Back in 2008, I bought the first generation Kindle e-reader from Amazon. It was fun but somewhat awkward, with a keyboard of tiny buttons below the screen and big page turn buttons on the sides, plus an odd little scroll wheel controlling a little vertical cursor. The screen was the big appeal, requiring no power to maintain the on-screen text and being legible both indoors and outdoors.
The first Kindle back in 2008
Amazon went through various iterations of the device, reducing the complexity of its interface and making gradual improvements in the display. I have had eight of the devices over the past 18 years.
Standouts to me included my first Kindle with a touchscreen, the 2012 Paperwhite, although I didn’t mind page turn buttons. A disappointment was the 2019 Oasis: I came to hate its odd shape, with one side being much thicker.
The Kindle Oasis
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I purchased a non-Amazon Boox Note Air with a 10.3″ e-ink screen. The big screen was nice, but it was simply too difficult to get books onto it.
My Colorsoft Case
Thankfully, my latest Kindle, a Paperwhite Signature Edition I purchased in 2024, is my favorite thus far. I especially like the Colorsoft Signature Edition Case I bought for it, which has a magnet that automatically turns the Kindle on when I open it. I even like its fabric cover so much that I made a picture of it the background wallpaper on my iPad.
Since January 2025, I’ve read on my Kindle an average of 15 days each month. I’ve read a Kindle book for the past 39 weeks in a row, while my longest recorded Kindle streak was 98 weeks from November 2018 to September 2020. So I’m still a huge fan of the technology.
Even though I now just use my 2024 Paperwhite and the Kindle apps on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac Mini, it still bothered me to read that Amazon plans to cut off access to the Kindle Store on Kindles released in 2012 and earlier. Granted, that is going back 14 years so it will only affect about 3% of current Kindle users, and one would imagine that the batteries in the affected devices are in pretty rough shape by now. The various Kindle books we have bought of course still remain available in the various Kindle apps and e-readers.
I was glad to see they are not actually bricking the devices. So long as the old Kindles are not deregistered or factory reset, they will still display whatever books are still loaded on them, which seems humane enough, and I expect most of the affected devices entered landfills or were recycled long ago. To have early versions enter forced obsolescence reinforces to me that I’ve been using the gizmos for almost two decades. Egad!
In 1972, I flipped on our new color television one afternoon and saw a man with pointy ears appear from nowhere in a corridor and begin sneaking around. I remember thinking, “Is that some sort of ghost?”
My first glimpse of Star Trek was of a disguised Captain Kirk beaming onto a ship
It was, of course, Star Trek, the Original Series, which had originally aired from September 1966 to June 1969. By 1972, it was in syndicated reruns as 16 mm film prints that local television stations would air five days a week. I had tuned into the midst of The Enterprise Incident when Captain Kirk, disguised as a Romulan, “beamed in” to one of their ships. So the pointy-eared guy I first saw was not Mr. Spock!
There were only 79 episodes, which meant that the entire series would play through about three times in a year. So I was excited when a Saturday morning animated series debuted in September 1973, bringing new episodes to my second grade self. I was only seven years old, but I remember hoping the cartoon would not be just a “kiddie show” and being gratified when it turned out to play much like a fourth season of the original show, albeit in an abridged format with Filmation’s typical limited animation and pacing issues.
Early Models
AMT model kit from the 1970s
My best friend, Gene Freeman, built an AMT model of the U.S.S. Enterprise. But he painted it red, white, and blue and by the time I saw it, the engines had already snapped off. I had no inkling before that one could build models of Star Trek ships, and it wasn’t long until I’d convinced my mother to buy me a model kit of my own.
The AMT model kit is notorious for its various inaccuracies, but it was actually used in a few shots in the original series and the two different main studio models built for and used in the original television show didn’t fully match each other anyway.
The long-lost 33″ studio model was rediscovered in 2023, and it was in rough shape
Far worse than any inaccurate details was how the engines on my model always tended to sag, despite my best attempts with glue, rubber bands, and eventually popsicle sticks. It was an early physics lesson, and I can take some comfort in how the long-neglected 33-inch studio model, when rediscovered in 2023 after being lost for decades, had droopy engines.
The 11-foot hero model, donated to the Smithsonian after the show went off the air, also suffered. I first saw that model in person in 1984, by which time it had lost its original nacelle caps and deflector dish. I took photos, with my crummy 110 camera, from various angles, including the unfilmed port side, which had tape all over it due to electrical lighting that had been added to the model in 1965 after the first pilot was filmed.
The Smithsonian moved the model multiple times over the decades, with some botched restorations. Its engines were sagging by 2012, and that helped prompt a thorough restoration that has the ship looking its best.
The restored 11′ model at the Smithsonian
In my childhood I built models of the Enterprise, the Galileo 7 shuttlecraft, the starship bridge, and a Romulan warbird. I asked my mother for help in painting the warbird and, after I’d applied the big decal to its underside, lacquering it to protect it. That model survived the longest, but eventually all of my childhood models were in rough shape and got tossed.
An old AMT model of a Romulan ship; my mother helped me paint and lacquer mine
Adult Models
In adulthood, close friends who knew of my love for Star Trek not only gave me a decent plastic communicator, phaser, and tricorder but also several ship toys manufactured by Playmates. Unlike my childhood toys, most of the items received in adulthood have survived.
Since Andrew Probert was instrumental in the redesign of the ship for the movies, beside the model I hung his signed artwork, Past Reflections. It shows the refit suspended above a reflection of Matt Jefferies’ original design.
My last Enterprise, Probert’s Past Reflections, landing party devices, and more
The Bored Game
As a child in the 1970s, I had asked for whatever Star Trek paraphernalia was on offer, but at that time little was available that was truly authentic to the live-action show that had been cancelled back in 1969. What I did obtain reminded me of what Spock said in Amok Time: “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”
Witness my joy at Christmas 1973 when my 7-year-old self received the Star Trek board game he had requested.
I convinced my parents and friends into playing that game with me a couple of times. However, it wasn’t anything like watching the show, and I much preferred playing other games like Battleship.
From Pathetic to Prized Props
The lesson about being careful what you asked for didn’t take, however, and for my next birthday I received some blue walkie talkies marketed by Mego as Star Trek communicators. Gene and I played with them a bit, but they bore only a limited resemblance to a “real” communicator, and we had little use for walkie talkies, so after a few years they wound up in a garage sale. I built a crummy plastic phaser, communicator, and tricorder, but I didn’t have a decent toy communicator until I was given one in the 1990s, and in 2016 I purchased a superb version by The Wand Company that matched my childhood dreams.
My 1975 communicators versus the one I bought in 2016
Fifty years later, my last Enterprise is on a completely different level. It even replicates some of the lighting features that special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull had added to the movie miniature back in the late 1970s. I’m now quite content, and my retirement from employment in 2026 also marks my retirement from collecting Star Trek items.
When I gaze upon the model, I sometimes think of the deeply flawed yet visionary Gene Roddenberry. I can hear him softly sharing, “It isn’t all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.”
When Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster channeled youthful male wish fulfillment into the bulging muscles of Superman, clad in the costume of a circus strong man, they first gave him super strength, speed, and invulnerability.
However, he couldn’t fly when he appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, although he could certainly jump. In his debut, he leaps up onto electrical wires while carrying a lobbyist, leaps with him onto the dome of the U.S. Capitol, and the cliffhanger is how he then tries but fails to make a leap across to a skyscraper.
Superman in his first appearance, able to leap, but not yet fly
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!
That always bothered me when I was a kid watching reruns of the show in the 1970s. Why would he bother with leaping over tall buildings when he could just fly over them? Visuals of him in flight began with the 1941 Fleischer Superman theatrical cartoons, since animating him constantly leaping about was too time-consuming, and the custom infiltrated the comics by Action Comics #65 in October 1943.
My introduction to the Man of Steel
The first Superman comic book that I owned was Superman #256 in September 1972 when I was six years old. By then, he was tremendously overpowered, able to travel faster than light to other galaxies and withstand atomic explosions. He had X-ray vision, heat vision, telescopic and microscopic vision, freezing and hurricane-force super breath, super ventriloquism and hypnotism, and so forth.
Lex Luthor had to become ever more ingenious, and magical characters like Mister Mxyzptlk and were also introduced to counteract his overpowered abilities. Kryptonite was first introduced in the radio serial in 1943 as a way to weaken him, and that made its way into the comics in 1949, where it multiplied into well over a dozen different types.
The 1950s television series used Kryptonite in a half-dozen of its 104 episodes. Reading the comics in the early 1970s, I was told that Superman possessed genius-level intelligence and an eidetic memory. However, I recently was reminded that his 1950s television persona was only as intelligent as the script writers.
Episode 100
I recently replaced the television antenna atop Meador Manor, hooking it into an HD Homerun to stream broadcasts and digital video recordings of them to devices across our home network. I wanted to test its functionality, and a quick search revealed that the 100th episode of the old Adventures of Superman show, which was the ninth installment of its sixth and final season in 1958, was being broadcast on the local MeTV affiliate that evening. I set it to record and the next day I watched Superman’s Wife.
The first two seasons of the show, filmed in 1951 and 1953, were black-and-white, with plenty of film noir influences in the early shows. The next four seasons were filmed in color, increasing productions costs such that the final four seasons had half as many episodes, with only 13 each year instead of 26.
If you marry Superman, you are guaranteed to become a damsel in distress
Superman’s Wife opened with the Man of Steel supposedly getting married to a policewoman portrayed by actress, pin-up, and nightclub singer Joi Lansing.
The plot is quite campy, but the stupidity is what interests me. The climax is when the evil Mr. X lures Superman and the Daily Planet editor Perry White and reporters Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen into a bathysphere, of all things, at “Pier 96”.
It is lowered down so far that if it were opened, Superman says the pressure would crush the humans aboard. The writing is sketchy, but if Superman breached the capsule, I expect the humans would at least drown.
Everyone is stumped for awhile, evidently unable to fathom the flying Man of Steel simply rising up and pushing on the roof of the capsule to lift it to the surface. Jimmy Olsen says, “If you were only on the outside, you could just lift the bathysphere up to the surface!”
Superman replies, “Lift it? That’s it! Jimmy, you’ve just given me an idea!”
Okay, he’s a dingbat, but now he’ll fly up and push up on the roof, right? Nope! Stupidman decides to pull a plate off the roof, which he knows is attached to the lift cable, and then rapidly pulls down on the cable while the compartment begins to flood. Pulling down on the cable might work if his body were pushing up against the roof, but he just stands on the floor and repeatedly yanks more and more cable down into the capsule, which mysteriously rises.
So he can fly through air and water, but he can’t fly up inside the capsule to push on its roof?
Uh no, that would not work. All he would be doing is playing out line from the dockside winch down into the capsule while it sat on the ocean floor. If we want to be generous, we’ll say that Superman slid his unseen feet into some sturdy metal floor straps and that is how he saved the day.
Yeah, I know it was a cheaply made kiddie show in the 1950s and Superman physics is constantly nonsensical, but did writers Robert Leslie Bellem and Whitney Ellsworth truly fail to realize the obvious solution, given his capabilities, of him just pushing up on the roof?
No doubt they wanted the dramatic footage of water spraying into the capsule while Superman yanks on the rope. I laughed out loud at poor 70-year-old John Hamilton, who played editor Perry White, getting absolutely soaked. The director and editor made the most of shots of his fedora hat redirecting some of the shower.
Poor old John Hamilton got soaked, while Lois and Jimmy stayed dry up on stands to the side
Hamilton was a veteran of stage and screen who had played hundreds of parts, but no doubt is best remembered for the Perry White role he inhabited from ages 65-70. His gruff iconic catchphrases of “Great Caesar’s ghost!” and “Don’t call me chief!” while chomping on a cigar made it into the comics. Sadly, he died less than a year after filming Superman’s Wife.
Oh yeah, as for her, she ends up as the campy damsel in distress, tied to a car bridge with dynamite about to go off beneath her. Supes unties her, leads her away, and shields her from the explosion. It all ends with the marriage being revealed as a sham to use her as bait to lure out Mr. X, as if Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen wouldn’t have already been tempting enough.
While I enjoyed the Superman comics, the old Adventures of Superman reruns, and the silly animated Super Friends back when I was in elementary school, by the time Christopher Reeve was playing him in 1978’s Superman I was a 12-year-old 7th grader who found it rather silly. I did pay for cinema tickets to endure the three increasingly awful sequel films, and even the 2006 Superman Returns with Brandon Routh, but I was never tempted to visit a cinema for the later films with Henry Cavill and now David Corenswet.
Superhero movies rose to great prominence after the 2008 Great Recession, much like comic books surged in the Great Depression of the 1930s. They certainly boast better special effects these days than in the movie serials and television series of 70+ years ago, but their scripts continue to ignore basic physics, which limits my engagement.
The English inventor John Frearson patented a screw with a cruciform socket in 1873. His design was often used in marine hardware until the 1980s. However, the cruciform screw we in the USA are familiar with is the Phillips design, which was originally patented in 1932 by John P. Thompson, an automobile mechanic in Portland, Oregon. Thompson patented a matching screwdriver a year later. His driver design had a more rounded head that self-centered more readily with power tools.
The Phillips screw system worked better with power tools than the earlier Frearson one [Source]
However, Thompson couldn’t find a manufacturer for his design, and businessman Henry Frank Phillips bought the rights to his patents, redesigned the socket to be shallower for easier mass production, and founded the Phillips Screw Company. A side effect of the tapered design was that Phillips screwdrivers cam-out, or slip out of the screw head socket, under lower torques. Contrary to some reports, this does not appear to have originally been an intended feature, although later refinements touted it in what might be regarded as putting a “positive spin” on the issue, if you’ll pardon the phrase.
I’ve always despised Phillips screws for the cam-out issue, resorting to pushing in hard on Phillips screwdrivers to try and reduce cam-outs. However, I have discovered a nifty solution, but it is not to return to Frearson’s system. Instead, use JIS screwdrivers on Phillips screws.
JIS stands for Japanese Industrial Standard, and JIS B 4633 defined a screwdriver with different geometries that reduces cam-out. There are matching JIS screws defined by JIS B 1012, some of which are identifiable by a tiny dimple in one corner of the cruciform head, and you might spot them on Japanese motorcycles and some Japanese electronics. You will be exasperated if you try to use a Phillips screwdriver in a JIS screw, as it won’t seat properly and you may strip the screw.
However, while you might be hard-pressed to distinguish a JIS screwdriver from a Phillips one by sight, if you put one to use, even on a Phillips screw, you can readily tell the difference.
The different geometry of the JIS screwdriver reduces cam-out when used on a Phillips screw [Source]
Using an Impacta screwdriver
A JIS screwdriver will stay locked into a JIS or a Phillips screw under higher torque, which greatly reduces my frustration when assembling items or loosening screws. When I first heard about JIS screwdrivers, I ordered a couple of impact ones from Vessel. Those have a spring hidden in the handle so that, if you encounter a very tight or rusted screw, you can seat the screwdriver in it and then pound the end of the handle with a hammer. That will produce high torque while turning the screwdriver 12 degrees.
I have yet to use that feature, but just casual use of the Vessel JIS screwdrivers convinced me to buy some more. The first Impacta ones I bought were both P2 (for Phillips head size #2), but for screws of sizes 0-1 you need a P0 screwdriver, you need a P1 for screw sizes 2-4, a P2 for screw sizes 5-9, and a P3 for screw sizes 10-16.
So I bought a less expensive four-pack of cushion-grip non-impact JIS screwdrivers from Vessel of sizes P0 through P3.
My Vessel JIS screwdrivers
All six of the screwdrivers are magnetized to help hold onto loose screws, and they are now my go-to tools when I encounter a Phillips head screw.
There are other screwhead types, of course. We all know about the simple flat-head screw with a single slot, and there are the rare Pozidriv screws and drivers that were the result of a collaboration between the American Screw Company and the Phillips Screw Company. They also reduce cam-out, but don’t use a Phillips screwdriver in a Pozidriv screw. Heck, never use a Phillips screwdriver at all, I say.
There are also Torx screw drives, with a six-point star-shaped pattern, which I’ve occasionally encountered with electronics. Sometimes a pin is added to the center of the star as a security feature, requiring a special driver, and there are various other security fastener designs.
Our neighbors to the north are known for being pretty square with their Robertson screws and screwdrivers. Canadian P.L. Robertson invented them in 1908 after cutting his hand with a slotted screwdriver. They are also self-centering, reduce cam-out, and are easier to use one-handed thanks to the tapered socket which tends to retain the screw even when shaken, and the square socket allows the use of angled screwdrivers and trim-head screws. Henry Ford liked them, finding they saved time in producing his early cars, but Robertson refused Ford’s onerous licensing terms, so Phillips screws eventually dominated the auto industry in the USA.
If you are building something from scratch, experienced folks say to go with Robertson square drive or Torx screws and screwdrivers, rather than JIS screws. But if you are like me, you are usually dealing with Phillips screws that came with an item. For that, go buy yourself some JIS screwdrivers, and then hide the Phillips ones in the back of your tool drawer.
The last of the original radio news services, CBS News Radio, will close on May 22, 2026. Below is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt doing one of his famous “fireside chats” in 1940. You probably recognize the NBC and CBS microphones. MBS was the Mutual Broadcasting System, which operated from 1934 to 1999 and was the original home of The Lone Ranger and The Adventures of Superman years before they appeared on television.
As for NBC, back then it had two different radio networks, NBC Red and NBC Blue, which explains the BLUE microphones in front of FDR.
In 1943, NBC was forced to sell off the Blue network, which became ABC. Eventually Disney owned ABC, and in 2007 Disney merged the ABC Radio Network with Citadel, and in 2011 that was merged with Cumulus Media. In 2019, it owned 428 stations in 87 media markets.
The separate NBC Radio News was sold in 1987 and merged with the remnants of MBS into the CBS radio operations in 1999. So all of those will come to an end in May 2026, although iHeartMedia, which was once Clear Channel Broadcasting, will continue to operate its own news radio services for its 870 U.S. radio stations, branded as “24/7 News” with links to NBC News NOW.
Why the news business is contracting
As a person who pays close daily attention to the news, I am now an outlier. Over half of the people in my 50-64 age group don’t follow the news regularly, and less than one-quarter of people below age 50 are keeping up.
Older people have always paid more attention to the news, and about 3/4 of folks under age 30 say they mostly get news because they happen to come across it, while about 3/4 of the folks who are 65+ say they mostly get news because they are looking for it.
Only 8% of US adults say individuals have a responsibility to pay for news, ranging from 5% of those with some college or less to 14% of college graduates, and only 16% say they have paid for news in the past year via subscriptions, memberships, or donations. 45% of adults say ads or sponsorships should be the main way news organizations make money, 25% are not sure, 11% say subscriptions, and the rest suggest completely impractical methods of government funding or charitable donations.
Only 27% think news organizations are struggling financially. No doubt more would be aware of the collapsing newspaper, radio, and linear television news industries if they paid more attention to, you guessed it, the news.
Personally, I have read newspapers, in print and later digital form, for decades. I also subscribed to the weekly Time news magazine as a college undergraduate in the 1980s and stuck with that for thirty years, and I often listen to NPR news and check the online version of Bartlesville Radio News.
The steady erosion of journalism and my approaching retirement led me to make some cancellations in February 2026 that brought my news spending down to about $120 per month, or $4 per day, versus about $150 per month, or $5 per day, as of last summer.
Here are my surviving monthly subscriptions:
Tulsa World, $39 with maybe six local/state stories per day
Apple One, $38 for a bundle of news, music, and media services
KWGS NPR, $25 donation to our local public radio station
The Oklahoman, $11 with maybe ten local/state stories per day
New York Times, $4 since it is no longer available in Apple News
Cancellations
Back in 2021, I began sending $5 per month to NonDoc, and in July 2025 I subscribed to Oklahoma Watch for $15 per month. I wanted to support state journalism, having appreciated their efforts in various newspapers. However, I found myself never reading their articles unless they appeared in the Tulsa World or The Oklahoman, so I decided to pull back. Back in July 2025, I also signed up for a year of Tangle News for $59, but I have been deleting their weekly emails without reading them, so I won’t be renewing that, either.
A far more significant cancellation was finally giving up on the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, which was costing $11 per month. I had mostly stopped reading it years ago, but its last local employee was a former student of mine who was still breaking some stories and publishing some beautiful photographs, and so long as he was there, I kept paying.
Finally, in January 2026, he resigned, sharing: “While I was hired to write for Bartlesville, changes at the company suddenly had me writing for up to four different newsrooms a week — often for towns and communities I’d never even set foot in.”
Now the E-E only publishes branded editions on Tuesday-Saturday, and none of them have local stories by an in-town reporter. The Oklahoman cost me $6 per month last summer, but it is now $11 per month. Both of those newspapers are currently owned by Gannett of USA Today fame, and I can use my account at The Oklahoman to read the Examiner-Enterprise‘s electronic edition, should it ever again break any local news.
The effective death of the E-E is a great loss to history, as it ends 130 years of local newspaper journalism since the Magnet was founded in Indian Territory back in 1895, two years before Bartlesville was incorporated.
After 130 years, Bartlesville no longer has any local newspaper employees
What remains?
Overall, radio is tied with printed newspapers and magazines as having the fewest people preferring it for their news. I’m in the News websites or apps camp in the chart below.
However, with the local newspaper virtually defunct, I now rely on Bartlesville Radio News, in its internet form, for local stories. I appreciate their online newsfeed and their commitment to community news, and I know and like the owners and the news director. However, they know their audience, so their newsfeed often features right-wing politics, and I avoid their non-local talk shows. Thankfully the station has had a strong internet presence for years, and I can easily scan their local newsfeed and access links to individual community programs of interest to me.
Apple News is my mainstay for national news, with me regularly reading items from Reuters, AP, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and others. I’m glad that Apple shares 50% of its subscription revenue with publishers based on user engagement, and that publishers can also monetize their content with advertising.
As for newspapers, that industry’s workforce has been in decline for the entire 21st century, with employment in periodical and book publishing also shrinking amidst the digital transformation.
My New York Times subscription came up for renewal at the end of 2025, and as usual their stated renewal price was high at $25 every four weeks, or $325 per year. I did my usual online procedure of saying I wanted to cancel, which again triggered their system to make its usual counteroffer of $1/week. I still occasionally read an article or column from them, which haven’t been available in Apple News since 2020. However, with columnist David Brooks having departed for The Atlantic, which is still in Apple News, I might finally let the Gray Lady lapse in 2027.
Paying $1.28 per day for about six unique stories in the ever-shrinking Tulsa World is getting pricey, but I don’t want it to fold like the Examiner-Enterprise. So I’ve chosen to keep ponying up, even though I’m told that if I telephoned their subscription department and threatened to cancel, they would offer a meaningful price break. I subscribe to The Oklahoman to augment the Tulsa World‘s declining state coverage, and each year I’ll re-evaluate whether those subscriptions remain worthwhile.
It is disconcerting to see news operations contracting and sometimes disappearing. The old European concept of the three estates of the realm being the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners led to the press and news media being termed the fourth estate. Today, I’d say we have the government, oligarchs, consumers, and the media, with the collapse of both trust and economics in the fourth estate greatly empowering the oligarchs.
April 10, 2026 UPDATE:
Over the years, as a complication from helping my parents manage things, I actually managed two subscriptions to The Oklahoman. I have my personal one that is slated to cost $149 to renew for a year in October 2026, or $12.42 per month. I also managed a separate account with a recurring monthly subscription of $10, which they just announced would double to $20. I logged in to cancel that one, and they counteroffered $15 per month, but I still cancelled it.
Meador Manor 
