Media

The infamous shock jock recently went off the air. I had found his station by accident when I was visiting Phoenix about a week before his final show. I figured that I would listen to it as much as I could, since I wouldn’t get another chance unless I purchased it. I’m trying to keep the radio at a low volume in my cube so as not to disturb anyone else, or offend them, when one of my female co-workers overheard it and initiated a conversation about how much she enjoyed the show and that we had better hurry up and get satellite radio if we wanted to keep listening.

I guess this wasn’t really “surprising”. It’s been one of the universal truths that higher population leads to more widely defined permissible behavior. Why that is, I couldn’t say. You would almost expect that if there are fewer people to get angry, you could get away with more, perhaps it’s the anonymity of not having to know or ever interact with your neighbors.

Speaking of, I’ve driven or walked by my immediate neighbors every day the past week, and haven’t said word one to them yet. Actually that’s not that different from Lubbock. In Lubbock all I would say to my neighbors is “Howdy neighbor” as I walked by.

I guess what really surprised me was that I was under the impression that the shock jock had left because they were afraid of being fined by the FCC, well what do they replace him with? A format from Los Angeles called “Free FM” that’s just one crass shock jock after another. I eventually had to search for a music station because I didn’t want people to walk by my cube and hear the constant barrage of sex talk.

Phoenix is also one of the carriers of the liberal radio station. We don’t happen to have that in Lubbock either. I’m not sure the exact number of radio stations, but I tried to do a quick scan and preset setup, but ran out of my 8 presets on FM and AM pretty quickly. I’ve not sat down to determine for sure, but there even seems to be more TV broadcast channels than just the big 5.

Something I’ll have to do soon is do a search for Phoenix podcasts versus Lubbock podcasts.