Radio Days

Like a lot of people, I listen to the radio in my car. I have the six best stations I can find preselected - mostly rock music, but one talk station that takes a break from politics for this funny show just about the time I drive home. However, I hate commercials and I have the attention span of a fruit fly, so I will switch between stations every time a crap song comes on, or they go to a commercial break. I sometimes listen to Bob and Tom in the morning but they've started doing something that pisses me off to the point that I'll switch off completely - you wait for all the shit commercials (refinance your loan, get a great deal on a new car, come to McDonalds for a breakfast McTurd) and finally they take you back to the studio. At that point one of the cast starts into this unbelievably dull monologue about why you should buy a Pajamagram, or go to the fucking Vermont Teddy Bear company. Yes, it's another commercial.

The whole point of commercials is to pay for the airtime, right? The station airs programs that attract listeners and sells commercial time to companies who want to sell stuff to listeners. So what does the fucking commercial in the program itself pay for? It's free money for the program maker, isn't it? It's getting to the point where I would almost consider investing in satellite radio, just to avoid the commercials.

I tried satellite radio a few times in Detroit when it came in a rental car. Maybe it's me, but I spent all my time going up and down the stations trying to find something worth listening to. (This is not easy on I-94. They have potholes that you could hide a body in.) It reminded me of moving to the States and getting cable. Sixty channels! Game on! After two weeks I realised that I had fifty five channels of pure crap and five local channels that I could get for free. I could get more channels, of course, so long as I was prepared to sell a kidney to pay my cable bill.

So I'm not sold on satellite radio yet. Howard Stern is over there now, but I don't know that I see the attraction. You see, much of his show seems to involve getting strippers into the studio and having them show their boobs. And here's the really salient point: it's radio. You can't enjoy boobs on the radio. Having someone talk about getting them out doesn't really do it for me.

As a last resort there's always NPR, but even they spend half their time telling you all the foundations that make their programs possible (and people like you, of course). They might as well just have the commercials and drop the pretence. Besides, if I start listening to NPR, it's only a matter of time before I'm buying a Buick and complaining about the rock music.



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison