Today on KMOX, I talked with TV critic Aaron Barnhart about the FCC's report on regulating violence on TV, Rosie O'Donnell leaving "The View," and whether this is the last season for "Law and Order" (clang-clang!). Listen.
It's "Cry-Baby Sumo" day in Japan, and don't those kids look happy? The winner is the baby who cries the loudest. The loser is forced to live in the fat folds of a sumo wrestler for a week.
Today on KMOX, I joked with Jon Macks about the LA Times sportswriter who is going on vacation as a man, but coming back as a woman. Then we dissected the silliness of the Democratic presidential candidates debate. Listen.
Today on my KMOX show, I talked with Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie, who brilliantly deconstructed the FCC's new congressionally-mandated report about violence on TV and its effects on children. It's part of the ever-growing movement to have our Nanny Government regulate content because you can't control what your kids watch.
And you know it's all about the kids. God forbid that adults be allowed to choose their own entertainment without government intererence.
Listen, the read Nick's piece on the subject at Reason.com.
One side of the face: "Who cares what Sheryl Crow says? She's just a singer going around expressing her opinions in public, and nothing she says matters."
The other side of the face: "Hey, did you hear what Sheryl Crow said? We have to pay attention to it, make a big deal out of it, and punish her for saying it!"
One other quick story about this.
I was talking to a friend about the Burke-Crow-Costas controversy, and how the Archibishop didn't specifically tell Catholics they shouldn't go to the Gala on Saturday night. Instead, he said he would leave it to "their conscience" to make that decision.
My friend (who is Catholic) said that's the old Catholic guilt thing, essentially a message of "let it be on your head." I told her that guilt is a little different in my upbringing. Being the son of a Jewish mother, I was more likely to hear, "Oh, you're going to see Sheryl Crow, but you won't come see me? Did Sheryl Crow carry you for nine months? Did Sheryl Crow ever cook you a nice dinner?"
In Burger King ads, this is what a Whopper looks like...
As heard this afternoon on my KMOX show, here's a Knuckleheads In The News® Hall Of Fame story, about some con artists in Japan who set up a business called Poodles As Pets. But instead of dogs, they sold them sheep -- and the buyers didn't know the difference!
The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food. She was crestfallen when told it was a sheep. Then hundreds of other women got in touch with police to say they feared their new "poodle" was also a sheep.You MUST read the whole story. Then read this update, in which Snopes debunks the whole thing.
Regis is back on his show this morning, six weeks after his heart surgery, and looking good. David Letterman is his guest, and had the Line Of The Day -- when Regis asked him about the quintuple bypass surgery he'd had a few years ago, Dave answered, "Well, my first bypass was The Tonight Show."
I've said many times that anyone who does something to help sick children is doing something noble. For 19 years, Bob Costas has been raising money for Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center here in St. Louis, with an annual fundraising concert at the Fox Theater. He calls upon his showbiz friends to line up major comedians and musical acts (e.g. Ray Romano, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, John Mellencamp, Tony Bennett, Hootie & The Blowfish) and thousands of people show up each year.
This Saturday, the headliners are Billy Crystal and Sheryl Crow.
Today, Archbishop Raymond Burke condemned Sheryl Crow's participation, calling it a "scandal" that a Catholic hospital would be involved with someone who has publicly expressed her pro-choice position and appeared in ads last year supporting Amendment 2 in Missouri (the stem-cell referendum). Burke is the same religious leader who told Catholics that they shouldn't vote for John Kerry or any other pro-choice politician.
My producer Fred Bodimer got the first word on this story and an interview with the Archbishop, in which he made his case (remember, this is four days before the event!).
Immediately afterwards, I had Bob Costas on the phone with his reaction. Listen to what a classy guy Bob is and how diplomatically he handles this. My favorite part is where he explains that he'll understand if some who have bought tickets decide not to go, as long as the money from their tickets still goes to the hospital.
This afternoon on my KMOX show, I talked to Jeff Bell, who suffers from an extreme form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he writes about in his book, "Rewind, Replay, Repeat."
Jeff is the afternoon anchor on all-news KCBS/San Francisco, but his bosses and co-workers had no idea he suffered from OCD -- despite the fact that he had to take cabs to cover stories because if he drove himself, he'd end up going around in circles to make sure he hadn't run someone over. We discussed that, the impact this has had on his personal life, and how he's been able to get it under control.
Listen, and to find out more, visit Jeff's website.
A traffic camera captured the effects of a rainstorm on one sewer when the water just wouldn't be contained anymore. Watch where the manhole cover ends up after the geyser, and what happens to the driver who encounters it.
Here's the video Kevin Wheeler mentioned on my KMOX show today, of a 4-year-old kid being bowled over near the end zone of a spring football game in Colorado. The question is why a kid that young was left alone there -- his father was several yards away -- in an incredibly dangerous area near the field. After the crunch of wide reciever and wall, the kid is lucky to be alive...
Kelly Fogle was understandably freaked out yesterday when her son called to say that her 5-year-old daughter, a special ed student, had not been dropped off by the bus after school. Today on my KMOX show, she explained what happened next, leading up to her daughter being found, sweating and exhausted, but safe.
Listen.
Today on my KMOX show, I played the VERY disturbing testimony on Capitol Hill by Kevin Tillman about how the Pentagon lied and manufactured stories about the death of his brother, Pat, in Afghanistan several years ago. The fact that the family was misled purposely, so that the government could create a tale of heroism, indicates not just a lack of trust in the American people, but also a disrespect for every member of our military.
Kevin Tillman is no anti-war nut. He volunteered along with Pat, and was serving with him in Afghanistan at the time of the friendly fire incident that took his brother's life. Listen to his testimony.
Stephen Colbert takes on Sean Penn in a Metaphor-Off from Thursday's "Colbert Report" (listen for "No Whammies!")...
Today on KMOX, I talked with TV critic Aaron Barnhart about NBC using the Virginia Tech shooter video and branding it with their news logo. Then we discussed the return of "Heroes," and a new Bill Moyers PBS show that takes the media to task for how it covered the buildup to the war in Iraq.
Listen.
At the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night, Press Secretary Tony Snow introduced this David Letterman list of the Top Ten George W. Bush Moments...
My friend Mark Evanier in Los Angeles asked on his blog today why Dodgers games on the radio are now out of sync with the live event:Is it being done intentionally to discourage people from listening to Vin Scully on the radio while they watch the game at the stadium or on TV? I can't imagine why Vin Scully would need to be broadcast on a delay, nor can I fathom why anyone would care if you listened to him this way. Can anyone clear this up for me?
A reader named Dave Sikula wrote to Mark and explained that the game (and all other live programming) is on delay because radio owners are afraid a prohibited word will be accidentally aired and they'll be fined by the FCC.
That's true, but it's not the complete answer. There's also the technical matter of broadcasting in HD.
Although the technology hasn't really caught on with consumers, most AM & FM stations in the major markets now have an HD signal, and the digital processing inherent in transmitting that signal creates an extra delay of just over 8 seconds. So, even if there were no content-control delay, you still wouldn't be hearing Vin Scully's call of the Dodgers game in real time. And when you hear the top of the hour tone on my KMOX afternoon show just before the hourly CBS Radio newscast, the combination of the two delays puts that tone some 14 seconds after the true top of the hour.
However, there's one positive side effect of the HD signal for those of us doing the shows with airborne traffic reports. Before, when we were only using the content-control delay (the one with the "dump" button that we very rarely had to use), we couldn't go to Captain Rodger Brand and John Larrabee -- the guys who do our traffic reports from a helicopter and a plane -- without coming out of delay. They were monitoring the over-the-air signal, and if we kept them in delay, they'd hear their own voices coming back at them several seconds later and likely spiral out of the sky and into the Earth. To avoid that nasty scenario, I had to pause each time while we dumped out of delay, then introduced them, had them do the reports, and then we'd start building up the delay again during a commercial break so it was there when I went back to taking phone calls or whatever.
Now here's the benefit of the HD signal -- even on AM, it comes with a sideband signal that we use to send them a pre-delay audio feed directly from the studio, which we couldn't do before, and which they hear through an HD receiver. That way, we never have to dump out of delay and they still get to hear everything we're doing in the studio as it happens. Considering we do "traffic and weather together every ten minutes" in the last two hours of my show, that's a dozen times a day we no longer have to worry about going in and out of delay. On the other hand, it means that when they describe an accident they've just spotted on Highway 40, you won't know about it until 14 seconds later.
Note that there is an even longer delay when you listen to my show live via KMOX.com, because that digital processing of the streaming audio takes even more time.
Interestingly, many people with Dish Network or Direct TV were already out of the loop when it came to watching games on TV with the sound down so they could hear their favorite radio play-by-play guy describe the action. There's a delay inherent in the signals bouncing to and from the TV satellites that would add a couple of seconds, too. Radio broadcasts are almost all done via ISDN phone lines, which move the audio much more quickly. So, for instance, during a Rams game, you could hear Steven Jackson go off-tackle and gain four yards, and just as the whistle blew at the end of the play, you'd see the play start on TV.
One other quick story. When I did mornings at WYNY/New York in the mid-80s with Rick Harris (no relation), NBC had never had a morning show that took listener calls on the FM station, and they were scared to death someone would say something wrong. Thus, we were prohibited from taking those calls live until they installed a delay unit. Rather than ordering a new stereo unit from Eventide, their engineers borrowed two mono units from our AM sister station WNBC, wired them in (one for the left channel, one for the right), and told us to go ahead and try it.
The next morning, when we began the show at 5:30am, we punched in the delay system and went about our normal morning silliness. In less than a minute, every hotline number on the phone bank was ringing like crazy. We were still talking on the air, listening to ourselves in pre-delay and thus didn't know what was wrong, but it had to be something major, so we went to a commercial break quickly.
Off the air, Rick answered one hotline and I answered another, to find the chief engineer and the program director both yelling at us to dump out of delay immediately. It turned out that the two mono units weren't slaved together, and their delay wasn't in sync. None of the engineers had considered this possibility, and they hadn't tested it on the air until that moment.
The effect was to create an echo from the left channel to the right channel that was unlistenable. We turned the units off completely and had to do yet another show with no live phone calls. Two days later, a stereo unit arrived, the engineers put it in, and everything worked just fine -- except we had an airborne reporter then, too, which meant going in and out of delay all morning for his reports.
I was not all that surprised when NBC got out of the local radio business less than two years later.
Today on KMOX, I joked with Jon Macks about John Edwards' $400 haircut, Alec Baldwin's voice mail to his daughter, and the Rolling Stones' effect on wild horses. Then I gave Jon a Joke Challenge about a stud elephant. Listen.
With Earth Day this Sunday -- I know, you hadn't heard about it -- I had Joel Makower back on my KMOX show this afternoon for some perspective on where we are on environmental issues.
We talked about large corporations like Wal-Mart waving the green flag, what it means to be carbon neutral and buy carbon offsets, why we don't see a lot of green marketing claims anymore, and whether the private sector should lead the way or government has to play a role. Joel also explained how your own bottom line still comes down to the three R's (reduce, reuse, recycle).
Listen, then read Joel's blog, and his GreenBiz.com site, too.
For anyone who still has the temerity to ask why the victims in those Virginia Tech classrooms didn't rush Cho to stop him from killing, read this account of what it was like for Colin Goddard, a student who was inches away from the shooter.
If John Edwards is going to get a $400 haircut from a Beverly Hills stylist, he ought to have his own theme music, provided in the video below.
The whole notion of having a "stylist" is alien to me, as it probably is to most men. I get my hair (what little there is, so go ahead and accuse me of jealousy) cut by a barber. That can be a man or a woman, but it's always a barber, and never in a "salon." As for the $400, that may be more than I spend on haircuts in an entire year, even with a generous tip.
Recently on my KMOX show, we had a discussion of the question that is inevitably asked of all presidential candidates: "Do you know how much a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread cost?" Rudy Giuliani got trapped by it last week, guessing way low, although he did know the price of a gallon of gas. For politicians who have reached the level where they're running for president, they don't know that stuff because they don't do their own shopping, and haven't for many years.
I wonder whether that question and answer are factors in how anyone votes. There are so many hot-button issues exploited on the national level, and there's very little any president can do about the price of consumer goods. Knowing the correct retail price of grocery items is a good way to meet Bob Barker, but is it a valid test for candidates?
To be honest, I'm not always sure what those things cost, because when we need milk, I go to the store and buy milk. I'm not going to shop around to find the place that has it for 6¢ less. I know we're fortunate not to have to watch every penny -- but if I don't, then Giuliani, Clinton, McCain, and Obama certainly don't.
That said, you'd think this would be one of the first things they'd learn before starting their presidential campaigns. Maybe, on the way to the big kickoff announcement, they could have a staffer run to the store and do a price check, and then memorize it for the inevitable press opportunity when the question comes up.
Of course, if the question is, "How much does a hair cut cost?" and your answer is in the triple digits, you may have an even more serious relatability problem.
Now, see how far you get into this clip before you say, "Leave the hair alone, John! It's fine!"
Some of the callers to my KMOX show and commenters in the topic below have taken some of the families of the Virginia Tech victims to task for so willingly speaking into any camera or microphone that's shoved in their face. They wonder if doing so makes it hypocritical for them to then criticize the news media for its coverage of the story and airing of the Cho videos and photos.
I don't like the notion of attacking the victims of any tragedy, or their families -- but I see the point. I can assure you that when and if a tragedy befalls my family, you will not see me discussing it on "The Today Show" or any other media outlet, including my own radio show. I'll be too busy mourning and dealing with how to piece my life back together, a process of healing that will last long past the point at which any journalist would still be interested. I'm not saying that others are wrong to handle this differently, because it's an ultra-personal decision, but for me it's not an option.
My colleagues in both the radio and TV newsrooms will hate me for saying this, but I wish more people who find themselves at the center of a tragic news story would tell reporters to go away, that they have no comment to make, that they don't want to share this horrible moment with the world.
As one who works inside the mass media beast, I can tell you that it lives to chew up everyone and everything in its path for as long as there's meat on the bone. Once that's gone, and maybe some of the marrow with it, the beast moves to its next story and devours it in the same way -- and on and on. But there's no law that says you have to be fodder for the beast. At a time when your life has been turned upside down and you don't know which way to turn, resist the urge to turn towards the spotlight.
You'll feel better afterwards.
Hot topic on my KMOX show this afternoon and Channel 4 segment tonight is whether the media should be showing the Cho videos, pictures, and words.
A lot of angry people say they shouldn't. For some of them, this is yet another reason to bash the media which, in their agenda-driven estimation, never does anything good. I disagree, but then, I'm the guy that watched the Nick Berg beheading.
Your thoughts?
Dave Dellaterza of VoteForTheWorst.com was on Letterman's show last night. This afternoon, he described the experience on my KMOX show, from what it's like backstage to exactly how cold that studio is. Then we talked about who will be eliminated from "American Idol" tonight.
Listen.
As a followup to my earlier columns on the banning of tag and dodgeball, and Paula Spencer's piece on protecting kids from everything but fear, Kelly Hyde e-mails:I work downtown and the other day I was taking a walk at the Arch on my lunch break. It was a nice day so it was very busy and I could tell there were several field trips there as well. I happened to notice that a group of kids were playing a game in the grass. When I got closer I could hear them yelling, "Red Rover, Red Rover!" I couldn't believe it. These kids were on a school field trip and their teachers were letting them play RedRover. I thought it was great. I had heard that Red Rover was outlawed almost everywhere because kids can break their arms when other kids try to break through to the other side. It was refreshing to see that.
The year was 1990, the British game show was "Sale Of The Century," and the contestant on the left was Simon Cowell. At the time, he was just a record company exec making his TV debut and trying to win a Fiat, but he went home with a set of kitchen utensils instead.
As a followup to the Police Scalping Scandal, I talked with Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce today on KMOX about why she isn't prosecuting eight St. Louis police officers who took World Series tickets from scalpers and gave them to friends and family.
She explained that she's constrained by constitutional limitations that don't allow her to use the confessions the cops made during the internal affairs investigation as admissable evidence.
This sends a horrible message to both the police and the public, and makes it mandatory that the state legislature change the ordinances to prevent future similar ethical and criminal violations by police officers. I have heard from several people who believe that because these cops did such a dangerous job, they should be given some slack. Wrong! Regardless of the job they do, they have each taken an oath to uphold the law -- when they don't live up to that oath, there should be consequences.
As the officers' two-week suspension winds down, the civilian Police Board meets tomorrow to decide whether to accept Chief Joe Mokwa's punishment for the officers -- probation and demotion to a lower rank for a year.
Listen.
As "The Sopranos" winds down, Howard Mortman noticed that, in the opening montage they've used in every episode since the show debuted, there's a quick shot of a gas station. Take a look at what a gallon of gas cost in New Jersey a decade ago.
It was interesting both watching and doing the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre today. As the afternoon progressed, it occurred to me that this story, while horrific and sad, was getting a huge boost from the technological know-how of the residents of that campus in Blacksburg.
This is Virginia Tech, after all -- but even more than that, it's the first big story to take place on a campus where everyone is connected, not only to everyone else, but to the world outside. Within minutes of the tragedy, cell phone video emerged, complete with the disturbing soundtrack of gunfire recorded by student Jamal Albarghouti. When the cell phone circuits became too busy to accomodate outgoing calls, students used MySpace and Facebook pages to reassure parents and friends that they were okay. They used instant messaging and e-mail to discuss with each other what had happened.
We were able to connect with Eric Frey, a former KMOX producer who left us to go to Virginia Tech to get his Masters. Unable to connect with his landline phone, my board op, Kevin, sent Eric a text message on his cell phone, and within minutes we had him on my show for a first-person account of what had transpired this morning. While we were doing that, a student journalist was appearing on a TV newscast via webcam from his room during the lockdown. The university itself kept posting updates on its homepage, and the Roanoke Times provided continuous coverage via a blog on its website.
Tonight, students are using Facebook and MySpace to leave condolences on the pages of those who died, forming an impromptu online memorial. For those who have said that spending time online is creating a world of lonely, singular people, here's proof that there is a real community there, sharing experiences of one very bad day.
Today on KMOX, I talked with Aaron Barnhart about the PBS documentary series "America at a Crossroads," the return of "Hustle" on AMC, and the debut of Sundance Channel's green Tuesdays.
Listen.
Tonight's the night for the "Operation Homecoming: Writing The Wartime Experience" on PBS. Colby Buzzell and Jack Lewis, two of the soldiers featured in that documentary, talked about it on my KMOX show last month. Listen here.
On his HBO show this weekend, Bill Maher had a scathing commentary entitled "Say It Loud: I'm Elite and Proud!" about the many Bush administration attorneys who got their degrees from Pat Robertson's law school...
Today on KMOX, I joked with Jon Macks about Imus being fired, the New Jersey Governor's hit-and-run, and Los Angeles trying to get the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Listen.
This afternoon on my KMOX show, Jeremy Scahill discussed his book, "Blackwater," about the powerful private army that our government has hired to fight alongside our military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even domestically.
There are so many disturbing angles to this story. We're losing career military men who leave because they can earn much more in Blackwater's army of private contractors. There's no oversight of Blackwater or its employees by Congress or the Pentagon. They recruit mercenaries from other countries, so we're not just outsourcing our customer service operators, but now we're outsourcing our soldiers. Blackwater provides security for our diplomats, ambassadors, and even Nancy Pelosi's recent trip to Syria -- that's a job that used to fall to the US Marines. And there's lots more.
Listen, then get the book.
