Bristol under the lights is arguably the most entertaining NASCAR race — hell, any motorsports race, anywhere — of the year, especially in the dog days of late August.
Swear to God, it’s the closest thing I know of to a real-life Rollerball:
So, contrary to their fans’ wishes, they Lions got the guy they apparently wanted all along. Like I was saying, it’s like putting chrome spinners on a rusted-out K-car — the team needed a chassis and motor first, and that was defense or offensive line.
So young Mr. Stafford will get almost tens of millions of dollars — while also setting the league record for guaranteed money before playing a down — to learn his new job in the middle of America’s financial Armageddon and newly-crowned most dangerous city. Assuming he hires good boydguards, of course he’s pumped:
Who know what the future will hold, like, if they get quality defense with their #20 pick. But today, way you look at this deal — PR, on the field and financially — this deal’s not looking good.
If you fish or hunt, I imagine you’re into the whole “circle of life” thing. Kill or be killed, it’s human nature to hunt, survival of the fittest, blah blah blah.
So when fishermen walk over ice on Lake Erie (or any other lake) to ice fish, they’re embracing the destiny of nature: if a fish is stupid enough to bite their lure, then the fish dies. However, I also suggest that if a fisherman is stupid enough to go out onto cracked and melting ice which then breaks off and floats into the lake, he or she embrace the circle of life and get thee to swimming, instead of wimping out and hitching a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter.
I imagine many of these hearty, go-it-alone, independent fisherman disdain any kind of government aid for what they would deem “stupid” behavior — being on welfare or food stamps, needing drug rehab, or any other touchy-feely bleeding heart stuff. Sporting a parka, beard and fishing rod doesn’t make them any less welfare cases.
So, let ‘em float, I say. Depending on your perspective, it’d be either God’s will or Darwinism.
A centuries-old saying is that “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Except, apparently, when Monday-morning quarterbacking the demise of a much-loved Detroit radio station. So, in very Rashomon-like fashion, various players, current and former, have taken to dissecting the rise and fall of The Fan — Detroit’s first all-sports station, WDFN-AM — in the midst of Obama’s inaugural speech last Tuesday.
=> Former PD Gregg Henson, now out of the radio business but still aware of what the deal is, has long charted the station’s up and downs here;
=> Nice guy former morning drive host Jamie Samuelsen weighs in here;
=> His former partner, Greg Brady, writes a great post — definitely not in the “60 Second Blog” ethos — here;
=> Now former-PD Rona Danzinger provides her witnessing of the carnage, and rebuts Brady, here;
Another axiom is that you should always follow the money. The loss of The Fan stemmed directly from Clear Channel’s being sold, a deal that it was conceived during a bull market, and then ended up closing during the beginnings of the credit squeeze. You can chart the ever-increasing acrimony in what finally evolved into a shotgun wedding:
=> In November 2006, corporate owner Clear Channel agreed to sell to Mitt Romney’s old place here and here; some of CC’s past shenanigans, like gluttonous over-consolidation and the rusulting possible anti-trust violations, are mentioned in the second link:
=> Finally, after an interminable 19-month due diligence process and lawsuits all around, the deal closed this past May, and a whole bunch of belt-tightening was on the horizon.
Now, everyone I ever met from The Fan ranged from at least cordial to downright awesome, a situation you rarely find at any broadcast outlet. Also, let us not forget that many other off-air people at Clear Channel, including friends, got the ziggy, too.
In the big picture, what Clear Channel has wrought has not been good for the industry beyond a handful of its higher-ups. Closer to home, the various takes range from entertaining to informative, and often both, and contain many of the avoidable mistakes and missed solutions which could’ve made the whole situation better. We forget, though, that while the soldiers on the front lines do the fighting and dying amidst the fog of war business, it stems from the directives from the generals above, playing their little game of Risk or Monopoly, but with real lives.
In the end, I think some essential truths are born out:
=> Terrestrial radio is an awesome business when you craft a product that reflects where it’s broadcasting. Homoginizing stations across markets is ultimately a death wish.
=> It’s apparent after the last few months, so it’s no news flash, but the private sector will screw over everyone but themselves, if you let them.
=> The FCC should take begin to take a long, hard look at these licensees of the public airwaves, and if they aren’t doing anything productive for a local market beyond providing syndicated national programming, those licenses should be in jeopardy, if not pulled.
As someone who adores radio and has had some ideas work in the industry, I have long held out hope that these corporate behemoths would ultimately have to divest the stations for any number of reasons, from anti-trust compliance to wanting the tax write-downs to, perhaps, ultimately suffocating from under their own weight. Then, after prices are re-set to a sane market level, local owners will once again be able to craft unique programming visions which are now being relegated to the wonderful, but limited, Internets.
Bottom line, this is yet another example of the path corporate America is now wrongly pursuing to see better days, what I call “downsizing to greatness.”
The ass-kicking Anthony Bourdainfilmed in Detroit this week for his series, “No Reservations.” Though The D will be only one of three cities in an unfortunately-named, in a highly-cliched fashion, “Rust Belt” episode, any Detroit visibility on television other than the Lions, Kwame and animal control cannot hurt. Thanks for coming, Tony, but, really, we know you could’ve done a whole hour on us.
Second, while some people accuse Mitch Albom of sappiness for his non-fiction writing, that’s never really bugged me. Me, I occasionally sense he phones in his column, but when you work for a place that lives to phone it in, how can that be avoidable? Yet, on a bigger stage this week, he writes bigger, approaching the heights he is capable of, with his piece this week in Sports Illustrated, “The Courage of Detroit.” Even though some of our local sports positives are overlooked in order to make his Comeback Kid meme work, it puts a face on a problem region that is easily dismissed as a faceless, “just Detroit.”
Seriously. If you want to judge our city like this dumbass, at least take the time to do some research and thinking. But then, really, why let the facts get in the way of an opinion, eh?
