Mac wrote:
If you've stopped listening, how do you know it's crap?
I can't speak for Score Is Doomed, but I play a game I like to call "
tabula rasa radio roulette" with Murph's show, the Mike North Mourning Fiasco, and the Last Neighborhood Saloon. Basically what I do is tune in to each program on a daily basis and wait for a comment that is so egregiously stupid that I have to switch the station off for the rest of the show. The
tabula rasa part enters the equation because I do this just about every day, giving each show a "blank slate" from which to work no matter how mind-numbingly horrific it was the day before.
While I realize this practice is both idiotic and masochistic, the sad state of Chicago radio (aside from the low frequency college stations) leads me to engage in this behavior. Plus, I do admit that I take a certain perverse pleasure in bearing witness to the unstable mixture of ignorance and ineptitude that is Chicago sports talk.
In any event, in my informal competition Murph is always the quickest station changer, clocking in at a robust 15-30 seconds (on average) before I have to dump him. Sometimes he doesn't even have to speak--it could just be one of his ubiquitious drops like the "That's no Gouda" soundbyte or the "Andy the Clown" horn that induces a pervasive feeling of existential dread in me. Next comes North's daily exercise in barely suppressed white supremacist rage. This show usually lasts about two minutes on my radio, although it's more likely that Fred's pointless obsequiousness or Jen's contrived "smart ass" banter will trample my will to live more quickly than any of Mike's hoodlum wistfulness or thinly veiled bigotry will. Your show, then, wins the distinction of being the tallest midget in this category. I usually can stomach about five minutes of it before Harry's inane Beaver Cleaver take on sports or Jurko's fake enthusiasm lead me to contemplate hurtling myself through my windshield.
I hope you don't take the above personally, Mac. You are still a genuine radio talent, but your partners will always make for a very heavy albatross indeed, no matter how much weight they lose. And at least your show is better than those produced by North and Murph, right?
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.