Walk into any coffee house and you will find wide eyed people in an alpha state, seated  in front of their computer. They aren’t just intently focused on it. They are “as one” with it, like the guy during  the recent Florida election,  staring hypnotically at the  hanging Chad, like a  Zen monk, contemplating  a rose, “as one” with it. 

 

There is a wide array of lap toppers. There are those who are engulfed  in their most private thoughts, communing with their computer in depths they could not  otherwise plumb.

 

If finding love is finding someone else who reflects the real marvelous  you, the lap top can also bring this about in the absence of that someone, a  kind of  surrogate lover.

 

 The lap top is ideal  for  engaging a fantasy lover. Because they are anonymous,  there are no bounds to which users can express  themselves to their new found  “partner”.

 

Many times, their newly found  live play mate on the other computer, is playing  the same game. A plain girl morphs herself into a  fairy princess, and the guy is Prince Charming. It is the perfect set-up, the nearest to the Star Trek Holodeck.  

 

Of course, a virtual reality tryst would be better, creating a world  that is startlingly real, but  not  socially presentable in a Starbucks or other public venue.

 

I know a dweebish  young man who has morphed eight simultaneous romances, none of which he intends to bring to the surface by actually going and meeting the women on the other end.

 

Other more realistic users employ  their computers to Google information that they couldn’t otherwise access: how to tune a car, change a faucet, trim a tree, find the latest cure for any number of baffling afflictions, or check out a  person of interest.

 

I was startled to find that Google had swiped all of my Radio Daily News  chapters and placed them in an accessible Happy Hare file. Be careful what you say publicly. You could be Googled.

 

This last weekend  at a Starbucks. I  sat across from a General Atomic executive, concentrating on his lap top while sipping a latte. He was connected  to his subordinates with special software. He didn’t mind telling me that two of his contacts were overseas.

 

No one communing with him could have imagined that he was at a Starbucks, settled  comfortably in one of their thick padded chairs, with the San Diego Harbor spanning  panoramically over  his left shoulder.

 

He was making decisions without having to take a face to face meeting. It  appeared to be a casual exchange on his part without  having had  to mask his executorial face with a furrowed brow and grim visage. Proof that one of the bad aspects of corporate life … face to face meetings … is unnecessary.  Better on a lap top where you can  relax  and expound without being pontifical. Pontifical sucks up precious psychic energy.

 

The lap top is a warm social tool, I have watched young people grouped  together, staring down into their lap tops, conversing  in short unintelligible bursts,  a form of  social haiku.  BTW, were they verbally text messaging?

 

This brings me to my central thesis, the potential power of  lap tops, and computers in Internet radio.

 

Internet radio investors should go that extra mile and purchase gear that will  make them more interactive with their listener/viewers than many are willing to commit currently.

 

New Internet radio operators make the mistake of thinking  Internet radio is a slightly advanced form of  simple radio. It would help if we stopped calling it Internet “radio.”

It’s like calling a Hudson Terraplane a “Rolls.”

 

Consumers  are waiting for the day when Internet “radio” will be more available in cars and other moving targets., but I envision plenty of use for it, as is.

 

Even today, a computer user  can  play games with the  host of an Internet  show,  participating  on their own inexpensive video computer camera, fulfilling  the dream  to have fifteen  or thirty  minutes of fame not only in a lifetime, but  any time he or she  wishes.

 

SignOnRadio in San Diego did not have this shelf ready  capacity. to connect the host visually with the audience. I asked a mid-level executive why this was so and he wordlessly rubbed his index finger against his thumb in the universal sign of money.

 

Imagine an in-studio camera demonstrating product with a link to the advertiser  enabling the potential customer to  order there and then. Home TV is raking in tons of money. Don’t investors think the additional gear would  pay for itself in no time.?

 

In this thesis, I have purposely left out that next extension of ourselves, the cell phone.

Innovations are on the way that will make the current  cell phone as much or more  of an extension of yourself than the computer.  Cell phones will be “Sell” phones. I will explain in another episode.

 

In China, there are 585 million cell phones in use.  These amazing implements   have penetrated the farthest reaches of the world including remote African  and Asiatic  villages. In these  areas,  Manufacturers are attempting to bring  their price down to $5.00 or less.  Battery life is a problem but this is being solved by the erection of solar powered generators.

Engineers from the major  cell phones companies are traveling the back country of the world  to make cell phones viable. .

 

They are especially  vital in  earth quake regions.  People use them to locate  their separated families and loved ones, the same with war ravaged countries.

 

There was recent flair up of fighting in Lebanon,  because the government was shutting down the cell phone towers in the Hezbollah neighborhoods of Beirut. Hezbollah won, and got their phones back.

 

Now, to a topic with which I am more intimately familiar.

 

It was fun reading about the WLS 89 Rewind in Chicago, a day devoted to paying tributes to the all time greats. It is a puzzlement to me that Larry Lujack and the other guys  has not been offered a gig. Perhaps, by now, he has. Lujack says He has one more chapter left in him and I think he underestimates.

 

For that matter, every market has a former great who should be swept up, because there has been a  recent tsunami-like boomer turnover and these guys are back “in.”

 

Imprints are insidious  Veteran jocks evoke fond memories. If you are a programmer buying into the  booming new Boomer format,  do yourself a favor and  find a place for some of them.

 

Most vets are fine ad-libbers, a lost art. Put a good veteran ad-libber on mid day or evenings or weekends,  and give him three or four isolated adlibs each hour. Charge double for them, more than you would charge for two 60’s in that slot. I predict great things. for you.

 

Mike Glickenhaus asked me to help a staggering  pop standard  KPOP a few years ago. I took mid day weekends, not the M-F drive time he asked me to take.

 

I trashed the  classic Clear Channel  music “sweep”  clock and  broke the vanilla pop standard music  format by inserting more energetic music and isolating the times I had to pitch a cruise with our listeners.  An average 90 travelers went with me on my trips, compared to the 25 or 30 travelers scored by the M-F drive time jocks.

 

The reason for my success  is simple The full time guys  were excellent talents, who were forced to bury their  60 second live trip pitches  smothered  among the four minute cluster of commercials mandated  by Clear Channel. I ignored the rules, isolating the pitches in a single slot, and  lengthening  them to at least 90 seconds, giving me time to romance the trip before entering seamlessly into the hard information.

 

Despite threatening memos from lower programming, but with  the encouragement of upper management,  I plowed on. Ratings did not suffer, For that entire year 2001, I succeeded on all levels, rating  #1 AQH and TSL  45+ in a median  65 + format, a station that was tanking in other day parts. I have described this in prior chapters.

 

You may have read my recent RDN Frank Sinatra series. Chuck Dunaway  sent some timely Sinatra material. Chuck writes….Now that "Nothing But The Best" has hit  #2 on the Billboard album charts, Sinatra becomes the only artist in history to place an album in the Top Twenty in every decade of the chart's existence.  His highest charting albums, by decade:
1940s - "The Voice" (#1)
1950s - "Only The Lonely" (#1, 5 weeks)
1960s - "Nice N' Easy" (#1, 9 weeks)
1970s - "Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back" (#13)
1980s - "Trilogy" (#17)
1990s - "Duets" (#2)
2000s - "Nothing But The Best" (#2)

 

Randy Michaels checks in with his  “Philosophy of Ambiguity.”….

Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?
Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?
How do they get deer to cross the road only at those yellow road signs?
What was the best thing before sliced bread?
One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.

How is it possible to have a civil war?

If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest drown too?

 

Frank Sinatra preceded the Internet explosion But here he is, typical Frank, to register his posthumous opinion of it.

http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239

 

Ain’t never seen a horse that couldn’t be rode

‘r a cowboy that couldn’t be thro’ed.

                                                Eminent newsman and cowboy philosopher

                                                Robert B. McEntire, KILT Houston