Don't mess around when burtations strike

In Los Angeles, when a reporter does this, it's cause for alarm and much legitimate speculation about on-air strokes or possible brain tumors. Scary stuff.

In Omaha, when a reporter does this, it means you must be watching Channel 6.

A flaming zip

The good news is that we're still a creative, innovative nation.

The bad news is it's increasingly in the service of the banal. The dumb. The pointless.

And the profane.

Enter the Flaming Lips' new YouTube project, something the group is calling a "cell phone symphony." It really is quite clever and innovative -- 12 separate videos that correspond to a single track of the band's new free single. (Profanity alert, etc., and so on . . . click at your own risk.)

The idea is for you and 12 of your closest mates to each download a track, go "one, two, ready, play" . . . and you're the Flaming Lips. Or your iPhones are the Flaming Lips . . . whatever.

AND WHAT is this new development in popular music? It's a little avant-garde number called "Two Blobs F***ing."

Paste magazine was all over the story. I hope it was practicing safe keyboarding:

The Flaming Lips have been known to experiment with ideas such as this in the past. The 1997 album Zaireeka is made up of four discs intended to played all at once. Around the same time, the band produced “The Parking Lot Experiments” and “The Boombox Experiments” inviting fans to simultaneously play cassette tapes issued by the band with varying pieces of music through their car stereos and ghetto blasters to create a psychedelic symphony conducted by the band.

Now, the next logical step has come to fruition with “Two Blobs F***ing,” which was specifically designed to be utilized with the mobile devices that dominate our increasingly digital culture. “Imagine the lo-fi symphonic joy that you, along with family, friends, pets, and others, will create at the touch of a button,” reads a press release. “The more devices, the more harmonic possibilities can be constructed. You and your device, at one with the music, become the orchestra, just as the Gods of Technology naturally intended it to be.”

OF ALL the things that could have been done as the first multitrack, interactive, do-it-yourself smart-phone single, we get vulgar nonsense like "Two Blobs F***ing." What could have been genius -- and kind of is genius from a technical standpoint -- ends up being birthed as the idiot offspring of cleverness and a dirty mind.

It's rather like a Philip Glass composition consisting of variations on the theme "There was a girl from Nantucket. . . ."

Call it the debasement of art. Listen for yourself, though. (I assembled all the audio tracks in a multitrack digital audio workstation so you wouldn't have to . . . or have to try to round up 11 friends with smart phones -- and a high threshold of pain.)


I'M NOT SURE what this is more of, prurient or pointless. Actually, what it's more of is 8th grade -- which is where, unfortunately, too much of our culture's "artistic" sensibility lies.

As it is, "Two Blobs" just leaves me with . . . nothing. I'm not shocked. Neither am I outraged.

The single didn't have much of a beat, and you couldn't really dance to it. I might give it a 42, Dick.

It didn't leave me smiling, and it troubled me not with deep thoughts. Really, it's nothing. And art -- music -- should not be nothing.

But we're addicted to pushing envelopes for the pushing's sake, even when we have nothing to say. Unfortunately, increasingly, we're a culture that has nothing to say.

It's almost as if we were 300 million blobs mentally masturbating. Call it a mortal sin of the mind.

Simply '70s: The real TV spiel

You say it's Feb. 14, 2011. I say your clock is fast.

Way fast. Thirty-seven years fast.

According to my clock, it's May 1974. Bell bottoms are all the rage. Platform shoes, too.

And we like to settle in on the living-room couch in front of the big console television set and watch all the cool kids dance to the top hits on American Bandstand.

Or The Real Don Steele Show on KHJ-TV out in Los Angeles.

Sorry, I meant Boss Angeles.


Hey, man, can you get that open flame away from my shirt? Please?

If you don't, I'm a cut you up bad with the big, big comb I got in my back pocket for my big, big hair.


Think I'm not serious? Maybe I'll introduce Gary Glitter to your 12-year-old sister, man. I hear he gives lip-syncing a whole new meaning.

Or maybe I'll make you watch Don's "Show Biz News Stuff" skit twice. Tina Delgado may be alive, ALIVE, but that bit just died, DIED.

Rock 'n' roll, man.

Power to the percolators!

Would you like to see the definition of insanity?

The epitome of consumerism run wild?

The alpha and the omega of insane faddishness?

Yet another example of planned obsolescence in the name of unnecessarily separating suckers from their no-longer-so-expendable income?

Making a damned cup of coffee a lot more complicated than it has to be?

HERE YOU GO, courtesy of Reuters:

Starbucks Corp, the world's biggest coffee chain, on Sunday said it plans to announce a new product for the single-serve market "in the near future."

Analysts long have expected Starbucks, which also sells Via instant coffee packets, to make a more aggressive move into the small, but fast-growing single-cup brewing segment.

Word of its new plan comes as Starbucks is getting ready for the March 1 termination of an agreement by which it provides coffee discs for Kraft Foods Inc's Tassimo one-cup home brewer.

Kraft's Tassimo brewer won some loyal fans with its bells and whistles, but it was bested by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' generally lower-cost Keurig brewing system that now has a near-monopoly in the single-cup category with roughly 80 percent market share.

While several analysts expect Starbucks to begin providing coffee for the Keurig system, some also have concerns about expiring Green Mountain patents, patent challenges and whether current Keurig users will migrate to the company's new machine.

"Starbucks is currently exploring all options to expand its presence in the premium single-cup coffee category, beyond our initial entry with Starbucks Via Ready Brew," Starbucks spokeswoman Lara Wyss told Reuters.

"Single-serve is still in the earliest stages and no clear delivery system has been established as the gold standard so it is important for us to look at all options," Wyss said.

HERE'S THE PROCESS: People threw out their old drip coffee pots and percolators because somebody invented the Mr. Coffee, which was way better because it was NEW! And because it cost more.

But the Starbucks took over the world with espresso drinks and other gourmet coffees, which you couldn't have at home unless you bought an expensive espresso machine, which was better than a $25 stove-top espresso pot because it, like, cost 10 times as much. Duh!

Espresso makers, though, were too complicated. What was needed was something as simple as a stove-top espresso pot, but would make only one cup of coffee using high-priced, proprietary little packets that fit in little coffee makers that cost $200. This was real progress, which is defined as quadrupling -- through technology -- what the average consumer might have paid in Luddite days for an espresso pot and a hot plate.


ENTER the Tassimo single-serving coffee maker, for which Starbucks supplies overpriced coffee in little proprietary packets. The Tassimo represented a tenfold leap in progress, as measured by the cost of making a cup of decent coffee increasing from roughly a dime to a dollar.

Progress, however, requires obsolescence. Thus, the inevitability of Keurig -- shoving Tassimo to the margins of java history, and the need for your average coffeeaholic to shell out another $120 bucks -- Look, Marge! Economical coffee at home! The new coffee machine is $80 cheaper than the one we bought last year! -- for the new coffee-making system that's incompatible with the old one.

AND STARBUCKS will be there with a product that we know will be superior to whatever swill you're drinking now . . . because it will cost so much more.

It's The American Way.

As a card-carrying Democrat, however, I have no interest in The American Way. So you'll see me in the kitchen of our little collective here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, spitting in the face of bourgeois society by making myself a cup of communist coffee in a proletarian pot.

On a prehistoric contraption called a stove.

Simply '70s: Punk in England in '76

From 1976, London Weekend Television takes a look at the British punk scene, in which we see the Sex Pistols before Sid Vicious, Clash before the "The" and Siouxsie before the Banshees.

We also see Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Topper Headon making some sense about why there had to be punk at that moment in musical history. And we see a calculatingly bored Johnny Rotten unable to grasp the contradictions of condemning bands like the Rolling Stones as "a business" while immersed in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle -- the real one, not the mockumentary -- up to one's spiky hairdo.

The mod, hip, now and happenin' -- or should that be "mawd, 'ip, now 'n' 'appenin' "? -- Janet Street-Porter presided over all of this, despite being nearly 40 at the time and well-ensconced in the establishment the punks so loathed.

Well, at least Rotten didn't spit on her.

Well, at least the rats like the place

If I still were a student at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, I would be dreaming of climes far distant and repeating "It's always darkest just before dawn" with the same kind of urgency that propelled Dorothy to furiously click her rubied heels and incant "There's no place like home."

I've written much about my old alma mater in this space. And much of that writing has been about how the educational powers that be in Baton Rouge allowed the place to become a crumbling dump unfit for animals, much less a city's best and brightest teenagers.

Eventually, it came to pass that those school-board powers that be were forced to recognize that something had to be done -- that something drastic had to be done, because the campus was too far gone for going along to get along.

That meant razing the whole campus, save the historic main building, and starting over. And that meant finding a temporary home for Baton Rouge High for a couple of years.

THAT NEW HOME turned out to be the recently abandoned Lee High School, killed by the soft bigotry of low expectations and the inevitable consequence of low performance. The school board shuttered Lee before the state Department of Education could take it over.

To be succinct, the former Lee High is a dump -- as evidenced by these clippings from the BRMHS student newspaper, Campus Currents. In some respects, it's apparently a worse dump than the old joint. And it's fitting, on so many levels, that a school named for a man revered in the South for battling human rights and history to the Confederacy's last breath should be a big, mid-century modern slave cabin.

Complete with the rat droppings.


NO ONE EXPECTS that people charged with the education and welfare of a city's children should turn a school's temporary quarters into the Taj Mahal. One would expect, however, that any administrator who gave a rat's ass about children under his care would at least get rid of rats' feces before the Baton Rouge High move-in date.

One would expect that the gym would be bee-swarm free. That the football field wouldn't be infested with fire ants.

In most places in these United States, you'd expect that. Baton Rouge isn't one of those places.

Baton Rouge is one of those places where people -- more specifically, white people -- complain about how high their low taxes are, then happily pay thousands per year in "private-school taxes," which simultaneously allows them to destroy public education, not worry about having destroyed public education, and keep their kids away from the Mad Max moonscape they made of public education.

IN OTHER WORDS, no one cares whether anybody cleans up what the rats left behind.

And no one can say with any confidence that the brand-new Baton Rouge High -- awaiting the next crop of a city's best and brightest come fall 2012 -- won't, in due time, be just another neglected dump that teachers have to muck out before their students show up.

Simply '70s: Raydio rules the radio

Let's just say that Raydio -- eventually to be known as Ray Parker Jr. and Raydio --kicked serious butt in 1978. Here's "Jack and Jill" . . . on Simply '70s.

Boogie on. We insist.

3 Chords & the Truth: Doo WHACK a doo

It's been a long week, and another big episode of the Big Show is in the can.

You might have to whack it on the side a time or two, like this old radio of mine, but it should play just fine after you do. Such is life at 3 Chords & the Truth.

The Big Show is a classic, and it's an adventure, but sometimes you just have tuf gi9b itioe oasf j a sheporuj odwpd kd -- WHAP! -- you just have to give it a sharp rap on the top of the cabinet when it aioDUY DWEPIE Kopejf wpqoie jfdu r acct ewoip u -- WHAP! -- starts to act up.

THEN YOU'LL be good to go.

Really.

I promise.

Is there anything more I need to say about this week's episode of 3 )PUEd ipoidsdixm mp3oi2urdfpxocr31209 nm wskqjdalmd qoiu02p o 3rp00234pirpo3 -- WHAP! -- 3 Chords & the Truth, your bastion of good music and eclectic playlists on the Internets?

I didn't think so. Carry on.

Download.

Listen.

Ebnoyw dk Engoo -- WHAP!

Enjoy.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be theefkj e3wlw -- WHAP! -- there. Aloha.

Hail to the Rubber Band Man

Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer might run for president?

Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap) Cancel! (snap)

FROM the Monroe (La.) News-Star:

Former U.S. Rep. and Gov. Buddy Roemer said he will announce within the next month whether he will be a candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 2012.

He said he’s “doing my homework,” but Roemer talks in an interview as if his mind is already made up. He’s discussed it with his family and board members of his Business First Bank and even has lined up a vice president to run the bank in his absence while campaigning.

“I’m getting ready to make my case with the American people,” he said Friday.

Roemer, who served one term as governor, 1988-92, before being squeezed out of a re-election bid by two candidates on political extremes — former Gov. Edwin Edwards and neo-Nazi and ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — said he’s working on a message that he believes would “wake America up.”

“As a banker, as a businessman, I thought I’d read President Obama’s budget a couple of months ago. It was a mistake,” he said. “He’s got a deficit every single year, smaller ones at first but three-quarters of a trillion dollars in the third year. By the 10th year the deficit is $1.4 trillion and the deficits are higher in the out years.”

This is a coffeepot

This is a coffeepot.

A coffeepot is what one uses to brew coffee. Not a "coffeemaker," a coffeepot. On a stove.

Making coffee in a coffeemaker is like leaving your children to be reared by a nanny. They might come out OK, but why did you bother having them in the first place?

Coffeepots are hands on. Coffeepots, especially in this Coffeemaker Age, make a statement. They stand out from the robotic hustling mob.

COFFEEPOTS are sacramental. Coffeepots are all about pouring a cup with the communion of saints, many of whom boiled a kettle of water and poured it into a coffeepot, where the hot water kissed the chocolate-hued grounds, then dripped into manifest destiny.

A coffeepot is grandma and grandpa. A coffeemaker is . . . is what, exactly?

This right here, friend, is a coffeepot. It seems to long predate Joe DiMaggio's first commercial for Mr. Coffee (he says, spitting on the ground, but never the grounds).

NOT ONLY is this a drip coffeepot, this is the finest example of a drip pot I've ever seen. It's made of heavy aluminum, and it wasn't made to wear out. Ever.

Mrs. Favog and I found it last weekend at an Omaha estate sale. The price -- $10. And now it once again fulfills its manifest destiny.

That would be making a damned fine cup of joe.

The 3rd I yi yi

Sometimes, having 20/20/20 vision isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Ask that Iraqi-born professor at New York University -- the one with a camera in the back of his head. Actually, make that the art professor and performance artist who used to have a camera implanted in the back of his head as part of a little something he's calling "The 3rd I."

Like I said, sometimes 20/20/20 vision isn't all that.

HERE'S THE LATEST on the trials of being a performance artist, as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education the other day:

An NYU professor triggered a debate about campus privacy in November when he decided to implant a camera in the back of his head for a year-long art project.

Now the professor, Wafaa Bilal, faces a much bigger obstacle than students who might not want their pictures taken. His body is rejecting part of the implanted device.

The Iraqi-born artist underwent surgery on Friday to remove a section of the camera apparatus, which is rigged to snap a picture every 60 seconds and publish the image on a Web site set up for the project. The pictures are also displayed on monitors in a physical exhibit at a museum in Doha, Qatar.

“I’m determined to continue with it,” Mr. Bilal, an assistant arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, said on Monday.

Under its initial configuration, the camera was mounted on three posts. Each led to a titanium base that was implanted between Mr. Bilal’s skin and skull. The procedure was done by a body-modification artist at a tattoo shop in Los Angeles. But the setup caused constant pain, because his body rejected one of the posts, despite treatment with antibiotics and steroids. So Mr. Bilal had that post surgically removed, leaving the other two intact.

THE COMPLICATIONS involved in attaching a camera to one's head have been well known for at least five decades, though miniaturization and advanced technology have made the procedure more and more feasible.

Above, we see a photo of an early attempt at what Bilal is attempting. Unfortunately, this late-1950s subject did not survive the surgery to remove this RCA TK-41 color camera.

Kinescopes at 11.

Simply '70s: Turning the world on with her smile

Fall 1970: I dunno . . . yeah, Mary Tyler Moore was great as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show a few years back, but is anybody really gonna buy a show about a "career woman"?

I give it half a season.

Who dat mad about dat Saints coach?

Sean Payton bought a house.

Well, lots of people buy houses, albeit lots fewer than before the economy blew up. But what makes this deal by the New Orleans Saints head coach stand out has to do with that old real-estate saw -- "Location, location, location."

In this case, the location of the Payton family's new residence is suburban Dallas.

But, according to Payton and the Saints, the coach isn't going anywhere. Well, professionally. Physically, the fam is hauling butt to north Texas, while Payton keeps a New Orleans-area place to crash during the workweek.

Most places, this isn't a massive issue. Bad PR form on Payton's part, but not a massive issue.

Then again, most places ain't Louisiana, and especially ain't New Orleans.

YOU'D EXPECT a certain amount of fan grousing anywhere. That's what sports fans do -- act like total fanatics. Likewise, everywhere has a certain set percentage of cranks and doofuses.

It's just that, in the Gret Stet, the percentage is a little on the high side.

OK . . . a lot on the high side.

You can tell that when you're reading stuff like this in the newspaper. By someone employed there. Paid good money (well, at least money) to produce stuff like this.

Thus, we have the spectacle of a "sports correspondent" for the Houma Courier/Thibodaux Daily Comet writing with such vehemence agin' a carpetbaggin' coach that one almost can picture Red Man juice flying from his twitching lips as he beat the hell out of his keyboard:

It seems the Paytons never wanted to live in Louisiana from the outset.

As a life-long Louisiana resident, this move by the Paytons tells me that they never liked our state or our way of life.

We have to deal with hurricanes and the BP oil spill has hurt our economy, but Louisiana always bounces back.

It is going to be hard to believe Payton when he promotes New Orleans or Louisiana when his family lives elsewhere.

If I was a Louisiana company that uses Payton as a spokesman, I would drop him immediately.

THAT'LL SHOW that Yankee son of a bitch! I bet he thinks he's better'n us.

Oh, wait.

I don't look at this move as Payton's first step to eventually working with the Dallas Cowboys. I look at it as an insult to New Orleans and our state. I guess we are just not good enough for the Paytons.

THERE you go, podna.

Of course, by that line of reasoning (such as it is), you also could argue the Gret Stet and its benighted citizenry "are just not good enough" for thousands upon thousands of its native sons and daughters -- and I am among that ever-growing number -- who willingly have chosen to move not only their families but themselves the hell out of not only New Orleans, but out of Louisiana altogether.

It happens . . . particularly in states that live their civic lives (such as they are) at the top of all the bad national lists and the bottom of all the good ones.

In other words, fat, disproportionately violent and uneducated is no way to go through life. Or have your kids think is normal.

That's a cruel way to put it, but what the hell other verdict is being delivered by the cold, hard facts of demography? What other verdict is being delivered by the history of a state perpetually unable to effectively govern itself?

What other verdict is being delivered by endemic political corruption? By lack of opportunity for its college graduates (underrepresented though they might be as a percentage of total population)?

AND THEN you have the disaster area that is New Orleans. Oh . . . and there was a hurricane there, too.

Listen, all you have to do is look at the state budget, and then look at the kind of racial mau-mauing surrounding the potential merger of one really bad mostly black New Orleans college into a mediocre mostly white one -- and then wonder what the hell percentage is there in such a dysfunctional civic landscape?

You could, but folks in my home state would rather work themselves into high dudgeon that some fellow from California who went to college in Illinois has not come to see life in the Gret Stet as the ultimate meaning of life. Face it, some folk just ain't gonna embrace the suck.

And when you think about it -- which Louisianians don't . . . and won't -- perhaps the biggest part of that never-ending suck is that there is not one chromosome of introspection in the Louisiana genome.

Not one.

This explains a lot. Including, probably, Sean Payton's real-estate transactions.

Simply '70s: Oh, man. Like . . .wow!

The hippies were right.

The s*** really was good that year, man. I could have sworn I saw a little dude driving a motorboat around the crapper.

But, like, that's impossible, man.

Pass the Bugles and the Boone's Farm, would you?

The bosses of me

Scout the Dog (left) and Molly the Dog happily pose inside the semiwarm house Tuesday on a frigid, icy Omaha afternoon.

They tell me it beat going outside -- it was, like, 1 below zero at the time -- that it seemed to amuse me, and that they try to be indulgent toward their pets. I can't speak for Mrs. Favog, but this pet is grateful for his masters' beneficence.

Olbermann heads to Caffeine Dreams

This just in on the latest career move by former left-wing MSNBC flamethrower Keith Olbermann. No, not the Current TV gig . . . the next one:

Feb. 27, 2013

OMAHA -- Firebrand cable-TV personality Keith Olbermann today announced to passing traffic on a frigid street corner in this Midwestern city that he will stage yet another media comeback next week, thumbtacking typewritten "special comment" fliers to the bulletin board at a popular coffee shop.

The former Current TV host and longtime liberal icon said his latest basic-cable falling out was a "blessing in disguise" which would allow him to explore "the postmodern, anticontextual steam-punk alternative-media scene" at Caffeine Dreams, 4524 Farnam St.

Making an obscene gesture at a pickup truck sporting a red, white and blue "God's Own Party" bumper sticker, Olbermann said he expected to schedule his post-technological postings for Wednesdays at 10:35 a.m. -- give or take 20 minutes, depending on whether the No. 2 Metro bus makes it to the 46th and Dodge bus stop on time. The midmorning commentaries are to coincide with the onetime opinion-maker's weekly triple brevé with an extra espresso shot and fat-free half-and-half.

Olbermann exited Current unexpectedly three months ago, after calling former Vice-President Al Gore, founder of the cable channel, a "poorly-endowed, fat-ass, proto-Republican enviro-phony whose inconvenient truth, alas, was that he wasn't man enough for a fine side of Tennessee ham like Tipper." Gore immediately dismissed the outspoken TV personality after having his Secret Service detail brand "AM NOT NEITHER" on Olbermann's forehead.

That led to a monthslong disappearance for the TV talker, who previously, according to one former colleague, "napalmed his bridges" at CNN, ESPN and MSNBC before landing at Current TV in February 2011. At the time, cable-TV analysts were optimistic that Olbermann easily would be able to increase the channel's viewership a thousandfold, to a daily audience of roughly 30,000.

Those predictions turned out to be wildly overstated, and tensions between Olbermann and Gore mounted proportionately with Current's ratings disappointments.

Olbermann turned up at the Omaha Greyhound station a week ago, paying various transients a dollar to tell their "homies," as the fading TV star put it, about his post-mass media comeback on the Caffeine Dreams bulletin board.

When contacted by a reporter, a coffee-shop barista said she thought it would be all right if Olbermann posted his special comments on the bulletin board, so long as the owner OK'd it and it didn't keep customers from getting to the self-serve café Americano carafes.

Baby, it's cold outside . . .

This weather can't last . . .

(But baby, it's cold outside)

It really can't stay . . .
(But baby, it's cold outside)

Got to go away . . .
(But baby, it's cold outside)

Last few days have been . . .
(Been hoping the heat'd kick in)

Nothin' but ice . . .
(Warm air would be so very nice)

My mother will start to worry . . .
(She probably froze in a hurry)

My father will be pacing the floor . . .
(He's such a hypothermic bore)

So really I'd better scurry . . .
(Beautiful. You'd die a death quite icy)

Well, maybe just half a drink more . . .
(Turn on the weather while I pour)

The neighbors might think . . .
(Baby, it's bad out there)

Say what's in this drink?
(I thought it was antifreeze)

I wish I knew how . . .
(Your eyes are frozen open now)

To break this Arctic spell . . .
(Here's a wool cap, it'll feel just swell)

I ought to say no no . . .
(Your chattering teeth are getting worser)

At least I'm going to say I tried . . .
(But, hey, your battery died!)

I really can't stay . . .
(Listen . . . you'd freeze, no doubt)

Baby it's cold outside!

'Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?'

If a radio station doesn't make a sound because the computer crashes, will anybody be there to not hear anything?

Or whatever.

We're getting closer and closer to an answer we radio-lovers don't want to hear, I'm afraid, in this world where technology can replace human beings but has no power to replace itself when it dies.

Back in the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth and played vinyl records in broadcasting studios powered by vacuum tubes, the only thing that could keep a radio station off the air for a day and a half would be a transmitter failure, a fallen tower or the death of the mastodons running inside the giant mastodon wheels powering the generators at the electric plant.

NOW, IN OUR modern, technically advanced times, all it takes is a little computer crash to bring down a radio station like KRNU at the University of Nebraska, according to the Omaha World-Herald:

A computer error originally made it look as if the station, 90.3 KRNU, had lost everything over the weekend, said Rick Alloway, a UNL broadcasting professor in charge of the station.

While the first check of the computer system that holds all of the station’s files suggested a hard-drive crash, the error was later attributed to a more minor hardware failure.

IN RADIO, at least, progress means willingly turning oneself into a technological quadriplegic, as it were, one dead battery away from being trapped, helpless, in a marooned wheelchair. Or studio, as the case may be.

God forbid we give a live DJ a stack of compact discs, tapes or records and tell him or her to create some magic. What, did the HAL 9000 running KRNU eject all the staff out the airlock and into the man-killing Nebraska cold?

"I know I've made some very poor decisions recently," the automation probably told Alloway, "but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you."

THAT'S just what it told every other station as the bodies piled up outside the airlock.

"Daisy, Daisy . . . give me . . . your . . . answer . . . do. . . ."

Satan goes by 'Anonymous'

Click on E-mails to read.

Satan never sleeps.

That's because he's too busy leaving anonymous comments on blogs and websites.

If you're one of those people inclined to doubt the existence of hell and the devil , look at these comments I got today on what I thought was a fairly whimsical post on the Sex Pistols and the state of the Establishment, circa January 1978.


IT'S A HELL of a thing, no?

Obviously, "Anonymous" is one disturbed individual, and an angry one, too. Obviously, this is why I moderate comments to Revolution 21's Blog for the People. Obviously, these got deleted.

And -- obviously -- I'm now making an example of them . . . and the sick soul who has nothing better to say than this.

Where does such rage come from? How do you explain such an all-consuming, intense hatred of all humanity? And can anyone deny this poor soul exists in some very real, albeit private (for now), manifestation of hell?

Mental illness or some manner of deviant socialization can get you most of the way to an explanation, but not all the way to one. It doesn't -- at least not in my opinion -- get you all the way to that degree of nihilism, that level of hatred of the human race itself. Mental illness or sociological deficits can explain the brokenness, but neither can explain the phenomenon of evil.

What we have here is evil -- and all sociology or psychology can shed light upon are the fissures that allow evil to penetrate the soul and do what it will. This is what Satan looks like when he thinks the cameras aren't rolling; this is what he sounds like when he's at a loss for words.

I SUPPOSE my disturbed correspondent is some sort of punk who -- again, obviously -- takes issue with the aforementioned post. He, she or it is a cautionary tale of what can happen when one takes this punk thing entirely too seriously.

Especially that "I am an antichrist" part in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." Not the Antichrist, mind you, but an antichrist.

The real Antichrist will be a much better writer with a much larger vocabulary.

Note to the convention and visitors people

Dear Omaha Convention
and Visitors Bureau:

I love your website. You're right, there's plenty to do and see in our vibrant city -- people will love it here. They might decide to move here, even.

Just one thing, though. You need to get folks in the door.

While I think your website does a great job in that respect, there is one glaring oversight. See that "Omaha weather" thingy at the top right of the page? Get rid of it from October 1 through May 1.

"Hey, people, come to Omaha! Look! Right now, it's 2 DEGREES!!!"

In the PR and travel biz, I think that's known, technically, as a "non-starter." Unless, of course, you're marketing our fine area exclusively to the fine citizens of Barrow, Alaska, and International Falls, Minn.

Love and kisses,

Me