Another Bonehead San Diego Media Blurt: KPBS Cans Sesame Street During Pledge Drive (Aug 16, 2002)

Channel 10 has the sentencing for Andy Williams. I'll catch the 30-second news blurt later.

Channel 8 has some old fart hosting a game show. Bob Barker blows!

One of the shows I was watching in my youth was Sesame Street, the pre-schooler classic that is now being introduced to kids by their parents who watched it back then. I tune in to see what Sesame Street is like some 33 years since I first watched it and all I get is some crudely-animated cartoon about some cats. I say "hey, where are the sponsors such as F, Y, and the number 2?"

What are these boneheads at KPBS thinking when they conduct those pledge drives? To pre-empt a popular classic kids show in favor of running some stupid cat cartoon and asking for money to support the station?" How stupid is KPBS? Welp, there goes the kids switching to Nick Jr. and Disney Channel since they think Sesame Street has been cancelled. Dumb, KPBS, real dumb move.

Not to mention, there go your adult subscribers who think there's no longer a reason to pay for KPBS since their kids discovered Nickelodeon, saving their parents money to help pay the exhorborant Cox Cable bill nowadays!

Cox Cable Is Also a Bonehead (Aug 15, 2002)

Before we go to that, let's go to the stupid move Cox Cable made before that 20 years ago this month in August 1982. The good news? Cox Cable added WTBS out of Atlanta. The bad news? They dropped KABC 7 in order to make room for the station. Boy, that was intelligent of Cox, wasn't it? Now I had to buy and antenna to watch "Ryan's Hope" and whatever ABC shows channel 10 wasn't airing for years on. The same month, Cox "mysteriously" found some new channels, 27 and 28, to put on some experimental pay per view movies on. Couldn't those idiots put WTBS on 27 and left KABC on 7 then?

Back in September of 1982, KUseLessI 51 signed on, and Cox needed a place to put that channel on. Guess what, boys and girls? Dimwitted Cox dropped KHJ (now KCAL) 9 from the lineup to make room for KUseLessI. The boneheads at Cox could have placed 51 on 28. Another stupid move.

For months that followed, Gus Stevens, the former media editor of the San Diego Evening Tribune, (um, let me explain somehthing first. There was the San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune, which were essentially the same newspaper publishing under two different names in the morning and night for no reason except to make more money) received a mountain of letters complaining about the stupid move Cox Cable made by dropping KHJ 9.

One person listed the movies KHJ aired the previous week that Cox viewers missed for a month. More complained that they could not watch the Los Angeles Laker road telecasts where longtime play by play man Chick Hearn (who died earlier this month) was calling the action (his was a radio-style telecast that also aired on KLAC 570).

Some complained that they could no longer watch "Elvira's Movie Macabre", a popular Saturday night showcase where a local hostess (Elvira, played by Cassandra Peterson) does all kinds of skits designed to make you laugh between the movie scenes and commercials.

Others complained that they couldn't watch the syndicated fare such as Eight is Enough and other shows since no local station in the San Diego Outland was carrying some of the programs. At least I had the antenna set up (I could also get Dr. Demento on KMET 94.7 better with it) for "Ryan's Hope" so I could watch the early "Enough" shows I missed the first time around (I was watching Grizzly Adams and Real People on NBC most of the time opposite "Enough" when they all aired Wednesdays at 8pm).

You know, when you think about it, Cox Cable did a very shabby job back then when it comes to channel lineups. Later on that year, they introduced the Playboy Channel, which caused an uproar among the people who complained about the sex they are getting on channel 22, even though they didn't subscribe to it. Cox scrambled the picture, but they couldn't find a way to scramble the sound. Another idiot move by Cox Cable.

More bonehead Cox Cable moves followed such as dropping 2/3rds of their FM radio service in order to make room for their stupid Cable Radio Service. I tried it and it sucked donkeys! I couldn't tell what songs were playing since there were no announcers. There was a 1-900 number you could call if you wanted to know what songs were playing, but I said "F--k it" and dropped the service. Come to think of it, Clear Channel's voicetracked radio isn't that bad compared to this.

Cox Cable in 1982: totally short-sighted and completely disconnected with the needs of the sophisticated San Diego Outlander.

Back in 1982, I had antennas wired all over the place so that I could receive the Los Angeles radio and TV stations Cox wasn't carrying. Their FM service was lacking back then as it didn't use their full capacity to include the popular Los Angeles stations I was listening to (forget the classical and jazz stations) such as rockers KMET 94.7, KLOS 95.5, and KOLA 99.9, Top 40ers KIQQ 100.3 and KIIS 102.7, oldies KRTH 101.1, and new wave/punker KROQ 106.7.

My Awful Early Adult Years

Why the hell didn't I move back in 1981 when I quit Grossmont College when I ran out of money? I could have made some real friends elsewhere instead of the idiots I was stuck with down here. I didn't have time to study since that blasted Singing Hills dishwashing job ate up 11 hours a day, and classes took up 4 a day, and I needed 10 hours of sleep and rest a day. You do the math. It just didn't add up! I was falling asleep during the Charger games.

The food at Singing Hills was awful. All they had were fatty entrees and bland buffets. That chef Joe Satchmo didn't have a clue what healthy eating was all about. His assistant, Cass, was okay, but unfortuaneatly, he was another religious superstitionist with no connection to reality. He wasn't an asshole like Joe was; just half that: an ass.

I found Grossmont College lacking and outdated. I would have been better off if I knew of any smart people that could get me a job with paid training instead of wasting seven years on a Associates Degree that wasn't going to do me any good if all I did was to lead me admission to a more expensive four-year college degree that would take me 27 years to complete!

And going to the Armed Services was out of the question for me. I am perceived to be gay (though I'm not) by the idiot kids at the elementary and high schools like Cleveland, Pershing, and Patrick Henry High who have no clue about diversity. I figured I could pass as a gay if I got drafted, and I would have lied about being gay if it meant not serving a country that was full of uneducated religious superstitutionists who did not support true diversity and interesting ideas about what a human being is all about. After all, somebody had to think about me, and nobody did back then. If there's no me being accepted, then there's no me serving the country either.

The kids in San Diego were dumb; all they did was to think that playing sports made them popular. I was smart; I watched TV full of popular stars that really had talent. All they did was to drink booze and dance all night. All I did was to learn life's experiences and lessons from watching "All in the Family," "M*A*S*H", and "Happy Days." What the hell does sports do me any good if I was just a slowpoke?

Going to college costs tons of money. I wish I had tens of thousands of dollars back in 1978 so I could have moved out of the San Diego Outland, got into a real college life, met some cool folks who liked punk and comedy music, got a real education in radio media as I wanted to get into radio back then, much more than getting into computer programming which I found easy if I could do small projects in BASIC, but very much quit when I got into courses dealing with running a mainframe and COBOL. I found the media interesting and that's the field I should have gotten into. I cheated through most of the computer courses at Grossmont just to get fake "B"'s just to please my parents. Hell, I could have been a Clear Channel radio baron by now!

In short, I had a very much screwed up young adult life since I was very much an outcast in a town full of ignorants who didn't know any better and refused to even try to know better. It's no wonder why I call San Diego America's Behindest City. It was back then, and it still is today.

To San Diego Media: Get a Life! (Aug 26, 2002)

Furthermore, I wish to dispell a rumor: those car make and license plate names that flash on the traffic condition signs is not a call from a radio station asking the driver of the car that sees it to call the station and claim a prize. I just don't know where those blasted ideas keep coming from. It's actually part of the Amber (nothing to do with Tiffany Thiessen of Saved By The Bell) Alert system to get the drivers involved in aiding our police in apprehending a possible kidnapper before its too late.

But in getting back to the point: last Wednesday's verdict and this Wednesday's sentencing of a child killer whose name I refuse to print in my website universe (it won't show up on davesdatebook.com either) seemed to bring out the worst of the media along the Left Coast. If the idiots at KFI weren't bad enough, the idiots at our local stations (especially the "Cheap" Channel empire stations) probably made the verdict into a cultural event at ridiculous proportions with endless hype about coverage on the Roger/Padres station as well as live coverage of the verdict on all their other stations, plus talking about it all day Wednesday on most of its stations.

Furthermore, the local stations bumped their obsolete talk show and soap opera programming for, yet, more courtroom coverage.

How much coverage is too much? You tell me if it isn't enough. (crickets chirping). Tell me if its too much coverage and you only care about the verdict and sentence that you can easily digest mentally in 30 seconds so you can get on with your life (LOUD APPLAUSE!)

So what did I do last Wednesday the minute after the verdict was heard on (name any radio station)? Yep. I put on the 10-hour MP3 CD and alternated between listening to comedy and fast music songs and listening to techno on Midweek Rewire on 98.9 while I worked. Looks like "Cheap" Channel or the other local TV stations hasn't touched me all day.

At 5pm, I found serenity on the television: reruns of "Sabrina" on KSWB! What's the use of seeing the verdict 27 more minutes on the local news when I can get more in-depth coverage of it on the Internet and newspapers anytime. Besides, after a day of sorrow against the accused in a court of law, and I trust that the jurors did the best they could do with the evidence presented to them and came up with a verdict that best suited the situation on hand, there's always comedy on TV and MP3s as a powerful weapon against blues. In fact, last Wednesday, we had a party that was not related to the verdict in any way; we just felt like putting on electronica music while we played cards all night!

You know, there comes a time when its time for the people at KGTV, KUseLessI, KFuMBle, and "Cheap" Channel San Diego Outland Death Star Headquarters to get a life and start covering something else; it came months ago. Leave the jurors alone! Let the courtroom unfold its own drama without intrusive idiot media journalists and reporters!

When the verdict was read, people were cheering in the streets. What the hell is with the barbarians in the Outland? They're not the ones who are judging the defendant and should not get any joy when the guilty verdict is read. Are their heads up where the sun don't shine? I guess there are a lot of idiots like these in town who dwell on playing juror because their brains are mush from listening to sappy songs on the radio. These simpletons are ruining the Outland for the rest of us and maintaining the slogan of San Diego as America's Behindest City.

By the way, in case anyone noticed, last week was America's Behindest City Week. How far is the city behind the times? I guess San Diego is stuck in Medieval Era mode with behaviour like this. We already said goodbye to "Joey" the Panda at the Zoo (I refuse to print names I cannot pronouce, so I renamed Wuhmey or whatever to a name I can pronounce.)

The same idiots who root against the defandents are the same ones who go to church to practice their religious superstitions and preach to the leader of their choice. Only in San Diego Outland do we have people who do the opposite of what they are supposed to be practicing. You're supposed to show sorrow towards the accused, not to taut and heckle them. San Diego is setting a bad example of courtesy towards strangers, making fools out of themselves by being rude, impolite, and having no manners.

Great, now people will cheer at a guilty verdict in more TV courtroom cases in Outlands in other places and boo when the accused is found not guilty. Who are they to judge?

Goodbye Summer