Every once in a while, I stop to think about how much has changed in the relatively short time that has been my life (so far). Oh, there’s bad shit, yeah, but there’s good shit, too. Or pretty interesting shit, at least.

I mean, when I was a kid, TV was black and white, and there was only AM radio (now, there might have been FM at the time, but not up here that I recall). When FM finally rolled around, there weren’t many stations, but damned if there wasn’t a hell of a lot more to listen to. The best around here was WOUR, 96.9 in Utica, They played the kind of stuff you hear on the Technicolor Web of Sound (except, as we moved into the 70’s, we started to get into punk and ‘new wave’ and what was ‘alternative’ music before they coined the phrase), and lots of other nifty shit that you’d never have heard on AM (like anything longer than 3 minutes). Now, of course, radio mostly sucks here. That’s part of the bad shit.

But, check it out. Communications satellites were basically born when I was. If you wanted to have satellite communication, you had to do it when the bird was above the horizon in both places. Until they managed to get geostationary satellites in the air. Now, I get my teevee from a satellite (actually an array of four or five satellites). I get bummed out if I can’t get a decent wireless Internet connection, and I can’t remember the last time I was out of cell phone range.

Amazing how far things have come. But I still miss those early days of FM.