Hey! I was listening to that!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This isn’t really something I felt strongly enough about to rant in the Pit, but it still irked me.

I had to drive 3 and a half hours from Kentucky to St Louis yesterday afternoon. I don’t have a CD player in my car and the tape player has just been chewing up cassetes lately, so that leaves me at the mercy of the AM/FM radio to pass the time during that drive. So I’m flipping through the stations trying to find something that isn’t country (sorry to you country music lovers, but it just doesn’t do anything for me) and came across an Oldies station.

So I’m doing 75 or so, singing the Summertime Blues with Eddie Cochran and then they play Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. I’m getting into it, singing along (I can’t hit some of those high notes, but what the hell, I’m the only person in the car) and happily cruising up the Interstate when suddenly, in the middle of this song I was really enjoying, an announcer comes on saying they interupt their regular programming for a special announcement.

I’ve never heard a station interupt a song for an announcement before, and I’m driving along thinkning “What the hell happened? Another bombing? Did one of the Presidential candidate’s plane crash?”

No.

The announcer continued, “We interupt this broadcast to inform our listeners that Simon & Garfunkel is our artist of the day! The 50th caller will win $5,000 and a chance to win a PT Cruiser in Thurday’s drawing!” Then they went back to playing music. Not Bridge Over Troubled Water though - some kind of surfer oldie.

What numb-nuts thought this was a good idea for a promotion?
“Hey, Bob, what will do is, we’ll pick an artist and when their song plays, caller X gets the money.”

“Aw, Bill, everyone does that.”

“Okay, then we won’t tell the listeners which artist we’ve selected for the day and just interupt in the middle of the song to tell them to phone in now. Oh - and we won’t play the rest of the song we interupt either, we’ll just go right into something else.”

“Bill! That’s brilliant! No station has ever arbitrarily interuppted songs before! But won’t this piss off listeners who don’t care about the contest and may be enjoying a song they haven’t heard in 10 years?”

“Yeah maybe.”

“Great! Go for it!”

I changed the station after I heard the surfer music and luckily ran into a classic rock station that was having a Rush marathon. Smooth driving the rest of the way. :slight_smile:

2

Should have stayed with country… We’re to busy crying to interrupt…:wink:

3

ABC news once interrupted Paul Harvey “The Rest of the Story” (I was in a glurgy mood) for an update on the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash.

“We interrupt this programming for breaking news on the John F. Kennedy, Jr. plane crash.”

:anticipation:
:ABC news signature theme:

"And now a live report on the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash.

“We still haven’t found the plane. We are still looking.”

And ten minutes of variations on “we are still looking”.

And the station never returned to “PH TROTS”; went to local news. And it was actually an interesting one, for once!

4

screech-owl - they did that recently in St Louis when Mel Carnahan’s plane went down. Every ten minutes they would interupt what on TV and go to the news studio to say the same thing every time:

“A plane owned by Gov. Mel Carnahan has crashed. We don’t know who was on the plane for sure sure yet, but here’s some people to talk about their opinions as if it will shed any light on the subject when in truth, right now it is all conjecture and theory. We actually don’t know shit, and we will continue to interupt whatever you’re watching to tell you we don’t know shit until some shit turns up that we can actually inform you about.”

5

An apt acronym, seeing as how some folk might say PH gives them the trots . . .

6

It’s bad enough when they talk over the beginning of songs or cut them short at the end (as if…“yes, all we care about is the part where they sing. The music is really not that interesting. Don’t know why the artist included it in the first place.”)

But cutting off in mid song is just damn clueless!

7

I know the feeling. There’s a top 40 radio station in the Bay Area, K101, that we listen to carpooling to work (it’s the “compromise” station, once at work it’s on with the headphones and Stern though).

Anyway, they have this idiot DJ Don Bleu. So every time they play Shaniah Twains “That Don’t Impress Me Much” they have the lyric “So, your Brad Pitt…” replaced with “So, your Don Bleu…”.

Gah!!! I HATE that!! Not only is it totally moronic, not only is it a big masturbatory ego thing, but worst of all it’s an excuse to play that song over and over again. Gah!

8

ohhhh… I detest when stations screw with songs. (With the minor exception of the South Park remix of “My Heart will go on”. That was very nice.)

I hate when anything destroys the flow of my music. The song will be over in two minutes, tell me about the death of whoever then.