Obscenity Fines are Retarded

Do you think that FCC obscenity fines are too high? You're right.

The FCC's language fines far exceed other governmental fines. The largest fine levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency in 2004 was $60,000. The largest FCC fine that year was 1.2 million dollars. It was for Fox's "Married By America" bachelor party episode, in which all the bad words were edited out, and all the exposed breasts were pixillated.

WFMU was kind enough to post a list of federal fines and came up with this list of non-FCC fines imposed by the Federal Government, so you can get some perspective on the current proposed laws to increase the fines for naughty phrases to half a million bucks each: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/mp3s/index.html

$10,000 for killing a Whooping Crane.
$54,500 for releasing anydrous ammonia into the environment.
$55,000 for illegally travelling to Cuba.
$70,000 for mishandling and mislabeling hazardous chemicals.
$116,000 for improper disposal of flammable material
$133,000 for exposing employees to infectious diseases
$1.2 million for broadcasting pixillated breasts

last year FCC fined Clear Channel Communications $27,500 last year for each of eighteen indecent incidents by shock jock Howard Stern. this was already outrageous. But has since become chump change.

On February 16th 2005 , The Bush Jr. administration won House approval for a bill that would raise the maximum FCC fine to $500,000 per violation. Under the new measure, Clear Channel and Stern himself would each have been fined a total of $9 million.

Under this bill when Bono says "fucking brilliant" on the air, he and the networks would garner the exact same fine as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects. For the same price as a superbowl "wardrobe malfunction" you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have spare change left over to improperly store some radioactive waste.

No wonder Stern is moving to satillite radio.
I hate Bush, this is just inane.

KMHD is the best Jazz station in America

Somewhat subjective I know, a controversial statement for certain. I still have my soft spots for WRTI and WBGO but KMHD just wowed me when I got to Portland Saturday.

I lost 3 hours in flying across the time zones and lost more in the damn flight itself. I've lost a lifetime in layovers in Chicago this year but that's a separate issue. But KMHD is programmed by psychics and that's all I know. They read your aura or they see your mental energy or maybe they pull a heart chakra out of a rabbit's hat. I dunno. But every time I need to hear some kind of music, even if I don't know it myself... they know.

Upon arrival I was toast. Totally burnt, tired agreeing to pay for stupid things, signing without reading just to get to a bed. KMHD was playing Little Red Rooster by Howlin' Wolf. Then Muddy Waters on Born with nothing. Goddamn psychic DJs reading my mind.

Then this morning. It was cold cold cold. There was a thin coat of water on everything and the clouds were splitting sporadically. The wind was up and even the hotel room was cold. I couldn't stay warm or even dry while working. There was no sun and I was driving in circles in a run down neighborhood trying to get un-lost.

KMHD was playing Dixieland and swing jazz. Everyone from New Orleans to Boston knows Dixieland is the audio equivalent of Orange Juice and Sunshine. day in, day out, they play a mix of blues and jazz -new and old, and they don't seem to carry any of the intellectual baggage that a station WBGO brings to the mic. They just let it groove and let that alone impress. KMHD, the place to be.

check out these Portland radio sites, great stuff:
http://www.portlandradio.org/
http://www.pdxradio.com/

Wake Island & Midway Island Radio

Each is smaller than Guam, each more obscure than Micronesia, more remote and barren than.. pretty much anything. Their only connection for two decades was by cable, and pretty much only to eachother. It was a tether from nothing, to nothing. It was just a small part of the Pacific Broadcasting Network.

The US annexed Wake Island in 1899 for a cable station. It's crucial airforce and naval base was constructed in 1940. In subsequent years, Wake was developed as a stopover and refueling site for military and commercial aircraft crossing the Pacific. Since 1974, the island's airstrip has been used by the US military and some commercial cargo planes, as well as for emergency landings. There are still over 700 landings a year on the island.

Currently owned by the US, the possesion of this lump of rock is disputed by the marshall islands. The U.S. Millitary left the island by october of 2001 but come contrator personell remain on the island even today.

The island has no commercial radio stations. Armed Forces Radio/Television Service (AFRTS) provides a radio service by satellite ...and Of course there's always shortwave.
including the infamous K7ASU.
http://www.afrts.osd.mil/
http://members.cox.net/k7asu/

Midway island by comparison Midway at first seems to be just another lonely island. It's about Midway between California and Asia. That's 1,304 miles west of Honolulu, and 1,182 miles east of Wake Island. The Commercial Cable Company established a small outpost there near 1900, as the first trans-Pacific submarine cable reached the island, which formed part of the very young Territory of Hawaii. The US had just taken possession of Guam and the Philippines after the US-Spanish War, and the northern Pacific was an area of growing US influence. We had not yet shed our Colonialist tendencies.

But unlike Wake Island, by 1936 Midway was being advertised as a tourist stop. By 1935 NBC had stopped in to broadcast through licensed outlet WOEH, And by 1944 AFR had started broadcasting as 900 KMTH-AM. The station was audible clear to New Zealand by 1956 after they upped their wattage to 250 watts.

The AFRTS still keeps a small broadcasting unit on Midway, using 50 watts on the FM 94.0. The station no longer uses the callsign KMTH, ending the WWII link to the Pacific Ocean Network. In recent years, Midway Island has been re-opened to the public, and the Pan American Airways dream of some 65 years ago of a tourism resort is being realised. It's now an eco-tourism resort with regular flights from Honolulu by commercial airline service. However, visitor numbers are restricted to protect the birds who've survived these years of China Clippers, Japanese bombs, and Country music from KMTH.
http://www.radiodx.com/spdxr/KMTH.htm
http://www.midwayisland.com/
http://www.midway-island.com/pics/midway-island011.jpg

Read this:
http://www.radioheritage.net/

Radio and the Kennedy Assasination

No TV stations broadcast the assassination live, as the area through which the motorcade was traveling was not considered important enough for a live broadcast. Dallas radio stations KBOX-AM and KLIF-AM carried some live coverage, but neither of the actual shooting. Both later recreated the sounds of the shooting for records they released. It included excerpts of news coverage of that day.
http://www.historyofklif.com/pgtwo.html


On November 1963, the Dallas police were recording their radio transmissions over two channels. A frequency designated as Channel One was used for routine police communications. A second channel, designated Channel Two, was an auxiliary channel, which was dedicated to the President's motorcade. Up until the time of the assassination, most of the broadcasts on this channel consisted of Police Chief Jesse Curry's announcements of the location of the motorcade as it wound through the streets of Dallas. Links to transcriptions below:
excerpts here: http://www.geocities.com/whiskey99a/dbt2002.html
full transcript here: http://pages.prodigy.net/whiskey99/dbt2002.htm

Very detailed piece on the sequence, overlap and gaps between the various dictabelts.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/scally.htm

In the early 40's, the engineers at Dictaphone Corp. developed a new recording media using a tube of very thin plastic. When the tube was cut, it created a continuous loop of plastic; also called a "belt." Audio could be impressed on to the "belt" using a stylus to cut a groove in the soft plastic.

This Dallas Police Dictabelt recording is the source of the audio track we so often hear paired up with the infamous Zapruder film. Video recorders of that era had no audio track.

Workers at Dictaphone went to work in WWI for the war effort to design and build radio monitoring and audio logging equipment to help the Allies break the German and Japanese codes. The corporation still exists and indeed will even still transfer your old dictabelt recordings to CD-R. http://www.dictabeltrerecord.com/

Remember, someone is always more obsessed than me.
http://members.aol.com/DRoberdeau/JFK/DP.jpg

KBOA's addiction to baseball

Tenacious radio sports fans have been responsible for some of the stranger events and innovations in radioland.

During the first summer of KBOA-AM's operation in 1947 they carried the St. Louis Cardinal Baseball games during the daylight hours of the sun-up to sun-set operation but was unable to broadcast the ball games played at night. In that era they ran at 250 watts as a daytimer.

But in the summer of 1947 the Cardinals were having a good season and we all know how baseball fans can be. So KBOA hooked up The baseball loop. It was a telephone line feed direct to St. Louis so the station staff started could listen to the dame on a monitor. They just couldn't broadcast it on the air.

Then slowly a growing group of fans started dropping by to listen to the ball games. This crowd of cardinal fans grew until staff members had to install a public address system to serve and hundreds of cars which would park on the KBOA grounds along Highway 25. Former PD, nwo congressman Paul Jones estimated the total head count at about a thousand.

The following year they got an FM signal to carry those night games on.

Paul Jones interview here:
http://www.kboa830.com/People/Paul_Jones.htm

Check out SMAYS.com for more KBOA lore.