My mother grew up in Ann Arbor, I heard about Ann Arbor throughout my childhood, and I went to college in Ann Arbor, but it had never occurred to me that I might have been named after Ann Arbor. The story my mother told me about my name is that they wanted a name that began with the letter A — so I ended up with the initials AAA, straight As — and they wanted something as simple as possible. The second-choice name was Amy, which is also only 3 letters, but it's 2 syllables, so Amy it wasn't.
I'm also only just now looking into the question whether Ann Arbor was named after someone named Ann. Wikipedia says:
"... but having just returned from a tour of Arizona, I’d argue that it’s the perfect time. What Barack Obama described as 'an inflection point' is America’s worst domestic crisis since the civil rights movement of the 1960s: the relationship problems of a democracy still a few months short of its 250th birthday. For curious travellers and for those who prefer to make up their minds based on what they’ve seen rather than what they’ve been told, now offers the opportunity to witness not only history in the making but the events that brought America to where it stands today. Arizona is the place to start. Everywhere is open, everyone is delighted to see you...."
Somebody else says: "My favorite strategy is to wait until after the game is over, then youtube "description of the game highlights". I get a great 15 minute highlight reel, feel the vicarious surge of endorphins and move on with my day. It's awesome and free. Love it."
The article itself offers the old-timey alternative: local radio.
"... and shocked an older generation still listening to Frank Sinatra and Big Band music. Laboe is also credited with coining the 'oldies, but goodies' phrase.... His radio shows gave the families of incarcerated loved ones, in particular, a platform to speak to their relatives by dedicating songs and sending heartfelt messages and updates....
He often told a story about a woman who came by the studio so her toddler could tell her father, who was serving time for a violent crime, 'Daddy, I love you.' 'It was the first time he had heard his baby's voice,' Laboe said. 'And this tough, hard-nosed guy burst into tears.'
Anthony Macias, a University of California, Riverside ethnic studies professor, said the music Laboe played went with the dedications enhancing the messages. For example, songs like Little Anthony & the Imperials' 'I'm on the Outside (Looking In)'... spoke of perseverance and desire to be accepted...."
I kept the book for my own library after my parents were gone, and I knew exactly where to find it in my disorganized shelves when the author's name came up in conversation here at Meadhouse. The conversation began with a report of something funny that had happened outside in the snow, and a confession of mine about being too concerned about embarrassment when I was a child, which led Meade to engage in a type of transgressive humor that I associated with Louis CK, whom Meade contrasted to Red Skelton, a sweet, gentle comedian we both remember loving back in 1950s TV.
I guessed — for no reason other than his on-screen niceness — that Red Skelton might have been a terrible person in real life. I went looking for dirt on his Wikipedia page. I didn't read every word, and I didn't find any dirt, but I got interested in the subject, so timely today, of censorship:
On April 22, 1947, Skelton was censored by NBC two minutes into his radio show. When he and his announcer Rod O'Connor began talking about Fred Allen being censored the previous week, they were silenced for 15 seconds; comedian Bob Hope was given the same treatment once he began referring to the censoring of Allen.
[FOOTNOTE] Fred Allen was censored when he referred to an imaginary NBC vice-president who was "in charge of program ends". He went on to explain to his audience that this vice-president saved these hours, minutes and seconds that radio programs ran over their allotted time until he had two weeks' worth of them and then used the time for a two-week vacation.
And then I was reading the Wikipedia article on Fred Allen, whose book I played with when I was a child and have kept all these years but never read:
What's so amazing about this design is the commitment to rectangles where curves make so much more sense. Or is that just my Western point of view? If the radio is rectangular — they seem to have thought — then the dial should be rectangular and the knob should be rectangular. If you begin with something rectangular — and you're not going to have an oval-shaped radio — then you ought to square off everything else, no matter how natural the curve seems to be. It's the opposite of form follows function. It's form follows form.
"By the early 2000s, it had embraced a version of conservatism that is less focused on free markets and small government and more focused on ethnonationalism and populism. It is, in short, the core of Trumpism — now and in the future, with or without a President Trump.... If you visit a carpentry shop or factory floor, or hitch a ride with a long-haul truck driver, odds are that talk radio is a fixture of the aural landscape. But many white-collar workers, journalists included, struggle to understand the reach of talk radio because they don’t listen to it, and don’t know anyone who does.... Because of the ocean of content, one must listen to it at great length, a daunting task for anyone not already sympathetic with a host’s conservative views.... Each show has its own long-running inside jokes and references, a kind of linguistic shorthand that unites fans and repels outside examination.... By 1963 President John F. Kennedy was so worried about what an aide called this 'formidable force in American life today,” which was able to “harass local school boards, local librarians and local government bodies,” that he authorized targeted Internal Revenue Service audits and the use of the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine to silence these pesky conservative broadcasters. The result was the most successful episode of government censorship of the last half century.
Conservative broadcasters have never forgotten it, and it is a key reason that a conspiracist mind-set has such a grip on listeners. Since 2003, Rush Limbaugh, who got his start working in radio as a teenager in the mid-1960s, has mentioned the Fairness Doctrine on nearly 150 episodes. He credits the rise of talk radio to the lifting of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by the Reagan administration."
"... featuring every episode of the original Theme Time, starting Monday, September 21 at 12pm ET. First introduced in May 2006, Theme Time Radio Hour was a weekly one-hour radio show hosted by Bob Dylan, with each episode dedicated to a different topic, including Money, Presidents, and Spring Cleaning. The show was among the most-listened-to programs on all of satellite radio. All of Dylan’s classic satellite Theme Time shows will air back to back during the week, including a brand new, never-before-heard episode titled 'Whiskey' a tie-in to his whiskey collection, Heaven’s Door Spirits. In honor of Bourbon Heritage Month, the all-new two-hour episode discusses how whiskey has shaped the world — from music to sports and everything in between.... While Bob Dylan got through three years and 100 episodes without once playing any of his recordings on Theme Time Radio Hour, he did break out a recorder, and launched into Blowin’ in the Wind on one show ('Days of the Week')"
Writes Fred Bals at Medium.
The "diet version of the N-word" is "Negro," and Stone, in the middle of talking to O'Kelly, muttered something to the side. The beginning of the sentence was hard to make out, but it ended with "arguing with this Negro."
When Mr. O’Kelly asked him to repeat what he said, Mr. Stone let out a sigh, then remained silent for almost 40 seconds. Acting as if the connection had been severed, Mr. Stone vehemently denied that he used the slur. “I did not, you’re out of your mind,” Mr. Stone told the host.
Afterwards, O'Kelly said: “The only thing that I felt was true, honest and sincere that Roger Stone said was in that moment that he thought I was not listening. All of my professional accolades, all my professional bona fides went out the window because as far as he was concerned, he was talking and arguing with a Negro.”
Stone is ludicrously dishonest here. And no one should take solace in the fact that "Negro" was once the polite term. For background, read "When Did the Word Negro Become Taboo?," a 2010 Slate article dealing with a newly released statement Senator Harry Reid had made before the 2008 election, saying Barack Obama could win because he was "light skinned" and had "no Negro dialect." That was 10 years ago, and people were calling on Reid to resign. I remember when "colored people" was the polite term (and so does the NAACP).
But it hardly even matters here, because even if Stone had muttered "arguing with this black man" or "arguing with this African-American man,"it would have been offensive. Do the interview, answer the questions. If you have a valid reason to object to the interviewer, go ahead and say it, but if your objection is that he's black, you're horribly wrong. Saying "arguing with this black man" is in the category of remarks like "It's like arguing with a 2-year-old" or "It's like talking to a wall." It's disrespectful even if the source of your irritation is not the race of your interlocutor. Add race, and it's a cruel insult. Make the racial word different from the normal words that decent people use in public speech, and you make yourself a pariah.
Stone paused for 40 seconds and denied that he said it. He knew it was wrong. If he knew it was wrong, and it's so obviously wrong, why did he say it? It's his secret thought but it just slipped out, because he lacks brain/mouth control? Or did he actually really want to hurt O'Kelly?
NPR's research revealed recommencing commutes would boost back audience the most. Yet a significant minority of public radio listeners said they would tune in more often if NPR shows offered a greater variety of news coverage, beyond the coronavirus, recent protests for social justice and the election....
NPR has been planning for the migration of listeners away from traditional radio for years....
The lack of commuting is just accelerating the decline of news radio. People were already moving away from it. NPR has its website and podcasts to get its share of the audience as radio becomes less important to people. I remember when I didn't have satellite radio in my car. I would have the radio on my local NPR station nearly all the time. If I was in the car, I listened to whatever was on NPR. But it's been 20 years since I did that.
"RM Broadcasting LLC, a Florida-based company that has agreements to broadcast the Russian state media program Radio Sputnik... KCXL’s website, which says that it’s the radio station that will 'tell you the things that the liberal media wont (sic) tell you,' lists Radio Sputnik in its morning programming.... RM Broadcasting in 2019 was ordered by a federal judge to register as a foreign agent under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires political agents in the U.S. acting on a foreign government’s behalf to disclose their relationships, finances and activities.... KCXL’s president is Peter Schartel, who... [says he's] 'basically a liberal, patriotic American...but our government has done some horrible things.'"
"Ted Kennedy 'a fat slob,' Steve Forbes 'a meanspirited creep,' Dan Rather 'a loony,' Rush Limbaugh 'a drug-addled gas bag.' Many listeners detected the toxins of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mort Sahl or Groucho Marx.... He was sued for defamation, denounced, ridiculed, shunned, hated and feared... After years on the edge of acceptable standards, however, Mr. Imus evidently went too far on April 4, 2007, when, in his trademark drawl, he referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, which had reached the N.C.A.A. finals and was composed mainly of African-Americans, as 'rough girls' and 'nappy-headed hos.'... In 1996, at the correspondents’ dinner in Washington, he insulted President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, who were there, and later referred to it as 'The Speech From Hell.'"
ADDED: "The toxins of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mort Sahl or Groucho Marx"?! Those guys were all geniuses. We were blessed to have them in our midst. How did the word "toxins" get in there?
"... was a prophetic moment in early rock ‘n’ roll — a rare example of an uptempo ‘50s rock song to venture outside the conventional 1, 4, and 5 chords — that probably inspired the Beatles to make similarly bold chord choices in songs like 'I Saw Her Standing There.'"
Gerron, an Olton native, went to Lubbock High, where she met and dated Jerry “J.I” Allison, who along with Holly was a founding member of the Crickets, according to A-J Media archives. Her namesake song, which went to No. 3 on the charts for Holly in 1957, was originally titled “Cindy Lou” after Holly’s niece, according to A-J Media archives. The title was changed to “Peggy Sue” - then Allison’s girlfriend - after the couple were briefly broken up.
Gerron and Allison were married through much of the 60s, but later divorced. Gerron went on to Pasadena Junior College in Pasadena, California, becoming a dental assistant. She would re-marry and had two children and multiple grand-children....
[Bryan Edwards, now living in New Mexico after operating the business called Edwards Electronics in Lubbock] remembers that he knew Peggy Sue from Lubbock High School, and in recent years she had asked him about ham radio. “She said, ‘Ive always wanted to be a ham.’ At the time, I thought it was just a passing comment. Then she said, ‘I want to get a ham license.’ A couple of other guys and I started helping Peggy, and the result was that she got a ham radio license. In the mid-1990s, we decided we wanted to have a special event station commemorating Lubbock and Buddy Holly, and Peggy would always take a very active part in that. She would come over to my house and spend hours talking to people on the special events station. We might talk to from 1,000 to 1,500 people all around the world during the time commemorating Buddy Holly. Peggy would be the one who would be talking to people, and it was fascinating for her to tell stories to those people. When they would mention an association with Buddy Holly, she would immediately have a fantastic comeback. She would share with people from all over the world — it was a really great time.”
How strange to be declared pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty over and over again all your life and to know the prettiness that inspired the declaration belonged to Cindy Lou (who?!).
And then there's Jerry “J.I” Allison, the divorced husband and former Cricket. He seems to still be around. Here's a 2015 interview with him. My favorite thing about it is this picture of his surrealistically preserved childhood home:
ADDED: This post has been corrected to reflect John's correction: "I meant 'I Saw Her Standing There'; I inadvertently mentioned another Beatles song, but I changed it now. Thanks to a reader who noted the mistake."
"Witnesses say five shots were fired, injuring one DJ in the buttocks and shattering the glass between studios. The injured DJ was sent to the hospital and quickly discharged. There were no major injuries or fatalities. After the shooting, police secured the area and did not allow DJs entry to the premises. Due to the investigation, the station experienced radio silence Sunday morning before resuming normal programming at 9:38 AM. A motive is still unknown and it is unclear how the assailant entered the building. Police say there is no sign of forced entry. Police do not have a suspect in custody."
WORT is Madison's "listener sponsored community radio station" (Wikipedia). Here's its own presentation of its history:
In the early 1970s W-O-R-T is just a gleam in the eyes of five of us. In fact it isn’t WORT we’re dreaming about. It’s WOMB ! W-O-M-B, those are the first call letters we wanted (rejected at an early open meeting), then W-A-R-T which we request from the Federal Communications Commission. But the FCC turned us down because WART had just been reserved by another station....
The foundation’s name, “Back Porch Radio,” expresses Mike’s philosophy of an easy going, unpretentious, down-home, approach to broadcasting.... Within a few weeks there are many locally produced programs on the air, including: “IN AMERICA THEY CALL US DYKES”; “WHAT IS TO BE WILL BE, WHAT AIN’T TO BE, JUST MIGHT HAPPEN”; “THE MADISON REVIEW OF BOOKS”; and Bob Lynn with his “THURSDAY NIGHT FREE UNIVERSITY.” Some that started in the first weeks are still going strong, including Bonnie Kalmbach’s “TWO FOR THE BLUES” and Rockin’ John McDonald’s “I LIKE IT LIKE THAT.”...
I hope you didn't miss that, buried as it was at the end of a post that I think a lot of readers blew off because it's about last night's "American Idol." That post has only 13 comments right now, and a couple of the later posts have over 100 comments. I know my readers have interests that only somewhat overlap with mine, and I realize the number of comments has an unknown relationship to the number of readers. But still, I have to worry that things I want read do not get read.
I wanted to make sure readers see this material, which corrects something I wrote in a post a week ago about the song "Walk Like an Egyptian": "It's one of the songs Clear Channel banned after the September 11, 2001 attacks." I'm reposting the correction because I want to get out this story of fake news that became fake history:
I got that from Wikipedia, where the information is presented like this:
I have an informant — a person I have strong reason to trust and who I believe has first-hand knowledge — who wrote to me:
This is a battle I no longer fight; it’s been lost. I even saw it mentioned in a recently published college textbook of American history. But for you, here’s the real story:
Clear Channel Radio never banned any songs after 9-11. A day or so after the attack, one program director in San Diego sent an e-mail to other PDs with a short list of songs they might want to think twice about for a short time, purely for reasons of taste and sensitivity. I doubt that Walk Like An Egyptian was on the list then.
Now, you have to recall the typical bad-boy snotty attitude of the typical FM rock program director of 2001. Immediately, for their own entertainment, many of them started adding to the list, coming up with increasingly ridiculous suggestions, and trading the list back and forth.
The later, ridiculous list is the one that that made its way to the press, to the early forms of social media, and eventually to history books. Clear Channel was already being bashed for its size and its destruction of local radio, so this story fit right in.
As we head toward the end, there's little room for duplication. We've got to choose, and maybe there's not room in the top 5 for 2 female singers in the same niche. "American Idol" has forefronted Catie Turner since the first episode this season. And I forefronted her in a post about last week's show. She was the "Lisa Loopner" who sang the Disney song "Once Upon a Dream" so delightfully.
But the week before, I told you my favorite was Maddie Poppe. Remember? I was utterly charmed by her performance of the old Bangles song "Walk Like an Egyptian":
Last night, Catie Turner chose that other great Bangles song "Manic Monday." It was Prince night on "American Idol," so I don't have my usual complaint that the show presents songs as if they were written by the most familiar performer. Prince got full credit for writing "Manic Monday," but those of us who love Prince and love that song also know it's a Bangles song. (Here's the old Bangles video for that.)
We'd just seen Poppe distinguish herself 2 weeks ago bringing a Bangles tune back to life, so what did Catie Turner do with what seemed to be the perfect song to compete in the niche of quirky cute girl?
Sorry, but Deer in the Headlights is not the right kind of cute. "America" voted and Catie did not make the final five.
What Prince song did Maddie sing?, you might ask. "Nothing Compares to You." Sweet. Final 5. What did other people do with Prince? Oh, if you cared, you'd have devoted last night to watching the whole damn 2 hours, like I did. But if you want to laugh or you understand something about country music that escapes me, here's Caleb Lee Hutchinson doing "When Doves Cry." He's been hogging the country boy niche all season.
By the way, back in the post about "Walk Like an Egyptian," I said something I now think is wrong: "It's one of the songs Clear Channel banned after the September 11, 2001 attacks."
I got that from Wikipedia, where the information is presented like this:
I have an informant — a person I have strong reason to trust and who I believe has first-hand knowledge — who wrote to me:
This is a battle I no longer fight; it’s been lost. I even saw it mentioned in a recently published college textbook of American history. But for you, here’s the real story:
Clear Channel Radio never banned any songs after 9-11. A day or so after the attack, one program director in San Diego sent an e-mail to other PDs with a short list of songs they might want to think twice about for a short time, purely for reasons of taste and sensitivity. I doubt that Walk Like An Egyptian was on the list then.
Now, you have to recall the typical bad-boy snotty attitude of the typical FM rock program director of 2001. Immediately, for their own entertainment, many of them started adding to the list, coming up with increasingly ridiculous suggestions, and trading the list back and forth.
The later, ridiculous list is the one that that made its way to the press, to the early forms of social media, and eventually to history books. Clear Channel was already being bashed for its size and its destruction of local radio, so this story fit right in.
I listened to the entire 6-part series over the weekend (and listened to parts of it twice). It's very good, not as good as "S-Town," but definitely worthwhile, especially if you want to expose yourself to the thought processes of a woman — a successful businesswoman — who becomes inexplicably stupid while in love (and a second woman whose religion takes her to a mindboggling level of forgiveness).
Subscribe to the podcast in the normal way or start here at the L.A. Times where you can play the audio (highly recommended) or have a reading experience (with photographs).
John is shown to be thoroughly evil—a descriptor used by several interviewees—and the story freely presents him as a monster. It does this journalistically, through legal documentation, jail records, first-person accounts, archival recordings, text messages, restraining orders, and so on. But it also does so narratively, with the kind of language we might hear in [the old radio melodrama] “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” [Veteran newspaper journalist Christopher] Goffard seems to encourage an almost mythical impression of his subject’s evil. At one point, Goffard tells a lawyer that the lawyer’s description of John sounds “almost like the opposite of a religious experience, you know, where you meet someone holy and it changes your life? This is sort of the inverse of that. Like you looked into a void.” “That is so true,” the lawyer says, with emotion. “Because we all—we don’t want to believe the really bad things about people. We just don’t. We want to think that people are good. And when you meet somebody like this, and you realize, ‘I am sitting here in the presence of evil incarnate,’ you know that people like him really do exist.”...
The podcast is a crude construction, and its choices often come to the detriment of the actual narrative it’s trying to unfurl and ideas it’s itching to explore. Which is a damn shame, because the Dirty John story, as reported by Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard in a six-part written feature, is a stunner. If you were to give up on the podcast midway through its first episode and switch over to the feature, you’d find a deep, complex tale of domestic abuse and psychological violence that’s rigorously reported, deftly written, and smartly laid out....
I got a lot out of hearing the voices of the characters, but I wanted more psychological depth. A man was evil — some people are just evil, we're told, and there's no explanation. You might as well say his skull was full of "green worms" (somebody says, near the end). As for the woman who took him in and took him back repeatedly, she's treated with such respect as The Victim that there's no exploration of the part of the story that would make some sense of her awful choices: profound sexual desire and satisfaction.
"... 18 for women and 10 for men" — #11 on "Twelve shocking facts about North Korea," according to Pravda.
Also:
9. One does not allow [sic] to turn the government radio off even in one's own house. One can only turn the volume down a bit. There are special units that track down those who listen to forbidden radio programs, and this crime is punishable by death.
And:
12. In the event of a fire, the first thing to rescue from a burning home must be portraits of DPRK leaders.
ADDED: What would you save if you have to rush out of your burning house? That's an old question, but the classic old answer doesn't work anymore, because we keep our photographs — including our photographs of beloved leaders — on some website. Grab your iPhone and your car keys and get out of there. Anything else?
IN THE COMMENTS: George M. Spencer writes:
Generally speaking, human life means little in Asia.
That's the first sentence of the Pravda article.
Isn't most of Russia in Asia!?!
I had to look back at the article, because I didn't believe that line would be on the news site, even at Pravda, but it is indeed the first sentence of the article.
"We don't have as much as we used to, but that's always been there. And so, they can listen to you and know ain't no tricking going on, ain't no nothing. They don't even have to question. Very seldom you hear a black person talking about conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory is The New York Times and The Washington Post and NBC and CBS. And just thank God that all these radio stations like yours...."
That's just the first thing I ran into as I looked for old video of Dick Gregory — old in the sense of not things put together on the occasion of his death. That's Dick Gregory talking to Alex Jones.
Here's the obituary in the conspiracy theory New York Times:
Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84....
In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.
Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”
He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”...
There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.
And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.
Correction appended: "An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. They were in 2001, not 2011." Of all the dates to botch.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
Posts
