Episode 96: Cranky Jack Hammers

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People are entitled to their opinions. They are not, though, entitled to spouting their opinions unchallenged when those opinions perhaps deliberately ignore crucial bits of history that, if better known, might greatly undermine the importance of those opinions. To issue just such a challenge is my aim in this Episode 96: Cranky Jack Hammers.


From this wonderful site.

In this episode, I excerpt Clive Desmond's selective history of commercial radio titled "A 700 Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream" (aired in edited form on 99% Invisible). I also play: Podington Bear doing "Bad Cut;" and Jahzzar doing "Reflections. To close out Black History Month, I produced a brand-new KMFDM opening that backed Martin Luther King, Jr. As usual, I close the show with Mistle Thrush.


My source for the MLK audio.

I read from: Henry Giroux's book, The Violence of Organized Forgetting; Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (the source of the Herbert Hoover quote); J.C. McQuiston's article in the August, 1922 issue of Radio News (something I also discovered thanks to Wu's book); testimony from the 1935 Federal Communications Commission hearings on radio policy; and a sentence from a letter written in 1934 to the magazine The New Republic. [I goofed when I finished up the episode by forgetting to list in the credits the quoted sources. Oops. I regret the error, but hadn't the time to correct it.]


Zappa's album cover mentioned in the episode.

I'm releasing this and all of my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 share-alike, attribution, and non-commercial license.

Episode 95: Let Me Educate You

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I confess: I sometimes screw up. We all do, after all. The point worth remembering is not the fact that we D'oh! on occasion, but what we do afterwards. And, given our almost universal screw-upped-ability, it's probably best to not assume we are god's gift to the unlearned every time we drop "knowledge" on the masses' asses, and, moreover, to occasionally subject our own insights to review. Those two lessons are the subject of today's Episode 95: Let Me Educate You.

In this episode, I read from: my computer's quickie dictionary; and a few chapter titles from Michael Shermer's Why People Belive Weird Things. I played audio from: Sam Harris' Waking Up podcast (Episode 31, "Evolving Minds"); and from "The Hate Debate" from Jad Abumrad's More Perfect podcast.

Tunage includes: KMFDM's "Attack" (backing Mark Blyth); Lee Rosevere's "Multivac;" and two from Jahzzar, first "Lullaby," and then "Dip." I close once again to Mistle Thrush's "It's All Like Today."

I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.