The number one British album today in 1981 was “Queen Greatest Hits”:
The number one album today in 1987 was the soundtrack to “Dirty Dancing”:
Sometimes, one sentence says all you need to know: Today in 1990, record producer Frank Farin fired Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan because the members of Milli Vanilli insisted on singing their next album. Need I write more?
The number one single today in 1992:
The number one British album today in 1998 was “U2: The Best of 1980–1990 and B Sides”:
Today in 2000, Chris “Limahl” Hamel, former lead singer of Kajagoogoo, was nearly killed when his bus crashed and caught fire on the way to a concert:
The number one British single today in 2004:
Birthdays begin with Cornell Gunter of the Coasters:
Today in 1968, Britain’s W.T. Smiths refused to carry the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland” …
… with its original album cover …
… although a different cover was OK:
The number one single today in 1983:
Today in 1990, Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones crashed his car on the M4 motorway near Marlborough, England. Wood got out of his car and was waving traffic around his car when another car hit Wood, breaking both his legs.
Birthdays begin with Ruby Nash Curtis of Ruby and the Romantics:
Brian Hyland …
… was born the same day as John Maus of the Walker Brothers:
Booker T. Jones of Booker T and the MGs:
Neil Young of the Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash & Young and his own voluminous solo career:
Last month, I wrote about my 20-plus-year avocation, sports announcing, which has provided me with volumes of stories even though I’ve never worked in broadcasting full-time.
I wrote that I haven’t really patterned myself after any announcer that I’m aware of. But if you listened to, for instance, Jim Irwin call Packer and Badger games and Bob Uecker call Brewer games for decades, you are likely to unconsciously emulate them unless you make a conscious effort not to.
Packer fans today get to hear the outstanding work of Packer announcer Wayne Larrivee, known for …
The contrast to Larrivee is the other announcer at Lambeau Field Monday night, the Vikings’ unprofessional Paul Allen:
The example of working to not sound like someone applies to the announcing Carays, Harry …
… and Skip, who did not want to sound like his father, and almost never did …
… except for this October 1992 moment:
Jack and Joe Buck don’t sound alike, but Joe gave a great tribute to Jack in crazy game 6 of the World Series:
Harry Caray and Jack Buck called Cardinals games from the late 1960s until the Cardinals fired Caray in 1970. Note the differences between their styles:
Buck then took over and announced the Cardinals and NFL football until his death:
The younger Buck now announces baseball …
… and football (where he almost became the Packers’ personal announcer, calling their last six games of the 2010 season):
Team announcers have two priorities: (1) Get people to watch or listen to the broadcast, and (2) get people to come to the team’s home games. Some team announcers claim to call games down the middle, but that’s not necessarily what their listeners want to hear. And when your team does well, that tends to help the announcer’s career too:
The number one task of an announcer is to call the game — score, down and distance, balls and strikes, etc., and of course in-game commercials and sponsor mentions. The announcers I like best are those who besides that make you watch, whether you have a rooting interest in the game, and regardless of the score.
Skip Caray was worth watching to see what he’d say next, including:
Until Braves owner Ted Turner made him stop, upon reaching the bottom of the fifth inning: “We’ve come to the bottom of another fifth.”
During a late at-bat of a Braves hitter during a game in Los Angeles: “He has twice grounded to short. [After the swing] He has thrice grounded to short.”
During a period where Turner prohibited CNN announcers from using the word “foreign,” mandating “international” instead, a batter called time out and stepped out of the batter’s box because, Caray explained, “he had an international object in his eye.”
Caray described one poorly attended Braves home game as “a partial sellout.” Another home game, with entire sections of empty seats, was called “Blue Seat Night, folks — you dress up like a blue seat, you get in free.” In another game, he announced, “The stadium is filled tonight, but many fans have come disguised as empty seats.”
Caray once mispronounced the name of Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt, omitting the M and adding a Z sound at the end. After coming back from commercial, his partner, former Milwaukee Braves pitcher Ernie Johnson, asked, “What was the name of the Phillies third baseman again?”
When you’ve been announcing games since 1974, as Reds announcer Marty Brennaman has, you can get away with being critical during games:
Whether or not he can call games as well as he used to, CBS’ Verne Lundquist (who had a couple of problem calls in the LSU–Alabama game Saturday) is enjoyable to watch, particularly on basketball with Bill Raftery, which is kind of like watching your two great-uncles argue with each other:
The best hockey announcer right now is probably NBC’s Mike Emrick:
One announcer whose very voice is college football is ABC’s Keith Jackson …
… although he could do other sports too:
My favorite sports announcer was Dick Enberg of NBC and CBS:
The announcer that makes every other sound like a rank amateur is, of course, the transcendent Vin Scully …
… who, though best known for baseball, could announce football too:
Scully’s opposite in career is NBC’s Al Michaels, best known for football …
… and one hockey game …
… but who also did baseball well:
One more thing: The exciting aspect of calling sports is that the announcer is never 100 percent sure what’s going to happen. Watch the bizarre finish of the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, for which no announcer could properly prepare:
Besides the end of the War to End All Wars (which didn’t end all wars but led directly to the next war) and the day Americans remember and honor those whose service and sacrifice allow me to freely write this and you to freely read this, what else happened Nov. 11?
Today in 1954, Bill Haley got his first top 10 single, “Shake Rattle and Roll,” originally a Joe Turner song. Haley had changed the name of his band, the cowboy-motif Saddlemen, to His Comets.
Imagine what the Transportation Security Administration would have done with this: Today in 1969, the FBI arrested Jim Morrison for drunk and disorderly conduct on an airplane. Morrison and actor Tom Baker had been drinking and harassing stewardesses on a flight to Phoenix. Morrison and Baker spent a night in jail and were released on $2,500 bail.
Today in 1972, an era when pretty much everything would go in rock music, listeners got to hear the first example of what might be called “yodel rock”:
Continuing our Elton John theme of the past few days, John had the number one single today in 1973:
Today in 1978, Donna Summer had the number one album, “Live and More,” and single, which counted as “more” more than “live”:
The number one British single …
… and album today in 1989:
The number one album today in 1995 was the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”:
Birthdays begin with Roger Lavern, who played keyboards for the Tornadoes:
Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods …
… was born one year before Vince Martell of Vanilla Fudge …
… and Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds …
… who were born one year before Pat Daugherty of Black Oak Arkansas:
Jim Peterik of the brass-rock band The Ides of March …
… and then Survivor:
Paul Cowsill of the Cowsills:
Mike Mesaros of the Smithereens:
Andy Partridge of XTC:
One death of note: Today in 1972, Allman Brothers bass player Berry Oakley hit a bus with his motorcycle and died at the same intersection where bandmate Duane Allman had died in a motorcycle crash a year earlier.
It must be difficult to be a business publication editor in the People’s Republic of Madison.
Either that, or Joe Vanden Plas, senior editor of In Business, has fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome. Vanden Plas claims “I don’t really mind a gubernatorial recall” against Gov. Scott Walker, who is only the most pro-business Wisconsin governor of the 21st century:
Before I get into my reasoning, let me state the following: I voted for Walker because I thought the policies he spelled out during the 2010 campaign would improve the business climate in Wisconsin. While there is always room for improvement — we still need to enact a Wisconsin-centric approach to boosting venture capital deployment — I believe the governor has delivered on that promise.
Walker also promised to get the state’s fiscal house in order, and even though we have more challenges with future budgets, we now have a balanced budget. Here’s the rub: he never told us, while campaigning in 2010, that he would limit collective bargaining in order to get there. That little bomb was dropped a couple of days after the election, after victory had been secured.
This is where Vanden Plas’ entire argument falls apart before it really gets going. Readers of this blog know that Walker has done exactly what he said he was going to do, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in June and August 2010, and as repeated by a teacher union publication last fall.
That fact makes Vanden Plas’ next assertions dubious:
Republicans calling for recall reform want malfeasance in office to be the main criterion under which recall elections can be considered. That should certainly be one of them, but what about politicians who promise one thing during a campaign and do just the opposite while in office? Or those who camouflage their real intentions during a campaign and then spring a surprise once the votes are counted?
As much as I appreciate the Governor’s attempts to help job creators, he was guilty of the latter and it was immensely unfair to voters.
Let me amend that: Vanden Plas’ assertions are not dubious if the governor he’s referring to is Walker’s predecessor, James Doyle, who said, “We should not, we must not and I will not raise taxes,” and then raised taxes by $2.1 billion. Voters never got a chance to vote on that since the tax increase was passed right after the 2008 election … except that that tax increase added on to Democrats’ gross incompetence helps explain the 2010 election results. Perhaps Vanden Plas was thinking of the 2009–10 Legislature in his last sentence, “A defeat would send a message to people in both parties — no post-campaign surprises or you could also be recalled.” And as for camouflaging “real intentions,” as far as I know not a single Democratic candidate in Recallarama uttered the words “collective bargaining,” which was disingenuous at best.
I have to wonder why a business magazine would take the side of (1) government employees over those whose (excessive) taxes pay their salaries and (2) government employee unions over the magazine’s own readers, but that’s what Vanden Plas does:
We will have an opportunity to weigh the benefits of a balanced budget and more taxpayer-friendly property tax bills this December (another Walker promise) versus what I hope will be Walker’s opponent outlining an alternative fiscal path.
I have no problem negotiating with public employees, during a budget crunch, to have them contribute more to their health care and pension benefits, so long as they have the opportunity to recoup what has been lost through collective bargaining when economic conditions improve. Diminishing collective bargaining power removes that possibility.
Voters had an “alternative fiscal path” to choose from in November 2010. That path included multi-billion-dollar tax increases, and multi-billion-dollar state budget deficits. Voters emphatically chose the path Walker and Republicans represented. Since January, opponents of Walker have responded by (1) denying that grotesquely large deficits (as in the second largest per capita deficits in the nation) are a problem and (2) proposing to raise taxes.
Vanden Plas’ praise of public employee collective bargaining belies the fact that unions are seen as a negative in nearly every state business climate comparison — comparisons in which Wisconsin has advanced from bad under Doyle to mediocre under Walker and will undoubtedly slide back toward the basement should Walker lose a recall election.
The correct time to object to an elected official’s or party’s political direction is at the next regularly scheduled election, which is less than a year from now. Voters can throw out the entire Assembly and switch control of the Senate back to Democrats if they like. The current path guarantees that the next Democratic governor and members of a Democratic-controlled Legislature will be recalled at the first politically expedient opportunity, which will make this state ungovernable for anybody. (Unless something far worse happens.)
The Dane County economy is more influenced by government — state government, the University of Wisconsin, and the state’s second largest county and city government — then any other metropolitan area in this state. (Imagine if Walker, instead of requiring state employees to pay more for their benefits, had laid off a couple thousand state employees.) But businesses in the People’s Republic of Madison are not immune from the economic laws and forces that affect every other business in Wisconsin. Anything that makes businesses less profitable (as in excessive taxes to fund excessive government employee pay and benefits) is bad for the entire state.
These screenshots were what Charter Cable subscribers in Ripon saw, on WTMJ-TV (channel 4) at 1 p.m. …
… on WISN-TV (channel 12) at 1:03 p.m. …
… and on WCGV-TV (channel 24) at 1:04 p.m.:
I may be wrong about this, but I thought the EAS test was supposed to be simultaneous on every EAS-participating over-the-air and cable channel. I only got WISN and WCGV’s tests because I just happened to be flipping channels after the WTMJ test was over. Then, Telemundo (cable channel 17) had audio of a National Weather Service Required Weekly Test, which usually occurs Wednesdays at noon. Right day, but one hour and a few minutes late.
That wasn’t as strange as what apparently happened in Milwaukee, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
In our newsroom, we monitor four cable news networks. At 1 p.m., all of the stations interrupted their broadcasts. But instead of showing a test alert, our Time Warner Cable service switched all of the televisions to QVC.
We wondered whether it might be a local issue, but after turning to the social media network Twitter, we saw people complaining about the same problem on different cable systems across the country.
In the Washington, D.C., area, Twitter user @dmataconis wrote: “Did not see it on Comcast in northern Virginia. Instead, saw about 30 seconds of QVC (was watching MSNBC at test time)”
In Los Angeles, @123arnie wrote: “For the Emergency Alert test, Time Warner Cable changed my channel to QVC, so when the test was over I could buy things.”
In Milwaukee, Twitter user @marnerae01 wrote: “National Emergency Test turned TV to QVC. feel safer knowing if theres a disaster, I can purchase seasonal items for 3 EZ payments of $19.50.”
Beginning at 2:01 p.m., viewers and listeners in many states said they saw and heard the alerts at the scheduled time, but others said they did not. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancies, but that was one of the purposes of the test — to find out how well the system would work in an actual emergency. …
Many of the reported failures affected cable and satellite television subscribers, and some were quite puzzling. Some DirecTV subscribers said their TV sets played the Lady Gaga song “Paparazzi” when the test was under way. Some Time Warner Cable subscribers in New York said the test never appeared on screen. Some Comcast subscribers in northern Virginia said their TV sets were switched over to QVC before the alert was shown.
In some cases the test messages were delayed, perhaps because they were designed to trickle down from one place to many. A viewer in Minneapolis said he saw the message about three minutes late. A viewer in Chattanooga, Tenn., said she saw it about 10 minutes late.
“We always knew that there would probably be some things that didn’t work and some things that did,” a FEMA official said an hour after the test. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agencies had not publicly acknowledged the glitches yet.
This appears to have gone about as well as the ESPN Y2K test:
It also makes one think that technological change is not always positive. Now that we’re in the digital TV era, we’ve all seen instances in which, instead of a snowy or fuzzy analog signal, there is no signal at all, or, worse, the picture is frozen in place for minutes or even longer.
For the conspiracy theorists, here’s a comment from CBS in New York:
It was supposed to fail. This is part of the mission.
When it fails on TV and radio stations, the government gets the opportunity to argue it should also target cellphones, and the power grid, and Internet service providers so that every means of communication is interrupted and may be controlled.
I maintain what I wrote Tuesday, that I have a hard time imagining, when the EAS wasn’t used for 9/11, what national — as in nationwide — emergency would require the White House to have the ability to override every TV channel. (Except, apparently, QVC.)
The spin being put on this failure is, “well we had to test to learn were the weak spots in the system were.” Perhaps.
But, think of it this way: In a genuine emergency isn’t better that all of our notification eggs are not in one basket?!
Let’s retire the Emergency Alert System along with the TSA and put the money toward something useful like hardening our electrical system infrastructure. …
Of course, this being government, scrapping this deeply flawed and unnecessary system never occurs to them.
And some people still believe the government should take over health care and take a more active role in the economy.
Today at 1 p.m., for 30 seconds every TV station and cable channel will broadcast a test of the Emergency Alert System.
The test will not sound like this:
The test is a first because there has never been a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System or its predecessor Emergency Broadcast System.
For that matter, the EAS has never been activated for a nationwide emergency. That includes 9/11, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or any other national event, including this event 46 years ago today:
It may seem like an obvious thing to have issued a nationwide EAS alert on 9/11. But what good would it have really done? It would not have been issued before the second plane hit the World Trade Center at the earliest, and by then the plot involving the two other planes was well under way. The federal government grounded every flight in the country. Issuing a nationwide EAS alert would have only generated more panic then the conclusions TV viewers were already drawing.
So what is the point of a nationwide test? According to an FCC news release, “The purpose of the test is to assess the reliability and effectiveness of the EAS as a public alert mechanism. EAS Participants currently participate in state-level monthly tests and local-level weekly tests, but no top-down review of the entire system has ever been undertaken. The Commission, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will use the results of this nationwide test to assess the reliability and effectiveness of the EAS as a public alert mechanism, and will work together with EAS stakeholders to make improvements to the system as appropriate.”
The chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau adds:
Early warnings save lives. This was demonstrated recently and dramatically during the major earthquake and tsunami that devastated Eastern Japan. Except for Japan’s early warning systems, loss of life would have been much higher. …
Although FCC rules require local and state components of the EAS to be tested on a weekly and monthly basis, the system has never been tested nationally end-to-end. If public safety officials need to send an alert or warning to a large region of the United States, in the case of a major earth quake and tsunami on the West Coast, for example, or even to the entire country, we need to know that the system will work as intended. Only a top-down, simultaneous test of all components of the EAS can tell us this.
Early warnings do save lives, but only if they’re heeded. The National Weather Service issued this apocalyptic (as described by the narrator) warning before Hurricane Katrina, which was not heeded by tens of thousands of New Orleans residents:
Part of the reason, as I’ve discussed beforein this space, is that the National Weather Service issues more tornado warnings than they used to,which means more ignored tornado warnings. In the past, tornado warnings would be issued upon visual (by weather spotters, usually law enforcement) or radar evidence (the “hook echo”). For several years, the NWS has been issuing what I call STCOPAT warnings, for a “severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado.” (We had a personal record three visits to the basement this year, one toward the end of our German/French/Italian foreign exchange student’s visit, and another during a Story Time visit to the Ripon library.)
There have been a handful of false emergency alarms of a non-meteorological nature. Imagine yourself listening to the radio in Fort Wayne, Ind., on a Saturday morning in February 1971, when you hear this:
In June 2007, something similar happened in Illinois:
Today’s test originally was going to take 2½ minutes, but was shortened to 30 seconds. As TV Technology puts it, the Federal Emergency Management Agency “confirmed the shortening of the Nov. 9 test, but did not say specifically if the agency did so to reduce the chance of an unintended reenactment of ‘War of the Worlds.’ The change was said to be made at the direction of Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.”
I’m guessing the test was shortened to 30 seconds because of, shall we say, negative reactions. First, from The Blaze:
Only the President has the authority to activate EAS at the national level, and he has delegated that authority to the Director of FEMA. The test will be conducted jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS).
In essence, the authority to seize control of all television and civilian communication has been asserted by the executive branch and handed to a government agency. …
So this begs the question: is the first ever national EAS test really a big deal?
Probably not. At least, not yet.
But there are some troubling factors all coming together right now that could conceivably trigger a real usage of the EAS system in the not too distant future. A European financial collapse could bring down U.S. markets. What is now the “Occupy” movement could lead to widespread civil unrest. And there are ominous signs that radical groups such as Anonymous will attempt something major on November 5th- Guy Fawke’s day.
Now we know in the event of a major crisis, the American people will be told with one voice, at the same time, about an emergency.
All thats left to determine is who will have control of the EAS when that day comes, and what their message will be.
I can’t see a legitimate need to cut off radio and TV in an emergency.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Of all the Presidents this one is least trusted to have such control at his fingertips. This is not good news. what will we do when all radio and television communications cease, in the event of some type of emergency? I understand there possibly could be a time it is useful. Now the programs make announcements and run bulletins and banners across the screen. This is a great deal of power for one person to hold. How would we know what is going on if it happens that all communications were to cease for a time? … we would not know the cause or purpose. Not a good situation. This happened in Germany prior/during WW11
… Like I’ve said before, there hasn’t ever been a nation-wide test of the system. Now, you could say we sort-of had one in 1971 when the idiot operator at NORAD sent the wrong message during a weekly test. If you look at the results of what happened, then the system failed miserably. Over half the country would not have known if we were under attack. This is a way for the FCC to gauge how (and if) the system will work and to take steps to fix what doesn’t.
Now, something I didn’t know…the EAS is basically a last-ditch effort to get a Presidential message out to the people, just in case the President couldn’t use the networks to talk to us.
There are some who will view this as a way for Barry the Boob to prepare to put us under martial law, but I don’t look at it as something so sinister. It really is a good idea to do this…just to make sure it works. And if in some future time he does use it to do just that, then you can say “I told you so”.
It says something about the level of distrust in the federal government and the president that a seemingly worthwhile test has sinister overtones. Then again, the term “homeland security” is rather 1984-esque. And one should be skeptical about a government agency (and I could stop the sentence right there) for its color-coded contribution to national security.
The better question to me is what nationwide value the EAS actually has. In case of natural disaster, there’s no question. But natural disasters are local in scope. Should the U.S. be subject to, say, an electromagnetic pulse attack, no one will hear a presidential EAS message. We have news media that did as good a job as possible reporting the day of 9/11, and they would do the same in the event of an event of similar scope. Knocking every TV channel off the air for a presidential message, regardless of who the president is, seems to me to be counterproductive. In an actual emergency, less communication is not better.
The number one single today in 1983:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 