Now that you have read my biography, perhaps you would like to know about some of my hobbies and interests. I have quite a variety of interests which center around three main categories, radio, music and geography, especially exotic places throughout the world.
Back around 1957 when I was only three years old, my dad made me a Heath Kit AM radio, and I used to love fooling around with it, twisting the tuning dial and seeing what far off radio stations I could hear. Even as early as age three or four, I discovered that at night, radio stations came in from great distances, because of the changes in the ionosphere that took place at night, allowing stations to bounce off it and skip for hundreds of miles. People have observed this phenomenon ever since the dawn of radio broadcasting. Picking up these distant radio stations has a name in the hobby of radio listening. It is called DXing because the letters DX were originally a morse code abbreviation for a distant station back in the earliest days of amateur radio. There are many clubs throughout the world that are geared to this hobby of radio listening. In fact, some people spend lots of money on very sophisticated high quality radios and special antennas to bring in distant AM signals from all parts of the globe. In Europe, people regularly listen to radio stations from North America, the reception seems to be particularly good in Finland. Of course, I didn't get into this hobby very much at the age of three and four, but when we moved to Vermont from the Boston area in 1965, I remember thinking that it was amazing that I could pick up radio stations that were so far away that they were in a time zone that was an hour earlier than our own. What I didn't realize at the time, was that these giant AM stations like WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana on 1190 kHz, and Chicago stations like WMAQ on 670 kHz, WGN on 720, WBBM on 780, WLS on 890 and wCFL on 1000 kHz were very powerful with 50 thousand watts of power, and many of the frequencies that they were on, might have had only one other radio station on them in the entire US. So from about the age of twelve, I really became quite interested in AM DXing, or mediumwave DXing as the Europeans often called it, because they refered to our AM band as the mediunmwave band.
I also became fascinated with shortwave radio, and the idea of hearing radio stations from all over the world really appealed to me. Because of my intense interest in Australia which you will read more about later, I always wanted to pick up Radio Australia on shortwave. I would have heard them a lot sooner if I had only listened to my friend David Dillon. He told me that I should listen for them in the morning but that didn't make sense to me. After all, it was at night that distant AM stations came in, not during the morning. Sometimes distant AM stations would continue to come in during winter mornings, but particularly in the summer, distant stations had already faded out. So, picking up Radio Australia halfway around the world during the morning just didn't make sense to me at the time. IN those days I didn't understand the difference in the propagation characteristics between the AM band and the shortwave bands. Oh, if I had only stumbled on 9580 kHz back in 1966, I would have been blown away by the solid signal that Radio Australia put into North America during our local mornings. I am a shamed to admit that I didn't discover this amazing frequency used by Radio Australia with its beautiful armchair copy until the fall of 1973. Anyway, When all radios were analog and didn't have digital frequency read out, it was rather difficult to know just exactly what frequency you were on. So to help people tune in the various shortwave stations throughout the world, each shortwave station would play a little tune over and over again, beginning about two minutes before the start of a broadcast. These tunes were called interval signals, and I found them absolutely fascinating, and became quite interested in collecting them as I began learning more and more about shortwave radio.
At first, I was satisfied to learn about different countries by listening to the shortwave radio stations in those countries. But by the early eighties I wanted something more. I wanted to learn about life in these countries and be able to hear the local AM and FM stations as well as local folk music from these countries. I figured I could do this by communicating with people living in places where I had an interest, so I began writing to newspapers in cities that I had a special interest in, and began corresponding with people on cassette tape from such places as Scotland, NOrthern Ireland, the Northwest and Yukon Territories of Canada, Alaska, the nordic countries of Europe including Iceland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Singapore, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Capetown South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. It was a very enjoyable and educational experience for me and I learned a lot about many countries throughout the world.
As I became even more involved in the field of radio, and even decided that I wanted to become a disc jockey, an occupation that a lot of blind folks fancied, I became interested in collecting airchecks, jingles from those great jingle companies in Dallas Texas like PAMS Productions and Jam Creative Productions, and old time radio programs.
Note: The aircheck link takes you to a site called the Real Top 40 Repository. From 1996 when the site opened to sometime in late 2005, this was a free site. You can still browse the comments section about all the airchecks for free, but to listen to airchecks, you now have to pay a nominal fee and it is pretty reasonable, something like only $20 a year.
One thing that I did not care for at all at the time, 1968 and 1969, was psychadelic rock, or if you prefer, acid rock. I didn't like groups like the Jimmi Hendrix Experience, the Iron Butterfly, Cream or the Jefferson Airplane at all. Music was changing and not necessarily for the better. Unfortunately for me, my music tastes were not changing with the times. So around age fourteen, I started getting very interested in the fifties. I was familiar with a lot of the top 40 hits of the fifties because I had inherited my Uncle Fred's record collection at the age of 9 back in 1963. But one Saturday afternoon in 1967, I accidentally discovered a radio show that would change my life forever, and set the course of my musical preferences for decades to come. I discovered a program on the little FM college station WTBS, now WMBR which in those days was located at MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts and the call letters didn't belong to Ted Turner's "Super Station" channel 17 in Atlanta. The program was called Rock and Roll Memory Time hosted by Chuck Deeber. It aired between 3 and 5 PM, and Chuck played a mixture of rock standards and a kind of music from the fifties that I had never heard before, called rhythm and blues or R&B for short. I really loved the music of a duo that recorded on the Herald label in the mid fifties called Charlie and Ray. I especially liked their recordings of Dearest One and Oh Gee Ooee. It seemed like a large number of the groups that performed this type of music were named after birds. There were the Orioles Ravens, Robins, Larks, Swallows, Crows, Wrens, Meadowlarks, Cardinals, Sparrows, well, you get the idea. Three additional very popular pioneer R&B groups of the era, were the 5 Keys the Moonglows and Billy Ward and the Dominos which first allowed audiences to hear Clyde McPhatter's astonishing clear tennor voice. Eventually Clyde McPhatter would form a group of his own in 1953 with a bunch of fellows that more or less drifted together so the group was called The Drifters. Once I really became interested in R&B vocal groups around 1968, the interest just grew and grew, and even today it is probably my favorite type of music.
Around 1985, I started becoming quite interested in the twenties, especially twenties music. Now I have even gotten into the old cylinder recordings that were made in the 1890's and during the beginning of the twentieth century before the Columbia Record Company introduced the flat disc record.
When I was in the sixth grade at the Perkins School for the blind in Watertown, Massachusetts during the 1965'66 school year, a very dear teacher named Miss Lillian C. Crowley got me very interested in geography and in braille map reading. For some reason, not many blind people have much of an interest in reading braille maps. But as soon as Miss Crowley showed me my first braille map, I was absolutely hooked on them, and I always loved reading and studying them in great detail. Perhaps part of the reason was that we had just moved from the state of Massachusetts to the Burlington, Vermont area, and I knew that it took a long time by bus to get from Boston to Burlington, Vermont. and I wanted to know just how far it was between Boston and Burlington. So when I discovered that the How Press at Perkins had maps for sale and they were only a quarter a piece, I immediately bought maps of all six New England states. Massachusetts actually had two braille maps available, a physical map showing mountains, lakes and rivers, and a political map showing just cities and towns in the state. Because of my intense interest in these braille maps, my classmates began calling me teacher's pet.
Around this same time, I was absolutely crazy about Australia and naturally I snatched up the physical and political maps of the island continent as well. I still love Australia to this day, especially the two Northern Territory cities of Darwin and Alice Springs. At one time, it was possible to hear the Darwin radio station Top FM on the net. Tthey stopped streaming their audio a couple of years ago, but the station changed its name, and now it is called Territory FM and the station does stream their audio on the net. They also have MP3 archives of their Territory Talk shows on their site as well. There is also a dance station in Darwin called Kick FM that can still be heard on the net, but it's not a radio station that I am personally interested in listening to, but you might emjoy the music that the station has to offer. However, I do enjoy listening to the audio stream of ABC Radio Darwin which you can listen to here. There are also some on demand audio files available from ABC central NT in Alice Springs. The website had stopped carrying any audio files of their features due to lack of interest. However, I am happy to be able to report, that since I let a woman named Nicole at the ABC Alice Springs website know how much I appreciated the audio files that used to be on the site, she is now once again posting audio and even video files on the ABC Alice Springs website once again. Nicole told me that once the Alice Springs ABC website gets an upgrade sometime in 2008, they too may begin streaming their audio. If this does come to pass, I will provide a link to the audio stream for ABC in Alice Springs as well. There is another radio station in the Alice that does stream its audio although both website and audio stream seem to be somewhat unreliable. Station 8KIN or CAAMA Radio aims its programs at the aboriginal people of the area. They play a lot of fascinating Australian music, and they stream their audio in stereo right from Alice springs.
Back in the sixties, my father worked for Gulf Oil, inspecting Gulf service stations throughout both Vermont and New Hampshire. When I used to go to work with dad during those brief periods when I was home, at first I always told him that when we crossed the Connecticut River from Vermont into New Hampshire, I somehow always got a funny feeling being in New Hampshire. But eventually I would absolutely fall in love with the state. Around 1967 when I was thirteen years old, I decided that my thre favorite cities in the state were Berlin, Keene, and Laconia.
The northern White Mountain Chamber of Commerce in Berlin has an excellent website about the Berlin Gorham area, which even includes a historic look at heritage tour through Berlin's old ethnic French, German, Russian and Scandinavian communities. Because I have had such an interest in these three cities in the granite state for such a long time, I always enjoy reading the Berlin Daily Sun which is sometimes not updated on their website, the Keene Sentinel, and the Laconia Citizen. Laconia's radio station WLNH has interested me for many years and you can listen to them live here. Some other interesting New Hampshire community newspapers to read include the Colebrook News Sentinel, the Conway Daily Sun, the Berlin Reporter and the Littleton Courier which are actually on the same page along with several other New Hampshire newspapers. For a while, the Berlin Reporter and the Littleton Courier were free to read on the net, then they became paid subscription websites and now they are free to read again.
Paul Tardiff, better known in Berlin as Poof, writes a column each week in the Berlin Daily Sun about different periods and aspects of the history of both Berlin and Gorham called "Hello Berlinites" and there used to also be an accompanying website called Once Upon A Berlin Time. But the city of Berlin has fallen on hard times. The paper mills have closed down for good leaving hundreds of people in the area without employment, so the website closed down around early December of 2006 which is most unfortunate. Paul did write a book about the history of the Berlin Gorham area which was also called Once Upon A Berlin Time. I only wish this book was somehow available in a format that I could take advantage of since the results from scanning a book can be so unpredictable.
Another way to find out what is happening in the granite state, is to check out the NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio website, and they have a lot of archived programs about the state available on demand, and they also stream their audio live. You can also keep up to date with news from the granite state through the WMUR-TV channel 9 website in Manchester.
Vermont Public Radio also streams their programming live on the net, and like the NHPR website, VPR also has a wealth of interesting archived programming available on their website. A good overall Vermont travel and tourism website can be found here.
Ever since I first read the book The Polar Passion by Farley Mowat in 1977, the Arctic became a place that truly captivated me. I became interested in the entire Arctic region from Alaska to the Russian Arctic. A good overview website about all sections of the Arctic can be found here. A good source of Arctic news can be found at the polarnews.com website. Here is another site that is an excellent source for news of the Arctic.
Then, there are some specific countries that are either totally in the Arctic, or have sections that are located above the Arctic circle that particularly interest me. For example, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard which most North Americans know as Spitsbergen. But actually Spitsbergen is only one of the islands in the Svalbard group. So as you can see, I have an intense interest in geography and in the Arctic in particular.
There are also some specific Arctic communities that I am very interested in, and most of them are the northernmost towns in their respective geographic areas. For example, I am very interested in Finnish Lapland and in the city of Rovaniemi on the Arctic circle, and the small town of Utsjoki in the extreme north of Finland.
For many years now, I have had an intense interest in Barrow Alaska which is the northernmost town in the state of Alaska, and in the United States as well. The cities of Fairbanks, Nome and Kotzebue Alaska also fascinate me.
Then there is Grise Fiord Canada's northernmost village which is located on the southern coast of Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic in the new territory of Nunavut. The northernmost town in the Yukon Territory is called Old Crow and I have an intense interest in this community as well, and although this city is not in the Arctic, I am also very interested in the capital city of Whitehorse.
I am also fascinated in the town of Resolute Bay which is located on Cornwallis Island in the high Arctic also in Nunavut. Another northern town that has always fascinated me is Inuvik which is still located in Canada's Northwest Territories.
Although not in the Arctic, Churchill Manitoba is another community that absolutely fascinates me because it is known as the polar bear capital of the world.
I am also fascinated in northern Ontario, particularly in the cities of Sudbury, Kapuskasing, and Moosonee. I am also very interested in both Goose Bay in eastern Labrador, and Wabash and Labrador City in western Labrador.
There are two groups of islands off the north coast of Scotland that are pretty isolated from the rest of the country. They are the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and you can listen to the morning BBC Radio Orkney Around Orkney broadcasts live Monday through Friday at 7:30 AM and the BBC Radio Shetland Good Evening Shetland broadcasts Monday through Friday live at 5:30 PM British time. These programs for each day are available for the next 24 hours until the next day's program replaces it except on weekends when Friday's programs remain on the site until the following Monday.
The city of Prague in the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia also interests me very much.
Moving on to Asia, I have always been fascinated in Malaysia and the capital city of Kuala Lumpur in particular. This is because in 1966 when I was at the Perkins School for the blind, a teacher trainee who called himself Brother Augustus came to Perkins from Malaysia, and he was so much more friendly than the other teachers and teacher trainees at the time. We often talked about rock music, and at the time, there was a group of school children from his school in Malaysia that called themselves the Braille Dots, and they sounded just like Cliff Richard's group the Shadows. Ever since meeting Brother Augustus, I have been fascinated in Malaysia. I always loved the interval signal of the shortwave station called the Voice of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur which I was never able to pick up from North America.
Another Asian country that has always fascinated me is Nepal and especially the city of Kathmandu. I always enjoy catching up with the latest news of the Kathmandu valley by reading the Kantipur Daily newspaper or by listening to the English newscasts from Radio Nepal in Kathmandu. The station was actually quite surprising, in that it began limited Internet webcasting very early in the game, especially for an Asian radio station in as poor a country as Nepal. As early as the beginning of 1997, Radio Nepal made highly edited versions of their English newscasts available for their world-wide audience to hear. The audio quality was pretty distorted at the time, and there was a loud 50 cycle hum on the audio stream. They also cut out their weather forecasts at the end of the newscasts which really disappointed me. Gradually over the years however, the audio quality of Radio Nepal's English newscasts steadily improved, and they stopped editing them entirely by sometime in 1998 or '99. Eventually Radio Nepal offered both downloadable ra files as well as a streaming real audio ram file of both their morning and evening newscasts on their website. Now, finally as of February of 2009, Radio Nepal finally offers a continuous stream of their broadcast right here.
Radio Nepal presents three English newscasts daily, the morning newscast is at 8 AM Nepal time. Nepal is on a very strange time zone indeed, 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of UTC. The morning newscast can be heard at 02:15 UTC or 9:15 PM the preceding evening eastern standard time. The afternoon newscast is at 2 PM Nepal time, that's 8:15 UTC or 3:15 AM eastern standard time. The evening newscast is at 8 PM Nepal time, which is at 14:15 UTC or 9:15 AM eastern standard time. The station also provided text versions of their newscasts as well, but although there is still a link for their text newscasts, the last time the news appears to have been updated at this point, (February 2, 2009) was back in October of 2008.
Note: When I first created this hobbies and interests page, the Kathmandu Post, the Rising Nepal, the Independant and many other English newspapers from the Himalayan Kingdom were available on the net via a website called nepalnews.com, but by the end of 2003 nearly all of the English newspapers from Nepal were gone. Now I can report that the news from the Kathmandu Post is back on the net via the Kantipur Online website. I don't know whether the Kathmandu Post and the Kantipur newspapers have merged, but they now appear to be part of the same website. Kantipur Online also runs an FM radio station in the Kathmandu valley which you can stream here. Then too, by October of 2000, there was a five minute English newscast called Breakfast Bytes from Nepal's first independant radio station called Radio Sagarmatha which is the Nepalese name for Mount Everest. Supposedly the station is streaming its audio but when I recently checked, the audio stream was not working. In 2004 and 2005, Kantipur FM also had a daily English newscast available. They still might, I'll have to check their program schedule.
But on February 1, 2005, King Gyanendra put the Kingdom of Nepal under a state of emergency and imposed strict censorship rules forbidding any of the media in the Kingdom from opposing his political actions and dictitorial manner of running the country. Unfortunately the Radio Nepal website disappeared from the net for a time, and all independant radio stations were forbidden to broadcast news and public affairs programs. Only Radio Nepal which was government operated continued to air newscasts in the Kingdom. You can download the Radio Nepal interval signal at this link. It is still possible to read news from Nepal at the nepalnews.com website.
Update: On May 28, 2008 the Kingdom of Nepal ceased to exist. For several years now, the people of this small Himalayan Kingdom have been very unhappy with the dictatorial manner of the KIng's heavy handed running of the country, so on April 10th, the people voted to abolish the Kingdom which for 240 years had been run by the Royal family. So on May 28th the Kingdom of Nepal became in independant republic. The people of the former Kingdom were very happy about this and they had two days of great celebration to mark this momentous occasion.
Now in addition to Radio Nepal's on demand broadcasts, there are several stations that offer live streams from Kathmandu in the new Republic of Nepal. One of the most reliable of them is Hits FM at 91.2 MHz which does offer some English programming as well as Nepalese music. A somewhat less reliable audio stream from Kathmandu is Times FM 90.6 FM. There will be certain times though when these audio streams are down due to power failures and Internet conjestion.
In this same area of the Himalayas, lies the exotic and often totally forgotten and unknown Kingdom of Bhutan which up until 1974 did not allow any visitors at all. The KIngdom was totally isolated from the rest of the world until then. It is fascinating to read Kuensel the Kingdom's daily English newspaper and to listen to the BBS Bhutan's national radio service in the capital city of Thimphu which is one of the smallest capital cities in the world. It is absolutely fascinating to listen to the Bhutan Broadcasting Service's English newscast, weather and community announcements. It really gives one a sense of what life in Bhutan is really like. Some of the lost and found announcements were just fascinating to listen to. The BBS used to make segments of their English broadcasts available as Windows Media wma files. But now they actually offer a live audio stream of their programming. They have two daily hour long English broadcasts at 05 and at 14 hours UTC.
Note: Bhutan has also done away with the classification of Kingdom and in February and March of 2008, they held free elections and have also become a democracy. This is part of the reason that the Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) has started streaming their live audio so that the rest of the world can learn about these events and so that Bhutanese people living abroad can follow them too.
Another country that I have always found fascinating is Indonesia especially the bustling capital city of Jakarta which is where the headquarters of RRI, Radio Republik INdonesia is located. The city of Manila in the Philippines also interests me.
Turning to the south Pacific, the island nations of the Pacific have always interested me. You can find news stories from throughout the region, here on the Pacific Islands Report website hosted by the University of the South Pacific in Hawaii.
My favorite Pacific island nation hands down, is the Cook Islands. It is really fascinating to read some of the articles from the Cook Islands News each week. This is the official Cook Islands Government website. Here is a travelog by a couple that visited the Cook Islands in 2006.
For two decades I have had an intense interest in Radio Cook Islands and I wished that somehow I could hear their broadcasts, especially their local English newscasts and Cook Island weather forecasts. Well, to my absolute delight as of June of 2007, Radio Cook Islands is finally streaming their audio on the net. And finally, here is a website that shows links to videos of the happy carefree relaxing music and uninhibited dancing of Cook Islanders.
Other Pacific island nations in the region that interest me include Christmas Island, Easter Island Fiji, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Kingdom of Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna islands. Actually there are two separate Christmas Islands in the world, the Christmas Island that the locals call Kirimati in the Line Islands group in the Pacific, and another Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean which is administered by Australia. So as you can see, I am fascinated in exotic places. That's why well known cities like London, Rome or Paris don't really interest me that much. I'd rather be heading to the Falkland Islands or St. Helena in the South Atlantic, or how about perhaps the most remote island in the world, Tristan da Cunha? In Africa, I have always had a fascination for the city of Capetown South Africa. I am also fascinated in the two countries of Burkina Faso, formerly Upper Volta until 1984, and also Togo in West Africa. You never hear anything about what's going on in those countries. I mean, sometimes you hear about what's going on in Ghana or Kenya or Mozambique, but Burkina Faso and Togo never get mentioned. It's almost as if they don't exist at all. Well, as you can see, there are many places around the world that have captivated me for many years. So now you know about my hobbies and interests, and by reading this, perhaps now you have gotten to know a little more about me and will have a better understanding of me as a person and just what makes me tick.