725/14 Future of AM Radio

(0725 Dinosaurs)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on radio dinosaurs.

That’s what I am.  That’s what you are.  Know how I know?  Simple.  I am broadcasting on an AM radio station and you are listening to it.

We are outmoded.  They’re going to make oil shale out of us in a few minutes.  We are tuned to or otherwise using a medium that is said to be outmoded, superannuated and walking dead.

The conventional wisdom says we are the steam trains of the space age.  Our sound is old fashioned.  Our sister stations, Qwik Rock, Y 106.9 and Tunes 92.5 have much better sound than we do here at 970 am.

That’s true. And that’s why they play music and we don’t.  Requires good sound.  AM radio never had the sound quality FM does.  And FM has never had the sound quality of an iPod.

But when you need us, we’ll be there.  And you can hear us far and wide.

So what?  So when there’s a tornado or a hurricane or global warming turns State College into an oceanfront community, you’ll still be able to hear us -- far and wide.

And we’ll be ready and able to tell you about the conditions that will affect your lives.

Not only that, but you’ll be able to hear us even if you’re miles and miles away. And even if there’s a mountain in the way.

So reports of the death of this medium are exaggerated.  So far.

But most of us in talk radio … remember, most, not all… are engaged in political bullfighting.  We wave red flags, stir up anger where we’d be better off stirring up reason. We incite.

At some point even the people who love the rush of adrenaline are going to be worn out from the effort.

(Hmmm. Rush of adrenaline.  Maybe that’s not the best way to put it.)  Burst of adrenaline…

We need to broaden our scope.  And maybe we need today’s young people to point the way instead of looking at an AM radio and asking grandpa “what’s THAT thing?”

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/30/14 Contrasting Cracker Barrel and Red Lobster

(0730 Two Restaurants)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on two restaurants.  I’m not going to tell you which they are until the end.  But please give me 90 seconds first.

There are two stories here and both have become well known. The first had hired a man in his 70s as a host.  He was a veteran of the viet nam war and working part time.

A man, apparently homeless, comes in, says he’s going to build a fire to fry a fish and could the host please spare a few packs of tartar sauce.  

What would you do?  

Of course you’d give it to him.   That and a biscuit.  The guy goes away.  And so does the job of the greeter. Fired.  Policy.  We’ve warned you before.  No free food.

I guess a few packets of tartar sauce are food.

Second restaurant.  A woman and her husband went there for their anniversary dinner.  Thirty years of anniversaries.  The husband died last winter and the woman’s daughter took mom to the same place on their anniversary THIS year.  Keeps up the tradition.

They too received freebees.  The whole meal. Paid for by the managers and the wait staff.

It started when the waitress asked the manager if she could give them dessert.

He said… let’s give them the whole meal.

So the waitress wrote a note in the little folder that they use to deliver your bill when you’re finished.

And when it came time to deliver that bill, she slipped the folder with the note onto their table.

The Today Show website reported this story and withheld the customers’ names … so will we.  

Now… about why I waited until now to give you the names.  It’s because both are chain stores and each has an outlet in here state college.  But neither incident happened here.  The restaurant with the fired viet vet is a Cracker Barrel in Sarasota, Florida.  The restaurant with the generous manager and crew is Red Lobster in Columbia, Missouri.

Nothing we can do here… but two stories I thought you should know about.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/31/14 Booze at Arts Fest

(0731 Arts Fest Boozers)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on

Booze Fest.

We read in State College dot com that there were more alcohol related problems during Arts Fest than there were on State Patty’s Day.  The figures come from the police department and the hospitals.  So they have to be right, right?

Arts Fest is five days and State Patty’s is one day.  But no matter.  A drunk is a drunk.  A DUI is a DUI.

For those of you newer here than I, State Patty started when the School on the Hill had the audacity to be on break on and around St. Patrick’s day.  Students created a new holiday to allow them to get sloshed whatever the class schedule.

Fortunately, under pressure from everyone who is not a hard drinking student. State Day has been diminishing in both stature and in arrests. Most of the downtown bars close but business at the state stores booms in the two or three day runup.

Arts Fest, of course, is not an official five day drinking binge.  And the tactics that helped reduce State Patty to a shadow of its original drunken self in recent years cannot be applied to the might and grandeur of one of the region’s largest attractions.

Bars are not going to close for five days no matter the size of the bribes that encourage them to close for one day in March.

But the figures on alcohol- related illness and lawlessness is yet another reminder that this is a drinking town and until and unless that changes, anything and everything is an excuse for drinking to excess.

I’m no drinking prude.  I like my vodka.  So don’t get the idea that you’re hearing a prohibitionist.  

And I understand that drinking is cash flow in several stages from the bottle to the glass to the digestive tract to the courtroom or the hospital.

But I am disappointed.  So far all those great minds at PSU and all those distinguished alumni and all those dedicated public servants in this region, have yet to figure out an effective way to make us all a little more inhibited.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/29/14 World Cup and LeBron James

0729 Sports  

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on the world of sports.

I’m a little late to this trough, but… Okay, everyone, you can go back to your seats and relax now.  Germany has won the World Cup and LeBron has returned to the Cavs.

A world at last at rest.

Soccer fans -- known everywhere in the world but here in the US as football fans -- are nuttier and more volatile than American football fans.

But there hasn’t been a knock-down-the-stands riot at an NFL game in this country since Columbus.

Unlike baseball’s World Series, the World Cup really is an international affair.  It’s also a big bucks operation.

The host country this time, Brazil, proved that it could hide reality long enough for most of us to forget how terrible conditions are for some there.  High crime.  Street urchins. Poverty. Disease.

A big, beautiful country with a big heart and big heart disease.

So after nine-thousand rounds, there’s a winner… this time, Germany. Makes college basketball’s March Madness seem like a cameo instead of the endless betting parlor it really is.

Speaking of Basketball: LeBron James is a really really good basketball player.  And he’s a native of Ohio.  And he played for the Cleveland Cavaliers for a long time.  He was a first draft pick back in the day.  And they picked him.

After seven seasons, he went to the Miami Heat.  Now, after weeks of intense guessing about his future, he shocked the world by going home.

The Cavs can use his help.

The Heat was getting cold.

And this is no knuckle dragging dummy.  His new 19 million dollar contract has an escape clause after a year.  And lots of other bells and whistles.

Many a burned out or retired professional athlete has found himself adrift after the games are over.

So James has to keep an eye on the future.

And based on the Hamlet-like public pondering about where to go after the Heat, we see James has a good eye for the public consciousness.

More power to him.  And more money.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/28/14 Homeless in State College

(0728 Homeless in State College)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on the homeless.

New York's Ultimate Solution to the Homeless Problem is at last out in the open. Free one way tickets to somewhere else. Better, one would suppose than gas chambers, but could that be next?

What's more troubling than kicking the homeless out of the city? The idea will catch on and other places will start doing the same. Soon, we'll have homeless trading among municipalities.

Here in Central Pennsylvania, the homeless have learned to "pass." For those unfamiliar with the term, it means they comport and dress themselves so as to be taken for "regular" people. Either that, or they're all Anne Frank, living in attics or basements.  Or shelters.

There are homeless shelters in this area: Bellefonte, Milesburg, Burnham, Huntingdon and Lewistown.

Bet you didn’t know that.

While the homeless of any large city are obvious… in places like here.. they are invisible.

But the per capita proportion appears to be about the same everywhere.

You never hear about people being rousted from sleeping in doorways, panhandling, or hanging out intimidating students and/ or townies.

But that doesn’t mean we’re without this problem.

Who are these people?  One is a former professor who lived in his minivan and worked part time at a big box store until someone noticed his expired registration and had the car hauled away.

Where is he now?  No one knows.

Another is a woman who used to make formal gowns until one day she was sent away for shoplifting thread.

Small incidents, for sure.  But life changing for the people in the crosshairs.

Those are just a couple that I know about.  How many don’t I know about… how many don’t YOU know about.

So while we all dream of a football paradise or a drinkers’ paradise or our cutsey-quaint community and patting ourselves and each other on the back for the splendid job we’re doing raising money for the hospitals or holding track meets for a hundred different causes, we should be looking for these invisible people, making those among them who want to be seen visible and providing more for all of them.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

8/4/14 College Heights School

(0804 College Hgts School.)

970 WBLF. I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on the College Heights School.

For awhile there, it looked like there was going to be another Garman Theater type battle over the College Heights School on North Atherton Street.

But we have dodged that dodgy bullet.

The school district owns the thing.  It hasn’t been used as a school in quite awhile.  It sits there chewing up maintenance dollars.

So when the save-the-children federation a.k.a the school board decided, finally to sell it, Penn State stepped up the plate with a bag of money.

But wait.  Like pretty much anything else around here, the boro said “not so fast,” and  reminded one and all that it had first right of refusal.

A group called CASE, the Collaboration of Arts, Social Services and Education stepped up with an empty money bag and announced “we want the place.”

So the boro decided to exercise its right of first refusal and offered to lease the school to CASE.  CASE said “oh goodie” and started figuring out how to raise the money to fill that empty bag.

And then it learned that the cost of bringing the building up to code and making other repairs could run into more than 1.5 million dollars. And donations weren’t exactly rolling in.  

Big donors evidently don’t like to put big donations into rentals.

So CASE gave up the case and Penn State has a clear path to buy the school.  It’s expensive.  But it’s not THAT expensive.  $450-thousand.  Chump change to the school on the hill.  So, maybe two million overall including those code repairs.

Figure another few hundred thousand for cost overruns.  And even that is not a big bite for Penn State.

People who use the North Atherton corridor can brace for more traffic, of course.  And driving around bulky construction projects.

With the CVS under construction at Cherry Lane and the in/out driveways of Panera at Vairo Blvd.-- also new -- and the awkward turn from the Champs bar… and that traffic-slowing steep hill into Wendy’s and the additional traffic around Lumber Liquidators and the supposedly imminent work on the road itself… we’re in for a slow ride.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

8/1/14 Best Desserts

(0801 Best Dessert)

970 WBLF. I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on the best dessert in Pennsylvania.

The website “Business Insider” is usually occupied with things like the gross domestic product, the stock market and the number of corporations using overseas addresses as tax dodges.

But recently it came up with a list of the best desserts in America.  State by state results.  Something from every state.

Mud Pies from Mississippi… Salt Water Taffy from New Jersey … Junior’s cheesecake from New York… Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream from Vermont.

In Pennsylvania, the award goes to Amish Donuts and Apple Fritters from some place near Philadelphia.

I’m sure they’re fine donuts and fritters.  But personally, I’m a Dunkin kind of a guy.  That said, Donuts aren’t dessert.  They’re something you eat on the run.

The best dessert I’ve ever had around here was the carrot cake and cream cheese frosting from Eat ‘n’ Park or Denny’s.

Ice Cream?  Penn State loyalists will insist everything sold in the school’s creamery is the very best in the known universe.

Rah, rah, PSU.  But Meyer Dairy beats them by a mile.  And my kids went to the same high school as both Ben and Jerry, so I have to put them at number two.  And Bryer’s was made in my neighborhood in Queens, New York… so I have to come down on their side, too.

I have no idea what Business Insiders’ standard is. Here’s mine: Gooey. Fattening. Enough butterfat to make Paula Deen and Martha Stewart embarrassed.

It’s DESSERT, fer cryin’ out loud.  Eat all the donuts and cookies and mud pies you want. But these aren’t desserts, they’re between meal snacks.

And fruit may be good for you.  And it may be sweet.  But it’s still FRUIT.  Fruit is stuff you eat because you HAVE to, not because you want to.

Fruit is merely vegetables only sweet.  Unless it’s baked in a pie, it’s not dessert.

The other day we had some skinny cow ice cream sandwiches with no added sugar.

What’s the point?  Still okay in a sweet-tooth emergency when there are no Amish Donuts around.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/31/14 Booze Fest

(0731 Arts Fest Boozers)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on

Booze Fest.

We read in State College dot com that there were more alcohol related problems during Arts Fest than there were on State Patty’s Day.  The figures come from the police department and the hospitals.  So they have to be right, right?

Arts Fest is five days and State Patty’s is one day.  But no matter.  A drunk is a drunk.  A DUI is a DUI.

For those of you newer here than I, State Patty started when the School on the Hill had the audacity to be on break on and around St. Patrick’s day.  Students created a new holiday to allow them to get sloshed whatever the class schedule.

Fortunately, under pressure from everyone who is not a hard drinking student. State Day has been diminishing in both stature and in arrests. Most of the downtown bars close but business at the state stores booms in the two or three day runup.

Arts Fest, of course, is not an official five day drinking binge.  And the tactics that helped reduce State Patty to a shadow of its original drunken self in recent years cannot be applied to the might and grandeur of one of the region’s largest attractions.

Bars are not going to close for five days no matter the size of the bribes that encourage them to close for one day in March.

But the figures on alcohol- related illness and lawlessness is yet another reminder that this is a drinking town and until and unless that changes, anything and everything is an excuse for drinking to excess.

I’m no drinking prude.  I like my vodka.  So don’t get the idea that you’re hearing a prohibitionist.  

And I understand that drinking is cash flow in several stages from the bottle to the glass to the digestive tract to the courtroom or the hospital.

But I am disappointed.  So far all those great minds at PSU and all those distinguished alumni and all those dedicated public servants in this region, have yet to figure out an effective way to make us all a little more inhibited.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/30/14 Two Restaurants

(0730 Two Restaurants)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on two restaurants.  I’m not going to tell you which they are until the end.  But please give me 90 seconds first.

There are two stories here and both have become well known. The first had hired a man in his 70s as a host.  He was a veteran of the viet nam war and working part time.

A man, apparently homeless, comes in, says he’s going to build a fire to fry a fish and could the host please spare a few packs of tartar sauce.  

What would you do?  

Of course you’d give it to him.   That and a biscuit.  The guy goes away.  And so does the job of the greeter. Fired.  Policy.  We’ve warned you before.  No free food.

I guess a few packets of tartar sauce are food.

Second restaurant.  A woman and her husband went there for their anniversary dinner.  Thirty years of anniversaries.  The husband died last winter and the woman’s daughter took mom to the same place on their anniversary THIS year.  Keeps up the tradition.

They too received freebees.  The whole meal. Paid for by the managers and the wait staff.

It started when the waitress asked the manager if she could give them dessert.

He said… let’s give them the whole meal.

So the waitress wrote a note in the little folder that they use to deliver your bill when you’re finished.

And when it came time to deliver that bill, she slipped the folder with the note onto their table.

The Today Show website reported this story and withheld the customers’ names … so will we.  

Now… about why I waited until now to give you the names.  It’s because both are chain stores and each has an outlet in here state college.  But neither incident happened here.  The restaurant with the fired viet vet is a Cracker Barrel in Sarasota, Florida.  The restaurant with the generous manager and crew is Red Lobster in Columbia, Missouri.

Nothing we can do here… but two stories I thought you should know about.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/29/14 Sports

0729 Sports  

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on the world of sports.

I’m a little late to this trough, but… Okay, everyone, you can go back to your seats and relax now.  Germany has won the World Cup and LeBron has returned to the Cavs.

A world at last at rest.

Soccer fans -- known everywhere in the world but here in the US as football fans -- are nuttier and more volatile than American football fans.

But there hasn’t been a knock-down-the-stands riot at an NFL game in this country since Columbus.

Unlike baseball’s World Series, the World Cup really is an international affair.  It’s also a big bucks operation.

The host country this time, Brazil, proved that it could hide reality long enough for most of us to forget how terrible conditions are for some there.  High crime.  Street urchins. Poverty. Disease.

A big, beautiful country with a big heart and big heart disease.

So after nine-thousand rounds, there’s a winner… this time, Germany. Makes college basketball’s March Madness seem like a cameo instead of the endless betting parlor it really is.

Speaking of Basketball: LeBron James is a really really good basketball player.  And he’s a native of Ohio.  And he played for the Cleveland Cavaliers for a long time.  He was a first draft pick back in the day.  And they picked him.

After seven seasons, he went to the Miami Heat.  Now, after weeks of intense guessing about his future, he shocked the world by going home.

The Cavs can use his help.

The Heat was getting cold.

And this is no knuckle dragging dummy.  His new 19 million dollar contract has an escape clause after a year.  And lots of other bells and whistles.

Many a burned out or retired professional athlete has found himself adrift after the games are over.

So James has to keep an eye on the future.

And based on the Hamlet-like public pondering about where to go after the Heat, we see James has a good eye for the public consciousness.

More power to him.  And more money.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/22/14 Hobby Lobby

(0722 Hobby Lobby)

970 WBLF. I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on the Hobby Lobby Supreme court decision.

By now, you’ve heard about this.  Five male supreme court justices have ruled that if you *CAN* get pregnant and you work for hobby lobby, you’ll pay for your own birth control.

Hobby Lobby is a chain of home project  stores that sell “inspirational” books, Ball jars, ribbons, white glue, sewing thread, stuffed puppies and “World’s Greatest Grandma” coffee mugs, along with junk stones and other things for people with no life for which they substitute costume jewelry making.

The people who run the place, the Green family, have decided that because theyhear voices that tell them birth control is abortion and abortion is murder, they have the right to violate the Affordable Care Act, which requires birth control be made available to women who request it.

And the supreme court says, OK, you can withdraw the morning after pill and the IUD from the list of things your medical insurance will pay for.

The Lobbyists say, look, little girl, we pay you above minimum wage.  We give you Sundays off.  So… what’s a couple of reproductive drugs and devices that’s getting you all riled up.  We have sincere religious beliefs, you know.

One of the few associate justices who is not nuts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, says -- quote -- the court has stepped into a minefield.

And it won’t be long before someone steps on one of those mines… one the court hadn’t detected.

That’s right.  This is simply another of the thousand cuts the court is making into reproductive rights.

Its intention is to whittle them down to nothing.

If the business were owned by sincere  Christian Scientists, would they then have the right to withdraw from all pharmaceuticals for their employees?

How about sincere religions that forbid transfusions… or vaccinations?

The Hobby Lobby decision really has nothing to do with the company’s sincerely held religious beliefs.  That’s only an excuse to overturn established law in the name of sincerity… for which there is no effective test.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

7/25/14 Radio Dinosaurs

(0725 Dinosaurs)

970 WBLF.  I’m Wes Richards with some thoughts on radio dinosaurs.

That’s what I am.  That’s what you are.  Know how I know?  Simple.  I am broadcasting on an AM radio station and you are listening to it.

We are outmoded.  They’re going to make oil shale out of us in a few minutes.  We are tuned to or otherwise using a medium that is said to be outmoded, superannuated and walking dead.

The conventional wisdom says we are the steam trains of the space age.  Our sound is old fashioned.  Our sister stations, Qwik Rock, Y 106.9 and Tunes 92.5 have much better sound than we do here at 970 am.

That’s true. And that’s why they play music and we don’t.  Requires good sound.  AM radio never had the sound quality FM does.  And FM has never had the sound quality of an iPod.

But when you need us, we’ll be there.  And you can hear us far and wide.

So what?  So when there’s a tornado or a hurricane or global warming turns State College into an oceanfront community, you’ll still be able to hear us -- far and wide.

And we’ll be ready and able to tell you about the conditions that will affect your lives.

Not only that, but you’ll be able to hear us even if you’re miles and miles away. And even if there’s a mountain in the way.

So reports of the death of this medium are exaggerated.  So far.

But most of us in talk radio … remember, most, not all… are engaged in political bullfighting.  We wave red flags, stir up anger where we’d be better off stirring up reason. We incite.

At some point even the people who love the rush of adrenaline are going to be worn out from the effort.

(Hmmm. Rush of adrenaline.  Maybe that’s not the best way to put it.)  Burst of adrenaline…)

We need to broaden our scope.  And maybe we need today’s young people to point the way instead of looking at an AM radio and asking grandpa “what’s THAT thing?”

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®