Well, I think that I have gotten through a whole week of blog entries.. that means that I have successfully started up again. We'll see.
My favorite radio show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, was on again on Saturday (sometimes it's superseded by fund raising.. but that stopped on Friday. Carl Cassell, the famous announcer has retired from announcing and will, instead, be the show's vote counter. Carl's mellifluous voice has been heard for many years and he will still place his voice on the answering machines of show winners.
I will quickly repeat myself about my friend, Pete Mandell, a radio announcer who traveled with me daily on our long trips to Boston University. Even while an under-graduate, Pete had a radio show in New Bedford, from 4 pm to 5:30 pm every day. He used his real name for this show: Pete Mandell; from 5:30 to 6 pm each day, he traveled to neighboring Fall River, where he had a show from 6 pm to 8 pm under the name: Paul Mills. Nobody in those towns knew this was the same person. He even had a rivalry going between the two stations.
I lost touch with Pete for a while, and met him again at a High School reunion, where he confessed to me that he also had another program each day at a Middleborough radio station. I can't remember the name he told me he used for that one.. but I'm sure it had the initials: PM.
Boston University was kind of loose with its attendance requirements, and Pete used to make the rounds of the Boston radio stations and sound studios instead of sitting through boring lectures. Pete had one of most inventive minds of anyone I have ever met, and our daily two hour trips to Boston were really "trips."
This week, after WWDTM, I listened to Radio Lab. Part of the show was spent discussing the Search and Replace function of Word Processors. As we all know, of course, the computer can be set up to look for certain words or phrases, and replace them with other ones. For instance, if you had a long newspaper article that you were writing about Carl Rove (why on earth would you want to?).. and suddenly realized that in the 50 times you wrote his name in the article, you misspelled his first name Karl. Rather than going through word by word, you could set the computer up to scan your article and wherever you found Karl, it would change it to Carl. A nice function to have.
During the program, a couple of examples were mentioned where this function caused unforeseen results:
An author decided to change every reference in his story about lifestyles from "gay" to "homosexual". This was ok, until that part of the story that told about an athlete named "Tyson Gay."
A newspaper decided it was not polite to call newsman Walter Chronkite by just his last name, for example: "In the evening, Chronkite reported on the event." They plugged in instructions, so that everytime Chronkite appeared in a news story, it would be changed to Mr. Chronkite. Well, their ideas about Walter's longevity were greatly exaggerated, and when he died, their obituary said, in part: "In attendance at Mr. Chronkite's funeral, was his wife, Cathy Mr. Chronkite, and his son, Walter, Mr. Chronkite, Jr.
Later in the program, they did a piece on the Kirtland Warbler, a Michigan bird that becomes extinct if it doesn't encounter new tree growth from burnt forests. Conservationists who want to preserve this specie of warbler, arrange for controlled burns. However, as expected, the burns do not always work the way they are planned, and humans and buildings get burned as well. Consequently, some people in Michigan wish the bird would become extinct and root for cowbirds that sneak their eggs into warblers' nests. The warblers are too dumb to recognize the new eggs and resulting gigantic baby birds and feed them while their own fledglings die of malnutrition.
My friend, Ivan Gibbs, knows all about Kirtland Warblers and at coffee break time, he and I and other folks sometimes spent time talking about birds, as well as the Buzzards Bash, that takes place in Hinkley, Ohio each year, when the buzzards come home to roost.
Bye bye, Birdie.
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