I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT (EARTHQUAKE EDITION)

I am somewhere in Southeast Asia when an earthquake strikes. There is some damage, but not many injuries. Somehow I am roped into co-hosting a BBC special report about it, since I’m there and have some broadcast experience. 

They set up the studio in an old church, installing cameras and pulling a studio audience together for it. They’re also installing tiki torches at the end of each pew, for some reason.

While they do that, we go around assessing the damage. In one building behind some glass doors, we see a cat. It doesn’t look in very good shape, but we don’t know whether it looked like that before of after the quake.

We also discover that someone has sent a mariachi band around to help look for survivors. They walk up to a building, turn on the front-door intercom and sing, “Hello, are you okay?” The people inside sing back: “Yes, we’re fine!”

We go back to the church, where I find out that my co-host will be Jeremy Clarkson. I tell him I’m nervous about the broadcast because it’s been awhile and anyway I’m not an expert. He says, “Don’t worry about it, there’s nothing to it, and you’ve held up pretty well under the circumstances. Besides, not many people get to have these kinds of experiences in remote parts of the world.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I grin, “you do it all the time on Top Gear.”

He replies, “Yes, but that’s my point. If it wasn’t for that show I wouldn’t get to have those experiences. I’m lucky to have a job that forces me out of my comfort zone, otherwise I’d spend my whole life back in England eating fish and chips at the pub.”

Clarkson asks if I know anything about the local cuisine. I do, and so we end up literally running around the village looking for good local street food. We encounter Richard Hammond, who is participating in a chili-eating contest. The chilis are so hot that he has to be hosed down with cold water as he eats. Meanwhile, James May is pretending to steal Hammond’s breath mints.

And then I woke up.

And on that bombshell,

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dEFROG ON 45 #62: THE BALLAD OF PABLUM-PUKING LIBERALS

As I’ve mentioned before, my 45 collection is the result of a variety of sources. Some of them I bought. Some of them belonged to Mom and Dad. Some belonged to someone else’s Mom and Dad.

For example, one time I was at Mr Cat Taylor’s house, and for some reason we started digging through his dad’s record collection to see if he had anything useful or interesting.

And we found this.

Which is notable because that is the same Morton Downey Jr who was Rush Limbaugh before Rush Limbaugh was Rush Limbaugh.

Well, at least he would have been if Rush Limbaugh had been more like Jerry Springer.

To illustrate, here’s a clip of him and Ron Paul shouting.

I don’t have the facts to back this up, but I tend to think that Morton Downey Jr invented conservative talk shows and Fox News mainly by proving there was a mainstream audience for loud, rude conservative jerks to yell at liberals. 

That said, he also proved that it was possible to go too far and spook advertisers and affiliates into dropping you. He also proved that you don’t really have to believe what yr saying in order to pull this off – something I’ve suspected Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck of doing for awhile now.

Anyway, it’s fair to say that in the 80s, a lot of people (including myself) hated Downey – not because we disagreed with his opinions so much as the fact that his goal was to piss people off and get them to shout at each other. I thought he represented a new low in both television and public discourse at the time.

Little did I know he’d only scratched the surface.

How low can you go,

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