{"id":4033,"date":"2022-11-23T15:12:44","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T20:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/?p=4033"},"modified":"2022-11-23T15:12:44","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T20:12:44","slug":"twenty-three-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/2022\/11\/23\/twenty-three-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty-three"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Radio Reminiscence (From September 23, 2004 about Air America)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ah, yes, this is somewhat apropro, as I&#8217;ve been listening to <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/fly-on-the-wall-with-dana-carvey-and-david-spade\/id1603639502\" target=\"_blank\">Fly On The Wall<\/a><\/em>.  (Al Franken, before he was on the tranwreck that was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Air_America_%28radio_network%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Air America<\/a> was on SNL&#8230;)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>The entry is up on the blog, but some of the links no longer work.  I also talk about being in Orkut jail&#8230;..<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>I decided to look a bit more at Air America\u2019s ratings now, since they\u2019ve managed to be on the air six months now\u2026..<br>Minneapolis\/St. Paul<br>Air America is on KSMM\/WMIN. KSTP and WCCO are the big talkers in the market.<br>Al Franken and his Public Radio gigglebitch are both from Minnesota.<br>KSTP and WCCO have a combined 12.8. KSMM and WMIN have a combined 0.8.<br>In New York City, WLIB is back to where it was before AA made it the flagship station (it was broadcasting in like Korean, I think), and WABC still has over three times as many listeners.<br>Yep, this is a successful operation.<br>And once again, it proves not that liberals can\u2019t do talk radio \u2014 that\u2019s not what it proves at all. It proves that radio amateurs can\u2019t do talk radio.<br>Alan Colmes is a good talk show host. I much prefer him to some of the right-wing idiots (hello, mister weiner!). Al Franken is a shitty talk show host, saddled with a public radio leech who whispers into her tinny low-budget microphone.<br>Randi Rhodes is barely adequate. She\u2019s maybe good enough to handle an afternoon show in a mid-sized market.<br>Don\u2019t get me started on the other hosts, it\u2019s just not worth the effort to type\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Franken lost his polemical career for pretending he grouped a sleeping woman on a USO tour plane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I disagree with his politics, and thought Air America was shit, but his comedy is funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>RIP, too, to Alan Colmes who I met sometime after I wrote that&#8230;.along with Sean Hannity.  Radio people were hit-or-miss in-person.  The ones who were real misses, well, one is also dead, one has gone on to big cable TV success, another I have no idea about, and don&#8217;t care to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it&#8217;s such a different world almost twenty years later.  I went and looked at the cumulative numbers for the stations where I used to work a few months ago;  if the stations had pulled numbers that small when I was there, everybody would have been <s>fired<\/s>laid off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking of Tidewater, Chesapeake made big news for a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.msn.com\/en-us\/news\/us\/chesapeake-virginia-walmart-gunman-who-fired-on-coworkers-identified-as-andre-bing\/ar-AA14tt1m\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">shooting at a Walmart<\/a> where I&#8217;ve shopped many times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The shooter was a Walmart employee.<br>No assault weapons weren&#8217;t used.<br>Doesn&#8217;t seem to be motivated by bias of any sort&#8230;<br>And, since I started plunking away at this, the perpetrator has been identified.  Kinda doubt he&#8217;s a supremacist of any sort.  (Doesn&#8217;t managing a Walmart kinda exclude you from that&#8230;.?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the typical politicians are still pushing hard for more gun laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What can you say?  (When you think government is the solution to everything, you wind with a lot more people in prison than lives saved.  Hello, Mr. President, Madam Vice President&#8230;.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thanksgiving is tomorrow.  I&#8217;m hoping it goes well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kinda craving fruitcake.  I guess the podcast who&#8217;d been selling them as a fundraiser quit that after I&#8217;d stopped listening.  I tried listening again a few weeks ago, and there just wasn&#8217;t anything to keep me around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I try to forgive.  It normally doesn&#8217;t work out.  Maybe that makes <strong>me<\/strong> the bad person.  But I don&#8217;t care.  If I turned it off, most likely it&#8217;s because I was bored.  But there are some that it was because of something egregious.  This was the latter.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Seven more days.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I think I&#8217;ve pretty much done what I was intending to do with this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Radio Reminiscence (From September 23, 2004 about Air America) Ah, yes, this is somewhat apropro, as I&#8217;ve been listening to Fly On The Wall. (Al Franken, before he was on the tranwreck that was Air America was on SNL&#8230;) The entry is up on the blog, but some of the links no longer work. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-journal-writers-month"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/control-h.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}