Another Brush With Near Greatness

[banjoplayinnerd]

This morning I had a few minutes to kill before I had to take off for work so I fired up the radio and did an exercise I call "one ping only." This is a reference to the Sean Connery/Alec Baldwin movie "Hunt for Red October." Baldwin's character sends a message to Connery, a sub commander, and wants him to acknowledge the message by pinging Baldwin's submarine once. "Vasily," Connery says to his XO, his voice unmistakable even with a hint of an Eastern European accent, "Verify our range to target. One ping only."

When I do a "one ping only" I send out a single CQ, not necessarily expecting a reply but wanting to see if my signal is getting out. If I see a lot of reception reports on the reverse beacon page, I know that frequency is open for business. If I see few or none, it's time to go somewhere else. Sometimes that's a different band, sometimes it's off to read a book or play with the grandkids.

I did a one ping only on 15 meters at about 6:50 this morning and got nothing. No reception reports at all. So I decided to see if anyone was listening on 17 meters. I got one reception report from a guy in Ohio. I was getting ready to switch things off when I got distracted, and when I looked up I saw that I was sending a second CQ. Oh well, no problem, I'll just turn everything off after that finishes. The CQ finished, I got ready to exit the program . . . and saw a transmission on my frequency. The display had been blank, so this was certainly someone answering my call.

WA7KPK KJ2U DN40

Hmmmm . . . DN40. Grid square DN is somewhere in the north midsection of the country. I set the software to send my answer and, as I usually do, searched Google for his call. His webpage on QRZ.com came up, showing that he was from Alpine, Utah and his name is Ken Jennings.

Wait a minute. Ken Jennings? Utah? Could it be . . .?

The answer is a bit farther down the page. "This question comes up from time to time. NO, I am not the Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame . . . but I am his father. Unfortunately, DNA does not flow uphill." It's accompanied by a picture of his son with Alex Trebek, and a Jennings family portrait.

So that is my brush with those near greatness for today. I can add that to one of my best friends from Texas who was Willie Nelson's veternarian's assistant, and the time I did Windows 95 tech support for a woman who had been on a Mormon mission with Donny and Marie Osmond's parents. (One of these days I'll write about the time I got a tech support call from Donny Osmond.)

UPDATE: I got a very nice note attached to Ken's electronic confirmation telling me that his wife is from Edmonds and his daughter lives here in Shoreline. (His son's Wikipedia page says he was born in Edmonds.) I've mentioned before that JT65 is very formulaistic and you don't learn much about the other operator other than where they are, so it's always nice to get personal touches like this.

Comments

[technoshaman]

*giggles* you know that's only one of my very favourite movies...

And Connery didn't much bother with the EU accent... but they did do something interesting... All the Russians had *some kind* of European accent, be it Eastern or British or whathaveyou... and Ramius, who wasn't Great Russian but Lithuanian? Had a Scottish accent, traditionally known for being a rebel. :)

And I really loved the way they switched from Russians speaking Russian to Russians speaking convenient English... :)

[banjoplayinnerd]

Maybe it's just my imagination, but I detect a hint of an accent in Ramius that isn't there in any of Sean Connery's other characters. It's a little hard to pin down what kind of an accent Ramius would actually have; he's Lithuanian, not Russian, but he would have grown up in a Lithuania dominated by the Russians (certainly from his early teens), and as a rising officer in the Soviet Navy would have used Russian day in and day out. Then again given his age he probably would have grown up in Vilnius speaking Lithuanian, his wife was Lithuanian, and . . . I'm way overthinking this, aren't I?

Yeah, Hunt for Red October is a wonderful movie. It's certainly flawed - there are several places where the writers are pretty heavy-handed in showing that we are in an American or Soviet environment - but it's a good adventure yarn, and whatever other flaws the script has, there are some great lines. "I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck, maybe even a recreational vehicle." or "Be careful what you shoot at. Most things in here don't react too well to bullets."

[technoshaman]

I think the most annoying part was the clearly added-in line "could be a missle boat out of Polyarny..."

OTOH, one of my favourite bits was just after the one you cited... "I think I shall need.... two wives." "At least!"

And if you freeze-frame it just *after* "You arrogant ass! you just killed US!" you'll find a very interesting detail which I have no idea as to it's authenticity, but.... :)

[banjoplayinnerd]

The trivia and goofs sections of the IMDB entry for Red October are particularly entertaining. :-)