2 comments:

• Jerome Kinderman posted at 9:40 am on Mon, Mar 28, 2011.

  Posts: 2024

  Lt. Chris Piombo: As I started reading this column, I was hoping that the answers weren't posted at the end (I truly did not scroll down to check before trying to answer them in my mind). It would have been interesting to see how things would have evolved here on this forum. Oh well - maybe next time you might consider giving us a few days to argue amongst ourselves? Although the Internet would quickly reveal the answers for those who didn't want to play the game.

  • Link

   

• Jerome Kinderman posted at 9:36 am on Mon, Mar 28, 2011.

  Posts: 2024

  Regarding Hill Street Blues - I was stationed at Bitburg Air Base, Germany with the Air Force from 1982 through 1985. I'm not sure what was going on over here during that time-frame (technology-wise that is), but it was that one show that had the sale of VCR machines practically spin out of control because it was so popular (and so were the VCR machines at over $600 at that time). While we had relatively old reruns of the program on AFN (Armed Forces Network), the "rental" of home-made recordings of it and other popular shows received from friends and relations state-side created at least one investigation into the propriety of such a money-making scheme. No JA office could find it a violation of the UCMJ.

  I wonder what it's like now what with the advent of satellite transmission of entertainment to these bases and posts that have our military members probably viewing live programming on their iPhones. We felt very isolated in the early 80s over there; I'm sure it's not that way any longer.

  Oh, and for those of us who did have tapes shipped to us for nearly up-to-date viewing, we insisted that the commercials remain intact. After a couple of years of not knowing what was going on over here, we actually wanted to have all the commercials we could get – and then passed them around to other members who actually paid a small fee to watch them.

  • Link