Thing I really hate today:
More or less complete strangers (with whom I’ve exchanged ONE very brief round of email) who spontaneously add me to their “forwarded forwarded email virus alerts ” mailing lists. I’m not too fond of ANYONE who does this, but to do it after one round of email is truly repulsive.
Note to sender: I don’t have a Windows machine (thank God), I’ve already deleted this message 20 times this year, and spam is bad enough, thanks, without having it come from “friends” too.
Realizations while listening to the 1980s station while driving to Safeway tonight:
You never would have heard a segue between Tone Loc and the Cure on any actual radio station during the actual 1980s. Things just didn’t work that way. Stations focusing on the 1960s and 1970s offer similarly improbable pairings of, say, Steppenwolf and Neil Diamond.
Commercial oldies stations have this way of mushing up an entire decade into a format which says “if it was a hit and it will make people stop changing stations until the next commercial, we will play it.” Which is, of course, the whole point of commercial radio. Keep in mind that you are not the radio station’s customer. You are its product, neatly delivered to its actual customers, the advertisers.
Of course, what this means is that commercial radio pretty much sucks as far as long-term listening goes (KABL excepted, of course). It’s not really designed for that, even though some of us still do it. I my be a program director’s wet dream; I’m so lethargic that once I have a station set, I don’t change it until the most heinous thing imaginable assaults me. Which is why I listen to college radio a lot…
Never much been one for switching stations a lot, be it radio or TV. Watching TV with a remote-happy partner who can’t stay parked for more than 30 seconds (my dad, for example) is my idea of an evening in hell. And, despite claims to the contrary, there must be a lot of others like me. Otherwise, the networks wouldn’t sandwich all their new (and often rotten) shows between two hits. This would also explain why I’ve started watching The Fresh Prince after Roseanne every day.
I’m sort of curious how other people feel about this too, but wondering aloud might result in a lot of email I probably won’t answer, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.
But I’m off the stated topic, I’ve used up my space, and I haven’t even gotten to my other realization: that “Oh Sheila” by Ready for the World really desperately wanted to be a Prince song. Or a Sheila E song, which is essentially the same thing, all in all.
Back to the grind…