I never thought we had a very musical family, but apparently we do.
Last weekend, our oldest son performed in Ripon Middle School’s “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” a musical about musical opening numbers, ranging from “On the Town” to “The Lion King.”
On Monday, Michael played trumpet and sang in the RMS band and chorus as part of the school district’s Music in Our Schools Month concert.
Michael is either sitting in the band toward the back of the floor, or in the upper left bleachers.
He’s just the most recent performer in the family. Earlier this month, Shaena performed in a Barlow Park concert, and Dylan sang in a Murray Park/Quest concert. (Apparently the Ripon Area School District takes Music in Our Schools Month seriously.)
I guess I’m the musician, if you want to call me that, of longest standing in the house. I had five years in the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, and for the past few years I’ve played trumpet for various Masses at our church. (Including Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil next Saturday. I’m supposed to lead the procession into the church, but it’s possible the rest of the congregation could head in the opposite direction if my play is particularly bad. I also play at what I call the It’s-Midnight-Somewhere Mass, which one year meant that the first thing I heard on Christmas morning was myself on the radio from the night before.)
I play a retired UW Marching Band trumpet, and I still have the trumpet I played in high school, which was originally my father’s, or more accurately my father’s high school band director. Jannan played baritone in high school and at Ripon College, and sang in the San Juan City Choir during her pre-Peace Corps days in Puerto Rico. We do not have a baritone (at least not the musical instrument) in the house. Jannan does sing in church; as far as I was concerned, playing an instrument prevented me from having to sing.
Perhaps it’s genetics. Readers know that my father was the piano player on southern Wisconsin’s first rock and roll band. My mother sang as part of the talent competition for the 1960 Miss Wisconsin USA pageant. They met because Mom was looking for someone to arrange piano for her competition. (The rest of the story of how they met involves a dentist, chicken soup, fish sticks and tires, but I digress …) My parents made me take several years of piano; I can’t play it anymore, but either I got perfect pitch from that, or I just have perfect pitch. I’m also a much better player-by-ear than a music-reader.
Jannan and I had different, but similarly fulfilling, high school band experiences. The Lancaster High School band has marched for years in parade competitions. One of her fondest memories is of winning a parade in Belmont over their usual archrivals, Cuba City. (The irony is that we later lived in Cuba City.) The fact that early ’80s UW Marching Bands had members from Madison La Follette and Lancaster meant that, I believe, she and I once attended the same UW Band Day football game. (Neither of us remembers seeing the other, which happens when you have a couple thousand band members in a stadium with 60,000 or so people in it.)
After three years in middle school band, I had one unremarkable year in freshman band. And then the new band director pushed me up into the top band at La Follette, the Wind Ensemble, instead of the middle-level band I was expecting. That ended my run of being a first-chair player, because the players in front of me were better than me. Wind Ensemble, though, was a revelation, musically speaking. We played challenging pieces, including Gustav Holst’s suites in E flat …
… and F …
… Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Folk Song Suite” …
… and two pieces from this guy named Leckrone, “Permutations” and “Intrusions” (which he wrote for us):
High school band was a more cool experience than I could describe. We were playing every day, and while practice is important (or so I’m told, not that I’m an example), there’s a difference between practicing by yourself and practicing with the entire group. Being at high school of 2,000 can be an isolating experience, but I had something in common with 150 at the school, particularly the 50 in Wind Ensemble. (Probably not surprisingly, three of my ex-girlfriends were in band.) Our director gave us a sheet about Holst’s Suite in E Flat that showed that the melody at the beginning was mirrored by a later melody that was upside down from the main melody.
Not only did we have concerts to perform, including a cabaret-type evening in our Commons, but we got to go on tour — the Twin Cities one year, including the musical “Annie Get Your Gun” (along with staying in a hotel with dreadful Hawaiian music and a roommate who fancied himself a rapper), and Chicago the next year, including “Fiddler on the Roof.” (Which was part of Michael’s musical. So was the opening of “West Side Story,” a La Follette and UW Marching Band show, and “A Chorus Line,” which I played senior year at La Follette.) “Fiddler” was at the Marriott Lincolnshire Resort, an evening that followed an afternoon in the hotel pool with a guy who turned out to be Tevye.
I could never have been described as an athlete in high school (which hasn’t changed in the nearly 30 years since then), and even when I was on athletic teams the attributes of athletic teams never sunk in sitting on the bench. I learned those in band — the necessity of preparation, practicing over and over and over again until you get it right, teamwork, the team being more important than you, and most importantly, the importance of performing well whether or not you get recognition for it.
That’s why when I hear people talk about how the only important thing in school is the stereotypical academic subjects — math, English, science, etc. — I start looking for the old trumpet (which weighs more than a baseball bat after several layers of lacquer) to swing at their skulls. Extracurricular activities. including athletics and music, take up 1 to 2 percent of a school’s budget. In addition to the academic benefits, music builds self-esteem not by dubious self-psychology, but by accomplishment and public performance.
Music is an exacting academic field. As the Children’s Music Workshop puts it, “In music, a mistake is a mistake; the instrument is in tune or not, the notes are well played or not, the entrance is made or not.” Performing well whether anyone’s watching was a staple of the UW Band in the bad old days of the ’70s, most of the ’80s and the early ’90s, and I got good preparation for that marching pregames and halftimes of a football team that won nine games in four years. But beyond that, it was good preparation for a professional field that doesn’t include a lot of feedback, a field in which (like any other field of endeavor) it’s important to do good work whether or not anyone recognizes it.
At some point after my UW Band days ended, I came to the realization that I preferred playing in concerts to watching them. I’ve only gone to a few UW Band concerts, and most of them have been outside of Madison, in smaller locations with less grandiose shows. I have not had the Walter Mitty moment of being called out of the crowed at a Chicago concert (I’ve been to three of them, the first with about half of the UW Band) to play.
I had, however, a really neat experience at our church at the end of the All Saints Day Mass Nov. 6. Our priest asked me to play “When the Saints Come Marching In” for the recessional. I asked him how he wanted me to play it, and he only suggested I play as the spirit, or Spirit, moved me. So the first verse was straightforward, and then I swung into New Orleans jazz funeral mode as well as my limited playing and really limited improvisational skills could do. The reaction I got afterward demonstrated I succeeded.
Which means that today is the one-year anniversary of the end of my employment with Marketplace Magazine and Journal Communications. Which, you’ll recall, prompted the creation of this blog.
(The irony is that today I’m speaking at a Ripon elementary school’s Career Day. That is a better activity than what I was doing one year ago today.)
A year ago tomorrow I wrote:
I’ve been told, and it makes sense, that I should start a blog to maintain the discipline of writing. (Rust is a terrible thing, as anyone who owned a 1970s-era car should know.)
And so, here begins, for an indeterminate amount of time, The Presteblog. The Presteblog is likely (though not certain) to read much like Marketplace of Ideas … the opinion column and blog of Marketplace in the 10 years I was the editor of Marketplace. …
The late Marketplace of Ideas blog was usually four days of business/political stuff (and in three years of daily blogging I certainly never lacked for material), along with what I called “Frideas,” on subjects that might be found in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal — which included everything from cars to pets to parenting to adult beverages to my sons’ Cub Scouting. We’ll see if I can maintain that schedule. …
We’ll all see where this goes.
I have more or less followed that format over the past year. (I violate it when the calendar doesn’t cooperate, such as when the 30th anniversary of your high school’s state boys basketball title occurs on a Tuesday.) Four days a week readers get my views, or others’ views with which I mostly agree, that lurch between conservative and libertarian. (And if you can’t come up with an opinion to express in this state these days, you shouldn’t be opinionating.) Fridays are the date for ruminations on all the aforementioned nonpolitical subjects and others, such as the one coming next hour.
While some readers may conclude that I’m a doctrinaire right-winger and whatever the GOP does is perfect, actual readers know I do not believe that. The Democratic Party’s contribution to our country is overwhelmingly negative, but that doesn’t mean the Republican Party’s contribution has been always positive. (I think there are few members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in Wisconsin who criticize Gov. Scott Walker. I do, though probably not in areas of which Democrats would approve.)
I try to be original in what I write, with others’ views to buttress and restate mine. I prefer facts and logical arguments to, calling, for instance, public employee union heads poo-poo heads. (However: Democratic U.S. Senate candidateTammy Baldwin is a socialist. That’s not name-calling; that’s a fact, even if she won’t admit it.) There is enough on which to criticize President Obama without delving into conspiracy theories about his citizenship.
If nothing else, the Presteblog has been a good exercise in the discipline of daily writing. When I started the Presty the DJ blogs, I began to combine Saturday and Sunday entries until they got too large. (And on some days the weekday blogs get large enough to make … the … page … very … slow … to … load …) I am often sitting in the living room at 1 a.m. finishing up tomorrow’s blog, and not always because this laptop is as the as slow as a Chevrolet Vega on bad gas.
The irony is that daily journalism takes up the smallest space in the journalism portion of my career. In order of length, it’s 11 years of quadriweekly (?) business magazines, five years of weekly newspapers, and 7½ months of daily newspapers. And yet here I am with nearly a year of blogging every day, not just every weekday.
This blog also got me onto Facebook, where I somehow have managed to accumulate 298 Friends. (I was on Twitter before, where I have 536 followers.) The person who advised me to switch from Blogger to WordPress also pointed out that Facebook has enough users to count as the third largest country on earth. (Irrespective of the double-counting thing, that is.) I got onto Facebook for networking and to promote this blog. The added bonus has been the number of people with whom I’ve gotten to connect, or reconnect, and in a few instances deconnect, as well as annoy with my disagreeable (to them) political views. I’m also on Google+, though I’m not sure why.
I maintain my skepticism of social media as really being all that unique. It strikes me as merely another way to communicate, with its own particular characteristics, and its pluses and minuses, the latter including the inability to take back something you said or wrote that in retrospect could have been expressed better. Blogs, on the other hand, give one the opportunity to communicate — or, put another way, show off yourself — in multimedia, with photo, audio and video options:
Blogs do, however, require you to promote your blog. This blog gets picked up every so often at wisopinion.com and wisupnorth.com. I also blog at RiponPress.com and at IBWisconsin.com, which give me new audiences to offend. And keeping up my reputation as a media ‘ho I will appear generally wherever someone will have me — “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” Wisconsin Public Radio, and even the lion’s den, the People’s Republic of Madison.
Obviously the older the blog entry is, the more hits it’ll get. It is interesting, though, that the oldest of the top 10 is eight months old, the second oldest is five months old, and most are from November and December. And if you look at the list, my favorite subjects for others to read are state politics and the associated Recallarama crap, fall 2011 sports, facial hair, my ongoing verbal war with my hometown, and Cadillacs and Chevrolets. (Apparently all I need do to bump hits is to write about the logical next step from Occupy _______: Assassinations.)
The odd thing about this is that I like doing this. I started the blogs when I returned to Marketplace to reach new audiences. I don’t have to be writing two separate blogs at 12:29 a.m. with a body heat-sucking cat in between me and the laptop, but I am. And I see from my blog software that people are actually reading this. As I’ve written before, negative comments are second in preference only to positive comments; the worst is to hear “You write? Never heard of you.”
So The Presteblog continues for, as previously threatened, an indeterminate amount of time. We’ll all see where this goes.
Even though I’m not employed in an agriculture-related field, I make a point to go most years. I also go to what used to be called Farm Progress Days and now is called Farm Technology Days whenever it’s in the area. (This year it’ll be in Outagamie County July 17–19.) For that matter, one family highlight every March is the Ripon FFA Alumni Farm Toy Show. And one of the most interesting farm-related shows I’ve ever attended wasn’t a farm show, at least in name — the Midwest Renewable Energy Association’s Energy Fair, held near Amherst each June. That show could have been called the Alt Fair, since it combined not just alternative energy but alternative building and, yes, alternative, mainly “sustainable,” agriculture.
The WPS Farm Show price is right (free plus $3 for parking). The food selection includes ribeye steak sandwiches, pork chop sandwiches, baked potatoes and cream puffs. There are also giveaways — for instance, recipe cards from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board — as well as an FFA silent auction and contests. (I chose not to enter the contest for free bull semen.)
If you’re a gearhead, you should be able to appreciate the technology on display, including sprayers large enough to walk underneath.
No, this is not a new model of crop duster.
I admit to being more interested in cars than in other pieces of transportation, which doesn’t stop me from going to, for instance, the EAA AirVenture. (Which has a substantial collection of Ford vehicles, including Shelbys.) So imagine my surprise to see …
… a real live Chevrolet Volt, the first I have ever seen. WPS had it there to promote electric vehicles, as an electric utility. WPS is driving a Volt in partnership with General Motors and the Electric Power Research Institute. Its results are supposed to be at www.wisconsinpublicservice.com/volt, though the site doesn’t appear to be up.
(I didn’t drive the Volt, but my impression that it is inadequate for families remains. It seats four, not five, so we won’t be buying one. The front seat room was adequate, but the trunk doesn’t appear adequate. You may not know that because of the materials used for the gas tank, it requires premium fuel. Maybe you won’t use much, but when you do, you’ll be using the most expensive gas out there.)
Going to farm shows always makes me pine for a pickup truck. I’ve never owned one, though I’ve driven a few, and I know owners of trucks. I don’t have a particular use for one, but, you know, a large Ford Super Duty 4×4 with a diesel engine and manual transmission might be fun to point in the direction of the next driver I see with an objectionable bumper sticker. (You can guess from reading this blog what I might find objectionable.)
It makes sense for farm shows to have farm animals, particularly unusual ones:
I asked the alpacas how they were enjoying the Farm Show. The brown one kept saying “Mmmmmmmmmmmmm,” and I can’t tell you what that means because I don’t speak alpaca. The white one kept eating the whole time. He must be related to me.
Part of my interest in farming (beyond my interest in eating) may be my indirect farming heritage. My godfather was a farmer (though he worked full-time off the farm), and my grandfather owned a farm implement dealership and then sold farm implements on the road. (He owned a succession of Chrysler Corp. station wagons packed from behind the front seat to the tailgate to the roof with three-ring binders and folders of his stuff. Had he ever been rear-ended in his wagons, he would have been decapitated.) He would stay with us while attending the World Dairy Expo or other farm expos at the Dane County Exposition Center.
Then after three years of living in Grant County, I married a farmer’s daughter; her father was a beef and dairy cattle farmer, and her brother now owns the farm. My mother-in-law has fed me farm food for more than 20 years — beef where you know the source, side pork (think of it as super-bacon), chickens the size of turkeys, elk, tongue, and other things I would not have been otherwise fed. The weight gain I’ve had since I met Jannan is a small price to pay, and as you know a waist is a terrible thing to mind.
Obligatory photo of the official farm tractor of the in-laws.
I think agriculture’s role is also underappreciated in the American economy and in Wisconsin specifically. Agriculture and farm equipment are two of the major exports of this state. You would have never gotten me to believe this 25 years ago, but I ended up doing a fair amount of ag reporting in my rural newspaper days, and I insisted on a yearly look at agriculture and food processing in my business magazine days. (My own experience in working agriculture is limited to manual labor tied to the farmer’s daughter’s gardening.)
Other than parenting, farming is the most 24/7/365 job there is. Dairy cattle have to be milked twice or three times every day. Other farm animals have to be fed every day. Cows and pigs do not recognize vacation. Farmers get to deal with the weather’s being too cold or hot, too dry or wet, or any of those at a specific time in the growing season. Farmers are better off repairing their own equipment if they can, because given how much we pay to get cars repaired, one can only imagine the equivalent per-hour repair costs of tractors and combines. Wisconsin’s famous work ethic started with farmers.
Farmers have to deal with everything businesses do, because farms are businesses, but they also get to deal with the various edicts of the state Department of Natural Resources, along with whatever idiocy the U.S. Department of Agriculture comes up with. (That is thanks to one of the worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions of all time, Wickard v. Filburn.) And if you wonder why food prices are going up this year, go down to your favorite gas station and look at the big digital numbers.
One of the great unremarked-upon innovations of the American economy is the opportunity to eat foods formerly considered out-of-season all year. Last night I made salads of spinach and tomato, neither from a can. If you buy peaches or watermelon in February, they won’t be the quality of peaches or watermelon purchased in August, but I’m old enough to remember when they weren’t available at all outside their traditional seasons.
My eyebrows start dropping in a scowl when I start hearing about the concept of farmland preservation well away from urban areas, because I think the purpose of farmland is misunderstood. Farms are factories, places where food is manufactured. Farms have become so efficient that much less farmland, and fewer farmers, are needed to feed more people, Americans and others. Farms are not there to prettify the rural landscape or to contribute to your sense of aesthetics. The people who have the most to lose by overgrazing or not otherwise taking care of their land is, duh, the farmers. (Not to mention their farm animals.)
One of the most interesting stories I wrote in stint number two at Marketplace was about Northeast Wisconsin specialty farms, which included free-range beef, dairy and chicken farms. The meat I sampled from two of them was great. It was also considerably more expensive than what you get in your favorite supermarket. Of course, in a free-market society, you should be able to choose food based on your standards of quality and value.
The WPS Farm Show was about farming (duh), but it was also about its sponsor. While farmers get to choose their suppliers for their inputs, the state Legislature chose not to give us the ability to choose our supplier of electric power and natural gas.
There were displays about electrical safety and energy conservation (including one of the coolest in-state inventions of all time, the Orion Energy Apollo Light Pipe, a combination hemispheric skylight and light). It’s a bit ironic that a power company has a show that includes displays that promote using less of its product. There were also some “green energy” companies, mainly solar power firms.
Except for those willing to pay the extra cost of “green energy,” users of electric power are agnostic about its source. Business runs on energy, whether it comes from coal, natural gas, nuclear power, wind power, solar power, hydropower, geothermal, biomass or whatever. Growing economies need more power, and will always need more power. Neither farmers nor anyone else enjoy the consequences of a non-growing economy.
The number one British single today in 1963 may make you tap your foot:
Today in 1966, Mick Jagger got in the way of a chair thrown onto the stage during a Rolling Stones concert in Marseilles, France.
The title and artist are the same for the number one album today in 1969:
The number six single today in 1973 got the band on …
So as the song said, the members of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show bought five copies for their mothers.
The number one single today in 1975:
Today in 1975, Led Zeppelin had all six of its albums among the top 100, including number one, “Physical Graffiti”:
Today in 1980, Pink Floyd set a record for the longest stay in the album charts, 303 weeks, beating Carole King’s “Tapestry.”
And “Dark Side of the Moon” was less than halfway through its 15 years — to be precise, 741 weeks — on the charts.
The number one single today in 1986:
Today in 1996, two of the three members of the Teddy Bears filed suit against the third, Phil Spector, for not receiving royalties from reissues of their number one single:
Birthdays begin with Chad Allen of the Guess Who:
Who is Evangelos Papathanassiou? You know him better as Vangelis:
Speedy Keen played drums and sang for Thunderclap Newman:
Bobby Kimball of Toto:
Patty Donahue sang for the Waitresses …
… who recorded my favorite Jewish Christmas song:
One death of note today in 1985: Jeanine Deckers, the Singing Nun:
Whoever came up with the idea to put the Scott Walker recall petitions at IVerifytheRecall.com might be in line for some kind of journalism award.
If the website accomplished nothing else, it helped demonstrate the lack of knowledge within the state’s news media — or at least those caught signing the petition to recall Walker or one of the Republican state senators — about the state Open Records Law. (Which during my entire professional lifetime and at least a decade before that has been the sword journalists use to strike against those in state and local government who don’t want the public to know what they’re doing. The irony level is off the charts.)
It also may have demonstrated that either many people who work for media organizations haven’t read their employer’s code of ethics, or those media organizations haven’t explained their codes of ethics to their employees very well. (Journalism codes of ethics were devised out of the belief that journalism is a public endeavor, and out of the reality that journalism is the only line of work specifically protected by the First Amendment.)
There is also a third option, and I’m surprised no one has mentioned this before. Perhaps the media types who signed the petitions signed thinking they were helping their employer. A gubernatorial recall means months and months of stories, and, even better, millions of dollars of advertising, hopefully with their employer! (Any media company with Wisconsin operations that is not making buckets of money this year needs to replace its entire sales staff.)
I’m not sure into which category Rob Starbuck of WISC-TV in Madison fits, but he is the latest media person whose signature has been discovered by Media Trackers:
After Media Trackers first reported the signings, Colin Benedict, news director for WISC-TV, told Media Trackers that when he learned of the events he immediately “took action” and made sure “additional steps” were implemented in the newsroom process to prevent conflicts of interest in political reporting. “I directed that [Starbuck] not participate in any interviews related to the recall elections,” he said. Benedict also clarified that the signing was in violation of the station’s policy for newsroom employees.
Finding broadcasters on the recall petitions is more of a challenge because many of them don’t use their real names on the air. That’s usually not the case with print, which was how Boots and Sabers (H/T: Wis U.P. North) is able to pass on this from the Wisconsin State Journal:
Wisconsin State Journal editors learned this week that six staff members signed petitions calling for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker.
Five of the six signed a petition on Nov. 15, 2011, the first day the documents were circulated, and just before an internal memo from State Journal editor John Smalley reminded staff members of the newspaper’s policy against such activity, based on a long-standing code of ethics.
“We were surprised and disappointed,” Smalley said of finding the staff members’ names by searching a database of signatures at iverifytherecall.com. “We apologize to our readers for the lapse in judgment by several staff members.” …
Smalley said the newspaper considers signing a petition of any kind a violation of the company’s ethics policy. A portion of the code reads: “Participation in public affairs or events that may leave the impression that news judgment is being influenced by activism is prohibited.”
I don’t know what WISC’s or its parent company’s employee manual states, but for a media person to sign a petition violates the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics:
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
When a journalist puts his or her name on a public document that advocates a partisan or otherwise political activity, the journalist has violated both of those points. That is whether the petition is for or against a Democrat, Republican or nonpartisan candidate, or a referendum. WISC is based in Madison, but non-Madisonians and non-Dane County residents watch WISC too. WISC’s viewers have good reason to wonder whether WISC has been fairly covering the Recall _____ movement.
Those claiming that journalists’ political activities are protected by the First Amendment are the same people who would be screaming bloody murder had Starbuck signed a petition advocating the recall of Walker’s predecessor, Democrat James Doyle. (Particularly in the People’s Republic of Madison.) And anyone who claims they signed petitions only so people got a chance to vote is telling a tall tale. Anyone who signed the Walker recall petition opposes Walker and wants him out of office.
That certainly applies to elected officials who signed the Walker petitions, particularly those who do not have a D after their name. The list of signers include Madison Mayor Paul Soglin. (And apparently nearly every other Madison elected official.) Let’s say you’re a Madison resident who is known to be a conservative, and you have a problem with the city. Think you’re going to get a fair shake from Comrade Soglin and his apparatchiks? (The answer to which could be: You mean now, or since 1973?)
Appearance matters. The judges who signed the petition were wrong because they now appear to be biased. Starbuck and the Gannett 25 were wrong to sign because they now appear to be biased. All of them have damaged their own credibility by signing. In the court of public opinion, they’re now all guilty until they prove otherwise. The First Amendment does not protect you from the consequences of your actions, including exercising your First Amendment rights.
WFRV-TV in Green Bay had a surprising announcement Tuesday:
WFRV-TV Sports Director Larry McCarren has decided to part ways with WFRV-TV at the end of this month.
Larry has made a significant contribution over his 24 years at the station.
He is a noted authority on the Green Bay Packers and has been named Wisconsin Sportscaster of the Year four times.
Larry’s final newscast will be on Friday March 30th. All of us at Local 5 thank Larry for his years of service and extend him best wishes for the future.
I’ve lived in the Green Bay TV market for 18 years. I’m told when McCarren started on WFRV after the Packers cut him in the Forrest Gregg Purge following the 1985 season, he was legendarily bad. He’s still not the most dynamic TV personality, but that’s not why he’s stayed on WFRV for 27 years; it’s because he’s become the name-brand Packers authority on Wisconsin TV. Between his knowledge of the Packers and the NFL and his ability to communicate that knowledge, the man with the dangling left pinky has more TV involvement with the Packers between doing games on radio and WFRV’s “Larry McCarren’s Locker Room” than any other TV sportscaster in the state.
I’m told McCarren is 61, and in some media cases that’s retirement age. But I don’t think he’s retiring. The Green Bay Press–Gazette reports he’ll still be working with Wayne Larrivee on Packers radio anyway.
This is not based on inside information (which I lack anyway as a former Journal Communications employee-owner and employee); it’s merely a prediction, and you know how accurate those can be in my case. (However, I do recall saying during a Marketplace Magazine cover shoot at Lambeau Field in the fall of 1994 that WTMJ radio should hire McCarren to join Jim Irwin and Max McGee on Packer games. A few months later, WTMJ hired McCarren to join Irwin and McGee on Packer games.)
Journal Communications’ WTMJ radio in Milwaukee is the flagship station of the Packers Radio Network. WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee is Your Official Packers Station in the Milwaukee TV market. If you’ve been watching Journal’s WGBA-TV or its digital subchannel long enough, you’ll see a promo that says that WGBA is now Your Official Packers Station in the Green Bay TV market.
WGBA is the only Green Bay TV station without locally based sports anchors. WTMJ-TV’s Lance Allan, Rod Burks and Jessie Garcia do the sports on WGBA from Green Bay. (It’s amusing to flip between channel 4 and channel 26 and watch the same sports anchor simultaneously.) This is not a big deal for Packers, Badgers or Brewers coverage; it is a big deal for local high school or college sports coverage, which is pretty much nonexistent on WGBA, and one big reason WGBA’s news trails badly in the ratings.
There has been speculation that Journal will shut down WGBA’s newsroom and do WGBA’s news from Milwaukee. If that’s what Journal intended to do, they could do that before now; they certainly have the technological capability to do that. (WGBA’s weekend weather segments are also done from Milwaukee.) In some markets, one station produces another station’s newscasts; WKOW-TV, Madison’s ABC affiliate, produces the newscasts for WMSN-TV, the Madison Fox affiliate, and WAOW-TV, Wausau’s ABC affiliate, does the same for WFXS-TV, Wausau’s Fox station.
Whether shutting down the WGBA newsroom was Journal’s plans once upon a time, the new Official Packers Station thing makes me think that that’s not Journal’s intention anymore. WGBA will get significantly more ad revenue by carrying preseason Packers games and other Packer programming, including “The Mike McCarthy Show” and “Inside 1265” at a minimum, in addition to however many Packer games end up on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” WTMJ-TV and WGBA also will be carrying the summer Olympics, which always means a good Journal Broadcast Group revenue year. And this being an election year, you’ve already seen more political ads than you can stand, but not as many as you’re going to see.
Given the revenue bump Journal Broadcast Group generally and WGBA specifically will be seeing in 2012, this would seem to be a logical time to increase McCarren’s work with Journal stations. He will still be doing Packer games on WTMJ radio; he could be WGBA’s sports anchor and contribute to WTMJ-TV’s Packer coverage, as well as other Official Packers Station programming. For that matter, “Larry McCarren’s Locker Room,” or its next iteration, could be beamed to the other Official Packers Stations elsewhere in Wisconsin.
About “Locker Room,” the Tuesday afternoon version of the Green Bay Press–Gazette story was cryptic enough to make you think this scenario is not out of the realm of possibility:
His departure changes the status of “Larry McCarren’s Locker Room,” his Green Bay Packers-related show.
If the show continues, it would be entering its 25th season.
Earlier this month, WFRV management and McCarren said the future of the show was under discussion.
All this may be far-fetched, but Journal Broadcast Group has not been averse to making the big hire in the past. (Or the big purchase, given that Journal is the only in-state media company to own more than one TV station.) When Irwin and McGee announced their plans to retire in 1998, no one would have ever thought that Larrivee, then the voice of the Chicago Bears on radio and Bulls on TV in the nation’s third largest media market, was even a fantasy candidate to replace Irwin. But when the 1999 season began, there sat Larrivee and McCarren in the Lambeau Field press box.
(For that matter, I don’t know that Journal Broadcast Group wants to be this ambitious, but there are NBC stations in Madison, Eau Claire and Rhinelander that probably could be pried away from their current owners for the right price.)
Maybe it’s not far-fetched at all. Tuesday evening, the Press–Gazette added:
“A major factor at the end of the day is I think I belong where most of the Packer stuff is as far as the Packer (TV) network, coach’s show, preseason games and things like that, and that’s moving,” McCarren said. “That’s certainly a factor.” …
“We’re talking, and there’s a mutual interest,” McCarren said.
Steve Wexler, Journal Broadcast Group executive vice president said he couldn’t comment and added “other than he’s obviously one of the great broadcasters in the state, both in TV and in radio.”
It’s also possible the Packers could bring McCarren in house, where he could serve in similar capacity while working for the Packers Media Group, which operates the team’s official website, Packers.com.
Moving between stations seems more common in the Green Bay TV market than in the Milwaukee or Madison TV markets at least. Younger viewers may not recall when Tom Zalaski worked at WBAY-TV, or Tom Milbourn worked at WFRV, or Mark Leland worked at WGBA. But then Zalaski moved from WBAY to WFRV, which pushed Milbourn from WFRV to WLUK and WLUK’s John Vigeland out of TV entirely. (Leland went from WGBA to WLUK in a separate transaction, to use a pro sports metaphor.) For that matter, every commercial station in the Green Bay market has carried more than one network in its history. You have to be, well, my age to remember WBAY as a CBS station, WFRV as an ABC station, WLUK as an NBC station and WGBA as a Fox station. (WFRV and WLUK are both former ABC and NBC stations.)
McCarren’s TV hiring may not happen immediately. The aforementioned switches often came after the anchors’ noncompete clauses, which can be up to one year, expired. But it seems to make logical sense (which, granted, doesn’t always apply on TV) for McCarren’s role to expand on Journal Broadcast Group stations now that he’s leaving WFRV, and, note, by his decision.
Today in 1964, the Beatles were the first pop stars to get memorialized at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum …
… while in the North Sea, the pirate Radio Caroline went on the air:
The number one British single today in 1970:
The number one single today in 1981:
Today in 1982, David Crosby was arrested after he crashed his car on the San Diego Freeway in greater Los Angeles. Police found cocaine and a pistol in his car.
Asked why he carried the pistol, Crosby answered, “John Lennon.”
Today in 1992, Ozzy Osbourne invited the first two rows of the audience at the Meadows Amphitheatre in Irvine, Calif., onstage with him.
Several other rows invited themselves onstage, forcing the end of the concert.
Damage exceeded $100,000.
Birthdays begin with Chuck Portz of the Turtles:
John Evans of Jethro Tull:
Milan Williams played keyboards for the Commodores:
Geo Grimes of Danny Wilson:
James Atkin of EMF:
One death of note today in 1974: Arthur Crudup, who wrote …
The latest demonstration of the Obama administration’s hostility to transportation freedom comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, reports c|net:
Last month, the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency published a dense document with guidelines for automakers on how to minimize the distractions caused by in-vehicle electronics. Buried among equations for determining optimal display viewing angles and testing procedures is the recommendation that navigation devices should only show static or near-static images, which would essentially eliminate their usefulness. …
Every current installed navigation system uses the car as a fixed point, and shows the map moving around it. NHTSA wants that changed so as to keep the map fixed. Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image. The recommendation seems to suggest that the position of the car could only be updated every couple of seconds. Likewise, the map could be refreshed once the car has left the currently displayed area.
This recommendation would essentially make navigation unusable. The system could still give an auditory warning for the next turn, but without being able to glance down at the map and see how close the next street is would likely lead to a lot of missed turns and resultant frustration.
And although NHTSA includes the results of driver distraction studies in the guidelines, it has no testing directly related to using a navigation system. Instead there are more general conclusions against any tasks that require looking at a device for periods of more than 2 seconds, or a series of glances that amount to more than 12 seconds at at time.
NHTSA is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, which is run by former Republican U.S. Ray LaHood of Illinois, proof positive that not all big-government busybodies are Democrats. Apparently only in government can looking at a GPS device be considered more dangerous than looking at a road map or a road atlas.
The DOT also includes the National Transportation Safety Board, which late last year recommended that states ban cellphone use, including hands-free use, except in emergencies. This is despite the fact that an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study reports no decrease in crash rates in states that enacted cellphone bans.
There remains no compelling evidence that cellphone use is inherently more dangerous than other driver distractions. More dangerous than talking with a passenger? More dangerous than eating or drinking? More dangerous than adjusting your sound system or climate control system? More dangerous than looking at road signs? More dangerous than looking at your car’s speedometer when you see a police car?
Everything that leads to bad driver acts are already prohibited under state law, ranging from inattentive driving (which gets you a ticket) to negligent use of a motor vehicle (which is a felony). Banning specific acts of inattentive or negligent driving is redundant, yet, in the case of cellphone and texting bans, unenforceable.
These are not the only instances of the Obama administration’s continuing harassment of drivers. How do you like paying upwards of $4 per gallon for gas? How are you going to like paying for $5-a-gallon gas later this year? How do you like your tax dollars being wasted on United Auto Workers-member salaries for GM or Chrysler workers? I won’t ask how you’ll like 54.5-mpg “vehicles,” because you won’t be able to afford one.
This and my previous blog chronicled the disaster that the Obama administration has been for cars and drivers. Would the GOP candidates be any better? Ron Paul might be fine with getting rid of the DOT entirely, but he’s not going to become president. Rick Santorum isn’t either, but his economic positions have been bad enough to make you think he doesn’t get it about transportation freedom either. Newt Gingrich is enough of a technogeek to make you think he doesn’t like the Chevy Volt, but not necessarily non-internal-combustion-powered cars or such “innovations” as driverless cars.
That leaves Mitt Romney, who seems to be driving toward the nomination. Romney, remember, is the son of George Romney, former president of the late American Motors Corp. The younger Romney recently chose his Secret Service code name: “Javelin.” Maybe there’s some hope of having a president who’s not reflexively anti-car and anti-transportation freedom.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 