WUFT-FM is a great public radio station.  It is an NPR affiliate, and, of course, the NPR programs we air–Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and so on–are fine programs that we all enjoy.  But, when WUFT was founded over twenty-five years ago, classical music also figured prominently in the mission of the station.  And that mission has been successful for all these years because the public has been very supportive.

Obviously, public radio support is measured in pledge dollars, and, from a cost/benefit perspective, classical music is probably the best format.  While nationally-syndicated news and public affairs programming is very expensive (over $1,000 per broadcast hour), classical music is a relative bargain.  The cost-effectiveness of classical music is such that, at WUFT, the pledges for classical make up for the deficits the more expensive news programs generate.  That is not a bad thing, though.  Rather, it is a mutually beneficial way to bring variety to the listening audience.

The first sign of trouble appeared during the membership campaign last April.  A letter appeared in the Gainesville Sun–an unsolicited letter not tied to any previous article or op-ed–that complained about the classical music.  It was a letter which ought to have elicited nothing but laughs and derision, since it complained that our format was devoted to “dead, white, slave-traders”.  I don’t know a single classical music composer that ever owned a slave, much less traded slaves.  A letter from a crackpot doesn’t have much power to change anything.  But on its heels appeared an op-ed by a somewhat well-known local photographer, which posited that our format was stale and that Gainesville listeners were missing out on a host of other NPR programs. This op-ed initially had an effect that was the opposite of what may have been intended.  The day after its publication, WUFT had a great pledge day for classical music, and the Sun eventually published a series of letters in support of classical music.

Then, after the seas calmed, word came that a committee was considering possible changes to WUFT’s format.  A proposal to expand local news coverage and increase student involvement seemed perfectly sensible.  And, perhaps that would be the extent of the change.  But the minutes of the committee’s meetings suggested that bigger changes were on the table.  On the second floor, it was clear that this wouldn’t end well.  No one on the staff involved in music programming, including the station manager, was appointed to the committee.  This led some to believe that a decision had already been made, and that the committee was merely window dressing.  The rumors reached the public, and more letters appeared in the Gainesville Sun, including a scathing op-ed by UF music professor Raymond Chobaz, which alluded to UF president Bernie Machen’s involvement in the elimination of classical music programming from the radio station at his previous employer, the University of Utah.

This afternoon the official word came out:  WUFT will go all-talk.  No more classical music after August 3, 2009.  Supposedly, the second HD stream will be devoted to classical music full-time. But it is unclear whether it will be locally programmed or come from a generic national satellite source.  It is also unclear what jobs will be eliminated.  And what will become of the other arts institutions in North Central Florida, which have enjoyed a warm relationship with WUFT, is also unclear.

I don’t speak for my coworkers, and I don’t speak for WUFT.  But, as you all know, I certainly speak for my self.  And for me, this is heartbreaking.

I did add a class about ancient Egypt to my schedule, and it is the first class I have ever taken in McCarty Hall.  It’s in an auditorium, and, in spite of the rain, it seemed nearly full.  I dropped the course about America in the 1970s.  I had reservations about the instructor, and it would require a goodly amount of writing, whereas the Egyptology class requires none.

On my bike ride home, after it had stopped raining, I encountered a small boy also on a bicycle.  He said, “What’s up, dude?  Want to race?”  He couldn’t have been more than eight years old.

Taking so many hours this summer was not my original plan.  Indeed, I had thought I could get by taking only two classes, one of which would be a one-hour astronomy lab.  But the CLAS advisor mislead me.  In order to graduate in December as planned, I must take three more classes than I expected.  So, the astronomy lab moves to autumn, and two three-hour classes had to go on my summer schedule.

The first of these today was called “America in the 1970s”.  The teacher had the Reverend Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” playing when I walked in, which was encouraging, but I felt more discouraged as the class went on.  There’s nothing wrong with the teacher’s personality.  (Last summer, in a Florida history course, the instructor, Dr. Noll, acted like a maniac the first day, probably in an effort to scare off the suckers, but proved to be one of the funniest teachers I ever had.)  Still, I just didn’t get a good feeling.  He’s a grad student, and I just haven’t had good experiences in courses taught by grad students.  Plus, the assignments didn’t strike me as especially compelling, and I’d have to write about sixteen pages of papers, and not about 1970s topics that interest me, e.g., Bruce Springsteen.  I am fascinated by the era, but, like I said, I just wasn’t feeling it today.  I’ll give it another chance, but I may drop this class in favor of one about ancient Egypt.

My second class this afternoon, also held in Keene-Flint Hall, was “The United States in World War II”.  The teacher seems young, but struck me as a smart man, nevertheless.  He has just moved to Gainesville from Boston, and told a funny story about driving out to the country last week to buy a leaf blower off someone on Craigslist, only to encounter danger, and witness someone drive off a dirt road into a lake full of alligators.  The work load seems manageable.

I’m really hoping to get a 4.0 GPA this semester, but that will be a challenge.

Nobody born after 1984 can appreciate how big a star he was.  No pop culture figure can ever match the Beatles and Elvis for sheer overwhelming fame.  But if you lived during the early 1980s, Michael Jackson was the star.  When I was little, every kid had Thriller, and listened to it over and over again.  A new Michael Jackson video on MTV generated tremendous interest.  Kids at my school wore leather jackets with tons of zippers and tried to moon walk.  He was ultra-famous.

But, of course, he could never duplicate the success of Thriller.  Even if he continued to sell well through the rest of the 1980s, everyone compared his later work to Thriller or Off the Wall, and the comparisons were never favorable.  Combine that with his increasingly erratic behavior and freakish appearance, and before long Michael Jackson seemed like a sad carnival act.  While he had once been the one everyone wanted to emulate, he wound up being tabloid fodder.  A lot of it he brought on himself.  Some of it may have been unfair.  But, by the mid-1990s you could have queried a hundred Americans and not found anyone who’d claim to be a Michael Jackson fan.  “Thriller was good”, they’d say, “but that guy’s messed up”.

We live in a different age.  Everything is incredibly segmented now.  There isn’t just one MTV anymore to claim the attention of the young.  The 1980s saw the rise of some remarkable superstars, but the conditions that created those stars don’t exist any more.  Set aside the sham marriages, plastic surgery, baby-dangling, accusations of molestation, and all the other bizarre and disturbing behavior and rumors, and think back to the years 1983-1985.  There was nobody bigger than Michael Jackson.  And no athlete, movie star or singer will probably ever be that famous again.

I am not sure the same can be said of television.  Certainly, the generation that first developed the technology still lives.  But, unlike the pioneers of aviation who predicted space flight, I doubt many involved in the development of TV could have anticipated what the technology would look like today.  With the obvious exception of color broadcasts, my early TV experiences were probably not so different from those of kids growing up a generation before me.  Our set was fairly small, required an antenna, had no remote control, and received maybe four or five channels.  Today, though, TV is unlike anything I could have ever imagined.

While I was growing up, a 27″ television was considered very large.  A TV over 30″ was enormous.  Anything bigger than that–a projection TV, for example–was something you’d only see at a sports bar.  When I moved back to Gainesville in 2000, I bought a 27″ TV at Best Buy on Archer Road.  It was too big to fit in the back of my car, so Jeff and I took it out of its box, flattened that, and put the TV itself in the back seat.  I felt like a king with such a big screen.  For the first month I lived at 1600 4th Avenue North, I got free cable.  That is common in Gainesville, since everyone moves in August, and Cox often needs a month to connect new customers, and disconnect former customers.  Alas, they had cut me off just before the Sydney Olympics. Today I watch a TV larger than I ever thought I’d own.  And it looks better than I suspect anyone fifty years ago thought television could ever look.

On this enormous TV, I can choose from among a couple dozen high-definition channels.  Generally, I’ll choose PBS, or one of a handful of network shows that I enjoy.  We get a few movie channels in HD, too, which is nice.  In fact, I essentially avoid watching anything in low-def now.  I don’t mean to sound snooty about it, but once you have seen 1080p, 420i is unacceptable.  SDTV is the visual equivalent of hearing the latest digitally-mastered stereophonic recording played on an Edison wax cylinder.

One of the high-def channels we get is MLB, the Major League Baseball channel, and my interest in it came about in a strange way.

Repeats and syndication are probably as old as TV programming.  When I was very little, I remember watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and several other shows.  Later, when Nick at Night debuted, I loved The Patty Duke Show, The Donna Reed Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Lassie, Mr. Ed, and several others.  I spent whole summers watching these black and white sitcoms with my grandparents.  I noticed that any television show that enjoyed a decent run would eventually be syndicated.  I never thought, however, that repeats of sporting events would be broadcast.  “Why”, I wondered, “would anyone want to watch a game for which they already know the outcome?”

Then, a month or so ago, I was flipping through the guide on the DVR, and I saw a listing on the MLB channel advertising a repeat of a June 17, 1978 game between the Yankees and Angels in which Ron Guidry struck out eighteen batters.  Now, even though I knew exactly what to expect by watching the game, I watched it anyway.  And it was great.  So, last weekend, when MLB was showing a 1998 Cubs vs. Astros game in which Kerry Wood struck out twenty batters, I couldn’t resist.  This is curious, because feats of great pitching don’t become apparent to the live audience until late in a game.  Nevertheless, I wanted to watch a game for which I knew the distinctive feature, and for which I knew the outcome.  It makes no sense.  Last night, I watched game seven of the 1965 World Series, and followed it with a Bob Costas interview of three former Major League umpires.  It was fascinating.

But, most significantly, an MLB channel repeat of an episode from the 1994 Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, so enraptured me, that I straightaway went to the Smathers Library and checked out the entire series on DVD.  I loved all nineteen hours of it.  The history of baseball really is the history of our country, and while the business of professional baseball is ugly, the game of baseball remains one of man’s few perfect inventions.

Coors Light is giving adult consumers a way of knowing when their beer is at the ultimate drinking temperature with the debut of the brand’s Cold Activated Can in a 24 fluid-ounce container. Thermochromatic ink turns the mountains blue when the beer is cold enough to drink. The company was the first U.S. beer brand to offer this type of product with the debut of Coors Light and Coors Cold Activated Bottles….

I have an equally effective technique for determining when my beverage is at the “ultimate drinking temperature”:  I touch it with my hand.

On her stream today, Gato Ranch, whose real name is Jana, posted something that I found disturbing.  The Gainesville Sun has taken one of her photographs, and, without her permission, posted it on their webpage in conjunction with a story.  Worse still, in spite of the fact that the stolen picture had her real name and a copyright symbol, the Sun gave her no credit, and posted a link for readers to buy the image.  From them!  It is the most blatant copyright violation I’ve ever seen.

Jana tells me that she notified the Gainesville Sun of their violation, but this isn’t the first time they have done this to her, so one must assume that this is par for the course with them.  She doesn’t believe that they copied the picture from Flickr, but from MySpace, which explains the low resolution.

I’ve never thought much of the Gainesville Sun.  In fact, I have a hate-hate relationship with that paper.  They publish unsolicited Craigslist-style rants in their letters section, which I feel violates all standards of journalism; they have been adversarial in their coverage of WUFT-FM, where I work; they have misquoted me in articles, and acted offended when I alerted them to that fact.  They are simply a bad newspaper.  Now I see they are also criminals.

Shame on you, Gainesville Sun.

So, I have a polite request for anyone who reads the Sun online:  if you ever see any photographs you recognize as mine, please let me know.  If it can happen to Jana, it can happen to me.

This is patently absurd.  I can almost guarantee you that the Obama administration would have very much preferred a Mousavi victory.  But what good would it do to trumpet that preference at this point?  None.  The United States has no ability whatever to demand a recount or a do-over.  And to officially declare that Ahmadinejad is a cheater will only make things worse for us if the forces within Iran–the only ones who can do anything to change this–do not succeed in overturning the sham election.  What chance would we have to discourage the pursuit of nuclear weapons by Iran if their president thinks we’re against him personally.

As always, an argument as foolish as Kagan’s comes complete with an intentional misinterpretation of history:

Supporters of President Obama, who until very recently had railed against the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” and who insisted on a new “realism,” have suddenly found themselves rooting for freedom and democracy in Iran.

Supporters of President Obama–let’s say liberals in general–didn’t ever oppose “freedom and democracy”.  They opposed the military invasion of a sovereign nation that had no weapons of mass destruction or connection to 9/11 at a time we were fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and could not afford to redirect those resources.

Liberals are not contradicting themselves as Kagan would like you to believe.  He’s lying, and I’m sure he knows it.  In any case, I shouldn’t expect any better from the man who co-founded the Project for the New American Century, and who pals around with Bill Kristol.

But, last month I made a rare nighttime outing, and braved the scene to see a band that shows astonishing promise, and whose songs have been echoing in my head since: Bombadil, from North Carolina.

Miriam saw them last summer at a music festival in Gainesville, and she spoke very well of them.  I heard a few songs on their MySpace page, and they seemed good enough that I was interested in seeing them myself.  But in a disaster which I’d rather not think about ever again, we missed seeing them on their next Gainesville visit, when they played at the Orange and Brew, a small, but clean, smoke-free venue at the Reitz Union.  It was distressing, to say the least.

Months passed, and I waited for word that Bombadil would again venture south.  Finally, in March or so, I noticed some Florida dates scheduled on their webpage.  Orlando, Tampa, etc., but no Gainesville.  I wrote to the band to ask if they might consider adding a Gainesville show.  James, the drummer, soon wrote me back to say that, indeed, they were adding a stop at 1982 (a bar in the same building once occupied by Common Grounds, which has moved to SW 2nd Avenue).  I was glad to hear it.

I always worry a bit that the band I’m present to see will play last, requiring me to stay past midnight.  But, upon arrival, I was delighted to see that 1982 had a sign right inside the door showing what times the bands would play.  Bombadil was listed second, and would start at a reasonable 9:45 or so.  I chatted with the members of the band before hand, as they were unloading their van.  James remembered that I had written to them.

Sara, Mark and Laura had come with us, and since we had a little time before Bombadil would start, we went down to Mother’s Pub and got some food.  The place is a dive, but I kind of liked it.

Once we got back to 1982, and the show began, I was transfixed.  Bombadil is a whimsical, captivating band.  Their songs were instantly catchy and memorable, and their arrangements were inventive, with the guitarist frequently switching between acoustic and electric instruments, and the bass player repeatedly moving to electric piano.  The drummer played a large recorder.  When the set ended a mere twenty minutes later, I was sad.

Afterward, when I spoke again to members of the band, James gave me a copy of their new CD, due to be released in July.  A couple days later I got a chance to listen to it.  It is the best album I’ve heard in a decade.  A review is forthcoming.