Lydia’s Blog

At the moment, I’m listening to the radio and dreaming about killing myself.

The Rush Limbaugh show just ended, and now there’s a shitty program reviewing a book about Christian child rearing.

In the last hour, I’ve heard phrases like “drive-by media” and “Steelers cum Mets paradigm”.

These are just a few of the gleaming gems one can frequently hear on the United States Military radio broadcast. In case anybody was wondering, the public voice of the U.S. Military in Europe is as closed-minded, gospel-spewing, and monosyllabic as one might expect of any other armed-services outfit.

This might sound harsh, but I might be more inclined to support our troops if they didn’t sound like such complete retards.

Anyway.

I’m not listening to this anti-intellectual sludge with any sort of relish. The thing is this: for me, having the option of an English-filled environment is really important. One of the most effective ways of creating this environment is via radio.

In Berlin, my radio clearly received the BBC World Service. The World Service is the gold standard of English-language broadcasting, heard in across all seven continents, featuring eloquent translations from some forty languages.

The World Service is like sitting in the company of several people you greatly respect…listening in awe at the unfamiliar yet brilliant point being made…with style and wit….as opposed to the Military broadcast, which is like overhearing two drunk hicks exchanging banalities whilst urinating through the chain-link fence behind the local 7/11.

The fucked up thing is this…were I in Kinshasa, Vladivostok, Havana or Seoul…I could easily find the World Service on the radio. In Stuttgart, however…not so much. Not on FM, AM or short-wave.

So it’s Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Pat Robertson and Sean Hannery for me.

The internet you ask? Nope, my bandwidth won’t support the BBC feed. It’s barely wide enough to transmit my own idiotic musings to you poor people.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 10:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.