Category Archives: Geekery

My many obsessions, interest or tangential curiosities.

The 2024 Top Five

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So – what were the five most important stories of 2024, according to that most dispositive of sources, yours truly?

Glad you asked.  Here goes:

5. I, Knucklehead – Recently, we learned that Harris’s insiders knew she never had much of a lead or chance. But that wasn’t what we saw, or even inferred from the data we saw out here in the wild. Even some fairly reliably intelligent conservative pundits were prepared for the worst as of 7PM CT on November 5.

So I was driving up to North Dakota last summer, worried that Harris was going to pick Josh Shapiro as her Veep nominee.  The conventional wisdom was that the road to the White House led through Pennsylvania, and that Shapiro would deliver it, and likely make Trump’s path to victory a lot longer and more convoluted. 

I was driving home from the same trip when I got the news that Giggles had picked Tim “Piglet” Walz as her running mate.  And I let out a huge sigh of relief, and maybe a gleeful cheer or two, as I careened down I94, my mood having brightened about 145 degrees.

His debate performance against JD Vance was a revelation to some – but almost an anticlimax to me.  I knew from the moment I got the news that Vance would mop the rest-room floor with Walz.  He didn’t disappoint. 

4. He Killed Medicare – It wasn’t just Joe Biden that collapsed in the infamous June debate with Trump. It was the entire campaign of gaslighting that the Democrats and media were trying to run.

And I was about to add my usual “pardon the redundancy” after that last sentence, but I think that everyone with eyes to see and the interest in using them caught it. While the bloom was off the mainstream media’s rose long ago, this past year took a heat gun to whatever was left of that shabby wallpaper.

3. The Big Stick – The Mossad attack on Hezbollah’s leadership via remote controlled boobytrapped pagers and radios was a brilliant kick-off to what appears to have been a slow but definite end-game to Israel’s year-long campaign to crush the Iranian proxies who’ve sworn to Israel’s destruction this past three generations.

It’s all the more important when you remember that it happened when the American election was still very much up in the air, at least outwardly. The Israelis were making hummus while the sun shone, unsure what the status of their alliance with the US would be after January 20. Of course, after the Trump victory, Israel emasculated Iran’s entire air defense network, leaving them basically helpless before any retaliation for any future aggresssions, rebooting much of the math in Middle Eastern politics.

2. “Fight, Fight, Fight” – The leaks about Harris’s real internal polling notwithstanding, the first assassination attempt against Trump was, I think, the point where it started to feel like Trump had more than just an election to win; it was more of a rendezvous with destiny.

I know – I hate being that dramatic without cause. But I think it may actually have been appropriate in that case. It started to feel like it had to happen. There was a change in the campaign’s momentum and, really, a change in Trump.  He seemed a lot more focused, not only as his ear healed, but through the rest of his campaign.   The Twitter-firebomb-throwing Trump of 2015-2020 wasn’t gone, per se – but he seemed much more on task.  Calmer? 

And as much as the Harris campaign tried to co-opt the term “Joy”, it started to feel like there was some sort of je ne sais quoi to the Trump effort – not “joy”, but “purpose”?  “Sense of mission?”

It felt a lot more intense and immediate after that. 

And #1. – Red Green Shoots – It was the year you saw conservative media and “influencers” (much as I hate the term) start to hit their stride. The cultural right hit its “Battle of Midway” moment in myriad battles for the culture:

  • Research undercutting “Trans” ideology and medicine started to take on a critical mass.
  • Young people, Latino men, married women, and increasing numbers of black men voted for Trump
  • There are signs that GenZ is tiring of the meaninglessness of the left’s modern culture.
  • Hollywood’s “woke-ism” is taking flak, with cultural resistance to the PC-ing of tentpole projects like Star Wars and Snow White and Netflix’s ongoing woke-y decay reaching, if not critical mass, at least notable, sustainable velocity. 

Feel free to sound off in the comments. What the heck.

Homework

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Vivek Ramaswamy ruffled a whole lot of feathers over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants.

Stipulated in advance – there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force. That may need some fixing.

But when you start comparing second-generation Indian immigrants?

He’s not really wrong.

You should open and read the entire tweet – but I’m going to pull this quote:

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers…[Families should emphasize] movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

That drew some, er, sporty responses from what media calls “MAGA”. No doubt you’ve heard ’em.

But if you leave aside the abuse of H1B visas, and the pretty spotty record of outsourcing engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results), he’s not wrong.

This guy – one of the less-useless voices in academia – puts it well (and again, you’d do well to read the entire tweet):

But again, I’ll pull the quote:

An entertaining aspect of the past few days’ race war is that the elite Asian/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (“You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid”) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white American critique of Black and Mexican scholastic culture.

As a political scientist, there’s an important point here: bigotry doesn’t just go in one direction. For most people, the more forward-caste person – the bastard ahead of them in society – will always be a ruthless, stiff, amoral, dead inside, thieving, SOB who is a trash lover. But, the more poor and rural person? A dumb, inbred, animalistic, backward, criminal, low-IQ, ridge-runner.

And it should hardly bother “MAGA” too much to notice that Ramaswamy agrees with them – modern American academic culture in general would have to stand on tiptoes to get to “mediocrity”, and that pathology is even leaking into the once-sacrosanct “STEM” fields.

But it’s not just academic culture.

Immigrants, as Reilly notes, have always had to kick it up a notch to get to “even” in America.  Indians – like Chinese, Koreans, VIetnamese, Philipinos, and before them Italilans, Jews, Germans and all the others, all the way back – have done it exceptionally well. 

The concentration of Indians in technology (and, this past few years, politics) should be taken as a challenge – to our education system, sure, but to our family culture as well.  

Bugs

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“Mitch, why are you so ambivalent about self-driving cars?”

Because I work with software engineers, and I know how screamingly unreliable and charmlessly quirky anything to do with software is until the technology has years or decades to mature?

Which is annoying enough when you’re trying to make a grocery list or listen to a song.  

Getting into a metal box and clipping along at 30-60MPH? 

Hard pass. 

Solo

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Tonight’s the anniversary of my first. night ever “soloing” on the radio. I’d been at KEYJ, learning the job a couple of weeks; I’d worked a couple of shifts with DIck Ingstad over my shoulder making sure I knew what I was doing.

And tonight, I was on my own, working the evening shift.

The following Saturday, I’d switch to my regular shift – Saturday mornings from sign on (in the studio at 5AM, start broadcasting at 5:55AM, on the air to 3PM).

But I needed to get through this evening first.

KEYJ’s control board.

And for whatever reason, I remember the first three records I played.

First up – this pretty obscure Art Garfunkel solo effort.

I guarantee you, the only reason I remember this song at all is the fact that it was the first song I ever played on the air.

Then? Cliff Richard’s last Top 40 single:

Which, I”ll be honest, I still kinda enjoy.

And then came Dan Peek – former member of America, who’d turned into a solo, Christian artist:

It occurs to me, I may be the only person who remembers any of them.

The Eternal Pot

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“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
 — P.J. O’Rourke

So I’ll be a little stupid.  This was the DFL Monday night:

The party that gave us MNSure, MNLARS, and the entire parade of MN IT hits…

…is heckling the grownups about software glitches.

A Little Soggy

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Governor Klink, Melissa Hortman and the Urban DFL clacque squandered a $19 billion surplus paying off the DFL’s special interests, and all we got was a broken dam.

Unexpectedly? No. Not a bit. The century-old Rapidan Dam on the Blue Earth River – a tributary to the Minnesota, and eventually the Mississippi – has been a problem for a long time.

And everyone who gave a, er, damn knew it:

In 2021, a study was conducted that identified two feasible solutions for the dam’s state of disrepair: repair or remove the dam. Both options have significant costs, and each has its opportunities, trade-offs, and timeframes. The purpose of the Future of Rapidan Dam project is to identify the community’s needs and concerns and use their input on the options to help the County make the best decision for all impacted by the Dam’s future.

You can’t buy any urban non-profit allegiances with a dam. You sure can’t carry a dam in a suitcase to Kenya.

It’s bad.

If there’s a better way of depicting the results of the DFL’s priorities, I’m open to suggestions.

Ugly

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Classic literature instructs us:

*** 

Said the Mock Turtle with a sigh, ‘I only took the regular course.’

‘What was that?’ inquired Alice.

‘Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’

‘I never heard of “Uglification,”‘ Alice ventured to say. ‘What is it?’

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. ‘What! Never heard of uglifying!’ it exclaimed. ‘You know what to beautify is, I suppose?’

‘Yes,’ said Alice doubtfully: ‘it means—to—make—anything—prettier.’

‘Well, then,’ the Gryphon went on, ‘if you don’t know what to uglify is, you ARE a simpleton.’

Minnesota Democrats know what it means and they are hard at it

I don’t like it.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

The problem with the flag – and to a lesser extent the license plate – is that they were designed by graphic designers, judged by people whose background was graphic design (filtered through politics), by criteria that make sense only in graphic design terms.

And while graphic design is one of many tools used to get ideas across to people, when applied for its own sake it’s an intensely myopic discipline. It certainly doesn’t help that so much of my own field has been dragged down by visual designers masquerading as problem-solvers.

Take all that and filter it through politics, and you get the same effect as when you filter science through politics; bad design and/or politics.

The Minnesota DFL destroys everything it touches.

Hot Gear Friday: The Swiss Army Guitar

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The word “iconic” is overused these days. I try to avoid it.

It’ll be hard in this next bit.

If you are not a guitar player, and someone says “electric guitar”, it’s more than a little likely the first guitar you picture in your mind is a Fender Stratocaster.

There are other electric guitars – but if the world had to explain “electric guitar” to an alien, this would likely be the example of choice.

The Fender Stratocaster turns 70 this year.

Radio repair man turned inventor Leo Fender could not possibly have known what he was starting when he began designing the Strat in the early 1950s. Perhaps because he wasn’t a guitarist, he approached the design differently, with an eye on not just manufacture but also repairability. Hence the bolt-on, rather than glued-in, neck. He had hit the mark a few years earlier with the Broadcaster, later renamed the Telecaster due to a legal wrangle with rival manufacturer Gretsch. He also designed the Fender Precision bass. Both were instant successes, popular with western swing bands, but the Telecaster was and remains a slab-like, utilitarian workhorse – two pickups, no nonsense. And as much as musicians loved its sound, they often complained that its square edges dug into their ribs and banged their hip bones.

The Strat, with its neatly nipped navel and two-horned cutaways, is probably what first comes to mind when anyone hears the words “electric guitar”. Millions of players have learned on a Strat – whether made by Fender, its budget Squier imprint, or one of the numerous companies producing copies. Many others dream of owning a top-of-the-range model from the Fender custom shop, costing a five-figure sum. Then there are the secondhand Strats with one previous famous owner. The black 1969 model that Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall went under the hammer for almost $4m, in aid of a climate change charity.

They are famously versatile – their electronics provide thinner tone than the beefy Les Paul, but the three pickups are out of phase with each other, which helps give the Strat a dizzing sonic variety.

There’s reedy and out of phase:

To piercing, with tones you didn’t know existed until you played them:

To pretty much anything you want:

I finally got one, three years ago. It’s a Squier – but it gets the point across.

Philatelic Equity

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Clothing retailers send me junk mail promoting the Spring Collection of fashion designs, so I can run out and buy new clothes to match the season. I never do, but that doesn’t deter the junk mailers.  There’s always hope that I might update my wardrobe.  The Post Office sends me advertising emails promoting the Spring Collection of stamps.  Seriously?  Does ANYBODY run out and buy stamps to match the season?  

What annoys me is not just the two seconds it takes me to click “Delete,” it’s knowing that an advertising campaign doesn’t happen organically.  They probably let bids to hire a firm of graphic artists.  They no doubt had committee meetings to review the offerings for diversity and inclusiveness.  They definitely tasked programmers to modify the on-line store to include the new products.  I can’t even imagine how much it cost in total.  I wish we could measure the response to see if the ad campaign worked.  I hate to complain about the Post Office since it one of the very few Constitutional activities the federal government is authoritized to do, but this is beyond ridiculous. 

Mitch, I see an opportunity for you, writing specialty books.  Somebody got the contract to write “Mister Zip’s Windy Day” for the Post Office (scroll down).  I know Smokey the Bear is the mascot for the US Forest Service but I wonder what the US Marshall’s mascot is?  Do they need a Second Amendment Friendly kids book?  

Joe Doakes, stampless, but at least not in Como Park

My first response – they do this for stamp collectors. How much of a market are philatelists? I have no idea.

I know that recording artists today make much of their actual profit from merchandise sold on tour. Is the USPS mining that same vein?

Or is this just another wealth transfer from taxpayers to favored advertisers and merch producers?

And, since Joe brought it up, how do I get my taste?

Touching

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I’ve joked – or, really, “joked” – that I may just make my millions by developing a line of televisions and other technology products with mechanical power switches, channel selectors and other key controls.

It’s not Luddism – at least, not directly. I actually design things for people to actually use effectively in the real world. And much of the world we interact with is designed by people with more enthusiasm than empathy for the person who’s actually trying to use their product in the real world.

I’m looking at you, company that built my washer and dryer control panels with little tiny dark gray letters on a slightly lighter gray background, which if you’re over 40 and have a dimly lit basement makes things a lot more difficult than they should be.

And at the idiots who put the touch-screen interfaces onto damn near everything in every post-2015 car I’ve rented lately:

Touch screens are ubiquitous in new cars. A recent S&P Global Mobility survey of  global car owners cited by Bloomberg estimates nearly all (97%) of new cars released after 2023 have at least one touch screen nestled in the cabin. Nearly 25% of US cars and trucks currently on the road reportedly have a screen at least 11 inches long according to that same survey. These “infotainment systems,” once largely reserved for leisure activity like switching between Spotify songs or making phone calls, are increasingly being used for a variety of tasks essential to driving, like flashing lights or signaling for a turn. Consumer Reports, which regularly asks drivers about their driving experience,  claims only around half of drivers it surveyed in 2022 reported being “very satisfied” with the infotainment system in their vehicles. 

So Im not the only one who wants to bring back mechanincal controls:

Starting in 2026, according to The Sunday Times, the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) will only award its top safety rating to new vehicles that use old-fashioned buttons and levers to activate indicators, hazard lights, and other critical driving features. The new requirements could force automakers who use the safety rating as a selling point to reassess the amount of driving features they make accessible only through touch screens. Though these voluntary standards are limited to Europe, a battle over buttons is gaining momentum among drivers in the US as well. 

Any old time, people.

I’ll take the “W”.

Social Media Rules For An Anarchic World

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With the change in name from Twitter to “X”, we an in fact call these “X-ioms”:

“A tweet that starts with “hear me out” almost never deserves to be heard, much less heard “out””.

“Arguments that end with “period” or “full stop” should almost always have stopped before they started.”

“When a tweet ends with “that’s the tweet”, a silent “unfortunately” is assumed.”

“Posts beginning “As a [blank] scholar” or “[Blank] scholar here!” only have a high likelihood of being wrong and stupid. They are, however, infallibly guaranteed to be insufferable.” (This one is via @davidpdeavel on X. And it reminds me of a prominent NeverTrumper who tosses “GErman Studies major here…” in front of an amazing number of unrelated subjects).

“Any tweet that start with the words: “With all due respect” will include none.” (Via OldSchoolPhD on X)

Bach To The Future

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Peter Schickele – better known to decades of music geeks as the author of the “PDQ Bach” music history saga – has passed away. He was 88.

It occurs to me that calling. him the “Spike Jones of Music Satire” depends on a generation of people who know who Spike Jones was.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”

That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”

“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Maybe the “Weird Al Yankovic of Classical Music”?

The music majors in college were all into PDQ Bach – and I eventually figured out why. He really, really did classical music satire – perhaps the most esoteric form of satire there is short of lampponing ancient Greeks in ancient Greek – really, really well. He not only nailed the punch line – the funny jab – but the setup, the keen understanding of the milieu he was sending up.

This one made me laugh so hard I had a hard time breathing.

Maybe you had to be there. But as I was there, there are no regrets.

One of the things that gave me the odd chuckle was Schickele’s constant North Dakota references. Clearly the guy knew something about the state – but he was a New Yorker.

An accomplished bassoonist, the young Mr. Schickele played in his local symphony, the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, when he was in high school.

Years later, he would pay tribute to his North Dakota roots by bestowing upon himself, in his role as P.D.Q.’s earthly representative, an august academic title: professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (There really is a Hoople, N.D. There really isn’t a University of Southern North Dakota there — or anywhere.)

So I learned something new:

RIP, Peter Schickele. .

20,000

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Apropos not much – but I looked at my stats about two minutes ago, and saw that there were precisely 19,999 posts published on this blog.

Which makes this 20,000!

It’s kind of like watching your car go from 99.999 to 100K, only it takes a lot longer…

Who Says Minnesota Can’t Win Championships

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Football? Baseball? Hockey? Hoops? Soccer?

Nah.

But collecting memorabilia from a band whose career bell curve peaked during the Carter administraiton?

We are – or at least, one of us is – the champion!

Vern Simon received certification that his collection of KISS memorabilia has earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records

Today his collection reflects his loyalty to the original four members of his favorite band: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley.

Vern’s collection also reflects KISS’ reputation as a prolific marketer, lending its name and the likenesses of its members to clocks, lunch boxes, and even a coffin. The latter is one of the few KISS items Vern does not own, though he does have a KISS coffin displayed on a poster.

“I want to be number one,” he said. “I’ve never been number one in anything.”

You have climbed to the mountaintop, Vern Simon. You are among the rarest species of Minnesotans – one with an actual championship.

Bullets And Butter

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Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:

“Return of the Rifleman” is the title of a big write-up in the NRA magazine on the subject of the Army’s new rifle.

You didn’t know?  Neither did I.  Turns out the Army has been looking for a new rifle and cartridge since WW II when the M1 with its 30.06 bullets in stripper clips was determined to be too slow and too heavy.  “Lighter weight” and “capable of fully automatic fire to saturate close range targets” got us the M16 but now the Army is looking for an upgrade again.  

6.8 x 51 mm cartridge at 80,000 psi chamber pressure gave better ballistics than the .223, 308, 30-06 or even the 6.5 Creedmore.  Slightly smaller diameter than the 7.62 x 51 NATO round but same length cartridge requires an AR-10 sized platform.  Steel jacketed cartridges weigh slightly less than brass and are cheaper to make but cartridge size is the same.  No reduction in total size or weight, no gain in rounds carried, so the deciding factor was effective range: 800 yards.

I have trouble believing new recruits will be able to hit anything shooting that far.  Current Army rifle qualification course shot with an M16 is a series of 40 pop-up targets from 25 to 300 yards.   That’s a far cry from the 800 yards the new gun was designed for.   Also, the whole point of switching to the 5.56×54 M16 rifle and 9mm pistol ammo was standardization with our NATO allies.  Is that out the window now? 

My question: does this signal a change in strategy?  What war are they anticipating?  Where will combat troops be expecting clear fields of fire half-a-mile long to make use of a new cartridge?  Not in Europe, not interchangeable with our allies.  Not in the jungle, that’s for close range weapons.  Not in the desert, that’s what the Barrett is for.  Where does the Army anticipate it will be fighting?

Russia?

China?

America? 

Makes me think conspiracy theory thoughts about the military industrial complex wanting a change merely so it can sell new hardware and ammo; and the administration wanting to ban sales of AR15 ammunition to civilians to preserve manufacturing capacity for the Army to supply its new guns; and whether the newest woke recruits wearing red high heels and rainbow arm bands will be able to use the new gun/ammo to full effect. 

I’m a big believer in Chesterton’s Fence.  Color me skeptical about this change.

Joe Doakes, formerly in Como Park

Not that I disagree with Joe – it’s hard to be too cynical about any branch of today’s American government – but there are rationales for the caliber change.

This particular Youtube account – by a former admittedly mediocre infantryman, who does some really good open-source intelligence stuff – explains some tactical rationales from a grunt’s-eye view.

As to the caliber thing? I do feel a little awkward as an American. In the sixties, we jammed 7.62.51 down on NATO, over the objection of the Brits, whose 7x43mm round had immense potential to be the sort of “intermediate” cartridge that modern “Assault Rifles” needed; America believed in long-range marksmanship, which required the full power cartridge…

…until Vietnam, when it turned out long range marksmanship was largely irrelevant, and the US jammed down the 5.56x45mm.

Which brings us to another jamdown, today.

Two Plagues

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Call me a curmudgeon if you will. I don’t care. If caring about the classic art and craft of doing radio makes me a curmudgeon, then I’ll get a “Curmudgeon” face tattoo and wear it with pride.

Figuratively speaking. Face tattoos are a horror.

Anyway.

There are two plagues afoot in the world of radio.

Decline And Fall: Broadcasters – especially big broadcast networks – have been strapped for cash for a decade and a half. Big chains, like IHeart, went on leveraged buying sprees in the mid 2000s, just in time for the advertising market to collapse in 2008. The revenue never really bounced all the way back – the recovery from 2008 coincided with the rise of streaming, “renting” music, and a near complete collapse of the music radio market that had kept radio handsomely afloat from the late fifties to the early 2000s.

So big radio networks are in the same bind as companies that manufacture white-out, paper checks and rotary phones; they cater to a market that’s shrinking by the month. Outside of conservative talk, Spanish and sports radio, most of the radio industry involves trying to coax a shrinking cohort of baby boomers and Gen-Xers to tune in to morning shows. Music radio, once the marketing cornerstone of the music industry, is scarcely relevant.

The traditional talent pool in broadcast, up until probably the 1990s, worked a little like this: people started as disk jockeys, usually in small markets, and via combination of talent, perseverance, opportunism and luck, worked their slow, laborious way up the ladder of market size; from Cody Wyoming to Casper, thence to Palm Springs, then on to San Diego and finally Los Angeles was a typical trajectory, with each echelon in the market weeding out tranches of non-hackers, who went into sales or real estate or managing Shopkos, leaving only the most talented, determined and lucky to make it on the air in the big-money markets.

Rush Limbaugh altered that dynamic in talk radio – pre-empting the bottom of the talk food chain with his syndicated shows; joined by Hannity and Pagliorulo and Prager and Hewitt and the rest, the middle of the ladder pretty much evaporated as well.

And then in the rest of radio – with little money left in the industry, and most of what was there soaked up by the Dave Ryans and Tom Barnards who were left in the business, most of the “disk jockey” jobs at the bottom, and then the middle and upper-middle, of the ladder transformed into “voice tracking” – recording bits onto computer files which would be stitched into place between songs by computer. A jock might earn decent money – but be tracking for several stations during a given shift, not really building up an identity as a “star” anywhere. Which was fine, given that stardom was more or less irrelevant.

And so with the talent pool in both music and talk radio disrupted, the big broadcasters needed to find another source of talent to fill in slots when the holdovers from the golden ages of music and talk started leaving the scene.

The Plaguecast. And so major broadcasters – commercial and public – turned to the pool of “podcasters” that sprang up around the time streaming began supplanting broadcast.

And it’s been mostly dreadful.

Here’s why.

Good radio is the original social medium. Since the dawn of music and talk radio, the hallmark of good radio is being able to reach through the signal chain – the microphone, the transmitter, the electromagnetic spectrum, your receiver, and finally to you – and give you the impression the announcer, the host, is talking to, playing a record for, telling a joke or story, to and for you. To be able to push that “live” energy through all those layers of misdirection, not to talk at you, but to talk to you. Personally. Or at least give you that feeling deep down in your gut. Its a live medium (or used to be), a conversation with stimulus and response traveling back and forth at the speed of sound and, in between us, the speed of light.

Podcasts, on the other hand, is one or more people talking into a microphone and getting recorded. There is no fact, much less illusion, of pushing energy out to real, live people. Podcasts are, at best, storytelling (which can be wonderful, but is not interactive; it’s tellers, and it’s listeners, and never the twain shall meet. At worst? It’s a group of people having a conversation that you listen to.

And you can tell when someone who’s started in that medium tries to transpose that style to live (or live-ish) radio. Buck Sexton and Clay Travis (or is it Buck Travis and Clay Sexton? I have no idea, to be honest), who sit in Rush Limbaugh’s time slot ‘cross much of the land, but can’t seriously be said to have “replaced” him, are classic examples. They chatter through the issues of the day – but unlike Limbaugh, who pushed an energy down the signal chain that felt like he was in your car with you, talking to you. Clay and Buck came up through the world of podcasting, and they were very successful at it. And they sound like a couple of guys kibitzing – because they are a couple of guys kibitzing, via a digital connection, watching each other via Skype.

The format makes a little more sense on NPR – because public radio has always given the impression that it’s a room full of “elites” talking to each other (barring a few old-timers, like “Weekend Edition”‘s Bob Simon, who is one of the most gloriously talented and utterly underrated broadcasters on NPR…

…which is rapidly becoming a podcast network, in the worst sense of the term.

We’ll come back to that later today.

Chatter. Speaking of Public Radio…

One of the iron clad bits of craft in traditional radio is “Don’t half-ass it with an open mic. Say something, or be silent. Don’t create background chatter”, whether that chatter be walking over other voices, or just making inchoate noises in the background. They are a distraction. They divert the energy you’re trying to push out in the world.

But over this past 2-3 years, something has crept into the NPR style guide that annoys the crap out of me.

It goes a little something like this:

HOST: “So, what’s your take on the situation”

GUEST: “Well, the impact it’s had has been drastic…”

HOST: (Quietly, almost non-verbally) Hmmm.

GUEST: “and weill be affecting the area for years…”

HOST: (Barely audibly) “Huh”

GUEST: “…to come”.

I say “Added to the style guide”, because to paraphrase Fred Thompson in Hunt for Red October, Public Radio doesn’t take a dump if it’s not in the script ,and it’s not in the script if it’s not vetted against a style guide by an editor.

Why? To give the illusion of empathy? To create the audio impression the host is paying attention?

Little subvocal interjection are all over the place, and they drive me absolutely insane.

Together, they are two of many plagues upon the radio industry.

More about both, tomorrow noon.

No Sense Of Measure

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I’ve never been a huge fan of 60s-80s prog-rock band “Yes”, really.

But I am a huge fan of artistic excess.

Actual “Yes” fans dunk on me pretty hard for being much more into their eighties incarnation, with Trever Rabin replacing Steve Howe on guitar – the edition of the band that did Owner of a Lonely Heart almost forty years ago…

…and, its followup single, this weird, elliptical, “prog”-rock meets new wave detour “Leave It”, with one of the weirder videos in the early history of MTV:

Did I say “one?”

I recall a brief blurp of controversy in the eighties about the video – or videos – to this song, but I never retained many of the details.

But details, there were – a total of 18 videos, produced by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, the art-rock polymaths behind the band “10cc”, who went on to write the figurative book on “groundbreaking”, disconcerting and, now, oddly archaic video production.

And the story just gets better and better:

I’m almost sorry I missed this the first time around.

It’s from the brief period where I could actually enjoy “Yes”, apropos not much.

Opportunities

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed (a little while ago):

I had an airplane reserved but they cancelled. Tornado in Cannon Falls. Too windy for light planes to safely fly. Disappointing.

Some people spend their whole lives chasing storms. I had one drop right in my lap and I missed it.

Feels like being a kid again. “Other people have all the fun, I never get to. It’s so unfair.”

Joe Doakes

as someone who occasionally likes to chase storms (when they aren’t chasing me) they both sound pretty cool.