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Let's talk talk radio - Why have discussions when you can listen?
Posts
Nope. A bullshit reason would be, "All he does is talk about girls like a pervert."
is my reason a bullshit one? cause really, his voice makes me want to murder small teddy bears. it's not what he says, it's literally his voice.
Yeah I can try the streaming thing, I know my old classical music station does stream, but I haven't tried it down here yet, mainly because i'm terribad with time zones.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
It's a silly one because I don't know how you walk through the world hearing voices you don't like that seem to drive you to violent urges. Instead of ignoring them like normal people.
So there's a show on Sirius, Geektime, that's gonna start going weekly starting next Friday. Pretty general comic book / nerdy stuff, but they manage to get some pretty notable folks on like Jon Favreau and they even got James Cameron for a few minutes this week.
Then they get Kim Komando. who recommends software and hardware technology stuff and talks about the newest stuff. Her show is decent.
Then they get Lars Larson, who is pretty biased to the right, but his show isn't on often. Michael Smerkonish is on sometimes, and he is a lefty, but his show isn't all that interesting.
Then Dr. Joy Browne who gives general relationship advice that seems good enough.
I honestly have the exact same reaction to his voice. It is a serious fingernails-on-the-chalkboard experience. Not Tom Hanks though. He's also unfunny. Stern, not Tom Hanks, who is sometimes funny.
Radiolab, This American Life, Car Talk and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me - :^: If NPR was a subscription service
I would pay for it.
I don't get it. He sounds like a guy. It's not like his voice is high-pitch. I can link you a couple videos easily showing you far more annoying voices. Hell, he's had two guys work for his show, High-Pitch Mike and High-Pitch Eric, who actually have awful voices.
Can't explain it, so I just avoid it. by not listening to Stern and not watching movies with Hanks.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Aside from all that, the one thing that shocked me more was someone on here talking about the TICKET. I'm a total P1 for them, I think they're absolutely hilarious, especially Mike Reiner. Just about everything he say's is golden. I like Corby too and Bob and Dan, although I thought most of them were the same person until recently. I'm just utterly shocked that I would see a ticket shoutout on the PA forums.
Oh I understand. I can't listen to Ed Shultz for more or less the same reason.
Well there are other reasons too, but yeah.
Geektime I heard for the first time today, just by chance. I knew it was a thing, yeah, but I didn't know when it aired and boom there it was this afternoon (had to stop listening when it was time to go to work though).
Diane Rehms. dear god. this woman sounds like she is about to fall over dead, and is already in the middle of a stroke. It's awful. I feel bad saying that because she is obviously 150 years old, and she must of been a big deal when the radio was invented to still have a show.
Which is generally preferable to raving lunactic holy-roller.
You can fight stupid with smart.
You can't fight crazy with anything.
She is still a better interviewer than literally anyone you will find on the TV.
It's like a radio show done by members of the PA forums. They actually get a lot of good talent on there too. Robert Kirkman was just on recently. As well as some famous marvel artists (whoever the guy who created gambit is, I'm not a marvologist.)
You got out while the getting was good. Art Bell is an amazing host who can make anything interesting, and who was usually upfront about his show being for entertainment purposes. The guys they brought in to replace him, especially George Noory, are awful hosts who make everything sound boring, can't keep track of the interviews, and use the show as a platform for their insane (and criminally boring) beliefs.
It's too bad, because in the 90s Coast to Coast was a wonderful show. I listened to it nearly every night and didn't believe a single word that anyone said, but it was so bizarre and fantastic that I was always glad to listen again. Stuff like Mel's Hole, the Bigelow Ranch, and Al Bielek. Classic guests who talked utter nonsense for hours at a time, but did it in an entertaining and engaging manner.
I used to listen to a whole lot of general talk shows, news and current affairs stuff. They're great for a while, but eventually you realize what most of the hosts already know:
A: The people who listen to talk shows and the people who call talk shows are completely different groups. It usually takes a special kind of person to call a talk show and want to give their opinions out over the air, and an even specialer type of person to do it multiple times. Even the most efficiently run 3 hour show isn't going to take more than a couple dozen calls per hour, yet their listener base can be in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. When a host lays out a topic and accepts calls you're not even getting an inaccurate measure of what people might think about the topic. It's completely meaningless.
B: Certain topics are more popular than others, and so they get recycled constantly. Abortion, gun laws, animals, stuff like that. You will hear these same 5-10 topics every 3 weeks. Whenever a host doesn't have a topic in the news to talk about, they'll go right back to these because they are 100% guaranteed to get calls.
C: This dovetails from the last point. Basically, you eventually realize that call-in radio is a wasted, useless, and superfluous format. There is no coherent argument, the questions can never be answered, the problems never get solved. There are few talk show hosts that will even admit that, because they need people to keep going in order to fill the time slot. If the topic they're debating gets solved 3 callers in they still have another 15 minutes before the break, so they can't pack it in and move on. They have to keep taking calls and talking in circles.
D: There isn't enough time, even in most long-form radio shows, to get into details about most topics. But that's also one reason why I still enjoy long-form (2-3 hour) radio shows, especially for interviews. Unlike television, the guest and the host can take the time to digress and have actual conversations after they've run through the 10 standard questions that every interviewer asks anyway.
There's a local radio host named Jim Richards who is my all-time favourite regular format talk show host. He's smart and extremely funny, and also very open about the process of talk radio. He's a guy who will admit that a topic has run its course after 3 calls and move on to something else. And when I started listening to him he had a terrible time slot and almost never got calls, on any topic, unless it was a crazy person. Yet he also had very good ratings. He'd get on air and complain about how nobody would call, beg for calls, he'd even call OUT to try and get calls. It was awesome.
I also really enjoyed Phil Hendrie before his retirement. His entire schtick was a deconstruction of talk radio at the expense of the callers and for the pleasure of the listeners, and he incredibly talented and was surprisingly consistent with the funny considering he did 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week. I still listen to some of his best shows, and I'll always have a soft spot for some of his characters.
Yeah, once you listen to her enough to get used to her voice, she's really good.
Howard Stern might be the greatest interviewer of all time. He usually get's (very very) famous people to admit things to him that they would never admit anywhere else. And usually that has very little to do with asking them about their sex lives. Which he does also.
I imagine that if I actually cared in the slightest about any of the people he interviewed I'd appreciate his skills more. But since I don't, I don't.
Yeah they played some of that interview when I was listening. I thought the show was going to be like, "Trendy to be a geek" kind of thing, but goddamn these guys know way more than I do.