764 The Cryonic Cat

764 The Cryonic Cat

There's a place in Michigan called Clinton Township, about 30 miles northeast of Detroit, and in it there's a boxy little building in which about 100 people and 70 pets lie dead and frozen awaiting the day their fatal conditions can be fixed and the bodies, presumably brought back to life. It is called the Cryonics Institute and there's one body they haven't listed as in cryostasis, that of the radio industry, or the cryonic cat.

Why a cat? Because a cat has nine lives. And radio has used up at least six of them. Predictions of its death may be premature at the moment. Tabby's death has been much and falsely reported since his birth in the early part of the 20th century. But this latest version rings truer than the previous.

Tabby ain't what he used to be. After all, who listens to him? Mostly old folks who themselves will be Cryo-candidates pretty soon. Or right wing crazies. Or people who think rap, hip hop, modern country and modern rock are kinds of music rather than kinds of noise. Or people who don't know how much better things used to be. Or people who can't figure out how to use an iPod.

Broadcasting in this country is governed by the Communications Act of 1934, parts of which have become superannuated today. So in 1996 when congress was still more or less functional, they revised it. Tabby became a commodity. Numerical ownership restrictions pretty much evaporated and mega-companies formed and bought up pretty much every cat in sight. The 1996 act was supposed to foster competition. Right. How do you call one company that owns 1200 stations with several in each of the top markets and "clusters" of them in every Podunk in America competitive? Is there one guy running all of them sitting at corporate headquarters in a Texas cow town, San Antonio? Is he the Executive Vice President of Homogenization? Moo!

Pass any "local" radio station at night and notice the windows are dark. The lights are out. Who needs air people when a computer will do it all for you. One guy in San Antonio running every radio station in the country? Not yet, but maybe soon. Hiring is down. Creativity is down. No one relies on localism. McDonald's in Patchogue, NY is the same as McDonald's in New York, Chicago, Taipei and London -- with only minor menu variations. Same thing with radio.

So, Tabby, come over here, please. We're going on a little trip to Clinton Township. You'll like it in Michigan. Clean air, friendly mice. Great hunting and fishing. We're about to cool you to the temperature of liquid nitrogen and then wait until we can cure your illness.

Shrapnel:

--Radio was pronounced dead on arrival in the 1920s, again when TV became popular, then with the advent of widespread Internet use, and again with the arrival of widespread satellite radio and again with the widespread popularity of MP3 players. That's six lives and counting. Meantime, someone reserve space in Michigan.

--If you're heading for the cryonics lab after death, here's something to put into to your will. "If within 50 years, they don't bring me back, cut me up into cubes, wrap me in plastic bags and stash me in a convenience store ice-for-sale refrigerator. At least the cubes will be put to actual use."

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

©WJR 2010

763 The Trench Coat

763 The Trench Coat

It's the mid 80s and your correspondent wanders into Brooks Bros. at Madison and 44th looking for a raincoat. Peter, "his" sales representative has learned not to question the ragged blue jeans, the ragged beard and the pre-fashionable messenger bag, knowing that there's a "store charge" card behind the hideous outfit.

He shows the coat and it's perfect in fit and look. The price? $300. "Three hundred dollars?" whines the customer? "That's a lotta bucks for a raincoat, Peter." Peter says the thing will last ten or 15 years. He lied. Twenty five years later, it was still going strong, if you ignored the belt buckle with the leather cover that had worn down to bare metal. No sign of fraying. No broken or missing buttons and the epaulets, unadorned, but unscathed and ready to accept the number of bars or stars should the customer suddenly gain rank above "citizen," requiring military decoration.

We're often told that every man looks great in a tuxedo. Maybe. But there's no doubt that every man (or woman) looks swashbuckling in a trench coat. Even cartoons. (Think Dick Tracy.) Even slobs. Think (Columbo.) What most of us moderns can't figure out is how these things were useful in trenches. Sure made Murrow look handsome, which many thought he wasn't. Even crooked politico Jack Abramoff looked less ugly in one, though his choice was black and he should have gone for the tan and a size that didn't make him look fat.

And Peter Finch as Howard Beale proved to millions of moviegoers that even a battered, mud-splattered, rain soaked trench coat could look good.

But like almost everything else, they don't make 'em like they used to. Brooks Bros. seems to have forgotten that "trench coat" is not interchangeable with "rain coat." Apparently, so has Lands' End. Burberry has not. But for more than two grand, who'd buy one?

So, the "original" from the mid 1980s is long gone but well remembered. And in its place is a simple, epaulet-less, unbelted, rain coat. It, too, will last a zillion years. But that's only because it's never worn.

Shrapnel:

--Speaking of trench coats, globe trotting Nancy B. reports from Cambodia that the famed Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh now specializes in pizza and mojitos. She says she arrived too late for lunch hour and too early for happy hour. She may look great in Burberry Tan, but we gotta get this lady a better watch!

--Heaven forbid the money's not there when you've arranged for an electronic auto-pay from your checking account. There often is no way to change the date or even reach the people at the account. The local electric company doesn't cut you off on these occasions, it soups up the voltage and blows up your computers, TV sets and heating and cooling system.

--Segway, hell -- it's fast fade to black. Jimi Heselden, 62, liked Segway transporters so much, he bought the company (like the electric shaver guy,) and then drove one off a cliff and died. Should have stuck to owning rather than using, alas.

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

©WJR 2010

762 Beancounter Bob and L'Enfant Terrible

762 Beancounter Bob and L'Enfant Terrible

Bob Wright was working in the fields of General Electric's Financial Services division. This was about the time that Jack Welch was turning GE from a stodgy industrial conglomerate into a Wall Street darling and bought RCA and with it, NBC. Wright was no broadcaster, though once he headed Cox Cable. So Jack probably thought "Ahah! Here's a guy who knows television," and named Wright president of the new acquisition. Wright did not know television. And he made some totally dunderheaded decisions that you, too, might make if you were a lawyer in a big financial services division. But to his credit, he learned the business. And he learned damned fast and built a monolith of a network and a ratings leader out of then-ailing NBC.

Twenty one years later, he got kicked upstairs. They named him "Vice Chairman" of GE. What's that? No one is sure. Welch was long gone, his replacement at the top, Jeff Immelt is a walking, talking, stock-sinking character out of "The Peter Principle," and so is Wright's replacement as CEO of NBC, Jeff Zucker (Rhymes with looker, not that other word.)

Zucker, named executive producer of the Today Show at the age of 26 rode that success right up to what Laurence Peter called his "level of incompetence." And now at the ripe old age of 45 is basically on the street. Probably not necessary to worry about the guy. Those GE settlements can be pretty decent. But with new owners coming, it was time for a change.

Jeff is Harvard educated, a native of south Florida and could easily have been cast in the role of "The Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang" of Toonerville Trolley fame. He also is the smartest guy in the room. And with the possible exceptions of Fred Friendly and Max Liebman may have been the best TV executive producer of all time. He knew instinctively what would work and what wouldn't and had the grit to take chances. And while he sometimes acted like a maniac, boy, did we give good television on his watch.

Then came the promotions, first to Hollywood and then back to New York as the Grand Macher of the network. He had his share of harebrained schemes ... shows that exceeded the long established standard time constraints, making Conan O'Brien star of "The Tonight Show," and putting Leno on at 10 PM. But by the time Jeff got to the top, NBC's ratings steamroller, lasting longer than the law of averages would have predicted, was heading downhill. The hits were wearing out or were gone. Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, etc. were long over. The replacements were cheap and awful: Fear Factor, the Apprentice, and other so-called reality shows.

But at the same time, the stable of NBC cable networks started to flourish with original programming like "Monk," "Psych" and "Burn Notice," and even one of the Law & Order spin offs as a first run on USA. SyFy became a force in TV and so did Bravo. CNBC is considered the reliable source for financial news. MSNBC has carved out a middle-left leaning predominance. All this on the watch of the Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang.

Many of those of us who worked for him or beside him, used to be grateful for when he stayed downstairs in the Studio 1A control room while we were on the floor above. We were happy to have an equally smart, influential, fearless and authoritative Morning News Director, Jim Dick, to run interference between Jeff and the news staff. But what Zucker did with morning television was nothing short of brilliant.

Say what you will about JZ, point out all the flaws you want. But the guy did plenty to keep the company profitable and firmly entrenched in the 21st Century. He has nothing to be ashamed of for 15 of the 24 years he spent with the company. Except the Leno fiasco and not renewing the original Law & Order.

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

©WJR 2010

761 Newsday

761 Newsday

Those of us who lived long on Long Island would love to read the local paper there, Newsday, now and then. But the new owners have made it close to impossible. They're either pioneers or they are putting a once-great paper into the ground. Yes, it once was a great paper. Major columnists, major reporting, major investigating. Huge pageloads of ads, sports, a first rate Washington bureau. And circulation? Until some crooks on the business side started fudging the figures and dumping copies into the landfill they were going great guns, serving a region of more than five million people and among the largest papers in the country.

We all know that times have changed in the newspaper business. They have to get their bucks when and where and as they can. But this is ridiculous: If you want to read Newsday on the internet, you have to be a subscriber to the company's cable service, Cablevision or a subscriber to the print paper itself. Otherwise, it costs five bucks a week. $260 a year.

Cablevision serves a lot of locations all over the country. But not all of them. No kid on a bicycle is going to make a 12 hour round trip to plunk a Newsday on your porch in Harrisburg or Rochester or even Union County, NJ. (Heaven forbid you should be a Long Islander living in Florida or Arizona.)

So they give you headlines and the first paragraph of a story. And this paper has never been known for the tell-all headline or gisting in the lead paragraph.

Five bucks a week for the full paper on line? Nuts!

But here's the real rub. If once you were a subscriber, they send you headlines via e-mail, and ads. You don't need to pay to read the ads. Shocker, eh? So the campaign is on. Every time they send an ad, we write a standard letter to the advertiser (not the paper itself) saying "please tell your Newsday ad rep that we ex-patriots who neither get the paper delivered nor are able to subscribe to their ever-more-costly cable service will actively tell our remaining LI friends and relatives to boycott you -- and when we come back for a visit, count on us not using whatever it is you're selling." If enough people do this, Newsday might lower the internet price to something reasonable.

Shrapnel:

--The local mail is getting more screwed up every day. In the latest, we didn't receive yet another bill, and a month later when a later one arrived, we got slapped with about 40 bucks in interest and late fees. The merchant (GAP) immediately and without fanfare removed the extra charges, which is the exception, rather than the rule.

--When the wireless companies pitch you for "new improved" service they don't disclose all the terms. So you have to call them and interrogate. And after a call of that length (and the accompanying wait of that length before someone comes on the line) you end up doing nothing because you're more confused than you were in the first place.

--Looking around for vacation air fares. No planes go from any "A" to any "B" that means anything at all directly from anywhere. Thanks for this "hub and spoke" "system" probably should go to Bob Crandall, former AMR chief and the "Chainsaw Al" of the airline industry.

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

©WJR 2010

760 The Civil Wrongs Movement

760 The Civil Wrongs Movement

The civil rights movement borrowed successful strategies from the labor movement -- what, 30, 40 or so years its senior. So, now the civil wrongs movement is borrowing successful strategies from the civil rights movement, 40 or so years ITS senior. There is, of course, a major difference today. The first and second of these movements wanted inclusion through organizing. The latest iteration wants, essentially to undo almost 100 years of progress.

The cwm wants to stop paying its bills so that it can have more money to ... what? Buy toys? "Create" jobs? "Protect our children from the slings and arrows of what they think of as outrageous government? The ultraconservative yeehahs, stuck in their word of fantasy and free market mythology, want to turn you into plow mules, keep you so scared and so busy you never ask for a raise or expect a promotion or have any future financial security. They want to enslave you to "unearned rewards and unrewarded duties," as that great liberal, Ayn Rand, often said and wrote.

So maybe it's time to borrow strategies from the borrowers of strategies. In extreme, that would mean burning a cross on Glenn Beck's lawn or "disappearing" some civil wrongs workers in a Mississippi swamp. Too extreme. But some of the tactics of the anti labor and segregationists might work. Start small. Surround and intimidate the mobs that are trying to surround and intimidate you at an abortion clinic. Start spreading the word that what the so-called tea bags are trying to pull off is sedition and leads to anarchy. Get in there and make sure everyone knows that people who bus into Washington or wherever are "outside agitators," a marvelous phrase coined by some southerner decades ago.

Most of us can't afford Henry Ford's "solution" to the "union problem," which was hiring thugs to beat up workers. And that, too, is too extreme. But what's happening today is lethargy and ultimately, lethargy kills.

These anti-American protesters are going to win if someone doesn't do something about them. Make Pogo wrong when he said "We have met the enemy and he is us." If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Shrapnel:

--Which to you prefer: (a) Doctor with a great bedside manner but limited expertise... (b) Doctor with a lousy bedside manner but who's a medical wizard. Wrong. No doctors come to your bedside anymore, not even in the hospital, so there's no longer any such thing as a bedside manner.

--Real everyday manners, now that's another story. They, too, seem to be among the missing. How "me" can you be... before someone cleans your clock for cutting you off on line?

--Printer panic time. Yours will tell you when you put in an "unauthorized" ink jet cartridge and forbid you from using it. The cure: forget your manners, push "print" and the thing'll back down and do what you want.

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

©WJR 2010

759 Give Us a Hint

759 Give Us a Hint

Hey, drivers! You know that little lever just beyond the steering wheel? Check it out. It's there in easy reach. You know where the wheel is, of course. And the various gauges, and the shift lever, the radio/cd/mp3 player, the GPS receiver, the heat, the air conditioning, the fan, the phone. You know where the brake is, and the accelerator. The rear view camera, maybe even the windshield wiper control. But what about the directional signal?

Until Ford or someone comes up with a mind reading transceiver to go along with that GPS thingy and all the other electronics on modern cars, you still have to tell the folks in back of you that you intend to make a turn or a lane change. For that, you have two primitive devices, your left arm and your directional signal. Anyone remember hand signals? Straight out the window for left, up for right and down for stopping. Or, so you don't have to trouble yourself to open the window, you can flip that little lever on the steering column to signal either direction. It doesn't take much energy. Less than pushing "scan" on the radio or twisting the temperature knob for up or down. WAY simpler than texting at 65 mph.

Signaling a lane change on the highway is the law. When was the last time anyone was busted for not doing that? The cops don't need speed traps, all they have to do is ride around with their eyes open and fill those coffers with signal fines.

This no signal trend started in (naturally) California. But most Californians are of, shall we say, limited consciousness. The trend has spread in all directions. Bus drivers still signal. Taxi drivers may. The drivers of 18 wheelers usually do it. Everyone else? It's iffy, leaning to non-existent.

So what's the big deal? Wait until some guy in a Porsche cuts you off at speed or some guy in a "Smart-for-Two" makes a New York taxi turn, left from the right lane or right from the left lane.

Maybe it's too much to remember. After all, you have the phone, the Blackberry, the heater, the air conditioner, the mp3 player, the accelerator, the steering wheel and the brake peddle to worry about. They used to tell us "use the signal even when there are no other cars around." Why? Habit, and "just in case" there's someone out there you DON'T see but who sees you.

How tough is that?

Shrapnel:

--Well, glory be! Chase has gotten around to sending letters of apology to the nearly 2 million people affected by the internet outage last week. But the e-mail starts off by saying "if you have recently cancelled your... account, please disregard this message."

--WABC, the New York radio station, plans an on the air tribute to right wing talk pioneer Bob Grant, 81. This is the station that fired him twice and hired him three times, most recently for a brief weekend program. Grant's been at the radio game for more than 60 years and even if you disagree with his virulent, strident miserable opinions, he deserves a steady paycheck (which, apparently he'd still like to have) more than an audio version of a gold watch.

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

©WJR 2010

758 Political Short Takes

758 Political Short Takes

Some thoughts on the primary of 9/14/10:

CHARLIE RANGEL: wins. No big surprise. But it's a resounding confirmation of what he's done for (not to) the district all these decades. Adam Powell-the-umpteenth was a distant second. The people of Harlem have spoken and Charlie'll be back for another term, but his percentage this time was only about 51%, lower than usual. What they do to him in the house is anybody's guess, but they're not going to make his life easy. Is there an actual election here? Yes, of course. But c'mon, man, it's the 15th district.

RICK "Loser" LAZIO: This guy keeps coming up like an acid reflux stomach ache after pepperoni eating contest. The guy hasn't won anything on his own since 1998. If Steve Levy/Leave-Stevie had stayed in it might have been a horse race, but still with lousy odds and a small handle.

CARL "I Am Not A Racist" PALADINO: wins the Republican nomination for NY Governor. He'll probably win majorities in the boonies, but with any luck he'll lose overall to Andy Cuomo. Nothing like a tea bagger with a big mouth to unite the Democrats. Kind of like Joe Biden, except not funny. New York has had more than its share of great governors. A few of them have even been Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt come to mind. If somehow elected, Pally is not going to be one of them.

KARL "Rasputin" ROVE: got his comeuppance even though he wasn't running for anything. But he didn't get it in a way that'll wreck his career or his fame-for-being-well-known. The comeuppance was from...

CHRISTINE "Don't Jerk Off" O'Donnell who won the Republican nod to run for governor of Delaware and who called Rove's efforts to elect MIKE CASTLE "Republican cannibalism." Isn't putting Mommy on the campaign payroll also cannibalizing? O'Donnell is a tea bagger. Maybe she and PALADINO will run away together after loosing their general elections, get a motel room and not have sex.

CAROLYN MALONEY: waltzed to victory over Wall Street tool and good looking babe Reshma Saujani 80% to 20.

CAROLYN MCCARTHY: No longer an amateur or beginner, she was unopposed for the Democratic nomination to succeed herself.

PETER KING: Long Island Republican congressman with a big mouth and who has been described by people in the know as "bigger than the party," won 91% of the vote over a nobody. Only an imbecile would challenge King in a primary. Probably true in the general election, also.

BARACK OBAMA: Come out, come out wherever you are!

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: Is gleefully committing suicide. Their Dr. Kevorkians are people like Newt and Sarah and the radio and television talk hosts, and it's all completely legal. JEFFREY FIEGER ... they don't need you. Kinda like the voters of Michigan.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Looks like Marilyn Monroe compared with the Republicans' Ugly Betty. But beneath the surface, they have troubles of their own. Reid, Pelosi, and similar blunderers.

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: How did we sink this low?

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

©WJR 2010