I will not answer any questions afterwards

Good Afternoon to Everyone at Czech TV

CQ CQ CQ

Listening to :- Aion - Dead Can Dance

I used to listen to a lot of short-wave radio when I was in my teens. I started because Radio Moscow was stuck between the two frequencies that Radio 1 used on Medium Wave. (The link to Radio 1 is meaningless now - you won't find Dave Lee-Travis or Kid Jensen on that site). Radio Moscow phased in and out and was so difficult to hear that you only ever got half a story. I listened to it occasionally during the Falklands war but it blindly reported the "facts" from Argentina rather than from the dour-faced Ian McDonald of the Ministry of Defence (who sounded like a Speak-Your-Weight machine) and so would often report things like Aircraft Carriers being sunk. Maybe that was confusion over The Atlantic Conveyor which was carrying Chinooks. It was odd that the Russian presenter who had so obviously learnt their English either in the US or using US tapes, tried so hard to make the magazine programmes jolly and un-threatening. I got the feeling that they couldn't actually understand what they were saying and just read out phonetically spelled cue cards. All the possibility that communicating with the west might corrupt them was removed. I hear Antoine de Caunes used to do this for Rapido because he could not speak English. Contrast the Soviets' upbeat delivery with the slow talk of both Ian McDonald and the presenters on some of the Voice of America programmes who used a limited vocabularly and left a pause between every word.

What I really wanted to listen to was The American Forces Network (it used to be on 15430 khz but it was so fuzzy as to be unlistenable). Now we have the Internet, these things don't sound so exciting. Children will grow up without any sense of the mystery created by distance and the trouble you had communicating with people at those distances. I used to be so impressed that any phone in the world could connect to any other phone; now it is just part of the furniture shall we say - like TV or Orange Juice - no great shakes.

The heading for this morning's entry is visible just below where I am typing this and I have just said it out loud to myself. It is strange how a phrase in one language which to a native is guttural and earthy (making it great ammunition for profanity) sounds powerful and dignified in another. Silflay Hraka, u Embleer-Rah is the utterance of a great warrior. Say it in English and you have something for a drunk or a teenager just getting used to swearing.