Playlist Date & Time: 1/10/2010 11:55PM - 3:00AM

Program: Blues in the Night with Jamie Dell'Apa

Concentrated Radio

With tonight's show we are breaking the sound barrier.  No, not the physics sound barrier, this is it's lesser-known cousin, the radio sound barrier.  

A feat of daring-do most thought impossible but from our radio-tower-to-your-ears we've got one selection per minute planned tonight.  That's 163 selections in two hours and forty-three minutes.

This is inherently dangerous radio.  Take full precautions if you are listening at home.  Me?  I'm wearing safety glasses, a bicycle helmet and full-body bubble wrap because nobody really knows if we'll create a sonic boom or pop radio tubes or cause the dreaded spontaneous combustion.  

Damn the themes in our quest for speed?   Never!   This is WWOZ, your space-age-a-go-go radio station.  We don't give 24 hours of precious, earnest, namby-pamby stories in exchange for an annual NPR coffee mug in a tote bag.  We've got themes:

1.  Baby it's cold outside (and the barely related),

2.   Baby it was a cold war (with its alternative ending),

3.   Bomb, bomb, the hydrogen bomb (to the completely unrelated),

4.  Getting bombed on, (pseudonym for drugs - Mary Jane, Tea, The Stuff)

5.  Future cars (they fly or talk or turn into robots...)

6.  Alternative orthopedics (the tie-dye edition of Gray's Anatomy)

7.  The antidote to jam band music - songs of 1:00 to  01:30 in duration.  

Yes, I did need to train for this sound barrier attempt by dropping the lavish creature comforts heaped on public radio show hosts.  On the windy mid-20 degree coldest-nights-of-the-year (tonight and yesterday) I continued my three year's of outdoor showers.  (Although I had to keep spinning like a rotisserie chicken to stay warm.) 

Of course we'll include the usual interstitial sound clips that I record off the iron oxide coating (rust) of metal uncovered by Katrina.   All the years of TV and radio broadcast electromagnetic waves have imprinted a history of Americana on this rust.  (Just like a tape recorder uses the iron oxide on magnetic tapes.)  

Video link is to Your Cousin Dimitri's earlier attempt to break the radio sound barrier:

Box Score

186 Selections including

78 Songs and 108 interstitial sound clips.  Record breaking amount of content but:

186 Selections played over 220 minutes of elapse show time is only an average of a new selection every 01:10.  This isn't enough to break the radio sound barrier of averaging a new selection every minute.

186  Selection over 3:12 of music content (192 minutes) which means it was six selections short of breaking the radio sound barrier regardless of announcer breaks.

28  Minutes of forgettable Mr. Know It All announcing that moved the barrier another 28 selections away.

Next attempt will use more interstitials, less long songs and a hell of a lot less of Mr. Know It All.  

In other notable quantifications of my New Orleans life: 

3 Serfs required to pull the Joan of Arc cart in her Twelfth Night parade.  I was the one with a cigar and red gloves trying to unionize us.  (I figured if I acted like Bender, they wouldn't ask me next year.)  

0 Prostitutes outside my house at 4am Saturday night

0.2   Of a mile of crown moulding installed in the house over the last two weeks  

20 Degrees outside 

Playlist Tracks