Nothing much Tickety on my mind lately. A few observations to freshen up the thread:
(1) Becca the New Traffic Twist does a pretty nice job. I could do without traffic reports entirely, but they seem to be a staple of local radio, so there you go. A couple of unusual pronunciations aside ("Jagwire," "tellpipe"), she seems pretty sound. Always interesting to see whether a Traffic Twist will become a target (Barb Smith) or a tread-lightly-around tigress (Alexis Smith) or kinda one of the guys (Tara Artho) or hardly there at all (Julie Mac). A belated welcome to her.
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(2) With all the Breaking Bad talk I thought it might be a good idea to check out The Fan. Someday I need to do some kind of piece about Ben & Skin, but this isn't it.
I guess they are famous for knowing lots of athletes well enough to get them for interviews, which is really great if athletes are interesting interviews, not so much if they aren't. Fortunately, some are -- Dirk -- but many, many are not. Upon punching up 105.3, I hear them interviewing Derek Holland. Now maybe Derek Holland is a really good guy to talk to, but he must have gotten beat up about his many bits, and brought low by the conclusion to the Rangers' season. It was agonizing to hear, poor guy had nothing to say. I confess that I did punch out on him for awhile, so maybe it got a lot better and if it did I apologize for what follows, but I punched back in in time to hear them begging him to be their color next-day interview for all Stars and -- was it Mavs or Cowboys? Sorry, I forget -- games, or maybe just home games. (After extracting a promise from him not to speak with any other local sports radio stations, which he delivered.) And he said OK and you'd have thought the Ben & Skin show had just won the lottery. I have to assume they were not serious about this, but it was hard to tell. If they were, then they just promised a lot of don't-listen segments.
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(3) I find the growing Sean Bass controversy interesting. I'm delighted he's pushed back in these pages. More than one Confessor has criticized him over the past year or so, citing a dismissive attitude toward persons, including colleagues, who do not share his views on one thing or another. Personally, I hadn't really noticed it, at least not to the degree that it would be off-putting. So I listened for it, and I still didn't get a snotty vibe from Sean, no more than one gets from other of the more youthful hosts. (He and I do disagree about the proper coverage of sites like this one, but that's OK, too.) And he got a strong defense from a Confessor on the last thread who said hey, Sean and Jake know their baseball and hardly anyone else does, so good for them.
I don't mind some intra-Ticket tension. In fact, as little as I know about sports, even I can tell that some of the hosts don't think deeply about the sports they cover. And The Shake Joint always has some really good, carefully-considered analyses. I'm hopeful that The Pan-American Catman will pair Sean with some of his targets on a panel somewhere along the line.
That would be innarestin radio.
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(4) Spoilers aside, here's the problem with all the Breaking Bad talk. This is a point I've been wanting to make and a Confessor beat me to it a couple of days back on the last thread: This Breaking Bad obsession makes these guys look so . . . so . . . dull and common and fannish, and not in a fun sportsy way, but in a pedestrian Tiger Beat way. Like they've got nothing going on, nothing else interesting to observe and comment on.
Let's put it this way: After the Breaking Bad binge we've all tolerated for the past couple of years, reaching near-Rolling-Stones levels as the series drew to a close, The Ticket boys should never, ever again make fun of Ty Walker for his Star Wars enthusiasm.
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BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING
Craig Miller just announced that 104.1 FM would stop broadcasting The Ticket effective close-of-day this Sunday. Cumulus must have gotten its FCC issues squared away, which means both the death of 104.1 and the inauguration of Cumulus's management of 103.3's programming.
This is very bad news for Your Plainsman, Western Civilization, and quite possibly My Ticket Confession. Almost every minute of my listening of The Ticket since 2004 has been via 104.1. I am listening to it now at a location that does not receive one hertz of 1310 AM. The SportsDay app and iHeart are not good alternatives for me for a large part of my listening day, nor is the Internet stream.
So look for lots more cheap reprints of good Confessor comments as main posts.
Oh, I can hear 1310 most of the time. But it's just such an f-y by the CTO -- assuming they don't improve the Ticket signal in any way -- that I'm starting to wonder if it's time to stop rewarding the Dickeys' contempt for the Cumulus audience.
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