So far, this much is known:

• KKNG, Tyler’s country outlet at 93.3, has displaced KOJK, which was running Jack FM at 97.3.
• There’s still something vaguely country going on at 93.3, but it’s clearly a case of stunting, and they’re redirecting people to 97.3.

This would suggest that something other than country will be going in, but so far there are no clues.

I can’t say I’m exactly surprised that Tyler bade farewell to Jack: they’ve never climbed much over a 1 share. The only thing I found in the FCC Daily Digest was a decision to allow KWTV to abandon channel 9 in the name of better local reception: their signal will appear only on channel 39 once the tech stuff is done.

Regular reader “scooby214″ sent this in as a comment elsewhere; I’m giving it top-of-its-own-thread treatment. The topic: smooth jazz, and the lack thereof in town, unless you have a really good receiver that can separate a 103.7 signal out of Okemah from a 103.5 signal out of Anadarko.

The story:

It appears that KOCD may be landing a translator in the OKC metro area in the near future. See the link to the consignment of license application … as posted by a [Radio-Info.com] forum member.

If this is truly a translator for KOCD, this news makes my week! 100.9 is one of the few frequencies left in OKC, so perhaps they can keep the full 250 watts that the translator is currently using in Enid.

I have yet to see any FCC paperwork on moving the actual translator facility, but people are talking like it’s a done deal, and by “people” I mean Ron Black:

Beginning March 1, KOCD 103.7 FM in Tulsa and 100.9 FM in Oklahoma City will be carrying the Larry Stein Show from 6am to 8am Monday through Fridays.

KOCD, despite a generally-terrible signal out here, has consistently pulled in a 0.5-0.6 share of the Oklahoma City market. (They get about a 1 in Tulsa.)

The very word “infrastructure” sounds big and imposing, all concrete and rebar and buttresses here and there.

Not so, says Doc Searls: it’s plastic, and especially so when it comes to radio:

[T]he infrastructure of broadcasting, at least here in the U.S. … is being gradually absorbed into the mobile data system, which is still captive to the mobile phone system, but won’t be forever. For New York’s FM stations, the old-fashioned way to get range is to put antennas in the highest possible places, and radiate signals sucking thousands of watts off the grid. The new-fashioned way is to put a stream on the Net. Right now I can’t get any of these stations in Boston on an FM radio. In fact, it’s a struggle even to get them anywhere beyond the visible horizons of the pictures I took on the Empire State Building. But they come in just fine on my phone and my computer.

You have to wonder if Ferris O’Brien is getting more listeners off TheSpyFM.com than he can possibly get off that 900-watt stick out there in Boondoxia.

To borrow the name of a band Ferris plays now and then, We Were Promised Jetpacks. That’s not happening yet, exactly, but prying terrestrial radio off actual terra firma seems to me to be a step in the right direction.

Here’s the press release:

Active Rock KHBZ-FM (94.7 The Buzz)/Oklahoma City flips to Classic Rock as “947 The Brew,” airing rock music of the late 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s. Core artists include U2, Genesis, Journey, Def Leppard, INXS, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and Van Halen under OKC Director of Programming Tom Travis.

VP/Market Manager Bill Hurley said, “We are thrilled to fill the void of great rock radio for anyone that graduated in the 1980’s. Our Clear Channel team is focused on making “947 The Brew” everything that fans of rock radio have been using their iPods for.”

Travis added, “Finally, I don’t have to hear music my Dad listened to before he met my Mom.”

I remind you that your Dad drank Canadian Club.

Basic admission by Clear Channel: “Well, we never could make a dent in the KATT, so now we’re going to take a shot at KRXO.” Good luck with that.

Tweeted this morning by Phil Bacharach:

Dear Santa, thanks for bringing back 105.3 The Spy. Not 2 be an ingrate, but can you improve its reception in OKC? That would be perfect

The elves at the FCC will shoot down that idea in a hurry, and the reason is something called Minimum Distance Spacing, which is intended to keep stations from interfering with one another. To meet full spacing requirements, this station at 105.3 must be at least 31 km away from stations at 104.9 (KKWD Bethany) and 105.7 (KROU Spencer), and at least 72 km away from stations at 105.1 (KBLP Lindsay) and 105.5 (KWCO Chickasha). A cursory check of the map reveals that this is not happening. There is a provision for squeezing in a little closer, but it requires contour protection on all sides: the new guy must reduce tower height and/or power output from the maximum permitted for that class of station to protect existing stations. (All these stations are class A: only KKWD operates at a full 6,000 watts.)

A similar situation prevails with Jack FM at 97.3. And the deal that allowed the Sports Animal (WWLS) to move from 97.9 to 98.1 was somewhat complicated: it required the moving of a Stillwater station (KVRO) from 98.1 to 101.1, and a substantial reduction in power at the KATT (100.5) to reduce interference to the new Stillwater signal. The FCC has overseen swaps much more complex than this, though.

Bottom line: The Spy is what it is, and assuming, as we should, that Ferris isn’t rolling in dough, it’s not going anywhere.

Yes, I admit it; I stayed up late to hear the rollover from ESPN Deportes to The Spy.

Which didn’t happen.

On the Web site yesterday: “We are currently undergoing unforeseen circumstances. We are working to get them resolved as soon as possible and re-launch.” Ferris O’Brien put up a MySpace bulletin around four this morning, although without an explanation.

I have my own belief as to what happened, but not wishing to spread rumors, I will keep it to myself.

And yesterday’s gone, says Jeff Shaw:

We used to love listening to AM radio. Everybody I knew had a pocket radio powered by a 9 volt Ray-O-Vac battery that would go dead in about a day and a half.

I had one of those back around 1961: an actual Japanese Transistor Radio with, as the late Allan Sherman said, “a wire with a thing on one end that you could stick in your ear, and a thing on the other end that you can’t stick anywhere because it’s bent.” I still have a radio that runs on 9-volt batteries, but it’s a VHF weather-band unit. (If the Sherman reference seems familiar, you may have seen it here.)

Since my music tastes have evolved, I don’t listen to much radio anymore, so I’m not familiar with any top forty hits. Also, I got weary long ago of hearing the same song over and over, everyday. So much for programmed radio. If it’s Friday at 4:45 pm, I’ll bet you can turn on the radio to some local station get BTO’s “Taking Care of Business.” For the 4 millionth time. After I hear a song 500 times, I sort of lose interest.

I tend to duck stations playing current stuff. Yesterday, zipping down US 62, I caught these guys playing Herb Alpert’s “Rise,” followed by an edit of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again,” in which the infamous plastic organ competently fingered by Donald Fagen was excised.

On the other hand, I’ve already picked up a copy of “Meet Me on the Equinox,” a Death Cab for Cutie single from the New Moon soundtrack, released this past September. It will be a while, I suspect, before it gets its 500th playing.

The apparent revival of The Spy has generated a fair amount of chatter around town, and the old logo still has the 105.3 frequency, which suggests that ESPN Deportes isn’t working at the little 900-watt Kingfisher station.

Nobody seems to have mentioned the minor detail that Citadel doesn’t own the station anymore: when Citadel absorbed the ABC/Disney radio group in 2007, KINB was spun off to a temporary trust company. (KKWD was also similarly spun off, but Citadel was subsequently allowed to reacquire it.)

Possible scenarios:

• Citadel has been allowed to take back KINB and will reinstate The Spy on 105.3.
• The 105.3 reference is an oversight/red herring, and Citadel plans to put The Spy on an HD subchannel on some other station.
• The trust itself will reinstate The Spy on 105.3, presumably pending a sale (though FCC’s FM Query presently shows no applications to buy).

I suppose we’ll know more a week from today.

Or something like that. Actual Fark headline:

WKRP gets the porn treatment. WKY coming to a porn store near you soon

Linked to this. I’m assuming the WKY reference has something to do with a, um, common lubricant — “She don’t use jelly!” insists Wayne Coyne — but I figure, if any radio station around here gets transmogrified into porno, it would have to be KTOK, simply due to the presence of news director Jerry Bonin’ Bohnen.

“Infrastructure” — the very word sounds somehow stout, sturdy, stable. “Plastic,” says Doc Searls:

The term “infrastructure” suggests physicality of the sturdiest kind, but in fact all of it is doomed to alteration, obsolescence and replacement. Some of it (Roman roads, for example) may last for centuries, but most of it is obsolete in a matter of decades, if not sooner. Consider over-the-air (OTA) TV. It is already a fossil. Numbered channels persist as station brands; but today very few of those stations transmit on their branded analog channels, and most of them are viewed over cable or satellite connections anyway. There are no reasons other than legacy regulatory ones to maintain the fiction that TV station locality is a matter of transmitter siting and signal range. Viewing of OTA TV signals is headed fast toward zero. It doesn’t help that digital signals play hard-to-get, and that the gear required for getting it sucks rocks. Nor does it help that cable and satellite providers that have gone out of their way to exclude OTA receiving circuitry from their latest gear, mostly [to] force subscribing to channels that used to be free. As a result ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS are now a premium pay TV package. (For an example of how screwed this is, see here.) Among the biggest fossils are thousands of TV towers, some more than 2000 feet high, maintained to continue reifying the concept of “coverage,” and to legitimize “must carry” rules for cable. After live audio stream playing on mobile devices becomes cheap and easy, watch AM and FM radio transmission fossilize in exactly the same ways.

I note for reference that of the thirteen full-power TV stations licensed to somewhere within the Oklahoma City market, only two are broadcasting on the channel they say they are: KWTV (9) and KETA (13). (In Tulsa, it’s two out of twelve, including, yes, the OETA station.)

So should we dismantle the antenna farm? Searls says yes:

[I]f you want to do something green and good for the environment, lobby for taking down some of these towers, which are expensive to maintain and hazards to anything that flies. Start with this list here. Note the “UHF/VHF transmission” column. Nearly all these towers were built for analog transmission and many are already abandoned.

I checked two of the taller ones in the state, KWTV’s in northeast Oklahoma City and KTUL’s in Coweta, and they’re apparently still in use, digital notwithstanding. Doesn’t mean they’ll stay in use indefinitely, though.

Plan B? Forget it. Somewhere in India, they’re thinking about Plan TV:

According to this article I spotted a few weeks ago … on the occasion of World Population Day, the Indian Minister of Health and Welfare offered a novel plan to help cut down on sex and, thus, on the burgeoning population: Bring electricity to every Indian village so that people will watch television until late at night and, thus, be too tired to make babies.

Well …

It’s a novel plan, but I’m not sure it will work as advertised. For one thing, you’d have to make sure that the TV sets aren’t located in the bedroom, to prevent people from having sex during commercials. You’d have to be sure that the cable or satellite TV channels available to those sets didn’t include things like Playboy TV, Spice Channel, or other channels bringing hard- or soft-core pornography (which would sort of defeat the purpose). You’d have to make sure that the sets featured really good sleep-inducing channels instead — like the Golf Channel, the Bowling Channel, and anything featuring Oprah Winfrey. And you’d have to be sure that the Food Network … uh … never mind.

I don’t know about you, but I suspect the Barefoot Contessa could lead me around with a spatula.

With the demise of Radio and Records, those of us who don’t have connections at Arbitron are having to find out the local radio ratings the hard way: by waiting for them to show up in the newspaper.

Of course, they tend to focus on who’s Number One. (If you care, it’s news/talk outlet KTOK, with the usual assortment of right-wing happy fun pundits.) I look down the list for who’s struggling, and wonder why.

Or sometimes I don’t wonder why. The two strongest AM signals in town combine for a lowly 2.0 share: in aggregate they’re beaten by, among others, an underpowered NPR station and the #3 (out of three) country station. It doesn’t matter how many times they shuffle the lineup at KOKC: until they come up with some compelling programs, they’ll be the news/talk also-ran. Since there’s no evidence that the ownership is willing to spend any money on this, I can’t see why they don’t just abandon the format and go back to being KOMA, carrying the “Classic Hits” (formerly “Oldies,” but that’s a bad word these days) format on both AM and FM. WKY, now running a regional-Mexican format that’s mostly ignored — KTUZ-FM pulls about three times their numbers — has failed at news and sports of late, so I don’t know what to do with them, but you’d think the first radio station west of the Mississippi would have some brand value left, considering it still has its original calls and a heck of a lot of reach for 5,000 watts. But at a 1.0 share, nobody cares. You can’t call up Renda (KOKC) or Citadel (WKY) and say, “You know, you’re getting your butts kicked by a classical station.”

I remember (thank you, John Quincy) a WTMA jingle which noted that the station was #1 by Hooper and Pulse. The old Hooperatings date back to the Golden Age of Radio, but they did pretty much what ratings do today: they measured the audience, and sent the numbers to advertisers, who planned their buys accordingly. Hooper’s methodology was simple: they’d call you up and ask you what you were listening to. (This was, I need hardly point out, way before Caller ID.) Pulse took a different approach: they did face-to-face interviewing, at least during their early days in New York. And both are gone now, Pulse having faded some time during the 1960s — that jingle, adapted from PAMS Series 18, dates from 1961 — and Hooper was taken over by A. C. Nielsen in 1951 and eventually phased out.

Nielsen is still the gold standard for TV ratings, which annoys TV broadcasters, who claim they’re being undercounted because of all those Internet viewers. So they’re forming their own ratings service:

Media participants in the consortium — including networks owned by NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and Walt Disney — expect it to be operational by September.

They have pulled in Procter & Gamble and AT&T, the top and third-biggest US advertisers, and Unilever. The involvement of such big names highlights how urgently advertisers feel the need for better information to justify ads that run across multiple media platforms.

If this sounds a little like Fox taking inventory of the henhouse, well, it’s not the first time suspicions have been aroused. From the immortal “Chaos” by Arbogast and Ross (you can hear it here), fifty years ago:

Speedy Clip talkin’ at you from radio station KOS, Painted Radio K-OS, with the Speedy Clip show, the number-one program on the number-one station in the number-one city as rated by the number-one rating service, Numbers Incorporated, owned and operated by radio station KOS — and KOS-AM.

Nielsen will have its own Net-measuring tools in place within a couple of years, we’re told.

The cash-strapped New York Times Company’s last remaining broadcast property, radio station WQXR in New York, will be sold, in pieces.

Two of them, precisely. NYT will swap the license for WQXR (96.3 MHz, 6000 watts) for the license for Univision’s WCAA (105.9 MHz, 610 watts); Univision will pay $33.5 million to NYT. And public broadcaster WNYC will acquire WQXR’s studio facilities, intellectual property, and the 105.9 license for $11.5 million.

This is not the first time a classical-music station has been shunted off to a poorer dial position in exchange for cash. I said back in 2003:

The historical record shows many instances where a classical station relocated to an inferior facility in exchange for lots of money; the best-known, perhaps, was the move of Cleveland’s WCLV to a 6-kw channel in exurban Lorain. It was argued at the time that the move would help secure the station’s then-uncertain future, and maybe it did, but I’d hate to have to try to tune them in from the parking lot at Severance Hall.

Next time I was in Cleveland, I tuned in to WCLV to see how well it reached the city’s east side. The answer: not very. WQXR’s tower isn’t moving — it will remain on the Empire State Building — but cutting its power output will definitely reduce its availability to fringe-area listeners.

(Via Doc Searls.)

To my surprise, the government did not grant another stay of execution to analog TV, which yesterday transitioned from merely dead to really most sincerely dead.

Actually, there remain stragglers: low-power stations were not required to convert to digital, and so I thought I’d crank up an old portable TV which knows from nothing about digital signals and see what showed up.

KOCO-TV (5): “If you’re seeing this message, your TV set has not been upgraded to digital.” Alternate version in Spanish. (Scheduled to be discontinued in 30 days.)

KTOU-LP (21): Home Shopping Network affiliate.

KCHM-LP (36): Univision affiliate.

As pickings go, this is on the far side of slim. Officially, there are eight low-power stations in the area; I’m out of range for some of them, like the one in Norman, and much of the same programming can be had on cable anyway. (The FCC has never approved a must-carry rule for low-power stations, although one was under consideration last fall for Class A stations, those with calls ending in -CA.)

Jaci writes to whoever’s running the morning shows on commercial radio:

I understand it’s 7 am and no one wants to be driving to work in the cold. I see their grumpy faces every morning in my rearview (oh, wait, that’s me checking my eye makeup) and they barely stop for the Beauty School students crossing Main Street with funky orange hair (yeah, that was me again — my heel slipped off the brake). I know you’re supposed to put everyone in a great mood — or at least top their Corn Pops breakfast.

But your morning shows SUCK. Can Bubba tell the kiss of a man? Can a transvestite do a backflip into a split in heels?

Do I look like I care?

It’s 7 am and I have a three year old in the car. Do you have to talk about sex and transvestites and hookers every freaking day? Here’s a thought — PLAY SOME MUSIC.

Occasionally people are puzzled when they hear that I pour a three-digit sum (well, a low three-digit sum) into public radio each year. Perhaps this explains why.

The Oklahoma Employer/Employee Partnership for Insurance Coverage is buying, not merely TV spots, but actual “news” inserts on the two Griffin Communications stations in the state.

Not that there’s anything right with that:

“This kind of question arises when news media organizations try to diversify, when they are looking at more ways to make money,” said Joey Senat, associate professor of media law at Oklahoma State University. “It does create the potential for unethical behavior,” he said.

The key is whether a company discloses the sponsor of the information and “the number of walls they put between the newsroom and the other arm of the company doing the marketing,” Senat said.

The record of state television stations in such matters is not exactly reassuring, though David Griffin insists: “We don’t sell the news. We never have and we never will.”

Now if Gary England directs us to furnish our storm shelters with living-room suites from Mathis Brothers, then we’ll worry.

If you saw something like this on the tube yesterday, you might be forgiven for thinking that there’d be a hell of a lot of snow on the ground this time today. Where I live is in the northern half of the four-to-eight-inch band. And indeed this is consistent with snowfall patterns in this part of the country: the northwest part of the state almost always gets more of it than the southeast.

But as of noon, with the weekly siren test just now ending as I type this, there isn’t enough snow on my entire quarter-acre lot to fill up the shovel more than once, and what was a Winter Storm Warning until 7 pm has been downgraded to a Winter Weather Advisory expiring at 1 pm.

The fun aspect of pointing these things out, of course, has to do with the fact that the weather doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s predictions, and that goes double or triple or fourple for all those “OMG WE ARE DESTROYING ALL LIFE ON EARTH!” nitwits, who generally should be baked on a four-sided cookie sheet at 350° until done.

Paul Harvey, a fixture on American radio for over fifty years, has died at his Arizona winter home at the age of 90.

The young Paul Harvey Aurandt first broke into radio in his hometown of Tulsa at the age of fourteen: a high-school speech teacher was sufficiently impressed by the lad’s voice to take him over to KVOO. At first, the new kid did scut work around the studio, but eventually they did put him on the air. He continued to work at KVOO while studying at the University of Tulsa. After World War II, Harvey moved to Chicago and began working for ABC’s radio station WENR; in 1951, he was offered a daily slot on the full ABC network, which continues to this day, though he missed a few weeks in 2001 with a voice problem, and he cut back his on-air hours last spring.

I remember the first time I heard Paul Harvey, back in the 1970s. His delivery, so unlike the deejays of the day, seemed anachronistic, a throwback to the days before television. But if Harvey’s voice style was just idiosyncratic enough to prompt me to work up a vocal impression, I’d never be able to duplicate the sheer delight I heard in his words, the sound of a man who was doing what he loved in front of an audience that clearly loved him. And though the voice grew older, cracked a bit, cracked a bit more, that love never, ever diminished.

Only one way to send him off: “Good day!”

Regardless, you’re not going to hear that many of them on the radio, and it doesn’t matter what radio either:

[W]hen you listen to a [Sirius XM] channel all day for several days, it becomes obvious there is a fairly limited playlist that isn’t changed all that often. The old AOR stations with actual DJs played a much wider variety — tell me “Bob” or whatever plays whatever they want, oh yeah. Not so much.

Maybe they don’t want much.

Anyway, it’s not like any of the stations have to make room for tedious anachronisms like record libraries, fercryingoutloud: even your classical stations have gone to digital storage.

Still, as long as there’s one record out there I don’t have, and I suspect there always will be, there’s a reason to go searching outside my own collection. Even, yes, to the radio.

Despite the government’s having caved on the DTV deadline, Oklahoma City stations are expected to go ahead with the switch on the 17th of February:

Officials with KFOR, KWTV, KOCO, KOKH and OETA in Oklahoma City and KSWO in Lawton said the switch from analog to digital signals is ready and will occur as planned.

As KOKH goes, so goes co-owned KOCB; KFOR will presumably switch over KAUT as well. (The KSWO move is important to OKC, because KOCO will be on channel 7, the channel being vacated by KSWO.)

Tulsa, maybe not so much:

Griffin Communications owns KOTV in Tulsa and KWTV in Oklahoma City. Griffin President David Griffin says he’s filed a request with the FCC to switch [KOTV] — but says he could change his mind if all the stations don’t agree.

KJRH general manager Mike Vrabac says station officials have met to discuss a date to make the switch at the same time but haven’t met since yesterday’s vote in Congress.

Last I looked, KTUL was carrying the same wire story, but nothing else.

I was listening to the Thunder game on the radio last night and noticed that the Sports Animal station ID had grown by one: the last station listed was WKY, Oklahoma City.

Does this mean that Citadel is giving up on the Jox 930 format? (And did we need a fourth sports station at all?)

There exists a rumor of a new country station coming after Christmas, but do we need a fourth country station at all?

In Oklahoma City, Bob FM (96.9) and Jack FM (97.3) coexist quite nicely, although Bob, with the bigger signal, draws the bigger audience.

In Sioux City, Iowa, though, Jack has supplanted Bob:

Powell Broadcasting today announced the re-naming of its variety-hits radio station, located at 102.3 FM, from BOB to JACK.

The announcement was made at noon today at the Tyson Events Center parking lot. Powell Broadcasting general manager Dennis Bullock made the announcement which was followed by the song “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” kicking off Jack’s play list of 1,200 songs.

Bullock confirmed rumors that Jack won the radio station in a poker game from BOB, a fictitious announcement made amid free hot dogs, the unveiling of Jack’s van and a $500 cash giveaway that featured contestants turning the handle of five Jack-in-the-boxes for their chance to win.

This is not, incidentally, the first time that Jack allegedly won a radio station in a poker game.

In 1977, a fellow named Jerry Mander published a book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which contended that the medium itself was deeply flawed by nature and that no palliative measures would make any real difference.

In February 2009, there will be folks who can’t watch TV, and Mander, who hasn’t been heard from much lately, probably thinks that’s a good thing. And even if he doesn’t, Tony Woodlief does:

I pray, on a fairly regular basis these days, that some technological blessing-disguised-as-catastrophe will obliterate the ability of every television in America to receive a signal, for a good solid year.

The impact:

Imagine a year in America without television. People would go stark raving mad for the first few months, but those of us who are well-armed can handle that contingency. And maybe after a while folks would pick up books. Maybe they would talk to their children. Maybe those repetitive nights spent drooling in front of the idiot-box might be replaced by board games, and longer meals, and conversation. Or maybe we’d just get used to the silence, to the quiet of being in our own skins that seems to terrify so many of us.

Then again, maybe not:

Or more likely, we’d throw all our talent and treasure at solving this of all problems, because while we can tolerate a decaying educational system, a pervasive malaise among young people, the death of our religion, and the overall decline of genuine community, we cannot, by any means, sanction the loss of our precious yap-boxes.

I figure anything that puts [insert name of bloviating TV-news gasbag] out of work can’t be all bad.

We keep hearing that radio isn’t as profitable as it used to be, that station groups, even the big ones, are barely scraping by or actually sliding into the red.

Maybe. Yesterday about a quarter to five I passed a Mercedes-Benz CLS 63 in some sort of ultra-black that probably vanishes from sight halfway through twilight, and it bore the vanity tag KVOO, among the most famous call letters in the state. Obviously somebody at that three-station cluster is making some serious money. (And no, I’m not in the habit of racing cars, especially cars with twice the horsepower; I simply made slightly better use of the openings in traffic at that particular moment.)

KXAP-LD, the state’s first non-network Spanish-language television station, has gone on the air in Tulsa, and apparently it should be marketed as a controlled substance:

I don’t know what they’re saying, and I can’t quit watching.

I have a minor in Spanish, but I don’t speak it well. I don’t list it on my resume unless I’m sure I won’t need it for the job. Since HB1804 passed, I find it pops up on my resume more often.

TeleTul airs horribly dubbed English movies, three commercials and a couple of local programs. One of movies is the 1970s Jaws rip-off, Orca. Someone either purchased the rights to air this movie 20 thousand times, or brought in an old VHS tape.

Still, as a small station at the far end of the dial (which channel 51 will be after analog TV dies in a few months), they have to do things to attract attention. For example:

I watched a program called “D’Ponca Mother.” This is the most relaxed talk show I’ve ever seen.

The host sits in his chair, sways back and forth, and asks questions. His wardrobe is a pair of rolled up khaki pants, a shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest and flip-flops. He’s in front of a green screen, which he could be mistaking for a beach. His guests wear wigs. Two strange sidekicks sit behind him and make faces. After the last commercial break, the host takes off his pants.

What’s amazing is that Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t thought of this yet.

My usual guideline for watching Spanish-language television applies: if you can pick out one-third of the words, you’ll be fine.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Chisholm Trail Broadcasting moved Enid’s KNID-FM, 96.9, into the Oklahoma City metro, and after various shufflings and a programming deal with Citadel, the station was named Bob. The KNID call was moved to another Chisholm Trail station, licensed to Alva, on 99.7.

And now the second version of KNID is being moved into the Oklahoma City metro: CTB has a construction permit to relocate to Mustang (!) with somewhat reduced power (39 kW instead of 100). Suggestions for name, imaging, and format are welcomed — by me, anyway.

Meanwhile, I will continue to snicker at this exhibit provided to the FCC by the owner which asserts that after all, this is a Mustang station, not another OKC outlet, and Mustang deserves a radio station of its own because, among other reasons, “Mustang has its own zip code and phone book” and “Mustang is a separate and distinct advertising market from Oklahoma City.”

Fearless prediction: When Bobette, or Jeannine, or Bubba, or whatever goes on the air, you will hear Mustang mentioned exactly once an hour: at the mandatory station ID. Period.

CBS has brought forth an Internet-radio outlet called I Hear Dead People, which Scott Ross explains thusly:

The motif of “the planet’s only multi-dimensional radio station” is that every song is by an artist or at least features a band member who is no longer living.

I tuned in last night for a few, and here’s what came up:

• The Blues Brothers, “Sweet Home Chicago” (John Belushi)

• INXS, “Devil Inside” (Michael Hutchence)
• Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Fortunate Son” (Tom Fogerty)
• The Clash, “London Calling” (Joe Strummer)
• Led Zeppelin, “Whole Lotta Love” (John Bonham)
• Queen, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (Freddie Mercury)
• The Doors, “Light My Fire” (Jim Morrison)
• Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated” (Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee)

Of course, you could always listen to your nearest classic-rock station and hear most of the same stuff, but I Hear Dead People isn’t trying to sell you a new truck with DOUBLE! REBATES!

Behold the kindness:

Obama will be giving his acceptance speech in the evening on August 28, 2008. That same evening 26 NFL teams will be playing their final exhibition game in preparation for the season starting the first week of September. Nearly all the games are set for 7:00 or 7:30 starts, and most teams have local television packages that will broadcast the games.

McCain will be giving his acceptance speech in the evening on September 4. That happens to be the same day the NFL kicks-off its regular season with a nationally televised game between the Redskins and the Giants, starting at 7:00.

If I’m going to have to listen to a bunch of platitudes mouthed with only the slightest bit of conviction, I may as well hear them from Dick Enberg, right?

That’s the assumption, anyway. Today I got a flyer from Rep. Mary Fallin, bannered “Are you ready for the DTV conversion?” Inasmuch as all the district-specific information is on the front page, I’m guessing that this same material has been sent out by the 434 other House members, suitably modified. Page Two is a non-technical explanation of why your television is going away in February; pages Three and Four are an application for a converter box.

Observations:

• They actually printed a link to a list of qualifying boxes, which makes this piece somewhat more useful.

• I’m assuming the same photo of the elderly couple at one end of a love seat (isn’t that sweet?) is being used on all these flyers. (And I noticed that apparently he’s wielding the remote.)
• The piece was addressed to someone who hasn’t lived here in twelve years. I blame the state Republicans, who really need to clean up their database.
• Aren’t we due for a fresher picture of Mary Fallin? Being a governmental hottie entails certain obligations to the viewing public.

I’m still somewhat perplexed by the fact that NewsChannel 4 will be on channel 27, but the TV will inform me that it’s still channel 4.