What's My Beef!

As a website author, while some others took a break for a while, it was my American duty to keep on working on the daily editions as I churned out reports and links to how radio and the media were affected by the Sep 11 event. There was a lot to share with the readers, and no matter how bad I was feeling, I would feel worse if I didn't give the readers my side of the sad event. The readers are my #1 customer, and its for the people that I'm doing this for.

It's also my duty to also inform the readers that life is not going to stand still while the terrorists wage a new kind of war against us. Any evil wacko from the Middle East that tells me that I can't watch Alyssa Milano in "Charmed" is going to be answered with a million dollar missle courtesy of our U.S. Armed Forces.

Humor has changed in focus, but it still plays an important role in American culture. The writers had to decide what was not subject to ridicule such as President Bush's pronounciation and the World Trade Center rubble. MAD Magazine even ran a more serious letters page in a recent issue, addressing the attack, but understand that it takes two months to put out the magazine. With my pages about Funny Music, Dr. Demento, TV Died, and Funny Stuff, I hope the readers take a break from following the war against the terrorists to have a laugh and smile in the emotional healing process. Song parodists have made the evil villian Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban the butt of their biting song parodies such as Bob Rivers' commentarys on songs such as "Taliban on the Run" (Parody of Wings' "Band on the Run") and "Osama Got Run Over By a Reindeer." Many Osama Bin Laden songs are heard on Dr. Demento, DFSX, and many other morning radio shows across America as morning radio often is a prime daypart for commenting about the world and national events with talk and song parodies.

And while there were fine people and organizations doing their duty to make America better, the most important people in the nation are the ones that have made Superman, Batman, and Spiderman in a newspaper editorial seek an autograph from these kind of people; I'm talking about the New York City Fire and Police departments; they're the men and women that truly are the heroes of the year 2001. Also no less than them are the people who are serving in the military to find and capture the evil villians in Afghanistan; they're also our heroes who are banding together with several other countries in a common goal to rid the Middle East of terrorism and to make Afghanistan clean of the wacko extremists who don't believe in television, pictures of people, and treat the women as subordinates.

Ricochet Wireless High Speed Internet - they hyped it for a month or so that you can surf the net at fast speeds without any wires! It could go as fast as 128kbps so you can listen to Real Audio radio on your wireless computer, thus, turning your computer into a wireless radio that can tune in well over 10,000 audio streams! The cost? $50 a month. Too cheap? Expanded too fast? Unfocused? Ads never made sense? You make the call. Ricochet folded after a year.

Radio Stations Pulls Internet Streams - how do you lose an audience that had a habit of listening to your stations? Easy. In the light of copyright threats from the ASCAP, BMI, and the RIAA among others, Clear Channel, as well as many other radio station groups (except Viacom/Infinity which never put their stations on the net anyway) pulled their signals because the radio spots had union actors that would make the commercials streamed over the net cost about three times much as they would over the airwaves to simplify things. The RIAA demanded that the radio stations pay a second copyright fee to stream the music. Also given the fact that Internet radio is not much of a revenue generating venture, the stations pulled their streams, leaving their listeners to search for new stations to listen to on the Internet. Now that some stations have resolved the problem of commercials using union actors and other matters, some are coming back to the net. But is it too late?

THE XFL (NBC, UPN) - Who can possibly forget, oh, say, the epic Feb. 11 battle of the titans, the Las Vegas Outlaws versus the Memphis Maniax? Apparently everyone in the United States. Dumb, crass, and sexist is what we would expect from a gridiron experiment conducted by World Wrestling Federation mogul Vince McMahon; what we got, however, was dull, stupid, and sexless. The fact that this great country rejected it pretty much after the first week that it aired is yet another reason to love the common sense of the average American.

World Wrestling Federation boss Vince McMahon and NBC's Dick Ebersol were stunned to find people weren't dying to sit out in Soldier Field in February for their wacky mix of semi-pro football and sleazy cheerleaders. What were the odds? Apparently it is possible to underestimate the taste of the American viewing public. Thank goodness they took a bath on this.

Mariah Carey Acts and Valerie Bertinelli Sings - in D.T.'s Stupid Xmas Special '97. You read a couple of days ago, one of the battles had an embellished Mariah and Valerie switching jobs to compete in a contest of the cuties. I guess some things are better left on paper.

Anne Heche's In-N-Out Urge - first she's gay, now she's straight, but also says she's from some outer space realm. Talk about a mental case!

Michael Jordan Returns - but not as a basketball coach, unfortunately. This Wizard is no Harry Potter.

Reality Show Glut - ENOUGH ALREADY!

Shannen Doherty Quits Charmed - maybe that's a good thing, but then again, Rose McGowan has no charisma. This series is fading fast. I watch it only because of Alyssa Milano nowadays.

The Detroit Lions - winless in the first 12 games of the season, beating the San Diego Chargers' 0-11 futile start record from last year.

Doug Flutie - sure, he's no Ryan Leaf, but he led the Chargers to an eight game losing streak after starting off 5-2. Give Drew Brees a workout! Give the third QB some time on the field! The receivers keep dropping balls. Flutie throws interceptions. Are we sure we're not watching last year's Chargers?

Emeril - how did this cable network chef qualify for an 8pm major network sitcom anyway?

The San Diego Wildfire - so much for basketball in San Diego. Nobody's interested if it's not the NBA and a winning team! Give us the Lakers up in smell-A anyday!

Michael Jackson's Comeback Attempt - a 42-year-old singing like a 13 year old? Must be a joke, right? Nope. It happened this year. His "Invincible" album fell on mostly deaf ears.

The Great McSwindle - you could believe you can win in this year's McDonald's Monopoly game, a nationwide million-dollar contest concept Clear Channel stole the idea from. It was revealed in August that the winning pieces for the game had been stolen by the security director of the company's McDonald's hired to run the contest! He gave the pieces to co-conspirators who passed them to accomplices who then "won" the prizes of which everyone involved got a cut. In short, you had as much chance of winning this contest if you ate at Wendy's! You had a better chance of winning a million dollars if you simply listened to a Clear Channel radio station near you! McDonald's was surely embarrassed, but they could have been protected if the game boards they distributed had fine print anticipating this debacle. MAD Magazine #413 ran a Monopoly board that truly described what the issue was about. Among the places to land: "The McDeception Begins when you GO to McDonalds!" "Attention McDonald's! COMMUNITY CHEST is closed!" "BALTIC AVENUE - We'll let you have $20 Cash at McDonald's and maybe a small shake - but that's it!" "You'd be IN JAIL...and not JUST VISITING if you won a big prize this year!" And it goes on until you reach "BOARDWALK - Choice of $1,000,000 (In Your Dreams!)"

Major League Baseball Pulls Baseball Games From Free Internet Radio - MLB decided to take full control of their games on the Internet by forcing the radio stations to cut their streams when they run the MLB baseball games on their radio stations so that MLB could sell the same choppy and poor-fidelity streams back to the listeners for a fee. Sorry, MLB. You lost a lot of baseball fans with this kind of greed!

The RIAA Closes Down Napster - so much for sampling the songs for free. Now the RIAA wants us to pay for the privilege of reviewing songs whether or not we intend to buy the songs. It doesn't work that way for me. If I like the song, I'll buy the song willingly. Most of the junk that's made today that the RIAA wants me to pay for isn't even worth the valuable hard drive space in MP3 form!

Anything Made in China - I bought a hammer at K-Mart and it broke apart a day later. On the label: Made in China. I bought an MP3 CD player at Fry's and it won't play most of my Dr. Demento Show MP3's. On the label? Made in China. Yup. Aside of the poor-quality, slave-labor wages in China's factories are a global disgrace. Let's buy from Mexico, Canada, and America instead, pay more money, and reward only the manufacturers who pay decent union wages to the people making the stuff!

Buffy Moves to UPN - looks like 20th Century Fox's plan to get more fees for their series paid off in a short monetary gain. The WB wisely passed on Fox's demands for paying higher fees to keep the series on their sked. WB moved the female skewering "Gilmore Girls" to Tuesdays opposite "Buffy," and their revenge seems to be working. "Buffy" has dropped in ratings, but news just came out that star Sarah Michelle Gellar destroyed her locks for a shorter do, the ratings are predicted to take a further nosedive and may cost her the series. STUUU-PIIIID! YOU'RE SO STUUUUU-PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!

Daytime Television - where did all the great shows go? Where's the game shows, sitcoms, cartoons, and variety talk shows? They've all moved to cable. Instead, we get stupid dating shows, mindless talk shows, idiotic reality shows, montonous courtroom dramas, and cartoons that skew so young that nobody older than five years of age would be caught dead watching them.

Back in my younger days, we had variety talk such as Mike Douglas and Dinah! We had game shows such as Concentration, Beat the Clock, and Joker's Wild. We had off-network sitcoms such as Green Acres, Andy Griffith, Batman, and just about everything from the 50's through the 70's. We had movies at 3pm on 10 and 39 after the network shows ended, movies on the independents at 10am, 1pm, 6pm, 8pm, and all night, and 2-3 movie nights on the networks. We had cartoons that brought in the adults as well as the kids, soaking up Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Superman, Daffy Duck, The Little Rascals, and The Flintstones.

Soaps were a decent half-hour apiece; now they're stretched out so thin that most busy people sick of fast-forwarding through the filler scenes just don't bother to even tape the shows anymore. I predict that within the next 20 years, these soaps may go the way of the dinosaur at the rate they're loosing viewers.

Daytime television is now a vast wasteland with reality shows supplanting real entertainment programming.

Prime Time Shows Well Past Their Primes - isn't it about time that Fox finally got rid of the inane X-Files and brought in an hour of comedies? Isn't it time that the snobby Frasier and Friends realized that it's no longer 1995 and they're well past their best years? Touched By an Angel continues to bore. ER is out of stories. Most of the sitcoms are full of penis and gay stereotype jokes. Nobody is watching Family Guy. Will and Grace, Just Shoot Me, and Dharma and Greg are just not funny. Can't these kids running the networks get anything right?

Homogenized Music - radio has gotten so far left of what's good to listen to, it's "left" this realm. We are sick of being force-fed depressing songs from Alicia Keys, cookie-cutter teen acts, monotonous hip hop and rap rock acts, and short oldies playlists. Hope Santa got you all multi-CD changers for your radio so you can escape the music radio bulls--t with me.

HDTV - I have no complaint about HDTV, per se, but do we all really need to see higher-definition versions of all the junk Hollywood's TV studios are producing? Most don't even deserve to be in color either! Why not put the quality shows such as Masterpiece Theater, Evening at Pops, and Malcolm in the Middle on the HDTV versions of the stations and keeping the junk on the old analog versions? If you want better TV, you'll pay to get it with an HDTV set!

Power Companies Gouging California - talk about abuse on a grand scale. The electricity producers demand high prices for electricity, parts of California get rolling blackouts, prices go up, and Governor Gray Davis tries to take over the electricity grid and sign contracts with the power producers that are now worth much more than the going cost of electricty today. First, the inept Susan Golding and the Charger Ticket Guarantee for the overpriced NFL team from 1997, now this from Davis and the Power Companies. What happened to taking full control of the other guys instead of making them control you? Davis won't be here after next election day in 2002! Now Enron is bankrupt! Will Duke (Dupe) and Dynegy be next?

The Fall of HBO! - it used to be a great movie station when Hollywood was once making great movies in the 70's and 80's. Now we get a pay-version of NBC or whatever with worthless crap such as "Sopranos", "Sex in the City," "Oz", "Six Feet Under" and whatever else. Where did all the great movies go? Why so many HBO channels? Why not just combine them into just a movie channel for all dayparted to serve different age groups, dump the series, and return back to what worked in the first place!

The Fall of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - too many editions a week! Too many predictable celebrity editions who are allowed to cheat. Result? Loss of viewers! Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg!

Windows XP - the "Clear Channel" of the OS industury has taken abuse of its monopoly to a level so high that it's appalling. Now Microsoft wants everybody to upgrade to their buggy XP system, an upgrade that has demands so high that many older computers simply cannot run it at all, even with upgrades. If you have a business with older computers in use, it may cost more than about 20 times $100 for the upgrade, but more like 20 times $2000 for the upgrade in the new computer. Microsoft wants to play "Big Brother" with you by getting you to sign up for its Passport service. Microsoft is dropping paid support for its older systems dating back to DOS and through Windows 98 by the end of 2003. You may eventualy have to "rent" their OS on a yearly basis in the future. Most older software such as those used for DOS and Windows 3.1 may no longer work in XP. Now Microsoft is taking on a "Clear Channel" mode by suing Lindows because they own the "indows" letter group and is forcing them to change their name. I'll be glad if the courts wise up and allow independent companies to create their own versions of Windows in any version they want to (3.11, 95, 98, etc.)

This list is not exhaustive, but I know you have some favorites of your own to add. Coming soon...radio lumps of coal. I'm almost finished with it!

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