Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   not robot radio
Monday, December 2 2002

We had homeslices galore working at our place today, what with Louis hanging drywall in the bathroom and Darren taping and spackling the studio. Darren had tried to find Curt and Antwon again today, but evidently they had proved impossible to scare up. I overheard Darren talking with Louis today and he was telling him that the hardest thing of all in the general contractor business is finding people to work for you. I suppose this depends on what you're willing to pay.
I was still finding last minute wiring tasks for myself in the studio as late as today. What with all the drywall hung, I took the opportunity to install two crude place-holder ceiling lights and three outlets. I was doing the wiring so quickly and with so little difficulty that Darren suggested I could perhaps do a little barter of my electrician skills for his in the field of drywall. I always find it astounding when people are impressed with my wiring. There's no skill involved at all, and the danger is practically zero since you can easily test to see if a wire is hot before touching it, even after taking the precaution of turning off its circuit breaker.

Later in the evening I worked on building a little shelf around a set of pipes coming up from the half bathroom en route to the new master bedroom's bathroom.
As I did this work, I listened to a new station I discovered called WDST. It's a commercial station broadcast from Woodstock, but, unlike almost all commercial radio stations, it has real live DJs who tell you the names of the songs they just played, just like the way commercial radio stations did back when I was a teenager. It says something about the low expectations I have of modern radio that I would find such things impressive. Indeed, WDST is like public radio when compared with the various Clear Channel options legally monopolizing the Hudson Valley airwaves. (Thanks a lot, Telecommunications Act of 1996!)
Actually, Nic Harcourt, the world-famous host of my old favorite Morning Becomes Eclectic at KCRW in Santa Monica, got his start at WDST and that station actually broadcasts Sounds Eclectic one of Harcourt's nationally-syndicated shows, even though it is syndicated by the decidedly non-commercial Public Radio International. The philosophy of WDST seems to be to play a wide range of rock and roll from both the present and the past. The selection is not nearly as electic as what Nic Harcourt plays when free to do his own thing, but it's much more eclectic than conventional conglomerate radio. By way of examples, WDST plays PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, the White Stripes, and the Pixies, none of whom I'd ever heard on anything but college radio in the past. They also play plenty of groan-inducing modern rock, including the Goo Goo Dolls, Candlebox, Matchbox Twenty, and even Creed, but at least you know the next song is going to be coming along. (By the way, the one Creed song they played is "Higher" the one I actually secretly like, if only for that clever guitar lick.)
I keep thinking that stations like this, embattled by the broadcast jukeboxes of Clear Channel, should advertise with a campaign "We're not Robot Radio."

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