When pigs fly... or when Swine Flu...

I think it was Obama's consigliere Rahm Emanuel who alluded to never wanting to waste a perfectly good crisis. The monetizing of this one particularly sticks in my craw. While the best way of preventing the spread of this illness is proper and frequent hand washing, a company called Purell bought a full page ad in today's New York Times pulling a quote out of a document from the Center for Disease Control and using it to pimp their product. Who knows how many other papers this has run in- and a full page NYT ad is around $140,000. You still pick up the bottle. The germs are still there to get to someone else. The germs that survive the Purell are STILL on your hands.

WASH. WITH. SOAP. AND. WATER.

I spent ten years around folks whose livings were made in American hospital operating rooms. Trust me, they all WASHED.

While we are on the topic, in the same issue of the Times (the paper whose mission it is to keep me crazy) had this article about the inability to contain this illness. Here is a link to the article.
The one line that made my head spin was a quote from a Dr. Michael Osterholm that showed how vulnerable we really are in an economic sense when the concept of closing the borders is invoked. Not only would we have no source for sterile hospital masks, gloves, gowns and other related stuff but even important drugs and/or the raw materials needed to make them. Then he said "Our global just-in-time economy means we are dependant on others... A Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bar has ingredients from nine countries in it"

So let me see if I get this straight. If the borders were to close tomorrow one of the largest cereal companies in this great land of ours couldn't manufacture a freakin' cereal bar? How are we supposed to successfully build the next generation of automobiles when we can't make a cereal bar under our own power? Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

If this was no more than a marketing opportunity for some well placed pharmaceutical companies, the governments would do what they did a few years back for the SARS epidemic. Lock down cities and whole parts of countries and ground flights to MAKE SURE that travel is restricted. The company I used to work for was sweating bullets during that episode because it had moved most all of its production to Singapore, and NOTHING was going in or out for a while.

Luckily, there seem to be no major issues in the suburban area that includes Garnerville, NY. There will be a facility wide Arts Festival and here is a link to their website. RandoRadio will be celebrating its first full year of streaming- webcasting- digital hurling- whatever. Go click on the RandoRadio picture at the upper left and go to OUR website to see more of what we will be doing. We will also be asking for some kind of economic stimulus because RandoRadio Is Too Big To Fail!!!

Of course, the main idea is you will hear the effects of your stimulus with us immediately, not months or years down the road.

Time to figure out what will really work for the live show this Saturday. Check out our website and give a listen.

Peace be with you,
Glenn

"You Can't Get There From Here"

And if you are a Firesign Theatre aficianado you know the next line is "...but I'm looking for the same old place!" I'm on the cusp of another show and running through some of the stuff I will be playing tomorrow. Sometimes there is a method to this process and other times it depends on what snakes have been stirred up in my head during the past week. It can fall into place nicely or it can get really ugly.

While I am pulling stuff that ties in with my own sensibilities I have to remember that I am doing programming for a listener base that is used to what "RandoRadio" is. One of my bugaboos is trying to find a way to reasonably incorporate that which is known as "classical music" into a free-form format and I have not been successful quite yet. There are fewer and fewer venues for this kind of music save some NPR stations and even that is becoming more of a piecemeal thing.

I was royally pissed when the local NPR station WNYC-FM pulled its daytime classical music programs after 9/11. They believed it was more important to simulcast their AM talk show stuff and keep New York City gazing into its own navel. Good bye Steve Post and Margaret Juntwaite. They relegated Mr. Post to the junkheap and you may hear Margaret every now and them if you're lucky. As our friends across the pond say, "oh, sod it".

I'm listening to the Sufjan Stevens CD "Michigan". If he only had a clue that 5 years later the tumbling automobile business would give this release even more significance. The track playing now is "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider). I should tie that in with the new John Rich song "Shuttin' Down Detroit".

Please click on the RandoRadio globe picture to visit our website and consider some economic stimulus to keep us going. RandoRadio Is Too Big To Fail!!! Just keep telling yourself that.

Peace be with you,

Glenn

So I took the plunge, see?

Yeah, I know it's been a while. Time seems to fly along much more quickly when you spend much of the week being up before the chickens. Thanks to converging religious holidays I actually got a couple of weekdays off- lost pay but gained some sleep. Whatever...

The previous post nonwithstanding I took the next step into the world of social networking and set up a Facebook presence. While the start was a little shaky I've managed to ease into it and for now, all seems well. I've even participated in a couple of the group time-waster activities and lived to tell about it.

The only collateral damage from this seems to be some increased activity on my old Classmates.com account. The problem is that they wised up and I now would have to pay for content I used to see for "free" (translated as "live with the cookies/spyware the site would throw into my machine). I'll have to consider that over the weekend.

I already pulled the content for tomorrow's show and it will veer off in several different directions during the course of two hours. I have yet to settle into a groove after over a year of doing this, and perhaps that is a good thing. There is so much good musical stuff out there that it would be a crime to confine oneself to a single genre or style. For the most part I try to keep the sets from getting too schizophrenic. Sometimes I don't quite succeed.

But if I got it right all the time it wouldn't be much of a CRISIS now, would it???

Thanks for looking in, and continue to listen to RandoRadio. Remember that we require fiscal stimulus to operate, and RandoRadio IS TOO BIG TO FAIL!!!!! Please go to our website and help bail us out to the best of your ability. The biggest difference between bailing us out and bailing out a bank is that you HEAR THE RESULTS OF YOUR STIMULUS INSTANTLY!!! Heck, all that other bail-out crap will take months or years before any results get to us. We even have T-Shirts, mini "Lava-Lamp" tchotchkes and other goodies. Please Go to our website- YES, YOU CAN!!!

Time for bed- Saturday morning wushu class starts early.

Peace be with you,

Glenn