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Topics - Robert

#1
Radio and Podcasts / NooriGuide
December 01, 2019, 09:17:00 AM
I expect a lot of very helpful advice to come from this site:
https://nooriguide.com/
#2
In the Politics section, I "hear", "What are social justice warriors losing their shit about today?" in a weary, not very interested voice.

"dude, weed lol" practically self-delivers.  The voice is laughy but dull-sounding.

"The border is secure" I always hear in the voice of Art Bell doing a commercial.  Even tone on each word except for "The".

"nous nous rendons, nous nous rendons" sounds very earnest & insistent.

"Guns" I hear repeated slowly-to-medium speed as in the Negativland video I brought up there.  Like someone selling them at a bazaar, but not shouting.

"El Chapo free!" I hear as "El Chapo, free!", also at a bazaar, but louder; someone's giving him away as a premium for another purchase.
#4
Radio and Podcasts / The Hound has returned.
December 03, 2018, 06:31:06 PM
This month Jim Marshall's apparently doing a continuous stream of his old DJing shows, in chronologic order, starting with him on WFMU in the 1980s: http://thehoundnyc.com .  The plan is to then go on with new shows of his own, plus hosting new entries of talker Chris T.'s "Aerial View", which have already started, Fri. 6 PM, and I'm sure others.
#5
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#6
Radio and Podcasts / Saw Art yesterday...
June 10, 2018, 01:55:58 PM
...at the vape shop.  He was asking for a vape that wouldn't disturb his sleep so much.

"Whew, that was some night!  Woke up covered in dirt.  No idea what I was doing, and the dreams...they were just ridiculous.  And you're hearing this from someone who made a living for years listening to people tell the most outrageous stories.  And then Airyn treated me like I had bad breath, so the vape must be doing that too.  Maybe I should put the vape pen before the filter on my CPAP.

"Anyway, got to get to my lawyer's after this.  Somebody making unauthorized use of my name again."
#7
Random Topics / Nobody came to "Get" [i]Lost[/i].
April 08, 2018, 08:21:25 PM
I started a multimedia lecture series as Sussex Co. Community Col. to explain Lost, the TV serial.  I was a friend of the guy who made the show since he was a teenager, and I knew where it came from and how it really made sense if you could read the clues.  It was cleverly written to hide from the audience that it was not fantasy or SF (except for 1 small element) but actually a cloak-&-dagger story they could solve as a mystery, not even revealing that overtly at the end, but you needed a lot of background in detective fiction & drama to "get" it.

I was surprised to find out at the beginning of the term that half a section of biology I teach was interested in attending such a lecture series.  Apparently the show's had a new life on Netflix.  But when it finally arranged, none of them came.  Maybe after several weeks of hearing me in class, they weren't interested in hearing more from me even on an unrelated subject.  Only one other person showed up, maybe its being Good Friday evening held down attendance.  Unfortunately technical difficulty caused me to cancel that evening.

The following Fri. there was no tech problem, but the 1 who showed up the previous week didn't come, & the other person who heard of it thru the same channel (Nextdoor.com) & said she wanted to come the previous Fri. didn't show up either.  Possibly for the 1 who did show up, the syllabus I passed out was more convenient for him to research on his own.  Or maybe I'm just boring in person.

Maybe my friend Damon Lindelof was right not to have a denouement of Lost.  Maybe practically nobody cared about a solution, except for a few hardcore mystery fans.  So they just pretended it'd been a nonsensic fantasy story, w people acting strangely for no good reason.
#8
Random Topics / pretty pix
February 18, 2018, 03:45:59 PM
I've just got to say I'm really taken by the avatars here -- even mine; I usually just take the default but was inspired by the rest here.  They're so...convincing.  I really think of it them as the leering guy, the squirrel, the winking laughing lady, the handsome guy, the laughing wolf, the gaping man, & all the others writing these things to each other.  And they seem so enthusiastic about it.
#9
MV says we should be able to poll in our own threads, but I can't find a button or command for doing so, so I'll assume it'll come up after I start the thread.

I'd like to know how you apportion responsibility for the quality of an interview show, with or w/o phoners-in, between producer and m.c. (the house on-mic "talent").  I'll put up brackets for percentage of responsibility when I find that "poll" button.
#10
A little while ago I was listening to an entry in Chilling Tales for Dark Nights on DMDN (where they're used as filler) that I must've heard about 2 years ago.  It was the one about the phantom biker, and I'd forgotten about where it was set.  It was set in the area that I moved into last year, and there's something about its having all these geographic references that I'm now much more familiar with, so I listened more closely.

This story I don't think of as chilling.  To me it's a happy story about someone who defeated both death and the cops and kept on doing what he loved.  It also resonated with me that he, like me, skipped out on the electricity bill when he left his last residence -- although I was just broke, while he had the better excuse of being dead.
#11
I mean in terms of prominence & tenure in comparison to care & effort?

Nominations entertained here.  Please state your reasons.
#12
Random Topics / subject line roulette
September 03, 2017, 04:47:14 PM
The people that we miss on the awesome forum
Bizarre Cases of the missing and murdered
#13
Radio and Podcasts / DMDN programming
February 19, 2017, 06:12:06 PM
The Dark Matter Digital Network is Keith Rowland's baby, right?  That Art Bell invested in but has cashed out of?

I don't know about the rest of you, but of DMDN's programs I've listened to, most are more interesting than their supposed flagship show, Midnight in the Desert -- maybe (though probably not) even when it was MITD with Art Bell.  Admittedly, I wouldn't have been likely to have tried it had it not been for Art Bell, and I probably wouldn't've found out about MITD had I not Googled GNS.

Ms. Wade (and her producer) does have the harder job, in that her show is live & consumes so many hours, while many of the others on the network are pre-recorded, produce just an hour or a few a week, and in most cases are co-hosted by several regulars rather than solo like Ms. Wade.  But I wonder if more should be done to promote the other shows in preference to MITD.  And you don't have to stay up late to listen to the other shows, and many of them provide no-charge (but no-guarantee) ways to listen after the initial 'casting of them, via reruns and podcasts (seems Mr. Rowland doesn't have exclusive rights, unless I'm mistaken).

#14
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/study-muddles-tunguska-mystery is up tonight as news at Coast's Web site.  The evidence needing to be explained is of a high energy, low mass hit of some sort.  Thru my neo-Velikovskian cx Charles Raspil & David Lindelof, I got to know electric universe devotees, meeting Wally Thornhill for instance.  Among them was a member of the NYC Fortean Society, Arthur "Cyril" Merrystone, who hypothesized that short-period comets had little matter but a lot of potential energy tied up electromagnetically, and that it was one of those that hit Tonguska.
#15
OK, I'm stretching the "industry insider" part.  Tonight at the WFMU Literary Guild Meetup with readings, I asked someone who does a late night program how he thinks Noory keeps his job.  This on-mike personality's opinion is that he does it by not being Art Bell.  Art Bell was scary-fun, but Noory is comforting-bland to the audience -- the Disney version of Art Bell.  My source hasn't listened to C2C in years, knew about Art Bell's Dark Matter satellite comeback but not about MITD.

It makes a certain sense.  I remember late night radio from decades ago.  Many stations were still signing off at local midnight or shortly after, it being considered uneconomic to put programs on.  Of those that stayed on, they mostly did so with local programming, mostly of music.  Yes, I know, Jean Shepherd used to do overnights, and there was hardly any long-format network radio left, so it's not as if the lack of a nationwide overnight program was remarkable.  However, the first program I recall that aspired to a national late night audience (Nightcap -- Herb Jepko) was a phone-in talk show whose topic was, essentially, small talk.  Uncontroversial stuff for long haul truckers, night watchmen, health & emergency workers, and insomniacs who didn't want anything to make them more wakeful.  We've discussed that here, or at least I have.

Then came Larry King, who, although he had controversial guests on, tried to fade into the background as m.c., and if possible fade the phoners-in as well.

So maybe that vibe is what they think Noory taps into.  C2C has fringe topics because Art Bell started it, and nobody has a good idea about how to deviate from that line.  Noory's not really interested in the subject matter, but he doesn't have to be if he's just supposed to be a comfortable pillow.  The criticisms we make about how unseriously he takes his performance are irrelevant, because we listen for different reasons from most of C2C's current audience.
#16
"For years Noory has established himself as a late-night radio phenomenon, known for his skill in holding a national audience’s interest by his study of the subjects under discussion, his sensitive yet probing questioning of guests, and his ability to identify with callers from around the globe, making their questions and comments part of the show’s drama."

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/george-noory-of-coast-to-coast-am-writes-spellbinding-night-talk/#g2m0eXFHR4gkZr1J.99
#17
I notice lately on C2C they may be building back up their roster of experts (or at least "experts") called on in hour 1 to comment on something in the news.  That was what made the show tolerable a few yrs. ago, and then they got away from it.  I liked that they were in the opening hour, because I'd usually fall asleep later, and that they were on just as long as necessary -- could be just a minute, could be the remainder of the hour, anything in between.  Noory just let them talk, they knew what to do.  C2C impressed me highly in those days as being on top of things, so much so that I hardly missed Art.
#18
C2C trots it out ridiculously frequently, and I keep trying to remember when I 1st heard it, because in my memory it goes way back.  I have a recollection which may be confabulated of driving w a friend & listening to it in the daytime or early evening on some Sat. rerun of C2C that WABC was doing.  ISTR its having been in the late 20th C., but may have been the early 21st.
#19
Radio and Podcasts / Noory Derangement Syndrome
July 31, 2016, 09:35:02 PM
At Reason's Hit & Run blog, commenters have come up with an expression (or maybe it originated elsewhere), Trump Derangement Syndrome, to describe the writings of those who, opposed to Donald Trump in his presidential campaign, go to absurd lengths of special pleading against him.  There are plenty of legitimate bad things that could be, & have been, written about him, but the critics can't stop there.

I notice a Noory Derangement Syndrome, and lately also a Wade Derangement Syndrome, here.  Of course there's plenty to criticize about Noory's approach to C2C (it can be summed up as, in many cases, "worse than no m.c. at all"), and plenty also about Ms. Wade's approach to MITD.  But do people then have to impute all sorts of character flaws to either or both of them as well?  Is it just because it's fun to pile it on when criticizing a public figure (and we know [Redacted] did plenty of that re Noory here)?  Or do people really believe it?
#20
Radio and Podcasts / Q for Art
July 23, 2016, 10:04:19 PM
When you bowed out of C2C and said (I don't remember your exact words, but approximately) you expected Mr. Noory to take the show in his own directions, did you think that after this many years so much of C2C's subject matter would still be the ground you'd previously plowed?
#21
I've never been a fan of John Gambling, who, like the Phantom, lives forever on NYC radio by each one passing the mantle to his same-name son.  However, I never thought he was very bad until his WNYM show yesterday in a segment about presidential candidate Gary Johnson, when, in rapid succession, he asked the guest he was interviewing a total non sequitur question and asked him a question he'd just answered.
#22
Michael Savage remarked on his program the past day or so that he was once told by a producer of a nighttime program of his that normal people have lives; they get home & don't listen to any more radio.  So normal people don't listen later than 6 PM.

Funny, though, how they'll watch TV.  Maybe that's the idea: that they'll listen to radio only when they can't watch TV.
#23
I got fed up, plus had to go to bed, last night with Jim Marrs on talking about, among other things, some incidents of the mysterious airship flap of the 1890s in North America.  The handling of the evidence of these cases has long bothered me.  On one hand, they're cited by UFOlogists as early evidence of travelers from outer space.  OTOH, they're treated by debunkers as hoaxes.  What I think is just that they were just the phenomenon they were reported at the time to be: test flights of actual dirigible lighter-than-air craft.  Not from outer space, but from Americans; not entirely figments of people's imagination, either.

Both ETH proponents and debunkers (and of course Jim Marrs) seize on some of the most unreliable reports from the time as evidence that the things in question could not have been what they seemed.  Reports of great speed (of which dirigible balloons are not capable) have been inferred from 2 sources.  One is ground observers who were not part of the project in question, who were naïve, and therefore in no position to judge the speed of such an aerial object.  The other is reports of the craft as being at one location & then another; the explanation there is simple: reports conflating two different craft as one having covered all that distance.

Of course there were hoax reports too, many of which were not expected to be taken seriously.  And the word from the fliers themselves, who were interested in maintaining as much as possible of their commercial secrets, was unreliable.

Of course Jim Marrs just takes the most far-fetched interpret'n of the evidence, saying that because a navigator is said to have been from Mars, he really was.  And that the story about one such aerial navigator's stated intention of bombarding Cuba must've been from a time traveler, because who could have known about the next year's Spanish-American War?  First of all, that report was among the most unreliable and ridiculed.  Second, it's not as if the war could not have been anticipated, because at that time, there were many people in the USA advocating just such a war against the Spanish regime in Cuba.  (Had the Philippines been mentioned, that might've been more interesting.)  In fact the report might have been intended to satirize just such war mongering.

So I did some searching today, and found that there are indeed others who interpret the evidence as I do, i.e. the most straightforward, obvious way.
#24
Radio and Podcasts / Noory improving?
April 03, 2016, 10:18:14 PM
I've had occasion a few times lately to listen to C2C while he was emceeing.  I didn't notice any Nooryisms or obvious gaffes, although I did catch one of his phony exclamations -- although Ms. Wade seems to have developed a stock one too.  He seemed genuinely interested in the content.

I think he's actually improving.  I attribute this to motiv'n under the threat of competition from MITD.  This confirms my previous surmise that he wasn't intrinsically bad, just a lazy SOB who was making minimal effort.

Does anyone here have evidence to contradict my observ'n of improvement on Noory's part?

If the trend I'm perceiving continues, then Ms. Wade had better step up her game, which will be harder because she has less experience and I think is already trying as hard as she can.  Either that or Mr. Bell needs to come back.  However, I don't think Mr. Bell was motivated by competitiveness at all, but rather by disgust, and that if he too perceives Noory to have improved, Mr. Bell will have achieved his aim.
#25
Radio and Podcasts / To Art Bell & His Threatener
February 17, 2016, 07:31:50 PM
Can we negotiate a settlement?  That is, assuming neither of you is crazy, can we change this from an impasse into blackmail?  That is, create conditions assuring Mr. Bell's safety from the other one of you while doing MITD?  What are your demands?

We'd need some way & means of communication by which Mr. Bell could be convinced that you are indeed the person who's been making threats, and that you are not nuts but just very strongly motivated.  You'd need some assurance that you would not be identified in such a way that would endanger you.  And then the conditions would need to be satisfiable on an ongoing basis, and not as, say, a lump sum payment that would be all Mr. Bell's risk.

If you have a grudge that concerns the show, you'd need some way of stating it publicly in a way that you could not be identified by it.

I'm hoping you read here and that I've started something that might pay off.  It's not really for discussion here, although of course anyone who wants to continue this thread will.  I'm just hoping there's some way to facilitate communication somewhere by some means.
#26
Radio and Podcasts / Is MITD doomed?
January 08, 2016, 11:45:19 PM
I see a lot of posts to that effect, but haven't seen evidence either for or against.  This is a math problem.

MITD is a business.  It will continue in business at least as long as it makes $, or until key personnel get bored w it.  In determining whether it makes $, one need take into acc't the opp'ty costs of the investors & other people who need to put time & effort into it (including interesting people to be interviewed) -- that is, whether they'd be better off doing something else with their $, time, or effort.  Other than the opp'ty cost, does anyone have any figures as to how much the show costs to put on, & how much it's likely to take in?  Unless someone has some actual $ figures, we're shooting completely in the dark as to the future of MITD.

MITD doesn't have to open its books to us, but here's a nonprofit in the same business that does: Auricle Communications, who operate WFMU.  They share many, though not all, of the types of expenses that MITD does.  See p. 9 for a breakdown of expenses.  WFMU's audience is now about 2/3 via stream.  They own a bldg. & xmtrs, which MITD does not have the expenses of.  Also MITD can take paid advertising.  Notice how large the figure is for WFMU's depreciation & amortization, which are on paper and for MITD would represent sunk costs that may never be realized & hence can be neglected in this calcul'n if we needn't consider whether the program's going to survive, say, a decade or more.  WFMU keeps on their books expenses for the Free Music Archive, which MITD has no equivalent of -- but whose music they could use for free for bumpers.  And even though WFMU's staff is mostly volunteers, I bet MITD's paid staff is smaller, so look for the salaries and benefits total to be less.

Interestingly, WFMU lists as its expense for "internet and online transmissions" a figure of less than $70k/yr., even though WFMU puts out at least 4 separate streams of 24-hr. programming.

Now for key personnel.  Let's assume Art Bell is dead, his head severed, chest staked to the ground.  (Nothing personal, Mr. Bell, jus' sayin'.)  So anyone who's keeping a foot in the door subscribing or advertising in the hope he'll be back, let's forget about them.  In that respect then MITD would be similar to C2C, because they're not getting Art back either.  I know too little about Ms. Wade to judge whether she'd be interested in a long term job doing what she's doing.  But supposing she is, can she attract enough interest to keep the revenue up & significant guests interested in the exposure, considering how late at night they have to stay up?  Then taking that as a baseline, any hope of getting Art back would be gravy.

Don't tell me the show has no future w/o Art, because C2C has staggered on all this time w Noory at the mic most of the time.  You may never listen again, but here we're trying to forecast whether enough other people would.

Can anyone here supply figures to plug in to the spreadsheet & prove it's a go or a no-go?
#27
Radio and Podcasts / Temps Host Phone-In Show
January 02, 2016, 08:54:43 PM
It just occurred to me, given recent developments, to link to a demonstration of 2 people's being hired from a temp agency, w no preparation, being sat down to host "7 Second Delay" in mid-show:

http://www.wfmu.org/listen.m3u?show=63003&archive=133999&starttime=0:00:00
http://www.wfmu.org/flashplayer.php?version=2&show=63003&archive=133998&starttime=0:00:00

"7 Second Delay" is a weekly 1-hr. phone-in (or phone-out) experimental comedy program usually co-hosted by comedian-screenwriter Andy Breckman and station mgr.-DJ-AV producer Ken Freedman (who mostly plays straight man to Andy B.'s "bad boy").  While the temps were being shown the ropes, Andy had to be taught to screen calls, all during the show itself.  The hired help IIRC were not told in advance they'd be going on-air, they just knew they were doing a 1-time job at a radio station.  What's amazing, though, is how successful the experiment was.
#28
Radio and Podcasts / ALL other talk shows
December 16, 2015, 02:22:53 AM
Seems to me there'd be more interest & solidarity in the events surrounding MITD than there seems to be.  I look at the threats to Art Bell to be threats to b'casting generally, & think they'd naturally all take an interest.  Then again, they didn't seem much up to taking the side of Howard A. Stern when he came under a different kind of threat.  So maybe there's not as much of a radio "community" as I'd thought.

I thought they might also take an interest in the Cinderella story we have developing here in the form of [Redacted].  Discussing precedents, I happened to Google the taking over of Judy Jarvis's small-station network talk show by her son Jason when she sickened & then died, and found it was something of a big deal at the time in the industry trade j. Talkers; even got into the Congressional Record.

Am I looking at this wrong, or are others surprised too in the lack of interest elsewhere?
#29
Questions about him directed at me made me wonder.
#30
Random Topics / Streiber
December 07, 2015, 09:20:08 PM
Tonight I learned of a band by that name.  Their CDs have cover art featuring crop circles & flying saucers.
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