I had an amazing conversation standing in front of the bank waiting for it to open this morning.

I got there too early. I left a little early because the geek convention is on my way to town and I wanted to drive by the hotel and Bay Center to try to spot geeks. But the hotel has a uniform dude keeping cars from parking and there was no sign of any geeks anywhere from Alcaniz St.
So I headed on down to the Wells Fargo on Garden.

Shit it was 25 minutes to opening when I got there. I had brought the neighbor's newspaper (I'm retrieving it for them while they're out of town) and I was worried about remembering to put it back in the plastic bag so it wouldn't have looked like I read it. That's because seaoat has made an impression on me about this sort of ethical question. lol

Anyway I picked up the paper and read the front page. It was all good. A headline story saying studies show geezers are no longer more risky drivers than whippersnappers.
Another headline story revealing there are so many throngs of snowbirds trying to ride that sightseeing bus on the island, and the story of it is all the people who are being turned away because they can't accomodate them all.
As a Pensacolian (transplant not native), it makes me feel damn proud of the place I grew up in knowing that so many people want to come so far to see it.
Even if it is a just a little side trip from the actual reason they're here which of course is to escape the utility bills in winter. Hell my latest Gulf Power bill was $248. For a 1400 sq foot house. In what they like to call the fucking "sunbelt".
What in gods name must it be for a Minnesotan or Canadian or New Englander.

Anyway, About 10 tell nine I see this old redneck get out of his car and walk up to the door. So I figure I better get in line. And that's when a really amazing conversation ensued.

Gotta go. I'll try to pick this up later.

I have a hard time believing that you would wait for the Bank to open......I would think you would break a window or something.

No Seaoat....Bob's a good guy.

Your conversation ain't nothin Bob ..seaoats been talkin to an ass all morning.

No Seaoat....Bob's a good guy.

You have become delusional.....put the cough syrup down. I hope you are feeling better and miss your posts, but I know some days when you are not feeling well....this place is too much work.

2seaoat wrote:No Seaoat....Bob's a good guy.

You have become delusional.....put the cough syrup down.  I hope you are feeling better and miss your posts, but I know some days when you are not feeling well....this place is too much work.

LoL....no cough syrup. Still have a little residual pneumonia in the right middle lobe.

LoL....no cough syrup. Still have a little residual pneumonia in the right middle lobe.

Be very careful and rest. The second bout with the big P is ALWAYS worse than the first...........but why is your keyboard covered with sticky cherry flavored stuff if it is not cough medicine.......It has to be those sticky keys causing you defend Bob who starts a thread.....we hijack it......and then he comes back and has forgotten why he started the thread.

Bob wrote:I got there too early.  I left a little early because the geek convention is on my way to town and I wanted to drive by the hotel and Bay Center to try to spot geeks.  But the hotel has a uniform dude keeping cars from parking and there was no sign of any geeks anywhere from Alcaniz St.
So I headed on down to the Wells Fargo on Garden.

Shit it was 25 minutes to opening when I got there.  I had brought the neighbor's newspaper (I'm retrieving it for them while they're out of town) and I was worried about remembering to put it back in the plastic bag so it wouldn't have looked like I read it.  That's because seaoat has made an impression on me about this sort of ethical question.  lol

Anyway I picked up the paper and read the front page.  It was all good.  A headline story saying studies show geezers are no longer more risky drivers than whippersnappers.  
Another headline story revealing there are so many throngs of  snowbirds trying to ride that sightseeing bus on the island,  and the story of it is all the people who are being turned away because they can't accomodate them all.
As a Pensacolian (transplant not native),  it makes me feel damn proud of the place I grew up in knowing that so many people want to come so far to see it.
Even if it is a just a little side trip from the actual reason they're here which of course is to escape the utility bills in winter.  Hell my latest Gulf Power bill was $248.  For a 1400 sq foot house.  In what they like to call the fucking "sunbelt".
What in gods name must it be for a Minnesotan or Canadian or New Englander.  

Anyway,  About 10 tell nine I see this old redneck get out of his car and walk up to the door.  So I figure I better get in line.  And that's when a really amazing conversation ensued.

Gotta go.  I'll try to pick this up later.

Hey, you should go see those geeks. Did you see the pics and costumes of some of the so called female geeks in the newspaper the other day? Something you might like to see.

The dude wasn't actually dressed in coveralls,  but whatever his clothing was, it really resembled that.  You've seen it.  A coveralls colored blue shirt and blue pants and a real homely look.  Could have been my age or probably a little older based on what he revealed.

I made the same joke about waiting for a door to open that I always do.
That got a little laugh from him.  And then we do what we always do waiting for that pot to boil,  we look at our watches about every minute to see if it's 5 minutes or 3 minutes to go.  
But he says "I forgot to set my watch this morning".  And then I had him on the ropes where I wanted him.  I pulled out my droid and said (humbly like always) "this will give us the time to the second".  I then started to explain why it's so accurate.  At which point he looks me right in the eye and says "I have a little short-wave radio at home and I use WWV to set my watch".
To which I could only reply (this time sincerely humbly) "you're doing exactly what this thing is doing" and he realized he had shot me down but he let me know in a humble way too.  There was never any one-upsmanship or pissing contest in this conversation.  Just me realizing this book was definitely not what was on it's cover.  So from that point I turned to interviewer with him being the interviewee.  In other words,  I went into listening mode but I knew I also needed to throw him the right questions.  

I asked him "do you listen to much shortwave"?.  And again humbly he took me back to when his grandfather had a console radio with the shortwave band on it.  Told me about how the antenna wire went up the chimney and then over to a tree in the yard.  And that it could get "EVERYTHING" and that yes he had listened to a whole lot of it.  And how that inspired him to keep listening for the rest of his life.  So I asked him "do you listen to foreign country radio broadcasts in english on shortwave".  He answered yes and said "I used to listen to a lot of Radio Moscow".  I asked him "what did you think of it"?
His answer was "that was when it was the Soviet Union and I was lot younger".   After further conversation I quickly realized that he had listened to a lot of overseas radio and for that reason had a lot broader perspective on world events than I do.

But it was what came next that I love most.  He casually starts telling me something that it appeared he thought I knew nothing about.
He says "I used to listen to a station which was across the border in Mexico,  XERF.  It was 250,000 watts".
When he said that,  I looked him in the eye and said "you actually listened to Wolfman Jack as it was happening?".  I said "where were you when you were listening?"  He said,  "right here,  Pensacola".  And then he very humbly did an impersonation of the Wolfman that would get him an audition in any comedy club.
At that point they opened the bank.  And then we went to separate tellers and then on our separate ways.  

I've only ever talked to two people who were there for the real-life American Graffiti.  One is my very good friend yella.  And now this person.
I didn't even know that you could get the Wolfman in Pensacola.  And the guy at the bank said it came in clear as a bell.  
So when I got home and googled Wolfman's wiki page,  I discovered XERF was being listened to as far away as Europe and Russia.
Damnit if I had only known about it at the time.  I didn't learn about Wolfman Jack until Opie made me aware of it.

Wait a minute it wasn't fucking Opie who turned me on to Wolfman Jack. It was of course George Lucas.
Boy am I getting senile.

Yella this is for you and the stranger both.

from wiki. Wolfman Jack was Robert Weston Smith.

In 1963, Smith took his act to the border when the Inter-American Radio Advertising's Ramon Bosquez hired him and sent him to the studio and transmitter site of XERF-AM at Ciudad Acuña in Mexico, a station whose high-powered border blaster signal could be picked up across much of the United States. In an interview with writer Tom Miller, Smith described the reach of the XERF signal: "We had the most powerful signal in North America. Birds dropped dead when they flew too close to the tower. A car driving from New York to L.A. would never lose the station."[4] Most of the border stations broadcast at 250,000 watts, five times the U.S. limit, meaning that their signals were picked up all over North America, and at night as far away as Europe and the Soviet Union. It was at XERF that Smith developed his signature style (with phrases like "Who's this on the Wolfman telephone?") and widespread fame. The border stations made money by renting time to Pentecostal preachers and psychics, and by taking 50 percent of the profit from anything sold by mail order. The Wolfman did pitches for dog food, weight-loss pills, weight-gain pills, rose bushes, and baby chicks. There was even a pill called Florex, which was supposed to enhance one's sex drive. "Some zing for your ling nuts," the Wolfman would say.[5]

That sales pitch was typical of Wolfman Jack's growling, exuberant on-air style. In the spirit of his character name, he would punctuate his banter with howls, while urging his listeners to "get naked" or "lay your hands on the radio and squeeze my knobs". Part of the persona was his nocturnal anonymity; listeners from coast to coast had no idea how to recognize the face behind the voice that said things like "Wolfman plays the best records in the business, and then he eats 'em!"

XERB was the original call sign for the border blaster station in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, which was branded as The Mighty 1090 in Hollywood, California. The station boasted "50,000 watts of Boss Soul Power". That station continues to broadcast today with the call sign XEPRS-AM. XERB also had an office in the rear of a small strip mall on Third Avenue in Chula Vista, California. It was not unlike the small broadcast studio depicted in the film American Graffiti (which was filmed at KRE in Berkeley). It was located only 10 minutes from the Tijuana–San Diego border crossing. It was rumored that the Wolfman actually broadcast from this location during the early-to-mid-1960s. Smith left Mexico after eight months and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota to run station KUXL. Even though Smith was managing a Minneapolis radio station, he was still broadcasting as Wolfman Jack on XERF via taped shows that he sent to the station. Missing the excitement, however, he returned to border radio to run XERB, and opened an office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles area in January 1966. The Wolfman would record his shows in Los Angeles and ship his tapes across the border into Mexico, where they would then be beamed across the U.S.[6] It was during his time broadcasting on XERB that Smith met Don Kelley, who would become his personal manager and business partner over a period of over twenty years. It was Kelley who saw the potential for Wolfman Jack to become more than a radio personality. Kelley started to work on a strategy to transform Smith from a cult figure to a mainstream entertainer in film, recordings, and television. He promoted Smith to the major media and formed enduring relationships with key journalists.

In 1971, the Mexican government decided that its overwhelmingly Roman Catholic citizens should not be subjected to proselytizing and banned the Pentecostal preachers from the radio, taking away 80 percent of XERB's revenue. He then moved to station KDAY 1580 in Los Angeles, which could only pay him a fraction of his former XERB income. However, Smith capitalized on his fame by editing his old XERB tapes and selling them to radio stations everywhere, inventing rock and roll radio syndication. He also appeared on Armed Forces Radio from 1970 to 1986. At his peak, Wolfman Jack was heard on more than 2,000 radio stations in fifty-three countries.[7] He was heard as far off as the Wild Coast, Transkei, on a station based there, Capital Radio 604.[8] In a deal promoted by Don Kelley, The Wolfman was paid handsomely to join WNBC in New York in August 1973, the same month that American Graffiti premiered, and the station did a huge advertising campaign in local newspapers that the Wolfman would propel their ratings over that of their main competitor, WABC, which had "Cousin Brucie" (Bruce Morrow). The ads would proclaim, "Cousin Brucie's Days Are Numbered", and they issued thousands of small tombstone-shaped paperweights which said, "Cousin Brucie is going to be buried by Wolfman Jack".[9] After less than a year, WNBC hired Cousin Brucie, and Wolfman Jack went back to California to concentrate on his syndicated radio show. He moved to Belvidere, North Carolina, in 1989, to be closer to his extended family.[10] In the 80s, he did a brief stint at XeROK 80, another border blaster that was leased by Dallas investors Robet Hanna, Grady Sanders, and John Ryman. Ryman then moved Smith to Scott Ginsburg-owned Y95 in Dallas, Texas. Ryman and legendary programmer Buzz Bennet rocketed the station to fame.

ppaca wrote:

Hey, you should go see those geeks. Did you see the pics and costumes of some of the so called female geeks in the newspaper the other day? Something you might like to see.

I would dearly love to go see those geeks.  I even put on a Star Wars t-shirt today I got at a yard sale so I wouldn't look square.  
But then I googled to see what the admission price is.

Let's put it this way,  for me to pay $30 to get in a geek convention,  it would have to have George Lucas AND Spielberg AND Roddenberry AND Captain Kirk and Spock and Scotty and Bones and Chekov and Ohura AND Robert Crumb and all in there in person.
But I don't pay $30 to get Billy Dee Williams autograph even if he did play some role in Star Wars.

So I had planned to do what seaoat would not approve of and walk around in the lobby of the hotel without paying anything in hopes that would be good geek watching territory.
But it's too hard to park so that's out too.  So I'll just have to see it through the eyes of Sue Straughn.

$30? WTF

You can park at the civic center and walk across. Go into the bar on the first floor, whoops can you afford a beer?    Be sure to take a box of milk duds.

Better yet, wear your t-shirt and get a cape and mask and just stroll in like your with the group.

That sounds like a plausible plan, ppaca. Especially the part where I can ALWAYS afford a beer. I don't even need to see any geeks and it's still worth it. lol

Bob wrote:That sounds like a plausible plan,  ppaca.  Especially the part where I can ALWAYS afford a beer.  I don't even need to see any geeks and it's still worth it.  lol

You know you could wear a long coat and sneak you're own beer in and just mingle in the lobby. Why pay their prices for the beer?

ppaca wrote:

You know you could wear a long coat and sneak you're own beer in and just mingle in the lobby. Why pay their prices for the beer?

If seaoat sees that he's gonna tell both of us we're sinners.