lab tests were more horror show than practical scenario. Second, it’s the manufacturing process that endangers workers, not the end-user. Third, if we’re ranking PFAS risks, drinking unfiltered water, eating from PFAS-coated packaging, or cooking on scratched Teflon are solid tens on the risk scale, while wearing an FKM strap is a lonely little one. That’s the Fallacy of False Priorities: panic over the trivial while ignoring the obvious.

    Even so, the issue isn’t a Nothing Burger. Divecore’s own Paul admits handling FKM worries him, and he’s working on alternative materials—silicone, vulcanized silicone, HNBR—to protect his workers and reassure consumers. That’s just smart business.

    Meanwhile, I’m not without options. My strap drawer holds factory Seiko silicones and urethanes, plus top-tier Tropic straps made of vulcanized rubber. They’re fine, but none hold a candle to the sleek perfection of Divecore FKM. I tried swapping them in, but they feel like consolation prizes—serviceable, never glorious.

    So I made a deal with myself: enjoy my pristine FKMs for now, and when the new HNBR or silicone Divecore straps arrive, I’ll switch. Sounds reasonable. Except once you’ve let the idea of PFAS seeping into your skin lodge in your brain, it refuses to leave. I’ve written about it on Instagram, made a YouTube video, and now I’m stuck in an obsessive loop, second-guessing every strap change as though I were rewriting my will.

    Which brings me back to my original point: the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And right now, that man is staring at seven watches, toggling between glory and paranoia, wishing he could strap on peace of mind.

  • The Influenza of the Mind

    The Influenza of the Mind

    Last week, one of my teen daughters caught a cold. She shrugged it off with the stoicism of a soldier, and I barely noticed she was sick. Then my wife came down with it five days ago. It hit her harder, but she still managed to run errands, wrangle housework, and conquer the Everest of six laundry baskets stuffed with clothes that needed folding.

    Then there was me. Yesterday, after my afternoon nap, I felt aches and pains and immediately began writing my obituary. Sprawling out on the couch in the living room, I put on the docuseries The Kingdom on ESPN but had to close my eyes, then take another nap because I was “so unwell.” 

    Convinced I was succumbing to something sinister, I staggered into the kitchen and cooked dinner. The salmon, broccoli, and rice all came out overcooked—not because I was incapacitated, but because I was deep into Internet articles about PFAS “forever chemicals.” Nothing like a side of toxic paranoia with your charred protein.

    My family tolerated the burnt offering, attributing it to my alleged illness. But once I slumped onto the couch after dinner to watch Below Deck, I went full opera tenor: sighs, groans, complaints, the whole libretto of impending doom. My family, unimpressed, mocked me. “Illness always makes me morbid and lugubrious,” I explained, as if quoting from a Victorian diary.

    My daughters laughed. My wife rolled her eyes: “Here we go. The man flu.” I thought about citing research suggesting men actually suffer more with the flu, but even I knew I’d already overshared.

    “Maybe you’re just tired,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t work out tomorrow.”

    I declared that one missed workout would cause my muscles to shrivel like neglected houseplants. “I’m doomed,” I muttered, then retreated to bed before nine like a bereft invalid.

    This morning, I awoke braced for catastrophe—a full-blown cold, a fever, the Grim Reaper at my door. Instead, I felt…fine. Perfectly fine. My wife and daughter had been right. I wasn’t sick. I was just tired.

    The truth is, when I sense illness creeping in, I go from zero to tragic opera in seconds. I suffer from Influenza of the Mind, a performance illness that turns me into a paranoid man-baby. Last night’s theatrics were not the noble struggle of a fading patriarch, but the wailings of a melodramatic hypochondriac in need of nothing more than eight hours of sleep.

  • Classroom Playback: What a Football Player Taught Me About the Hedonic Treadmill

    Classroom Playback: What a Football Player Taught Me About the Hedonic Treadmill

    I’m starting a series I’m calling The Classroom Playback, where I revisit conversations from class discussions and reflect on how they challenged my assumptions. More often than not, I’ve found it isn’t the instructor who does the teaching—it’s the students. This is my first installment.

    I teach a college writing class to the athletic department—an eclectic mix of football bruisers, soccer strikers, volleyball hitters, and water polo warriors. Two days ago, in the context of an essay that addresses a generation of young men who don’t work or study but play computer games in their bedrooms, I introduced the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the cruel little loop in which humans adapt to pleasure until the buzz wears off and they need to crank the dial higher, faster, and louder, until finally the machine spits them out, exhausted and miserable.

    To make the point vivid, I shared a story from a former student. His older brother had dropped out of college, moved back in with mom, and made a religion out of lying in bed. His life consisted of Netflix marathons on a laptop, constant texts to his girlfriend, and a bong glued to his lips. A self-sedated sloth with Wi-Fi.

    So I asked my athletes, “Does this guy sound happy to you?”

    One of the football players, a psychology major with a grin as wide as the end zone, shot up his hand and said, absolutely—this guy was living the dream. No responsibilities, no alarms, no essays. Everyone, he insisted, would be content to live such a life.

    My jaw dropped. A psychology major dazzled by the ecstasy of permanent adolescence? I reminded him—gently but with a sharp edge—that life demands connection, structure, and purpose if humans are to flourish. Without it, the brain rots. He smiled, nodded, and conceded my point. But the nod was polite, the smile indulgent. I wasn’t sure I had actually shaken his conviction that the guy with the bong had cracked the code.

    After the football player declared his envy for the bong-hugging bed-dweller texting his girlfriend, I scanned the room and realized my grand metaphor had belly-flopped. My hedonic treadmill example didn’t land, to use modern parlance. What I intended as a cautionary tale of mental rot registered instead as a spa brochure: Netflix, weed, and endless texting looked less like disintegration and more like a vacation package.

    With fifteen weeks left in the semester, I’ve had to remind myself of two things. First: I can’t demolish their fantasies in one lesson. The hedonic treadmill requires repeat assaults, examples from all angles, until they feel—not just know—the despair of a life without meaning. Clearly, Bong Boy failed to deliver the emotional punch.

    Second: these kids belong to the “I’ll Never Buy a House” Generation. Their skepticism is hardwired. To them, the fantasy of collapsing in bed with Netflix and THC isn’t just laziness; it’s an antidote to the endless hustle culture they know they’ll never escape.

    Therefore, my football player presented me with a lesson: As an instructor, I can’t be myopic and teach ideas such as the hedonic treadmill from a limited point of view. I have to see things through my students’ eyes. 

    I’m close to sixty-four. My students are nineteen. If I want to reach them, I need to remember the golden rule of teaching—or sales, or persuasion of any kind: know your audience, speak to their anxieties, and try to see life through their eyes. Otherwise, you’re not a communicator—you’re just an old, out-of-touch crank with a lecture.

    I want to thank my football player for opening my eyes and reminding me that the classroom is instructional for both instructors and students alike.