Valinda Bolton: Apparently, we can't do better

HD-47 Representative Valinda Bolton's first campaign ad (still, for some reason, available on YouTube) spoke about the real issue of education, as mentioned here. So, one would think the first mention of her in the 80th Legislative session would be regarding that, right?

Of course not. After all, she placed the blame for the condition of education in Texas solely on one party, which, coincidentally, isn't hers. No, the first mention of her is because she cast a vote seemingly only meant to embarrass Speaker Tom Craddick. And it worked: now, House committees can't even consider bills for another week, and the full House can't take up bills turned out by the committees until March 9. Given that the Legislature adjourns on May 28, that doesn't give the House much time to get anything done.

If one happens to see Ms. Bolton, please ask her how this vote reflects the desire of HD-47 for some meaningful action to be taken, since its main result is to prolong inaction.

I'm with the Statesman on this one: someone ought to be embarrassed by this vote, but it ought not be Mr. Craddick.

This is why they pay Chris Matthews the big bucks...

Matt Lauer and Chris Matthews discussed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign on Today this morning when Mr. Matthews made what has to be one of the dumbest statements I've heard in a while. His pearl of wisdom? "If Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, she has a good chance of winning the general election." Really! Good grief, at this point, if Toonces, the driving cat, were to win the Democratic nomination, he would have a good chance of winning the general election. Thanks for justifying that salary, Mr. Matthews.

By the way, I'd be more likely to vote for Toonces than for Ms. Clinton. I'm just saying.

Now I Feel Old (Part 2 in an apparently ongoing series)

Our local oldies station, KITY (an affiliate of Dial Global's The Oldies Channel) continues to redefine what an "oldie" is. Today, I found out that "oldies" includes songs from 1988 that aren't "Kokomo" (which has been playing on oldies stations for years already), when I heard Steve Winwood's "Roll With It" during morning drive.

Obviously, "Roll With It" fits a certain musical style, and I don't expect a whole lot of 1988 songs to show up as oldies (really, can you picture Bruce Chandler transitioning from Frankie Valli into Guns N' Roses?), but still, wow.

NOTE: The KITY page no longer has streaming audio embedded, but still offers a link for it.

Overkill Ice Coverage

Yes, it's icy. We all know that. But it certainly isn't necessary to stay on the air forever telling us about it. (This mostly applies to KXAN, which stayed with the same weather coverage for upwards of twelve hours yesterday while I was watching, but the other stations seem to be just as bad.)

Maybe it's just me, but the coverage of "Ice Storm '07", the "Big Chill", or whatever other names they now have for this, reminds me too much of MadTV's "Windstorm '97" spoof. That's probably not where news directors should be getting their inspiration...

Icy Austin Morning Radio

One of the consequences of the ongoing icy weather in Austin seems to be that KLBJ-FM is currently off the air. This is a bit of an improvement over their current morning show, but let's wait to see how things play out.

No, I really don't care too much for Dudley and Bob, sorry. I like to hear music while I drive, not hours of talking. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a classic rock station playing music during morning drive since 107.7 was still the Hawk. Bob-FM isn't bad, and KITY is pretty good when the signal isn't overpowered (that's the problem with using translators), and I suppose that even Majic 95.5 plays okay music every so often, but on pretty much any other station to which I listen, you have to wait for a long time before someone, be it Kidd Kraddick, Bobby Bones, or even JB and Sandy, stops talking. Remind me why that's a good thing.

By the way, if you want to annoy Kidd Kraddick, ask him about the time in 1997-98 that he facilitated the wedding of two complete strangers. Odds are, he and everyone else on the show will deny that it happened.

Congrats to the true college football champion...

The true champion of this season should, of course, be Boise State. They played a great season, culminating in a spectacular come-from-behind victory in the Fiesta Bowl, and finished the season undefeated, the only Division I-A team to do so. So, of course, they should be the champs, right?

Well, not in the BCS world. Boise State is not from one of the money-rich BCS conferences, so the powers that be can shut them out if they want...which they did. And, for some reason, the AP blindly went along with them. Not since the 1975 season has a one-loss team been universally recognized as the national champion, while an undefeated team was not. That would be Arizona State (then playing in the WAC), as explained very nicely by the texasyank here, here, and here.

As the texasyank said, Florida has now become the BCS champion. The real champion of this year's season has to be Boise State.

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