572 Two New York Culture Shocks

572 Two New York Culture Shocks

They're not the kind that rattle the earth. In fact, they each were kind of quiet. But New York underwent two big culture shocks, nonetheless.

First the good one: In the dark of night, the Canadians invaded. They converted 12 Dunkin' Donuts outlets into Tim Horton'ses. What's another bunch of coffee shops in Manhattan? Ordinarily, not much. But, as New Yorkers will find, Tim's makes the best coffee on the planet -- and it'll be better here than it is up north if only because the water here's better. Welcome to NYC, Tim's. Its about time.

Then, the bad one. In a trade reminiscent of a deal for NBA players, the ailing and mismanaged New York Times newspaper has sold its radio station, WQXR, the first commercial classical music station in the country, the biggest and the best. "Oh, don't worry," says the Times, "classical music will remain the format." Yeah. For now. Forty five million dollars will change hands in this confusing and complex deal. WQXR will move up the dial to 105.9, a hard to receive frequency that was meant to serve New Jersey (and remains licensed to Newark.) The Univision Spanish language station that's there now will move down the dial to WQXR's present spot, 96.3 which can be heard far and wide. After that, the New York public radio station, WNYC will take over owning and operating the newly repositioned WQXR.

Complicated to a fault. The classical station that's been operating since 1936 and has been under Times ownership since 1944 and has been a lighthouse of culture in a sea of garbage ever since.

Those of us who have been listening to the station starting in our mothers' wombs will notice a difference. Older listeners will remember the brilliant early days, the tolerable middle period and the okay present period as a New York icon akin to the Brooklyn Bridge, the library lions, the Penn Station eagles and the original Carnegie Hall.

And that 45 million? It's not going to make any difference to the Times' bottom line or debt or advertising woes. Unless they use the money to buy some Tim Horten's franchises.

Shrapnel:

--Meantime a group of minority broadcasters is asking the treasury for a bailout, claiming new devices used to determine listenership are showing smaller numbers and that revenue is plummeting. Earth to these guys: ALL advertising is plummeting. Everyone in the business, even the big operators, ESPECIALLY the big operations could use a bailout.

--The President has called for spending 12 billion dollars to shore up and expand two year community colleges. It's about time. Some of the best educating in the world goes on within those walls -- and with little of the pomp, claptrap and impracticality that has come to mark most other forms of higher ed these days.

--It has become almost impossible to buy a bad guitar at any price, a sharp change from only a couple of decades ago. The good American and Japanese, Chinese and Korean makers are getting better by the day. And the cheapies are fast catching up, at least in terms of sound and playability, if not in longevity.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009

571 Graybeard the Pirate

571 Graybeard the Pirate

(MOUNT TANTAMOUNT, PA) -- Graybeard the Pirate has been fired from his job as an announcer on a public radio station here. The station is owned by Mount Tantamount State University, which is only a "state" university when it feels like it. The rest of the time, it's private. Yes, here in Middlanowhere County, PA., they have a school with a really strange state of being. It gets a boatload of money from the state, but it isn't OWNED by the state. So when it wants to play like a private school it does, and when it wants to play like a public school, it also does.

Graybeard was host of the morning show, which means he did the local inserts between segments of "Morning Edition," the second most boring program on national radio. Graybeard was classier than the national hosts. Well, he SOUNDED classier.

He lent a degree of elegance to a program that gets a lot of national exposure and is a living, breathing and automatic "snooze button" on hundreds of thousands of radios. So why was this guy fired? The official reason was "budget," which may be a little legit, since the state is cutting back everywhere in the face of the recession. But that wasn't the real reason.

The real reason was politics. As regular readers of these postings and the author's own radio program know, our position is there's nothing more brutal than the politics of a non-profit, be it a church, a hospital or an institution of higher learning. General Electric or Lockheed's political operatives would look at the non profits and recoil in horror. Or turn envy-green.

No, Graybeard was fired because he's an outspoken conservative.

This is not typically a vehicle for defending conservative politics. But it is a place where first amendment junkies can find companionship. Graybeard got the ax because he's more Ayn Rand than he is Nancy Pelosi. And that ain't right. Those of us on the left of things make a mistake when we can guys like this. It makes us look petty and opens us to charges of censorship, the very things for which we berate our right wing brothers, no matter how sane or nuts they may be.

These days, talent is not enough -- at least not in the world of non-profits. You have to toe the party line or keep your mouth shut. Neither is a good thing.

Shrapnel:

--The Forward newspaper has moved from its long time office on East 33rd St. to Maiden Lane, way downtown. Somehow this seems right. Midtown was never a place for an outfit like that to put down roots, though the new building looks more like one of those glass brick towers than a lower east side tenement.

--The paper's owner, the Workmen's Circle, remains on 33rd Street. C'mon, fellas. Get with the program. The lower east side is cool. And it's where you too belong.

--David Souter is writing his memoirs. It will run ten, maybe 12 pages. Then, he'll do the talk show circuit where Larry King and Matt Lauer will have to do headstands to pry more than "yep," and "nope" from the guy.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009

570 Phone Calls

570 Phone Calls

The phone doesn't ring too often these days. In fact, most of the calls come from "entities" with which a "prior business relationship exists," which is well within the law governing the Do Not Call list. Most of those can be blown off with a hangup (for the robo versions,) or a polite "thank you but I'm not interested" when there's a live humanoid on the other end of the line.

Sometimes the humanoid -- who is, after all, merely doing his job and probably hating it -- will take a request that he stop calling. This usually draws a response like this: "You realize that if we stop calling you, you won't get any future word on exciting money saving and special event offers we may be making?" Nature's answer to this is "Yep. Not interested in your exciting money saving and special event offers which always end up costing more than whatever you're getting now." Nature's answer to THAT is "it may take four to six weeks for your request to be processed, please understand we may call you before we're able to move you off the list."

Yeah. It takes six weeks to unplug a name from a call list. Sure.

True to their word, the half dozen companies who received that request have stopped calling. So it's more effective than the old ploy which was to tell the caller ".. oh, he died. In fact, I'm just watching the house while his widow is at the funeral." Nature's reply to that generally is something like "...well, is there anyone else available who might like to take advantage of our free HBO for six weeks offer?"

Not even an "I'm sorry to hear of your loss..." let alone an "I'm sorry to have bothered you."

Getting back to that lack of calls, and a glorious lack it is, thank you: the only time people who count seem to call is when the house is empty -- which doesn't happen a lot.

"You have 16 new messages. First message...."

It's like people know when you're not home and call then.

Hey, wait. That's not a bad idea. Turn it around and use it to leave messages for people you have to call but you don't really want to talk to.

Shrapnel:

--How's the tap water in Bundanoon, Australia? It better be decent, because that's all the water you can get there. The town has banned sales of bottled water, hoping to save the earth and some bucks.

--We learn the above from the Bundanoon Daily News newspaper. It's going along with eco-project by printing on both sides of paper so thin you can use it instead of Glad Wrap. The problem comes when you try to read it.

--Have you noticed that the cell companies no longer give you free phones? At least two of them have. But mail-in rebates remain if you are very very very patient and fill out the proper forms in the proper way.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009

569 The Power of Positive Thinking

569 The Power of Positive Thinking

Not that Norman Vincent Peale didn't do some good. But he also did a mess of harm and we're just now starting to realize it. And pay for it. By the time he published "Positive Thinking" in 1952, he already was a powerhouse preacher with a wide ranging magazine and radio audience, and with a warm voice that you'd call a whiskey voice on anyone but a preacher, he cooed and cajoled us into believing one of two or three of the greatest lies in history, without ever stating it in plain English. Here's the lie: Positive and negative thinking are axiomatic.

Smarmy Normy never said that in those words. But that was the premise behind his message. Perhaps that message would have gotten into the ether on its own, or from someone else's pen or radio show. But Norm's the guy put it out there. The rest of the world -- or a good chunk of it -- ran with the idea. A good chunk still does.

And this is what we are fighting today: the idiot notion that we can "...be anything we want to be..." that we can "...set our mind to any goal and accomplish it..." A load of ideological manure. And it's hurting us every day. The great entrepreneurial movement leaves no room for backup. When we fail in our attempts to re-invent the wheel, we get a job flipping burgers. Oh, sure, entrepreneurs succeed with a combination of work, help and luck and being in the right place at the right time with the right idea. But to tell people that a certain mindset will carry them to the top of the heap? Nah.

There ARE limitations. You HAVE limitations. Fail to recognize them at your peril.

Yes, Normy helped put us on the road to where we are today: deeply in debt, mindlessly "individualistic," reliant on our own internal machinery and not up to the task.

The power of positive thinking is as often the power to destroy as it is the power to create. And it's no axiom.

Shrapnel:

--They called the memorial "Jacko's final act," but it wasn't. Why do you think Grandpa and Grandma want those kids? It's so they can unleash a new set of Jacko-monsters on an eager public.

--The United States and its Good Friend Russia have signed a bunch of new agreements, and peace and happiness reign throughout the land. Now all we have to do is stop the unpaid former Soviet Generals from selling their secret stashes of nuclear warheads to someone. Like Iran?

--Oh, and then theirs our Good Russian Friend Sergey Aleynikov. He's charged with stealing secret code... not from the CIA or the Pentagon, but from Goldman Sachs, which needed it for one of its trading divisions and may lose a bunch of money as a result of the theft. True capitalism has come to the former Soviet Union.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009

568 The Web Maven

568 The Web Maven

Young Einstein is busy trying to build a website. He has this ultra cheap place that registers names for next to nothing and has pulled the trigger. First thing he learns is that cheap isn't cheap. You have to buy a site builder thingy that any oaf can figure out and use. "You'll have your website tonight," says the introduction to the software. But just in case, give us your phone number and we'll give you a "welcome" call and answer any questions. Pick a time frame that's good for you. The software is many times the price of the registration.

Young Einstein gets the call while at work and says to the guy "I can't figure this thing out. It doesn't do what it says it's going to do."

Young Billgates on the other end of the phone says "call me back when you're home and in front of the computer. Meantime, I'll send you some helpful hints." The helpful hints turn out to be the same "information" links that came with the software and are useless.

Y.E. wades through reams of "tutorials" and still can't make a home page appear. He keeps going to the web address and finds an "under construction" sign. He goes to the software "dashboard" and then the "home page" tab. It has ABC news. It has facebook, it has all kinds of junk he doesn't want, and no way to get rid of the stuff.

Hey! How about pushing the "add a page" tab? "You have used all the pages your agreement allows. Would you like to upgrade?" No. So far 'stein has managed to put a picture of the George Washington Bridge (outbound) one one of the precious few pages, and not much else.

He's planning to call the web "help" guy back one day, but none too soon. Maybe some people were just not cut out to be web mavens.

For now, it's back to the endlessly gibberishtic "tutorials," half of which are trying to sell something.

They say website "tonight," but they don't say which tonight. Or for that matter, what year.

Shrapnel:

--Palin's actin' like someone in a wild west movie who hears the words "get out of town and I won't shoot ya." Except when it comes to governors these days, it's "prosecute ya" instead of shoot. Who was it said Palin makes Sanford look stable?

--Howcome it's okay to surge in Afghanistan when it wasn't okay to surge in Iraq or even be there. Bush II was trying to show he did better than daddy, and that and oil is why we went to war. Is Obama trying to show that we can do what the Soviets couldn't?

--The Knight Brothers charitable foundation is increasingly active these days. Let's hope they know more about "founding" than they did about newspapering. And how is it the foundation has all that money while the papers went bust?

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009

567 The Rebels of Arkansas

567 The Rebels of Arkansas

So Wal-Mart has gone over the wall. The Great Satan of American commerce has sipped the socialist Kool-Aid and in a stunning reversal of policy and genetics now supports the Obama health plan which would make employers offer medical insurance to its workers. Stunning. Unthinkable. Unheard of. Positively Kremlinesque. Joe Stalin, channeled in rural Arkansas.

The commentators are shocked. The White House is shocked. The competitors also are shocked, but not for the same reason as everyone else.

The competitors are shocked because if the Wal-Mart Commies win, they get yet another leg up. The policy shift was a stroke of competitive genius, not some Great Awakening.

Wally World already supplies what passes for medical insurance to about 80% of its workers. It built the costs into its operating budget long ago. It's like the light bill. It comes, they pay it.

Not so some of the some of the other retail biggies. If they have to follow suit, and they do, eventually, they're going to add those costs to their merchandise and you'll end up paying for it. Prices go up at Smartstores Juniorwear or Circuit City (oops) and not at Wal's? Well, it turns out this benevolent and communistic move is nothing more than a ploy to hurt competitors unable to afford the extra cost as easily.

Does the company's support mean anything in the real world? Of course it does. It makes the legislation creating the new health insurance system easier to pass. Wally is America's largest private employer. And if it hints to its employees that they'd look good if they wrote to their legislators and urged passage -- well, that's a lot of pressure.

And it makes Wally look like a good corporate citizen, to boot -- unless, of course, you're Smartstores Juniorwear or were Circuit City.

So the Great Satan of American commerce may have put on some makeup and hidden the horns under a Little Rock Little League baseball cap, but he's still the Great Satan of American commerce.

Shrapnel:

--Trying to wade ones way through the "simple" instructions for setting up a new website is like reading the instruction book for an M16.

You first have to learn the terminology, then the parts -- and only then can you start using the thing. After which, the gun -- or the website -- immediately jams and blows a hole in your face.

--Guy from the Bronx is on a commercial airplane and decides to take off all his clothing, then gets into a fight with a flight attendant trying to put a blanket over him. The defense: he's bipolar and didn't take his meds. Nonsense. He probably just trolling for the in-flight ugly award.

--When Reagan took Nancy to a Broadway show, his sycophants swooned. When Obama took Michelle to a Broadway show, he got slammed. And he paid a lot more for the tickets.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009

566 2159

566 2159

It's the year 2159. It's New York. Mike Bloomberg is in his 39th term as mayor. A pack of cigarettes costs $119.45 on 42nd St., but only $116.10 on Queens Boulevard. Bernie Madoff has served his sentence and is about to get out of jail. He's been behind bars for 150 years, or 54, 750 hours, of which he has worked 18,250 in the prison laundry at 75 cents an hour. He leaves the clink with $13,687.50 in untaxed wages, ready to start a new life as a free man.

Bernie just marked his 221st birthday. Mike is a mere 217 and speculation is running high that he's going to seek a 40th term, "just so it comes out even." Mike's been working out and so has Bernie. But Bernie didn't have a personal trainer like Mike. He had to rely on help from his homies in the lockup.

No Club Fed for Bernie. Not exactly hard time, either. But no Club Fed. So for a guy that old, he's in pretty good shape. So, don't you go messin' with "The B-Man." He's learned to take care of himself. The New York Times wanted to interview him on his release, but it went out of business back in 2012. Generations of kids have asked their grownups "Why do they call that place 'Times Square?'" Only history buffs remember.

There was a "Welcome Home Bernie" celebration scheduled for this day, but no one lived long enough to show up. Just as well. There probably would have been a bunch of protesters on hand with their hands out.

His lawyer, Ira Sorkin, has put his court bills into collection. But with only about 14 grand in his pocket, they're going to have a hard time getting much. Plus the collection agency doesn't have much chance of calling Ira's client, who plans to live in the Barry Manilow Home for Men somewhere downtown. No phones.

The street scene seems strange to Bernie. The buildings look familiar, some of them. But no cars. Mike banned motorized private transit at street level back in his 28th. Now, there are hydrogen powered buses for what remains of the population, down to about 8,000 from the 2,000,000 when he first set foot in the Big House. But the air is as pure as a snowfall at David Souter's house.

Some things haven't changed. You still need to speak decent Korean to find out whether the stuff on the salad bar has been sitting there for more than three days (Mike eliminated the Board of Health in his 31st term. Budget cuts, don'tcha know.)

Macy's is still having a 20% off sale. When Bernie passes one of Macy's windows, he notes there's a computer screen on display with an Internet news website showing. The top story is about some guy running a Ponzi scheme. He shakes his head in disbelief. "Who would do such a thing?" he asks.

Bernie has been rehabilitated.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2009