It would appear the only real option in Afghanistan at the moment is picking the type of failure we want to shoot for…
…while remembering that many Afghans who worked for us and are in mortal danger are hiding out (and nationwide), and many Americans – read “potential hostages” – are “sheltering in place” as well, in Kabul.
It would appear our options are:
Dunkirk, if we’re very lucky
Stalingrad – the German version – if we’re not
Mogadishu, to one degree or another – potentially leading to “Teheran, 1979” in the bargain.
Biden has his Saigon moment – He needs to avoid a Mogadishu one.
Securing an urban corridor through a hostile semi-guerrilla army to try to evacuate not only thousands of civilians, but themselves, from a single-strip airport that can potentially be rocketed out of business at the drop of a hat?
Which would subject the US to a choice between:
A humiiliating extended hostage crisis that’d make Iran in 1980 look like an episode of The Waltons, at the very best.
Bringing in a whooooole lot of air power to blast the paratroopers out of the jam, and hope they can save anyone at all.
Richard Fernandez writes an insightful column about The Garden Administration’s stunning reversal of fortune. From the economy to the border to foreign affairs to the culture war, we’re losing everything, everywhere, and all at once. On the bright side, they may have killed the last, best hope for freedom in the world; but their pronouns are up-to-date.
Joe Doakes
As someone who was there (albeit very young, and very Democrat), this feels an awful lot like the 1970s.
But there is no Herb Brooks warming up in the wings. R
on DeSantis has a chance of being well Reagan, at least.
The MN Gun Owners Caucus is suing the Minnesota State Fair for unilaterally breaking Minnesota state statute (714.624, in this case) by unilaterally banning law-abiding citizens right to carry, with a permit, on the MN State Fairgrounds – as they literally have been doing since the fair started in the 1800s, with literally not one single incident. We spoke about this last week, and on my show this past weekend.
Over the weekend, the DFL, er, shot back.
DFL Chair @kenmartin73 laughs along while his staffers insult permit to carry holders.
Law-abiding gun owners have been lawfully carrying at the fair for decades without incident. (According to the State Fair's own records) The DFL's comments are malicious and inflammatory. pic.twitter.com/71mj4RS6fm
On that clip of jabber-y, too-close-to-the-cheap-mic audio are DFL chair Ken Martin, and…
William Davis – the guy who “joked” before the 2018 mid-terms:
Last week, DFL staffer William Davis responded to a Facebook post that said, “On 11.6- take back your country.” On that post, Davis commented, “On 11.7- bring them to the guillotines.”
That’s the hamster that’s referring to law abiding gun owners who have a fraction of the violence record of, well, Twin Cities democrats, as cartoon characters.
WIlliam “Robespierre” Davis.
One of the people that, if you take his own rhetoric seriously, half of the state needs protection from.
You don’t even need to write a punch line with these hamsters.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office Water Patrol Unit has been hard at work this summer, because of a growing problem on Lake Minnetonka.
Law enforcement says people there are breaking the law by renting out boats without first having them inspected. Some of the boats were also being operated by people without the proper licensing.
To be fair, perhaps their intelligence group has found evidence that gangbangers are chartering boats to settle beeves with each other, pirate style.
The “Reverend“ Nancy Nord Bence provided this blog years and years of fodder on the hoof.
The former lutheran minister, ELCU Hair model,and former head of “Protect Minnesota“, the little gun grabber group that never really could, was living proof of and inspiration for Berg‘s 19th Law: no Minnesota gun control group has ever made a claim that was simultaneously original, substantial and true.
Even the board at PM eventually had enough; they tossed her sometime ago, to the chagrin of material starved Second Amendment pundits. She left to go into whatever flavor of political consulting she could find that, one would guess, involves clients who don’t really think that hard or care about results.
I hesitate to say “she’s back“, but she popped up on the radar over the weekend in regards to a Star Tribune editorial:
“Even the Star Tribune…“
The Star Tribune “editorial board“ may as well have gotten its “editorials“ on gun policy written by Mike Bloomberg, for these past…
… well, literally as long as I can remember.
If you are an organization that employs “Reverend“ Nord Bence, please, I implore you; have your people call my people.
I’d like to say the MN GOP Executive Committee took at least a half-measure at its emergency meeting last night.
To be honest? It was maybe more of a quarter-measure, voting for a financial audit.
The party really needs an independent legal review over the sex harassment charges, on top of the financial audit…
…and of course, Carnahan, whose financial and personal relationship with Lazzaro remains the elephant in the room.
Rebecca Brannon was able to watch the Zoom meeting – which, apparently, was itself a subject of a fair part of the meeting, by her account (read the whole thread):
So the party apparently plans to go into the State Fair with this as its status quo.
I may just have to go to the fair, if only to see how that works out.
More constructively? Anyone leading a petition effort to get signatures to force a Central Committee emergency meeting can have time on my show. Have your people call my people.
With only a couple of exceptions since the Battle of Jutland in the summer of 1916, the German High Seas Fleet had sat mostly at anchor at the Schillig roadstead off of the main German naval base in Wilhelmshaven. Days of inactivity had turned to weeks, which turned into months, which transformed the expensive, mighty battleships of the Kaiserliche Marine into rusting hulks crewed by aggravated, bored sailors. The attitude around Wilhelmshaven had only become worse in recent days as the U-boat fleet had been ordered to return to port as the new government of Max von Baden ended Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaign as an American-requested prerequisite to armistice negotiations.
But there was an air of excitement at Wilhelmshaven on October 24th, 1918. Orders had come down from the Chief of the German Admiralty, Reinhard Scheer – the High Sea Fleet would prepare to launch it’s entire armada out into the North Sea. 18 Dreadnoughts, 5 battlecruisers, 14 light cruisers, 60 destroyers and torpedo boats and nearly 30 submarines would sail for the Thames Estuary to engage a numerically superior British Navy in the thick of their home waters. The likely endgame was clear to German officers. The Chief of Staff to the High Sea Fleet’s admiral wrote in his diary that the coming offensive was “a battle for the honour of the fleet in this war, even if it were a death battle,” yet was necessary as “it would be the foundation for a new German fleet.”
Acting clearly against the wishes of the civilian German government, and even the Kaiser, the Kaiserliche Marine had put into the motion the first pieces of what on paper would be the largest naval battle in human history – twice the size of the forces at Jutland if all ships became engaged. It would end with their nation in defeat and engulfed in revolution.
German sailors – and a variety of civilian supporters – march in the major naval base in Kiel. The “Kiel Mutiny” would become the first acts in the German Revolution that ended World War I
The condition of the German Navy had seemingly been both a source of concern and a blind eye for the Oberste Heeresleitung or German High Command.
The sailors of the High Seas Fleet returning from Jutland on June 1st, 1916 were exuberant, having won a tactical victory and believing the congratulations sent to them by their Kaiser that they had “started a new chapter in world history” by defeating the vaunted British Royal Navy. But the cost of Jutland – 11 ships – had precluded another significant campaign in the minds of the German command, and the High Seas Fleet had only left Wilhelmshaven three times since June of 1916, and only once since the fall of that same year. Scheer, the commander of the High Seas Fleet until August of 1918, had in part led that charge, arguing that unrestricted submarine attacks were the only hope Germany had for winning the war on the seas. As a result, outside of the U-boats, the Kaiserliche Marine had nothing to do but wait. Read the rest of this entry »
Looking at the collapse of Afghanistan, and the likely re-emergence of Al Quaeda and ISIS, as well as the inevitable surge of Chinese, North Korean, Iranian and Russian aggression that will attend the adminstration’s show of not just weakness but pathetic senility, one looks for some bright spot.
So – a bright spot to the most dismal day of American foreign policy since I watched that Huey take off from the roof of the embassy in fifth grade?
Maybe it’s this: some of the top “minds” in DC Democrat messaging are going to have to spend so much more time thinking of ways to convince people that “conservative white supremacist terror” is the greatest threat facing this nation, they won’t have time to think of anything new.
I said I was “looking” for a bright spot. I didn’t say I found one. But then, what the heck, we can’t even find the ^$#@ President:
Site note: as I watch thousands of Afghans trying and failing to flee for their lives because American bureaucracy is more concerned about Covid testing than mass murder…
My Comcast bill seems high for what I get. I have the Basic TV package which we use for watching Family Feud and that’s about all. Basic TV, Service to extra TV, Extra TV cable box, Broadcast TV fee, and Taxes – it’s $50 per month. I’m thinking of dropping cable TV for a couple of those Over the Air digital TV antennas. Anybody have any experience with ‘cutting the cable?’ Do they work? Am I on the right track?
Joe Doakes
Comcast cable service is pretty ridiculous. But their Internet is still the best option available (that I’m aware of, anyway) where I live. And it cost more to on bundle them then to take them together
As this is written, the MNGOP Executive Committee is scheduled to meet on Sunday night. The Lazzaro Fiasco is forcing action.
The following needs to happen, while events are still even partly in the Executive Committee’s control:
Chairwoman Carnahan needs to resign.
If she doesn’t, the Executive Committee (henceforth EC) needs to put her on leave.
The EC needs to commission an independent financial audit.
All “Nondisclosure Aghreements” (NDAs) with former staffers need to be voided; NDAs don’t cover illegal activities.
The list of those NDAs needs to be made public. The considerations – reportedly $10,000, in some cases, of GOP money – need to be publicized, as part of the audit.
The EC, in short, needs to rip out the rot, fraud and corruption by the root, while it still can.
Because if they don’t, the following will happen:
The GOP will get slaughtered in the statewide races in 2022. It may happen anyway, but if the repairs don’t start immediately, it’s not even debateable.
Even though Legislative races are the job of the House and Senate GOP committees and the local units of the party, the general public doesn’t know this. Hell, I barely knew it until probably 10-12 years ago. As of two weeks ago, people were expressing some confidence about taking the House back from the scandal-ridden DFL. If this isn’t fixed, stat, that is out the door.
Will the EC act?
Please tell us the EC is smarter than the Judicial Nomination Committee.
Not many people ask me what my dream job is. But if they did, my response might be to spend half my day as a network talk show host, and the other half as a music producer.
And by “producer”, I mean, “fly by the seat of the pants creative type” – sort of like Jon Landau, moreso than the “frequency-chasing audio engineer” type, your Jimmy Iovines or Steve Lillywhites or Brendan O’Briens.
But nobody’s hiring.
Still, I enjoy the bejeebers out of this sort of tale – the day by day, take by take, track by track recaps of how a classic album, in this case George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, was produced.
So if you’re like me – a Harrison fan and a recording geek – you’ll love this long, minutely detailed read.
But it whets the appetite for more. I want someone to tackle more of these histories.
So in case the writer tunes in for this – let’s get cracking on:
Who’s Next
Born to Run (although there is an excellent documentary out there on the subject)
There’s a case to be made that we fought the wrong war in Afghanistan; that we should have gone in, rooted out the Taliban, and installed the best awful people have given them three steps toward the door and left in 2003.
There’s an even better case to be made that nation-building, especially in a place like Afghanistan, just can’t work.
I’m all ears.
It was America’s longest war by a fair turn, and it needed to end, somehow, someday.
But the idea that burning ithrough hundreds of billions of dollars of “investment” and just plain pouring money on the ground, and the lives of 2,372 American servicepeople, and it all ends with a Saigon moment? One our administration practically begged for, and seems unable to comprehend?
Typical Trump-supporting white supremacist confessed to setting cell phone store on fire in Minneapolis (oddly, he didn’t claim to have been inspired to commit his crimes by Umbrella Man). Case was broken by crack federal law enforcement officials surfing the web on company time who ran across this guy’s confession on social media. Heckuva job, fellas.
Joe Doakes
To the Minnesota Left, the fact that he is from out of state is all the evidence they need that he’s a Trump supporter.
It was night on October 23rd, 1918 as a series of rowboats silently dipped their oars in the waters of the Piave river in Italy. The Piave had remained as quiet as the rowboats’ occupants since the Italian defensive victory that summer, halting and then repelling an Austro-Hungarian offensive launched with hopes of knocking Rome out of the war. But the men aboard these boats were neither Italian or Austro-Hungarian, but British, members of the Honourable Artillery Company (an infantry battalion, despite the name) and the Royal Welch Fusiliers. While neither company could be viewed as “special forces,” they were most certainly elite forces of the Crown as the HAC had it’s lineage back to 1087 and it’s Captain-General was officially listed as the King George V.
Their assignment was to secure the series of islands on the Piave river that now constituted no-mans-land, starting with the largest island, Grave di Papadopoli. The HAC and Fusiliers landed with bayonets fixed, sneaking and stabbing their away across the island before the soldiers of the Dual Monarchy were finally able to sound the alarm. In a brief, but tough fight, with Italian diversionary troops even being defeated on the southern part of the island, Grave di Papadopoli was captured by Allied forces. The stage was set for the following morning, the one year anniversary of the Italian army’s humiliating defeat at Caporetto, as 1.4 million Allied troops would throw themselves at 1.8 million Austro-Hungarians. The result would be the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the end of the 600+ year Habsburg Monarchy.
Vittorio Veneto – a major Italian victory that in historical hindsight looks more like a case of Austrian collapse than anything else
By late October of 1918, it could be questioned whether or not a battle even needed to take place to bring about the end of Austria-Hungary’s participation in the Great War. The same day as the Germans learned that President Woodrow Wilson wouldn’t mediate an armistice based on his Fourteen Points, at least not without strenuous pre-conditions, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Baron István Burián von Rajecz asked for similar terms from the Allies. As Rajecz made his request, the Allies formally accepted Czechoslovakia into their alliance. Trying to curry favor with the various ethnic groups now striving to break away from the Empire, Emperor Charles I issued an imperial manifesto that days later that would fundamentally changed the Austrian half of the government, giving autonomy to most ethnic states. It wasn’t enough. The literal next day, the Hungarian parliament passed a resolution ending the Austro-Hungarian partnership, despite having just renewed it for two years, and declared independence. The Dual Monarchy was now a singular one (although the formal cancellation of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 wouldn’t happen until the end of the month). What remained was rapidly falling apart. Read the rest of this entry »
Big Left – via its wholly owned subsidiaries, Big Government and Big Media – have gotten much exercised about “misinformation” lately. As distinct from “disinformation” – someone actively telling you something that is untrue – “misinformation” is someone telling you anything they disagree with.
Rightly or wrongly.
This campaign has taken many forms – a Scarlet Letter-style whisper campaign on public media, active censorship by private-sector tech companies acting in concert with Big Left.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is riding his bike down a suburban street when Edmund DUCHEY, riding a recumbent bike, pulls out onto the street to cut BERG off. Duchey is proprietor at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”, and was badly scarred by a childhood in which he was routinely bullied – by much younger children
DUCHEY: Merg!
BERG: Jeez, you little feeb, you’re driving like a crazy f***.
BERG: It’s got little to do with carrying anything, anywhere. It’s about a government body being able to arbitrarily restrict law-abiding citizens civil rights in violation of state law.
DUCHEY: Hah! Stupid ammosexual! The State Fair is a private corporation!
BERG: A private corporation that had its own police force, with arrest power? Which has called itself a part of state government in its own court filings for over 100 years? Seems like a bit of a stretch. And Minnesota statute is fairly clear that state governments, outside the judiciary, aren’t allowed to bar law-abiding citizens from practicing their civil rights.
DUCHEY: Stupid wingnuts. So you want to carry your guns, so you can intimidate people at the fair?
DUCHEY: People walking around with guns on their hips, or an AR47 slung over their shoulder, are by definition intimidating.
BERG: I could meet you halfway, if you were smart enough to realize it; open carrying in a crowd is a little tactless. I’d never do it. But the ones who have permits are not the people you need to worry about, and the only time criminals carry openly is when they’re pushing it in your face to rob or carjack you. But again, this isn’t about your feelings. This is about the law, and whether we make the state follow it.
DUCHEY: So you want to carry your little gun concealed? You wingnuts will probably shoot your p****rs off.
BERG: And further down the Berg’s 16th Law rathole we go. But I’ll tell you what – there are over 300,000 carry permittees in MInnesota. If we were having accidental shootings in any significant numbers, you’d be hearing about it.
And when I did carry, it was like a .380. I’d need more like a 10 gauge with slugs. No way to conceal that. Now, for you, a .25 ACP should do the trick.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday announced that he would be resigning amid the sexual harassment probe in 14 days.
“New York tough means New York loving, and I love New York and I love you,” Cuomo said, “I would never want to be unhelpful in any way, and I think given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing, and therefore, that’s what I’ll do.”
I honestly didn’t think it would or could happen, even given that Progressives didn’t much care for Cuomo.
And just watch – his successor will be worse. Maybe not in “groping letch” terms, but policy-wise.
…that actual science is about skepticism, about diligently questioning one’s assumptions, about relentlessly searching for the facts on either side of them, pro or con.
All of that being said?
I’m astounded at how many of my knee-jerk responses to Covid turned out to be scientifically valid.
The virus is spread via the air – not surface contact.
And the latest among them? The J&J vaccine appears, despite some early hysteria from the US government, to be the better bet against Delta – in addition to its initial sales pitch, it’s efficacy against hospitalization and serious symptoms (which, having reason to believe that natural immunity was itself a serious hedge against infection, was my biggest goal), appears to be better at allaying the Delta Variant than Moderna or Pfizer.
It’s not quite a Berg’s Law, but it’s getting there.
There is a new wide-eyed, pants-on-head, bat-s**t crazy, right-wing, Trump-inspired, anti-vaccine conspiracy theory going around. Don’t fall for it. The claim is the vaccine does not prevent people from catching Covid and does not prevent them from spreading it; therefore, the vaccine is useless as a preventative and universal vaccine mandates are unnecessary at best (ignoring side effects) and potentially harmful to some (considering side effects). The claim is supposedly supported by a study which is not peer reviewed, did not appear in any major medical journal and was only reported on one website. Few, if any, mainstream media have covered the story. Don’t be fooled. The entity which conducted the study and published the results has a history of making unsupported claims, errors of judgment and reversing its advice. The study, performed by the Centers for Disease Control and announced in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, as reported by CNBC, confirms what I’ve been saying all along. Either it’s wrong or I’m right. What a terrible dilemma for the trolls. Joe Doakes
That’s the thing about being a troll. There really are no terrible dilemmas.
In recent years, as the print news business has been slowly unraveling, I’ve read quite a number of nostalgia pieces from “ink stained wretches” lamenting the demises of the papers where they, in effect, grew up. We’ve seen this most recently with the spiralling-in of the City Pages, a vapid lifestyle tabloid in its later years that in its early days spawned some great writers (James Lileks), some journalists (David Brauer, Brian Lambert), one very goodeditor (Steve “Not The Journey Guy” Perry), a generation of “music critics” that further debased an already fairly useless genre of writing, and a lot of laughable, insipid drivel (I won’t name names; if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you don’t need me to).
I get it. When you get to a certain age, you start to realize that you haven’t had just one life; you’ve had quite a few of them, really. And you try to make sense of them, order them, set them up so that anyone who might be interested in the future knows the story – even if that “anyone” is just you.
I got to thinking about that the other day. This week is the 22nd anniversary of my first day on the radio, back in 1979 [1].
It was at KEYJ, a little 1,000 watt (250 at night) station in Jamestown, North Dakota. It was the #2 station in a two-station market – the competition, the mighty KSJB, with a broadcast radius that covered six states and two provinces, was more a regional thing. But KEYJ was not only absent any delusions of grandeur, but the station intimately knew its niche. While “KS” covered the upper Midwest, with a steady diet of country music in and among a stream of crop reports, regional news and agriculture reporting, KEYJ covered Jamestown and Stutsman County – the news, high school and college sports, city and rural fire calls, reports from the nursing homes, a “swap and shop” show, and a half-hour local talk show. We carried the Twins in the summer, the Jamestown Blue Jays and Jamestown College Jimmies during the school year, and on Saturday afternoons we’d do a “Class B Basketball Game of the Week”, recorded the night before, where the merchants of Ellendale and Kensal and Medina and Ypsilanti would pony up a few bucks in sponsorships to hear their towns kids on the radio.
And some music. Although that was more or less an afterthought – we played middle-of-the-road top forty pop and a lot of “recurrents” from the previous couple decades.
The boss – Bob Richardson, one of the guys who’d put the station on the air in 1953, and who’s still going strong at 90 years old – considered it part of his mission to train local kids who were interested in the craft and technique of doing radio. He always had a couple of high school or college kids on the staff [2]. Not only was it one of the best broadcasting “schools” around, but it was one of the stations new grads from broadcast schools wanted to get into, if they were smart; they, like I, quickly wound up learning how to do literally everything at that station.
No, that’s not me. That’s Dave Howey, who took all the photos in this story when he was the same age I was when I started – the photos are all from 1977-ish, a few years before my time. Dave went on in the business – he’s been dominating morning radio in the Brainerd/Detroit Lakes/Fergus Falls area for the past thirty years or so.
And in August of 1979, it was my turn.
I spent a couple of weeks, starting in late July, shadowing a few of the other guys – Dick Ingstad [3] and John Weisphenning [4], including a day or two spinning records and reading the news and weather. Now it was time for my first solo – on the air, on my own, no training wheels.
It was a pleasant late summer evening in Jamestown when I did my first “solo” couple of hours. I’d be lying if I said I remembered that next six hours especially well – but I remember the first song I ever played on the air. And the second. And actually the third.
It went well enough – I actually got to switch to my regular shift – Saturdays, 5AM to 3PM – the next weekend.
Which led to my ritual, every Saturday morning for the next year and a half or so. Get up at 4:30AM. Hike the four blocks to the station, unlock the doors, start turning on the equipment so it – all ancient tube-driven electronics – could warm up. Most important was the “Remote” – a big, tube-driven stack of amplifiers, rectifiers, and controls that operated the transmitters, two miles away on the south side of town. It’s the sort of stuff you could do on your phone today. Back then – or, really, back in the 1950s, since KEYJ was in effect a museum of the early days of radio – it was a seven foot tall rack of electronics that looked like something from the fire-control plot room from a World War 2 battleship.
This isn’t the remote stack – that’s to the left. This is the pair of ancient reel to reel recorders. That little speaker grill at the top is for a piece of equipment associated with the Emergency Broadcast System, back when it was still called “Conelrad”. That’s how old the gear was/
On a hot day, that studio got downright torpid – there was no air conditioning (other than in the engineering shack, where it was needed); the control room relied on a fan and an open window. On a cold morning, you could hear the tubes struggling harder than I was.
The whole place gave off a scent of ozone. They say smells are among the most powerful memory triggers; ozone does it for me. There was something about the crackle and excitement of being in a radio station, being on the air, that for me is intimately associated with the smell of ozone. If I smell ozone, I get a spring in my step.
Dave Howey’s picture of one of the tubes. From the remote control, or the board, or something else? No idea. But that place was full of ’em.
Spent the next 45 minutes sorting through the 50-odd feet of AP wire copy that had printed on the teletype since signoff, about six hours earlier. Sort out the news, weather, sports and other stuff you’d use for the newscasts – five minutes every hour, plus half-hour blocks of news, weather, sports, and local public affairs stuff at 7AM, 8AM and over the noon hour.
That kept me busy for a good half hour or so.
5:50 AM? The transmitter should be warmed up. Time for standby.
And at 5:55 AM? Hit the sign-on music, read the sign-on script, and it was off to the races.
Dave sent a photo of the control board.
Why, yes, I still know what the controls all do. Those three boxes on the top? “Cart” machines – they played those little rectangular cartridges you see stacked on the right that looked a lot like eight-track tapes (kids, ask your grandparents) because that’s what they were. I have no idea what happened with this board – I think some local collector grabbed saved it from the junkyard. At least, I hope they did. Photo courtesy Dave Howey.
I’ve described it as “looking like the front end of a 1952 Buick”, and compared to modern boards, it kind of does. There is literally not a single piece of digital equipment anywhere in this photo, or anywhere in the room. Or station, anywhere, other than maybe a calculator in the sales office.
How old was it? It was in the studio – above the White Drug on main street in Jamestown – and had been since the station went on the air in ’53. I saw a similar one in a documentary about “black” radio stations in the south from the late ’30s, so “from before the war”, in a year starting with “193…” something, is more likely than not. It felt like old-world craftsmanship; the Bakelite pots had a heft that nothing in a radio station today duplicates; the VU meter, perfectly balanced and looking like something off the Titanic, didn’t herk and jerk up and down like modern meters; perfectly balanced, it swayed majestically, like the much slower time it was built in.
(The “production” board, in the little studio room next door where we produced commercials, the occasional pre-recorded show, and where Bob did the daily half hour talk/interview show, had a “1928” date stamped on the manufacturer’s plate on the side – and it looked and felt like it; it was “Steampunk” twenty years before anyone had heard the term).
This may have been the newest piece of equpment at that station. I think it was from the early ’70s.
I went on to work at much more-modern stations – my next, KDAK in Carrington, had a board from the sixties. When I came “back” to KEYJ (which had become KQDJ), everything was remodeled, with brand new (for the early ’80s) gear, although everything was in the same cramped little space above the drug store.
My career moved on – to KSTP, six years later, with KDWB-AM/FM, WDGY and KFAI to follow in succession. And then it ended.
And when it started again, at AM1280 in 2004, I felt a little bit like Rip van Winkle; there was not a single turntable, reel-to-reel deck, or ever cartridge machine. Even the CD player was largely un-used.
And most jarring, although it took me a while to figure it out?
No smell of ozone. Solid state equipment, much less digital gear, gives off no ozone. Radio stations today smell like…offices.
Don’t get me wrong; the excitement I get from turning on a mike is still there. And I can’t imagine all that ozone was good for the health; radio people seemed to die way too young, from old mens’ diseases, back then.
But I miss that smell, sometimes.
———-
[1] Don’t bother checking my math. I said 22 years, and I meant it.
[2] Many of whom went on to big things. Terry Ingstad – you know him as “Shadoe Stevens”, one of the great LA disc jockeys – started there at 12, and earned a spot in Life Magazine in the process. His youngest brother, Dick, is a morning guy in Louisville today, and was one of my best friends in High School; hanging around with Dick while he did his shifts whetted my appetite enough to want to apply for the job in the first place. Mick Wagner, the great Oregon jazz DJ, Mark Swartzell, Dewey Heggen and many more all started in this old studio.
[3] As noted above, a morning guy in Louisville, who’s had an amazing career.
[4] At the time, John was a student at Moorhead State, majoring in Communications. Last I checked – probably 10 years ago – he’s a communications professor in California.
As Covid cases rise nationwide, it’s become fashionable among administration circles and their media lap dogs to try to make Ron DeSantis (and Greg Abbott) scapegoats – largely to head off both of their obvious ambitions and opportunities in 2024.
Is the slander false?
It’s the Biden administration and the main stream media. What do you think?
