Radio 101

I really appreciated, back in the days when this was done, the really quick radio commercial breaks, back when it wasn't necessary to have eleventy songs in a row. Stations would play three songs, break for one or two ads, and be right back to the music. I have airchecks that illustrate this nicely. Back then, I was willing to wait when I heard, "More music in 60 seconds!"

However, today's bloated breaks send me straight to the preset buttons. But what makes this worse is that it appears that we are simply expected to sit through these commercials as long as it takes. I don't know about anyone else, but I am not inclined to wait around for something to happen when someone blithely says "We'll be back in 3½ minutes." (That would be you, Bobby Bones.)

That moment I heard that, I flipped to Bob FM, and sure enough, Bob got a whole song, "Devil Woman", in before Kiss-FM even came back from their break. "Devil Woman", by the way, is longer than 3½ minutes, so either Bob faded the song early, or Kiss took a longer break than promised. Either way, that's not a good way to get your listeners to stick around.

Okay, now I feel old...

Thanks a lot, KITY. (Warning: page has embedded streaming audio.) KITY is Austin's oldies station (yes, Austin does have an oldies station; listen at 102.7 in most parts of town to hear it), and I have heard more and more 80s tunes in their mix. This morning, Lou Christie was followed by Lionel Richie's "All Night Long".

Is my music really that old?

Al Gore loses historical perspective

In the middle of Matt Lauer's fawning interview of Al Gore this morning on Today (when Mr. Gore could get a word in edgewise, what with Mr. Lauer's continual pleading with Mr. Gore to run for President, and his shilling of Mr. Gore's DVD), Mr. Gore stated that Iraq is the "worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States". (I believe "worst strategy mistake", as the page reads currently, is a typo.)

Ummm...not to downplay the admitted mistakes made in the Iraq conflict, but I can immediately think of at least one strategic mistake that was much worse, and that is Jimmy Carter's disastrous mishandling of Iran in 1979, withdrawing of support for the Shah, and basically setting the stage for everything that has happened in the Middle East since then, including the current Iraq conflict.

But I don't really think Mr. Gore was nearly as concerned with historical accuracy as he was with rhetoric and sound bites.

Why was I missing Christmas commercials???

'Twas the month before Christmas
And all ads were the same
They showed unrealistic situations
And they were all really lame