Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Spike.

First Podcast Ever

Posted in Spike News | Print | 11 Comments »

Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Spike.

Ah yes, like with the fall of “The Evil Empire” ,now that our enemy (The Bush-Cheney Crime Empire) has been temporarly vanquished, we turn on each other for kicks. No problema! As someone posted yesterday, it makes for a spirited discussion.

And it’s no wonder that the topic “Radio Sucks” would generate a lot of heat, because after-all 1) it does suck, and 2) it’s what brought all of us together in the first place. As for for the “progressive” hosts who are coming under scrutiny here, hell yes! Pedantic “true believers” like Jon are fighting the good fight, I suppose, but fact-checking is not entertainment and is doomed to fail in an entertainment medium. Furthermore, as the great Eric Hoffer once said: “Facts are counterrevolutionary.” A real hammer whack to the balls of the status quo requires a little passion, don’t you think?

But hey, all in radio are failures to one degree or another. They say in baseball, even the greatest hitters  get hits 30% of the time. In radio, the greatest “talents” only command about 2 to 3% of the available audience, and most of these successful hosts are successful only because of their equity in the market, not because of their talent.

There’s something new out there in the ratings game called the “people meter” that’s gonna change the whole way we look at radio success. See, it used to be that radio ratings were all based on “recall”, remembering who and what you were listening to on the radio at 2:17 PM last Thursday and writing it down in a little diary. That rewarded the hacks who have been phoning in their shows for years (Hedgecock, Roberts, etc.) simply because those would be the first names to come to mind. Now there’s an actual, real time audience measuring device for radio and the early evidence is that the tedious loud mouths and bloviators aren’t nearly as popular as we’ve been led to believe.

For example, scroll down to page 23 of this document and check out where the people meter ranks rightwing, douchy suck-fest KFI. About 18th in the L.A. market, according to my calculations. But according to the old fashion rating methodology, KFI was consistently a top 4 or 5 radio station in the market.

So what does all this mean? It means the old guard status quo defenders like Limbaugh, Hedgecock, Hannity, et al are not nearly as important as they think they are and that we’ve been led to believe. That audience is dying off,  literally and figuratively. And that provides at least a glimmer of a possibility for some ass-kicking, entertaining, quality talk radio in the future.

Now, if we could just kill the empty suit, mediocre, obstructionist shitheads that currently occupy the management level of radio. I’m getting tired of waiting for them to get fired.

Posted in Spike News | Print | 10 Comments »

Sunday, June 7, 2009 by Spike.

‘Been pretty busy of late, folks, travelling (NYC), trying to make sense out of a totally irrational stock market, and, ultimately, yanking my home broadcast studio out of mothballs and setting it up. I’m awaiting the arrival of my web nerd, Christopher Carmichael of SanDiegoRadio.net, at any moment now, and with any luck by sometime this afternoon we should  have our first podcast posted right here on this little ol’ website. So please revisit this sight from time to time over the next few days and check it out, tell a friend, etc.. The plan, with my somewhat limited resources, is to podcast 3 or 4 times a week and blog the other days. Maybe even attract some traffic to this website, sell some advertising, and make this into something other than a hobby.

In other news, no I haven’t listened to the Jon Elliot show yet on 1700 and not sure, really, why I would. The pathetic thing is that B.C.A. wasn’t willing to pay my salary so Jon stepped in and offered to work for free. Pathetic. Maybe that’s what Lib/Prog radio has come to but it ain’t for me. Plus the rest of the programming on that station is so weak-ass, it’s no longer even one of my car pre-sets.

Before travelling to Gotham a couple weeks ago, I did meet up with some serious contenders who are trying to return progressive radio to San Diego. They are, collectively, Liberty One Media , and their business model is to attract “members” and investors, and, ultimately, advertisers and try to have a bricks-and-mortar station up and running by the first of the year, in time for the congressional election of 2010. These guys spun off the old Save KLSD group and decided that actually doing something was better than constantly talking about doing something. I’ll keep you posted.

Hear Test Pattern

Hear A Little Trip Down Memory Lane (KFMB)

Hear First Podcast Ever

Posted in Spike News | Print | 37 Comments »

Sunday, May 10, 2009 by Spike.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Hahahahahahaha!

Jesus H. Christ. What can you say?

Posted in Spike News | Print | 113 Comments »

Saturday, May 9, 2009 by Spike.

Question: what possibly could be worse than a one hour exposure to the legal philosophical psychosis of John “Ball Crusher” Yoo, Bush’s former co-enabler on matters of illegal surveillance and torture? Answer: An hour of Yoo and Kenneth Starr, both smugly and unrepentantly insisting on CSPAN Saturday morning that virtually all power resides in the White House during times of “war” (and keep in mind, by war, they mean undeclared, life-long wars that would ensure these privileges eternally).

I watched in gape-mouth wonderment as Starr and Yoo blathered insanely before the American Enterprise Institute on the need for executive privilege, secrecy, and autonomy, all the while slyly winking and nodding their approval of military tribunals for civilian detainees, and extolling the virtues of torture and extra-judicial executions. You may recall that Yoo acquired the “Ball Crusher” nickname when he responded, during a campus debate, to the question “If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?” with “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.”

Forgetting for a moment that Starr once famously rejected Bill Clinton’s invocation of executive privilege during the Lewinski inquisition, and also forgetting the painful fact that these two fascists occupy tenured positions at esteemed west coast universities,  what really struck me about this little chat was the audacious certitude with which these war criminals discussed their perverse and criminal philosophies.

Here’s the link (if you can stomach it!).

Posted in Spike News | Print | 20 Comments »

Friday, May 8, 2009 by Spike.

Ok. I’m gonna pop an adderall tonight and write 30 posts in succession just to stave off the he said/she said abysmal drain circling that occurs when the Blogger ( Me!) takes a minor respite and assumes the Acolytes (You!) will carry the torch so that I can scratch my lazy ass and reap the revenues of this website (None!). But alas, the Fidrych piece non-plussed most of you, and I’ve been travelling and F**king off extensively, so I feel the Calvinistic need to….Perform!

But, alas, there are no “current  events” to which I feel worthy to respond. Plus, stung by a recent post that suggested that my shallow description of my trip to Paris was too high falutin’ for y’all to comprehend, I’m not sure where to go here.

Let’s see….Obama suggested that people wash their hands to help stave off swine flu and Re-Pugs reacted with the usual disdainful, gratuitous cold cock…where do I go with that? Let’s see: 1)most Americans probably do need to be reminded to wash their hands, 2) the whole swine flu thing was a trumped up BOO! to get you to invest in Rumsfeld’s Gilead, and 3)most Re-Pugs probably hire some illegal to not only wash their hands for them, but also wipe their asses, what more is there really to say?

Sorry people, but what once used to amaze, amuse, and titillate us has been rendered to the tedious exercise of watching our guy cautiously try to correct a shit-load of deferred maintenance and out-and-out-vandalism by the Bushistas and their fellow travellers in the media. Hell, I was just kidding about the adderall, but I’d need some pure under-the-sink crank to even muster the energy to click on CrooksandLiars dot com, much less Raw Story, to figure out the “progressive” take on the eco-bailout that serves as the Dem appeasement to their Wall Street over-lords.

Lets face it folks, the fix is in, the fix has always been in, and any energy on my behalf to lip stick the pig would only makes me wish I’d not wasted the lip stick, but instead used it write snarky messages on the mirror of our own collective indifference to what is really important.

Posted in Spike News | Print | 19 Comments »

Monday, April 13, 2009 by Spike.

Geezus, the outpouring of concern, boredom, ennui, and wtf?! on this website has been gratifying, to say the least, so lemme get this off my chest immediately: Fuck Radio! (if you have bothered to read my essay’s on why talk radio sucks, they may not be brilliant, but they certainly are accurate.) I appreciate the “when you comin’ back posts” but the sad reality is that local talk show hosting in San Diego is the equivalent of the long demised passenger pigeon; our colorful plumage now adorns the hats of the bourgoesie, and the skies are empty of our shadows. Oh well….

Actually, I’ve been in Paris, not to far off the great Montemartre district, where another fallen hero, St Denis toted his severed head several yards before uttering his final “sacre bleu”. They don’t make ‘em like that these days, folks. That was real moxie. Anyway,  the food was great, the wine cheap, the fromage ripe, the architecture splendid, and I can go to my grave saying I’ve seen the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, and David, plus a bunch of trippy Dali’s that made me wish I still did drugs.

Yes, Gey Paree is a long way from America in many ways. I actually witnessed 100,000 protesters marching through the Bastille district merely to show their displeasure with a threat that the salaries of university researchers might soon be reduced. The U.S. couldn’t muster 100,000 in the same spot unless it was Ohio State/Michigan in Ann Arbor on a fall afternoon. Maybe the “cheese eating surrender monkeys” could teach the indomitable ‘Mericans a thing or two about giving a shit.

And, sadly, yes, I have become aware of the recently coined Glenn Beck phenomenon, anointed both in Time and the New York Times as the great savior of douche bag conservatives, stealing precious publicity from the other odious piece of talk show shit, El Rushbo.

And of course the douche bag right proves every chance it gets how incredibly obtuse, whiny, and tiresome it has always been, witness this series of slobbering dribbles courtesy of Free Republic dot com.

But, alas, that’s not what draws me to the keyboard tonight, folks. I’ve actually been drafted into action this evening on a bit of news I picked up a little earlier: Mark “The Bird” Fidrych was killed in an accident at his home in Massachusetts today. Where to begin? First of all, if you have no idea who or what I’m talking about, kindly skip to the video below. For those of you who recall fondly “The Bird”, you might for a moment find yourself, as I did, time traveling to a not-so-long-ago Camelot and a epoch well before today’s spoiled brat, drunk-driving, coke sniffing, million dollar, entitled jock-acracy. Not that “The Bird” wasn’t a character in his own right. He was the full-on Big Lebowski “Dude” of professional sports, the kid who somehow maintained his innocence and humor and humbleness after a series of career destroying injuries that dropped him like an anvil from the cover of Rolling Stone to doing odd jobs on his own 130 acre farm in rural Massachusetts. And not to sound like an old fogey or anything, but I savor the memory of seeing Mark pitch, only once, at the old Tiger Stadium during his glorious ‘76 season. For those of you who give a shit about baseball old school, the number that stands out that year was not his 19-6 w/l record, but instead his 24 complete games. Fydrich pitched at least 9 innings of every game, save one, that he started that year, phenomenal considering the major league complete game leader (Roy Halliday) in 2008 finished with 9. But beyond the stats, it was the time and the place. Fifty cent hot dogs, $15 reserved seats, and an usher who recognized you from the previous season, courteously wiping down your seat with a shop rag for a much appreciated 50 cent tip.

Ah, 1976! ‘Nam disappearing in the rear-view mirror, Nixon long gone into exile, the sweet smell of pot wafting around the rafters of that derelict old ballpark, Tiger Stadium, sweet youth. Now, all gone. Gone to flowers, every one. As I fear has gone that once glorious city of Detroit, home of Henry Ford, Bob Seger, The Four Tops, the River Rouge, The Flat Rock quarter mile oval stock track, Greek Town, and, now, 300,000 soon-to-be-out-of work auto workers. Bird: you always said it best:

Posted in Spike News | Print | 79 Comments »

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 by Spike.

Anyone see Obama’s “Town Hall Meeting” the other night? Aside from the droning vocal style, the single moment that stands out was the President’s response to the internet query regarding legalizing/taxing marijuana. In one fell swoop, Obama dismissed both the internet-and its users- and the marijuana legalization effort (see video below). And during the same week, despite his promises to the contrary, the D.E.A. executed its first medical marijuana bust during the Obama regime. I’m bracing for further disappointments.

But, unless you’re Charlie Lynch, that episode pales in comparison with the Obama administration’s decision (or lack of same) to continue the economic bail-out policies of his predecessor, specifically to infuse banks and other financial institutions with taxpayer’s dollars with virtually no strings attached. The undisciplined profit mongers now have the keys to the treasury along with wide discretion on how and where to spend it. It’s one thing when they were screwing around with their stockholder’s money, but now they’re at the craps table with your money.

And it would merely be piling on to point out the abjectly sorry-assed response of Geithner and the administration to the AIG retention bonus debacle, irrespective of the phony populist backlash whipped to a frenzy by the likes of Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa.

I know it’s a short time into this deal with Obama, but his presidency, as historical as the election itself might have been, is rapidly shaping up to be a mediocrity, a more-of-the-same administration that’s using high approval rating as a crutch while promising more than it can ever deliver.

Posted in Spike News | Print | 18 Comments »