I was up late last night, on The Late Debate with Jack And Ben.

Which means I wasn’t up early this morning blogging.

It’ll be a light day today.

Here’s Ronald Reagan’s Thanksgiving address from1985:

He’d just rescued the nation from almost two decades of irresponsible spendthrift government,setting the stage for the greatest run of prosperity this nation had ever known.

Kinda makes you hope anything can really happen, doesn’t it?

Anyway – I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving!

Not sure why all the week’s mania manages to coalesce around Thursdays on this blog, but it does.

Posting will likely be light-ish until this evening.

As a general rule, readers of Shot In The Dark are a cut above the average media reader; smarter, more discerning, more literate.

But I have a few readers – mostly fairly clearly left-of-center – who, let’s be frank, are dumber than plant life.

But stupid people are people too, more or less.  So I’m going to answer some of the idiotic questions I get from some of these gabbling bobbleheads.

I got this one from Professor Dudley Doltt, a U of M staffer, in re my reporting on “Draw The Line MN”‘s duplicity and non-transparency;  “Why are you afraid of a fair redistricting done by “courts” @mitchpberg?”  Professor Doltt:  Where did I mention anything about the “courts?”  Or are you under the impression “Draw The Line” is a court?  I was criticizing Draw the LIne and the media.  Do try to read more carefully.  Also, do try to read.

I got this next one from Doctor Duh Doy Duhhhhhh Durrr Freaking Duhhhh, another U of M lab assistant: “are you whining about redistricting because you believe gerrymandering is one of the spoils of war?”  You might notice I accused the DFL of gerrymandering.  It’s a rather key distinction.  Not that you’re smart enough to get it.

I got this one from former regular comment-section-waxy-buildup “Tom In St. Paul”:  “Aren’t yu realy Joe Doakes from Como Park? You say he exists but he does not. I thenk you are teh lier!”.  Riiiight, Tom in Saint Paul.  Because I’m so reticent about expressing my opinion normally I’d have to make up a completely different identity to do even more of it.

Finally, there’s the question from John Thompson, a filth refinisher from Richfield.  “Aren’t you just a Rethuglikkkkkkkkkon moran?”  Attention, pieces of intellectual compost; it’s “moron”. Just like mom always spelled it.

Nonetheless, I value all my readers – including the stupid, incurious, addled and depraved among them!

It’s one of those weeks in the history of this blog I used to dream about around this time last year, when I was basically donating a couple of hours a day (usually 5-7AM and/or 9-11PM) to blogging for the Emmer campaign and the rest of the GOP slate, then racing to the day job, then feeding the kids, then the evening routine, and then – often as not – more blogging.  Back then, I was existing on caffeine and adrenaline and that buzz you get when you’ve got a feeling you’re really onto something.  The pace was frantic, and there was this amazing intensity to blogging…

…that burned me out hard.  After the election, it was probably February before I really got my mojo back.

If I’ve noticed one thing in almost (yeep) ten years of writing this blog, it’s that there’s a cycle to things; the “storms”, if you will, when you’re riding a rocket and on a constant adrenaline buzz are memorable, of course; the 2010 Gubernatorial Election, the 2008 race and the coverage of the Republican National Convention (and, mostly, the protests against it), the 2006 race and the naked media bias, and of course being one degree of separation from the explosion of Rathergate back in 2004, sitting in the studio at the Patriot as John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson were riding in on the curl that’d wash Dan Rather out to palookaville.

And after the storm, if you will, comes the hangover; the days, or weeks, when you can barely think about writing; when you’ve thrown everything you have into it, and don’t think you have any more.  It’s the kind of thing that’s ended more than a few blogs much better than mine.  Me?  I get through the hangover by getting through it; I love writing, even when I hate writing, so I make sure I, well, write.

Because when you weather the hangover, you get to days like today.  The calm before the next storm, if you will.

Oh, it’s really only calm on the surface.  There is a ton of stuff going on behind the scenes.  Stories that have been under the radar for months that are about to break back out into the open.  Projects that have been bubbling along for years that are about to re-erupt  (my “This Was The Year That Was” project, the thirtieth anniversaries of the great albums of the early eighties, is about to start ticking again – and of course, my “World War II: Fact And Myth” series is really just getting started, although a good chunk of it through 2014 is already written).

And of course, another big election.   Maybe the biggest one since 1980, really.

So that’s one thing I’ve learned – there’s a cycle.

The other thing I’ve learned?  The first rule of the “Calm Before The Storm” is “never talk about the calm before the storm” and ruminate that the next couple of months on this blog are going to be all pastoral and low-key.  It’s the best guarantee that something is going to blow up big-time in the next week.

No.  I know better than that.

There are those who say that political blogging is dead – replaced by Twitter.

To explore the issue, I present a Point/Counterpoint debate between myself and my evil twin brother Jed.

MITCH:  Is political blogging dead?  Who cares?  As long as I enjoy doing it, it’s alive!

JED: Solipsistic as always, Mitch.  The larger point is this; if all political communication is going to have to squeeze down to 140 characters (less links), then completing the de-evolution to Duckspeak is really just a formality.

The winner:  Both of us!

Dan Haugen, who we last ran into a few years back when we taught him a little about research, writes for “Midwest Energy News” – which is funded by an alt-energy pressure group – about Minneapolis’ new biking director, which recently survived a challenge in the Minneapolis city council even as the city lays off firemen.

The rationale is – well, both typical and mildly troubling (emphasis added):

‘An investment, not an expense’

Across the country, cities like Portland are hiring bicycle and pedestrian coordinators to help attract not only federal project dollars but also to make their cities a more attractive place for workers who want the option of living without a car, says Joan Pasiuk, director of Bike Walk Twin Cities, which promotes non-motorized transportation.

In other words, you have to spend taxpayer money to get other taxpayers’ money:

Chicago has had a bicycle coordinator for a decade and a half. Omaha hired its first bike coordinator last year. Even cities like Miami and Phoenix that probably don’t come to mind as major bicycling hubs have hired for similar positions in recent years.

“Cities are seeing this as an investment, not an expense,” says Pasiuk.

And there you see the spread; cities that are broke, or cities that are doing well enough that they can afford some of the petty luxuries like, well, biking coordinators.

It’s an odd set of priorities for a city that’s flirting with “broke”.

I had to mention this:

And then there’s the health savings. Researchers in the Netherlands found that despite being at higher risk for injury, cyclists enjoy “substantially larger” health benefits compared to drivers.

But if you read this blog, you knew that two years ago.

UPDATE:  I changed the reference to MN Energy News in the first graf; it’s “Funded by”, rather than “a front for…”, the pressure group.  It was pointed out to me – civilly, mind you – that the phrase “front” casts an unnecessary aspersion.  I’ve reworded accordingly.

It’s been a frustrating year for biking.

The bad news:  My office is in the western burbs.  I live in Saint Paul.  That makes for a sixteen mile commute.

The good news: Those sixteen miles are almost completely striped lanes and bike paths.  I know – taxes, transportation dollar, silly expenditures, bla bla bla, but I paid for ’em, so I’m using ’em.

More bad news: my daily schedule frequently doesn’t allow me the hour-and-change it’d take me to ride home at night; stuff needs to get done after work.  It’s clearing up…just in time for autumn.  Not that autumn is bad bike weather – not at all – but it does mean that the season is going to end in the next 2-3 months.

Semi-bad news:  since I really only got to start biking consistently in early August, I’ve been working my way up to doing the whole run.  I started by throwing my bike on the rack and driving to a park-and-ride out in the western subs.  Every week, I switch to a park-and-ride a little farther from the office.  I’m currently riding in the last eight miles or so.

The bad news:  between eight and 16 miles, there are no park and rides.  So I’m mentally working my way up to taking the plunge and riding the whole 16 miles each way.  But it’s my goal to fit the whooole thing in at least once a week,and ride all or part of the commute at least four days a week.

It’s more psychological than anything; three years ago, when I was biking all the time, sixteen miles wasn’t that big a deal.

The good news:  Oh, screw it. I’m going to do it.  Monday.

The police are searching for a missing woman:

[Maplewood police say] 74-year-old Geraldine LeClaire told her husband that she was going to US Bank on Beam Avenue and to Maplewood Bakery Saturday morning.

 

 

She left the couple’s house around 8:45 a.m. and never returned. Police say LeClaire suffers from memory loss.

She was last seen driving a 1999 tan Buick Century with license plate RGK 546.

Geraldine is the mother of one of my absolutely nicest neighbors, and grandma of one of my kids’ lifelong friends.  Please keep an eye peeled for her and her car.

UPDATE:  She’s been found, safe.

Earlier today, I wrote about an op-ed from over the weekend in the Strib.  Reading it, I assumed that the piece – by “Hinda Mandell”, formerly of Edina – was incredibly bad, overly over-the-top, broad-to-the-point-of-unfunny, stereotype-clogged parody.

Mandell is, in fact, a real person, with a twitter feed of her own; Ms. Mandell is apparently a real mid-level “communications” academic whose brief seems, ironicaly, to include parsing communication so finely for the wispiest hint of perceived victimization that “communication” of any type will eventually be rendered impossible.  The article was apparently on the level.  Not to mention the first thing I’ve ever read that was actually too dumb to be on Minnesota Progressive Project.

Ryan Rhodes figured it out before me – and after almost ten years of blogging, he’s just as worth reading as he ever was, by the way. He commemorated Ms. Mandell’s raving with the gifts of art…

…and fisk.

Who says there’s a higher education bubble? Note to aspiring communication students: Avoid the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, lest you come out of college much, much, MUCH dumber than when you went in.

Anyway – I guess there are a couple of lessons from this whole thing:

• We have too many academics.
• The higher ed bubble is about to explode. And when it does,and if (heaven forfend) Hinda Mandell has to find another gig, wouldn’t it be ironic if she had to get a job as a barrista?

I apologize for the error.

I’m off to tell my farmer friends to stop referring to “Hard Red Spring Wheat“, before Hinda Mandell claims they’re bigoted against Native Americans.

Yesterday was one of my kids’ first day at college.  Not gonna say who, or where – nutters are everywhere out there, and some of them are safely tucked into offices at institutes of higher education.  Why tie weights around my kids’ ankles?

And yes, I do feel too young for this, although I know it’s not true.

But all I can say is “Whew.  Finally”.

I’ve not spared much in relating my disgust with the Saint Paul Public School system.  As I noted a few years back, one of the best days of my life was when my kids got pulled out of the SPPS and put into charter schools. I’m not the only one; one out of eight Saint Paul parents has yanked their kids out of the SPPS and high-tailed it to parochial, charter, suburban (via the state’s open enrollment statute) or home schools.

But now, today, knowing my kids are beyond the claws of that wretched, dysfunctional, addled, mediocrity-worshipping, politically-correct, racist-via-low-expectations school system, I feel a lot better about life in general.

This isn’t to bag on the people I do know who are conscientious, diligent employees of the SPPS, who genuinely do care about students and are good teachers and dedicated staffers.

But I have to ask them – why do you share a district with people like this?  With a district that chooses every day between thick-necked adherence to idiotic policy and the welfare of children, and is constantly found wanting?

Anyway – it’s a happy day.

One more to go!

When it comes to temper, I’m pretty Scandinavian; I don’t really lose my temper; it takes a lot to get me to show any emotional at all, really.

But when I do?  Houston, we have a problem.

And so there really aren’t many things in the world that genuinely fill me with blinding homicidal rage.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a few:

• “Axe” Deodorant Ads: All of them – the falling angels, “double-pits-to-chesty”, the idiot skateboarders, and the worst of them all, that **c***g chocolate guy walking down the street.  Yeah, I know – their target market is the young and gullible (see also: Obama 2008).  But did our anscestors defeat the Nazis so that we had to endure this bilge?
• Huge, tasteless tattoos: 1992 called.  Seattle wants its fashion mistakes back.
• “Girl Power”:  No, not powerful girls; girls should have self-respect and be intelligent and strong and self-assured.  No, it’s the attitude I saw in a set of T-shirts at a store the other day – something to the tune of “I Throw Like A Girl. Jealous?”  Which, by itself, is fine – it shows a clear misunderstanding of physical and emotional development in boys and girls, but whatever.  But it was part of a line of “girls rock, boys suck”-wear which, again, I don’t care so much about, except that it’s been part of a twenty-year effort to make room for empowering girls by cutting down boys.  It manifests itself in schools, and it’s having a terrible effect – boys are rapidly losing interesting education; soon, they’ll be down to 40% of college students. And for the life of me, I haven’t figured out how disempowering one gender in terms of its own natural traits can “empower” the other one!  Also,  I’d love to see the firestorm that’d accompany a line of T-shirts reading “I think like a boy – so sorry your adolescent feminine three-dimensional spatial visualization is so inadequate”, or whatever.
• Historical Illiterates – Not all of them.  But many.  Especially the ones that will read or hear some reference to German history from 1933-1945, issued by, hypothetically, someone who’s studied the history, sociology, politics and language of the era in some great detail, and – no matter what the reference is to – bleat “Godwin’s Law! Godwin’s Law! Braaaaaaaawk!“.  Just saying.
• The taste of energy drinks:  All of them.  I can only think of one from among the whole assortment – Red Bull, Monster, Monster Java, Surge, Amp, RockStar, Pimp Juice (no, I’m not making that one up), Redeye, Pr0n Sauce (OK, I made that one up), SoBe  –  that doesn’t taste like carbonated fruit punch.  Amp Citrus tastes vaguely like lemonade – not a bad start – that’s been filtered through battery acid.  It’d help if every single one of them that I’ve tried didn’t give me a splitting headache – where by “help” I mean “with my aim”.
• The “States Rights Equal Slavery” Slur – Can you imagine out much better our nation would be today, had half of the nation sought secession, and the other half opposed it over, say, the Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, or the activist interpretations of the Interstate Commerce Clause?  The notion of enumerated powers, and reserving important powers to the states and The People, is a noble one, a cornerstone of true representative democracy and a key bulwark against the creeping centralism that’s been increasingly sapping this country for the past eighty years in an accelerating vortex of bureaucratic ooze. And just because the peckerwoods in half of the nation decided to stake “states rights” on a profound evil, slavery, doesn’t make the concept itself less any less vital.  If you have a brain in your head, a moral bone in your body, any respect for why this nation exists as it does (as opposed to in the form of a France or a Netherlands) and the faintest sense of respect for logic.  But if the majority of this country had any of the above, the Democrats would have to launch petition drives to get on the ballot, like the Greens or the Constitution Party.
• Pauly Shore – Yep.  Even after all these years.  Just can’t get over it.
• Mindless Petty Slander – It’s a long story.
• The Advertising Double Standard – You know the one I’m talking about; in advertising, most families show “Dad” as a bumbling, incompetent schlub whose improbably gorgeous wife seems to tolerate him (and provides the correct answer to everything, which always hinges on the product being sold).  I understand it, of course – these ads are aimed at products that women tend to buy.  But I wonder about this part – if you look at ads aimed at things men stereotypically buy – tools, cases of beer, work trucks – the portrayal across the gender divide is so different; in those ads, men are young, usually single, and surrounded by women whose intellectual and social capabilities are never questioned, and are indeed irrelevent beside the fact that they are hot.  So what does this tell us about how the world of advertising sees the American gender psyche (a perception which had best be accurate, for them, since business stakes billions of dollars a year on these ads)?  That men fantasize about being young, buff, drunk, driving big trucks, and surrounded by Selma Hayek and Sarah Chalke lookalikes, while women dream of making the men in their lives look emasculated, helpless and stupid?
• Discrimination Before The Law Against Anyone Based On Race, Religion, Politics, Ethnicity Or Affectional Orientation – Because if I didn’t say it, you just know some bobblehead would ask “So you don’t hate repression?  Hmmm?  Developing…”
• “Portlandia“.

Not a multi-part series.  I think I pretty well blew the karma out of my cylinders with this post.

I like to bike.  My current commute is 16 miles each way, if I do the whole thing (and I usually don’t; most days, I’ll throw my bike on the rack and drive to a park-and-ride and bike the last 8-10 miles,although my goal by the end of bike season, November-something with any luck at all, will be to ride the whole thing at least once a week).

Jason Lewis’ accusations notwithstanding, bikers pay all sorts of taxes; for starters, very few of us bike exclusively; most of us drive cars, and pay gas taxes, and as I showed some time ago, those of us who mix biking and driving actually benefit the rest of you taxpayers and gas-buyers.

I mention all of this purely to set up the fact that I’m not one of those conservatives who thinks bikes are in and of themselves a communist conspiracy, and that bikers have been sucked, wittingly or not, into some “progressive” vortex.  It’s just not true.

But like most conservative bikers, I do the odd theatrical facepalm when I see the institutionalized arrogance of the Bike über Alles crowd.  And we have just such a case on display in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood.  A “non-profit”, “Transit for Livable Cities”, is proposing a “bicycle boulevard” – not much unlike the one on 39th Street in south Minneapolis, which I accidentally discovered this past weekend, and which seemed oddly devoid of bikes when I saw it – straight down Jefferson Avenue.  And to do it, they want to make Jefferson, especially at Cleveland Avenue, virtually impassable to cars.

St. Paul Public Works plans to move forward this year with a grassy, bicycle-friendly median along Cleveland Avenue at Jefferson Avenue that has drawn both praise and criticism from residents in the area who are weighing the merits of a narrower crossing.

The median would force northbound and southbound traffic along Cleveland Avenue to slow and traffic along Jefferson Avenue to make right turns.

Public Works has tentatively proposed that the median go before the St. Paul City Council on Aug. 17. If approved, construction could begin in October or November.

Cleveland is the main way of getting north and south from Highland to the Midway.  Having a big gnarly bottleneck at Jefferson will not just be a huge pain, but it’ll squeeze traffic into the side streets or bump it over to Fairview, which is already overtaxed; with light rail contruction, getting north and south through Saint Paul anywhere west of Lexington (so far) is a sisyphean nightmare.

The citizens against the Jefferson Avenue Median have a facebook page.  And Joe Soucheray – who benefits from being one of few mainstream conservative commentators who don’t froth against biking for no reason takes the proposal apart.

More later…

It was 12:25PM, August 8, 1991.

It’d been two and a half days. since the labor had started – late Monday night, at the corner of First Avenue and Eighth Street, outside the Target Center. We’d been at the “KDWB Star Party”; one of the few bennies, at least for me, of working at KDWB was the concert tickets. And Bun, in the womb throughout the previous nine months, had always mellowed out when loud R&B music came on in the nightclub where I (and Bun’s mother, who worked in the same bar, and who I long ago promised never to write about in this blog, and I won’t, except to affirm that my daughter Bun does in fact have a mother) worked.  But not that night.  Months of kicking – Bun was a hyperactive little thing – turned into actual contractions.

For two days.

And finally, on Wednesday, August 7, around 4PM, the contractions dropped down to less than five minutes apart.  We raced to the hospital – Regions today, Ramsey County back then…

…where an arrogant little Hindi resident timed the contractions at just over seven minutes.  She sent us home…

…where they promptly dropped to ninety seconds apart.  Which led to another frantic drive to Ramsey, where they stayed at every ninety seconds…

…for the next eighteen hours.

It was a little after noon when, fogged with fatigue, I noticed that we weren’t alone in the room anymore.  There were nine doctors and eight nurses (or so I recall), and one of the doctors was holding what looked like salad tongs, and it occurred to me that “they didn’t talk about this in childbirth class”.

And out of the daze, at 12:25PM, came a little baby girl (I discovered it for the first time; we wanted it to be a surprise), pale and covered in blood and disconcertingly quiet.  She’d been in some form of fetal distress – hence the crowd of doctors and the salad tongs.  But in a moment or two, she caught her wind, and that moment after birth was the last quiet moment any of us ever had.

And I stopped measuring time from when I started my life in the big city, and started measuring it in terms of a family. And it’d be almost fifteen years before it’d occur to me to think a whole lot about the five and a half years before, when I’d started in Jamestown North Dakota a newly-minted college graduate, who got tired of waiting for his real life to begin, and decided on a drunken whim to move to the big city.

Bun came first.  A year and a half later came Zam.  Two weeks later, my first IT job, as a technical writer at a packaging engineering company, writing “how-to” manuals for machines that put Wheat Thins into bags and stuffed the bags into boxes (I’m not making that up), which led to jobs writing everything from the business plan for a supercomputer company software division to a user guide to a system that brokered end-cap space at grocery stores to the highest bidders.  And then – driven by the same restless boredom that had led me to Minneapolis in the first place – into teaching myself a new trade, one that hadn’t really taken off in the Twin Cities yet, “User Centered Design”, by which a guy with a BA in English could become an IT mover and shaker.

But that was all in the next seven years.  Twenty years ago today, I was a nightclub DJ and part-time radio guy, bored out of his mind and living one paycheck away from oblivion who still harbored ambitions of breaking back into radio, but was starting to realize it could never happen.  Not in this life – the life I was in, at that moment.

Now, I was Dad.

And all my time got measured from that moment, from then on.

———-

I think this is the end of Twenty Years Ago Today.  I started the series in September of 2005, really more as a present to my kids – so they could know, perhaps, what and who I was before they were born, in the event it ever occurs to them to wonder – than as something that fit into this blog.

From here on to the present day?  They are the story. And they were both there for all of it.

Oh yeah – and happy birthday, Bun!

It was Friday, August 2, 1991.

After my second interview a few days earlier, I got a call very quickly asking me to come in for a third interview. That was good.

I’d also found out from Joe Hanson – the keeper of all broadcast lore in Twin Cities radio – that I was on a short list; me and my co-worker at KDWB, Steve Konrad (who was going by the air name “Wally Pike”, and was producing the “Steve Cochran” morning show.  It was down to the two of us.

The previous weekend, Steve had walked in to the control room at K63, and we’d chatted about the incongruity of it all.  I laughed, and pointed out that I had some pressure; I had a baby whose due date was four days away.  “Gotta figure out how to pay for it”, I chuckled, not feeling all that funny at the moment.

But it was time.  I drove out to the KSTP studio, out on Highway 61 in Maplewood, and was ushered into Morris’ office.  I sat at a table with Morris and a consultant.  The consultant will remain nameless – partly because I don’t entirely remember his name, and partly because really, all broadcast consultants are the same.  This guy was one of about 500 consultants around the country who were claiming credit for Rush Limbaugh’s emergence as the savior of AM radio.

We chatted for a bit, we talked about my vision for the station.  I had thought out a pretty coherent one; get people to work on the ABCs of broadcasting – the station IDs, the cross-promotion, better call screening (not “tighter” so much as more strategic – bumping better callers, and women, farther up in the queue, that sort of thing), which would move some of the responsibility for the shows’ pacing to the producers, who had been operating as a bunch of glorified board operators for the past couple of years.

There was some give and take; the consultant was poking away pretty hard – but I don’t think he stumped me.

After about 45 minutes, Morris said “I have no doubt that you have the intellectual background and experience to do the job.  My biggest concern is that you’re going to try to get on the air”.  She knew, naturally, that that had been my big goal.  And it still was, to be honest.

But I fielded the hopper; “that’s not what this job is about.  I’ll have other focuses”.

Then the consultant fired back.  “So you did a conservative show?”  I affirmed.  “Why do you think Rush Limbaugh is as successful as he is?”

“Because there is a huge base of conservatives out there who have been grossly underserved by the traditional media, and who are finding a voice on talk radio that they’ve never really had before”.

“No!”, he pounced.  “Rush is successful because he’s irreverent.  Because he takes politics and has fun with it.  He could be talking about sports, or cars, or real estate; as long as you’re having irreverent fun with the topic, it’s all the same”.  He extolled Bob Yates (of whom I was a big fan), and Turi Ryder (of whom I was not, but who was someone the station had hired at the consultant’s direction) as examples of where talk radio was going.

I put the pieces together in my head.  They see me as a political talk partisan. Steve Konrad is the producer of a “comedy” talk show.  He sees “comedy” with a thin topical veil as the future of talk radio.  He’s got his mind made up already. 

I could feel the water leaking into the boat.  I started bailing.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Don Vogel?”

“I’ve got his tape, but I haven’t heard it yet”.

“I used to produce him.  Give him a listen.  It’ll show that I’ve got good chops at both kinds of talk radio”.

Things slowly fizzled after that.  They thanked me for coming out.  And the body language said that that was as far as I was going to get.

———–

I found out on August 6 – my baby’s due date – that I didn’t get the job.  And that Steve Konrad had given his two weeks’ notice at KDWB.

I also heard some other things – things I’d suggested in my second and third interviews.  The station’s hosts got a lot more punctual about “formatics” – giving the station’s IDs in and out of breaks, giving several of the four Arbitron diary identifiers every they did an ID.  Barbara Carlson softpedaled her “political insider” persona, in favor of her “big crazy personality” one.

And a few months later, Don Vogel started on the afternoon shift, in place of the afternoon guy they had in place that I’d mentally noted I was going to get rid of anyway.   His producer – in his first fulltime radio job – was Tom Mischke, who’d been the “Phantom Caller” during my time producing Don.

Oh yeah – and when Joe Hanson, whom Steve Konrad eventually hired to produce first Mischke and then Jason Lewis, next worked with me on the Northern Alliance back in 2004-2005, he told me the consultant had finally averred that his whole “people don’t care about conservative talk because they care about conservatism” line was the biggest mistake he’d made in his career.

So I made an impact – not that I got anything out of it.  And it did grate on me.  Bad.

But the time was coming fast to move on from that part of my life.

It was July 29, 1991.  It was exactly 11:30 AM.

And after a four year drought, I had a shot at getting back into the game.

After Joe Hanson sicced me on a lead for an “executive producer” at KSTP, I had had a phone interview with KSTP-AM’s general manager, Ginny Morris, the previous Monday.  I can’t honestly remember much about it…

…but it must have gone well, since she’d arranged a second interview immediately. We’d meet for a lunch interview.

Which was today – at 11:30AM.

We met at “Keys”, a cafe in the Midway.  Morris – one of the scions of the Hubbard clan, a granddaughter of Stanley Hubbard, the founder of KSTP, one of the great pioneers in broadcast history and one of the founders of radio as we know it today – arrived.  We traded some small talk as we took a small table along the side wall.    Or ordered a club sandwich; having never had a lunch interview before, I had actually gone to the library and researched what was and was not a good idea for eating at interviews.

The first half the interview was mostly your standard interview questions – “what’s your biggest weakness?”,that sort of thing.

And then, the second half?  “What would you do if you were the executive producer?”

I hadn’t expected that.

But after listening to what they’d done with KSTP-AM – my station – the previous four years, I’d certainly thought about it.

I remembered what Bob Richardson had taught me at KEYJ ten years earlier.  “I’d make sure everyone on the air did the station ID whenevever they open or close the mike”.  Radio station ratings back then were rated by people who kept diaries of their listening.  They’d track stations by one of four things that the people who analyzed the book could recognize; the call letters, the frequency, the motto and the air talent name.  “So every time they turn the mike on or off, it’d be “…this is KSTP, AM1500, the Talk Station, I’m Barbara Carlson.  Every time”.

She took notes.

“Oh, and Barbara Carlson?” I started, speaking of the station’s morning host, a legendary Minneapolis socialite and ex-wife of the sitting governor, Arne Carlson.  Her show was kind of a melange of her larger-than-life, “brassy” personality on the one hand, and all sorts of political insider stuff on the other.  “Pick one”, I said, “and incorporate the other side into it, so the show has a coherent identity. Be either a serious, sober political insider with a fun side, or be Barbara Carlson, with some politics”

We carried on like this for a good half an hour.  I had plenty of ideas.

Finally, she had to get back to the office  We shook hands.  The body language seemed…good?

I couldn’t really tell by that point in my life.  Nothing had worked out well for quite a while.

———–

I was getting better at body language.  She called me later in the day  I was on the short list; she wanted a third interview, with her and the station’s consultant.   Next week.

Why don’t you ever put liberals on your show?  We do.  Ed and I have interviewed Erik Black, Dane Smith, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, and my old friend, Erik “The Transit Geek” Hare.  All of them but Rybak at least once (and we may extend another invite to Hizzoner).

Beyond that?  I have standing invtations out to…:

1. Senator Amy Klobuchar (although finding an actual media contact at her office is always a challenge))
2. Senate candidate Al Franken
3. Rep. Keith Ellison
4. Rep. Betty McCollum (who, let’s be honest, doesn’t make even a token effort to be press-friendly)

While Ed and I are overt, partisan conservatives, we’ll put the level of civility and respect in our interviews up against anything you hear on MPR (and better than NPR; we’re honest about our biases – hello, Nina! – and neither Ed nor I has ever wished a death by AIDS on anyone).

And of course, our producer Tommy has standing orders to jump liberal callers to the front of the caller queue when we’re taking calls, which is pretty much always.  All you have to be is on-topic, or off-topic in a way we’re interested in discussing.

What about Michele Bachmann?  Do you think she’ll be the nominee?  Her surge in the early – let me say again, early – running is pretty impressive,  It shows that the Tea Party has gone from demonstrating to voting.  That’s a good thing.  So does Michele and her organization pack the gear to go all the way to the nomination?  I have no idea.  That’s why the nomination season is so fun to watch.  Who’s gonna end up on top?  More later…

No, I don’t mean why don’t you put liberal pols and wonks on the air.  I mean why don’t you put liberal bloggers on the air to debate with you?  Well, if there’s one that has something to say, that is something that’d interest and entertain our audience – which, remember, is national as well as regional – go ahead and pitch Ed and I.   We’re open to just about anything, provided we think it’d be good radio.

And by “good radio”, I mean entertaining and informative.  The sad fact is that general, “throw out a topic and let’s go at it” debates are really dodgy as radio entertainment.  Still, even abstruse ideological whizzing matches are kinda spotty when it comes to being entertaining radio – wonks love ’em, audiences usually don’t, although to be fair the Patriot’s audience, especially the Northern Alliance’s, is much more receptive than most – but anything’s possible, which is why I say “throw us a pitch”.  There’s not much in radio I haven’t done (other than “get rich); I’m game – but it can’t suck.

How can you say the shutdown was a victory for the GOP?  The Republican borrowed money!  Yeah, that particular DFL chanting point is a funny one.  First – no conservative is happy about the “borrowing”.  But we’re borrowing from ourselves.  Not China.  Not our children’s future.

Second – you do know Dayton’s “education shift” was going to be a lot bigger than the GOP’s.  You do know that.  Right?

No, Merg, I mean why don’t you let me, a “progressive” blogger with a history of bellowing, browbeating and namecalling, into your studio, so you can’t turn me off?  Hm.  Intrigueing offer.

I mean, I kinda spelled it out above.  If you have a subject that’s topical, interesting and potentially entertaining, we can talk.

If, on the other hand, you’re one of those leftybloggers who’s good for about one round of factual discussion – say, until your chanting points from Media Matters and “Crooks and Liars” and Mike Malloy get debunked – and you turn straight to the browbeating and the name-calling?  Well, the only real entertainment value would be in the whole “mocking your intellectual impotence” thing, and we don’t need you in the studio to do that.

And since you, not I, said that I “couldn’t shut you off”, that kinda implies the fun would end there.  Because yes, I certainly could!  It’s called a microphone switch, and I control it!  One of the key rules of hosting a talk show is “stay in control”.  Callers and guests don’t control the show – the host does!  So if a guest (hypothetically) veers from “entertaining” to “not entertaining” for whatever reason?  It’s done!  We move on!  And while it’s a fuzzy gray line between “mockery” and “not entertaining any more”, rest assured we’ll know it when we see it.

So stick with “pitching us a story”.  You might learn something.

It’s been an incredibly busy day.  Two, really – yesterday and today are both shaping up to be bruisers.

So if it’s all the same to everyone, posting is likely going to be very light today.

So much to talk about tomorrow – unpacking the shutdown settlement, especially.  Stay tuned!

It was Friday, July 19, 1991.

A few weeks back, Joe Hanson had tipped me off that KSTP-AM was looking for a new “Executive Producer” – sort of a Program Director, but less power.

That night, I wrote a resume.  It took some stretching; the sum total of my experience was…

• A year and change at KEYJ/KQDJ back in high school.  A great learning experience, to be sure – I reported news, did sports, and wrote and cut commercials as well as spinning records – but it was a year and change of part-time work.
• A summer at KDAK in Carrington, ND as a full-time jock, play by play guy, and the station’s main commercial production guy.
• Another couple of years part-timing at KQDJ in college.
• My year and change at KSTP-AM, producing Don Vogel and Geoff Charles and doing my weekend graveyard show.
• The year and a half watching the needle bob at K-63 and answering phones and running the occasional board at KDWB.

I guess my talent as a writer didn’t start with my blog.  I came indoors from some yard work to a message on the answering machine (!) from Ginny Morris, asking for a call back about perhaps talking about the executive producer gig.

I called back, and got through to her secretary.  She wondered if I could come in to the station on Monday.

I sure could.

I hung up, and frantically scoured the house for my suit.  I reassembled it, and whispered a silent prayer than it hadn’t shrunk.

And then I started trying to figure out how to convince Ginny Morris I was management material.

———-

Does it seem to you that this opportunity dropped into my life suddenly, even abruptly?

It seemed that way to me too, at the time.  I heard about the opening one day in June.  I sent the resume the next day.  And while I kept my fingers crossed, that’s about all the thought I put into it.  I’d pretty much given up on anything happening.

Until it did.

I spent the weekend in North Dakota, at my class reunion.

More later this week, hopefully.

I’ll be on Larry O’Connor’s “Stage Right” show at 11PM Central.

Join the show here.

So yesterday I finally got back on the road.  Sort of.

For the first four years of this series, I was riding to a job in downtown Saint Paul.  It was about six miles each way; a brisk twenty minutes, mostly downhill, in the morning; a gruelling (initially) climb up Cathedral Hill followed by a relaxing blast up Summit Avenue at the end of the day.

My new commute is something on the order of 20-odd miles.  Doable, certainly, but I’m not really in shape to make that kind of a jaunt and make it to work and do it on the way home at night just yet.  So I compromised.  I threw the bike onto a bike rack and drove out to a park and ride in a nearby suburb, and I rode the last probably five or six miles in to the office.

Gotta say, I miss the relative calm of city biking.

The first half of the trip was mostly bike lanes and trails; it was a fun, if choppy, ride.  Hills are fine; new hills that I haven’t done before suck.

The last half, though, was over a couple of busy suburban arterials with no shoulders and only notional speed limits.  I was keenly aware that I was only as safe as the least-engaged driver wanted me to be.  I grew eyes on the back of my head (or, to be fair, kept my head swiveling about like an owl on the hunt) for the last couple of miles in to the office.

The last three miles is, as it happens, the worst part of the whole trip.   The rest of the commute – from my front door to somewhere in the western subs, on a hypothetical all-bike ride to work – is striped bike lanes (Minnehaha, Prior, Marshall) or dedicated bike paths (the Greenway, the River Bluffs trail), up to that last little gauntlet of death.

So my goal for my abbreviated biking season; get to the point where I can do the whole, Saint Paul-to-western-subs trip at least once a week.

You heard it here first…

It was June 24, 1991.  I’d been working at KDWB/K63 for a little over six months.  It was my radio fix, of sorts; I got in maybe 24 hours a week, in and among my various nightclub gigs.  It wasn’t much of a living – but, I thought, it at least kept my toe in the racket.

Sorta.

I was in the studio on a Monday morning, picking up some hours filling in for the guy who normally ran the show after “Harley Worthit”, the morning guy, got off the air.

It was exactly the most boring job I’d had in my radio career.  I wasn’t a “disc jockey”; I was a “board operator” running satellite programming; my job was to sit in the booth, make sure the satellite didn’t go down (it was always fun when it did; I actually got to play real music from the studio.  It happened maybe twice) and listen for the cues from the network to drop in local commeercials – and then return to the network.  Hour in.  Hour out.

Endlessly.

It was pure distilled tedium.

It was not what I got into radio to do.

After four years of looking for another radio job…

…wait – four years?  Was that possible?

No  – it’d been more than four years of looking for a job in news or talk radio.  A few nibbles, a couple of tugs on the line – but nothing.   Other than sitting in the dank little control room at K63 and listening for commercial cues and turning pot knobs to keep the needles out of the red.

If it weren’t for the people that I got to hobnob with, and the thin thread to the goal that I held onto by just being in the building, and the people  – well, it was hardly worth it, was it?

Around 11, one of them – Joe Hansen – walked into the studio.  He was going to work the afternoon shift starting at noon – but he liked coming in early to hang out and shoot the breeze.

“Hey, man”, he said, as the smell of cigarettes permeated the room.  “You hear they’re looking for an “executive producer at KSTP?””   Having worked at KSTP, I knew the job was really sort of a poor man’s “program director” gig, although Hubbard Broadcasting liked to call them “executive producers” to keep them from feeling too powerful.

But no, I answered.  I had not.

———-

I’d been out of talk radio for four years.  In the eight years I had been in the business, I’d not come close to being management.

I was married, and had a stepson and a baby on the way in about six weeks.

Radio was not packing the gear as a way to feed a family.

But the idea of landing a job in the racket that would not only pay well enough to feed a family, but get me back into talk radio?

I went home and got out my typewriter and started cobbling together a resume and a cover letter that could make me look like management material.

And twenty years ago tomorrow, I addressed an 8.5×11 manila envelope to Ginny Morris, the general manager at KSTP, and dropped it in the mailbox.

…of bad blogging Thursdays isn’t going to break today.

Just saying.

Getting a late start on the bike commuting this year.  Part of it is because my commute jumped from six to about 20 miles.  Part of it is because my bike – a 1983 Fuji Monterey that I got in, well, 1983 – is showing its age; it’s a bit of a hangar queen these days.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s earned it.  I’ve got more miles on that bike that on some cars I’ve owned.

So I test drove some other bikes this past week, and have finally taken the plunge on a new ride.  More details – perhaps in a revived “Hot Gear Friday” – coming soon.

Next step – find a park-and-ride about 5-6 miles out from the office, drive and park there, and ride the rest of the way in (the office has a shower, thankfully).

Goal:  by the end of summer, be doing the whole 16 mile haul (it’s shorter via bike trails and lanes) at least once a week.