Moving past commentary-driven media

Maybe it’s time for something different.

For years, I listened to local sports talk radio on my commute home. I live in the middle of SEC country, and — especially during football season — the talk shows were full of callers who were mostly annoying and overly opinionated.1  The host of the show was great and I really enjoyed his commentary, so I kept listening. One day, after a particularly obnoxious sequence of callers, I tweeted something like “I’d love a sports talk show without callers” and tagged him. He responded, thanked me for listening, but said that most people didn’t want to listen to him talk for a couple of hours. They tuned in for the callers. That was the format.

Audience commentary is part of every type of media. With newspapers, we’ve long had editorial pages, op-eds and letters to the editor. Radio has a whole sub-genre of talk...

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I know the name is officially still in use, but if Apple ever manages to release an electric car, they should recycle the name “Claris.” Apple Claris sounds like an EV.

My wife and I are discussing a tropical vacation to celebrate our 25th anniversary. We visited a couple of resort web sites and I followed a couple of interesting options on Instagram. Now, every ad I see is for a Caribbean resort.

I occassionally do this thing where I go to bed early, then wake up at 2 am and work until about 4 am. I find that I’m more productive after some sleep. Thankfully, I’ve learned to schedule my emails for delivery at normal times, so people don’t think that I’m insane.

Our house is on a golf course that went out of business. Long story, but the course was eventually purchased by the original developer and gifted to the local rec commission. It’s taken a while for them to rebuild pedestrian bridges and do some improvements, but now, the park has about 4.5 miles of (very hilly) trails accessible from our back yard. Went on a wonderful walk with my wife this weekend and discovered trails I never knew existed.

Finally got around to watching Glass Onion. So much fun. Going to have to watch it again to catch all the details.

I’ve been walking on Main Street at lunch this week. Today, I ran into a bunch of friends who were also out and about. Almost had a pre-COVID vibe.