The IBM PCjr. Puzzle

The first personal computer that I ever owned was an IBM PCjr.

For you young 'uns out there, the IBM PCjr. was IBM's ill-fated attempt to introduce a "lite" version of their popular IBM Personal Computer to the home market back in 1984. This was back in the day when a full-blown IBM PC sporting two 5¼" diskette drives, no hard disk and 640K of RAM (yes, I said "K"; not gigabytes, not even megabytes, but "kay", as in "'Kay, after my word processing program is loaded, I have enough memory left for maybe a three-page document") cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000.

Oh, the idea was sound enough. Since most home users at that time were unwilling to shell out those kind of bucks for a bit of fledgling personal computer technology, especially when the likes of Apple, Commodore and Radio Shack offered much cheaper alternatives, IBM decided to entice them with a lower-cost version of their popular desktop business machine. The most obvious advantage was that those who were already increasingly using "Junior's" big brother at the office would have a smaller, yet compatible machine at home that could run the same software that they used at work. The Commodore 64, the Apple II and Radio Shack's Color Computer couldn't run WordPerfect or Lotus 123. Even when versions of those programs were eventually released for some of those other home computers, they still couldn't read a diskette created by an office PC. The PCjr. could.

Yes, it looked good on paper. Then IBM killed a perfectly good concept by fouling up the implementation as only IBM can. Part of the problem was in the way that they cut costs. For example, rather than including a "normal" keyboard, the PCjr. came equipped with a lower-cost keyboard that featured ridiculously small keys that were roughly the shape, size and color of Chiclets (by which I mean the gum). In fact, the keyboard became known far and wide as the "Chiclet" keyboard. The keys didn't even have letters, numbers or symbols printed directly on them. Instead, these were printed above and below the keys, on the keyboard itself. People hated it. Even the humble Commodore 64 and Radio Shack Color Computer included normal keyboards.

Unlike the IBM PC, the PCjr. didn't use a plug-in card for its graphical display; instead it used a chip built onto the motherboard. Although this chip did the graphical processing work, it had no memory of its own, unlike the plug-in video cards of the day, so some of the PCjr.'s memory had to be allocated for the graphical display, leaving less for programs and data. This was even more problematic since the PCjr. initially shipped with a maximum of just 128K of RAM (there was also a 64K version).

Although the PCjr. used the same Intel 8088 CPU that its big brother used, it ran more slowly than the PC because it didn't include a DMA (Direct Memory Access) chip, so some of the CPU's clock cycles had to be reserved for refreshing the RAM.

The biggest problem, however, was IBM's bizarre decision to make all of the PCjr.'s plugs completely incompatible with regular PC peripherals. You couldn't plug an IBM PC monitor into a PCjr. because the plug didn't fit. The same was true of a regular IBM PC keyboard, printer or joystick. IBM built special monitors, printers and joysticks just for the PCjr., and Junior owners were expected to buy them.

During the PCjr.'s short heyday, IBM licensed the character of Charlie Chaplin as the Junior's official spokesperson which, in hindsight, was ironically appropriate. Trying to get anything done with the PCjr. often felt very much like trying to eat a shoe.

Some of these shortcomings were eventually fixed, or at least worked around. The Chiclet keyboard was so reviled that IBM eventually gave in and released a more normal-looking keyboard for the PCjr. They even offered to replace Chiclet keyboards that had been shipped up to that point with the newer ones at no cost. Third party and after-market manufacturers eventually created upgrades that added more RAM and a DMA chip as well as adapters that would allow Junior users to plug regular PC peripherals into their machines, but these still had to be purchased separately. All in all, it was too little too late, and the PCjr. became the Edsel of computers.

In spite of its shortcomings, I liked my PCjr. It did have some cool features not found in a regular IBM PC. For example, its graphics chip was capable of displaying more colors than the IBM PC, which generally used a CGA graphics card and could display only four colors at a time. The PCjr. also had a built-in three-voice sound chip capable of playing harmonic music that sounded much superior to the PC's tinny, single-voice beeper. Computer games which specifically supported the machine looked and sounded better on the PCjr. than they did when running on its big brother, although they often ran more slowly.

My best friend, Mart, and I buy each other gifts for our respective birthdays and at Christmas time, being best friends after all. Over the years, we've sometimes given each other "gag" gifts, chosen with the intent to elicit a laugh or at least to raise an eyebrow rather than for their practical value, like the time that I gave Mart an audio cassette tape featuring sixty minutes of whale song.

"Whoa there, Halmanator," I hear you exclaim, "You've gone and started next week's post without finishing the last one!" I can understand why you might think so at this point. That's just because you don't know about the present that Mart sent me for the Christmas just passed. He sent me a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle promoting the IBM PCjr. I don't even want to know where he found it. Here it is:


Yeah, that's right Mart. I assembled it. Go ahead. Click on the picture. Get a nice, close look. Didn't think I'd do it, did you? But you forgot something. I'm out of work! I have all the time in the world on my hands! Go ahead! Gimme your best shot! Send me a model of the Eiffel Tower made entirely of match-sticks! I'll build that too! Muhahahahahaaaa!

You're goin' down, pal! Oh, you just wait until your birthday! Better clear that shed of yours, 'cause you're gonna need a large storage space, preferably with a lockable door! Nobody one-ups The Halmanator!

Easily Amused

Recently, I reminisced about how, during my boyhood, I would sometimes spend time watching raindrops splashing into puddles on rainy days. This may not seem like the sort of pastime that would hold most peoples' attentions for very long. Although I never timed myself, I daresay that this activity probably held my attention for far longer than most people would deem reasonable. Apparently I was already sorely in need of a life, even during my tender years.

It was always thus with me. My mother sometimes reminisces about my toddler years. Anyone who has ever parented a little boy between the ages of two and five years will agree that raising such a child is very much a "hands-on" activity. They tend to be full of energy, and they're into everything. You can't turn your back on them for a moment. Not so with me. According to mom, all I needed was a handful of Matchbox cars and I would sit quietly in some corner, playing with them for hours. Sometimes, she barely knew that I was there.

In fact, I've heard her recount, on a number of occasions, an anecdote about the time that our family moved to a new apartment. Mom set me down with my collection of Matchbox cars and left me to play while she went about the business of unpacking and arranging our new home. After several hours, as the sun began to set outside, I finally put down my cars, walked up to my mother and asked, "When are we going back home?" I spoiled my mother during my early years but, that's okay; I'm making up for it in my adulthood.

Things didn't change as I aged. During my schoolboy years, I would often pass the time when it wasn't raining playing bizarre solitary games which I had invented and whose appeal was apparent only to myself. One involved sitting in the backyard with plastic ships (essentially, bathtub or beach toys), dropping ants which I had caught onto their decks and watching as they clambered around. I was particularly satisfied when one of them would move between decks in the proper manner, by scurrying up or down a staircase or ladder, rather than straight up or down the wall, which I of course regarded as "cheating". I could never quite make the ants understand the rules of the game.

Another favorite game involved squeezing drops of water onto the north pole of a model globe, then turning the globe slowly and watching the droplets run down the northern hemisphere, toward the equator. If one of the mountain ranges, which were slightly raised, obstructed a droplet's path, I watched in fascination as it detoured around the perimeter or, more rarely, as it actually crested the summits and rolled down the other side, a giant tsunami besting even the mountains themselves. Once past the equator (i.e. the underside of the globe) I would muse as to how long the droplet could cling to the globe's surface before gravity overcame its adherence and it dropped off the face of the world. Antarctica was by far the driest continent on my globe.

If I happened to have inflated balloons handy (usually after a birthday or some such festivity), I would while away the hours with a game of "Battling Balloons". This involved dropping the balloons, which were filled with plain old carbon dioxide rather than helium and were therefore heavier than air, onto a heating vent on the floor. The rising warm air would toss the balloons around and, whichever one was the highest, was deemed to be "winning". I should point out that said heating vent was positioned near a corner of the room at the foot of a bed. The two walls that formed the room's corner and the foot of the bed served to corral the balloons over the heating vent, so that they couldn't easily escape the warm air current. Hence, they would jostle around, rising and sinking, jockeying for the coveted high ground while I watched. Good times!

Not all of the odd games that I invented were solitary. My neighbour and best friend, Mart, and I came up with a number of unusual two-player games. One was called "Hide-On-Each-Other". It's like Hide-And-Go-Seek, except that all players are both hider and seeker concurrently. The game involved skulking around our homes, trying to find and watch the other guy without being spotted ourselves.

Then there was the classic "Comeback Wheels". This involved the use of small plastic colored discs from some board game or other. We would set the discs on their edges on the floor, with the edge facing ourselves, then press our index fingers diagonally against the discs, exerting a simultaneous downward and forward pressure. Friction would hold the discs in place until the pressure caused them to spring free, in effect "flicking" the discs away from ourselves but spinning them in the opposite direction from their movement. The result was that the discs would skid away from us at first but then, as they lost momentum and gained traction from the counter-spin, come rolling back toward us. This game had no obvious object or conditions for winning. It was just fun to do.

You would probably think that, having reached adulthood, I've matured to the point where I no longer pass my time with such mindless pursuits. You would be mistaken. I've mentioned before, in this blog, that I enjoy computer games. What I didn't mention is that I don't always play games in the intended manner. (Well, come to think of it, I sort of did, didn't I? But that's not what I mean in this case). Even in the virtual world of the computer, I seem to have retained my youthful fascination with simply watching things unfold.

I'm an avid fan of Microsoft's Flight Simulator series. Their latest release provides a camera view that focuses on A.I. aircraft; that is, air traffic controlled by the computer rather than myself. I'd be embarrassed to admit how many hours I've spent, not actually flying, but just watching the A.I. aircraft while my simulated aircraft sat idle at an airport. In my own defense, or at least in the way of explanation, I'm intrigued by the behavior of the computer's A.I. (artificial intelligence). I find it fascinating to watch an A.I. aircraft taxi to a runway, take off, follow its flight path, enter a pattern, land, and then taxi to parking, all without any input from me. Sometimes, at busy airports, I've even seen A.I. aircraft abort an approach and go around because of traffic on the runway. The thought of a machine handling all that while (for normal people, at least) simultaneously modeling the flight characteristics of the player's aircraft and rendering the world realistically, not to mention weather, air traffic communications and even ground traffic, never loses its awe for me.

I've also spent a fair bit of time with The Sims, one of the more popular games available for the PC. For those unfamiliar with The Sims, the game is a sort of virtual doll house. You create a family, move it into a house, and control every aspect of their lives; their careers, their friends, their jobs, how they spend their leisure time and how the furnish and decorate their homes. I say that "you" do all of this. I do not. When I run The Sims on my computer, I often refrain from giving any of my characters any sort of guidance or instruction whatsoever. Instead, I simply watch them, curious to see what they will do when left to their own devices, much like the ants on the deck of my ship so many years ago. If they're tired and don't know enough to get some sleep, so be it. Watching them return from work the next day, only to pass out from exhaustion and crumple to the pavement before they can even enter their homes, much less reach their beds, only amuses me. Watching other passer-by Sims come across their dormant forms, stop to examine them, shrug their shoulders and go on their way amuses me even more.

I suppose that people like myself (and I do hope that there are others, else I'm worse than I thought) are so easily amused because we live largely inside of our own heads. Our own imaginations are our chief forms of entertainment. This has its advantages. If I ever become a quadriplegic, I'll wager I adjust to it much more easily than most would. Not that I'm suggesting anything.

The U/C Airplane Follies

My profile, as well as some of my previous posts, tell you that I'm an aviation enthusiast. I love flying, and I love airplanes. I prefer airplanes to helicopters. Admittedly, helicopters seem much more versatile than airplanes, but there's a certain aesthetic beauty to an airplane, its clean, streamlined contours and the way that its wings are outstretched to embrace the sky. Helicopters, by comparison, tend to look like bulbous, squat, ungainly beasts; noisy, flying egg-beaters. If Don Quixote had ever seen one, he would surely have jousted it full-tilt.

Sadly, I'm not a pilot but I compensate for this by filling every empty nook and cranny of my life with airplanes. I surround myself with airplane pictures and airplane calendars. My computer's desktop wallpaper and screen saver often feature photographs of airplanes. I spend a fair bit of time flying Microsoft's Flight Simulator on my home PC. I've taken a couple of introductory flights in small Cessnas over my home town and, for the past few years, I've gone soaring in gliders at least once each summer. In both cases, I've taken the controls for brief periods. In the winter, I wear a small bush plane pin on the lapel of my jacket. I also collect toy airplanes, and airplane models and miniatures. Some of those toys and miniatures have flown.

When I was about 13 years old, my dad bought me a U/C Cox P-40 Warhawk. U/C is an acronym for "U-Control", meaning a miniature flying airplane that's tethered to the flyer by a pair of strings. On the flyer's end, the strings are attached to opposite ends of a small control handle that the flyer holds in his hand. On the airplane's end, the strings are attached to opposite ends of a moving lever, called a bellcrank. By pivoting the wrist of the hand holding the control handle with the strings attached, the flyer moves the bellcrank which, in turn, moves the airplane's elevators up and down, causing the airplane to either climb or descend. There is no lateral control since the airplane, being tethered to the flyer, simply flies around him in a wide circle.

Seems simple enough, right? If all you have to worry about is climbing and descending, how hard can it be? Well, let's just say, if you saw me trying to fly this thing, or any U/C airplane, for that matter, you'd probably agree that it's a good thing I'm only a wannabe pilot.

I recall the first time that I attempted to fly the P-40. Dad and I went to a nearby schoolyard. It was summer, and school was out, so there was plenty of space, or so it seemed. The first lesson I learned that day about U/C flying is that it's a very good idea to pace out a complete circle around the spot at which the flyer intends to stand and ensure that there are no obstacles or obstructions inside that circle.

Dad took the airplane and walked away from me with it until the control lines became taut. He then fueled up the little .049 "Super Bee" gas engine that powered the craft, attached a battery to power the glow-plug, wound back the propeller on its starter spring and let it snap back. After a couple of false starts, the little motor sprang to life. I extended the arm holding the control handle in anticipation, and gave dad the "thumbs-up". He released the airplane, and it trundled away from him, quickly gaining speed. The tail lifted from the ground and then, just as she was getting light on her wheels, they (the wheels) caught the edge of a lawn that had rudely planted itself right in my flight path.

Well, okay, thinking back on it, I'm pretty sure that the lawn was in the flight path before we ever started the engine. This is why it's so important to check for obstructions inside the flight circle. It's not enough to have a clear, flat space for the airplane to taxi along at its starting position. That clear, flat space has to continue all the way around the circumference of the flight path. In my case, it did not.

Do you know what happens when a fast-moving airplane hits an immovable obstruction with its wheel struts? Pretty much the same thing that happens when a fast-moving person hits an immovable obstruction with his shins. The wheels (or shins) stop dead, but the body that either is attached to wants to keep going. Damn you Isaac Newton! My P-40 nosed unceremoniously into the dirt, and one of the wheel struts snapped. The little propeller managed to mow a three-inch diameter of the school's lawn before sputtering to a halt. Thus was my maiden U/C flight pre-emptively aborted.

I can't suppress a rueful smile when I think about how the scene would have looked to any of our neighbors that might have glanced out their windows at the time. First, they'd have seen dad and me, proudly strutting toward the schoolyard, carrying a shiny replica of a P-40 Warhawk and then, about 15 minutes later, they'd have seen the two of us, walking the other way, somewhat more slowly, me cradling my broken aircraft and wearing a decidedly dejected frown.

I was never able to fly the P-40 again after that. Although the engine still ran and the airplane itself was still more or less airworthy (despite a nasty crack along the nose and canopy), the broken wheel strut turned out to be an impassable barrier to flight. It proved impossible to glue that spindly piece of plastic back together with enough structural integrity to support the airplane through a successful takeoff, much less a jarring landing.

Having destroyed a relatively cheap toy that was made from rugged plastic and ready to fly the moment it came out of its box, I did what seemed the only sensible thing, which was to purchase a considerably more costly flying model airplane kit made from fragile, brittle balsa wood, which would take many hours of painstakingly careful assembly before I could even attempt to crash- er, that is, fly it.

Mind you, this wasn't until years later when I was in high school (it took me that long to get over the trauma). This time, it was a German JU87 Stuka dive bomber kit designed by the Paul K. Guillow company. Coincidentally, it could be configured as a U/C model and could be powered by the same Cox .049 Super Bee engine that had powered my old P-40 and, even more coincidentally, I still had it (the motor), although the P-40 itself was long gone by then. I hadn't considered, at the time, that mounting the power plant which had belonged to my ill-fated first flyable aircraft on this new model might be inviting disaster. Perhaps the motor was cursed! Perhaps it was still possessed by the ghost of the old P-40 (a natural enemy of the JU87 to begin with, being an American airplane) and was just waiting for its chance to visit the kind of destruction that its previous host had suffered on some new and unsuspecting airframe. In hindsight, that certainly appears to be the case.

The Stuka was built alongside my best friend, Mart, who had himself purchased a model of a de Havilland Mosquito, also from the Guillow's company. Mart was, if possible, even more foolhardy than I, having chosen a two-place aircraft. Do you know what it's like trying to start two .049 Super Bee engines anything like simultaneously? These engines tend to behave like finicky lawnmower engines. Whether or not they decide to start, when turned, depends on a number of variables including the ambient air temperature, the alignment of the planets and how nicely you talk to them. One engine would start and the other would fail. Then, after several more unsuccessful attempts, the second engine would finally fire, just as the first engine sputtered out, having exhausted its minuscule fuel supply. It was an exercise in frustration, to say the least.

Mart and I spent months assembling our respective models, carefully cutting the frames and formers, painstakingly running the stringers along the wings and fuselage, connecting the bellcrank and control rods to the elevators and, finally, covering the finished skeletal structures with a delicate tissue paper skin that was then painted and strengthened with a layer of fuel-proof "dope". I wasn't content to simply build my model as per the instructions, either. Oh no! I had to add a number of my own, personal "enhancements", such as building small, box-like compartments with forward-facing grilles under each wing. My idea was to fill these compartments with talcum powder. When the airplane picked up speed, the air flowing through the grilles would blow the talcum powder out the back, simulating a stream of white "smoke" trailing behind the airplane. This gives you some idea of my overconfidence in my own abilities at the time.

For the finishing touch, I added a custom bit of paint work to my finished model. Remembering how certain pilots during the war liked to name their mounts, I painted the name "ZERSTÖRER" (German for "DESTROYER") along the nose of my aircraft.

Given all the painstaking work that we had put into our models, Mart and I didn't rush to fly them. We waited patiently for the perfect day; sunny, dry, calm and windless. When that day finally came, we again made our way to a local schoolyard; not the same one where my P-40 had made its ill-fated maiden flight, mind you. No, this time, we went to a school closer to my old neighborhood, in an older section of town, densely populated by mostly Portuguese immigrants.

Although it was again summertime and the school was again closed, Mart and I couldn't evade the notice of a number local Portuguese teenagers as we made our way to the schoolyard. When they saw the two of us, carrying our airplanes, glow fuel, batteries and crying towels (just in case), they became naturally curious and followed us. As we prepared for our flights in the schoolyard, the somewhat rowdy Portuguese kids (whom Mart later affectionately referred to as the "Julios") watched with interest from the sidelines as they shouted taunts and encouraged us with their sincere hopes that we might entertain them with some truly impressive scenes of destruction.

I went first. Having learned my lesson from the P-40 debacle, I ensured this time that my airplane had full clearance and that there were no obstructions anywhere along its flight path. Having satisfied myself of this, I once again took the control lines while Mart fueled the plane and started the engine. He released it. The aircraft rolled along, picking up speed. The tail lifted from the ground and, this time, it TOOK TO THE AIR... a little too suddenly.

Perhaps it was over anxiousness on my part, still smarting from the memory of my P-40's demise, to get those wheels off the ground. Perhaps it was simple impatience to see the fruits of my labors airborne. Whatever the reason, I had tugged on the "up" line a little too eagerly, and my Stuka leaped into the sky in a steep climb.

Alarmed by this sudden rapid gain in altitude, I over-compensated and jerked on the "down" line, immediately putting the Stuka into a steep dive toward the schoolyard's asphalt. This immediately elicited a cacophony of excited whoops and cheers from the Julios, who prepared themselves for a splendid crash.

Horrified, I jerked the "up" line, again overcompensating, causing my Stuka to pull out of its dive scant inches from terra firma and again begin a steep climb, accompanied by a sullen chorus of "Awwww's" from the Julios, which sounded not unlike the disappointed exclamation that one hears from crowds of spectators watching a professional golf tournament after the golf pro narrowly misses sinking a long putt.

Overcompensating once again, I put the Stuka back into a dive, which changed the Julios dejected "Awww's" back into hoots and cheers. It went on like that for several more minutes with my Stuka executing an undulating series of parabolas worthy of NASA's infamous "Vomit Comet", accompanied by alternating cheers and "Awww's" from the Julios.

Then, at the apex of its last steep climb, my Stuka did something completely unexpected. It winged over and came directly at me! As this maneuver brought it inside the radius of its flight path, my control lines went slack and I lost all control of the aircraft. At that point, I did what seemed the only sensible thing. I dropped the control handle and, covering my head with my hands, I ran for my very life as the Julios exploded into a gleeful chorus of cheers.

Since I had my back to the Stuka, I did not see it when it smacked into the asphalt at the very spot that I had only recently occupied. I only heard the sickening crunch of splintering balsa wood a split second before the motor was, again, ominously silenced.

The body of my P-40 had only suffered a single crack after its jarring introduction to the ground. My fragile balsa-and-tissue Stuka was not so forgiving. The entire nose section was completely shattered, with serious damage to the wings and other sections of the aircraft. As I gathered up the debris in an attempt to salvage whatever parts that might be useful in my future attempt to rebuild the airplane's shattered nose, I came across a small scrap of doped tissue paper, with a few fragments of balsa stringers still stuck to its back, on which was inscribed a single, poignant, word ... "ZERSTÖRER". I understood, at that moment, how The Third Reich must have felt in 1945.

(Click to enlarge)

CKMS, HBC, HUH and Other Obscure Acronyms

Recently, my buddy, Mart, reminisced on his blog about a radio show that he and I used to do at the University of Waterloo's campus radio station, CKMS-FM, back in our younger days. That triggered some fond, and humorous, memories for me, so I've decided expound a little on the subject myself.

Mart said, on his blog, that he owned a radio and cassette recorder during his teenage years, but he just didn't use them. That's not entirely true. He didn't use them in the same manner that most other teenagers would use them; that is, for recording and playing music. He did, however, use the cassette recorder to create mock radio broadcasts. His repertoire included a soap opera parody that he called "General Crisis", a classical music show called "Classical Masterpieces" and, most bizarrely, a series of news reports by a pair of anchormen named Herb Jennings and Earl McGumphrie, representing an Imperial broadcasting network. By "Imperial", I mean belonging to the galactic empire in George Lucas' Star Wars universe. These "Imperial Reports" were meant to be the kinds of news reports that citizens of the Galactic Empire might expect to hear if Imperial journalists were on the scene during several key scenes from the Star Wars movies, describing the unfolding events. Jennings and McGumphrie always seemed to run afoul of these situations and get themselves in trouble. During one report, for example, McGumphrie accidentally managed to get himself locked inside one of the pods carrying an imperial probe droid just before it was launched toward the Hoth system.

Mart initially conceived of and recorded these things on his own (apparently he was badly in need of a hobby in those days) but he eventually played the recordings for me. Since he and I always shared the same quirky sense of humor, not to mention a certain fanaticism with regard to all things Star Wars, I was naturally taken with the idea and soon got into the act.

I should explain, at this point, that Mart was always more original than I. He was the "idea man". I, on the other hand, had a way of taking his ideas and extrapolating them into ponderous mutations of their former selves, to the point where they bore only the faintest resemblance to Mart's original, simple concepts and tended to scare away small children and the elderly. You might say I was the Bill Gates to Mart's Steve Jobs.

Mart's recordings reminded me of an audio version of a Canadian comedy show by the Second City comedy troupe that was on television at the time, called SCTV (the Second City Television Network) so I suggested that we develop Mart's recordings into a radio version of SCTV, which we called HBC (the HUH Broadcasting Corporation).

"HUH?" I hear you ask. What does "HUH" mean?

* Sigh! *

It stands for "Highly Uncontaminated Humor" but, to really explain things, I need to go back even further, to Mart and my pre-adolescent days.

You see, Mart and I used to be neighbors. That's how we got to be best friends. Then came the day that I moved across town. Now, that wasn't really so very far away, but neither of us was of driving age yet and we did live a healthy bike ride apart, so we kept in touch by mail for a while. (Note: for the benefit of my younger readers, "mail" in this context refers to the non-electronic variety, involving the delivery of paper documents by the postal service, a process which generally takes several days).

It wasn't long before we began enclosing extra things with those letters; drawings, jokes and such. This evolved into a full-fledged, home-made, hand-drawn comic book roughly resembling the satirical magazines that were so popular with pre-pubescent males such as ourselves at the time, like MAD and CRACKED magazines.

We called our magazine HUH Magazine, "HUH" being, as I said, an acronym for "Highly Uncontaminated Humor". Don't ask me what "contaminants" were supposedly missing from this particular form of humor. I suspect the most appropriate answer might well be "anything that could be considered to be of cultural or intellectual merit". I offer for your consideration a rather elaborate parody of the original "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" movie poster that I drew for an early issue of HUH Magazine. I won't divulge how long it took me to painstakingly hand-render this, except to say that I wore out at least two cases of colored markers.

So, you see, HBC was a sort of transformation of HUH Magazine from a paper medium to audio.

It's also worth noting at this point that, later on, around the same time that we did our stint at CKMS-FM (remember CKMS? I'll come back to it. I promise!) Mart and I decided that drawing cartoons might be a neat way to make a living. Hey, it seemed preferable to actually working (no offense to Mssrs. Adams, Schultz, Ketcham et al) and we actually went as far as assembling a portfolio of material and submitting sample comics such as the example presented here to United Features Syndicate and some other places.

The astute reader will have surmised from the fact that neither the names "Halma" or "Mielke" are today revered among the echelons of great cartoonists that every last publisher whom we approached respectfully declined our proposal. On the other hand, I still maintain to this very day that comic strips such as Kit 'N' Carlyle stand as irrefutable evidence that there is, indeed, no justice in this world.

As I mentioned earlier, Mart was the idea man while I had a tendency to realize his ideas beyond any reasonable justification. The concept of recording funny programs to tape was Mart's, but it was I who decided that we should develop it into a full-fledged parody of a radio station. Mart came up with most of the subject ideas and invented most of the characters. Aside from Jennings and McGumphrie, the Imperial newsmen, there was Luthor Heinberg, the classical orchestra conductor, Stan McGee (yet another reporter, but without the Star Wars slant) and a food critic whose name eludes me at the moment. I, on the other hand, found it necessary to sit down and draw caricatures of several of the key characters, such as the one of Earl McGumphrie, shown here. Somehow, creating a physical image made the characters more real to me.

Did I also mention that I'm a pack rat? By now I'm certain that Mart, who follows this blog, is likely picking his lower jaw up off his desk upon seeing that I've actually kept all this material for all these years.

So what has all this to do with CKMS-FM? Simply this. During my high school years, I met a Danish chap by the name of Peter Karwowski (well, okay, he was Polish; in fact, he still is, last I checked) who also remains a close friend to this very day. Peter was also interested in recording and broadcasting at the time and, in fact, briefly started a career as a radio announcer after finishing college. His interest in the broadcasting arts led him to CKMS-FM, where he volunteered as an overnight announcer on weekends. When I learned of this, I saw an opportunity to share HBC with someone other than just Mart and I asked Peter if we could use the station's recording facilities to do a somewhat more polished version of HBC and whether he might be willing to play segments of our work on his show.

Peter entertained the idea but, as it turned out, the good people at CKMS-FM were foolish enough to give Mart and me our own show which we imaginatively dubbed "The Andy & Mart Show" (guess which one of us chose the order of the names), so we started broadcasting HBC ourselves, rather than besmirching Peter's show with it, a small mercy for which I'm sure he remains grateful. We defined HBC for our listening audience as the "Hosehead Broadcasting Corporation" rather than the "HUH Broadcasting Corporation", partially because Bob & Doug McKenzie were very much in vogue at the time, and partially because we didn't want to have to explain what the acronym-within-an-acronym "HUH" meant, for reasons which, by now, will be all too clear to the reader.

The Andy & Mart show featured the usual combination of music interspersed with weather, news items, and special features including our own HBC segments and we always infused it with a liberal dose of our off-beat brand of humor, such as the time that we made finger shadows for our listening audience. In fact, the station's Programming Director, David "Doc" Hight (who wasn't a big fan of our show, I must admit) once sarcastically introduced us as "The Andy and Mart Comedy Carnival" just before surrendering the microphone to us at the end of his show, which immediately preceded ours. Much to his dismay, I took his pointed jab as a compliment and enthusiastically adopted the new name from then on. You just can't insult some people.

It would appear that I have once again taken Mart's quick, off-hand reference to our days at CKMS and inflated into ... this. I guess some things never change, as they say.