Thank you, Shea Weber

First off, hats off to the one person in the room who actually got the silly reference in the title of this blog, and that one person would be me, so excuse me while I pat myself on the back for that one.  As for what it means, we will get back to that at some point.

Since I have a few minutes to kill here, thought I might jot a few notes of news that have been rattling around in my cranium for the past few days and I managed to not put into the last blog.

I am in the process of working myself out of a job at the radio station.  Right now the two big things I have going for me is that 1) I am the only idiot willing to get up on a regular basis for work at 5am, which usually means a 4am fall out of bed time and 2) the people with the Wachovia show (the paid program I produce on Tuesday and Thursday morning) continue to sing my praises, and if there is one thing you don't want to do, it is piss off a paying client.  They are so happy that they are thinking of picking up a third day, probably Wednesday mornings, though that is still in the very talkative stages at this point.  All of that being said, my workload is starting to diminish somewhat.  I had mentioned previously about our format switch, from an all talk format to a business talk format, well the thing is, most of our old programming was piped in via satellite, which you have to sign a contract in order to get.  Some of the bigger name shows require you to pay a fee to carry them, but for the most part you get the shows on a barter deal, that is, they give you the programming for free, and you make sure all of their national advertisers clear their spots on your station.  The syndicator then goes to the advertiser and says, "Look, we are getting your spot to clear in "x" number of markets", and they use that number to set their advertising rates.  It is one of the reasons that most of the stuff on your dial isn't live and local, it is cheaper by far to just plug in a dish and pay no one, or maybe one person to babysit it than to pay talent and put on a show.

Sorry, iced tea is done brewing, I'll be right back.

As I was saying, as part of our contractural agreement, when we ended our broadcasting of the shows, we were required for the next 90 days to carry all of the spots that normally would have aired had they still been on the station.  And who got the job of recording all of those spots and making sure they ran?  Why that would be me.  I was recording over 4 hours of just commercials every week, which is quite a project, but I managed to get it done, and this is the last week I have for those spots and I just put the last 75 minutes of them in today.  Of course that means I have a lot less work to do, unless I can find new stuff for me to do.  I started a project of clearing out all of the out of date stuff from our production studios.  It may sound simple, but there is stuff in there that is 8 and 9 years old, so it is going to be a time consuming process.

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Day Two (Electric Boogaloo)

Okay, onto something completely different, this from the nobody asked me but department.  If you run a bank and you claim that you need no government assistance but the government forces you to take $25 billion dollars and then you come back and say, well, we may need another $25 billion to keep from failing, haven't you already, in fact, failed? 

Does Pamela Anderson actually have a vagina, or is it really a bag of holding?

As we tick away the last month or so of Pittsburgh's 250th year as a city, one has to ask if in another 250 years will we be celebarting 266 consecutive seasons of losing Pirates baseball?

Consumer spending last month reached its lowest point in 25 years, yet during the same month consumer confidence went up.  Can we now assume that we are confidently not spending our money?

Way back during the primary campaign, I said that I was proud to be a Democrat because of the field of Presidentioal candidates that we put forth and would have happily voted for many of them,and Barack Obama seems to be sharing that sentiment, choosing from that field his Vice President (Joe Biden), Secretary of State (Hillary Clinton) and Secretary of Commerce (Bill Richardson). One is left to wonder how much John Edwards regrets fucking around on his cancer stricken wife as he probably would have been on the short list for Attorney General.

Enough of that already, I need to explain away the title to this blog at some point.  It all goes back to my fantasy sports teams.  First, I want to say that the fantasy football team lost this week, but still clinched one of the 6 playoff spots with an 8-4 overall record and with two games remaining I sit 1 game out of first place, with the last game of the season seeing me play the first place team.  All of a sudden, I am thinking a first round playoff bye may be in the offing for me.

As for hockey, well the losing and climbing continues, as I went 3-5-2 yet moved up a spot in the standings.  As for the title to this blog, it is a pun on an old investment firm commercial known as Paine Webber, where at the end of the commercial the person talking would say 'Thank you Paine Webber".  I had the same thought Sunday night from my defenseman Shea Weber, as I went into Sunday looking in bad shape, the week's record stood at 1-6-3 and all I had playing were two defensemen, including one Mr. Weber.  All he did was net two goals and an assist and move me from  1-6-3 to 3-5-2, a three point swing that moved me from finishing the week in 9th place overall, to finishing in 5th overall, so thank you, Shea Weber.

Okay, bedtime is fast approaching here, so I am going to call it a night and sit down with my iced tea and my book.  Remember kids, reading is fundamental.