First, for those who believe the British are the height of sophistication and are so much more couth than us Americans: This was the number one song in the U.K. today in 1986:
The chicken is not having a birthday. Pervis Jackson of the Spinners is:
So is drummer Bill Bruford, who played for Yes, King Crimson and Genesis:
Today in 1980, Brian May of Queen collapsed while onstage. This was due to hepatitis, not, one assumes, the fact that Paul McCartney released his “McCartney II” album the same day.
Today’s rock music birthdays start with someone who will never be associated with rock music: Liberace, born in West Allis today in 1919.
Actual rock birthdays start with Isaac “Redd” Holt of Young–Holt Unlimited:
Nicky Chinn wrote this 1970s classic: It’s it’s …
Roger Earl of Foghat …
… was born one year before Barbara Lee of the Chiffons …
… and drummer Darrell Sweet of Nazareth:
William “Sputnik” Spooner played guitar for both the Grateful Dead …
… and The Tubes:
Richard Page of Mr. Mister:
Krist Novoselic of Nirvana was born one year before …
… Miss Jackson if you’re nasty:
Finally, Patrick Waite, bassist and singer for Musical Youth, which did this ’80s classic, dude:
The number one British single today in 1959 was not number one due to grammar:
The number one album today in 1971 was Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “4 Way Street”:
The number one British album today in 1983 (with the clock ticking on my high school days) was Spandau Ballet’s “True”:
The number one British album today in 2000 was Tom Jones’ “Reload,” which proved that Jones could sing about anything, and loudly:
The number one British single today in 1957 gave a name to a genre of music between country and rock (even though the song sounds as much like the genre as Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz” sounds like rock and roll):
The number one single today in 1967:
The number one British album today in 1967 promised “More of the Monkees”:
(Interesting aside: “More of the Monkees” was one of only four albums to reach the British number one all year. The other three were the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” and “The Monkees.”)
The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1963, the producers of CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew told Bob Dylan he couldn’t perform his “Talking John Birch Society Blues” because it mocked the U.S. military.
So he didn’t. He walked out of rehearsals and didn’t appear on the show.
The number one album today in 1973 was Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy,” which probably didn’t make Zeppelin mad mad mad or sad sad sad:
The number one British single today in 1958 was a cover of a song written in 1923:
The number one British album today in 1963 was the Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” which was number one for 30 weeks:
From NBCUniversal:
American Wire listed some Twitter reactions:
Let me guess: the main theme will be about how reporters aren’t Leftwing enough!
They could just as well have picked NYT or Wapo, and not a “dying Midwestern town.” It’s not the geographic region that’s relevant—it’s the fact that the entire corrupt industry is dying.
That’s the most depressing premise I’ve ever heard, mostly because it’s too true to life. The death of print journalism is funny, let’s watch them convulse?
so basically a true story of journalism in 2024?
If you can’t find enough programming to keep from re-making a re-make, then maybe you don’t need to exist as a streamer.
my immediate take (and not being in the writers room so what do I know!): there’s comedic gold in adhering more closely to reality rather than this “volunteer reporter” idea (like 3 local reporters making like 30k a year trying to do the work that 20 people used to do).
Evidently the last commenter has not heard of the Reader Inc. Editorial Training Center created by the late Thomson Newspapers chain. And in the wake of the Great Recession media outlets were seeking stories without offering pay. (For that matter well before that I was told I shouldn’t get paid for broadcasting games at one radio station, which ended my work at that radio station.)
The response does reflect reality:
I had one day where I covered an arson fire, a solid waste management meeting and a high school softball game. Then got yelled at by the publisher for claiming mileage.
I’m not sure who would find that funny besides people still working in the news media. Imagine the humor of getting hired at a job where you have no employee benefits other than mileage (which was reduced to $5 per week because, you guessed it, I was driving too much) and vacation (one week after one year). I also heard of a media outlet — I forgot if it was a weekly newspaper or small radio station — that would pay mileage to the event, but not back, on the logic that the employee would be going back to the office or home anyway.
The crazy part about this is you might think that publishers (who usually come from the sales side) would retire wealthy upon selling their newspapers. I can think of four publishers, two of whom I worked for, who sold out to bigger companies. All four didn’t live very long after retiring — from less than 20 years to one year. I don’t think any of the four got what most people other than their former employers got “rich” by selling out.
The economic model of small-town businesses, which includes weekly newspapers, has always involved smaller amounts of money than those unfamiliar with newspapers might believe. For decades two-thirds of newspaper revenues came from their advertisers, mostly retail. You can imagine what happened when the retail advertising base started to erode with changes in business. That, however, doesn’t mean subscribers have been willing to pick up the financial slack. And to this day few media outlets have been able to figure out how to handle the Internet and make money off it.
Another Facebook Friend (who is the wife of an actual friend of mine) is sure it won’t be funny because in the woke era nothing is funny. The irony may be that over my career I have gotten to know a lot of people, both in the media and those on the other end of notebooks and microphones, who would be funny to portray. But a lot of them, particularly those who get their paychecks from the media, would be too politically incorrect (not necessarily due to their politics but due to their personal quirks) to portray today.
You may remember a couple weeks ago I noted the first known meeting of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Today in 1963, upon the advice of George Harrison, Decca Records signed the Rolling Stones to a contract.
Four years to the day later, Stones Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones celebrated by … getting arrested for drug possession.
I noted the 62nd anniversary May 2 of WLS in Chicago going to Top 40. Today in 1982, WABC in New York (also owned by ABC, as one could conclude from their call letters) played its last record, which was …
Four years later, the number one song in America was, well, inspired by, though not based on, a popular movie of the day:
Yesterday’s announcement of the abrupt closure and dissolution of FreedomWorks by its board of directors is the closest thing we will get to a formal date of death for the Tea Party movement, which in truth has been dead since Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump did for the Republican establishment what it couldn’t do on its own in killing the Tea Party and its demands for small, constitutional government.
That impetus may return someday, as it has in the past — nobody during the first seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency was seriously predicting a mass movement against “compassionate conservatism,” Wall Street and corporate bailouts, socialized medicine, and the growth of the security state, any more than anybody in 1955 (outside National Review) seriously predicted the rise of Goldwater conservatism — but this particular iteration of the movement is dead as a doornail. Its institutions, of which FreedomWorks was one of the most prominent, are either collapsed or (in the case of the House Freedom Caucus) entirely repurposed toward MAGA populism. A few legislators (Chip Roy comes to mind) still define themselves in identifiably Tea Party terms, but many of those who rose within the movement have gravitated since then more toward either the MAGA side of the movement (think of Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Ron DeSantis) or the more traditional party (think of Nikki Haley).Luke Mullins of Politico talked to people involved with FreedomWorks, including the group’s president, Adam Brandon, who were blunt that “the decision to shut down was driven by the ideological upheaval of the Trump era”:
After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt…“Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising. “Now I think donors are saying, ‘What are you doing for Trump today?’” said Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks’ board. “And we’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors.” Brandon, for his part, said some donors would contact him to complain that the organization was doing too much to help Trump, while others called to complain that they weren’t doing enough to help Trump. “It is an impossible position,” he said.
As I argued two years ago in reviewing the wreckage wrought by the 2012 election, the movement missed its moment when it failed to coalesce behind a viable alternative to Mitt Romney:
Trust in the party’s hierarchy collapsed after the fiascos of 2006–08. Presaged by 2008’s popular boomlet for Sarah Palin, the Tea Party delivered populist energy, primary wins, and new stars (such as Rubio and Rand Paul in 2010 and Ted Cruz in 2012). The moment demanded a presidential campaign that was more populist, more combative, and meant to do what it said.
No serious Tea Party candidate emerged, leaving instead the 1994-retread campaigns of Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Newt surged rapidly in the polls after attacking a debate moderator and won South Carolina in a blowout, becoming the only winner of South Carolina not to claim the Republican nomination in the modern primary era. Santorum won eleven states on a mixture of social conservatism and economic populism. These were harbingers. The pent-up demand that might have followed a principled Tea Party conservative in 2012 had moved on to something less restrained than Cruz or Rubio by 2016.
R.I.P., Tea Party.
The last Republican presidential nominee who campaigned on smaller government was … Ronald Reagan. Not George H.W. “Kinder, Gentler” Bush. Nor really Bob Dole. (He was able to recite the 10th Amendment, but that and a tax cut are all I remember of his campaign, and he had no shot of winning anyway.) Not George W. “Compassionate Conservatism” Bush. Not John McCain. (If you’re sponsoring legislation with Russ Feingold, your conservative credentials should be immediately suspect.) Not Mitt Romney. And certainly not Donald Trump.
I’m not sure I agree with these two comments; you might:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
How much of the latter list really counts as smaller government beyond stopping government overreach?