Category: Radio

Dead air

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 52 Comments
KRCC is just one of the three public broadcasters we support.

CPR, we hardly knew ye.

The Right got another zopilote feather in its asshat with the news that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will cease operations in 2026.

What’s the problem? Why, money, of course. There’s just not enough to go around! Writes The New York Times:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been in the cross hairs of Republicans for decades. Conservative policy advocates, legislators and presidents argued persistently that the public shouldn’t be responsible for financing media they perceived as having a liberal bias. But repeated attempts to defund public broadcasters failed, until this year.

Congress voted last month to claw back more than $500 million of the organization’s annual funding in a narrow vote that played out along party lines. That forced the corporation into a cash crunch.

Hey, $500 million here, $500 million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Money for stuff like — oh, I don’t know — say, a $30 million military parade to give Felonious Punk a chubby on his birthday. Or $1 billion to refurb’ a Qatari jet that he will take with him to his “library,” which will be a walk-in closet full of fuck books, golf scorecards (see the Fiction stacks), and classified documents (homeless dude thumbing through them whilst on the shitter).

And then there’s the tab for flying this fat cunt around the world to visit his golf courses, where the locals gather to jeer, snigger, and call him a fat cunt. We can call him a fat cunt right here at home for free. See? I just did it. Didn’t cost one of the pennies we won’t be making in 2026.

Maybe that’s why the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got it in the neck. No pennies for that crowd.

Charles in the morning

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Charles Pelkey circa 1987 at Wyoming Public Radio.

Our old pal Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey is switching gears again.

He’s worn a lot of hats in his time — newspaperman, press secretary, cycling journalist, lawyer, legislator — and now he’ll be wearing headphones as the local host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” at Wyoming Public Media.

It’s not his first radio rodeo, mind you — Charles had the cans on at Wyoming Public Radio in the mid-Eighties, long before joining VeloNews in 1994. He may not have used a trebuchet to launch a piano into low earth orbit — not yet, anyway — but like the “Northern Exposure” deejay Chris in the Morning he has done some time in Alaska.

These days Charles and his wife, Diana, live within walking distance from the NPR affiliate in Laramie, so he probably won’t have to break out the tattered LUG kit and rusty two-wheeler for his daily commute, which should begin in the next week or two. But anything is possible, as he’s shown us many, many times before.

When Herself and I got the word about the new gig we immediately signed on as sustaining members of Wyoming Public Radio, which just happens to be running its annual spring membership drive. They’ll be rocking “The Thistle & Shamrock” here in about 15 minutes, so why the hell not? That’s a two-fer you can two-step to.

If you want to join us, and WPM, tell ’em Charles Pelkey brung ya. And don’t touch that dial. …

R.I.P., Bob Edwards

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Bob Edwards (pictured in 1989) started his career at NPR as a newscaster and then hosted All Things Considered before moving to Morning Edition. Photo by Max Hirshfeld for NPR

“The voice we woke up to.” That’s NPR’s Susan Stamberg speaking of Bob Edwards, who for just short of a quarter century was the host of “Morning Edition,” until the bosses gave him the shove in 2004.

Heart failure and complications of bladder cancer gave Edwards his final push on Saturday. He was 76.

I spent a lot of years getting the news from Edwards and his people courtesy of one NPR affiliate or another. KRCC-FM in Bibleburg; KUAZ in Tucson; one or another of the three stations I could get in Corvallis, Ore. (KOAC, KOPB, or KLCC); KCFR in Denver; and others along the long and winding road between newspapers.

“Morning Edition” became particularly important in Corvallis, where I was working for an afternoon paper for the first and last time. Edwards and the NPR news crew gave me a head’s-up as to what might await me when I staggered hungover into the Gazette-Times newsroom at stupid-thirty and started scanning the wires for nightmares to pour into the holes around the ads.

You’d never have known he was from Kentucky (like me, he shed any original-equipment accent). Unlike me, he was drafted and did a hitch in the Army, in South Korea.

Edwards wrote books, hosted a program on SiriusFM, and — according to his wife, Windsor Johnston, a reporter and news anchor for NPR — never got over his dismissal from that outfit, where just four years earlier his work had been honored and described by a Peabody awards committee as “two hours of daily in-depth news and entertainment expertly helmed by a man who embodies the essence of excellence in radio.”

“He was a stickler for even the tiniest of details and lived by the philosophy that ‘less is more,’” Ms. Johnston wrote on Facebook. “He helped pave the way for the younger generation of journalists who continue to make NPR what it is today.”

That’s a helluva mic drop. Peace to him, and to his friends, family, and loyal listeners.

‘Trails are gonna wash out in this rain. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments

This is not the work of Hurricane Hilary, which should carve a much wider swath through the high desert.

COVID finally came for Ken Layne of Desert Oracle Radio. But he did his usual Friday-night stint at the Z107.7 FM mic anyway, and you can catch the podcast of same at all the usual places.

“Some people say you should not do your radio show when you’re sick in the head. But I am not one of those people,” he explains.

Layne is waiting for Hurricane Hilary to visit the Mojave — it’s something new for a lot of the local desert rats, but as an old Nawlins hand he knows a little something about rigging for heavy weather.

This week’s episode is heavy on advice for riding out the storm. But he also recounts his bout with The Bug, a random prowler testing his door, and the apparent death and resurrection of a big ol’ spiny desert lizard who is a regular on his patio (but not the radio show).

“Be careful, friends,” Layne advises, adding, “And once you’re prepared, it’s time to hunker down. Enjoy the excitement — nobody ever says that on the weather report — but it’s exciting. It’s real life, it’s right here. No Netflix necessary.”

No excitement for us here in The Duck! City — Hilary will be giving us a miss — but we might catch a little wind burn from her passage. I guess it’s Netflix for us. How about you?

Just deserts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

Even the cacti are hunting shade.

“Just put a chair underneath the swamp cooler and deal with it all like a pro.” — “When Everything Goes Wrong,” Ken Layne, Desert Oracle Radio

Gonna be a hot one — or two, or three, or four, or more — throughout the desert Southwest.

Especially out there in Desert Oracle country, where Ken Layne chats with author Claire Nelson about the time when her day hike suddenly got too hot to handle.

Here in the Duke City I’ve finally bowed to the elements and switched the Honeywells from “heat” to “cool,” because we’ve been having too much of the one and not nearly enough of the other.

And it will only get hotter. The National Weather Service predicts high temperatures of 5 to 15 degrees above normal for about a week (!) as a strong high-pressure system blisters New Mexico like a chile on the grill.

We didn’t need no steekeeng air conditioning back in Bibleburg. Nobody made us move to the upper edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. We knew it was wrong, but we did it anyway.

And whaddaya wanna bet one or both of us goes out onto the sunbaked trails to get the ol’ heart rate up for a while? No brain, no pain. If you don’t hear from me for a couple days call the Duke City trash collectors. I’ll be that bag of bones under the prickly pear somewhere in the Sandia Foothills Open Space.