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Category Archives: Media & Culture
Bad Lip Reading: White House Press Briefing
Hadn’t watched one of these in a while because I found I was unable to tell the real stuff from the parody stuff. But they haven’t lost their touch.
Compactor
Did the invention of this piece of equipment put anyone out of a job?
Rob Frommel
Rob Frommel has been bussing tables and washing dishes at the Coffee Zone for the last couple of years and while I knew he was a musician, I had never listened to any of his music. Until today.
Budweiser Clydesdales
Barb’s garden club toured Warm Springs Ranch yesterday. It’s about 30 minutes from where we live and the home of the Budweiser Clydesdales. About as good as it gets for horses.
Yellow Pages
A friend of mine — a local small businessman — called me yesterday saying he was “taking a poll.”
FRIEND: When was the last time you looked up a phone number in the Yellow Pages?
ME: Uh, at least ten years ago. Everybody uses Google, don’t they? Why are you asking?
FRIEND: I got a call from a sales rep for the Yellow Pages asking me to renew my ad. I told him I didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong. I’ve been paying a thousand bucks a year for the last ten years. When I asked my wife she said, “We’d always had an ad so…”
A few years ago I was in the front yard when a guy pulled up and tossed a plastic bag on my lawn. It contained copy of the Yellow Pages. I picked it up and took it over to the guy saying I didn’t want it and always just throw them in the trash.
“Yeah, that’s what everybody tells me but I get paid to toss ’em. I can’t take it back so just pitch it,” he explained. I’d love to know how many people with ads in the YP are like my friend.
During my radio days (1970’s) I noticed one of our advertisers had been running the same ad for over a year. I started nagging our sales rep to go see the client and get some fresh copy. We’d produce a new spot, no charge.
“I think we just just let well enough alone. He’d tell us if he wanted to change copy,” whined the sales rep.
I kept after him and one day he stormed into my office. “I hope you’re happy! He cancelled his advertising!” And stormed out. I called the client to ask why.
“We had no idea we were still running that spot — and paying for it. My bookkeeper just wrote the check every month. It slipped through the cracks.”
I’ll bet the Yellow Pages folks have reams of data “proving” who uses the book and how often.
Radio 2018 (KWOS Morning Shift)
Best job (most fun) I ever had was working at my hometown radio station. I think half of the dozen years I worked there were on the morning shift. But it’s been years since I listened to “terrestrial” radio and wondered what it’s like in 2018. So I asked my friend John Marsh if I could sit in a corner of the KWOS studio and watch him (and Dick Aldrich) do the Morning NewsWatch. Very different from 1973. Tightly formatted. All digital and computer controlled.
Bob Priddy doesn’t do “fake news”
I had the privilege of working with Bob Priddy for 29 years. Last Saturday he was inducted in the the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame (along with two others). You can listen to his full remarks here. The clip below runs 2 minutes. Bob Priddy remarks at MBA Hall of Fame Induction (PDF)
Jay Parks – Drummer
Jay Parks drums for the sheer joy of it. Most afternoons he can be found sitting in his truck (waiting to pick up his wife when she gets off work) drumming along with tunes on local radio stations. He was kind enough to let me record a minute or two. I don’t think Under the Boardwalk by the Drifters would have been his first choice but he’s a trooper. As I drove away I could hear him keeping time to Ike and Tina’s Proud Mary.
I recorded this video back in 2012 and would have sworn I posted here but I can’t find it.
Can We Be Saved From Facebook?
If I had to pick a favorite quote from Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece on Facebook it would have to be: “When a tumor starts growing teeth and hair, you don’t comb the hair. You yank the thing.” If you love some Facebook or hate it… or don’t think about it at all, you’ll find this long article interesting. Here’s a few excerpts:
Facebook doesn’t push Nazism or communism or anarchism, but something far more dangerous: 2 billion individually crafted echo chambers, a kind of precision-targeted mass church of self, of impatience with others, of not giving a shit.
Whether Facebook is just a reflection of modern society or a key driver of it, the picture isn’t pretty. The company’s awesome data-mining tactics wedded to its relentless hyping of the culture of self has helped create a world where billions of people walk with bent heads, literally weighted down with their own bullshit, eyes glued to telescreen-style mobile devices that read us faster than we can read them.
An astonishing 45 percent of Americans get their news from this single source. Add Google, and above 70 percent of Americans get their news from a pair of outlets. The two firms also ate up about 89 percent of the digital-advertising growth last year, underscoring their monopolistic power in this industry.
(Former Facebooker Antonio Garcia Martinez) describes the company’s corporate atmosphere as an oddball religion where Zuckerberg is worshipped as an infallible deity – sort of like Scientology, but without Tom Cruise or space invaders.
But by the Eighties and Nineties, everyone in media was realizing that audiences cared more about seeing graphics, panda births and newscasters withstanding hurricane winds than they cared about news. The innovation of stations like Fox was to sell xenophobia and racism in addition to the sensationalist crap. But even Fox couldn’t compete with future titans like Facebook when it came to delivering news tailored strictly for the laziest, meanest, least intellectually tolerant version of you. Facebook knew more about you personally, what you might like and also what might tickle your hate center, than any TV, radio station or newspaper ever had.