Whose dream?
Sometimes on the way into sleep I'll pop into a mini-dream that is so weird or nonsensical that it wakes me up immediately and I have to start over. Most of those pop-ins are visual and not easily described or written. This one was nicely verbal and linear and writable, with a bonus that the subject of thought was itself parallel to the process of phase shift!

It went like this... using italics to represent the exact moment when dream mode switched in.....

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Grr. The FM radio is drifting. Stuck between stations. That's annoying. Should I get up and try to tune it? No. In the first years of FM, most radios had separate AM and FM and FM/AFC settings on the bandswitch. There wasn't any meaningful difference between the latter two; you didn't need to turn off the phase-locking to tune the radio. Back around 1961 I had an odd FM-only radio that had only two controls, the tuning and the FM to AFC switch. The radio was made by Blonder-Tongue. Now there's a name you couldn't use nowadays. Censors would pick it off immediately. Blonder-Tongue is a lot like the Spanish movie "Seven Celias and a Charlatan", but I doubt that the readers would WHAT? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? THAT DIDN'T MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE! There's no such movie, Spanish or otherwise, it wouldn't be "a lot like Blonder-Tongue" if it did exist, and I wouldn't know about it anyway!

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After fully waking, I googled a bit. (1) Blonder-Tongue did make an FM-only radio that was similar to the one I owned, but the one I owned was a Sarkes-Tarzian like this. I don't know why it was 'rebranded' in dream mode. (2) B-T didn't get picked off by the censors. It's still active 50 years later, still making the same main product line of VHF amplifiers and antenna splitting systems. (3) There never was a movie called "Seven Celias and a Charlatan". Sounds interesting, though. I'd watch it! [As always, I wish to hell I could channel some of that dream-time creativity into wake-time. If you paid me a thousand bucks to come up with an interesting title for a Spanish movie, I'd just draw a complete blank.]


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Here is a fascinating article on the history of Sarkes Tarzian. Like Atwater Kent and McMurdo Silver, it wasn't two guys named Mr Sarkes and Mr Tarzian, it was one man. First name Sarkes, last name Tarzian. His company was most famous for components; nearly all TVs and radios of the 50s had some S-T parts in their chassis. After the brief venture into complete radios, they stopped manufacturing in 1970. The company, still run by the Tarzian family, is now a holding company for several radio and TV stations.

Labels: Alternate universe, TMI

  ¶ 3:57 PM