Post 2613 - Monday

It is Monday evening, past 10pm. Newbie is here with me on my recliner. I have the FM radio built into  the sound bar on and tuned to News 95.7. I will turn in shortly.

Patricia made cream cod fish for dinner. You smash up some boiled potatoes and pour the fish mixture on top of it. It's a very hearty meal, and very filling. And delicious.

I am preparing for some Spring cleaning around here. I have a bunch of old vhs tapes to throw out. I am holding on to some of them in order to digitize the contents. There are shows on some of these tapes that simply do not exist in any other form. You may recall that a couple of years ago I located a tape of a show about notorious Halifax madam Ada McCallum. I have other unique items on other tapes, including some editions of the old Maritime Mysteries program hosted by the late Bill Jessome. He did the books later on, but in the 1990's, he produced these 3 or 4 minute features for Live at Five. From time to time, CTV would fill a half hour evening time slot with quite a few of these features edited together. I recorded two or three of these programs, and they languish on some old tapes in the house. I have found but one of them, but I know I have more.

I miss these old features. Live at  Five is now called CTV at Five or something, but they don't do that kind of stuff any more. CBC radio has a bi-weekly feature discussing stories of old Halifax, which became a book that I now own, but I still miss Bill Jessome's "Maritime Mysteries". Since his retirement from CTV in 1998, the tv feature ceased to be; but he did 3 of those books before his health reached the point where he could no longer do them. He died in 2013.

I have old editions of CJCH AM morning shows from the mid 1990's, hosted by John Biggs and Kelli Rickard. When CHNS had its 75th anniversary in 2001, they had a weekend-long celebration, and I recorded as much of it as possible. I found most of those tapes this weekend.

Let's see here. The Hotline on CJ was simulcast on television in the 1995-96 season. I recorded quite a few of those shows to boot. My favourite one was on March 19, 1996, when they discussed old unsolved murders. When it was first broadcast, I was scared crapless, mostly because one or two of those crimes took place in the part of the city where I was living at the time. They talked at some length about the 1955 murder of Michael Resk, still the oldest unsolved murder on the books (although I think there were murders during the war that were never solved, and very likely ones from long before that. Let's amend it to say that the 1955 Resk murder is the oldest one the Halifax police keep track of).

I have lots of old documentaries broadcast on A&E and TLC back when it was called The Learning Channel. One of them from 1996 was about survivalists, people who didn't trust the US government and who had decided to live off the land and in a way that did not require intervention of others. I wonder if those people still live like that, or if they decided that a world of iPod's and tablets and Netflix isn't that bad after all.

I have a lot of these vintage things. I also have a lot of movies I recorded back in the day, and which I have on dvd or on a hard drive or whatever. No need to keep those tapes. Gone. Episodes of "Politically Incorrect" with Bill Maher were very interesting back in the day, but I can't digitize everything, can I?

After I have decided what stuff to transfer to an electronic format, I will have to sit down and gradually perform that task. It is a real-time process, so it will take a long time. But it will be done, and when it is done, I will have a collection of interesting broadcasts and the like that will make me the envy of... of... well, maybe somebody somewhere.

But,first, I have to get off me arse and figure out what to keep and what to toss.  That's a big job in itself.

Too tired to think about it tonight.  Maybe tomorrow.

See you then.

Bevboy