It’s Friday (officially) and as I’m out of the office today, it’s nice to actually listen to some music in my living room. Here’s what I’ve spun up this morning.
Yesterday, I’d mentioned having seen the Silversun Pickups perform in the afternoon in the office, but I’d actually seen them just a few hours earlier as well – when they performed on “It’s On with Alexa Chung.” Pretty cool to have seen it from the control room, but this is what aired on television as they performed “Panic Switch.”
It’s Thursday, I’ve got a summer Friday tomorrow, so consider it weekend time for me at the end of the day. Woo hoo! So spin up your music player, drop ten songs, and get going.
Here’s today’s random selection of what my iTunes spun up this afternoon.
It’s important to note that this random ten had a short performance break, where I caught a few songs from the Silversun Pickups. Check out a photo I snagged of them playing downstairs from me in the office.
You know the drill, spin up your music player, drop the first ten tracks to hit the air. And yes, I’m hoping that people like Costa will continue sticking these out there. It’s a meme you know.
Here’s the first ten songs that cranked their way out of my iTunes this morning, for your viewing amusement. Yep, I was missing the Friday Random Ten threads. Sue me.
For those of you not familiar with it, ESPN regularly runs a series of segments called “Outside the Lines,” featuring various stories and different “looks” at things inside the world of sports. The latest one, “Pushing the Limits,” takes a look at action sports athletes and what they face on a daily basis in their jobs and personal passions, with a lot of focus on the tremendously insane injuries, crashes, and life-changing things they’re subject to. I’ve always been a fan of the X Games, AST/Dew Tour events, and so forth, and you usually get a minute or two of this stuff here and there while watching the major features in the sports – but this was an intriguing piece that I just had to share.
A couple of weeks ago, I read this article where the New York Times‘ Corey Kilgannon gave an update on “Short Al” – whose real name is Albert Kaufman – a caller heard on an almost daily basis in the overnight hours on WFAN’s sports talk radio airwaves, for years and years. As the story goes, sometime last year, Al stopped making his regular “appearances” on the station, and a lot of people wondered why. Kilgannon gets all those details nailed, and this week, Steve Somers – who hosted the overnight hours for a lot of years – had “Short Al” on the phone for quite a bit of his show. You can stream or download the links, dated July 22nd, on WFAN.com.
But that’s not totally the point of this post — reading it got me thinking about WFAN, and stations like it across the country (the world?) that have dedicated listeners, something that I’m beginning to wonder whether it will translate to the “younger” generations in this country. I’ve got a couple of other baseball-specific posts queued up in my brain for another day, but for today I’d like to stick to the station, and the experience of listening to it on a regular basis – so I’ll go back to the beginning.
Sometime early on in high school – it might have been 1990 or somewhere thereabouts – I was attempting to not melt during the summer, and the air conditioner on my floor of the house was outside of my bedroom. So, I chose to get a couple of nights of sleep outside of my bedroom, with the “house” stereo on a mega-low volume, WFAN 660 on the air. It wasn’t about the din of the radio at that point, it was just one of those “I’ve gotta listen to something and I really like sports” choices. Fast forward a couple days later, and I’m pretty sure I was hooked. Almost every single day since then, I’ve made a point of listening to the station overnight, as low as I can possibly go, when going to bed. I don’t hear it all, obviously, but I swear sometimes the sleepytime osmosis allows me to inhale sports information that I’ve gleaned when I wake up. When traveling, I find a local station when there’s no Internet, otherwise I stream the station from my hotel room. I’ve even got a nifty pillow that plugs into my iPhone that goes underneath my pillow at home so I can listen and not be a bother. Addiction? Probably. Healthy one? I don’t see why not.
You see, it’s not that I *have* to have something on in the background. Sure, I like the noise aspect, but I find that like myself, there’s a lot of people awake from 1-6am that like to talk about sports, and unlike myself, a lot of those people got to see baseball in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s (heck, I missed hte 70’s, too). It’s fun to hear them call in and talk about how different baseball was without the designated hitter (no, really), about the NHL with like six teams, or when Frank Gifford, Bart Starr, and others graced the gridiron. I’m not much of a caller myself, so call me a voyeur, I suppose, but there’s something about it that’s kind of a neat thing. It’s less about the trivia trading banter that goes on during the daytime hours when callers are cranked through like meat through a sausage grinder on most talk radio stations, and more about the actual discussions.
Beyond that, it’s sort of this midpoint-speed medium. It has the instantaneous quality of reporting back on the West Coast games when the Yankees are playing the Angels (which typically ends poorly), all while letting some guy who actually got to see Hank Aaron hit a record home run without the aid of a television recall that for the rest of us. Sure, I’m getting it most days without the aid of my clock radio, in higher quality and without the droning buzz of AM in the background, but it’s still the same.
So therein lies the question. Are talk radio call-in lines destined to go the way of older-only listeners and callers, will those of us listening now ultimately turn into said callers, or will the volume change (in volume of listeners and callers, that is) for the worse over the next decade or two? After having listened to this type of station for two decades now, it certainly “feels” different, but that could be just that I’m 20 years older than when I started. What do you think? Do you have this same kind of interest in talk radio – sports or otherwise – and do you think it’s evolving at all, for better or worse?
Here’s wedding video #2, encompassing a lot of moments from the time the ceremony ended through most of the night. Excellent Flip camera stylings from John have brought most of the video here, so huge props to go him for taking the time ALL DAY LONG, and to Brett for the Friday video you saw earlier. That’s all I’ll say for now, the video speaks for itself. We’ve got some more show to put together, plus some fun video from our trip to Whistler and Vancouver.
It’s probably got a little bit of NSFW in the middle for language, but that’s about it, in case you were wondering. Without further ado, here it is!
So it’s Thursday night, the last night of our trip to Whistler, Vancouver, and Seattle, and we’re staying at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel here in Seattle. We found an amazing room while shopping online a few days back, and given my penchant for the Fairmont (we ate dinner, tea, and a number of trips to the outdoor bar at the one in Whistler this past two weeks and spent some time with the awesome team over there), we figured it was a great way to close out our trip to stay at this hotel. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we headed out to Purple for some wine and dinner with a friend, and came back to the Fairmont to change before walking down towards the Puget Sound.
Upon, returning, let’s just say we got the excellent treatment from the staff here at the hotel. I’ll let the video tell the story. There’s an s-word or two if you’re into censoring those sort of thing, so cover the kiddies’ ears. Otherwise, enjoy Lara’s finest video to date.
We’ve got lots more video to come to share with everyone, but I thought this was just to rich not to post asap. Cheers!