News You Can Bruise for 2004 December 26

For Christmas, Sumana gave me a radio whose battery you can charge by turning the crank, which warms my survival-kit-obsessed heart. It also gets shortwave, but my trawl through the shortwave frequencies revealed the same sort of content you get on AM radio: sports, religious broadcasting, ominous yet monotonous beeping, etc. You'd think something that bounced off the ionosphere would be cooler. I couldn't even find any numbers stations.