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Some Confessors like the guessing games on this site.
Others find it annoying and even improper. That's OK. I don't mind the criticism, if expressed in tones conventionally disgusted.
I don't want to whine, but put yourself in my shoes for a moment.
This site had its third anniversary last Saturday. That's 469 posts, counting this one.
Basically covering (1) the station as a whole (CTO, signal, internal politics), (2) The Musers, and (3) The Hardline. There are posts about Norm but not a lot of them. A few more about BaD but again, not a conspicuous feature of this site. An occasional visit to other stations.
You know I'm not a Ticket insider, and you'd need a scanning electron microscope to find the inside information I've received from genuine insiders.
Which means that if I'm going to generate new material on this site more than once every couple of weeks or so, I've basically got two sources to draw on: I can comment on stuff that I've heard, which is far from the majority of the broadcast day and only, on average, about half of The Musers and The Hardline. The stuff I've heard you've heard too. It can be fun to comment on that and get your reactions, but after awhile, let's face it, there's not a lot new out there. You want another column about Hardline potty mouth? I didn't think so.
Or I can listen real carefully when I do listen, and speculate about stuff that the Nation speculates about, and sometimes I come up with stuff that maybe it hasn't thought of. Sometimes it strikes a nerve, sometimes it's right, sometimes it's plausible but wrong, and sometimes it's just plain ridiculous. I accept the ridicule and criticism -- anyone who runs a blog about something that people care strongly about had better be prepared for that. If it isn't vulgar or too over the top, up it stays.
A third source would be y'all, but my occasional calls for topics meet with stony silence. Still, you've noticed that a particularly interesting or well-aimed comment will sometimes serve as the topic for the following article.
Even when I'm wrong, I can sometimes flush out stuff that we wouldn't know otherwise. Take the just previous Pants Finnegan column. Anonymous advises that Pants is Gordon's reference to an obstreperous new sales guy. Says it twice, in fact. He also instructs me to "stop overthinking stuff like this." Well, Anonymous, if I hadn't wondered why Gordon had created this character, who didin't seem to have reference to any "type" we knew from the station, we wouldn't have the benefit of your (apparent, and, I think, actual) inside information that Gordon was noodging this new sales star from San Diego and, presumably, the sales department generally. And we wouldn't know that Gordon sometimes does whole bits that are meaningful primarily to his colleagues, and not to us. Those insights are not going to overturn Obamacare, but they are of interest to the good folks who click over to My Ticket Confession.
So I'm going to keep listening between the lines, and throwing out guesses, and maybe we'll all learn a little something about this wonderful station that positively invites us to care about it on a personal basis.
And someday, maybe some of those guesses will come home to roost, and I'll be able to say that you read it here first.
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In other news: Did you hear Corby and Mike discussing Dan Bennett this afternoon? The subject was working on holidays, which the hosts don't have to do this year, the first time in a decade or so, since the early Susquehanna days. I laughed out loud in the Conestoga when they ridiculed Bennett for his judgment that a lot of new listeners, freed from their workplaces, would spend their holiday listening to the radio. And that it took him ten years to realize that this view was in error. Pretty rough on the ol' CTO.
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Confessors, I'm buried for the rest of the week and then off with Mrs. Plainsman for a vacation in cooler climes. Please feel free to do 90- and even 180-degree turns on subject matter in the comments. I will monitor comments and toss in a pfennig or two if I have a thought. I'll be back if I'm able, but it may be awhile before there's a new article. Thanks to all for observing the unwritten rules of civility of this site, and in advance for continuing to do so.
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Email Your Plainsman: ThePlainsman1310@gmail.com
