Running Silent, Nothing Happens

When you are out of touch with media, does anything really happen? If you don't hear/see the alert/storm/debate, did it really happen?

A few weeks ago my car radio was stolen again, so I am again in meditative driving mode.  I miss the Teaching Company lectures, but I am regarding this as a sort of term break.  And the radio wasn't my source of news anyway.

I'm not sure, apart from Yahoo headlines when I log on here, I have much of a source of news anyway.  Some hurricane jokes blew completely over my head this week. "So how's that hurricane, Sandy?"  (Sandy is a misspelling of my real name.)  

"Oh she's calm now," I said after meeting a critical milestone on an difficult project. "Downgraded to a tropical depression."

It was several days before I realized the jokes weren't really about ME.  There WAS a Hurricane Sandy (a Sandy Cane) building on the east coast.  Well, so far away, and we have problems of our own.  The volcano is spewing again (causing itchy eyes and asthma-like breathing even several islands away) and a tsunami alert last night caused a lot of traffic accidents.  (There was no wave to speak of, just a lot of panic and fighting at gas stations.)  Alerts can be as bad as the real thing.

A friend on Maui who lives in the "inundation zone"called me during the alert period. She'd loaded up her car with all her meds, checkbooks, mobile devices, and was waiting it out on higher ground.  Her boat captain SO was a mile out at sea riding it out.  

It would have to be a HUGE tsunami, Biblical proportions as they say, to affect my living area.  The only thing I consider a real threat is that punk Kim Jong-un and his toy army. Did you know the country has an official website?

I'd been watching a movie, The Silent War, with Tiny Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) in his second role as a blind man (that I know of).

"Stop staring at me," she said. "I'm not staring, I'm blind," he said.

Blind Swordsman

Not a swordsman this time (at right), but a blind piano tuner recruited as a spy by a People's Republic of China agency doing intelligence work against the Nationalists just post-1949.  At least in Ashes of Time you could see his eyes, which are two of his most endearing features. (And his hair wasn't cut like Kim Jong-un's.) In this one he was always wearing shades, or a blindfold, or cloudy contacts to simulate damaged corneas, or bandages after he gouged out his surgically corrected eyes.  Seeing had conflicted with his hearing.  There was some sort of ethical/moral thing going on, but without any Oedipal connotations, I think.

Anyway, in the middle of The Silent War, I chatted with my friend.  Since I haven't turned on broadcast or cable television in months, I was at a loss to discuss the debates (I know who I'm voting for); the related satire of Stewart and Colbert;  the analysis of MacNeil-Lehrer (although isn't one of them dead?).  Fortunately since I have acquired a bad cold, which I attribute to vog,  temperature inversion, and stress, I had an excuse to not really say anything.  I can barely breathe let alone comment on politics.  

So morning after the non-tsunami, I suppose I could poke around and find out what's happening on that East Coast, (or even in Alaska where the earthquake that generated the non-tsunami originated).  Or I could ignore it. Someone is bound to tell me about it tomorrow. And it won't make a difference to me at all.  Like none of it ever happened.  Not listening.

MISWIRING

We've been having some wet and wild weather the past 15 hours, starting during my last Chinese painting class of the session, perhaps the last ever: our teacher is considering retirement and may or may not teach another class in January. (She says I must do lots of painting in China...I can sell paintings at the Great Wall. A Westerner selling Chinese paintings. "They'll be amazed. You can make money.")

We thought the class might not even continue through the evening...lots and lots of dramatic lightning and thunder, not common for Hawaii, and the rain and flashing skies continued during my drive home like some short circuitry in the heavens. The security guard at the art school advised us not to use the elevators. There were power outages and traffic jams all over the Island. "I don't want anyone stuck in the elevator," he said. We shared our end-of-class potluck with him and eventually left, no problems.

Driving out of town, I had to wait at a corner where traffic was being delicately directed through an intersection where the traffic signals had failed. Then, once on the freeway, coincident with a shocking burst of energy in the sky, my iPod, running through yet another new car radio, choked to a halt. I got a message on the radio display: "Miswiring. Check wiring and then restart unit." How disappointing. I was getting some good practice with the tones of Mandarin in a language course MP3. Ta ma de!

The new radio, installed over the past weekend was to replace the other new one (stored in the trunk for two years before installation) that got soaked and drowned in a storm on April 15. After nine months, I had finally gotten used to its excessive obsessive control features and had learned a lot, mainly using it for Teaching Company CD lectures. I ordered a cheaper simpler replacement from Crutchfield (highly recommended, great customer service) and the Wizard installed it last weekend, a little more easily this time since he had repaired the reckless damage the thieves had done previously. Easier to use, and a bit more economical, and more attractive, really, it sounds just the same and took me less time to figure out how to set the clock than the old new one.

But if it's not theives, it's what? "The lightning had nothing to do with it," the Wizard assured me. And he should know. "I switched the right and left speaker wires...I think that's what the problem is. Try to reset it, and if it doesn't work, I'll look at it later." Still it seems spooky that at that particular moment...miswiring indeed. This is the fifth radio I have had installed in TAO 61. Perhaps I should just get used to the sound of silence again. And the thunder.

RADIO WU WEI

I have been struggling with my new car radio, which is far from intuitive and has a manual written by so-called tech writers whose resumes must include the production of countless VCR manuals. The radio's buttons are tiny, the legends hard to see. But it's JVC so it must be good? I managed to get it to receive local radio stations and playback from my iPod, but, like MS Word, it has countless unnecessary and unintuitive features and options. Somehow I locked the CD player, the feature for which I bought it in the first place, to play Teaching Company CDs so I could learn something on my daily work commute. Alas, the radio would display nothing but the cryptic ODAA-I, whatever that meant.

I was all ready to just buy another radio, when I thought, "I'll give it one more try and then call customer service." Observing the time-honored tradition of RTFM, I retrieved the cryptic and convoluted user guide, printed in four languages, and noticed the big print on the manual's back page:

With my Hello Kitty pencil's point, I activated the reset button, and, woo hoo, now the CD player works. I reset my four favorite station presets (who actually needs 15 FM station presets and another 5 AM?--to say nothing of an option to allow user-entered text-based IDs for the favored stations, like FOX TALK NEWS, or HIP HOP CLASSICS or OLD FART OLDIES. Perhaps this comes naturally to folks who have been sending text messages on phones for the past decade). I think I have finally mastered the sequence of actions needed to set the radio clock, although it seems like it should do that automatically.

I admit all this digital technology is so cool, but I have never had the patience of a young friend who said, "When I get a new device, I just spend an hour or two with it figuring out all the commands." I want a wu wei radio. On-off. Volume up-down with a knob. A couple of push buttons for favorite stations. Maybe another button or two to activate the iPOD or CD.

At least I didn't embarrass myself with a call to a tech support rep who would have thought I was an idiot, muttering to himself, "RTFM."

RADIO DAZE
After two-and-a-half years going without, I finally have a radio installed in my car. It's been a valuable exercise in mindfulness to drive with nothing but the chatterings of my monkey mind and the sound of TAO 61's (the car's) exhaust. But this weekend, the Wizard kindly struggled to rewire the dashboard -- the thieves had made a real mess -- and get the new JVC radio+CD/MP3/iPOD-ready device installed and working. Still in the box, it had been taking up space in my trunk for two years. And in a Miata trunk, a half-cubic-foot is a lot of real estate.

It's a shiny black and silver thing, with tiny buttons, nearly invisible legends and indicators, and a coded display that I simply can't figure out, let alone see clearly. I did manage to set the clock, but I can't activate it to display the time. I'm feeling incompetent, maybe just old. (I understand why the Wizard wants an analog radio that tunes manually with a dial.)

I did manage to find a radio station this morning. I learned in a local newscast that a tree had fallen on someone and an assessment of the weak old ironwoods on the beach would begin---more tree wars; and that a nomination for the State Supreme Court Chief Justice with an unpronouncable--at least by the newscaster--Samoan name, Fa'auuga To'oto'o, had been criticized by the bar association. I once sat on a jury in his courtroom and thought he was pretty just. And I should give credit to our newscaster for trying; he has trouble with even simple things, recently commenting that we need to free ourselves of dependence on "important" oil.

Bored with the news, I opted for a CD, first of a Teaching Company series on comparative religion. But to effectively use the thing, it looks like I'm going to have to take a graduate class in radio operation -- or at least sit patiently for a while with a manual that's about as helpful as VCR documentation. (My iPAD came with no instructions, so intuitive it was, at least for a veteran Mac user --although someone considering one told me she took a class to learn it first-- I only had to ask a friend three questions about a couple of things I would have figured out anyway.)

The glitzy blingy look of the radio faceplate may help me to remember to remove it to prevent a fourth radio heist from my ragtop...it looks about as appropriate in the 20-year-old dashboard as a big diamond and ruby ring on a wrinkled hand with liver spots. (I need to schedule a detailing, to say nothing of a manicure and a facial.) My all-time favorite Sony, a couple of receivers back, was dull black and disappeared into the dashboard, although that didn't stop the rip-off artist.

If I have to actually learn how to use a car radio, I might just continue to listen to the sound of silence.

And there's something else; it really wants new speakers.