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Economically Speaking on the BIG SPEND Weekend

2011-11-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

As I set up myself for a brief blog --- noting that I haven't written anything to this particular column in 9 months (been a year for reporting and working but not for blogging for a change), the "Black Friday" shopping is coming to a close. It's Saturday in the EST, and before I am done with this post, it's probably going to be Saturday in the CST, too.

Small Business Saturday is coming to life. In fact, for those who were intelligent enough to wait a day, the reason for buying local and smaller "mom and pop" stores is about to become evident and bring about the first signs of a change in habits. These habits are going to be somewhat of a retrofitting the mindset of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans in urban and suburban areas. In fact, percentage wise this kind of change may even mimic that of some rural and small town atmospheres this year.

Now what is behind this Small Business Saturday is simple. Americans, fed up with the way the major corporations have become all about the profits and careless about jobs, have banded together to a small degree and listened to the groundswell --- the grass roots efforts --- of people that know for certain that shopping in the smaller retail outlets at the mom & pop stores is truly what gets the small economic engines moving again, despite the pushes from the megacorporations with their multi-targeted advertising campaigns to try and stop this from happening.

I made a prediction --- I have been known to make lots of semi-accurate predictions about the economy over the past 5 years --- that I think will hold up some in hindsight over the coming weeks. My prediction was that Black Friday will not be nearly as successful for the major retailers as they thought it would be. That sales will be down enough that by Monday there will be a fallout that has a lasting impact on Wall Street and the other worldwide stock markets.

In short, the prediction is that because of the dollars that were NOT spent on Black Friday but ended up in a different part of the economic situation --- that the Wall Street trading of some of the major corporations will drop off next week. And this will not be followed by good news for those corporate giants this time because they will be unable to cut any more workforce. They have been doing that for such a lengthy amount of time that there is no cutting available. Status quo is being understaffed or about even (at best) for the remainder of the shopping season between Black Friday and Christmas Day. Frankly, it appears to me that these giants of the retail sector will be downgrading their expected profits for the entire major shopping period. And Wall Street and worldwide reaction to this fallout will linger for many months --- perhaps a few years --- before things become "corrected" properly. Yes, I'm afraid to tell the real conservatives and the moderate-right or moderately conservative persons that if they didn't sell off their stocks, that now may be too late to sell off at a minimal loss. These chunks will be falling off precipitously across a wide range of sectors as a result of the dramatic monetary shortfalls from the predicted sales figures.

Now its worst nightmare situation is coming to get those CFO's: they cannot come up with a valid plan to justify more cuts of jobs, nor can they justify the spending of money to enforce the ways they would like to simply cover their butts over a lack of consumer spending by claiming that the demand far outweighed the expectations. Lies that we can all see --- there was not an expectation by consumers this year. The expectation from the CEO/presidents and board rooms was a more robust Black Friday than the past two or three years. Reality is saying differently. And on Small Business Saturday, we will find out where the shoppers were hiding their money...as they spend it inside the small shops in the major metropolitan areas and beyond.

Later...either in a few hours or over the weekend, I'll have more information about Black Friday spending. But on Monday there will be the first true signs of this Wall Street failure, followed by the more obvious signs on Tuesday.

AND --- before too long, I will share someone else's viewpoint and show how they were almost completely right with their opinions on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests.

Meanwhile --- I sure hope to get a little more information gathered to back up what I already have learned.

Jim Hoft: Targets Himself

2011-02-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

When one is a blogger and frequently names political activists opposed to one's viewpoint, there is little doubt that integrity can be called into question. MANY GOOD REPORTERS call into question the integrity of one JIM HOFT, author of the following article about CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan: After Sexual Assault & Beating...

HOFT will learn the hard way that the middle of the road reporters can and will call him out for being an extremist with no valid reason to comment upon something that he would not be prepared to do himself --- be a REAL and well-intentioned reporter. WELL, JIM HOFT, consider yourself warned by the middle of the road...not the "left", not the "right", not a "radical" something.

JIM HOFT: You're being called out by mainline, mainstream reporters who have no political agenda --- as you do --- because you're a lackluster blogger, an extremist radical who deserves to be ridiculed and mocked by all sensible persons. We can see you for what you are, which is simply an extremist blogger with no credentials as a reporter. He will likely resort to attacking me and others to ask why we can clearly state he lacks reporting skills or credentials. But even doing something as mundane as doing a Google Search for JIM HOFT points to his lack of skills at reporting.

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From the LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION BIO, on whose "ETHICS BOARD" sits this Jim Hoft:

Jim Hoft is the author of this article and author of Gateway Pundit, one of the leading conservative blogs on the internet today and which currently draws over a quarter of a million readers each month. He has led the pack on many news stories and has been the guest of numerous radio talk shows and panel discussions on current events. Gateway Pundit is often linked by internet giants and has been mentioned in the Washington Post, New York Sun, and the British daily Telegraph.

Jim earned a BS in Biology at Loras College. He is professionally one of the few in his field certified to train High Performance Team Building in World Class Organizations. He has researched microbes at the source of the Mississippi River in Itasca, Minnesota.

He also has modeling and acting accomplishments to his credit. He starred in numerous national commercials, has made appearances in nationally syndicated television shows and has been pictured in various publications from Caterpillar's Catalog to The St. Louis Post Dispatch. He's made brief appearances in film.

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So, he has modeled and done acting in commercials. He has a BS in Biology, researching microbes. He is certified to train team building.

What does ANY of that have to do with REAL WORLD REPORTING, other than perhaps researching microbes? And, when he researches those microbes, do they report something that will make ANYONE'S newscast?

So, in short, Jim Hoft is a blowhard blogger with no real reporting skills --- just a right-wing-only point of view. And he'll probably come after me in attack mode to counter that I have no credentials which validates my telling the world that a schmuck like Jim Hoft needs to permanently misplace or lose his keyboard and stop inciting the wrath of intelligent human beings. Frankly, you went after Lara Logan to get people to read your words. Bad move, Jim Hoft, because there will be lots of NOT-SO-LEFT people who will read your words and feel that you have betrayed the right and the far-right.

Well, that's sugar-coating it a bit, Jim Hoft. I would prefer you come to grips with the FACTS, and not some version of facts that you have invented in order to have your several hundred readers (I don't claim to have ANY readers, Jim...but I'm certainly not in the habit of having "a quarter of a million readers per month") agree with your radical viewpoint.

Your radical viewpoint about Lara Logan is this (here is the actual blog of Jim Hoft on gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com):

Gateway Pundit

After Sexual Assault & Beating… CBS Reporter Logan Learns That Political Correctness Is a Killer

…Update: No Media Matters, There Will Be No Retraction

Posted by Jim Hoft on Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 12:04 PM

Lara Logan is lucky she’s alive.

Her liberal belief system almost got her killed on Friday. This talented reporter will never be the same.

Why did this attractive blonde female reporter wander into Tahrir Square last Friday? Why would she think this was a good idea? Did she not see the violence in the square the last three weeks? Did she not see the rock throwing? Did she miss the camels? Did her colleagues tell her about the Western journalists who were viciously assaulted on the Square? Did she forget about the taunts from the Egyptian thugs the day before? What was she thinking? Was it her political correctness that about got her killed? Did she think things would be different for her?

CBS News says Lara Logan, shown covering the reaction in Cairo’s Tahrir Square the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, was attacked Friday and suffered a brutal beating and sexual assault before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. (AOL.com)

Peaceful Egyptian protesters screamed “Jew! Jew!” as they beat and sexually assaulted CBS reporter Lara Logan at Tahrir Square last Friday.
The New York Post reported:

“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, “Jew! Jew!” as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s main square Friday, CBS and sources said yesterday.

The TV crew with Logan, who is also the network’s chief foreign correspondent, had its cameras rolling moments before she was dragged off – and caught her on tape looking tense and trying to head away from a crowd of men behind her in Tahrir Square.

“Logan was covering the jubilation . . . when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration,” CBS said in a statement. “It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy.

“In the crush of the mob, [Logan] was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.

“She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning,” the network added. “She is currently in the hospital recovering.”

A network source told The Post that her attackers were screaming, “Jew! Jew!” during the assault. And the day before, Logan had told Esquire.com that Egyptian soldiers hassling her and her crew had accused them of “being Israeli spies.” Logan is not Jewish.

Lara Logan is lucky she’s not dead.

(end of original post by JIM HOFT)

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(he updated after Media Matters question him...obviously he attacks them because he felt provoked to go after an organization that has the right to defend another media person being attacked by a blogger who fancies himself better than others in the world)

UPDATE: Sorry Media Matters the post stands.

The far left does not like it when their tenets are questioned. It must be hard when someone holds a mirror up and you see that your twisted agenda has caused such havoc and pain around the world. These warped individuals must have missed that day of school when they talked about playing with fire.

One final question– Does Media Matters ever post anything that is not a dishonest smear job?

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Now I will explain that I am not in the habit of reading mediamatters.org --- so it is a rare thing for me to know that the Media Matters organization had anything to do with calling out a viewpoint from a blogger slash non-reporter like this Jim Hoft guy. It just happened to come up as one of the first three things on the Google search I looked through after seeing the questioning of Hoft's blog (questioning is the least of this guy's problems, apparently). MediaMatters.org isn't my cup of tea, either. But a good airing out of a bad blog post never hurt anyone --- unless you're a jerk like Jim Hoft who cannot see that his putting a spin and a context-breaking blog out for the public to consume is not just a bad idea, but is counter-productive to what he may have once wanted to say --- which is likely something about how he perceives that being a reporter in a politically charged foreign country is only done by liberal or left-wing persons. Good try, JIM HOFT. But BAD idea, poor execution, and beyond that --- POOR JUDGMENT to have thought going after a foreign correspondent was fair.

JIM HOFT has shown one side of himself that most people would easily qualify as being "mentally unfit"--- the side that JIM HOFT HIMSELF says is okay to attack someone who has been brutally beaten and sexually assaulted.

The question one has in return for Jim Hoft is this: When you get sent to prison for wrongdoing, are you going to enjoy being brutally beaten and sexually assaulted? Because it would be obvious to those of us who are reporters that you are not capable of handling anything in a rational manner. What you claimed in your article is irrational and unethical at best.

What Lara Logan does, Jim, is report from around the world to the public in the United States. She's not there for a political correctness show. She's not there because she thinks SHE will be different and she will be protected from the mob. She's there to report from the Egyptian mob --- a job that JIM HOFT would never take because he's not capable of doing such a job.

IF JIM HOFT says that going to a foreign country to report is unwise, then, shucky darn, Jimmy, we shouldn't go to any foreign land and report anything of any nature whatsoever...right, dude?

JIM HOFT simply made these statements to become the target of all the men and women who are enraged by the behavior of the mob that brutally assaulted a reporter. Maybe it was his intention to only target what he perceives to be "left wing only" people. But he forgets that one of the tenets of being a good reporter is to leave the baggage of "political sides" on the sideline and get the story first. No...check that...he never learned that --- because he has never been a reporter. His way of living has nothing to do with reporting. His way of living is ensuring there are no middle of the road persons out here doing the right thing. JIM HOFT would rather make us all left-wing liberals BECAUSE WE REPORT. Jim Hoft's world does not have print media, electronic radio as a media, and television resources --- his world is clearly stuck in the 1700s when printing presses were an expensive commodity.

Frankly, blogger-only-and-non-reporter Jim Hoft, we'd like to hear you say something that's not as PC as you did about Lara Logan. Apparently you forget that freedom of speech and freedom of expression each have come with a price. From here forward, you'll pay that price with any crazy words you include in any of your blogs.

FCC Needs Help

2011-01-26T07:23:00.000-08:00

Interference on AM Radio.

Digital interference on AM and FM radio.

Terrestrial Radio Signal degradation.

Frequency Allotments.

Mobile Communications.

The Fairness Doctrine.

Accurate Assessment of Facilities.

This list could go on for two or three columns. It's a partial list of things that the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, has NOT done to the satisfaction of many who are directly impacted by their ignorance, inaction, or ineffective actions.

Not everyone considers what the FCC does, or what its direct impact upon ALL Americans it has on a regular basis. But for those of us in broadcasting, communications or telecommunications, we have at least a peripheral knowledge of what the Commission does in regulating some of our business practices, physical engineering, policies, and future. But the Commission must also decide on issues that influence our daily work. And unfortunately, it's obvious to many of us, the commissioners don't always have a clue about what is going on at the ground level. This is crucial because it is at the ground level --- where most of us work --- that their activity or lack thereof is felt first.

Taking one of those things in which I have a direct interest: INTERFERENCE on the radio dials. For those of us who regularly on AM Radio stations, the interference of electrical wires, computer equipment, testing equipment, etc., is having one of the biggest impacts because the FCC --- which used to do a stellar job in forcing manufacturers to keep any interference to an absolute minimum --- does VIRTUALLY NOTHING to stop the EXTREME interference of the broadcast signals on AM/Amplitude Modulation RADIO.

Sure, we can do "live streaming audio at our website" and have others listen to us on their smartphones, PC's and net radios --- but it is not the same. We depend upon drivers to hear us on their automobile radios. When you're driving through almost ANY neighborhood in the U.S. where there is cable strung around the utility poles, the interference ranges from "some" to "too much to make AM listenable for extended periods of time" --- the impact is direct and immediate. This should NOT be this way because the FCC should have MANDATES on interference levels, mandates on remedies to restrict the interference to "near nil", regulatory engineers monitoring these levels --- and, they should be ENACTING FINES to the companies which put these modes of interference into our "public airwaves".

Why --- when the FCC is charged with being the authority over these problems --- do we have them at all? In the 1980s and early 1990s, we rarely had problems with such interference because the FCC sent out investigators to quell the problems associated with electric interference on AM radio.

What is the remedy?

Unfortunately --- MORE GOVERNMENT!

You sure didn't expect me to write that, did you?

I'm not a regular advocate for "more" government. But in this case, there was a dramatic fall-off in personnel and action at the FCC when the U.S. Government cut back funding for this branch. We suffered from at least two administrations that cut some of the essential parts of the FCC budget because of "deregulation". This left the FCC with a serious lack of personnel to handle their chores.

These cutbacks have led to AN EXTREME SITUATION >>> electrical interference is at an all-time high on AM radio and on other forms of audio and visual communications. And it must be STOPPED SOON.

The only way the FCC will be effective in putting the problem to rest is to ensure that they're in the right places with the correct rules and regulations set in stone.

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I am calling on ALL United States Senators and Representatives, the President and Vice-President of the U.S., and judges from the lowest courts to the highest court in our nation, to make sure the Federal Communications Commission is funded properly and fair.

The commission must be charged with finding the proper ways to end such a serious long-term problem facing the broadcasters across our country. This is but ONE issue that faces the direct questioning of the industries that have to follow FCC regulations.

If the Commission is not given the proper workforce, these problems will not go away.

And then the problem becomes worse, and YOU will have to deal with extremely upset broadcasters.

I give you this scenario:

RADIO STATION ON-AIR PERSONALITIES will be discussing the problems at the FCC more often than celebrity news if this isn't fixed right away.

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(Okay, now that we have that out of the way --- let's get the Congress and the FCC focused second on the problem of conglomerates and get into properly regulating ownership of broadcast stations back to ACCEPTABLE levels --- How about 10 AM and 10 FM stations per company nationwide?)

Yes, Virginia, There Is A Rebound Clause: Radio

2011-01-03T08:04:00.001-08:00

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a "new industry" called radio. At the time it started there were not many radio sets available because few Americans could afford these big tube-based wooden cabinets with speakers and wires. It took electric power, which would cost the average family quit a few pennies if it were used all day long and into the night. Times were tough back then, but the industry slowly grew, as the "listeners" grew along with the number of stations, advertisers, and performers who were scrambling to get their entertainment form of singing, playing music, performing plays and poetry, or simple spoken word "on the air" at one of the radio stations. Networks quickly sprang up and there were nationally broadcast shows. Sponsors were quick to sign up for these shows whether local or national just to get their products in front of the growing public. Although times were still lean and the technology was still relatively new, by the 1930s there were many radio stations --- and radio sets were everywhere. Some of the electronic component manufacturers began building radio sets that fit into a car console and allowed travelers to listen to radio stations far and wide as they drove across the countryside to see family or friends or just take a vacation --- another relatively new idea.

As the years went along, radio stations developed more, programs were more focused, FM was added, shortwave radio and amatuer radio gained some interest, television came on the scene and became an increasing competitor, and the overall industry --- once simply "radio broacasting" became known as "broadcasting", with radio and television being separate.

The American dream was more complex than ever, as was the industry of broadcasting by the time "rock and roll" radio personalities came along in the 1950s. Radio stations were bought/sold and traded by owners who were increasingly looking for a better deal for themselves. But most radio station managers remained forward-looking and hopeful that they could lead their station or stations (sometimes there was one AM and one FM owned in the same market by an owner) to be a competitive money-maker --- or, at least, survive financially.

With the 1980s and a down economic picture, some radio station owners complained that they were no longer able to be competitive against TV and cable broadcasting. Computers came along and by the mid-1980s had started to take a piece of the pie away from some who were interested in newer technologies. Radio was still a strong piece of the every day American pie. Listenership was not challenged all that much because there were "portable" radios with transistors, "personal" radios like the Walkman, and automobiles and vans and trucks all had AM/FM tuners --- even the Over-The-Road trucker and the local delivery vans had radios. But there were some radio station owners who thought that the best years still were ahead and made promises to keep enhancing what they had. So they lobbied for some deregulation with the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D. C., and asked that they be allowed to start buying up competitors. Somewhat surprisingly, after a few years of the debate, the FCC eventually allowed corporate owners --- ones with enough money to do so --- to own 2 FM and 2 AM stations within the same LARGE market, expanding the overall limits of ownership so that some of the "big" companies would grow. Among those early adopters of the 2 and 2 limits were CBS, Westinghouse, and ABC. They were big already, but under the new rules that kept increasing the "national limit" for stations owned, they were increasingly given the ability to purchase competitive stations in markets where they already were powerful.

By the time the 1990s were fully engaged, ENDING the national limits seemed to be the target of these and many other broadcasting companies. The national limits increased from 12 to 18 to 20 in a few years, under the guidance of the FCC and Congress with rules they continued to develop allowing more deregulation.

By 1996, the FCC and the U. S. Congress were giving the green light for companies who had reached the upper limits of the "national limit" to begin participating in further buyouts.

Radio, in part, was seeing some decline because of other new technologies. Cable broadcasting had increased its overall audience by expanding what was offered to subscribers: CNN, Weather Channel, HBO --- were all just a part of cable offerings as HGTV, USA, FoxNewsChannel, FoodNetwork, ESPN2, ESPN3, Fox Sports, and many others popped up and took another chunk of time away from regular broadcast TV and radio. And the computer age was in full force by the mid to late 1990s, with the internet, cellphones, and videogames all competing for everyone's time, money, and energy.

So --- radio ownership got what it wanted. Maybe I should say "shareholders" of radio companies got what they wanted. In the board room, owners were under increasing pressure to be one of the companies that would buy out the neighboring competition. CBS and Westinghouse "merged" into a bigger company. Clear Channel bought whomever was selling, including some companies who were reporting losses or were bigger than they were but had some financial problems because of the competitive nature of the entertainment and advertising dollar.

Smaller broadcasting operators found out that their stations were worth more on the market and put them up for sale --- not really caring that they were already making money against competitors who were cheapening what was being served to the public and losing money to the stations who had full on-air staffs and were seen in the public eye at "live remotes". So, by the time some of the "good" broadcasters started selling off their assets, the lesser broadcasters had already started adopting policies of "voice tracking" or "satellite service" --- both which only increased the erosion of listenership to that station or stations and only helped the bottom line of the owner. What did that mean? Job losses. There were people who were employed full-time at radio stations in small, medium, large, and major markets who lost jobs to new technology and newly adopted ways of making the bottom line "more competitive" with disregard to the listeners or the professionals who brought those listeners to the stations. These new technologies included the computer-assisted satellite, the computer itself playing the majority of music and commercials throughout the broadcast day, and stations which used computers as its SOLE way of broadcasting to the listeners. Job losses increased as the technology improved, but moreover the job losses increased as owners of stations decided that the bottom line of "savings" was far more important than having listeners 24 hours a day. Overnight listeners found out that there were no live bodies in many American radio stations --- if they bothered to ask at all. Employees of these stations who were eliminating positions scrambled to find jobs --- only to find that the owners of most radio stations were not going to be hiring. And what made it worse was the fact that the ownership "national limit" was dropped altogether. Full deregulation of the national limit meant that there were legal conglomerates who were and are allowed to broadcast using a public license as a tool to have only a few employees for an entire market. Where a group of stations --- let's just say "6" radio stations may once have housed 72 full-time employees doing on-air work, 11 would be sufficient for Clear Channel in 2010. This does NOT take into consideration the number of employees who worked part-time or off-air. That number would be reduced by a considerable amount in proportion to the overall count of stations in the market. Voicetracking was a substitute --- and if you don't know how to be voicetracked in two or more markets, you could not work for Clear Channel as a personality. Oh --- and if you wanted a salary that matched what someone made in 1995, you may as well forget it. Salary levels for those fulltime employees were more like that of 1990 --- and there's the no-compete clauses you are forced to sign, the right-to-work rules that were in place in numerous states which allowed the employer to terminate you "at will" for anything they wanted to do --- including cost-cutting. In this economic climate, others followed suit, causing permanent layoffs to literally tens of thousands of people who had been in an industry that EVERYONE USES. Even naysayers didn't think radio ownership would stoop to such a low-life level. But those naysayers thought deregulation of radio broadcasting would run its course much sooner.

Have you read enough of this to understand that Clear Channel is one of many conglomerates who operates their stations NOT IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE PUBLIC --- BUT ONLY IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE SHAREHOLDERS??? This is contradictory to what the radio station was supposed to be --- and was --- from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Not only am I not the first person to point this out --- but there are so many columnists who have worked in broadcasting or as professors who have pointed these facts out as the facts they are that I could decide to do a web search and cull from their work. I have taken one piece of information which cites FCC rules and regulations --- a piece from the book "Radio --- the forgotten medium" published in 1995 --- and incorporated my own language and not quotations from the book. Yet, I give them a credit due because they cited certain rules that the FCC had enacted, and I knew those to be accurate as of the publishing of that book.

So, what does this mean in the scheme of things in 2011? It points out major flaws in corporate ownership --- conglomerate ownership --- as well as Congressional allowance of conglomerates; FCC commissioners not fully challenging the congressional laws and that lessened the commissioners' authority to continue enacting rules that kept ownership limits at a reasonable level; a judicial system that was given too much power to cause regulations to be dropped in the interest of ownership over the public interest; and a public which does not speak out against such injustices.

It's 2011 and the thing that must be done is TEARING DOWN THE IRON CURTAIN OF CONGLOMERATE OWNERSHIP in radio broadcasting.

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I dare say the "iron curtain of conglomerate ownership" goes well beyond just broadcasting. Corporate America benefits too much from American workers who won't sit up and make sure the shareholders suffer the same kinds of losses that the workers have suffered.

When was the last time you heard about the "average Joe or Jane" getting the chance to be the star of the evening network newscast because he or she was put on the spot by their congressional representative or senator, and followed by the television cameras and radio station microphones as they told of how their industry was decimated by deregulation and greedy ownership? It doesn't happen often enough, does it?

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Clear Channel shareholders are going to find out the hard way soon. CBS/VIACOM shareholders are going to find out the hard way soon. Cumulus and Citadel shareholders will find out the hard way soon.

Radio company stock shares for the "GREAT CONGLOMERATES" are about plummet.

The "great sell-off" of radio was thought to be in the 1990s. But the "greatest sell-off" of radio stations is about to commence in 2011. Radio stocks are going to fall below $0.01 in record numbers --- and huge conglomerates like Viacom are going to take a hit that makes their stocks worth about 65% of what they were just a couple of years ago. And they can't do a thing about it --- because they caused it, they earned it, and their going to learn that they screwed up the system by thinking they were immune.

Banks once thought they were immune to the great falls of the stock prices. That industry is plagued by a sell-off and a slower than expected economy --- it will take decades for some banks to recover from their own stupidity. And that's how business MUST BE in order to be fair and equitable --- some will just have to "hold" long enough to come back to where they were before they screwed up.

Radio is about to have this major sell-off because they did some of the same things that banks wanted them to do --- "buy, buy, buy" and drop the employment levels/jobs to an unsustainable rate. Stations cannot operate with no employees --- as much as Clear Channel and Cumulus want workers to believe they can --- because once they sell them off, others will have to employ people just to get listeners and advertisers back. This means --- the price of a radio station will come down even more than it has in the past five years --- conglomerate American radio station owners are about to take a DIVE into the red. Not a dive they haven't already had once or twice since they bought up others in the deregulatory period since 1996, but a dive that they would love to argue shouldn't happen --- BUT WILL happen in 2011.

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Clear Channel employees --- I'm not trying to scare you out of your jobs. You're lucky to have jobs when 60 to 70 percent of your former co-workers no longer have jobs, yes. But you're subject to finding out that the corporate conglomerate for whom you are working is even more destined to fail than their boards and upper managers want to believe. Clear Channel is about to falter. Cumulus is poised to fail along with Citadel. CBS/Westwood One/Viacom --- losses of gigantic proportion are heading to your corporate HQ in NYC, too. The shares of each of your stocks is about to plummet.

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What will happen in the coming months after many of the major broadcasting entities fail? Banks will be suffering even more. The stock market will adjust downward. And the economy will be poised for a return to glory.

HUH? The economy will rebound after all that?

Let me explain this line of thinking --- it is a theory that you can track back to the 1920s. As radio goes, so goes the economy.

Once broadcasting conglomerates have been decimated, the Congress and the FCC and the judges will see that "national limits" to radio station ownership were always there as a protection, not as a fight against the rich and wealthy. Soon after the fall, real broadcasters will once again be allowed to make the radio stations work in a positive manner. Jobs will return to radio, and listeners will hear the difference. The rest of the economy will follow, and the picture may not be a Currier & Ives plate, a Saturday Evening Post picture from Norman Rockwell, or even that of the "dot com boom" years --- but it will be more structured and level out.

In radio, where the no-compete clause has been in effect for a long time, there will be a new clause. And it will seem like Santa brought it to the world, soon.

Yes, Virginia, there is a rebound clause. The positive news is: it's about to be invoked.

What's In A Name

2010-12-09T09:30:00.000-08:00

The tail end of 2010 looks much the same as the end of 2009 and 2008. In some cases it's no different, while for others it's much bleaker. If someone tells me they are in better financial shape it's only because of a couple of factors --- none of which is the economy --- including the way they have learned to save while still having their job. It would be short of a miracle for someone to have found a better-paying job and saved money but it would be notable because that person is well above the average for Americans in 2010.

Here's what I see:

Although it's not new, there is story after story about charitible organizations needing more funding and donations from the public because of an increased need from others. Yes --- in December 2010, the Salvation Army, American Red Cross, ecumenical and religious organizations across the spectrum are all asking for increased donations because in almost every case they detect a much greater demand for their services this year than in the past two years.

So --- this means what? The recession is not ending.

Despite a stock market which has had modest growth, the economy is still a mess. And no matter what the people in the Bush and Obama administrations want to say, no matter how the market gurus spin things, this is not just a recession.

This is a DEEP ECONOMIC DEPRESSION.

What is bad about this is how obvious it is to the average person. Those who had terrific jobs just 5 to 10 years ago are finding that not only are "terrific" jobs difficult to find, "average" jobs are hard to locate. People who used to earn $50 to $60-thousand dollars are lucky to have those jobs, while many others who had similar earnings at their job are struggling to make half of that in the past year or two following layoffs.

The average person knows how bad their neighbor is struggling. Ebay selling is a way of life for some of these people. They used to have decent hourly wages in manufacturing. That's been several years for many of them --- when they were in their 20s and 30s. Now you'll see many men and women in their 40s and 50s struggling to find a job and becoming dependent on new service-oriented businesses. Manufacturing has all been a bunch of sellouts, largely to China and Mexico. India is feasting on American job outsourcing. In some cases there have been reports of Americans attempting to emigrate to India for jobs that used to be located in all 50 of the United States of America. This is not good for a time when the governmental and stock market/financial leaders are attempting to claim that things are improving.

What's in a name? Well, for the leaders ignoring the reality of how poor the economic condition has been in 2010, it's not much. They'll continue to call it a recession until the day the stock market bottoms out. THEN they'll be forced into saying the truth about the depression in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

What's in a name? GOOD NEWS. Sure, there will be good news. But first there will be pain on Wall Street, on the Nikkei, across the world's markets. MAJOR pain. It appears to be closer than ever --- perhaps in January or early February the market will take such a hit that even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will feel the short-term effects more than they dreamed --- I don't know this for sure, but call it a hunch that if the stock market takes the drastic fall that appears to be on the horizon that even the richest and wealthiest Americans will be selling things off.

What's in a name? CEO, CFO, COO, Chairman of the Board. These are the folks who have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but believing that it would never fall. When the men with the golden parachutes are hit as hard as the aforementioned "average" person in the U.S. and beyond, we will all see them scrambling to tell us their version of the GOOD NEWS. Personally, I am not going to buy their words. Thus far, this year and last and the year before, their words are no more worth reading and digesting than in a forced letter of resignation to someone who used to be a lower-level manager in their corporate structure. Those letters of resignation were forced upon so many American white-collar workers over the past decade that the CEO, CFO, COO and Chairmen of the boards all should cower in the corner in shame for what they have done to the overall economy.

Blame goes to the highest of the high in business. What's in a name is this: the mighty shall fall and the meek shall inherit the earth. And although I paraphrase from different places in the Bible, certainly Holy scripture may help to save some of those big shots who pay attention to the sacred words of God. But some of those big shots think they're bigger than God and will find out at the end of this depression that what's in a name is dependent upon how one reacts to the times. IF you're a bigshot --- I hope you reacted with favor to the call of the many of the Lord's commandments as well as with favor to the lowest-paid employees in your company --- I hope you didn't force a layoff or resignation into their lives.

What's in a name. Someone higher than you can and will enforce some might into your life even if you're the Chairman of the board.

++++++++++

This is a depression. An economic depression which has caused --- depression in so many people.

My guess, not my prediction, is that things will be very bad in January and February 2011 for everyone. But shortly after the huge stock market crash, things will turn around into a much happier climate. This new climate isn't something I can put my finger on right now --- just a hunch. In addition to prayers you may say for those who are dealing with the worst of times right now, please remember to give to charity if you have the means to do so. If you have the money --- even a few dollars --- please donate to some charity and make things better for others. It is a critical time in our nation's history for the charity organizations to be able to serve food, clothing, and shelter to hundreds of thousands more people who are struggling in 2010 compared to how it was in 2007.

And I once thought 2007 was bad. What's in a name. There's one name I would like to avoid being labeled: ignorant.

It's the Stupid Economy: Job Discrimination Rules

2010-09-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

You've heard the jokes over and over regarding an old political comment which went, very simply, "It's the economy, stupid." And it has been quite obvious that the economic condition has been poor for the past four years. Despite what you may read on today's USA TODAY about the recession having been over in June of 2009, there's not reason to believe that for most Americans. Come on and be honest about it, don't be stupid about it - the economic condition has not become dramatically better, no matter how many figures get thrown at the news media. Hey, I'm a member of the news media and I really don't think I can believe that the positive numbers are outweighing the negative numbers because I still have been getting the same feedback that I've seen for the past four years: jobs which can improve your life's standing are not there for the majority of Americans.

There is evidence on Yahoo! today - a story from the New York Times. Here's a link to this story here. It discusses something which I have posted about in the past: that Americans over 35 are increasingly not allowed to compete for the jobs allegedly available. Job discrimination is not only happening, but it is happening for an extended period of time.

Not telling the truth is simply the way "around" violations of trust, violations of rules and ethics, violations of understanding. What do you think of these violations? Apparently you either completely agree or you find fault with my findings because you're the boss who lies or the Human Resources person who MUST lie in order to keep your own job these days.

What happened to "The Golden Rule" when it comes to business and honesty?

Is it now a "new business-only Golden Rule" which completely dominates the world of business and economics?

Do unto others as you are going to be done unto by others when you are doing your job in business.

Read that again. Does this sound like the way corporations do business on a regular business? IF it is NOT, then I encourage you to tell me which corporation does not or companies do not follow this new "recipe" for business dealings. Overall for this particular writing, the way business is conducted with other business isn't necessarily the target of my critical thinking, but more the way these companies handle one-on-one dealings with potential employees. This is not to say that B2B is staying out of these bad situations. We occasionally read the stories about certain businesses becoming the targets of investigations or allegations of potential wrongdoing within a business transaction. These include some notorious gaffes such as that of Arthur Anderson's mismanagement, numerous banks which took it on the chin for making two-sided deals in which they caused their own downfall, and manufacturing companies which sold-out their businesses to others who were larger only to find themselves the target of an investigation into the "new owners" when they were only a subsidiary of that group for months. It can cut both ways in B2B - good or bad. But in one-on-one employment situations, where is the "control" that is supposed to be exercised by the "good" companies in good faith with potential hired hands?

Reviewing the New York Times article which appeared on Yahoo!, it shows a woman who has a good work history but cannot find a job with similar earnings largely because she is older than Generation X. Frankly, if I am reading this right (and I am no legal expert), this particular case could be one in which the woman could potentially file as part of a class-action suit against someone to which she applied for work IF there were dozens or hundreds of others in her age range who applied for open positions and did not get them because of their age and income history. IF those jobs went to someone who is just out of college or university and holds a similar degree but is 30 years her junior there is age discrimination. Unfortunately, she's not necessarily going to be looking for an attorney to file such a suit because she does not want to be labeled a troublemaker. And --- here's the interesting part to esquires around the country --- I am not a proponent of filing lawsuits as a general rule. I believe in forgiveness. Moreover, most of us believe in not attempting to make another wrong. The vernacular has been "two wrongs don't make a right" for good reason. We don't necessarily gain anything out of bringing down another. BUT, if it's obvious that such a thing will be best-served for the overall good of the public which is being unwillingly the target of unethical business practices, then I think filing suits is clearly the way to refocus the target to the party which is being unethical time and again.

This economy sucks. And if you missed this key piece to that article, I'd like to point it out now:
Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

This doesn't sound good in its tenor and tone. This not only signals what I was saying months ago about job discrimination against Generation X, but it comes to show one thing that I did not want to believe was happening then:

Age discrimination has extended its ugly range WELL PAST Gen-X to those who rightfully can file suits against those who have been practicing such discrimination. It's criminal, folks, not petty or nitpicky.

If the rules against age discrimination aren't being utilized against the companies and corporations that have been so doing for the 50 or older crowd --- what do you think that means for those between 35 and 50?

Banking On Failure

2010-08-31T07:14:00.000-07:00

The upcoming period of time is for those "opportunists" who will play upon the fears of so many. These predators bank on these fears - literally. They are bankers.

What they don't see is that in 2010 and 2011, they are not going to be able to sustain what has traditionally been "the ways of the banking industry" because they will be most in jeopardy of failure to recover from the big stock market crash that they do not see taking shape. Nikkei has been feeling the itch to trade lower, and now the other markets are starting to respond accordingly. And the banks --- well, they think everything is just groovy, man. They won't be able to react once the fall starts, which will be prior to autumn for point of reference.

What can the average American do to avoid the failures that are coming? I'll be frank: I don't really know an answer to completely avoiding the financial problems that the corporate world is going to suffer and what their roles will be on individuals wealth or lackthereof, but there are some things that we hear many times over that is common sense and should be considered.

First: make sure you don't have all your assets in the stock markets. That could cause your own failure.
Second: don't put all your money into one bank. Diversify WHERE you have your money saved or in checking accounts.

Credit unions are looking better and better all the time to me, and I need to take my own advice in making sure I place money in several accounts. It may be that credit unions are (more-or-less) regulated to stay smaller than conglomerate banks. That way they're less likely to have a big failure the way we saw just a couple of years ago with mid-sized and larger banks or 25 years ago with the Savings and Loan problems. Oddly, I think most people don't view credit unions as being safer than traditional banks if for no other reason than the banks all know how to play the fear game on the public and added an element of advertising to make banks SEEM LIKE (through the repeated advertising or editorials which make claims they cannot truly back up) "the safest place for your money" --- which we will soon see is not always the case.

But, what else? I've said it before --- not all of those people who were alive during the "Great Depression" were wrong in putting money away in cookie jars, bread boxes and in their mattresses. But I suppose for the sake of keeping the paper money protected, perhaps investing some money in a fireproof safe would be smart. Just make sure you know the combination.

Not that it's certain --- but I think we can bank on some bigger financial institutions begging both the U. S. Government and the Federal Reserve for some help in the next few weeks. But it's all but certain we can bank on those institutions which were deemed "too big to fail" having bigger problems than they did mere months ago. A few failures for those giants can trigger an avalanche of problems for some --- but NOT ALL --- Americans, as long as some of us prepare properly for the demise of the rich and wealthy folks who don't plan ahead for some of the biggest failures in the past 75 years.

Big Bad Americans

2010-08-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

So, I am a reporter.

I am always listening and asking questions to the everyday person, as well as hearing the "spin" of American businesspersons. Nowhere on the face of the earth has the 21st Century been more pushed by the decline in "industrial manufacturing" and the disarray of how things work for the greater good than in the heartland of America, the Mississippi River Valley.

Illinois coal mines are among the safest in the nation - or so we have been told for a number of years. But one reason that may be so is that those whom we look to "look out for us" - the environmentalists and even our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - is always telling us how bad the environment because of the mining of the "dirty" coal produced in Illinois. Thus, American and foreign manufacturers have either stopped buying Illinois coal altogether or have only bought it when it cannot get the "clean coal" mined in other places.

This leads me to a stop and rant point. No, not against the environmentalists. Against the CEOs of American manufacturing, as well as the presidents of the largest manufacturing unions.

These days it seems we do not need American manufacturing companies to be American-owned or American-operated. We especially do not need manufacturing factories on American soil. Seriously: do you see factories on American soil actually producing goods which are bought and sold in the USA? Yes, but rarely. I dare say that Congress screwed us royally. Our presidents have screwed us royally. We may as well be in 1772 America. Our money only goes out of the country to the manufacturing factories (no, it's not truly redundant to say manufacturing factories because some factories in the US don't manufacture a thing, just are used as warehouses with the name factory labeled upon it so the parent company can claim they still have manufacturing - albeit in a diminished capacity and computerized so only a handful of workers actually work there - in that facility) and only comes back to the top executives of the company and the shareholders, but not to the American economy because they have been granted tax shelters for the existing "factories" which don't do anything but sit idle and have occasional shipments of the goods manufactured in Mexico, China, Bangladesh, Honduras, and sometimes African countries, shipped out to our stores.

We are truly the home of the Big Bad Americans. The regular person on the street isn't the Big Bad in the scheme of world society, but it is true that we have these people in America. They are our CEOs, Congressional representatives and senators, our cabinet members, and our past and present members of the capitol all the way up to the White House.

I am not talking treasonous things --- I am being very succinct in saying that they are all playing a MAJOR ROLE in why the economic condition is the way it is today. They won't take the blame or push toward the goals which REALLY MADE AMERICA GREAT. We had the hostile takeover syndrome, the monopolies which became goliaths of the business world, and we've seen the debacles of industry --- of manufacturing --- all within the past 35 years. This is DIRECTLY as a result of legislation allowing our borders to be 'free' of trade practices which helped our economy. Now, we are "free" of those practices alright. Other countries' business negotiators and those in the board rooms of our American companies are in true cahoots to put our jobs inside the borders of our neighboring countries and our global rivals --- so that other countries have the jobs, do the work, and the American Big Bads have the money. Yes, the golden parachutes aren't there for the CEO of some Chinese manufacturer until he is motivated by the money coming from American industry and can somehow make a contract which will allow him or her to become the manager of some plant in China and have a giant pot of gold being deposited into a bank outside of China so that after 10 to 15 years he/she can leave and be politically asylumed where they can pick up their parachutes.

C'mon. Don't be naive. You cannot tell me this isn't happening. I know there are people who cannot tell you it's happening without them losing their careers in the U.S. of A. They are the third-tier and fourth-tier managers in companies that have done business in China and Mexico over the past 25 years.

I will say that if you have paid ANY attention to the news the past six months in St. Louis, you've already seen the CEO of one of these companies blatently tell us that he is not hiring in the U.S. because he can save tons of money by hiring in China and Mexico.

A gold star for the first person to email me with his name and his company located within the I-270 loop. He exists. Email me to buzzmusicmedia@gmail.com and you may be the person I cite as "someone who pays attention to detail" in an upcoming blog --- I'll give you the "in writing" gold star that our teachers used to give us because we spelled all of our vocabulary words correctly in 2nd grade.

Anyway --- although that CEO is only doing what the board of directors and shareholders wants him to do, it's a travesty that he is the person making those decisions and selling-out America EVERY DAY. I could ask for a job there --- and I'd perhaps be the best PR person he's had in ages, probably, because he and his predecessor always hire people who never return phone calls to anyone for any reason (why should I cite a single instance when I know it was returned over a 20 year period when I can only name a person at the St. Louis Business Journal who may have occasionally heard from the PR person during that time) --- and I'd probably get "no thanks, we don't hire in America" from his Human Resources Department.

But to the point of Big Bad Americans. If you're in another country - China, Mexico, Honduras, etc., and you're sure of a deal you are about to make with an American company which will bring jobs to your region, be it a city or town, you're not calling the person who is negotiating with you a "big, bad American" because you are about to have jobs for others. But I can say that if they don't have a "union" in place there --- they will see $2.18/per hour jobs and not truly benefit. And after ten years of sub-standard wages, pollution of their atmosphere, and possibly even "wage concessions" --- they'll be looking at the "Big Bad American" way of doing business as the manufacturer pulls out of that city/town/region and puts jobs in another country, leaving their economy as devastated or worse than our economy here in the midwest.

This isn't some doomsayers prediction.

Quoting Mr. T, "this is reality, fools!"

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I don't belong to a political party. To do so would allow me to be self-labeled a fool.

Legal Age Discrimination

2010-05-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I wrote about this topic - more or less - when I wrote about Generation X being irrelevant. It seems that not much has changed, except maybe it has become increasingly clear to some in my age range that being "not old enough to qualify for age discrimination" seems not so strange. And here's how it is perceived by those who are at the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation: people who haven't experienced life like the Vietnam War do not truly understand discrimination; people who didn't grow up with civil rights protests do not truly understand discrimination.

That is just Baby Boomers whining, in my view. It deems the person or persons saying those things as being "the old fogie" --- which is ironic, considering that they were protesting things that "old fogies" were doing prior to the 1960s and 1970s.

I'm not trying to be discriminatory to someone older than I, because I am socially aware of the importance of multiple-generational society. No, in fact, I am pointing out that sometimes it is the older person who is directly discriminating against a younger person simply over an age issue. It's not CALLED an age issue, per se, by the older person --- but it is what it is, something with which they have decided to pick on as "not right". Oddly --- that's what this is about, picking on something I have decided is "not right" --- so, how do I come to justify what I say?

Here's the food for thought, starting with the previous blog about "irrevelant" Gen-X'ers. Even though it may appear the economy is starting to trend toward a rebound from the depression (or for those of you who still wish to say it was only a recession...the recession), we have seen downsizing and outsourcing continue at a steady pace. Unemployment numbers have remained fairly high in Generation X people for much of this time BUT those have dropped a bit due in part to something that gets largely ignored. We run out of unemployment "benefits" and become a statistic which does not exist to the "real world" --- the underpaid. Sure, there have been some statistics about the underemployed --- I am one of these --- but it is the underpaid person who has years, if not decades, of experience in one field and has been forced to take a position with a lesser pay grade or work multiple jobs as a part-time employee in an attempt to make the money she or he was previously making in the "better economic conditions" of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

The underpaid: it sounds like a whining complaint until you ask around if it's common. Unfortunately it is common. 40-somethings are probably first (I can't cite stats, just have a hunch at this point), followed by 50-somethings and then 30-somethings. See, the reason the 60-somethings don't end up in this category much or most of the time is that they CAN file a lawsuit on age discrimination and have it heard in court easier than someone who is 42. Even those who are in their late-40s have a better chance of getting an attorney to represent them in an age-based lawsuit than someone in their early 40s. If this holds to be true --- and I suspect that plenty of people who are even at the tail of the Boomer generation would find this happens to them --- then this "underpaid" category is not simply an opinion with some people, but an undiagnosed problem within the U.S. economy.

But this leads back to the age discrimination situation for Generation-X. We may be able to find an attorney who wants to represent us in such a trial, but that attorney had better find some evidence of the discriminatory practices. I assure you that it's not an easily tracked situation at this point in time --- probably because the companies who are practicing this don't want such statistics entered at all into their databases IF they have a database with age-related information about their hiring/firing practices under the age of 50. Gen-X'ers, ages 45 and down to Gen-Y, would love it IF those statistics were made available because we could prove what appears to be a factor already: Gen-X suffers from age-related, but LEGAL, discrimination. And that's just a shame.

Radio: The Community Asset

2010-01-14T02:34:00.001-08:00

For nearly 26 years, a big part of my own little world has been called radio, or broadcasting, or radio broadcasting. It's what I do for a living, in a sense, because it's what has been the source of my income the majority of the time. I am a broadcaster, dependent upon the great "community asset" that is among all of us who have grown up with AM or FM radio. It's a community asset because the public airwaves are just that --- for the public to consume. And, if I have been taught correctly by the many teachers I have had, these airwaves are more-or-less "our" airwaves. We in the United States have the Federal Communications Commission allegedly looking out for our best interests, and, while the frequencies are owned by individuals and companies and corporate entities, the airwaves belong to we the people. Those statements can be debated, but it is how the airwaves are kept "in check" for the citizens --- the FCC keeps watch over our airwaves as best it can.

As I tossed and turned in bed early this morning, my mind kept coming back to this phrase "Radio: The Community Asset" and made me realize that today I had to start off my day writing this column.

The Community Asset. What does it do for us? A radio station can keep us informed about local news, weather and topics of interest. Radio can play our favorite songs by our favorite artists, from classical music to rock 'n' roll, jazz, R & B, blues, bluegrass, opera, country, folk, alternative/post-modern, hip-hop, rap, smooth jazz/new age...it's an endless plethora of things, right? But what does it do for me lately?

Ahhh. What does the community asset mean to us? For many, it's a link between our banal existence and the excitement of others' who have lives. Ouch...that hurt to write...partially because it's a phrase which I have heard people use because they think they're boring individuals. Whereas we can assure the person who said that they are far from boring, it is true that radio makes life exciting and interesting to many. That's why radio listeners are sometimes called fanatics or fans --- because they are genuinely participating in the shows they enjoy --- the stations to which they are listening for hours without end --- to the point of wearing the t-shirts and polo shirts they have either won through a contest or purchased from our "radio store" in person or online, placing bumper stickers on their vehicles and notebooks, even showing up by the thousands to win a talent contest. Yes --- the community asset means much more than a bunch of commercials on one station and off to another station where the brand new college DJ is rambling so fast and without enunciation that you're thinking he or she has a five-month college-only career. Yes, radio is the community asset which requires not much from the average person/listener other than --- to own a radio and to listen. But, again --- what does it mean to us?

A radio station --- let me bring up a prime example of one in St. Louis in Classic 99 --- can be the fabric which knits a large segment of the population together. This will to point to specifics and generalities both here, so bear with me. In the case of Classic 99 (or KFUO-FM for now*), the station has been on the air for 61 years, much of that time playing classical and liturgical music as part of the KFUO radio stations in Clayton. Since it has been playing this music for such a long period of time, it's nearly impossible for the community in whole to think of St. Louis without such a station. But it could happen soon. The owners of the radio station, the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, have placed the station on the sales block. The prospective new owners will immediately change the format from Classical music to Contemporary Christian Music, thus ending an era of 61 or 62 (depending upon the date the change may take place) years of a piece of the community. That's a hefty statement --- but it is a TRUE statement. Classic 99 has been a mainstay for musicians from all backgrounds, who perform dozens of styles of music, NOT JUST CLASSICAL music. Dare I say it, but without this important piece of the St. Louis community, we are just another large city without a cultural icon to which we can ALL relate and enjoy.
Sure --- I don't listen to it all of the time. I am not a fan of every style of music played on Classic 99. But I know it's always been there in my lifetime, and I have appreciated what it has given my community --- enjoyment, relaxation, excitement, personality. It's been a background station for some --- it seems that one cannot go into a dress shop or tailored men's clothier around St. Louis and not hear Classic 99 on the speaker --- and it's a constant companion to others who listen at home on their clock radios and stereos, or while driving in traffic and wanting to unwind with something more melodic and soothing than Phil Collins, Nelly, U2 or Taylor Swift.
(Hey, I'm not picking on these artists --- I listen to them, too...as the occasion warrants.)

But here we sit at the precipice of losing our community asset known as Classic 99. Sure, there are plenty of Contemporary Christian Music fans. And I am a Christian who enjoys that music format, as well. But the community asset known as Classic 99 is something which also plays (I dare to say) Christian music. Bach has been linked to many non-believers who found interest in the tunes, the background of the symphonies he wrote, and found numerous the reasons for their soul being drawn to the music Bach and others say was inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Many of these people eventually became Christian believers --- and although that's talking about the Christian community more specifically than the region, it is part of why Classic 99 is a community asset. It plays for all, from all backgrounds, races, religions, creeds --- the station has been there for us in lean economic times and good. It's an asset which benefits our community through the outreach to the non-profit groups who have spent money on advertising their events, and it's been a companion at all hours of the day and night. To twistedly paraphrase some Mark Twain writings...boy, will we miss Classic 99 if and when it's gone.

Our community asset --- radio --- will continue. But our specific community asset --- Classic 99 --- may go away. However, there are developments (thus far off the well-worn public path) which could mean a new community asset playing Classical Music within the next few months.

Are you a fan? Are you simply a listener? If you hope that a community asset such as Classic 99 (which it has been to this point) is coming to a radio near you, then you're going to want to check in now and then to find out what is developing. I promise nothing yet except to find out more. But I must say there are some very intelligent, kind, and well-blessed people who are planning that our community has an asset on the airwaves beyond whatever may happen to Classic 99.

I hope, soon, to bring you the exciting news which makes a bold statement: our community asset, the airwaves, has something long-term coming to your radio (and internet streaming, and smartphones, and, and, and, and...). It really could become another classic asset to the St. Louis region.

I suppose it's time for me to get up and turn on my radio. After all, those radio airwaves belong to me, so I probably should listen to my community asset.

==================

Footnote: *the pending deal selling 99.1/KFUO-FM Clayton MO has been challenged by comments filed by individual citizens and by petitions to deny the license transfer. The FCC usually green-lights a license transfer, but there is a chance that they would place this station sale on hold pending any investigation brought about by the filed petitions before the agency. Also, if a lawsuit is filed to block the sale, the FCC usually allows the judicial system to rule before granting final approval of a sale. As of January 13, 2010, the sale was still in a transitional time period and no lawsuits had been made public.

Music: Watching Judas

2009-11-27T07:18:00.000-08:00

Music is a universal language to those who can hear.

Today, I am talking about WATCHING JUDAS, a band. This band of young men hails from St. Charles County in Missouri. Yes, I've met them. I'm a musician-singer, and one of the two brothers in WATCHING JUDAS, Eric Barfield, used to play piano in a small group with me and some other musicians. This is not saying that I'm merely claiming that something is good because I know of the group. No, I don't automatically say something is decent: I have standards. WATCHING JUDAS has met those standards on their recording entitled "MARY MEETS SALLY", a CD (which appears to be a very small LP, if you own a copy --- yes, it looks like a RECORD)...well, this CD features a song I feel deserves attention, "LONG WAY FROM EDEN". This track has echoes of many groups, and one can draw your own conclusions with a good mind's eye as to whom has inspired the band to write and record this tune. I haven't asked Eric or Christian Barfield if this was written by one or both brothers, but it does sound like something they would have compiled as part of this overall good recording.

The Barfield brothers were in the studios of KFUO Radio several weeks ago and talked about their efforts. They've also been featured on other radio stations across the region over the past couple of years, and they are embarking on yet another "tour" of venues where they can ply their trade to various audiences, mostly under 60 (but I wouldn't rule out some over-60 people liking this music, too...as there are some sounds on this which remind many of us of late 1960s Beatles music/production).

The produced CD was recorded in Memphis and St. Louis, mixed in St. Charles MO (not to be confused with St. Charles IL, outside of Chicago), utilizing the four main musicians associated with WATCHING JUDAS, Eric and Christian Barfield (both sing, although unless you have heard both in person, it may be difficult to say which one is singing the lead), who play keyboards and synthesizers, Paul Nahrgang on Bass, and young Aaron Wahoff on Drums/percussion. They added family members Mary Barfield on cello and Sarah Wahoff on violin in the recording process. Executive Producer Baird Risdon helped Eric and Michael Barfield (now that's keeping it familiar) in the production of the process for "LISTENING HOUSE" records. And if you're a St. Louis native, you may recognize the setting captured by photographer Edward Crim as the "pickle pans" (that's what I call them) from Bob Cassilly's City Museum in downtown St. Louis. Even with all the local angles and angels (one would think) associated with this recording, it took a lot of personal money from the Barfield family and friends to make "MARY MEETS SALLY" a reality. It is a slice of local music, a slice of American ingenuity, talent bestowed upon these young guys, and part tribute to fans of WATCHING JUDAS that such a recording has been brought out.

I think that if you listen to the music of the past 45 years, you'll find something on this CD to enjoy, so long as you don't care that there are NO guitar riffs. Yes, there are no guitars used in the recording of "MARY MEETS SALLY" (except bass), which means that the production values had to be just a smidge more creative than others have attempted or accomplished. By no means am I attempting to say it singularly outshines Phil Ramone or Phil Spector, Brian Wilson or Brian Eno, but it is ladled with production gravy (sorry, yesterday was Thanksgiving, so the mind drifted to that metaphor) from the very first seconds of the opening title track.

Before it becomes a nationally successful band, I want to proclaim that WATCHING JUDAS is worth watching and hearing. I may not be the very first to think this way --- but I am looking forward to the day when I can say "I remember when WATCHING JUDAS was merely a group of nice young guys looking for a break." I think their break is this CD, and more specifically, the song "LONG WAY FROM EDEN".

Call your local radio station music directors and ask them to play this song. If they give "LONG WAY FROM EDEN" some airplay, hopefully others will request the song and the stations will start adding the tune to their playlists. At that point, WATCHING JUDAS will no longer be a well-kept secret to those of us who have already heard them.

====================

Check out WATCHING JUDAS at http://www.watchingjudas.com as well as http://twitter.com/watchingjudas

Oh...and Watching Judas is also on myspace and have a few videos on youtube.

Irrelevant: Generation X, and Me

2009-11-12T07:26:00.000-08:00

Today, I realized that I am irrelevant.

As I sat in the basement this morning, I reflected upon my life. Since I was born in 1965, I am a member of Generation X. A few years ago, there was a term that was largely associated with Generation X members, but I always felt did not apply to me --- called the "slacker". I worked two and three jobs, six and seven days a week, in order to become relevant. But, I suppose because I am a member of Generation X, things have become more denigrating to those of us who are labeled Gen-X. Perhaps it's that label of "slacker" which defined some in our generation, and cast a pall over our very existence within Generation X. Because we're now "middle aged", and no longer in our youth, we have become special to Gen-Y and the Baby Boom generations, as well as...well, not sure that we've given a true name to the younger than Gen-Y kids yet, but I may as well not look it up on the internet because I'm already irrelevant.

Ya see --- outside of those they identified more than a decade ago as slackers, Generation X doesn't even get noticed on the blip of the RADAR GUN that is our national media. CBS' Katie Couric is a Baby Boomer. NBC's Brian Williams is a Baby Boomer, and so are their respective backup anchors, Russ Mitchell and Lester Holt. Looking over at the other news desks --- well, okay, after you get away from retiring boomer Charles Gibson, there are a few anchors who may have a shot at the ABC News desk who are in Generation X...but, frankly, I doubt that the Baby Boomers in charge at ABC will allow a non-boomer to fill that chair as anything more than a co-anchor.

No, you see my point is not only am I, personally, feeling irrelevant. But it seems a lot of us in Generation X are being deemed irrelevant in this economic crisis. Some would say we're too small a generation to have as great an impact on the financial world as "boomers" --- even though we're in the middle of our best spending years. However, we Gen-Xers are also in the middle of being given pink slips or told our job skills don't match the open job positions which are largely being offered up to or snapped up by those who are Gen-Y --- not because we're unqualified for the positions, but because we don't match the financial requirements.

Huh? We're in this economy, making more money on average than the younger generation and we don't qualify? How can that be? Well --- it's BECAUSE we don't make or take less money than those who are younger that we don't match the financial requirements. That, by the way, is the lie that the Human Resources departments are counting on to get them through whatever minor hiring stage they set. Companies are suggesting the HR people not hire someone over 30 these days because of financial needs of the company are paramount. In reality they only want to pay for those who have just exited their formative educational years (high school, trade schools, colleges, and universities) and will gladly accept a smaller paycheck than those of us who have anywhere from five to 25 years in their career fields.

A lot of irrelevance in 2009 is based upon money and age. Much of it is based upon the age at which Generation X has going for it on the positive side --- we are young enough to work a lot of hours and experienced enough to know what we're doing, so we are in the right age range to make the wages that companies no longer wish to pay.

This is NOT limited to Generation X people. No --- a lot of boomers a few years under retirement age but above Gen-X are under the same guns. They, too, are fired upon by the institutions which they thought would allow them to retire as their parents or older cousins had done. Or maybe simply put --- fired, dismissed, trimmed due to budget constraints, laid-off indefinitely. How many other ways are there of saying "we are trying to protect our bottom line before we can protect your bottoms" --- or "assets before saving others' asses"???

It doesn't really matter, anyway, I suppose, which age category you fall into these days. The economic depression exists, while the government says otherwise (two different parties, two different administrations...neither will admit this is more than a serious recession). Unfortunately, it's leading to the downfall of the United States of America in a financial sense. Maybe we're going to be able to band together in the spirit of American brotherhood to get us through this mess. Or maybe we're going to crumble and fall prey to those who hold all the money in assets (not just bank notes --- banks are failing, insurance companies are failing, and Wall Street will fall again, too).

I just know this much --- I reflected upon my irrelevance this morning and have come to one conclusion: I don't see a way out of this for myself. I work in an industry which is befuddled by money-hungry investors, managed by people who don't understand the industry basics, and has consistently let go, fired, dismissed, etc., the base of people who understand how to keep it going and thrive...and although I have a part-time job...I could apply to literally thousands of outlets and be given no more of a chance than I have at my current employer to become full-time with benefits.

No...it seems my days of making that path to financial freedom were over long ago. Perhaps as long ago as half-a-career ago, the path was being broken up by owners who only wanted enough money to cover their middle-age and retirement years. The greed set out by people way above me in broadcasting 15 or more years ago has left me feeling tired and cold. Yet I am somewhat employed, while others I have known are working for peanuts or trying to move-in with their children or parents because they've been unemployed for a long enough period of time that it is as simple as being broke in a down economy.

Sure, I'm a victim of sorts: Of my own belief in my abilities taking me beyond what others have been willing to allow; of an industry which allowed itself to be taken over by money-grubbers who know nothing but their own crooked ways; of trusting that things would become better for all of us sooner, rather than later, because "some of the older generation will have enough sense to buy up the businesses and put us back in the driver's seat". Boy, was I banking without money...just like the banks do these days!

No...it's the end of 2009...I'm still going to work today, part-time. But I am a true Generation X member. And I am ever so irrelevant.

I just wish Andy Rooney would recommend that CBS fill his job position at "60 Minutes" with me, so my irrelevance would earn me a healthy and respectable paycheck for a few years.

Radio Broadcasting, Media & Business

2009-09-30T13:54:00.001-07:00

I've been a media member since...well that depends on my "real roots". I suppose it goes back to when I was a young child who, like so many Americans, loved listening to the radio personalities up and down the dial (when it really was a dial). Times were great for listeners: personalities were plentiful, and radio station owners paid those personalities enough to make a decent living, for the most part. It stayed that way up until perhaps the late 1980s or early 1990s before the dying breed --- the local owner --- could no longer afford to continue paying the "developmental personalities" at the smaller stations. The economy was not very good.

Consolidation laws FIRST forced the radio broadcasting (TV, too) industry to change - to accept larger allowable ownership groups. It had the potential to help, we were told. Then we watched as "deregulation" was forced through the FCC and Congress. Along the way, computers helped us out, giving us new ways of making "radio magic"...unfortunately, that was followed by brutally harming the program hosts with "voicetracking". Sure, it made it possible for us to do a break ahead of time so we could take a lunch break, but it also allowed station management to think "we can cut payroll with this feature". And cut payroll they did, except for their own pay. They took away the livlihood of hundreds of thousands of radio personalities, opting to show a "profit" for their quarterly or yearly earnings. Then they took the shareholders' money and ran to the bank with their bonuses.

Broadcast industry job cuts even made news this week. How about the way Westwood One CEO Rod Sherwood as well as Executive VP/Business Affairs and General Counsel David Hillman ordered mandatory five-day employee furloughs in Q4 2009, then "schedules" further salary cuts for 2010? The employees weren't very happy about these moves. You wonder how much Hillman will get as a reward for this kind of change --- Hillman's been specializing in this move for more than five years, before he was a VP. Ahh, the "esquire" must be entitled. Right? Keep combing through the press releases and watch for his "bonus" in 2010. It will happen.

With just only 25-year-long career in broadcasting, I have come to realize that the only place where radio's "personalities" will soon reside is where people are listening to them. That may not simply be a radio station: it will be a particular online "channel" as well as on your cellphones, media devices such as mp3 players, etc.

I'll boldly predict that such days are coming as soon as by the fall of 2010.
By fall of 2010 --- your favorite air personalities will be available for listeners on MANY media platforms. I should add this word: again. Many of these personalities have been out of the spotlight or unemployed for too long.

Frankly, I'm looking forward to this because of all the media applications where we will see this personality-driven "channel" exist...it'll be numerous platforms and the applications where they will be featured will be widespread, thus leading the various listeners/viewers (some will want the personalities on video, too) to seek them out.

I'll admit I am looking forward to this new "channel" because I will take part in its existence and shaping.
Q: Why?
A: Because I want to...and because someone has to get "radio" back on track, even if it's not always or only on the radio airwaves of AM and FM.

The good news is: the air-personalities will band together.

These men and women are already picking up on the fact that this is one development coming, as we/broadcasters who are personalities either shake our heads or laugh in disgust at the idiots currently running and ruining "radio as we know it".

Frankly, I am not a household name today.
Ahhh...but wait until "tomorrow" and see/hear what happens.

"Buzz"
buzzmusicmedia

A sincere thanks to all those who want to participate in this new chapter of radio broadcasting.
+++++++++++++++++++

RANDOM ramblings about "business".
----------
"I'll give him/her 'the business'."
"That's nobody's business but their's."
"I own my business...built it from the ground up!"
"In Business News..."

When one wonders about the economy...it's often because the "regular" news and the "business" news become closely related, or even the same.

"New Auto Production Down As Mexican Plants Begin Sending Inventory North"
"Fewer Americans Filing For Unemployment As Part-Time Jobs Are Filled"

Hooboy, to be an economics pundit in 2007 and predict the economic collapse (the way some actually did). Wow...someone could make fortunes off the writing of that history book.

Here's the question: What business can suck the life out of some and make others wealthy at the same time?

Unfortunately, the answer is: ANY business in 2009.

-------------

Who else thinks the business climate in 2010 will look mighty good for some compared to 2009?

Yet I Wonder What Happened To Excitement

2009-07-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

The weekend weather was incredibly mild in the St. Louis area and much of the midwest --- about the eastern half of the United States --- and I wasn't about to miss it. Or was I?

I just realized that outside of mowing the lawn on Saturday, taking out trash, going to the mattress retailer to pick up a bed frame, and not much else, the only outdoors thing I did all weekend was to attend a backyard barbecue (which was wonderful, I must admit, even though we only stayed for about 3 hours or so).

This leads me to ponder the question (as I get ready to go to work) --- what can and will I do for excitement on a Monday?

Perhaps before the end of the day I will have the answer. At least I can say this much without reservation: I'm blessed, whether it's with family, friends, co-workers, or otherwise known acquaintances --- I will enjoy the talents of all these people today. And even if I don't conscientiously acknowledge those talents outwardly, by the end of today I will be glad that I've had the chance to see them in use.

Tomorrow it's a different set of talents to observe and enjoy.

It's funny to me, but I don't sound excited in my head --- but when I read it on the page, it appears to me that I am excited about the days ahead. It's not something I'm questioning...I just find myself in wonder.

+++++++

I share a funny video --- I love how these things just show up in life. A friend and author from Houston TX, Andrew Lazo, shared this on Facebook this morning. Being I am from Generation X, this video was a direct hit for me. Actually, it was TWO hits for me. View it and laugh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN75im_us4k

"And that's the way it is. Good day!"

The Thumbnail For Sale On Ebay

2009-07-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

You never know what you'll find out on Ebay, or if you will ever bid on an item. Occasionally we grow curious and wonder what is behind the bidding process for the party/parties involved. In this case, I know a person whose mission this week is: selling a broken thumbnail on Ebay.

I give you the transcript of my interview with "shukuacacia" --- the seller of this item.

Here's the link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130319448837

++++++++++++++++++++++++
HERE IS THE INTERVIEW with the THUMBNAIL SELLER on Ebay:

Buzzmusicmedia:
Tell me about this nail. How did it break?

SHUCKUACACIA:
Umm, I dont know honestly. I was drunk...but possibly from punching a wall.

Buzzmusicmedia:
Which nail broke?

SHUKUACACIA:
Right thumb nail.

(Here's a link to the ebay listing and picture)
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130319448837

Buzzmusicmedia:
Does the thumb nail area hurt?

SHUCKUACACIA:
No actually, it broke down in the "pink" area so I didn't want to finish the break in fear of pain and blood, so I just let it be for a week and a half...and I was very careful not to break it, but then when I was rolling up my window the other side of my nail broke...so then on either side there was a break in pink part, and as time went on the break got bigger until it was all the way across. But my nail was still on because just above that break there was the nail...still pink, attached to skin. And, after it being like that for two days, it finally just came off with no pain or blood.

Buzzmusicmedia:
Wow...how lucky do you feel?

SHUKUACACIA:
Extremely.

Buzzmusicmedia:
It's not the most mainstream item found on Ebay --- WHY sell your thumbnail?

SHUKUACACIA:
(To)just see what will happen...will anyone buy it? If so, how much will they pay for it, and will someone get into a bidding war for it??

It's all a very thrilling experience to see what happens to something most people just ingore/throwaway.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

That's the thumbnail sketch of why she's selling a thumbnail on Ebay.

Illinois General Assembly Clashes With Residents

2009-06-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

The latest budget passed by the Illinois General Assembly is causing a DEEP divide.

Traditionally a column starting with that sentence is discussing the two main political parties in the U.S.A. --- but this time it is the residents of the Land of Lincoln against the state legislature. And, to borrow a coined phrase, it ain't pretty.

In times of economic troubles, all parties are worried about money. Residents are praying they can keep their jobs or find new ones to replace the ones they have lost or are losing. Government officials are grinding their teeth as they crunch numbers, and legislators are clashing as often as ever over what money is coming in, what money can be spent, and where to spend the money which comes in from taxpayers and the U.S. government. And in the middle of it all is a man who is charged with leading all of those parties --- following two "leaders" who were riddled with scandal --- Governor Pat Quinn.

Governor Quinn doesn't want to be known as a governor who lost control before he really had it. It appears he's been doing as much as he can during his tenure in the Governor's office and has offered solutions to a difficult balancing act: the next fiscal budget. Yet as his budget proposals were discussed in General Assembly committees, they were combing it over, dissecting it, and then "enhancing" it to the point that it no longer looked like the proposal Governor Quinn had given the legislature. In fact, the cuts the state senators and representatives decided upon make Quinn's budget pages look like baby swiss cheese. The state government would lose about 10-thousand jobs alone. That's the state of Illinois' payroll going down at the same time that the rest of the state finds it more difficult to do business with some agencies --- especially those who look for "customer service" in social service agencies. The proposal which came out of the General Assembly and eventually the president of the Illinois senate will cause literally tens of thousands of job losses before August the governor is forced to sign the current version of the General Assembly's budget.

So, if you're the parents, the siblings, the actual state residents who stand to lose their jobs or training from the drastic funding cuts to social service agencies and programs, NOW is the time to stand up and call the legislators and the media.

Which will get you better results?

Call your local newspaper, radio station and especially TV stations --- and let them know how upset you are that they're cutting services to the weakest among us: those with disabilities and the elderly, as well as children.

Perhaps they'll give this some daily coverage until a new budget - with a temporary and slight tax increase is included to alleviate the problem - helps restore the funding to so many of the public and private concerns which HELP these citizens.

I'm Anti-Death Until God Calls

2009-06-02T14:01:00.000-07:00

I'm what most people would call a moderate, middle of the road --- politically --- person. I feel that humans deserve the chance to talk, discuss, vote for, and rally over their positions in life.

I give you the death by gun of Dr. George Tiller, known by most as an abortion provider in Kansas. Dr. Tiller was killed at the doors to the church where he served as an usher this past Sunday, allegedly by someone who was a vehemently anti-government conservative.

So --- here are the coming rubs for me:

As it is my blog, my column, I am allowedto make the rules up as I go along. Thus, I will modify the names of the groups to which the world has been clinging for much of the past 35 years, since Roe V Wade, or, Roe vs Wade, depending upon how you've viewed the title of that ruling.

"Abortion-Choosers"

VERSUS

"Anti-Deathers"

Dr. George Tiller was murdered. Both groups hate that fact, whether you want to believe it or not. I'm sure why the Abortion-Choosers are upset, and I know why the Anti-Deathers are upset --- because it will be painfully obvious that many of those who are on the side of the Abortion-Choosers will speak up and claim that, as a group and in whole, Anti-Deathers are the ones behind the murder of Dr. Tiller as well as the murders and maimings of those abortion providers who have suffered injuries, including deadly injuries, since the Supreme Court voted to allow abortions in the United States.

Let me not forget to show the two sides that I'm in the middle on this issue, lest more than one of the sides think I'm clearly siding with just one.

Change.

Effecting change is good.

President Obama campaigned on that premise. Having a profound effect upon society, he maintained, can be done by one person. The nation agreed and thus favored Barack Obama over the rest of the U.S. presidential candidates. I'd say President Obama has effected change since his coming into office. So did President George W. Bush in his eight years in the White House. And we all may have an opinion on what the changes were in the far past and recent past, but today I will fall upon my faith to do some of the talking for me.

I grew up in a Christian home. My Roman Catholic mother and grandparents helped to raise me and my siblings within the Holy Catholic Church. Now to push for a moment what I've learned over the past many years --- if you're going to discern between Christian and Catholic, you really don't know that both stand for the same thing: Jesus Christ was God the Son. Christian means Jesus the Christ was the son of God, and to be catholic means to be a Christian believer.

I'm in the middle here. I've been working with Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastors for more than four-and-a-half years, but have been friends with many Roman Catholic priests in my lifetime, too. All of a sudden the left-leaners are telling themselves that I'm a conservative, and that surely this person voted for McCain-Palin at the ballot box last November. Nope. I did not. I can effect change just the same as anyone by not voting for a ticket with which I disagree upon issues --- I won't tell you for whom I voted except to say it was not for McCain-Palin. Suddenly the conservatives are saying "oh, great...a wishy-washy conservative who won't see the big picture and vote for the pro-life candidate". Well, again, I know that the conservatives would like to be correct 100% of the time, just the same as the liberals would like to be correct 100% of the time. Thing is --- I am not going to judge who is correct and who is not. I'll be judged by some, and others will realize that it doesn't matter what my views are UNLESS I CAN EFFECT CHANGE.

Bear with me for a moment.

I cannot applaud the person who murdered Dr. George Tiller. No, that's not right, and I am not the only person who says this. Conservatives such as Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List agree that murdering Dr. Tiller is not good for anyone.

On the other hand, I want to point to some people who like me are in the middle of the road --- moderates --- and don't believe that we can "effect change" in the world.

When someone asks whether ONE PERSON can "effect change", perhaps it's painfully obvious to some, but not so much to others. But I assure you that ONE PERSON can, in fact, have a dramatic effect upon the society in general. [did you read what I said about President Obama?]

Dr. George Tiller effected change...

...60-thousand fewer human beings came into the world.

As an Abortion-Chooser --- in Dr. Tiller's case he not only performed abortions but funded the very clinics where these tens of thousands of deathly acts were performed --- Dr. Tiller violated a fundamental dichotomy of his own doctoral creed in putting to death all of those humans.

Dr. George Tiller chose death as his calling card. I don't see him as compassionate toward women. I see him as an opportunist.

Sadly for Dr. Tiller, Scott Roeder was an opportunist as well. He took the opportunity to shoot to death Dr. Tiller. Mr. Roeder will be punished accordingly, I'm sure.

BUT WAIT! I, too, am an opportunist and looking forward to death.

Suddenly I am confounding all sides. Not for long, though.

Clarification:

"I'm Anti-Death Until God Calls" --- is the title of this column because...when God calls me to my death, I'll be all for death. I'm a believer in Christ as the Savior of the world. I look forward to the day the Lord God calls me...so I can see heaven.

As Dr. Dale Meyer, president of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, says: "Thanks for thinking."

YouTube Charm: A Few (thousand) Views Later

2009-05-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

This is easy to say: I'm a fan of YouTube.

When I can, I search YouTube for music videos. Not necessarily the MTV/VH1/BET/etc. kind of music videos, but the videos which COULD be used in those applications, as well as videos of musical groups taken by professionals and amateurs who have found a "gem" performance by an individual or group. A "gem" to me also means that the music is good quality, or at least good enough to hear a wide range of things: high hat on a drum set, for example, as well as the depth of the bass, the vocals of everyone in a group setting, and so forth. See, although I'm not technically called an audiophile, I am rather picky about what I hear on these videos, which leads me to listen to literally thousands of video files on YouTube. And it is interesting how widely varied the songs and performances I have found.

Given that I am a fan of different genres of music, there is no shortage in finding something different every day. Last night (although this has been going on for days), I was sitting and going through dozens of videos of the band Chicago [and a few of The Buckinghams and The Beach Boys]. Chicago's been around for about 42 years --- no small feat in the world of music --- and they recently stopped in St. Louis for a concert on their latest tour. Sorry to say, I still have yet to hear them in concert. I'll have to wipe that one off the TO DO LIST sometime soon, I suppose...although the current lineup has been static for more than a decade, with original members Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walter Parazaider and Robert Lamm, and longtime members Bill Champlin (a man who has been writing hits almost as long as Chicago has been performing), Jason Scheff (he's the man who had to fill the role of bassist Peter Cetera when the latter left for a solo career in the 1980s), Tris Imboden (he's the poor sap who eventually took over from legendary drummer Danny Saraphine when DS was given the boot for creative differences), and guitarist Keith Howland.

I'm not the big fan of Chicago that some are, but I do see the history of this band for what it is: lengthy, storied --- both good and not so good, and sincerely super because of great songs which both hit the charts and simply became legendary tunes. But the videos on YouTube are what has drawn me into their history even more over the past several weeks. I mean I already have been listening to a couple of different "Greatest Hits" compilations by Chicago over the last 15 years, so I already know there are vastly different recordings available to fans --- but YouTube has made me a bigger fan AND made me want to tell some other fans to shut their typing fingers up unless they have something other than the same old "Terry Kath is rolling over in his grave" posts in the comments columns on some of the videos. Terry Kath has been dead for 31 years and the band went on without him. As a musician and fan I will admit that claims of Kath's being the "soul" of Chicago in their early years bears noting: clearly he had a rock/soul style that fit into the band and helped transform it from a group of young guys in the Chicago area to a worldwide phenomenon. But that doesn't mean the group had to die when he died. That would be like saying the U.S.A. had to die when Warren G. Harding died in office: people move past troubled times in history, and Chicago the band did just that.
The fact that there has been historical evidence that Kath was not as pleased with the direction of the band during its most successful period is nothing new. All bands evolve, rock or otherwise. I play in a band with a 46-year history. We have one original member left performing: we don't disband our group because the original members are dying off --- we still perform the songs they performed in the 1960s and 1970s because that's what the listeners demand. And just because our original singer isn't part of the mix these days (he decided to retire from performing...and he comes to our performances at least a couple of times each year...and rarely will he actually get up on stage with us to sing) doesn't mean the band has to go to the pile of groups which no longer exist. And the same should be said about Chicago: they are musicians, each with their own soul. They decided that the death of one member was not going to keep them from performing. Another member left...they fired another member...they changed lineups, and in fact it is an evolutionary process that one can see by watching the videos of Chicago in "live" performances as documented on YouTube. In fact, you'll notice videos where Lee Loughnane or Walt Parazaider are not part of the lineup --- this shouldn't surprise anyone because they are human and would likely want some time away with family, or as some have suggested may have health concerns and not make some dates. This gives other musicians the opportunity to play with a legendary group and fill-in for one of those legends --- a feat many musicians would give their left kneecap to accomplish just once.

It's a great media form such as YouTube that gives us all the opportunity to take a look into the greater depths of things --- such as the performing history of a band such as Chicago, a kid playing ukulele, or a video of a family reunion in which you can almost smell the barbecue.

There are millions of things to do on the internet: I find YouTube gives me a sense of yesterday and today. YouTube is one website I will gladly use regularly as long as it exists.

Eating In St. Louis: Why Aren't We ALL 672-Pound Humans???

2009-05-29T06:40:00.000-07:00

If you've lived in the metropolitan St. Louis area, you are always finding new places to dine-in, take-out, mixture of both (I like to do that with pizza or chicken...eat-in sometimes at Porter's Chicken, but usually take it home to the family...same with the original location of Fortel's at MacKenzie and Heege), or places to purchase your ingredients and take them home to combine and cook them in the kitchen or on the grill. This IS St. Louis, after all, so we have options galore for breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, late night, even the middle of the night.

So --- I've not given my opinions on a blog before, but I'll give a few of my favorites today just because I have been inundated with food since I got up at dawn.

If money is no object, this list is beyond lengthy, so maybe I'll give myself a $4000 account for the week. That should be more than enough anyway, right?

BREAKFAST:
An option that is good at any time of day for me is GINGHAM'S. It's a family-style restaurant that most people would see and think "Denny's style" or even "Bob Evans like". And since the family that started the restaurant split the business up just a little bit, they have "two" locations --- one in St. Charles at Highway 94 and Sherman, the other in South St. Louis County at Lindbergh and Lemay Ferry --- both are good, although I have been partial to the South County location for many years since I've lived closer to it for the past 15 years. REASONS TO GO: If someone thinks that "Uncle Bill's" is a good pancake place...I invite you to do a comparison. To my taste, GINGHAM'S is clearly the better pancakes. But, that having been stated, do yourself a favor if you are actually hungry when you go into GINGHAM'S and like omelettes --- order your favorite kind of omelette and get the 3 pancakes option (the other option is hash browns and toast for if you want the omelette and aren't as hungry). You can get your fill and enjoy the flavors. For whatever time you go in --- they're open 24 hours a day --- I suggest the iced tea and/or coffee with your meal. They have great dinners, too, so don't limit yourself to the vast breakfast menu.

Okay. So we can find other options for breakfast for certain...let's just say that we were going to meet at Gingham's for brunch instead so we'll need an early morning option. I'm thinking doughnuts. Hoo-boy...do we have options here in St. Louis...and I'll be up front in saying that I'll hear from people about the places I'll be leaving out of my short list. These are simply because I don't frequent them --- not because I don't like them. I've eaten at nearly every good doughnut shop in the region, and some of the less-than-good shops, too.

DOUGHNUTS:
If you think it's tough to find a place for breakfast and stick with it --- doughnuts are even tougher to dedicate yourself to just ONE of these places. But if I have to find a place that I can count on for consistency, it's EDDIE'S SOUTHTOWN DONUTS at S. Kingshighway and Murdoch, just a block from the Christy/Kingshighway firehouse. Eddie's cake doughnuts are soooooooo good. Oh my heavens...I'm a cake doughnut fiend, and it takes my strongest will to keep from going there every single day. There are so many different doughnuts to try, too --- and it's not easy to walk in early and figure it out...which is why I usually wait until after 8 AM, so there are fewer options (crazy, you say? Naw...makes it easier to choose!)! EDDIE is there most mornings early on, so if you're up early go in and tell him Buzz sent you.
That having been said, they're not alone in my visits each month, due to location of my drive path to and from work. You see, not far from there at the corner of ChippeWatson at Donovan (it's what I call it because Watson and Chippewa meet there) is DONUT DRIVE-IN. They've been there forever, it seems, with a good variety of doughnuts. I am easily suckered in there...there are memories for me from 9/11/2001 (walked in with my family that morning and heard the news on WCBS/KMOX - we'd been listening to a Veggie Tales recording until that moment), and I still enjoy their custard doughnuts a lot - more because of location for me than otherwise because: THE BEST CUSTARD DOUGHNUT EVER is found at DONUT DELIGHT at 3605 Dunn Road in North St. Louis County. I've eaten hundreds of pounds of custard doughnuts with chocolate icing on top --- DONUT DELIGHT is the hands down winner of this category. I even was told how good "COUNTRY DOUGHNUTS" in Crystal Lake, IL was --- and they are very good doughnuts, and overall are fantastic (if you want to drive the 300 miles from STL to Crystal Lake, go ahead...just don't make it your only stop - that would be silly unless you grew up there) --- but the custard doughnuts at DONUT DELIGHT still win my devotion. But, why? Let's start with the size: it is larger than almost any other filled doughnut around. Go with texture of THE CUSTARD being textbook good. Let me reassert that I am a cake doughnut eater and not easily persuaded by non-cake doughnuts, yet I still love this particular doughnut. Filling: again, spot on because it's not supersicklysweet nor too tart --- it's a good mix. Topping the top: the chocolate on top has a chocolate flavor --- as if someone took the time to care about making the icing with real cocoa. Overall, it's my favorite doughnut outside of the realm of cake doughnuts.

I can safely say that a visit to other doughnut shops is not uncommon for me all over the metropolitan area, but I will for certain say that since the Kolache Factory took over on Brentwood Blvd., I sure miss the apple fritters which used to fill my stomach on certain days.

LUNCH:
An old favorite lunch spot from the time I was a kid is Woofie's. It's in Overland on Woodson Road just north of Page, in a tight spot for turning in and out --- perfect for anyone who loves the numerous varieties of hot dogs and sausage of similar ilk. I still can't tell you which is my favorite there --- my mouth is in the mood for something different each time I stop there. It's a MUST for your friends from Chicago when they're in town watching the Cubs being demolished by the Cardinals. Treat them to this: Chicago-style hot dogs make with Vienna beef --- yum --- because they'll need it with the next Cardinals sweep of the Completely Useless By Septembers.
There are numerous places with great lunch deals --- I can't tell you how many different places my mouth has found happiness and my pocket found some relief because someone told me about a $6.75 lunch special which included an entree, sides and drink. I'll let you decide your favorites for lunch...but if you are like me and sitting in South County with a Chicagoland native who wants a hot dog...you make the drive up to Woofie's ANYWAY.

Okay --- here's a tough item for anyone in St. Louis.

PIZZA:

Why is this so difficult? Well, because St. Louis has its own pizza. And that's a bone of contention and some contentment depending upon where you were raised. If you were NOT raised in St. Louis, you are probably not a fan of Imo's Pizza, Cecil Whittaker's Pizzeria, and numerous others who use PROVEL CHEESE on their pizzas.
My personal recommendation is CUSUMANO'S Pizza and Italian Restaurant (formerly of North County/Glasgow Village - now in the third generation, now located) at 1120 Technology Drive in O'Fallon MO --- on the northeast corner of Highway K at Highway 40-61 --- from the simple cheese pizza to your favorite toppings, these are done the old-fashioned way, with a thin crush. The Cusumano's Pizza special has: Sausage, Pepperoni, Bacon, Mushroom, Onion, Green Pepper, Ham & Shrimp. A bit out of the ordinary, right?

If you're in St. Louis proper and don't wish to drive out to O'Fallon MO, finding one of these operations with a good track record, such as the CWP on S. Grand (hello Laura) or the one at Lemay Ferry and Forder (hey, Greg) is the best idea. At Cecil Whittaker's, my preferred toppings are black olives, mushrooms and sausage. I'm not a big pepperoni fan, but these two locations do have good pepperoni as far as I am concerned --- it's not too greasy.

There's a St. Louis homegrown pizza restaurant which serves a variety of pizzas that I'd have to say is a favorite of both St. Louisans and non-St. Louisans. That is FORTEL'S Original Pizza Den at the corner of MacKenzie and Heege Roads. You'll find a variety of options with different sauces, different toppings...it's a little on the gourmet side, yet it's not too "foodie" for regular pizza fans. Tell Shelly that "Buzz on the radio" says "hi". No, you won't get a deal, but you'll make me smile if when I go in next to say "hi", Shelly tells me someone came in because I said you should do so.

If you were raised on non-St. Louis pizza, there are a few options. But I honestly will go with the masses here: PI. That's some FANTASTIC pizza --- I had some recently and found out what all the hubbub is about --- oooooo it's sooooooooooooo good! I'm sure to find a reason to be on the Delmar Loop area and stop at Pi again soon. I want my daughter to find out why we like different styles of pizza --- she's going to like this, too. Having experienced Pi, I know why the president wanted some for himself. It's how Chicago-style pizza, or Napoli-style pizza is done. And out-of-towners love this place, especially if they're avoiding the native St. Louis style cheese and sauce.

In St. Louis some of the best pizza is Spanish pizza?
WHAT IS THAT? Only my FAVORITE PARTICULAR PIZZA. For the best veggie pizza, you have to go to THE HILL to GUIDO'S. GUIDO'S PIZZERIA AND TAPAS on Shaw Blvd. is where you'll find this delightful treat. The sauce is spanish, the veggies are piled up high...it's a thin crust, and when you're done with a piece on the edge, take one from the middle and find out how different it is. Then, when you're done, take it home and put it in the fridge and have a piece in the morning. It will turn into many cold pieces of pizza --- this is the best cold pizza on the planet, too!

CHICKEN:
There are lots of opinions here. I enjoy PORTER'S Fried Chicken for my take-out --- and because I'm a big fan of their fried okra as a side item, I go there more often than almost any other chicken place. Occasionally I will sit in their little dining area and eat some of their fish, too. Many of my friends have come to agree that the home-fried taste is worth the repeated trips.

My honorable mention for chicken goes in the DINNER category. So...

DINNER:
HODAK'S is known for it's family-style chicken. Ahh, yes, the chicken is delightful. But let's go in for the dinners. Always served faster than you can imagine, always freshly made, hot where necessary, and cold items are cold, too. I love the sides here, in addition to the complex menu. Sure, the chicken is terrific. I love the chicken livers. Let me repeat --- I go for the sides. The mashed potatoes and gravy is great standard fare...always good with the meal. Turkey and stuffing is also good --- these folks know their birds. I cannot think of one time I've ever gone in and not enjoyed my food. This is a city location: Gravois between Jefferson and I-55. The parking is good, and the food is worthwhile...oh, and the staff is quick, friendly, and worth putting an extra five to ten percent in on the tips. Seriously, this is a good destination for someone who wants to make sure that the kids, the adults and the senior citizens are all going to find something at dinnertime.

ITALIAN:
What? We have to boil it down to one, two, or three places? Sheesh. I can't do that.
My favorite spaghetti and Italian salad is served NOT ON THE HILL, but in Fosterburg IL --- the Castelli family has operated the Moonlight/Castelli's Moonlight at 255 --- for generations...the fourth generation serves you today. The bolognese sauce is my preference because of the spiciness. The HOUSE SALAD is a love/hate thing. Most people will enjoy it, but don't eat it if you have allergies to nuts --- I suspect there is nuts in "secret" recipe, but I've never heard for certain. To find out why I love this place, drive Northbound 255 on the Illinois side and keep going until you exit at Fosterburg Road, turn left and go until you see the sign. It's an Alton area favorite and worth the drive. Okay --- that's my Italian restaurant pick, but I will put up that Cunnetto's House of Pasta (on The Hill) serves my favorite fettucine alfredo, while Charlie Gitto's downtown makes me happy with their variety of Italian fare, Zia's salad (on The Hill) is among the best anywhere, and Mama Campisi's (on the Hill) is high on my personal pick list.
I will state that my favorite spaghetti sauces outside of the restaurants are made by hand in my kitchen by me...but I am not selling it to the restaurants...they'd have to hire me because I can change up the ingredients depending upon what I have available at home. Homemade sauces are still the best.

BARBECUE:
Too tough to call, in reality, because there are so many reasons to say "somebody's backyard" is better than to have to pay for it at a restaurant. But if I had to come clean about where I go before any other place --- BANDANA'S is still my preference. Yes, I like Phil's, Pennie's, and several other places, but BANDANA'S smoky flavor and choices make it my first choice of the restaurants. Keep in mind that as I have heard that Three Monkeys is good, I haven't yet experienced their food...that's coming soon, I hope. The menu looks good to me.

A DRIVE OUT OF ST. LOUIS:
This is a personal favorite because in 1986 I lived above the restaurant in downtown Washington MO --- COWAN'S RESTAURANT. Breakfast, lunch, dinner...and THE BEST PIES around. I really don't care if you're a bakery fan or not --- Jerry's pies are the ones made with love and experience, and if you get there when they have the chocolate-peanut butter pie, get it room temperature or cold...don't get it warmed up. But if that's not your preference or you have allergies to nuts, try to get something with merengue on it --- lemon is great, chocolate, banana cream pie...oh man, now I wanna drive the 55 minutes to Cowan's and get some pie --- and it's not even lunch time yet.

ICE CREAM:
Since Velvet Freeze is no longer an option, I'll go with something you can find. Maybe I should say different places and options.
For ICE CREAM, it's OBERWEIS --- several locations in Illinois, but I am nearest the Telegraph Road location. They even have a terrific "no sugar added" chocolate yogurt soft-serve.
I'm going to be judicious and make it a tie for FROZEN CUSTARD. I grew up in North St. Louis County --- so I'm always going to love the variety of flavors and toppings at FRITZ'S in Old Towne Florissant (been to the one in O'Fallon MO, too and enjoyed it - there are a few locations around now), even though I now thoroughly enjoy MR. WIZARD'S on Big Bend in Richmond Heights --- and since I've lived south of the Highway 40 Mason-Dixon/Equator Line...yes, I enjoy trips to TED DREWES --- I used to live near the S. Grand location --- I like the fact that I can get a good mint topping and pistachios.

LATE NIGHT:
This is where I go back where I began...GINGHAM'S. Why? It's the old person's hangout. This means that the food is as good at 1 AM as it is at 10 AM. Coffee late at night with a waffle. Sounds good, doesn't it? But if it's just a good piece of pie you're looking for, enjoy it. And if you're just wanting to try something different, see if you can put your paws on the biscuits and honeybutter (if you like honeybutter...this is special!). Or get a burger, even the toasted ravioli, or a milkshake or...well, you have such a choice, that fire for a midnight snack can be extinguished with a trip inside.

++++++++++++

Let me make one distinction for all: GINGHAM'S allows smoking. These are NOT smoke-free restaurant(s). I would prefer a non-smoking environment at all times, but still go to Gingham's as a frequent to regular customer despite that enigmatic downfall (I am always looking for the ANTI-SMOKING SECTION in restaurants). If you're allergic to smoke, you may want to skip the trip. Their exhaust system is antiquated and not worth putting your life in jeopardy.

Stronger Than Strangers: The Big C

2009-05-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

My life is not much different than many people my age. As aging continues, little things become more prevalent in life, including the death of people who are younger, as was the case earlier this year with someone I knew from when we both were in the same high school. I hadn't seen her since she was 14 or 15, and I had frequently wondered about her since 1983. She'd been married and carried the burden of cancer off and on for a few years. Her husband is left to carry on raising the children without her. She was all of 40.

A few years ago I changed jobs and began working where I am now. Things always are shifting around and last summer I began working with a new radio show. In so doing, I made some new acquaintances and friends. One of these people is Scot Kinnaman, who is a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor and editor at Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis, and a regular contributor to The Afternoon Show on AM 850 KFUO.

Scot and I have a rather casual but cordial relationship, in that we rarely see each other, speak about once per week on the phone before he goes on the air to discuss the Treasury of Daily Prayer, a book he has edited from several great writers and sources. We found out each other was on Facebook and added one another. I have occasionally looked at his blog just to see what it is he is discussing, and it's possible he's read some of my blogs or notes in the past as well, although I've never asked.

Tonight I saw something more dramatic than usual. He posted on his Facebook and Twitter that the tests he had undergone recently for prostate cancer --- came back positive. Scot has to go through who knows what kind of physical beating (again) to fight the battle against the big C.

In knowing Scot Kinnaman for as little time as I have known him, I have never seen him in a cross mood (well, in the mood to discuss Christ's cross, yes...but in a bad mood --- not thus far). Reading his website (www.scotkinnaman.com), I now know more about him personally. His battle against a deadly disease just a few years ago was won because medical personnel quickly reacted to his symptoms AND because of his faith in God and Jesus that showed to his family and friends. Scot's a winner, and although he is perhaps feeling a bit down at having had to wait for the "verdict" that tests were positive for cancer, he also appears to be poised to fight in order to win the battle against prostate cancer.

I urge you, whether you know him or not, to pray for the healing of Pastor Scot Kinnaman.

Memorial Day: Tribute to Two 1st Lieutenants

2009-05-27T05:03:00.000-07:00

I wrote this past Monday, Memorial Day, and posted this to my Facebook notes. Today, I was looking at it again and realized more. This was about two 1st lieutenants in the USAF, yes. But it was also about two different wars, two different eras, two people of different genders. Here's the column:
Today is Monday, 25 May 2009 --- MEMORIAL DAY in the United States of America.

Today is not just any day. This is Memorial Day, when much of America just shuts down in remembrance of our fallen and wounded soldiers. This means the stores are closed --- no running off to buy eggs or milk or Pepsi. So today is a day the convenience stores get a little extra business. On the way home from work I was served notice to pick up something from the convenience store. It's raining cats and dogs as I stopped in St. Louis at Gravois and Weber Road. As I began to leave in the downpour that had been overhead for nearly 30 minutes, I saw myself and all the rest of traffic being stopped for a funeral procession. In all honesty I did not know for another 25 minutes that the procession was for 1st Lt. Roslyn Schulte, killed in action in Afghanistan this past week. To say that the procession was long would be an understatement. That is a good statement, actually. I would rather that she be remembered by hundreds, if not thousands, MORE St. Louisans. Lt. Schulte was a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, a native St. Louisan who joins around five-thousand U.S. military personnel on the deceased list since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her death is not being taken lightly by most people, I would imagine --- but not all are following the news of another local member of the military having died --- sometimes we get caught up in our daily lives and don't hear the names and reflect upon their role in combat or even hear of their death. Please realize that we are talking about a HUMAN BEING. But in this case it's a special human to Americans: this is a fallen soldier being buried ON Memorial Day.

Yesterday, we visited Jefferson Barracks National Cemetary in south St. Louis County. I mentioned to the occupants of the vehicle in which I was riding that I was given a privilege to cover the re-interment of 1st Lt. Michael Blassie as a reporter. It remains one of my most poignant memories, not just as a reporter, but as a resident of the United States of America, because of the nature of the services. Lt. Blassie was killed during the Vietnam War, 11 May 1972, and his remains were returned to the U.S. unidentified. Later, in 1984, his remains became interred at the TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER at Arlington National Cemetary as the Vietnam War's Unknown Veteran. This happened before there was such a thing as DNA evidence which helped to identify the remains of soldiers who had died in combat. The military had gathered Lt. Blassie's belongings near the area the military thought was his crash site, but due to the difficulty in positive identification of the 1972 crash, his remains were listed as unknown up through his 1984 burial and until 1998, when the evidence was reprocessed and he was positively identified. My role was as an observer --- as a reporter, I was given an assignment to gather the moment and file a couple of reports to my local radio station and to the ABC Radio Network. Later that evening it sunk in how special my day was to be: I had one of the lead stories in the national news that July 1998. But moreover, I was given a duty and helped Americans hear a story that needed to be told. It is still a source of honor for me to have been given the opportunity to cover his re-interment.

Other than the commonalities that both were 1st Lieutenants in the U.S.A.F. and St. Louisans, today I was able to bear witness to one of the most impressive things that the military can do to honor their fallen comrades: the jet flyby. I was home this time, just a few hundred yards from where Lt. Schulte was being laid to rest --- and this time I was not covering the story for the news. However I felt the same chills as the jet flew overhead. It is that chill which makes me realize I am free because of the service by these two individuals who by all accounts could have led extraordinary lives had they lived beyond their military years.
I hope that when I pass an Air Force 1st Lieutenant next time I recognize them and their rank and thank them. You see, I think that way because I have come to realize it could be that person being buried the next time I witness the flyby.

Thank you, heroes.

Music, Media, Blogging, and Public Relations...and CAKE!

2009-05-26T08:34:00.000-07:00

As if you couldn't figure it out, this is going to be a blog dedicated to forms of music, media, and public relations.

My 25th anniversary as a broadcaster is this year, and I celebrate that long as a journalist even though that predates my on-air days by a couple of years by virtue of the "time off" I did take between my junior year in high school and my time as a news reporter/anchor in radio.

Today, I freely admit that I am more likely to do public relations in tandem with interviews, reporting, etc., because it's more interesting to find the story and help the person with the story TELL it.

My first example is Michael Brinkley. I've known Michael for nearly 20 years. He is an artist and has always been creative. I've seen musical instruments he has created, drawings, movies, and other interesting endeavors...but his new one takes the cake --- literally. Designer Cakes.

Yesterday, Memorial Day 2009, I ate dinner with Michael and his wife and family. He brought a cake. It wasn't just any kind of cake --- it was a special Memorial Day Cake. He created it and made this specialty/gourmet cake specifically for this family gathering...and I must say it was scrumptious...delicious. It fit the day of remembrance to a tee --- and if you read his blog, http://designercake.blogspot.com, you will understand the meaning of the stars and stripes and decorations. Michael has only done a few different designs thus far, but he promises to expand his horizons and create new cakes for those who are looking for a special event cake.

Keep in mind that if you order a Designer Cake from Michael Brinkley, it's going to be personally made --- this is not some store-bought brand thrown together at the last minute.

Go to his blog first and check out the pictures of the cakes. Then consider emailing him and discussing your particular need for a cake or cakes. I guarantee he's not charging $1000 like some of those other cake artists are doing --- he's not a price-gouger or bait-and-switcher. If there's something wrong with the concept he may create for you, haggle with him. His artistry is an open-eared/open-minded creativity and he'll work with you on making and baking a great piece of deliciousness!!!