August 13, 2008
Sometimes we take our heritage too seriously:

SOMETIMES THEY JUMP OUT OF NOWHERE!

One day in 1977, while program director of a radio station in northern California, I was plowing through the day's freebie records for our next smash hit, when a record with a handwritten label came into view. In those days, records were vinyl and had a large hole in the center giving away their status as a 45 RPM vinyl recording. When I received a record with the song title and artist written on a plain white label in marking pen, it usually meant it was rushed out before the labels could be printed, by an eager promotion department at the the company, Curb Records in this case. I played it for myself, since it was the daughter of an old corresponding friend and memories flooded back at me from years past.

Back in the day - 1958 - I was asked to assume the job of program director of the U.S.Air Force radio station at Karamursel Turkey. Novel, since I was in the Navy at the time! But there had been a program director prior to me, the late Don Brown, who had achieved legendary status among the other personnel of KTUS. It was obvious that D.B., as he was known, was sorely missed by the station staff and I vowed to ease the transition by continuing many of the policies Don had installed to keep the operation successful and prominent in the eyes of the command. It somehow didn't matter that Turkey has a long standing policy of not allowing any sort of broadcasting by anyone other than their state Radyo (radio) services.

Among the files of correspondence from Don Brown to record companies and artists back in the states, begging for current records that KTUS could, and certainly would, play were a few letters back and forth between Don and Pat Boone. Pat was the John Mayer of his time. You haven't heard girls screaming until you've taken your girl to a 1950s Pat Boone concert! He was a nice, safe friend that parents felt would be perfect entertainment for their darling daughters, hence not only the girls made him not only popular, but their moms were right behind them at the ticket windows. There was a sizable section of American society that appreciated Pat's "aw, gee!" attitude, his respect for the Good Book, and his moral choice of music selections - in conjunction with the great Randy Wood, owner of Dot Records. Pat was Beatlemania long before there were Beatles. (He still makes records: check out his website!

Back to 1977: I opened the envelope containing the record with the handwritten label by, then 21 year old, Debby Boone. She had been two years old when I wrote my first letter to her father, Pat. The record had been rushed out on the strength of heavy buzz within the industry, and without realizing it, we programmers propelled that buzz into actual record sales. Bigtime sales. Ten weeks on the charts - longer, in fact, than any of her dad's records. It was produced by Mike Curb, who later became, California's Lieutenant Governor.

I will never not idolize Mike. He came all the way up into the northern part of the state in the heat of his campaigning and appeared on my radio show merely to thank me for being among the first disc jockeys to play You Light Up My Life. Oh sure, we talked about the campaign for Lieutenant Governor, but he was quite obviously happier when we were talking hit records, promotion, artists and, to me, the good stuff. He remains one of the rare good guys in the biz, and he's still at it. Wynonna Judd, Hank Williams, Jr., Sawyer Brown or LeAnn Rimes, are on Curb's labels.

So what's up these days? As an old retired person I can pick and choose whatever I want to do, and right now I find myself being a fan again. There's this incredible saxophonist. I first caught him playing on Michael Bublé's video of "The Way You Look Tonight" where he was a "freelancer" hired by David Foster to back up new Foster star, Bublé. I sat there with my chin on the floor watching the video, which had been recorded for AOL's Sessions series of web concerts. (It's also on Bublé's first DVD as a "bonus track.") This guy (at right), playing sax so smoothly, so perfectly, and enjoying it so much that he didn't even realize he was doing his elephant dance during the times he wasn't actually playing. It's Robby Marshall who was attending USC at the time, majoring in, what else? Music. Yeah, Robby's young, and one heck of a young professional...and musically maturing at warp speed. He's already been a world traveler, among his treks, a series of concerts last year at a jazz fest in Peru; he regularly plays at the hot jazz clubs in L.A. (The Baked Potato, for example) and many others. He's able to join, or to put bands together in an instant and they all sound like they've played together for years.

Talent. I like Robby's smooth, mellow sound. I like his attitude, and I like that he absolutely loves what he's doing. It is this attitude which precedes success, and he's got the right attitude in spades. Just watch the Video as evidence. If you can find anyone playing sax better, currently, let me know. If you're among the graphically challenged, photos are here.

August 1, 2008
I have a solution you can have some fun with:

Right up front, I should say that my wife and I chose, carefully, to live in the mountains of California's Sierra Nevada and near Yosemite National Park. We moved here from New York City because trees, streams, lakes, and mountain peaks appeal to us. So we moved to this little "village" in the mountains because it is unincorporated, we don't have huge glass buildings housing computer companies, although the tradoff is the lack of shopping variety.

    But that's okay with us. Just 45 minutes, and a tad over one gallon of gas, gets us "down the hill" to Fresno, where we enjoy shopping galore, jostling with Fresno's half-million population for a cash register then the ability to depart quickly and unnoticed.

    The big problem is that down to Fresno and back we must share the two-lane road, having very few passing lanes, with people evidently just learning to drive in mountains. They probably do straight freeways quite well, but put them on a mountain road and all bets are off. For instance they don't know about the rule, "If there are 5 cars stacked up behind you, one pulls over into a side lane to let them by. They don't realize that the entire object of passing lanes is to pass you because you're obviously going too slow for our tastes. If you're the slowest on the road. Passing lanes do not mean should start speeding. They mean those holding up traffic should, in their snail-like way, enjoy the right lane, while we "professional mountain drivers" would naturally want to get by you.

    So I came up with an idea many years ago, that we should put LEDs to work for us: Encourage car manufacturers (are you listening General Motors?) to put a simple LED billboard just above the rear bumper. From the comfort of our car we can "text" other drives with messages displayed on our LED board. Or, merely stepping on the break puts the message indicating you're about to stop on the board. An extra one on the front that would show messages backward, therefore rear-view-mirrorable, would be nice.

    One message that cries out to be used in the mountains is shown here. One that would quickly become a local favorite is this one.

Think of the applications! I'm certain you could come up with your own customized messages merely by texting your signboard.

    You can readily see that the first car manufacturer issuing this little feature would reap billions in the customers' rush to own one, hence the suggestion to General Motors whose stock is...well...not in the mountain peaks of Wall Street...go for it!

July 4, 2008

Sometimes we take our heritage too seriously:

EVERYONE NEEDS TO LIGHTEN UP

I'd like to be a DNA tester. I would go around to various countries and tell their people to lighten up; and if they didn't want to, I would take some of their dna and do a test, graphically showing them that even if they assume they're a full-blooded whatever, their dna from centuries, eons of peoples will tend to disprove that. Nobody is descended from someone who never migrated and along the way produced children.
    I lived in Turkey. Turks are very much into "Turkishness," even imprisoning people who "insult Turkishness" and yet, daily, reports are coming from the scientific community that are tracing the Turkishness of these wonderful peoples' DNA and are finding Turks are really only partially Turkic. They're more related to the throat singers of Tuvan, a republic located in extreme southern Siberia, where the DNA shows they were originally Oghuz Turks, the main Turkic people who later moved into Anatolia (Turkey). This occurred after the victory of the Seljuks over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071.
    But even this occurred centuries after their migrations began.

Back before Christ was born, Nomads of Central Asian Turkic descent coalesced into their first great empire, which, by around 551 AD, was a nomadic confederation that they called Göktürks or "Sky Turks". These tribes under a Khans dynasty, who affected, during the sixth to eighth centuries, the area from the Aral Sea to the Hindu Kush in the land bridge known as Transoxania.
    The movement of the Turkic people was quite slow. Spending up to a century in one place or another, they gradually pushed west and south, mating all the way and producing offspring with the locals, the fellow travelers, and others they met along the way. This thoroughly jumbled the DNA picture to the point that most Turks have very little "Turkishness" in their genetic structure. The highest estimate I've seen is 11%. Granted there are Turks who came to Anatolia from other places and who have been in the land multiple centuries, and have done their own cross-pollinations over time watering down whatever their original genes were.
    What I'm trying to remind all people of is this: Almost no one on the earth today is pure anything. So why can't we be "one big happy and diverse family" since we ALREADY ARE one big family? As Elizabeth Foley said, "The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart."
    Back to Turkey: Over my lifetime I have been friends with so many Turks of very diverse backgrounds, who live all over the world now, that I have long lost track of how many, and in some cases who, they were. All I can say about them is that - whatever genetic soup they're composed of - I never found a Turk, or anybody else, I couldn't be friends with. It just takes trying to do so.
     If you can make an enemy, with much less effort you can make a friend. We just need to lighten up, earth...and be a happy family.

Great book on this topic: The Turks in World History by Carter Vaughn Findley.

June 26, 2008

Nothing beats this one:

THE HOME "CINDERELLA TEAM" SCORES BIG!

Next College World Series
June 13 - 23/24, 2009
from Omaha, and in just

This replaces a series of thoughts I wrote here a few weeks ago regarding the College World Series. It's not that I had second thoughts, but because the whole texture of the CWS has changed for me. It turned out far better than I expected or could ever have hoped for. They're the U.S. Champions, and nobody can take that away from them...or me.
    Some history:     I was not quite 10 years old when I first heard about a "College World Series," whatever that was. But by the time I was a high school teenager, I began following the great college teams in their quest for a World Series trophy. Then just after I finished my junior year of high school, the first of many miracles occurred: University of California, who had won the first World Series in 1947, won their second World Series. I was in radio then, working at a small station in San Francisco, and I remember the news coming over the teletype.
    Somewhere in 1979, when I was 39 years old, but still in radio, a teletype brought me the message that some foresighted person, who had me in mind, had invented a television network devoted to sports, known as ESPN. I was hooked. I can't forget seeing their crisp, clean, clear video presentations on the old TV at my hangout, the Flume Burger Factory in Chico, California. The pictures looked better than I had ever seen.
    Hard to believe that was nearly 30 years ago. But the letters on a TV screen still make my heart jump, though ESPN now has had children and, in fact, grandchildren. ESPNU, their college sports channel was founded in 2005 just for me, I'm sure, though anyone is welcome to watch. I know ESPN had my College World Series viewing aspirations in mind. Didn't they?
   By 1979, 12 times California-based universities - mostly University of Southern California - had won the College World Series, but back in 1979 California State University Fullerton won it. Wait a minute: a state-run university winning the CWS that was NOT the Arizona State powerhouse with their four series wins. It was then and there that the first fantasy jumped into my mind...I drifted off into a land where my home team, Chico State University's Wildcats had somehow gotten into Division 1. Somehow had made it through playoffs. Somehow traveled to Omaha to play in the College World Series. Ahhhh dreams!
    Now we jump ahead nearly 30 more years. The University has changed from my hometown's Chico State, to my current hometown where we've adopted California State University, Fresno just down the road a piece, which IS a Division 1 school. And which did play in the playoffs. And which DID go to Omaha. And, "Cinderellas" that they've been called, DID turn into white knights, and last night turned into College World Series champions over a frightfully devastated University of Georgia the press' darling leading up to the finals.
    I love assumptions. Everyone just assumed Georgia would win it. But we locals knew the secret: Mike Batesole, a coach so likeable that even his team guys like him! They listen carefully to him, and Batesole's the sort of laid-back guy who believes in training your people to play intelligently, teach them everything you know, then leave them alone, to go out on the field and play harder, smarter, and with more heart than even they thought possible, and for the sheer fun of it. As legendary coach Augie Garrido says, "It's PLAY baseball, not WORK baseball!" These Fresno guys are psych majors, history majors, business majors. They're not planning careers in the major leagues; they're planning on running a small two-person business, or teaching, or working for an insurance company. Just guys.
     If a hero - as Christopher Reeve once said, is an ordinary individual "who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles", then I'd have to say he must have been talking about the Fresno State Baseball Bulldogs.
Perfect. I believe I saw the perfect baseball game: commentators, atmosphere, dedicated players from two great teams, a ton of spirit...And I was able to see it all on .

August 4, 2007  

I can't understand you...

COULD YOU REPEAT THAT AGAIN SLOWWWLY?

Is it just me, or there something wrong with companies that employ people in foreign countries to handle their customer service for American customers?

Not that I don't speak another language - I speak poor Turkish as it has been 45 years since I lived there, and I speak enough spanish to frighten even me - but I also don't go looking for jobs where I must speak one of those languages. So I hate calling my credit card company or other tech support and find I'm speaking to someone who doesn't speak English even at the first grade level.

I agree, most people who attempt to speak a language often understand the language better than they speak it, so I'm sure my new friend in India feels we're conversing just fine, but 10,000 miles, countless technical issues, and static-filled delays aren't helping either of us.

    Oh: And doesn't that satellite delay just about drive you freako when you're trying to interact on the phone? Same as when a TV commentator in Atlanta asks the reporter in Kenya a question, and the reporter's still picking his nose, and nodding his head like a bobble-doll, while he receives the signal - then gets this surprised "I've gotta wake up now" expression before answering.

    In trying to have an intelligent conversation with someone who doesn't speak my language well, is delayed by a satellite link, and whom I can't see speaking to me, it starts to burn me that the company I'm dealing with is taking the cheap way out of providing good technical and customer support...which, I was always taught, should be number one priority. And I don't pick up the phone and call people I never knew in Istanbul or Barcelona just to have a chat.
    Darn it!