Life Goes On During September 11 (Sep 11, 2002)

Midnight: D.T. sends in the day's Demented Datebook for September 11 on the Dr. Demento mailing list and on rec.music.dementia, but instead of reiterating the obvious infamous date's events in history, he poses a question instead: "How has September 11, 2001, adjusted your life?"

11:35 previous night-2am: D.T. watches Late Show, Tonight, Conan, and Late Late Show on tapes.

2am: D.T. goes to sleep

9am: D.T. wakes up, logs on to the Internet, and listens to Megamix and DFSX Comedy radio on streaming audio while downloading the e-mails.

10am: D.T. stocks up on cassettes of funny music and electronica remixes for his car radio.

10:10am: D.T. begins going to work and pops in the first of his cassettes.

11:30am: D.T. turns on 98.9 for one installment of Rewire techno remixes.

NOON: D.T. eats lunch and listens to comedy music on the cassettes.

1:30pm: D.T. turns on 98.9 for another installment of Rewire techno remixes.

2pm: D.T. listens to more comedy and fun music.

3:30pm: D.T. turns on 98.9 for another installment of Rewire techno remixes.

4pm: D.T. listens to more comedy and fun music.

5:30pm: D.T. turns on 98.9 for another installment of Rewire techno remixes.

6pm: D.T. gets off work, buys a fat take-out dinner at Robertos' and eats while listening to funny folk and country songs on the cassettes.

7:30pm: D.T. gets home.

8:00pm: D.T. pops in a VHS and watches TV programming he taped earlier that day. Out of some 2,700 hours of choices of Sep 11 commeration coverage available over 75 channels, what does he watch? A 2000 April Fool's episode of Drew Carey and Sabrina the Teenage Witch!

9:00pm: D.T. logs into the Internet and posts his weekly Today in History Datebooks through the Internet. Also at 9:00pm, D.T. turns on KBIG 104.3 out of Los Angeles to hear disco music, one of the few L.A.-based radio stations he listens to anymore since the heydays of L.A. radio listening of 1982.

10:00pm: D.T. watches a rerun of South Park

10:30pm: D.T. sends in the September 12 edition of the Demented Datebook on rec.music.dementia and the Dr. Demento mailing list.

10:30pm: D.T. downloads this weekend's Dr. Demento show from USENET and listens to it in 65 minutes, skipping over the commercials and overplayed songs. Thanks to Dr. Gandall for making life in the San Diego Outland not so rotten here.

11:35pm: D.T. watches David Letterman, one of the few first-run TV shows he sees that day, who gives us his side of the September 11 commeration and guest former president Bill Clinton gives so much advice that Letterman jokes that he may still be president. Also, D.T. tapes Leno and Conan opposite it for watching the next morning.

So what does this mean? Well, last year, when I woke up at about 10:30am on September 11, 2001, I turned on the radio and I kept hearing something about New York and airplane disasters, and it wasn't until I turned on the TV (where most people learn things from) that the most horrible modern-day attack happened almost five hours earlier while I was right in the middle of my REM sleep. Every radio station was talking about it, and every TV station had a feed from one of the ten broadcast networks and cable news channels relayed on various points of the cable system. I kept flipping around the channels to get as much of a handle as what happened that day.

That event is what led me to do a major overhaul of DFS News as I took most of the news website links I had on another page and placed them on the main DFS News menu. Websites from CNN, AP, the broadcast networks, Reuters, you name it, I put them all on the page, and asked the readers "for more information on the September 11 terrorist attack, please select a news source and select a story from there." I wanted to displace my stuff which wasn't important at the time in favor of links (as well as upgrading flashbot to a more prominent position) where the readers can just use my News page as a portal for more news sources, they can click on the links, and bookmark the websites they find that they like reading the news from.

Not to mention, I also got a record amount of stuff about September 11, prayers, thoughts, anything I could steal from, to also relay on my News section. In the five days since the attack, I received over 1/2 a million bytes of material alone, a record! This wasn't something I was going for, but this was a lot of work to edit and post on my part.

This September 11, 2002, I did something unique for a News website: the only places where you would see the headlines for the commeration of the Sep 11 events were coming from NewsMax or Flashbot on the main Davesfunstuff News (new name) section (channel 1 icon). Nowhere else on my website (except for Laughter is a Powerful Weapon) was there any other reference to the September 11 event of last year. No radio stories about it (you can read tons of it on Chris Carmichael's sdradio.net website). No programming about it was mentioned about it. Nothing. Instead, I decided to take the day off (except for posting the Dance Top 10 and Star Music News newsletters) after working hard on the News section last year when the terrorist attack on the East coast was fresh. I deserved the day off from the media anyway.

If you wanted to get away from the overkill of last year's attack, you could come here and read plenty of other amusing and fun stuff to learn and laugh. I'm not going to forget what happened last September 11, but I'm not going to beat the same thing into the ground over and over again on my resources when there is an overkill of the terrorist attack anniversary going on all over the radio and TV dial, which I convieiently avoided all day.

People like listen to the radio for fun, not for endless talk and endless sleepy slow songs. There was so much slow stuff on the radio that I just had to put on the tapes so that my mind doesn't get as dull as the majority of the San Diego Outlanders who prefer slow songs. Why is American radio so bad here? The Canadians, Brits, Germans and Italians have the fun radio. I can't find anything worth my time to tune in. Why does radio have to program so much mind-numbing music all the time on its 30 stations in the San Diego Outland? Soft love songs? Soft country? Soft alternative? Soft R&B? Soft pop? Soft oldies? Soft jazz? Soft rock and roll? Soft soft? Is San Diego radio all about soft music? What a screwed up music culture this Outland supports! It takes a million soft music moonies to keep the Outland behind the times. That's why San Diego has the nickname "America's Behindest City"

Could it be that it was all the soft music that is dominant on American radio contributed to so much dulless of the collective American senses that it led to the horrible terrorist attack of last September 11th? If dance electronica, political folk, man's country, and crazy comedy instead of MTV pop and love songs were the dominant formats in American radio, the Twin Towers would still be standing today.

Give us music fans some thinking music for a change. Sharpen our minds. Knock the sleepy music off the airwaves; they're contributing to the laziness of our American security system. We can't let this happen again. It's time to program energized music on the American airwaves once again. When was the last time Germany and Italy were attacked? Think about it.