The Vulgar Eclectic

recent blog posts

• Pebble says good morning

  

• Morning

  

• The Boxcar Children

  I happened to walk past a little thrift store earlier today. I was in an area I’ve never visited before and noticed this store tucked away in a little strip mall. I decided to stop in and take a look around.

  I wasn’t finding much in the way of books I was interested in, but then I checked the kids’ section and came across this nice old copy of the first Boxcar Children book by Gertrude Chandler Warner.

  This particular edition was published in 1950 and contains the revised 1942 text. Apparently (I just learned this today!), the book was originally published in 1924, but was republished in 1942 in a revised and shortened edition. This 1942 edition is the one I am familiar with, and is the text one usually encounters in modern printings. It would be interesting to compare it with the earlier, original text.

  This is a great, solidly constructed hardcover, handsome in its red cloth with black illustration. The inside front and back covers have a wonderful map…”Where the Boxcar Children Went”.

  I am planning to give it to my daughter as a gift, as it’s one of her favorite books.

  

  

• The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev

  Another old book jot…from November 2021.

  I just finished reading The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett (translation 1899). I’ve read works by Turgenev translated by various people and think Garnett does a great job with his style and voice. It’s a collection of one novella and four short stories:

  The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850)

  A Tour in the Forest (1857)

  Yakov Pasinkov (1855)

  Andrei Kolosov (1844)

  A Correspondence (1856)

  I found these stories moving and beautiful, often touching on interrupted or unrequited love and the negotiation of the sorrows of life and, sometimes, a sort of acceptance.

  A Tour in the Forest has become one of my new favorite short stories, and all of the stories in this collection resonated deeply.

  Sometimes one comes across particular books or stories at what feels to be just the right time. I think that’s the case here.

  “There is no getting happiness by struggling for it. But we must not forget that it’s not happiness, but human dignity, that’s the chief aim in life.”

  

• Crystal radio II update

  Awhile ago, my daughter and I built a crystal radio (see the crystal radio pages for more information if you’re interested). We decided to do a bit of an experiment with it and add a second coil attached to the antenna.

  We used the same gauge magnet wire (the wire has a different color coating, but is the same size) for the new coil. We added a second tuning wiper for this coil and changed the wiring of the radio a bit, so that one tuner is wired to the ground and one to the antenna. Now one wiper can be used to tune the large coil and search for stations, while the second wiper can be used to fiddle with the antenna (that’s a technical term!). Using both wipers together seems to help pick up additional stations. There is one very strong station, however, that seems to drown out most other signals. It was for this reason that we tried the second antenna tuner. I think it helps a little, but not as much as I was hoping.

  Also, my daughter and her friends wired in more earpieces, so they could all listen at the same time. It worked very well! At one point, they had three pieces wired in at once, although now there are only two.

  

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