I’m Totally Sirius!

Last November my husband took pity on me and gave me a Sirius satellite radio receiver for my car. I had become increasingly disgusted with the quality of broadcast radio in Atlanta. I’m originally from New York (see Red State, Blue State…), and was used to a wide variety of radio stations.

Not that I have anything but the most pedestrian of tastes in music. I’m a classic rock/oldies/Lite-FM kind of gal. I was also a huge Howard Stern listener since 1994. So when I made the move south, I suffered. The Stern Show is not available on any station in Atlanta and my other choices were limited. For awhile I found some replacements. I actually listened to Imus in the Morning for awhile during my morning commute just to give me some New Yorkness. Plus he would have Chris Russo from WFAN’s Mike and the Mad Dog Show on sometimes. I was also a regular listener of that show in NY and would switch from Howard to WFAN-AM. But Imus got replaced by a local sports show called Mayhem in the AM. They weren’t bad, one of the DJs was from Boston and another from Long Island (where I grew up), and so they talked about the Yankees a lot. But I think they got pressure from the station and started covering mostly college football and NASCAR (even though they admitted they needed a NASCAR tutor).

I found an oldies station, originally 105.1 FM with Randy and Spiff. They got canned one day and moved to 105.3, which then went Spanish language (I still have my alarm clock go off to that station, even though I don’t know what they are saying). There was one classic rock station at 92.9, but they went to the Dave-FM format, which in case you don’t know, is a DJ-less eclectic array of songs mostly in the classic rock format. But it was too diverse for me. Plus the ads for it with the monotone voice always made me feel as if the station was programmed by Hal from 2001. ‘I’m going to play something from the Who, Dave’. Too spooky.

So by last fall, I was desperate. It wasn’t just the lack of good stations. It was the constant commercials, the endless cloned news and weather. But mostly it was the inane DJ chatter and the forced group discussions about American Idol or The Apprentice, two television shows I couldn’t care less about. In my 45 minute commute I would be lucky to hear one or two good songs.

So when Sirius announced that Howard Stern would be joining then in 2006 and had a $50 rebate offer on equipment, I jumped. It was my Christmas present from my husband. He researched all the receivers and decided on the Audiovox model. The receiver is portable and I could take it out if I decided to get the boom box or home kit. It was $99 with a $50 rebate, plus I had to get the auto adaptor kit. This allows you to wirelessly link the Sirius receiver to your existing car radio so the sound will come out the speakers. If I had to do it all over again, I would splurge for an entire new car radio with a Sirius receiver included. We had to resort to crazy gluing the auto adaptor to my dashboard because the adhesive pad the kit provided would not stick. Not to mention the wires hanging all over the place. You also have to put a magnetic antenna on your roof and run the wire into the receiver (I had mine snaked through the rear window, trunk, floor and up onto the windshield to the dash). The cool thing is you can then collapse your normal AM/FM antenna because you will not need it.

I signed up for the 12 month subscription because it is the most cost effective. I paid $142.50 for 11 months and got one month free. A few clicks on the internet and you are ready to go.

There are several very cool things about satellite radio. The first and foremost is that the music channels are virtually commercial free (for someone who worked in advertising for 25 years, I really have bitten the hand that fed me so well). There are some promos, but that’s about it. Also no news or weather, there are separate stations for that. The talk radio stations of course have commercial breaks, (hey, the DJs have to pee too!) But many of the talk shows are UNCENSORED. That’s right…UNCENSORED! I’ll never get over the shock the first time I tuned into The Radiochick and heard the F word! There is one station called Raw Dog, which is supposed to be just that. I haven’t tuned it yet, but it might be fun. And I can’t wait to hear Howard uncensored.

Another really cool thing about Sirius is that once you are a paid subscriber, you can listen over the internet. Many of the satellite radio receivers will not work unless you have a clear view of the SW sky, so that leaves out any cubicles in an office building. But if you have internet access and earphones, you are all set.

The music selections are grouped into categories. As I said, my tastes are pretty bland. I have most of my favorites as presets on my receiver.

#1     60’s Vibrations
#2     Classic Vinyl (I love the scratch needle to record sound effect they play at the beginning of each song..)
#3     Totally 70’s (Barry Williams from The Brady Bunch is one of the DJs.)
#4     Big 80’s (Madonna is still Queen here.)
#5     Starlite (similar to lite-fm)
#6     Movin’ Easy (Soft and easy favorites from the '60s, '70s and '80s.)
#7     Sirius Love
#8     Sirius Gold (50s)
#9     Talk Central
#10     The Bridge (softer contemporary rock)

Because I’m mostly in the pop category, I have noticed that a title will be recycled through out the stations. I can hear xxx on 60s vibrations and then the same on Sirius Love, if it is a love song or perhaps on Movin’ Easy. The 70s station has something called Jukebox from Hell, which features songs that were awful and played to death on the radio back in the day. It is so bad, it is good, and brings back lots of memories that maybe would be better forgotten. It actually helped me identify the extremely annoying tune the neighborhood ice cream truck played this summer, Musicbox Dancer.

I should also mention that another cool feature is that all of the song titles/artists and in some cases, year are all displayed on the screen of the receiver. I can’t tell you how many times I had the distinct impression that a song was performed by one artist but it was another. Good for Trivial Pursuit!

If you must listen to news, they have a full array of cable news stations. But it is mostly the TV feed and can be distracting without the picture. You can get local traffic and weather by ‘jumping’ to that station. The traffic/weather stations are shared by 2 cities, so you may have to wait. Atlanta shares with Boston. So I press the jump button, and when the traffic/weather switches to Atlanta, it jumps in.

The news stations have come in handy when there is a breaking story. On the day the Michael Jackson verdict came out, I was driving home and tuned right into Court TV and heard it live. I also listened to Fox News on my drive in the morning of the London bombings. For some reason the TV news channels don’t work over the internet, probably some kind of black out.

But the best by far is driving in your car, tuning to a station and getting back to back to back songs that you love with no commercials. There are some days where I will have the tuner set to Totally 70s and just sing all the way to work and not have to change stations. There are so many different genres to choose from. There is an all Elvis station. There is Christian music. Hip Hop, Rap, Jazz, Country R&R/Urban, even Classical and Latin.

There is conservative talk, and liberal talk. There is a new Martha Stewart channel coming in September. There are all sorts of sports stations, including coverage of all the NFL games, from both team’s broadcasters. College Football, NBA, NHL Hockey, Soccer etc. Satellite radio is becoming a favorite of truckers. And when we rented a car on a recent trip from New York to New Hampshire, we made sure we had Sirius on board. A complete list of stations can be seen here.

And I have to mention the DJs. When there is a break in the music, the DJs name will appear. I was stunned to see Pat St. John on the screen one day. Pat was a staple on the old rock oriented WPLJ-FM back in the 70s-80s. (I’ll still never forget my shock one day when I came to work, tuned in PLJ and heard pop music. It was, to me, the beginning of the end of FM radio). Carole Miller also of PLJ is also here. Dennis Elsas who was on WNEW-FM is on too.

Sirius also picked up Cousin Brucie Morrow, who was a staple of WCBS-FM, which was the ever present oldies station in New York for as long as I can remember. (CBS recently ended the oldies format). Morrow hosts an oldies show from the Rock and Roll Hall of fame three times a week.

Sirius recently added old MTV VJs, Martha Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter and now Martha Quinn to the Big 80s station. I was never a big MTV fan and Alan Hunter talks way too much. I actually screamed at the radio the other day while he was yakking over the intro to a song.

Even with that, it is hard to find fault with Sirius. It is a vast improvement over local radio stations. Since I used to work in advertising, I have kept up with what is going on with the media. The merging of media conglomerates and the take over of local radio stations by outfits such as Clear Channel has ruined it. I know the politically correct thing to say is that it is a vast republican right wing capitalist scheme to control news and information. But I know it is all about streamlining costs (for news and other services) and trying to tie up advertising dollars. But what it has done is made radio very bland and repetitive. The DJs try to talk up the parent companies TV shows by pretending they watch and worse, actually like the shows and try to build up viewer ship. It is so blatantly obvious it make me sick. The other thing they do is plug other radio stations in the same market! Hey, if you like our station, you might also like WKKK 88.7 FM! Unheard of. Radio stations have been losing listeners and ad dollars in droves. They are now attempting to win back listeners by having exclusive deals with some artists. But I don’t see it helping.

The other advantage Sirius has is that it is NOT controlled by the FCC. Since it doesn’t go out over public airways, they can pretty much do whatever they want. Hence the uncensored talk. I do think the FCC will try to get their puritanical little hands on it as they are attempting to do with cable TV, but they are in for a fight on that score.

So if you are tired of spending your morning commute switching stations to find what you like and are on the fence about investing, I am here to tell you that it is worth it.

Now, if Sirius could only do something about the traffic……

Red State Blue State? How about Purple.

Some background, just like neo-neocon I grew up in the very blue state of New York and lived there for most of my life. Five years ago, my husband and I relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, for a job opportunity.  My husband had always wanted to leave New York, getting sick of the traffic and the taxes. I was a dyed in the wool New Yorker, and proud Long Islander. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

But a 40% increase in salary, a promotion, and the chance to live in an area where the cost of living was less were too attractive to pass up. I commuted between Atlanta and Long Island for a few months (McArthur Airport became my best friend!), then made the permanent move in October of 2000. We actually drove down the same day as the first Subway Series game, catching bits and pieces on the radio.

This was prior to 911, prior to the 2000 election. Because we moved so close to Election Day, we couldn’t vote in Georgia, and did not have time to get absentee ballots for New York. No matter, I knew Gore would take New York easily and my lone vote for him in Georgia would not be enough to beat Bush here.

I remember watching the election coverage and breathing a sigh of relief when it was announced that Gore won Florida. I was about to go to bed when they said ‘wait a minute..’ and Florida was up for grabs. I stayed up till all hours waiting for the results that wouldn’t come that night.  After a few days it became obvious that Bush was the winner, even to me. I was in shock to say the least. I realized that Gore ran a very weak campaign, but really, who would vote for George Bush!

Unfortunately I seemed to be the only democrat that felt that way. Over the next few months I became increasingly sick and tired of the tirades of the democrats about the election. It was the beginning of my awakening. They sounded like spoiled brats, sore losers, how ever you want to put it.

It was about this time that I became aware of the blue state/red state issue. Of course as a New Yorker, I had plenty of times joked about the south and ‘rednecks’. Now I lived here. While Atlanta was not the cosmopolitan city I thought it would be (The Empire State of the South? Please!), I began to enjoy the laid back atmosphere.

There were adjustments, mostly to my attitude. I remember one of my first forays into a local supermarket. I became paranoid that the people working there were following me because they thought I was a shoplifter. When the bagger insisted on wheeling my cart out to my car and putting the bags in my trunk (no tips allowed!), I envisioned this nice young man whacking me over the head, stuffing me in the trunk, and taking me to an abandoned lot raping and killing me and dumping my body there.

Fast forward to the election of 2004. As things began to heat up during the primaries, I was a little lost. I supported the war, sure, almost everyone did. But I was still hoping the Democrats would put up a candidate that could beat Bush. His father was defeated after a successful war, and GWII was not going as well. The economy was still down and besides, who would vote for George Bush!  My early favorite was Lieberman. I prayed that Gore wouldn’t run. Howard Dean was interesting, but too obnoxious. I never liked John Kerry.

All this time I was on my favorite talk board, Guardian Talk Unlimited, or GUT. The Guardian is a newspaper in the UK with a decidedly left bent. I had become one of the ‘freeper invasion’ there, even though I still considered myself a democrat (I suppose my first user name, ProudAmerican, didn’t help). As the election debate heated up on GUT, there were many calls to ban red states from voting or allowing their votes less of a value.

When Kerry turned out to be the nominee, it became obvious to me that I couldn’t vote for him. I didn’t like him, I hated his wife. To me he stood for nothing but the same old same old. While I was still a ‘social liberal’, very pro-choice, etc, I had always been in favor of a strong foreign policy and was very pro-Israel. Kerry scared the crap out of me on both accounts. I had almost decided not to vote at all, but in the end came to the conclusion that I would vote my conscience and vote for Bush.

When I announced this on GUT (I have never spoken to my old NY friends and family about it), I was of course attacked. I had some credibility with the lefty crowd there because of my pro-choice views but that didn’t seem to matter now. I now became ‘Georgie’s Girl’.

After the election there was the usual uproar and the blue state/red state issue heated up. My sister even sent me the map showing the US during the Civil War and the Election results as an overlay. There was almost an exact match. On GUT there were calls for secession or a new civil war between the red and blue states.

But what does it all mean? Have you ever looked at a map of election results? There are of course large blue areas, mostly urban areas. There are large red areas, most of the sparsely populated west and the areas outside of metropolitan areas, even in the bluest state. But for most of the US, the map is purple. A good illustration shown here.
With a few exception (small state such as Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, DC) most of the percentages were between 50-56% of the vote for the winner. So is a state with 45% voting for Kerry a red state? And is a state with 45% voting for Bush a blue state?

In my old home state of New York, as I well know, once you venture outside of the big city, the percentages of democrats to republicans shifts. I grew up in Nassau County which borders on New York City, but was run by republicans for as long as I can remember. As more and more city dwellers moved there and the population aged, it became more democrat, but still not as much as the city. Once you go into upstate New York, it is a different story. While refugees from the city have made inroads there as well, for the most part these people are conservative and republican. Still, New York State went 57% Kerry, 40% Bush.

Now take my newly adopted state of Georgia. The City of Atlanta is overwhelmingly democrat. It is run by a democratic mayor and city council. It has a large African American population. Outside of the city we again have a different story. The county I live in, Gwinnett (named after the Georgia signatory of the Declaration of Independence) is overwhelmingly white and republican. In my congressional district, we didn’t even have anyone running against John Linder, republican. And there were no opposition to any of our state senators either. Bush took Georgia with 58% of the votes and we also now have a republican governor and two republican senators.

So it seems that the divide is not really by state boundaries, but more by urban/rural divide. If Atlanta was higher in population in proportion to the state of Georgia, as New York City is to New York State, then it’s likely the democrats would win Georgia. The biggest state margins of blue Kerry votes are in states with large urban populations. California, DC, New York, Massachusetts. And states that went largely for Bush are states that lack big cities, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma.

So would dividing the country into two separate ones really help? Would the 42% of blues in New York be happy? Would the 40% of reds in Georgia be happy?

The answer of course is no. We may have blue and red areas, but the country as a whole is purple.


Some additional reading here.

Journalism Objective or Objectionable?

The Washington Post dropped its sponsorship on Monday of a walk organized by the Pentagon to remember victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and to support US troops, saying it was possible the event would become “politicized”.

The editor of Time feels that the supposed ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame by Karl Rove is “one of the biggest stories of our time”.

The New York Times launched an investigation into the details of the adoption of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts two children. They quickly withdrew after a maelstrom of criticism.

The Guardian had to sack two of its editorial writers after it was revealed that they belonged to extremist Muslim groups. The two regularly wrote about Muslim issues without disclosing their memberships.

Reuters refuses to label the 911 hijackers as terrorists “in an internal memo reminding our journalists of our policy in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, a statement was made that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”

That other bastion of impartiality, the BBC, banned its reporters from using the word terrorists in coverage of the 7/7 and 7/14 London bombings.

Just what is going on here? Has the world suddenly turned upside down, or has it always been this way? I understand a journalists need to be objective in reporting news, but does it have to go so far that the news loses all sense of perspective?

And do we actually believe that journalists can be completely objective? All of us are colored by our background and experience - that cannot be helped. We can certainly gain insight and broaden our horizons and even change our views, but deep down, even subconsciously, we all have a viewpoint. And it is impossible for any human to suppress that completely.

One of the regulars on GUT (guardian talk board) who is a journalist defends positions such as the BBC’s. Her take is that not calling anyone a terrorist prevents a journalist from calling someone like George Bush a terrorist.

You know what? If a journalist really thinks that Bush is a terrorist, he should say so. I want to know what this journalist is thinking. Because whether he, or anyone else believes it or not, that view is coming out all over his reporting anyway.

In the case of the two Muslims that were fired from the Guardian, I don’t have a problem with them writing for a paper and expressing their views, no matter how different they are from mine. I have a problem that they did not disclose their associations. Not that it was really that difficult to tell they had extreme views.

The New York Times is a perfect example. The paper of record has had some tough times lately. The Jason Blair fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg. I must admit my bias, having worked in advertising for many years, and being exposed to the business end of the NY Times. Quite frankly, they think their $#!t doesn’t stink. ‘Because we are the NY Times, that’s why’ would be heard over and over again. It is obvious that this arrogance comes across in both their news reporting and their editorials. But going after adoption records of two little kids is really low, even for them.

We know now that most of the press are liberals. They vote democrat overwhelmingly. They have a very thinly veiled contempt of Republicans and anyone who isn’t ‘like them’. They fall all over themselves for John Kerry and any other democrat who is running for anything.

I don’t believe in a vast ‘Jewish controlled media’ or even a ‘liberal press’. I think these people have their heads so far up their own butts that they don’t even realize their own bias. And neither did many of us until recently.

The advent of 24 hour a day news, the internet, blogs and of course – Fox news, has been a blessing. There is no longer a monopoly on the news and the viewpoint that goes along with it. IMO the more views, the better. It makes me laugh when liberals attack Fox News for being ‘conservative’ at best and the ‘Karl Rove news outlet’ at worst. Simply because Fox presents a different bent on the news they are immediately branded ‘wrong’ and dangerous. It seems the only correct viewpoint is the MSM liberal viewpoint.

So what do you think? Do you think the press can be and should be objective? Or do you want to know what their true feelings are so you can determine for yourself if what they are saying is legitimate or not?

Well this is my first crack at this. Ain't the internet wonderful, it lets complete strangers like me put my POV up for all the world to see! It's a know-it-alls dream.

Felids is derived from the scientific name for cats. My first venture into the internet world was on Prodigy (remember that!) on a talk board called Tabby Talk. It was a bunch of people talking about their cats, and then some. I was hooked.

Then Prodigy imploded and I lost touch with my fellow Tabby Talkers.

Fast Forward to 2002, right before the Olympics. I happened across an article on The Drudgereport about how America was being 'jingoistic' regarding the upcoming Olympics. The article was from a newspaper I had never heard of before called The Guardian. I had to respond, and became sucked into the vortex known as GUT.

For those who have never ventured into GUT, it isn't for the faint of heart. I had the previous impression that Brits (they hate to be called that BTW) were polite and stuffy. Well, let me tell you. If you have a thin skin, or don't like being called a cee u next tuesday, then GUT is not for you.

Anyway, I regularly spout my mouth off there under the same name, AmericanWoman. I have my fans, and my sworn enemies. Why not check it out:

GUT Unlimited

This is me with a friend.