This TV show is brought to you by… or is it “buy”…

What we see in syndicated TV shows are a standard intro with opening theme music, and a closing theme as well.  What we DON’T see are the original integrated television commercials.  And that’s understandable.  Why would we want to see old TV commercials for old products? Well, in many cases TV shows made special television…

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A postcard from the 2016 Iowa State Fair Photo Competition

Backstory.  After a one-year hiatus, I chose to enter my pictures in the Iowa State Fair Photography Competition.  I selected a mixture of recent and heritage images, with each one fitting in specific themed categories.  Four images printed off, matted, mounted, foam-boarded, postaged, and shipped. Now I wait.  And wait.  And wait.  And wait. While…

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The K-Chuck Cabinet restoration, Part 2

Yes, I’m still working on restoring the K-Chuck Cabinet, a former radio cabinet from the 1930’s that I’m repurposing into a hideaway film and lens storage cabinet. And when we last left this project, I had removed the old varnish from the cabinet with a combination of Citristrip spray, some plastic scrapers, paper towels, and…

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K-Chuck Radio: Yes, your heart still works…

I’ve compiled these “armor-plated heart” K-Chuck Radio playlists before; they’re songs with sweet ballads, thoughtful melodies, and emotions that just grab your soul and won’t let go.  Songs of love, songs of loss, songs of longing and songs of heartache.  That’s what we’ve got today on K-Chuck Radio.  Turn up your speakers and get your…

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How to fluster a phone scammer by pretending to be the police

As you know, I’ve been having a lot of fun lately with telephone scammers and spammers.  Recently I’ve been getting the “Hi, my name is Richard from Windows technical support, your computer is running slow, okay?” calls. Right.  You sound more like Rajesh than Richard.  And unless that accent of yours belongs to Priyanka Chopra…

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Best of our TU Community Blogs, July 14, 2016: Ten for Thursday

Something to share before we start our weekly TU blog recap and review. Yesterday, the Times Union added the first of what I hope will be a continuing series.  On the front page of timesunion.com, they list a feature called “What are Times Union bloggers writing about?”  And from this, they showcase almost two dozen…

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Week 2 of the 2016 Graney’s Stout Summer Trivia League

Sometimes, when playing competitive bar trivia, you can have a great run of several correct questions in a row. This was NOT one of those nights. A lot of teams this week, myself included, struggled in Week 2 of the twelve-week summer trivial league at Graney’s Stout.  Some of the questions were absolute murder questions…

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