Seemed Like an IDIOTIC idea!

Garfield flambe' (now that's a good idea!)






Just when you think people can't get any dumber...
You open up the paper and see a story like the one I saw in today's North County edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Lack of sponsorships delays display of 40 Garfield statues

The story, by Lola Sherman contained some of the following:
"Five-foot-tall statues of Garfield, the sassy comic-strip cat, will not be drawing tourists along old Highway 101 this summer after all.
"A plan to install 40 individually decorated Garfields between La Jolla and Oceanside is on hold because not enough people were willing to spend $4500 to sponsor a replica of the lasagna-loving feline."

Where do I begin to express the magnitude of how stupid I think this "idea" is??? Good God, there isn't enough space in infinity times ten to express how crack-brained it is. Please, oh please, make it NEVER happen! Garfield is the single most un-funny comic in the history of newspapers! I long ago concluded that the only reason the strip continues to run in most major dalies is because of the slavish devotion of humorless cat lovers who find this useless hairball..cute. Not funny...CUTE! Yeah, about as cute as a bad case of athlete's foot.

I'll continue to monitor this disaster in the making and do everything in my power to snuff it out. There is a woman associated with an animal center located in Rancho Santa Fe who is still attempting to make this cultural equivalent of Armageddon happen by securing a "title sponsor".

Any thoughts on how a five-foot-tall talking pile of pig flop might go over?

You're right. That's probably one we save for Iowa.

EIGHT Transistors...This could be the start of something BIG!

This is how people listen to the radio...Isn't it?



It began as all radio careers pretty much begin. Dumb kid saves money; buys EIGHT transistor radio instead of the measly six transistor job like every other kid; spends endless hours listening to guys his Dad's age, (only COOL), play Hound Dog and Wake Up Little Susie on the radio. In southern Michigan I could listen to WILS in Lansing, WKHM in Jackson, and Radio 80 CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario (Detroit) during the day. But...at night...whole new vistas opened up to this Midwest knucklehead. When the sun went down, it was MAGIC time. Radio's sky wave brought in 50kw blowtorches like: WLS, WBZ, WABC, KDKA and others into my world from exotic locales like Chicago, Boston, New York and Pittsburgh. My small town yokel imagination was in overdrive! While listening I was no longer some dork living in a town of 1800 "right smack dab in the middle of the mitten" of Michigan. No, I was a sophisticated urbanite who was headed for big things via my soon to be launched career in broadcasting. In fact, by the time I turned 13 I was already subscribing to Broadcasting Magazine and telling anyone who asked that I was going to be on the radio one day. Me and Marconi!

I turned 13 in March of 1961. It would be an interesting year for my family as Dad had been transferred by his company and in August Mom, Dad, my brother Steve and I moved to Spencer, Iowa. This was a big step as far as I was concerned. Spencer, after all, had a population of 10,000 and...a RADIO station. I was convinced that I had made the Bigtime. A census in five figures and a full blown radio station!

It wasn't until we actually arrived in Spencer that I realized that my characterization of the station, KICD, being "full blown" was more apt than I could have possibly imagined. The station BLEW monkey chunks!! It was the typical small town rural American poorly produced no talent horrible waste of kilowatts that most of them still are today. Not only didn't they have decent announcers, they had no jingles; no national or regional spots; no network news...no ANYTHING I wanted to hear. What they did have plenty of were reject jocks from other podunks, a bunch of horribly written live commercials, crappy music that only a parent could handle, and a major doofus farm director who called himself, "The Farmer's Friend". Geezus, he was awful!! Every morning he could be heard droning interminably about how many happy heifers and slap happy hogs had marched off to Omaha or Sioux City to become steaks and sausage. God, I hated that station! Later, when I was in high school, I worked at KICD. (Hey, it was my first real RADIO job.)

Sometime during my brief employment at "The Mighty 1240", ( I begged them to call themselves that.), the ever faithful "Farmer's Friend" got himself caught in "the tractor's nuts" as we like to say in the Midwest. He was fired for puttin' his "prize hog" to a hooker in the general manager's office. This is what apparently had been "getting him up" every morning at 5 for the past several years and went a long way toward explaining those long interludes of Hawaiian music during the farm market reports. But I'm getting ahead of myself...



to be continued....

Warming Up to Global Warming

"Hey, where's the beer?"





So what's the big deal?
Global warming this; global warming that...WHO CARES?!

Frankly, I'm always just a little chilly anyway. It seems like I have a sweatshirt or sweater on most everyday. Kicking up the temperature is just fine by me. Think of the savings on your heating bill!

Just to put it in the proper perspective for you, I have compiled a list of just a few of the positive outcomes of BIG BAD Global Warming.

THINK ABOUT THESE:

Melted butter pretty much at the ready for all occasions.

More topless business ventures launched. (car washes, bars, barber shops, etc.)

Fishing becomes easier as fish come to surface to find out what the hell is going on.

Free government ice cream! (I can't be sure of this one, but the DEMOCRATS are in charge.)

No more yellow snow.

No more car problems. You will be able to ride much larger insects to work.

Banana farmers in Minnesota no longer receiving government subsidies for crop failures.

More kids able to take early retirement thanks to increased lemonade stand sales.

Able to cook an entire roast in your pants.

Al Gore MELTS!

Global warming...embrace it!

Breaking Wind...how I ran away to join the RADIO

Nipper...considering a radio career





"How does that work?" It was my guttersnipe pal, Bob Chamberlain. "I mean...the guy just sits on his ass and plays records and they pay him and everything." Bob had a way of cutting through all the crap and getting to the meat of the matter even though he was only eleven years old. I looked up to him. I was nine and was looking to move into the media business just like Bob. He already had a paper route which took him to the far reaches of the hamlet of Leslie, Michigan delivering truth in the guise of the Detroit Free Press. Bob was making his pithy observation as we listened to the radio and shot pool in the basement of the home of Van and Scottie Aldrich. We were at the Aldrich manse because our parents, Bud and Cece Chamberlain and Cop and Eleanor Copper had dragged themselves and a combined seven kids to the Aldrich's for what was called in those days, a...vacation. It made all the sense in the world to families like ours in 1957 to wend our way from southern Michigan to beautiful Findley, Ohio to really live large. After all, for our parents it was a free place to hang out and, at least for me, it was the chance to live the Ohio dream of legal fireworks and the possibility of illegal firewater at an early age. But I digress...

RADIO. Yep, Bob was right. He was always right! I knew it for a fact when he very painstakingly and graphically explained to me what our parents were actually up to just a few months before another obnoxious brother or sister showed up. I know for a fact that I never looked at mom with quite the same respect as I once had. "You let Dad DO THAT??!!" Oh well, at least Santa was still "the goods", even if mom had fallen from her pedestal.

Radio, in those days, was reinventing itself after having its ass handed to it by television. Gone were the big band remotes, the soap operas, and the likes of Jack Benny, George and Gracie, Fibber McGee and the Shadow. They weren't idiots. They were on TV! The real money was all going to TV. See ya later radio.

After a few years of radio sliding into entertainment oblivion, innovators like Todd Storz and Gordon McClendon concluded that people would actually listen to the radio if you played the same moronic tunes over and over again. Storz was the first to discover this as he and his program director, Bill Stewart, observed customers and waitresses at an Omaha watering hole pumping nickels into a jukebox to hear the same few songs nonstop. They may have been drinking while engaged in this important research; so perhaps their conclusion is suspect. But, damn... it worked! And the whiskey was good.

Well, it was on the aforementioned sojourn to Ohio that started me thinking about this radio scam that Bob had so succinctly summed up as "getting paid to sit on your ass and play records". I pretty much concluded right then and there I would set my sights on the lofty career goal of...disc jockey! A career path that would lead me to fame, good times, major babes, and I was sure...FORTUNE!
Did I mention that I was nine...and an idiot?




to be continued...

Tough Times

Kick ass; take names











Kiss ass...kiss ass









Am I the only one who misses leaders who actually stood for something?
Have we, as a nation, forgotten the lessons of two world wars?

When did it ever make any sense to mollify people who wish to harm us? I'm grateful that my father isn't here to see how a country once united against evil and almost always willing to forget partisan politics in favor of doing what was right for our nation has become a country consumed with only the desire for political power purchased with transparent demagoguery.

Where is our next Winston Churchill, FDR, Ike or others like them? We need to come to our senses as a nation and toughen-up or surely we will not survive.

Stop coddling terrorists, stand up for our rights, come together in sacrifice for our own common good...or we will certainly have our future professed through the insane blur of the global terrorists' vision.

This is a test. Right now...We are failing.

WHY is this guy SMILING??

"Honey...I'm home!"


Is there a list somewhere?
You know, a list of all the guys who some clown in Spamland thinks need to get one or all of the wiener enlargement e-mails. (Oh, excuse me..."Male Enhancement" e-mails...)
I'm fairly certain that I have never cried myself to sleep worrying about this, nor have I exercised my inalienable right to order Viagra and hard core pornography in large quantities over the Internet. So, why do I and everybody I know, including women, get tons of these damn e-mails every day? And...where is our government in all of this? Shouldn't they be worried that the whole country will be consumed in lust and debauchery and therefore not able to do our taxes. What about all the property destruction resulting from all that enhancement?! Think of the all of the homes knocked down by unwieldy enhanced appendages! Perhaps this is all a scam cooked up by big financial institutions designed to rescue them from their sub-prime home loan debacle. I smell conspiracy!

Oh, by the way, since we are speaking of homes...I just today received another batch of those "free" address labels that charities and some businesses send out attempting to guilt trip you into donating money to various causes. Today's labels were unique. They say: Ken Copper/ Or current resident, followed by my address. I can't wait to start using them.

I'm afraid I'll have to cut this short. I just got an interesting e-mail from a fellow in Nigeria who's having some trouble with a banking transaction. I sense economic opportunity!

It's Painful...But I Have Insentive!

They made us exercise every morning in the Army.
By "they" I am referring to the sadists of various rank who delighted in making guys run and do things like Jumping Jacks until you wanted to lose all of your breakfast and maybe even some of the whiskey from the night before.
I HATED it!

When I got out of the Army I promised myself never to break a sweat again and was good to my word for over twenty years. Then about thirteen years ago one of the lowest forms of life on the planet, a radio time sales representative, approached me about doing a series of commercials for a local gym in San Diego. Now, you must know that since very early in my radio career I had learned to either hide or run away at top speed whenever a "Time Slime" approached. They invariably want something from you and it usually involves the commercial prostitution of your very soul.
"Look...I promised the client that you'd do it." Always meant an on air personality had been sacrificed by the sales rep for the "greater good" of the station's bottom line. I figured this was no exception.

"The client is willing to sign on for a 52 week schedule and you'll get cash plus a free membership and...they'll throw in a trainer for you." He had me at CASH. I thought I would be able to show up for a few sessions at the gym; quietly quit going and...continue to cash their checks. It was a deal.

The surprising thing was that after a few sessions with the trainer, Jeff, (a genuinely nice hillbilly from one of the Carolina's), I actually began to feel better and had lost a few pounds. I now had INCENTIVE. Not only that, during my next physical my doctor noted that my blood pressure and cholesterol were in a much friendlier neighborhood and that I could stop taking medication for the former. Amazing!

In the months that followed I found that I was in constant need of new incentives to continue my flirtation with good health and exercise. A compliment about how much better I was looking would be good enough to keep me going for at least a week. I learned to read magazines and trade publications as I slaved away on the treadmill or bike, which was further incentive as I now felt like I was accomplishing something as I sweated my way to good health. It has been like that for all of the thirteen years. Boredom sets in and some new prod is needed to get me to the gym. I'm involved in a constant search for a reason to do it.

My wife, Linda, joined me in this "get in shape" insanity after I had been at it for about a year. She initially joined a gym near her work, but since she retired and I "got quit" from the station that had the deal with the gym, we have both been torturing ourselves at a new health club near our home. It ain't easy...but we do it.

Just last week I was wondering why I still bothered with all of the exercise. The usual "gym ennui" was settling upon me once again. On our ride home the other day, both of us were commenting on how OLD we were feeling as compared to the others at the gym. We don't have tattoos; I have no hair to spike with styling gel; we seem to be the only members who know who Soupy Sales is. You know...the typical complaints. And then Linda said, "I can't believe the number of women in the locker room who don't put on any underwear when they get dressed."

I'll be back at the gym first thing tomorrow morning! I'm newly inspired!
This will keep me going for at least another SIX MONTHS! The good cholesterol and better blood pressure won't work anymore. THIS WILL!

Is she one of them???? How about her? Maybe I should just ask Linda. No, no it's better this way.
Maybe her????
No VPL there!
Lechery and me...working hand in hand for better health.