Which would have been utterly futile, since we had only one channel back then, anyway.
]]>When it comes to TV’s, I must admit: I never had the pleasure of mechanically tuning a TV. Not until after I spread my wings (as #5 and the last one to leave the nest), did my parents purchase a TV, and by that time it had color and a decent remote.
When I was young, though, my sisters and I would go to acquaintances of my parents three streets south of us every other Wednesday afternoon. Those people had (WooHoo) a Black & White TV: half the neighborhood kids would show up, curtains were closed and nobody was allowed to speak. Let alone touch a tuner dial!
Times were different back then!
(My parents never owned, nor knew how to operate, a car. And only once in their lives did they leave the country for a short vacation in Luxemburg, which is, oh, 50 miles south of where my father was born. And I STILL have a sister -the youngest even- who does not have, nor wants, a drivers license).
I DID mechanically tune radios though! Even a radio that I built myself AFTER I ‘built’ my first ‘non-tunable’ radio: We lived VERY close to a very powerful marine band radio transmitter in Scheveningen (there’s that word again!): all you needed was a crystal earphone and then connect both leads of its cord to a honker of a germanium diode and voila, ‘Scheveningen Radio’ loud and clear!
I never got that second ‘tunable’ radio to work though, and I think that’s when I decided to leave hardware to more nerdy guys and become a software person, although I never lost this possible remnant of my hardware period: the unstoppable urge to take things apart (much to my parents’ dismay, I always considered putting things back together a complete and utter waste of time).
Oddly enough, the word “Dutch” isn’t Dutch, it’s English, but it sounds like the word “Duits” which is the Dutch word for “German”, even though the Germans themselves refer to it as “Deutsch”, while we refer to our language as “Nederlands” and don’t like to be called “Duits” (since we had that nasty fight with “Duitsland” (“Deutschland”) from 1940 to 1945), even though we posess “Duytschen” blood according to our National Anthem, which every genuine Dutch person shrugs off as not REALLY meaning ‘Duits’, even thought it actually does.
Oh and both our Queen and her mother were married to German princes, so they were Duits (Deutsch), but became Dutch, which really isn’t a Dutch word at all, but an English one that sounds like “Duits”, which really means German … etc etc etc….
Got that?
There will be a test tomorrow.
Yes, they do.
(source)
]]>I have however flipped through the dial in real life. How many people have missed the pleasures of a mechanical tuner I wonder?
And yes, copy/paste is required for anything Dutch other than the word “Dutch” itself.
]]>The Chief Technology Officer of the company I work for has a TV with a DIAL?
Maybe it’s time to do some more eBay-ing and get something more, uhm, 21st century-ish? 😉
]]>As for a tatoo: personally I’m not into bodily mutulation. I only permit needles stuck into me for medical purposes 1. You know me: if I want to silently express myself, I use t-shirts.
As for no local dialects being involved, I think that’s the beauty of Chinese characters: I wasn’t aware of this until recently some of my Chinese friends pointed this out to me: one spoke Cantonese the other one Mandarine. They can’t understand eachother’s lanuages! But they DO use the same (pictorial) written language (characters). So, while they can’t TALK to each other, they can simply write it down, and the other can then read and understand it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we ALL had such a common written language? It would wipe out the (written) language barrier! And we don’t have to invent such a language: it already exists! Chinese characters!
And thanks to the information density of Chinese characters, it probably would also prevent the need for ‘two-cheekers’.
(Psst… you copy/pasted that Dutch word, didn’t you?)
1 Which, btw, do NOT include acupuncture!
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