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  • Art Stone 4:41 pm on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Jack “our soldiers murdered Iraqi women and children in cold blood” Murtha is dead

    Mr Murtha died from comlpications from Gall Bladder surgery – gall stones are a frequent side effect of rapid weight loss….. [let me know if I'm beating this into the ground...]

     
  • Art Stone 11:25 am on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Where’s my money? The 9.7% unemployment rate was partly due to a drop in the size of the labor pool – Rush sensed manipulation, but overlooked the obvious – the Baby Boomers are now solidly hitting 62 years old and leaving the work force.

    People have warned about this day for 20 years – the day we open the social security lockbox and find that it only contains IOU’s put there by our parents and can only be redeemed by the children so many of us never had. The fruits of the Progressive / Socialist plan are about to be harvested – USA Today has an article about how Social Security is in deep trouble.

     
  • Art Stone 1:28 am on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    SuperBowl ads – that’s it? Betty Young looked younger than Chevy Chase… Either I’m getting old or TV is deteriorating more than I knew… (or both)

     
    • puck30 3:56 am on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Chevy Chase for some reason hit the wall really early, if you know what I mean. He only 66. But I also agree with you tv is deteriorating faster then we wish.

      There are some flat out brutal shows on the major networks.

      • HPaws 8:35 am on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Ref: C Chase – although sober for over 10 years the choices I made will extract a cost for the rest of my life, I am regularly mistaken for 58+ not the 48 that my long form birth certificate says I am.

  • Art Stone 5:37 pm on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Being overweight increases your life span.. the “unexpected” conclusion of a 10 year study of about 5000 men and 5000 women in Australia – published in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society – looking at the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and death. The conclusion is you are 13% more likely to die if your BMI is “normal” than if you are “overweight”…

    CONCLUSION: These results lend further credence to claims that the BMI thresholds for overweight and obese are overly restrictive for older people. Overweight older people are not at greater mortality risk than those who are normal weight. Being sedentary was associated with a greater risk of mortality in women than in men.

    My eye surgery was called off a week ago because of my primary care doctor flagging me as hypertensive when I’m not. This is an area that is very annoying to me – almost all of the “conservative” talk show hosts (Ingraham, Mark Levin and Savage for certain) have gone on rants about how overweight people need to be punished because of their (our) effect in health care costs, when all the data suggests the opposite. The CDC had originally started this nonsense with a study they quickly retracted because the science contradicts that impression.

    Now to cover the other side, correlation does not prove causality – people who are obese might be richer and as such have better food and seek medical attention sooner when they have an actual medical problem…. and the study was for people in their 70s so it is probably dangerous to extend the conclusion to younger ages – but the BMI is not part of the Framingham Risk Index of heart attack and stroke for a reason – the relationship is inverse, which this study once again confirms.

     
    • puck30 3:51 am on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Well, at least I don’t feel bad about all that pizza I ate at the Super Bowl Party.

    • jmyrlefuller 7:56 am on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I have always maintained that the BMI ratings are overstated. I’m at 24.4 on the BMI– right on the fringe of what’s considered healthy. My doctor, at my last checkup, said I was at a perfectly healthy weight.

      The problem is that BMI skews against taller people, so if you’re over 6′0″, it’s very difficult to keep a supposedly healthy weight under the BMI.

  • jmyrlefuller 3:56 pm on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Another radio station bites the dust– right in my backyard… Hornell, NY based WHHO 1320, a Fox Sports Radio affiliate owned by a local radio owner, had its license renewal blocked by the FCC last week. According to the FCC, the owner did not broadcast legally-required statements and didn’t keep a public information file. The FCC gave WHHO a choice: pay $10,000 or lose your license. So, the owner, who also owned a much more successful FM (WKPQ), tried to sell off the FM to another company, but wasn’t able to do so. Once his license expired, the FCC said they wouldn’t renew it.

    WHHO, by the way, gave free air time to future Congressman Eric Massa every week, while not offering the same to his opponents… but that little violation of equal time didn’t even get mentioned, despite the fact that Massa only narrowly won election in 2008.

     
    • Art Stone 4:39 pm on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The FCC facility ID is 5308, which gives a sense of how old the station was… for FCC database geeks, the records are stored under DWHHO, indicating the deleted callsign….. it was 5kw daytime, 22 watts at night…

      According to the Consent decree the owner agreed to, the public file issue covered a period of 8 years… He agreed to pay a $1k “voluntary contribution” per month for 10 months and didn’t make a single payment. Not knowing the specifics, you don’t stipulate things to the FCC and then turn around and back out and not do what you promised.

      I’m picking up lots of little signs that the FCC is getting some backbone…. they’re mostly turning down STA “stay silent” requests for “financial reasons”, and tightening up rules on the games being played to “move” a station to a new city only by shuffling paperwork to circumvent the ownership limits. I’m keeping an eyeball out for when the FCC pushes the issue of all those Clear Channel stations still sititng in the “Alaho trust”…. Clear Channel was obligated to divest them as soon as pratical, and we’re over 2 years now… CC has been playing lots of these kinds of games of redesignating the community of license without moving the station, on stations it had agreed to sell and then back out of selling them.

      As I’ve hinted elsewhere, I think you’re going to see a lot of AM station licenses be surrendered in the next couple years. I don’t know if anyone even follows that – people watch the FCC announcements for new stations and enforcement actions, but I’m not sure how people would notice when the owner surrenders the license. I’ve had conversations about the related topic of who would even know if a station turned off its transmitter and just didn’t bother to tell the FCC? If it was a foreign language or small religious station, I’m guessing it would be a while… the DXer types might notice it gone, but would they send a letter to the FCC?

  • Art Stone 6:14 am on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Ray “chocolate city” Nagin is done as Mayor of New Orleans. He was term limited and Mitch “vanilla city” Lamdrieu got 67% of the vote in a 10 way race. If the name sounds familiar, he is the brother of Mary “$300 million” Landrieu

     
  • Art Stone 4:18 am on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    The U.S. is drowning in debt – that’s the message today on most Clear Channel News/Talk web sites – this is a subject that Clear Channel knows well.

     
  • Art Stone 3:53 pm on February 6, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Move over Letterman – Philip DeFranco is here.

    Who??? He is a nerdy guy with bad teeth who makes a 3-4 minute video a day of him looking into a webcam, talking about stuff and posting it on Youtube. His videos are getting viewed around 500,000 times on a regular basis.

    If you’re in the Entertainment business, this should make you very nervous. He’s doing the opposite of everything media consultants would tell you to do. That’s probably why people are drawn to it.

    There is another similar guy out in California doing a series called “California on”… He stands on the street mostly at Venice Beach and engages people walking by in conversation the topic of that video.

    This is the training ground for the next Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, but the destination isn’t media outlets licensed by the government. Where is the business model? What a quaint notion.

     
  • Art Stone 7:01 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Rush’s station changes… the thought occured to me today – I wonder if Rush’s compensation formula is affected when his program gets moved from a 3rd party radio station (like WSJS) to a Clear Channel owned station, where money changing hands just becomes an intra-company transfer between Premiere and the Clear Channel parent company and not “real” money… It might be a way to cut costs… or maybe it is laying the foundation for a Premiere IPO at some point…

    Rush seems to be trying to provoke a confrontation again… maybe it is is pre-marriage jitters, maybe the Glenn Beck effect concerns him….

     
    • puck30 7:14 am on February 6, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      What’s this about his fifth marriage? What’s the over/under on how long this one will last? LOL

  • Art Stone 1:44 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Lunch during Black History Month needs Watermelon – so says Rush Limbaugh…. The MSNBC Cafeteria celebrated Black History Month by serving Fried Chicken, collard greens and cornbread…. Rush is playing “play the media” today by adding in that they forgot the watermelon…. Detonation over at the Huffington Post in 11 seconds… [BOOM]

     
  • Art Stone 12:43 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Business Week & Bloombama go after Limbaugh – specifically Margaret Carlson (who is The guardian for her retarded brother) is upset at Rush repeatedly using The term “retard”… She makes reference to his “failed” TV show… Interesting perspective, since the show lasted 4 years in independent syndication, longer than most network TV shows. She does at least remember that Rush had a TV show, which most journalists don’t…

     
  • Art Stone 1:06 am on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    It’s that time of the month – during the first week of the month, typically is when I pull the FCC data and find new stations,call sign changes, frequency swaps, update ownership info, etc… One new station on this cycle is WANK-FM in Lafayette Florida. That station – in the wrong hands – could be trouble. They changed the call sign to match their “Hank FM” branding…

     
    • Robrrt 1:48 am on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      You know what I want to say in reply to this, but, for once, I’ll display some dignity and grace :)

    • jmyrlefuller 11:36 am on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’d be a little more worried about WANK-AM… but that’s just me…

  • Art Stone 4:21 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    ABC/Citadel is now “owned” by JP Morgan Chase – the bankruptcy filing indicates that JP Morgan leads the groups of banks that threw in the towel and finally dragged Citadel into court. Their proposed plan is to convert old debt to new debt and wipe out the stock equity owners…. where Disney stands in that equation I’m not sure… it was a complicated transaction (Disney sold ABC Radio to Citadel in exchange for about $2 billion that the combined ABC/Citadel borrowed (which is the amount now in default)

     
  • Art Stone 3:55 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Doug McIntyre is starting syndication next week – Citadel (ABC) is putting him on WABC and KABC back on the overnight shift to go against Coast to Coast

     
  • Art Stone 2:24 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    The stock market is “falling” today – because the US Dollar continues to get stronger vs other currencies….

     
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