The Return of the Website 2023

Short and simple:

To put it short and simply, my website was “AWOL” since I can’t remember!  It was at least the past year or so, if not more!  However, in the true “scouting tradition” I didn’t totally give up, nor let it bum me out – I just ignored those feelings – until the time came for me to dig, sniff and experiment around with the original platform once again, and lo and behold…”Viola!”  It was still hiding there, partially due to something called “Square” which apparently merged with Weebly – my original site platform  in 2007 – sometime this decade, as a monetization vehicle for “selling”.  Not sure what kind of selling, although the images are of pottery and ceramics and household stuff.  Hmmmm…

As my site and life is predominantly centered around music, media and wordcasting, the Square model did not fit – and that’s okay!  They who do other things do not traverse my online world, we do not counter-judge one another and we still exist harmoniously, and that, as the late Teena Marie sang back in 1981, is “square biz”!

Not to belabor the point, because soon I have some other current common nonsensical events to blogplain about, I’ll just ask that when you have some free time, you to check out the (slightly) new look of I.M.I.J Produckshunz (pronounced “image productions”), 2023 two-point-OH! http://www.imijproduckshunz.com/

The home of Cheetah Media & Freelance Services (CMFS).  We are here for your needs, if our lifetime expertise allows.

Many Thanks, Be Well and best wishes in all you (legally and ethically) Do.   ~ Cheetah NJB

Modern Incorrect Thank you? “Very” vs. “So” Much

My degree from the University is in English and Communication. I am a bit of a “wordsmith” in the tradition of the late William Safire, who penned the “On Language” column in the Sunday New York Times magazine.
Not a snob by any means, certain trends or linguistic fads get my Capricorn “goat”.

Recently, and I mean that I didn’t notice this until this year, 2015, I feel it disengenuous when I hear “Thank you SO much.” It is almost like the person saying that is almost hoping that the receiver will accept what they know is a knee-jerk bullshit common statement!

When I was raised, everybody said a version of “Thank you VERY much!”, if they had to go beyond just “Thank you.”

So when did this battle of the adverb/adjective, “very” versus the multifunctional “so” begin? My answer is when the laziness created by cell phones and other personal devices that have cause lowered educational standerds began: the advent of the “information superhighway” begat by techno inventions.

Sad to think that if most people are left to their own devices, they will take the easy way out, turn their brains mostly off and do the wrong thing like texting or paying too much attention to their telephone while driving.

This is all part of the reason that “Thank you VERY much!” is so much better than the lazy and lame, “SO much” we hear these days. I even heard an MSNBC TV news female anchor use it when receiving the toss back from a reporter the other day. I almost became nauseous.

For you, my reader, who was not an English major in college and do not understand what all the fuss is about, I will now define according to http://partofspeech.org/
“In verbal and written English, the word “so” has multiple functions. It can act as an adverb, a conjunction, a pronoun, an adjective, or an interjection depending on the context.”

While “like many words in the English language, the word ”very” also serves a double function. It can be used as an adverb or an adjective depending on the context.”

The solution could be to combine the two as in this version of the British “Keep Calm and Carry On” series:
Yet, I want to see “so” deleted from the modern appreciation lexicpon altogether! Its slang leanings are fake and lame, rolling off the tongues of (mostly) female hipsters with captious intentions.
Listen, now that I have brought this to your attention and according to your generation (or if you even care), please analyse the preference. Most of we Baby Boomers will agree with me and/or go “Oh Wow! I’d heard that trend but not really paid any attention to it – it did sound kind of weird…” lol Other younguns might find this column superflous or even dumb. And that last part is what I am getting at: the dumbing-down of our society and in this case, lingustic culture and traditions for the worse. Now, for a little musical punctuation for my points above:

“Thank you so much is becoming way over used and doesn’t come off as genuine anymore. It’s almost as if everyone were hypnotized into saying Thank you so much instead of the good old Thanks a lot.” – http://english.stackexchange.com/

Thank you very, very much for your comments!

Check Out The Review of “Achilliad’s Blog” in 2012 from WordPress!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 13 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

What is “radio”?

That is the question kids will be asking their elders soon if they aren’t already.  Terrestrial commercial radio as we once knew it IS dead. The mean-spirited “no fun bunch” has taken over. Corporations are to blame, and the Congress that deregulated radio about twenty years ago a la what Reagan did to the Air Traffic Controllers union in 1980 is also. I used to dream of being a successful music radio Program Director in a big city when I landed my first on-air gig back in 1978.  Now I know that dream will never be realized after almost forty years in the business – now mostly relegated to “part-time” status, I’m sad to say.

Recently, one of my favorite FCC Commissioners Michael Copps commented, “a tsunami of media consolidation fueled by the same hyper-speculation that was fueling so many bubbles in so many other industries [where] Stations were gobbled up en masse and totally unrealistic expectations were visited upon both them and even upon the ones who managed to stay unconsolidated.” And furthermore he said at the workshop, “the FCC had fallen “fell under the spell of an ideological deregulatory mind-set that fueled the evisceration or outright elimination of just about every public interest obligation or public interest guideline we had.” Not to mention planned careers like mine.  
I had a job interview with a Program Director a few weeks ago.  I guess he is close to my age but younger because we both reminisced about the days of editing audio using celluloid tape and a razor blade on those big ten-inch reel-to-reel tape recorders.  When I left I wondered how he got his job? Not that he isn’t qualified or anything like that, but I’ve almost forty years in “da bizness”, and can’t even get a sniff to fulfill my career dream?  I must have missed something along the way.  All of this began to change around seventeen years ago – about the time the computer became commonplace.  The bean counters came  in over we who had gone to school for/trained in broadcasting. Suddenly we had too many desk jockeys and not enough true disc jockeys.  I remember when I always had an eye to the “trades” Help Wanted sections for that next desired location, air shift or a music director gig.  I could send a tape, CD  and resume and get hired – seeing America the raido way; stations would even help you move !  Not no more – I’m stuck at the scene of my last relocation eight years ago.  No more “Radio Ga Ga” ( a song long before Lady Ga Ga burst onto the scene, by the way).

The result is the current vast, cold and cookie-cutter non-creative radio wasteland that discourages a disc jockey’s individualism, and where every genre’s playlist is a replica of the “competing” station over at the next corporation.

Of course another big competitor for radio ears are the I-Pods, Podcasts and other virtual media which I can only wish were never invented pertaining to the number of traditional radio employment opportunities; a no-win situation. 

Upon my recent prevailing against another unjust firing (when will I ever learn to get out of “radio”) a mentor wrote to me, “”Congrats!  I’m glad you won and yours is a victory for everyone who has been made a victim by companies such as Citadel.  I hope you get a generous settlement and I’m glad you didn’t let them get away with it.”

“The radio jobs that [we] yearned for thirty years ago aren’t coming back,” a Program Director friend of mine commented to me last week.  He has been one of the fortunate few to have been in his chair for about twenty years!  My suggestion has long been to bring back the requirement that broadcasters (yes,even DJs) have to pass the minimum Third Class FCC license test.  There are three classes of FCC licenses.  You would have a better quality of true communicators, and it would weed-out much of the “junk” we currently have over the terrestrial airwaves.  I bet people like Rush Limbaugh couldn’t pass the test for one on the first try! LOL

Two of  of these major “evil empires” of radio are Clear Channel (the former AM/FM radio and the greediest) and  Citadel Broadcasting.  Every time I read a headline like this week’s “Clear Channel Revenue Slips 6% In Q4 ’09” I am happy. I hope one day they disintegrate.  Citadel has recently filed bankruptcy, so logically they should not be appealing any worker’s mysterious, curious and cost-cutting dismissals these days – except that they too live in the illogical world of the bottom financial line which dictates that they shouldn’t pay a worker who is partially unemployed and pay into his/her unemployment benefits; yet they would rather dismiss that type of employee rather than create a position where he or she could earn more and get out from under the Unemployment safety net. I was a victim of such a bean counter lady recently.  There is no respect for longevity anymore and no willingness to “work with” employees for mutual benefits.  My uncle, who just passed away at ninety-two years old was a Jazz fan – he loved WBGO and NPR’s programs – always said, “The larger the company, the more stupid rules.”  ‘Nuff said.

We used to lightheartedly say about our being in radio that we were “bitten by the bug” because we had the fever to play music, cut-up, entertain, inform and communicate truths about our times.  That bug led to a fever that is hard to cure, and if you can break it, the residue tastes like that of losing a long-time lover or breaking a drug habit.