January 2010 Archives

I'm not watching the Grammys at the moment, because I can't. Oh, I COULD, if I really wanted to, but short of finding a stream set to CBS' east coast feed, I'll have to wait until 8 pm Pacific. But I don't really care enough to watch much of it. I know Silversun Pickups didn't win best New Artist (not that they're "new," but I long ago gave up trying to figure out the nominating criteria), and I guess Kings of Leon won something, but it doesn't matter much to me.

The Grammys, though, are my generation's Get Off My Lawn moment. You can't stand that today's music is so Auto-Tuned, overproduced, and derivative. Your parents hated your music, too. And "those kids today" will someday hate their kids' music.

The difference is, of course, that we're right.

So I may watch a few minutes of the thing when it comes on in a few hours, but I already know that Lady Gaga and Elton John open the thing and Stephen Colbert says something and Pink does an aerial circus act of some sort, and the Black Eyed Peas win something, which says something about the unfairness of life. It makes me sort of happy that I have to go to sleep at 9, like every good senior citizen....

I was gonna scan some stuff but the scanner driver crapped out and I only now have it working again. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, I saw an item on local TV news about some elderly women who finally got their bat mitzvahs. (For some reason, the CBS2/KCAL9 website doesn't have the story or the footage) I thought it was nice, but a couple of things came to mind:

1. I haven't been to a bar or bat mitzvah since my own, I believe.

2. They WANTED to be bat mitzvahed? Really? I would have done anything to get OUT of my own bar mitzvah.

Really, if you, like me, aren't all that serious about the organized aspects of your religion, is there a reason you'd want to stand in front of a hundred or more people, many of them family and friends, and croak out some passages in a language you don't understand full of weird guttural noises akin to clearing phlegm from the back of your throat while wearing an uncomfortable suit (husky, of course) and realizing that you DON'T REMEMBER ANY OF WHAT YOU MEMORIZED? That's something you WANT to do?

I did it. I don't know how, but I... well, I DO know how. I wrote the phonetic version in the margins of my prayer book. My relatives told me I read beautifully. It's easy if you have the script... and can read it.

The good thing is that you get money and gifts for being bar mitzvahed. The bad thing is that it's horribly embarrassing, drives you insane with fear for practically the entire year leading up to it, and, no matter what they tell you, you don't actually "become a man" by doing it. That comes later, usually, and no amount of "OH GOD!" makes THAT a religious ceremony. Not for most religions, anyway.

It was important, though, to my mother, so I did it. (The bar mitzvah, that is. The other one, I wasn't going to inform her about.) And for that, I'm glad I had my bar mitzvah, even if I can barely recall it and it left some scars. If I hadn't, though, I wouldn't try to make up for it later like those nonagenarians in the news story. If I reached 90 and hadn't had a bar mitzvah, I'd be celebrating having gotten away without having to do it. Although they wouldn't put me on TV for that.

They killed off a couple of radio stations in Montreal today. One was a Francophone all-News station, the other was Oldies. Neither was making money, even though the budgets had been slashed and the oldies station was down to one host. The licensee just shut 'em down and handed in the licenses.

There's no question that the stations were, in ratings and revenue, dogs, and you can't blame Corus for wanting to dump them. But it says volumes about the state of radio in general and AM radio in particular that two 50,000 watt signals, covering a huge swath of North America and based in a city with millions of residents, were not only shut down but turned in to the government. No sale, no donation, just... gone. There's no use for 50,000 watts on 690 or 940 AM?

Nope. And while there are some additional factors to consider in this case, namely the language split in the market that makes the area, effectively, two markets, those are both still big markets. The Anglo station tried News and Talk to no avail; it got creamed by CJAD, the heritage talker. Oldies was a non-starter. Sports is already being done on another station. What was left? Maybe Adult Standards, but how old can your audience be before you have zero ad sales?

The first inclination of the radio geeks among us is to say, hey, give it to me, I'll fix it. But could you? In 2010, unless you have a giant heritage station, can you just fix an AM station? If you're not, say, WABC or WCBS or WINS, KYW or WIP, WBBM, WGN, or WLS, KFI, KNX, KGO... if you're new and the underdog, can you make an AM signal work? In that case, it doesn't seem like there was anyplace for either station to go, English or French. Even multicultural/ethnic programming's on FM there now. AM? Not in the game.

This will not be the last time you see this happening, in Canada or in the U.S. More stations, faced with 65-to-dead demographics and crippling competition, not to mention land under their towers that could be redeveloped, will likely throw in the towel. Not all of them, mind you. But there are so many strikes against AM -- elderly demos, terrible sonic qualities, interference, the dreaded digital "IBOC hash" -- that plowing ahead may seem like a permanent losing proposition.

It's sad to see AM940 and Info690 go. But, truth be told, it was just a matter of time.

This week's All Access newsletter is supposed to be about the importance of building a loyal audience so that you can survive in the new media world. I'm not sure I achieved that, but here it is anyway:

So, is the iPad the revolutionary gadget that will change media forever, just like all the hype said it would be? We won't know that for a while, but, truth be told, that revolution started long ago, and it's going to have an impact on your career.

Okay, we're done here. I'm gonna go prepare to watch the Big Game, meaning, of course, the Pro Bowl. Football played by guys who don't want to be there and don't want to get hurt... does it get any better than that?

There's a passage in Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked" that explains a lot. In it, a character who works at a small museum examines a picture from 1964 of four people on holiday and wonders what the circumstances of the picture were, what the day was like for the people in the picture, what they were thinking at that moment. I read that and saw something of myself in that passage.

I'm aware that some people will look at the things in which I'm fascinated -- old commercials, ads, pictures from decades ago -- and wonder who would care. It was garbage then, they'll think, and garbage now. Trivia forever. What was on TV in 1964 wouldn't have been interesting to them in 1964, either, but it's definitely not relevant now. I understand that. Still....

I often look at the kind of things I post here and think back on what life looked like then. It's, I suppose, not all that different from watching something like "Mad Men" and thinking of how it fairly accurately conforms to my memories of early 1960's life. The houses, the cars, the clothes speak volumes about the way people go about their lives. So much of what's left from that era is in black and white that it's easy for someone who's younger to think that the world itself wasn't in color; I know I thought that way about the 50's and earlier, all before I was born. America in 1948? All shades of gray, at least to me. But I see an old ad and remember what the product looked like in color on the shelf at the Food Fair. I see a TV listing and remember sitting in our (color) living room watching that show on our (black and white) Capehart console television. And, through that, I can watch something from before my time and imagine what things looked like back then,

But it's also about how people lived. Ephemeral pop cultural artifacts like retail ads, comics, or home movies remind us that even in Depression or wartime, in the postwar boom and the turbulent sixties, people shopped and ate and listened to music and watched movies and played and consumed and lived. I learned the history in textbooks, but the history in pop culture ephemera is the history people lived. The big events and great upheavals and societal changes are all well-documented. The other stuff is where I come in; that's not as well-documented, and that's what interests me.

So, almost seven years into this, I can finally enunciate what drives my interest in old TV and old sports programs and old advertising. Other people can stick to the big issues. I'm more at home with the everyday.

That's why.

Too busy. Here, have a beer:

Utica Club, with talking beer steins (Jonathan Winters' voice, I believe). They're still around.

How 'bout one from the Land Of Sky Blue Waters?

Hamm's, the Beer Refreshing. Still around, a Miller brand.

Also from Minnesota, it's Grain Belt:

I think someone resurrected the brand at some point, but the iconic sign still looms over the Hennepin Avenue bridge in Minneapolis. I've run past it a few times.

Mr. Magoo drank Stag Beer!:

Homer Simpson has nothing on ol' Quincy.

And now I'm thirsty.

A guy I once worked with a long time ago was found dead the other day, in a park by the water. He'd apparently been homeless for several years, and the paper says that he'd broken up with a fiancee and hit the bottle hard.

Someone posted a link someplace to a website where he'd briefly posted stuff in 2004-06, and it's still there, not updated since then. It's pretty harrowing. Each entry is disjointed, less than lucid, chronicling life in a shelter, looking for work, selling off food stamps for cash, ranting against gay people. It's hard to imagine someone you remember as lucid, hard-working, normal going into the abyss like that.

But one can. It could be a relationship, it could be financial difficulty, it could be drugs or just untreated mental illness. It's not something that everyone's in danger of becoming, not if you're not mentally ill or addicted, which makes it a greater shock when it's someone you know, or knew, or thought you knew. I hadn't seen him in at least 15 years, but it's still surreal to imagine how he turned out, what happened, how it ended.

I don't know what the lesson here is. I don't know whether there IS a lesson. And I don't imagine he found peace at the end, but I know I'll be thinking about him tonight.

My cell phone is dialing people without me again.

It does that a lot, and it’s not “butt-dialing.” It happens even when the phone’s sitting on a shelf, untouched. It happens in the car, through Bluetooth. I’ll be driving along, and, without prompting, the sound of ringing will come through the GPS and someone will pick up, leading to my stammering apology and fumbling to hang up.

I haven’t figured out why and how this is happening. Maybe the phone’s lonely. Maybe it’s just testing the signal. Maybe it’s busted. I don’t know, and I’m not inclined to find out what the problem is, because I’ve come to accept it. My phone has a mind of its own, and that’s okay, because it does other stuff I need – e-mail, web, photos -- well. It’s the price I pay to carry a “smartphone.” It’s too smart for its own good, but I’ll take the trade-off.

And that, I believe, is the attitude most people have about technology. We’ve come so far, and achieved so much, that we’ll overlook defects that, in earlier generations, we would consider unacceptable. The computer freezes up? Sure, but it’s better than resorting to a notepad, calculator, and typewriter. The TV picture occasionally turns into a mosaic of blocks, or just plain drops out entirely for a few seconds? Yeah, but look at the crisp digital picture. Whatever the deficiencies, we complain, but we don’t stop buying. And when the next generation comes along, we’ll buy it in the hopes that the annoyances will be fixed this time around. Sometimes they are. And they usually come with new annoyances.

But they can do cool things, so if they’re not as reliable as the old versions, we’ll deal with it. Besides, maybe my cell phone knows better than I when I should call people. It could be a feature. I’ll check the manual.

This was on my Posterous site -- you've been there, right? -- but I kinda liked it, so here it is, from my cell phone camera, a rainbow:

This was from a break in the rain action this week. The rainbow actually seemed to drift closer and closer to the coast until it appeared to be reachable. I didn't see the pot of gold, though.

This week's All Access newsletter is about the obvious topic for talk radio at the moment:

It's been interesting to see the reactions on Twitter and Facebook to the demise of Air America Radio, or Air America Media, or whatever it was officially called at the end. There are the people who are gleeful because they see it as a conservative victory. There are the people who are worried about its effect on the future of liberal talk. There are the people who expected it, and there are people who didn't. There weren't many who didn't, actually.

Next week? I'm not thinking about next week yet. I'm just hoping that it'll stop raining before that.

I've been trying to bang out a column tonight, but I have half a column's worth of material. This is a lot like preparing too little material for a radio show, and I've been there, too. Either way, it isn't optimal.

Neither was the weather today, although the torrential rain didn't last too long, not as long as the last couple of days. The brunt of today's storms hit Ventura and the Valley and the mountains, and they had hail, which happens here roughly every five years or so; here, there was some wind and a lot of rain, including a little more leaking into the office, but nothing too terrible. No hail, either. We may make it through this one yet.

Back to the column now. The other half.

It rained again today, and by mid-afternoon it was very hard, like yesterday. It was so hard that, sitting in the office, I could swear it was raining inside.

Turns out it was.

Well, not exactly raining. More like a drip, or a series of drips from the blinds on the window. From what I could determine, a cascade of water managed to drain through a crack in the wall, drip into the top part of the blind, and distribute itself via the blind cords and wand to the sill below. After frantically applying towels and absorbent paper goods, the drip slowed and then stopped, but I'm not going to assume it won't be back, not with another day of torrential rain in the forecast. And I can't get up to the roof to patch the problem area until it stops. It's let up for now, but the rain will be back, possibly, as in the last two days, accompanied by water spouts and/or tornadoes. At least, today, the roads weren't covered with mud and rocks; we were able to get out of the house and run our errands. But I've had more than enough of this.

We're supposed to dry out by Saturday, but Thursday might be the worst day yet. I shall endeavor to stay dry. I will probably fail.

The forecast said that today's rain would hit, and hit hard, at about noon. It actually arrived a little early, but when noontime rolled around....

Let's just say that I have never seen it rain that hard in Southern California. Not when we had the mudslide, not in any other El Nino. Never. And, naturally, we had to go to an appointment, so we left early, leaving plenty of time; we scrambled under a huge waterfall coming off the roof onto the front steps, sloshed across the driveway to the car, jumped in, and pulled out into the street, which had become something not unlike the Delaware River. Up the hill we went, through puddles that resembled small lakes, to the main road, where after waiting for a lot of traffic to pass, we pulled onto the westbound lanes and discovered that the storm drains for which the city of Rancho Palos Verdes had spent millions were sending a torrent of water, mud, and rocks onto the road. When they hit us for the tax to redo the drains after the mudslides of a few years ago, they said that it would prevent, well, this. We made it only a quarter mile or so before I realized that there was a good chance we'd be washed away, or that the rocks and potholes beneath us would take out my chassis (or at least the suspension). So I did something totally uncharacteristic: I turned around and went home to find the back yard under water.

That's when I heard that all hell was breaking loose all over. A tornado watch was in effect in Long Beach. San Pedro, a few miles from here, had one street totally submerged and homes flooded. The anchors on KNX were talking about how the Palos Verdes Peninsula -- us! -- was apparently under siege from Mother Nature. And we were.

Meanwhile, the phone line was dead, and Verizon was insisting that the problem was in the house wiring, which they could come and fix for the low low price of $94 for the first half hour. I said no, thanks, so with nothing else to do at that moment but curse the heavens, I thought about how long it might be before I could go out and look at the phone boxes in the alley and try and fix the problem myself. I stared out the window and... and, you know, the rain, it seemed to be letting up a little. No, a lot. Hey, wait, the rain's stopped. And... what's that? The sun? Where did THAT come from?

Yes, the storm was over as quickly as it came. We did make it out, made the appointment after all (although we had to drive the looooooonnnnnnng way around, and up, and over the hill), the back yard drained out and dried off, and I even found the phone problem (the line had somehow gotten wet and shorted out; when it dried out, the line came alive again). But we were lucky. Someone's car was flipped by a tornado down in Seal Beach, the 710 was underwater, and the poor folks up in the Station fire burn area are still waiting for the mountains to slide into their houses.

And there's a lot more to come. We are far from out of the woods, and I am dreading the next round. Think dry thoughts.

It rained. It rained very hard last night, rained all the way through the night, rained when I woke up at a little before 3. It was pouring as I worked, then let up enough for me to get in a short run, then rained again, harder, with a ferocious wind that picked up our recycling bin, deposited the contents all over the driveway, then picked the bin up again and delivered it across the street. The apocalypse lasted until mid-afternoon... and then the sun came out and all was well.

But I'm still out of sorts. We don't get a lot of rain days here, although "It Never Rains In Southern California" isn't true at all. (It pours, man, it pours) And we're looking at rain the rest of the week, so the present lull is just that, a lull. It was also a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day, so the daily ritual of the trip to the post office was off as well. Other than the brief run, I was in the house all day. It felt like a sick day.

It wasn't, though. I'm fine, just a little out of sorts. There's a lot to think about, and the weather isn't helping me think. But TV is what applies to moments like this, so it's time to go switch my mind off for a bit. Maybe there's a "Two and a Half Men" rerun on KTLA. That'll work.

Three of my Facebook friends have passed away in recent months. I could chalk that up to the obvious -- we're all getting old -- except that they weren't really old. The latest was just 43; she got sick with what they thought was pneumonia, and that led to a heart attack, collapsed lung, and, finally, an aneurysm. It's impossibly terrible news, and while you might say, well, it puts all the other terrible news in perspective, it just feels like piling on.

But we press on. This morning, I tried to do a good deed: I found a set of keys on my running route, and the tags to the keys were partly worn away and unreadable, but the tag for Albertson's loyalty club seemed readable enough -- the bar code was faded but the numbers were readable -- so after I returned home, I dutifully followed the instructions on the tag and brought the keys to my nearest Albertson's store, where there was nobody at the service desk and the bag boy who took the keys seemed disinterested. He took the keys, flipped them in a "lost and found" drawer, and that was it. I asked if they would check the number and call the keys' rightful owner; he said, yeah, we'll call, in a tone that indicated no, he wouldn't. So, if you're counting on your supermarket loyalty tag to save you if you lose your keys, well, good luck with that.

It doesn't help me maintain my optimism about humanity. I'm not a religious person, so my reasons for doing the right thing basically arise from a self-inflicted morality of sorts, and it's automatic: It never occurred to me to do anything other than pick up the keys and look for the owner. It's what I would hope someone else would do. It's not about karma, it just is. Maybe doing nothing is the easiest thing, and doing bad is as easy as doing good. I don't know. All I know is that I picked up the keys, tried to do the right thing, and it seemed like it may not have mattered much.

But maybe it did. Maybe someone from the store DID look up the number, maybe the keys DID get back to the owner, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe is all I need. And if things worked out for everyone, that's great. I'm not naive enough to think that life's that fair, not in a world where the economy is hurting the innocent, the poorest are hit with a massive earthquake, and so many good people die young, but I can still hope for good things to happen. Maybe, for the person who lost those keys, today ended on a better note than it started.

More business, so...

MILK DUDS!!!:

Milk Duds never tasted quite, you know, real to me, but they WERE covered in real milk chocolate then. I'm not sure they are anymore, but I haven't had them in years. And when I saw this commercial, my mind went to another candy from my youth, mentioned in this vintage movie snack-bar ad:

Milkshake was one of my favorites, like Three Musketeers, only better. And, like Three Musketeers, they were great frozen. I haven't had one since I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, and they don't make them anymore, but I can remember the taste. And I could use one right about now.

I was floored today by the shock of hearing that my radio friend Francene Cuccinello passed away today. I would see her at the occasional radio convention, and you knew she was a Jersey girl right off the bat, because she had the attitude, the personality, the down-to-earth thing all down pat. I first met her when she was going through a rough time in St. Louis, but in the intervening years she had become a big deal at WHAS in Louisville after years of knocking around in TV news and on the radio, big enough to be eulogized by the Governor and Mayor. She was only 43 when, from what I gather, she fell ill, had a heart attack, then had an aneurysm. 43. A horrible end to a less than pleasant week, and it leaves me not too eager to write or be funny right now.

So here's this week's All Access newsletter, which doesn't seem like it matters much at the moment:

When the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien situation imploded the other day, my first thought had nothing to do with the specifics of where Jay would go or what would happen to Conan. It wasn't about whether I was on Team Conan or Team Jay (is anyone on Team Jay?). And it wasn't about how much of a disaster the whole Jay-at-10 move had turned out to be. No, it was that this bad move is going to make taking even good risks with programming a lot harder. Again.

I have no witty comment or joke left in me right now (save the sarcasm, please), so I'll just go now. Have a great week.

This week's column for All Access is mostly done, but I spent much of the evening revising it and I need to sleep on it, so I'm going to skip today's post and put the column up tomorrow. Okay? (Like you have a say in this)

By the way, if you missed out on Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, I saw them in Target today, But they're not for me. I love 'em, but that's a lot of sugar and calories in them there things. Not that I wasn't tempted.

In my continuing quest to use this site to post stuff that doesn't show up elsewhere, here are a few things from a 1974 Montreal Expos program commemorating a trio of long-gone media outlets. First, the Expos' longtime radio flagship:

CFCF was a big station back then. It dated all the way back to 1919 as experimental XWA, and was the Expos station from their second season until 1988, then again in 1991 through 1999, the last stretch as CIQC. And then the Expos ended up the only major league team without an English-language broadcast outlet, streaming games on the Net in 2000 before returning to its original home, CKGM, for the last few seasons.

CFCF was a standard-issue full-service station, with middle-of-the-road music and lots of news and service elements. It later went to adult standards, then briefly country, before trying talk in competition with the dominant CJAD. It moved to 940 AM, the former CBC frequency, in 1999, tried all-news and then another talk format, and it's now oldies.

You could read about the 'Spos in the Montreal Star:

By 1974, it was pretty obvious that there wasn't enough advertising to support two English-language dailies in Montreal. The Star, once the dominant paper in town, was the one that never recovered from a strike, and it dropped dead in 1979. The Montreal Gazette survived, and that's the sole local Anglo daily there today.

If you spoke French, you could follow Les Expos in Montreal-Matin:

Montreal-Matin was the first French-language tabloid in the market, and it had that field to itself until the much more colorful and downmarket Journal de Montreal showed up in 1964. At the time of this ad, the paper had only a few years left; the big broadsheet La Presse bought the paper a year earlier and folded it four years later.

And now, a brief interlude while we regroup:

This was one of the BBC's "Interlude" shorts, used as interstitials between shows back in the 1950's. It's just a white kitten playing, nothing more, nothing less. In the pre-ITV days, you wouldn't be going anywhere else, anyway, so you'd be expected to sit through this.

Cat's adorable, of course. But that's easy for a cat.

I love awkward television. The BBC's "Juke Box Jury" was up there on the cringe scale. They'd play records and show the celebrity judges and the audience kinda bobbing their heads, conscious that the cameras were on them. Then they'd go to the judges, who grappled with the task of finding something to say about a disposable pop record. Here's one from 1960, with Jill Ireland and David McCallum:

For some reason, part 2 is missing, but don't miss this part, featuring Pinky and Perky:

There's practically no action, everyone's stiff, there's no excitement for the "vote," and you know well before the announcement whether it's a "hit or a miss." But it's awesome to be able to see this after 50 years. And when you think that David McCallum is not only still working but probably in his biggest sustained hit ever -- "Man From U.N.C.L.E." was a brief phenomenon, "NCIS" is a long-running hit -- it's pretty impressive. The bored, distracted, very young man on this show couldn't have imagined he'd be a grandfatherly, loveable character actor in Hollywood 50 years on.

The king of awkward TV is, of course, Joe Franklin. I'm going to have to hunt for the right clips to illustrate what I mean. Stay tuned.

The Eagles' loss freed me to not really pay attention to football today, so I didn't. I worked, we ran some errands, and I worked some more. And, well, yes, I peeked at the games, so I saw the Ravens put a merciful end to the Patriots' season, and then I did check the Cardinals-Packers game as it entered the fourth quarter.

And, yeah, that was some game. Zero defense, the Cards' Neil Rackers missing a chip shot field goal that would have won it in regulation, then the end in overtime, which Aaron Rodgers will be reliving in his head forever. All of Packers Nation will be seeing Dansby's trot to the end zone in their nightmares from now on.

I'm not sure what's worse, to be ritually disemboweled like the Eagles were by Dallas or to storm back, almost win the game, and then have it literally snatched from your hands like the Cardinals did to the Packers. I had a whole game -- two weeks, actually -- to come to grips with the fact that the Eagles were not going to win and that come next season, Andy Reid will still be the coach and it's likely Donovan McNabb will still be the quarterback and Lord help us if Macho Harris is still on the roster. The Packers fans had their hopes inflated, pumped to Goodyear blimp proportions, then shot down like the Balloon Boy story, but faster. They had the ball in overtime and just-like-that BAM: over.

I used to get dental work done without novocain. That must have felt similar.

But that's Wisconsin's burden now. Me, I don't care anymore. The Eagles are through for the year. That was yesterday. Remember?

We took Flat Stanley out for a ride today. You know about Flat Stanley, the children's book character, and how schoolkids send one to family and friends to take pictures with him to teach the kids about where they live; our nephew Ryan sent us a Flat Stanley, so we took ol' Flat out on the town.

Now, I'm not going to ruin the surprise for Ryan by mentioning any specifics. We took Flat to (name of local landmark) and took some pictures with the exhibits. We went north to (name of city redacted) to (name of landmark) redacted, where they were still breaking down the tents and lighting for (name of event redacted). We drove back down to (name of city redacted) to (name of landmark redacted), where we sneaked inside for a few pictures), then up to (name of city redacted), where we found a spot on the street to get a picture of Flat in front of (name of landmark redacted). And then it was off to (name of landmark redacted), where we found mobs of people who... well, let's say that they all seemed like "Jersey Shore" rejects. The real New Jersey is getting a bad rap from that show; we have plenty of douchebags here, too.

So Flat got a nice tour of the area today. Tomorrow, we take him to a strip joint for a beer and a lap dance.

I've noticed more of my friends and business associates using location-tweeting programs like Foursquare to let people know where they are at all times. I fail to understand why you'd want that.

Oh, I do know SOME applications for that. If you're restricting the information to just close friends and the idea is that you all know where each other is so you can get together anytime, okay, that's useful. But if you're telling everyone on Facebook and Twitter that you're not home, um, why? Isn't that mostly useful to burglars? Look, this guy's not home! Quick, let's clean his place out!

And then there are other ways to invade your own privacy, like the one that tells the world what you're buying, or the Internet-enabled bathroom scale that tweets your weight. Do you think anyone else cares what you're buying or how hard you've fallen off the diet wagon? Why would you tell people all of that?

But I'm the one who's out of step. Everyone is saying that we should just give up on privacy, that privacy is the old way. Younger people don't care about privacy, they say. Everyone's an open book. Let Google Goggles identify you to anyone who snaps your picture on the street. Let the world know you just took possession of a new iMac or a 50 inch plasma. All that information's out there anyway, they say. Embrace it. Let it go.

But all that information ISN'T out there. Sure, you can Zabasearch someone to find their home address, but your credit card records aren't public unless you tie it into that service and let people know what you're spending your money to buy. Your medical records aren't floating around in cyberspace, but handing them to Google Health puts them in the hands of a private company that promises not to do anything untoward with them, even though you can't be sure. (You can't be sure your own insurer won't do that, either, but at least they're SUPPOSED to have the information)

I guess I'm just confounded by how cavalier people are with information, but, then again, people do a lot of questionable things. If the future involves telling everybody about every intimate detail of your life, whether they need it or not, and whether it's good for you or not, I sure hope there's an opt-out.

Well, look what's back! This week's All Access newsletter is about planning for the future when your competition seems to be several steps ahead, and what radio can do to preserve itself (and why it sort of has to ignore the present to have a future):

Have you been following all the news coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week? You couldn't help but hear about all the latest radios -- every TV report and newspaper column and tech blog was chock full of drooling over the newest and best HD Radios on display in....

So... Welcome back. Let's make this a great year. We could use one of those.

Ran out of time again, but this time for a good reason; I was testing out some things that will impact on this website, possibly soon. Stay tuned.

Here are some random promos and commercials from YouTube's rrunner81sg. Again, I have no idea why I love this stuff, but I do:

This one has the infamous WPIX "Your Ex Wants You Back" slogan, featuring Melissa Manchester:

And this one has a spot for the late WAPP "The Apple" in New York AND Yogi Berra (with Phil Rizzuto heckling) for WABC in its early talk days:

Enough.

Lost track of time there. Too late now.

Here, enjoy a baked cheese sandwich:

Yeah, I'd love an Apple tablet. 10 or 11 inches, color touch screen? I could put that to good use.

A thousand bucks?

Um, yeah, well... no.

I'm glad I'm not covering CES this year. The computer and electronics industries excel in showing off things I don't need but just want. A tablet's in that category; sure, I would love something Kindle-like on which to read books and magazines and papers, but in color, with full Internet capability and apps. That's likely what this thing is. But dropping a thousand bucks on that when a thousand bucks will buy you an actual MacBook, or two Windows laptops, or three netbooks, well, who has that money these days?

On the other hand, if they include HSDPA or EVDO free...

No. Even then, no. Must resist. At its heart, it'll be a toy, a gizmo, fun to play with, handy on trips, but unnecessary when I have a laptop and I have, um, books. It's something for people with disposable income, which, unless freelancing picks up again, I do not have. I'll have to watch this play out from afar. And who knows? There's always the Mega Millions....

.. in which case I wouldn't need a tablet. I could hire someone to surf the web FOR me. Are they showing THAT at CES?

It took no time at all for me to be swamped with work. I kinda saw it coming, but, still...

So here's a commercial break, featuring...

The Coronet guys!:

Tom Carvel! (Note the Santa cake's resemblance to a sideways Fudgie the Whale and the Chanukah cake's shape being an upside-down Cookie Puss):

A commercial featuring Jerry from the JGE commercials of New York yore, plugging his newer venture, a disco (under the old WTFM antenna in Fresh Meadows, Queens!). "That's the STAW-reeee!":

Another Jerry (Carroll), for Crazy Eddie:

They don't make 'em like that anymore. Or do they?

Yeah, they do.

ADDITION: These 1977 commercials from WLS-TV Chicago include a pre-fame Shelley Long doing a local furniture spot:

Cool.

So, that's it? Vacation is over? Already?

Yep. And, like always, I had grand plans for the time off that never came to fruition. I was going to spend a few days just sleeping, but the only day I spent on bed was due to the food poisoning; no fun. I was going to start some projects; they'll have to wait. I was going to visit some friends, read some books, take some walks by the ocean.

Yeah, well, things don't always go the way you want them to go. And I could use some more time off. But I'm already back writing away for the first columns of the new year. Next time off: a long, long time from now. If I didn't like my job, I'd be inconsolable right now.

Okay, we made it into 2010.

Speaking of dead retail as we were the other day, how about this one?:

Consumers was one of those places where you'd go to the store, write down a catalog number, hand it to a clerk, and go wait for your purchase to come out on a conveyor belt. Service Merchandise was the same concept, but with larger stores; Consumers was a smaller room, good prices but a pain in the ass. I don't know when people realized that you shouldn't HAVE to fill out a little form and wait for your items to get good prices, but they did, and Consumers and Service Merchandise were doomed.

On the other hand, I sometimes go to a restaurant -- The Counter -- where you order by checking off what you want on your burger on an order form clipped to a little clipboard on your table, rather than, you know, just telling the server what you want, and there's always a crowd there and I go back there a lot, so it's not TOTALLY out of the realm of possibility that some other reasons led to the demise of the order-form store. Maybe they should have served really good burgers, too.