Pulled Coupling Caps

[trem]

Good Post Enzo -
Where I grew up (San Jose Ca) we had a great store called Quement Electronics. I thought they closed in the early 1980's, but it seems they may still be open as some type of whole-sale parts house.
They use to sell everything from a single resistor...to Heathkit...text books...thousands of tubes...and High End Audio. Ireally wish they were available...to me... today.

My Landlord bought a Fischer VCR in about 1980. It was top loading...and had a WIRED remote. I can still remember the price.....800 Dollars.
I bought my first VCR in about 1988...it was "stereo" and cost 350 Dollars. The last one I bought was about 10 years ago...it was 50 dollars AND had a DVD player in it as well.
My cell phone is 4 years old.
We do not have any television service...we just use a DVD player to watch movies.
Do not have My Space or Twitter.
I do not have any Apps. nor do I know what they are.
Most of the digital electronics I own is to assist me (including the Internet and this computer) in learning about Electricity/Electronics, and to work on analog audio gear.....(and for general knowledge...like an electronic encyclopedia)
Thank You

[Leo_Gnardo]

Guernica.?
I need to read the whole thing I guess.
How did the glory years of The Luftwaffe work its way into a cap post...??

Take some dramamine, buckle your seat belt & read on. This thread wanders all over the place.

Luftwaffe - no glory in bombing and machine gunning a town of innocent people. Who was in charge? Wolfram von Richtofen, the bloody Red Baron's nephew. And the charming gentleman pictured below, Hugo Sperrle (later chief of LW operations in the West. Acquitted at Nuremburg. Should have gotten the rope just for Guernica.)

Now back to better things...

[km6xz]

I am of the opinion that the vast majority of information that people just have to have is meaningless in the overall scheme of life. Virtual life has replaced living life for so many who are connected, facebooked, tweetered and virtualized that it all takes the place of real person to person relationships.
What really important information has anyone gotten in exchange for the countless hours devoted to gathering connections or information. We are drowning in useless trivia that isolates us from important things. People get worked up about things they neither have any control of nor which has any impact on them. Yet they know nothing about what the kids are really doing in their bedrooms or how their neighborhood school is operating.

I made a deliberate choice 10 years ago to stop the train to oblivian and got off. As a result of adopting a simpler life i have started living in the moment and meeting and engaging more people and creative activities than any time of life. The world is much more interesting out in it than watching it. Luckily, actually a miracle, i found a society that all that makes sense to and have collected an amazing collection of great friends who i engage with everyday in person , even better that they all beautiful smart and engaged young females . I spend more hours a week socializing, attending cultural events or dancing than working. No one seems to care of my limited bank account, but everything about the quality of thinking. I really think my old society is toxic for the soul. Life is best experienced.

I am writing this on my phone hanging out in a pub with two beautiful talented actors, Nastia and Ksenia who i have known since they were 21.

[The Dude]

I am of the opinion that the vast majority of information that people just has to have is meaningless in the overall scheme of life... Virtual life has replaced living life for so many who are connected, facebooked, tweetered and virtualized that it all takes the place of real person to person relationships....
The world is much more interesting out in it than watching it. Life is best experienced.

AMEN!....., and, speaking of being in the world rather than watching it, I'll add that "reality television" is a festering sore on humanity. Who knew that Warhol's 15 minutes "prediction" included illiterate morons with no discernible skills or talent?

[Enzo]

President Obama was at a press conference a while back, and someone asked some cultural things, one of which involved "Snooki." The President said, "I have no idea who Snooki might be." I was somehow comforted by that.

[Chuck H]

+1 to Stan. And great reality check Enzo. And trem...

I spent my whole life in the 408!!! Peripherally there was the 415 and 650. All the cities there sort of glomp together as one megatropolis with no real space or boundaries in between. I bought my first DMM at Quement's and I'm still using it!!! And I think they are still there, sort of. The owner also owns the building and leases it all except for one small space in the front about the size of a bathroom. That is now Quement's Electronics. It's just a small room with shelves of catalogs you can order from and a clerk to help sort your order. I don't even know why they do it. The last time I went in there I was alone (other than the clerk) the whole time. I worked for awhile at the paint store one building over and seldom ever saw a car out front. The owner must be laundering money or something. DISCLAIMER: My info about Quement's is about thirteen years old so things could certainly have changed.

[trem]

Hey Chuck -
There was a Quement where I grew up ...near San Jose CA.
I was born in 1960...and at the time was not "into" electronics. I had no idea that 35 years later I would really miss them. Even Radio Shack would be great...if it were circa 1970.
best

[nashvillebill]

Take some dramamine, buckle your seat belt & read on. This thread wanders all over the place.

Luftwaffe - no glory in bombing and machine gunning a town of innocent people. Who was in charge? Wolfram von Richtofen, the bloody Red Baron's nephew. And the charming gentleman pictured below, Hugo Sperrle (later chief of LW operations in the West. Acquitted at Nuremburg. Should have gotten the rope just for Guernica.)

Now back to better things...

Looks like Colonel Klink !!!

[Leo_Gnardo]

Looks like Colonel Klink !!!

Don't let that monocle fool ya, this is one serious bad guy. No Col. Klink here. As for Klink, Werner Klemperer played the part, and his father was Otto Klemperer the famous conductor. Heard an interview with him years ago - fascinating - may have been on Fresh Air, and if it was you can probably find it on archive at WHYY.

- - - - - - - - - -

That bus to never never land? "Everyone stopped to look at your technicolor motor home." Here are two. IIRC the original was a '39 International Harvester bus, somewhat converted. Last I heard it was sinking into the mud at Ken Kesey's ranch near Eugene Oregon. May have been rescued. Somebody who knows their old buses, you tell us. And is one real and the other an imposter, or just a spare? Cowboy Neal says "Hup hup hup get on board, step lively now. Remember to leave a tip in the jar. No cash please."

[trem]

Don't let that monocle fool ya, this is one serious bad guy. No Col. Klink here. As for Klink, Werner Klemperer played the part, and his father was Otto Klemperer the famous conductor. Heard an interview with him years ago - fascinating - may have been on Fresh Air, and if it was you can probably find it on archive at WHYY.

- - - - - - - - - -

That bus to never never land? "Everyone stopped to look at your technicolor motor home." Here are two. IIRC the original was a '39 International Harvester bus, somewhat converted. Last I heard it was sinking into the mud at Ken Kesey's ranch near Eugene Oregon. May have been rescued. Somebody who knows their old buses, you tell us. And is one real and the other an imposter, or just a spare? Cowboy Neal says "Hup hup hup get on board, step lively now. Remember to leave a tip in the jar. No cash please."

Wow...the bus.
I have heard a few stories...that it rotted on Kens Farm...and that a replica was built for The Smithsonian.

I moved to San Francisco in 1985.
I had met a couple of Wealthy Females that lived on 25 North. They knew A LOT of people...and had some interesting parties. You never knew who might show up. I met John Brodie one night...among other names.
Anyway...I was a real fish out of water at these parties of theirs...but one night I met a very nice and very mellow "older woman".
She started to tell me all kinds of stories about hippies...The Haight...and The Pranksters. It was hard to believe a girl could make up all that stuff...just to entertain some "kid" at a party.
I asked my friend Lorraine....."Who is that pretty gal with the dark hair.?".
Turns out she was Cathy Casamo.
At the time she said she was living on one of the Marin-Sausolito-Larkspur house boats with some kind of sculptor/painter.
Was kind of bad what happened to her on that bus. That is life I guess.
I saw her a few years later at another "party"...at The Summit...on Green Street. Said she had gotten cancer. I guess it killed her a few years later.
We did not become friends...and I did not sleep with her...just happened to have met her a few times.
This thread has turned into The Twilight Zone.
I feel kind of "funny".
best

[km6xz]

It is a peculiar trait of societies to lionize spontaneous moments in time, not much different than any of an infinite continuum of moments in time, with permanent exhibits.
SF was an interesting place to be in 1967 when I first moved there from Sacramento, a 17yo electronics nerd who have no interest in music, having just graduated mid term from HS and moving from home for the first time. Interesting indeed.
I had always looked at SF as a great place to visit a couple times a year to visit museums, always was crazy about museums, one reason for moving to St Petersburg which is like a cultural center with 10 times the population and 50 times the cultural access and events. SF at the time was called simply "the city" since everything else in California was a suburb or small village that just had too many people. I've always been more comfortable in isolated rural areas with no close neighbors but finding a big city where I feel right at home even surprises me. Yes, SF was an interesting place, indeed, being young, and open to explore was a pretty great time to be living in such a rare focus of social and artistic change.
I doubt there was ever a 3 sq mile area, anywhere in history with as much new and interesting music was concentrated. People talk of the "San Francisco Sound" as if it was a single type but there were hundreds of competent bands who were all different and were not copying each other. I dare say there were more interesting bands in a small radius in western SF in 68 than there are in the US in total right now. They had the advantage of having lots of medium sized venues to play and most played every night, every day so playing 300 gigs a year, either you get good or get lost.
But the same thing was going on in visual arts, poetry, literature, philosophy, cooking, religion, science(if you increased the radius 30 miles, )even radio(KMPX etc)....a random street corner or park conversation probably touched on all these fields, it is a pretty heady time for those seeking to figure out the world. I doubt a physical concentration of practitioners of the arts will ever be see again since the connected nature of the world, physical place matters less.
By the end of 68 and into 69 it all started to unravel with many thousands of kids streaming in from all over the country who were attracted to the free style life they read about in Life Magazine or saw on Ed Sullivan. Middle America swapped and killed the scene.
Most of the originals moved to more isolated areas, first to Marin to the north or SC Mountains to the south, some to the desert. For a while tiny towns like sleepy Mill Valley or Sausalito suddenly had music, film and literature new celebrities living in a similar concentration as in west central SF.
But the creative explosion that peaked first in the 50s in the Beats, then in the mid and later 60s with the new culture, were rare phenomena.
I have not seen it explode so dramatically anywhere else in the world. The arts and music had a big swell in East Berlin after reunification in a similar but much less influential, Paris had several waves of collective artistic explosions, St Petersburg did not have such a peak, it was always a dynamic beehive of creative activity in literature, poetry, art, music, theater, film, fashion, dance, political and natural science etc. I always felt it was a gigantic version of San Francisco with a more sustained creative output, a culture that did not fit in the rest of the country just like SF which is not like the US at all, neither city belongs in the countries they reside in.
The only significant differences between SF and St Petersburg other than the obvious difference in size and age, is that the girls are a lot prettier;>) In fact, if this place was a hell hole otherwise, a guy would want to be here just for the wonderful women.

[Chuck H]

Yes, San Jose is the 408 area code. We're talking about the same store. The last tubes I bought at Quement's were National branded 12ax7a's. Very good tubes. They were the last tubes they had and they had to locate them in the warehouse on request. I was just a kid: "Hey, you guys got any tubes?"

[trem]

Yes, San Jose is the 408 area code. We're talking about the same store. The last tubes I bought at Quement's were National branded 12ax7a's. Very good tubes. They were the last tubes they had and they had to locate them in the warehouse on request. I was just a kid: "Hey, you guys got any tubes?"

Oh...OK.
Yeah...that was a great store...Bascom Avenue.
The Internet leads me to believe they are still in "business".....

[eschertron]

AMEN!....., and, speaking of being in the world rather than watching it, I'll add that "reality television" is a festering sore on humanity. Who knew that Warhol's 15 minutes "prediction" included illiterate morons with no discernible skills or talent?

.. I believe Andy said "everyone" would get their 15 minutes, no?

[Leo_Gnardo]

.. I believe Andy said "everyone" would get their 15 minutes, no?

"In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes"

There's an awful lot of folks who have overstayed their 15 minutes, some by 10,000x or more. I could give you a list but ... I have a life to live. I'm sure you can imagine mostly the same ones I do.

- - - - -

For a long time I thought it was Marshall McLuhan that said @ 15 minutes. Nope. But his "The medium is the message" still holds. He was referring to TV but now I see it as all the cell & smartphones etc that people are wasting their attention on. Saw it coming with the Tamagotchi toys back in the 90's. Now there's a whole generation who pay more attention to their little plastic toys than they do to everything else in life. Terrific. This isn't the future I signed up for.

Funny thing the US Navy termed their assistance to Japan re the Fukishima nuke plant meltdown "Operation Tamagotchi" reading in some flakey translation book no doubt that the term means "friend" in Japanese. Not realizing just what kind of "friend" it means. Demanding, attention-grabbing, pain in the neck "friend." Almost a frenemy. I'm sure some of our Japanese friends were slapping themselves in the forehead over that one. I was. In the final analysis, might be accurate.

Going back to work on some nice obsolete tube amps, signing off for now, your own Tamagotchi, LG.