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Author Archives: Steve Mays
His Dark Materials
5
Just finished Northern Lights, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. As we used to say back in the sixties, “Heavy.”
I’ve caught parts of The Golden Compass (the book’s North American title) on cable and wanted to see how the movie compared to the novel. Very well, it turns out. I’m eager to get on to Books 2 and 3.
I enjoyed most of the Harry Potter books –and it’s probably unfair to compare the two– but Pullman challenges readers in a way that Ms. Rowling never did.
Definitely on the short list for the next church bonfire.
UPDATE: Finished the third book today and I’m a little numb. I read somewhere that Pullman wrote the book for “young adults.” I’m not sure what that means… teenagers? Younger? Whatever, I wish I had read the book in my teens, although I’m not sure how much I would have understood. Maybe that’s the point.
I thought it was a terrific story. Life and Death; Sin and Redemption; Good and Evil; Witches and Angles. And a less-than-attractive view of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Easy to see why they weren’t keen on a sequel to The Golden Compass.
If you learned everything you needed to know in Sunday School, you can skip this book but I found the book to be very spiritual and mostly uplifting. A couple of quotes:
“I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn’t.” pg 954
“We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.” pg 854
“If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water that way instead of this.”
How Adam Carolla Became a Podcast Superstar
This article at Fast Company is more about Adam Corolla and podcasting than radio but this bit sort of jumps out at you:
“Radio has a lot of rules that are set up to protect the foibles and weaknesses of the host.” He names names: “Mark and Brian, Opie and Anthony are, like all radio guys, comedically second tier. I’m not putting these guys down; I’m in that group.” But you’re not going to find a Jon Stewart, a Stephen Colbert, or even a Jimmy Kimmel telling anybody the time during your morning commute. The rules enforce a sameness that eliminates any chance of something original happening. “Radio’s about guys with subpar intellects killing four goddamn hours…
As a former radio guy, I also enjoyed this:
“I’d rather have 10 smart people than a billion retards listening to me.”
I thought we couldn’t say retard.
I enjoyed Carolla when he and Jimmy Kimmel hosted The Man Show. (I think that was what it was called) I’ll sample his podcast and report back.
Chat Roulette funny piano improv
This is what I love about the web. Some funny, creative person turns a perv-fest like Chatroulette into something amusing.
Dave Grohl’s coffee addiction
Letters to the President
From The Huffington Post: “In his first week as president, Obama asked his staff to select 10 letters a day for him to read from among the tens of thousands that were flooding into the White House. … Fourteen months later, Obama still takes 10 letters (including e-mails and faxes) with him when he heads upstairs at the end of each weekday. He personally writes back to three or four.”
My suggestion posted here in March of 2008:
“President Obama reads, answers and acts on one email –from an American citizen– every week. Let’s say, on Friday. Here’s how it might work:
Anybody can email the president once a week. Yes, people will try to find ways to scam this but you can deal with that. On Friday morning, 10 emails are selected at random and forwarded to President Obama’s in-box. He looks through them, picks one and responds –personally– to the sender. If action is required, the email is forwarded to the appropriate subordinate who has to DO something because the president –and the country– will be watching.
My suggestion goes a bit further but the two are eerily close. And, yes, I did email my suggestion to the Obama campaign.
Video Affiliate Advisory
I love this idea. The head of affiliate relations for Learfield Sports (Keith Kowalski) posts a brief (60 sec) video, explaining a new text alert service for keeping radio affiliates up to the minute on changes to broadcast times due to weather. Nothing fancy here. Just pointed the Flip camera and popped the advisory up on YouTube. Our sports ops folks are making excellent use of their website (WordPress) which serves 40+ networks.
The Rainmaker: “You must be stupid, stupid, stupid.”
I don’t own a suit
I bought my first suits in 1971. A gray one and and brown one, both in a nice polyester blend. I was getting ready to start my ill-fated career as a U. S. Postal Inspector and the suits were exactly what you’d expect a fed to wear.
A year later I was a small town radio guy and the suits were traded for Hawaiian shirts and Levis. It was a dozen years before I again needed a suit. All the managers at Learfield wore suits in 1984. Even when calling on an affiliate radio station in Tarkio, MO.
Over the next 15 years or so, I accumulated about a dozen suits that you’d have to examine closely to tell one from the other. They’ve been hanging in my closet since I tunneled out of the executive suite and into cyberspace several years ago.
Today I loaded them up and took them to the local Goodwill. And it felt great. Oh, I’ll probably need a suit again some day (can you rent a suit?) But for now, it’s business casual on the dressy end and Hawaiian shirts and Levis the rest of the time.
“Some things need to be believed to be seen”
Excerpts from Adam Bryant’s interview with Guy Kawasaki:
- “I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen.”
- “We believed in the Mac division that we were making the world a better place by making people more creative and productive. Google, at its core, probably believes it’s making the world a better place by democratizing information.”
- “Make yourself dispensable — what greater accomplishment is there than the organization running well without you?”
- “You should conduct first- and second-round (hiring) interviews by phone, not in person.”
- “(Business schools) should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations.”
That last bullet is my new objective. If you get a longer email from me, remind me of this post.