From the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher: Is The New Sirius XM The Beginning Of Satellite’s End?

I admit some of my presets are gone, too, and the others are being programmed by the shallow-playlist specialists at Sirius New York. But then, I warned repeatedly about the merger being the death of the promise of satellite radio, and i see no reason to revise my judgments now.

Let’s hope whatever company buys this mess from the fire-sale of the upcoming bankruptcy will re-hire Lee Abrams at least as a consultant..and maybe to program a resurrected Special X? Meanwhile, there’s always Slacker and AOL Radio…

As some of you have noticed, things are slowly getting back to normal around here. The OTR Digest has mostly resumed its schedule, and while I don’t promise there won’t be delays in the future, I’m pretty sure they won’t be as severe as they have been over the past few weeks. I still need to organize things within my office (my right leg is against one of the pieces of replacement hardware stuffed temporarily under my desk), but things are getting better…

Now if I could just catch up with the rest of my work…

Studs Terkel passed away Friday October 31st at the age of ninety-six; he was in turn a radio actor, television personality, disc jockey, talk-show host, and chronicler of the human condition. He was an unabashed and self-described “old lefty,” vehement in his opinion of the current administration, and complained the country suffered from, “National Alzheimer’s Disease,” never teaching students enough history to keep them from making the same mistakes over and over. He was the author of eighteen books, the last published this month, and appropriately titled, “P.S.”

The program you are about to hear is an episode of Destination: Freedom from November 21, 1948. The radio series, broadcast on Chicago’s NBC affiliate, WMAQ from 1948 to 1950, was the work of a remarkable black writer, Richard Durham. Destination: Freedom showcased prominent characters and events in black history, while later examining contemporary political issues, never shying away from an honest and sometimes brutal look at race relations. John Dunning writes about the series in his book “On the Air,” “There were no buffoons or toadies in Durhams’ plays; there were heroes and villains, girlfriends and lovers, mothers, fathers, brutes.” This episode, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Dodger,” is the story of Jackie Robinson, and features Studs Terkel as Sammy, the Ancient Dodger of the title, narrating the story with a Runyonesque delivery and exquisite prose.

Studs said his epitaph should be, “Curiosity did not kill this cat,” and it didn’t; it kept him strong and vibrant for ninety-six years. Take it easy, Studs…but take it!

You may stream the show using the player below, or download it with the link. Remember, by subscribing to this blog with any podcasting client (Juice, iTunes, etc.) the shows will be automatically downloaded to your computer or MP3 player!

 Destination: Freedom - The Rhyme of the Ancient Dodger [31:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From CNN: Acclaimed author Studs Terkel dies at 96

This makes me especially grateful I was able to meet Studs in Washington, D.C. some years ago. The guy was amazing.

Edit: The BBC has its own obit. And Irene Heinstein points to this Chicago Tribune obit.

For those of you unfortunate enough to subscribe to satellite radio, you know that Sirius bought out XM (if you believe the press releases that say it was a merger, you are way too naive…). And shortly (middle of next month), the Sirius New York programmers begin programming most of the music channels. But right now, you can get a glimpse into the future of satellite radio programming by listening to the Halloween mini-channel, XM Gore, which is nothing but a rebroadcast of Sirius Scream.

Boy, does it suck.

No, I’m not saying that because it’s from Sirius, I’m saying it because it’s true. And I’m not even whining about the lousy sound quality of all the channels now that they’ve dropped everything down to 32kbps so they can shove in the “best” of Sirius (and then sent spam email to those of us refusing marketing email, no less!)…I’m specifically complaining about the uselessness of the Halloween channel. Some specific examples of why it sucks:
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It’s hard to sit down and describe the 2008 Friends of Old-Time Radio convention in a few words…there’s so much to say about three-and-a-quarter days of entertainment and enjoyment it’s tough to actually put it into words. But as someone who is rarely at a lack of something to say and who probably never used only a few words when many thousand would do, I’m going to try…
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Recently on the OTR Digest, the subject of Cecil and Sally has come up. I first heard of this series from Dr. Randy Spurlock at an FOTR convention some years ago; he told me he had a number of the syndication transcriptions, and was going to slowly have them transfered. He gave me a disc of episodes which, unfortunately, was damaged, although I was able to recover two episodes from this disc albeit with considerable recovery noise.

Fred Berney, he of OldieTV.com, after hearing about the damaged disc, later gave me some episodes to hear without the damage; it’s one of the episodes supplied by Fred taken from transcription discs supplied by Dr. Spurlock that is posted here. Written by John Patrick, and starring Patrick and Helen Troy, Cecil and Sally was one of the first nationally-syndicated-by-transcription programs; released by a San Francisco company, MacGregor & Sollie in the late 1920s…for an example of the cost to local stations for running this program, WKAV in Laconia, New Hampshire in 1931 was under contract to pay MacGregor & Sollie $17.50 for each episode over a 26 week run, according to Doug as posted on the Internet OTR Digest. Cecil and Sally was later picked up by NBC, but the episode here is from the syndicated run. There’s no open or close, presumably that and the sponsoring commercials would have been the responsibility of the local station who played the show.

Compared to radio programs of the 40’s and 50’s, it’s somewhat minimal, with few sound effects to get in the way of the dialog. But as an example of early dramatic radio, it’s an important historical document, so I hope you’ll enjoy this undated episode of Cecil and Sally.

 Cecil and Sally - Undated Episode [11:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This program marks the return of the worst voice in Internet audio after a somewhat lengthy break…

I received from Jerry Haendiges, of The Vintage Radio Place a large collection of programs, with the suggestion I “broadcast” some of them here on the blog…thing is, many of the programs he sent I’d never heard, and some I’ve never heard of, even as long as I’ve been in the hobby. So for the foreseeable future I’m going to run the shows he sent in low-bandwidth MP3 format - even at 32kbps mono, these shows are some of the best-sounding shows you’ll hear. But remember for even better sound, these shows (and a few bazillion others) may be purchased from Jerry in either audio CD format, or ultra-high-quality MP3 format.

Today’s show was a 1947 summer replacement for Abbott and Costello featuring the great Peter Lorre in an adaptation of the mystery classic “The Marvelous Barastro,” by Ben Hecht. This series, Mystery in the Air, was announced by Henry Morgan, better-known as Sgt. Friday’s partner Frank Gannon in the color version of Dragnet, and Col. Potter in the long-running M*A*S*H. The sponsor is Camel cigarettes, who asks, “What cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?” with a supporting cast drawn from some of the best the west coast had to offer, in this episode John Brown, Howard Culver, Jane Morgan, and Russell Thorson.

So turn off the lights, crawl under the covers, and listen to this episode of Mystery in the Air, “The Marvelous Barastro!”

 Mystery in the Air - The Marvelous Barastro [32:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Rockin’ like a mullet!

via

 Nostalgic Rumblings Jingle [1:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Received this sad news this morning from REPS…Gil was a great friend to the Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention, always quick with a laugh. Below a photo from last year’s con.

Fans and friends may leave their condolences for Gil’s family - and/or share memories or remembrances of Gil Stratton on his website guestbook at http://www.gilstratton.com/

Gil Stratton’s radio credits included:
Fibber Mc Gee and Molly, Halls of Ivy, My Favorite Husband, The Life of Riley, Lux Radio Theater, Suspense, Great Gildersleeve and others.

Gil Stratton, 86, called ‘em as he saw ‘em 6:22 PM Saturday

A friend of longtime Los Angeles sportscaster Gil Stratton emailed the news that Stratton died this morning at home in Toluca Lake. He was 86 and had suffered heart problems. Stratton was a fixture on KNX Radio and Channel 2 for decades and the popular sports anchor on “The Big News” with Jerry Dunphy that ushered in the era of hour-long news in L.A. From the obit being circulated by friends:

Stratton, 86, was a native of Brooklyn, NY and started out as a Broadway performer at the age of 19 in the musical “Best Foot Forward.” That led to a career in films including a supporting role in the Academy Award-winning “Stalag 17″.
His career was interrupted by World War II when he served as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps.

In 1954, Stratton caught the attention of management at Channel 2, then KNXT, and became a sportscaster. He became part of the “Big News” team headed by anchor Jerry Dunphy as the station dominated local news ratings in the 1960’s. Drawing on his background as a baseball umpire, Stratton would open his sportscasts with a trademark line: “Hi folks, time to call ‘em as we see ‘em.”

He is the recipient of seven “Golden Mike” awards from the Southern California Broadcasters association.

Gil Stratton, Jr. and our friend Ken Stockinger at the 2007 Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention

The first Cincinnati convention flyer is out, announcing the attendance of our friend Eddie Carroll, star of the one-man show Jack Benny: Laughter in Bloom. Check it out!

 23rd Annual Cincinnati Nostalgia Convention Flyer #1: Download

Talking about the cancellation of Do Not Disturb, I said, “there is hope for the American public.” Ok, maybe not, since Fox has ordered the back-nine for the uninspiring and derivative Fringe, large stupid location reminders and all.

Ah, well, there’s always Supernatural…

Thank heavens, there is hope for the American public; it solidly rejected the abysmal Do Not Disturb, this season’s attempt to insult the viewer as much as last season’s Cavemen did. Three aired, and done, although Fox is maintaining it’s just taking a week off, to be replaced next Wednesday with a rerun of the also not-so-swift Til Death.

Received the following information from Eddie Carroll, the writer and performer of the one-man show, Jack Benny: Laughter in Bloom:

I’m on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters here in LA and they are planning to build a Radio Archives Museum to house all of their radio memorabilia, adjoining the library in Thousand Oaks.

So, to start fund for the project, I agreed to do a benefit Matinee Performance on Sunday,Oct.19th. WELLLL…….!! That 2:30 matinee performance sold out, so I have added a second performance for 7:30 PM that evening.

HOWEVER…, the box office at the Scherr Theater in the Thousand Oaks Arts Center AND Ticketmaster screwed up and didn’t have the info about the added show for a week! So, people who called for tickets were told that show was sold out and weren’t informed that there was a second show.

There [are] indeed tickets still available for the evening show on Sunday Oct.19th.

If you’re in the area, you really do not want to miss this; it benefits a great cause, and if you haven’t seen Mr. Carroll “channel” Jack Benny, you have no idea how spot-on his performance is. For a tiny example, photos of his performance at last year’s Friends of Old-Time Radio convention are posted here on the blog - a small piece of video there, too.

For various reasons, we needed to step away a bit from on-line activities for the past few weeks, but we are alive, and will resume our regular posting schedule as soon as possible.

Now that the XM/Sirius merger has been approved by regulators who are supposed to look out for the American people but who instead are more interested in whoever has the money, it’s time to start the tributes for a dead industry. Oh, I know what the companies are saying, that they’ll emerge “stronger and better able to face the future,” but the truth is, now instead of one of the two companies finally going into bankruptcy, the sole remaining monopolistic company will fail and take the entire industry down with it, driven primarily by one man’s foolishness in giving an aging frat boy a half-billion dollars he never had in the first place.

As you probably figured out by now, I have been against this foolish merger from the get-go. It would have made a whole lot more sense to allow one of the companies to fail badly (HINT: not XM, since between the two it had a better chance of survival), to be picked up at bargain-basement prices by a new company with intelligent management who truly loved radio. Yeah, I know, but one can dream, can’t one? I mean, can you imagine what satellite radio could be like if there were two companies competing for the best sound and deepest playlists instead of who could throw the most money at tv personalities to kludge their stuff into low-bandwidth radio channels? Two companies who actually loved and knew radio?

Ok, so that ship has sailed; now former XM subscribers are forced to help pay off Hoo-Hoo and will be subject to the programming wizardry of Mel Karmazin, meaning shallower playlists and fewer niche channels…but you can bet there will be more major-label-sponsored single-artist channels (pioneered by Karmazin and already overused by XM even before the merger), wasting the bandwidth that could be used for small-based niche channels (anyone remember Lee Abrams’s extraordinary Special X?).

And then there’s the other side of the equation…lousy sound quality. The bitrate on the channels continues to fall…133’s The Bob Edwards Show is sounding anecdotally worse, with more of those compressed “Sssss” sounds than before - admittedly, the quality has gone up-and-down over the years as bandwidth is limited, then compression schemes are improved, then bandwidth is limited, ad nausium, but it seems to me it’s getting worse again.
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I mentioned a bit ago that one of the machines here suffered a catastrophic disc failure…understand, no data was lost, but I never did get the time to install the new hardware that should bring all of the data back on-line, so I’ve been limping that machine along without most of the tools I’m used to having. (Like, for example, changing a web page right now requires me to write raw HTML instead of using some of the cute tools that make it a little easier, which made the Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention update take a little longer than it should have.) I’ve been looking forward to a weekend to take the time to disassemble the computer (and my desk, while I’m at it, for some serious dust-bunny eradication) and install the hardware.

So today, the current in the house died for a few seconds…I don’t think it was more than two or three, in fact, although I admit it seemed an eternity when I realized that two machines behind UPS devices went completely down, and my daughter’s in the living room also died a horrible death. Of the two in my office, one was the one that had the disc failure a bit ago…that one is the only one that I was able to bring completely back.

My daughter’s Macintosh can no longer access the network so I can pull some utilities to fix the secondary drive that holds many of her applications, and frankly I don’t have the time to deal with it right now, so with my apologies I shut hers down until there’s a free minute. The other machine in my office to die was the Windows box that I keep almost all of the audio and video work on - yep, it’s the machine with the podcasting files on it, too. And that one got completely hosed; it refuses to boot into Windows (not even Safe Mode), and this is after running chkdsk /r on the drive from the recovery console. Twice. (*sigh*)

So…looks like I’m going to spend the entire weekend restoring ancient Windows software via PC Angel (anyone who knows what I’m talking about is shuddering right now), then updating it with a long string of reboots, then reinstalling most of my software since it will, even after the updates, not have the proper DLLs in there to run a goodly percentage of it.

Good news is, the machine should start running like a champ again (any time one completely reinstalls Windows the pep returns to the computer). Bad news is…there goes the friggin’ weekend…and all because of a few seconds’ of power outage and an apparently bad UPS.

Ok, kids, it’s about time to bid farewell to what used to be the best series on the air, 24. Last season (that is, 2006-2007, before the writer’s strike came along and got them more money for writing garbage like Cavemen) they brought on-board Manny Cotto, who hasn’t done anything worth watching since Odyssey 5, and as expected the show immediately hit the skids, went down the tubes, pick your favorite metaphor for worst…season…ever. So how are we going to fix this?

By hiring Star Trek: WhoCares’ Brannon “Hey, I only have one idea but I’ll keep using it over and over - let’s blow up the ship!” Braga and Manny’s brother Carlos Cotto, whose only justification seems to be nepotonic, as co-Exec Producers.

Seriously, we’re all doomed. Why is it every time I really like something they end up screwing me over? I still maintain the writers personally owe my mother a partial refund for the claptrap they foisted upon us, and that she purchased for me in DVD format (my mother knows me really well…every year there’s a 24 DVD set and something from the original-and-only-legitimate Star Trek under the tree for me).

And one more thing…can we please stop calling the upcoming two-hour movie a “prequel?” Unless it airs after the up-coming season (which it won’t), it’s no “prequel,” it’s instead a bridge between what was the worst season to date, and what is shaping up to be the worst season to air (at least based upon the recent new-hires). But it’s airing in the correct order chronologically. (prequel: A literary, dramatic, or cinematic work whose narrative takes place before that of a preexisting work or a sequel.) I don’t care if they filmed the whole bloody season first, if it’s airing in the correct order, it ain’t a “prequel.”

(*sigh*) I’m going back to 24: The Game. There’s a helluva lot more originality in the script for the game than there was in all of last season, anyway, and this year ain’t shaping up so good.

Oh, before I forget, yes, kids, I know I have been lax in the podcasting area. I’m working on that now, and should have some new shows posted within the week. Sorry ’bout that…

I’d like to ask for some input on an issue that is becoming pretty major on the OTR Digest…hit-and-run commercial interests.

Let me back up a little; routinely, people are sent to the OTR Digest to ask a question. It used to be folks asking about some family member or another who appeared, or at least was said to have appeared, on one program or another, and, “does anyone have or know about this show?”…that kind of question certainly belongs on the OTR Digest, and I’m sure everyone on the list is interested in checking their collections to see if they can help out.

But recently, the questions are coming more and more from commercial interests — people writing a book, working on a documentary, or the like; basically people with no interest whatsoever in Old-Time Radio other than their current “desperate need” for whatever it is they are going to be making money on. One example was someone with a company making money producing a radio series with an idea stolen from a certain famous newsman; hit - subscribe and request specific material; then run - unsubscribe and while doing so tell me he really doesn’t care about OTR, he just needed that one piece. Very recently a woman writing a book about someone hammered the Digest address (and every other address she could find on the server) with the same form letter over and over, asking for specific shows so she could use them in research for her book about this person - no interest in radio, just interested in the person. Heck, just today I was told this is why we are here, to help people who are involved in commercial projects.

Seriously.

Maybe it’s me, but I’m becoming offended by this…it’s almost as if the subscribers to the OTR Digest are expected to be an unpaid research service for these commercial interests demanding information or programs, and it never occurs to these folks how self-centered that assumption is. Understand, I’m not talking about the folks who are involved in the hobby; we have boatloads of authors (Martin Grams, Jim Cox, Stephen Kallis, David Siegel, and Anthony Tollin, just off the top of my head, and probably dozens more) who routinely participate in the Digest discussions. And I’m not talking about “legitimate” questions from folks dealing with their relatives…heck, I’ve participated more than once in finding long-lost programming for someone. I’m talking about hit-and-runners who don’t give a whit about OTR, and are only interested in having someone else provide them with research material they need “right away” and then vanish into the night never to be seen again.

Like I said, maybe it’s just me. I’d appreciate subscriber thoughts on this - I realize it’s pretty much my issue to deal with (and those who go out of their way to annoy me, by sending form letters to every address they can harvest, for example, will still be summarily ignored), but I want to know what you think about the issue. Please…discuss.

(Oh, just so there’s no confusion, this discussion is open to subscribers to the Digest…hit-and-runners justifying your “desperate need” should not apply… And one day soon I hope to bring up the contentious issue of on-line auction posts, but one major issue at a time, eh?)

Edit: Please be sure to read this comment before responding, to make certain we’re talking about the same thing. (Actually, I urge you to read all the comments, since they are universally interesting and well-thought-out.)

From Ars Technica: NY attorney general gets more ISPs to block alt.* newsgroups

Ars Technica checks out the new website, designed more as a promotion for Andrew Cuomo than anything to remove child pornography. Again, this is a good deal for the ISPs, since they can stop providing USENET services to their customers, but screws said customers since if they want USENET access to legal binaries, forcing them to sign up and pay a seperate provider like Ngroups to receive USENET.

Welcome to the unholy wedding of self-serving politicians and self-serving ISPs…