What SF's 105.7 today has in common with LA's KHJ from 1972

While getting my gears greased to tackle my grading chores on this Ides of March, I stumbled across
this item on SF Gate:

"Bay Area Latino radio station won't stop playing Nelly's 'Hot in Herre'"

"Bay Area radio station Latino Mix, 105.7 (Santa Clara) and 100.7 (San Rafael), and has had a Nelly hit from 2002 on repeat since around 3 p.m. Friday."

Twitter is all abuzz (Or is that Buzz is all a'twitter?). Looks like the hashtag du jour is #nelly1057

This immediately brought back memories of the time that legendary KHJ DJ Robert W. Morgan infamously played Donny Osmond's must-inject-insulin-now "Puppy Love" for about 1.5 hours straight.

The L.A. Times' Steve Harvey reminisced about that incident 32 years later:

"Police visited the Melrose Avenue studios of KHJ in Hollywood 'after receiving several phone calls from listeners who thought something was wrong because morning man Robert W. Morgan played Donny Osmond's 'Puppy Love' over and over for an hour and a half,' (Historian Jim) Hawthorne wrote.

"'The fear was that the station had been taken over by crazed fans of the 14-year-old singer'."

I listened in fascination for most of those 90 minutes even though "Puppy Love" was probably the worst pop single of all time at that time, which is why Robert W. Morgan played it.

"(Morgan) explained he "had grown so weary of the 'teeny boppers' requesting the song, he decided to play it repeatedly until the listeners tired of hearing it." Good Morgan!"

I won't be listening to "Hot in Herre" -- largely in fear because I don't want to find out what "Herre" means.

In reading Harvey's piece, however, I noticed that the "Puppy Love" incident occurred on March 15, 1972. Today is also March 15.

According to the SFGate blog, 105.7 may be pulling out the obnoxious stops because it is relaunching from "Latino Mix" to "Hot 105.7."

So the timing of it is either a remarkable coincidence, or a fabulous nod to radio history. I like to think it's the latter.

Calling yourself a journalist doesn't mean you are one

I am not good enough to draw this

Lots and lots of people call themselves journalists. That's like me drawing a stick figure and calling myself an artist.

I can't draw. And way too many of today's "journalists" have no business saying what they do is journalism.

Like this tired, here-we-go-again piece from the March 12, 2014 edition of SF Weekly, "Exit Music: Musicians Are Leaving San Francisco. Can the City's Legendary Scene Survive?

The issue is that good journalism is more than just assembling a bunch of links together and forming an opinion about it. Or taking a photograph or video on a smartphone and posting it to Twitter. Or writing a blog.

But that's what a lot of today's "journalists" think journalism is. 

Good journalism needs context and perspective and a sense of history and knowledge of what came before today. Good journalism also needs editors who can provide a check on the rampant egocentrism that most journalists--real ones and pretend ones--are known to have.

Good journalism also needs originality. But here, in San Francisco, where all the millennials consider themselves to be a *something* (writer, artist, musicians, poets, entrepreneurs) despite a decided lack of experience and credentials, there is also rampant parroting of the same old themes.

Photo courtesy HuffingtonPost

It goes something like this. No, wait. It goes exactly like this: "Musicians and artists are leaving San Francisco, and so am I, and the city I have lived in for 31 months *will never be the sameeeeeeee*"

Like "The San Francisco Exodus" in TheAtlanticCities.com

Like the nauseating "Goodbye San Francisco, You're a Passionate Lover," that ran a few months ago in HuffPost.

Like "Ty Segall and John Dwyer on Why So Many Musicians Are Leaving San Francisco for L.A." (Full disclosure: I have no idea who Ty Segall and John Dwyer are, and I bet nobody will in 10 years, either).

Like this ai-yi-yi-yi piece (count the number of times the writer writes the words "I" or "me"): "Dave Eggers, The Circle and Why I’m Leaving the Bay Area."

But the best one is this, from the San Francisco Chronicle: "Heading Out of Town / Artists leave San Francisco for less expensive digs in New York, Los Angeles and even Wonder Valley."

You know why it's the best? Because if you check the timestamp, it was written in 2000.

If I could draw me right now, I would draw this. From this site

And that's the point. Things have always changed. This is nothing new. These woe-is-me-because-me-is-all-who-matters dollops of drivel have no perspective, no context, no sense of history, and no sense of wonder.

However, the lazy narrative has been "Oh no, damned gentrification, we'll never be the same." 


The city is changing because musicians and artists are leaving? Because all the good places are closing? Well, there are plenty of new ones, too: Brick and Mortar, Amnesia, the Chapel, the New Parish...

I will always mourn the absence of, say, the Stone, the Keystone, the Avalon, Winterland, Wolfgangs, the I-Beam, the Longbranch and Keystone Berkeley, and on and on and on. It's a shame they had to close.

A real journalist would know those things, because a real journalist would do some real research. And perhaps that real research would be demanded by an editor who wouldn't allow the same thing to be written over and over and over again. 

I'll call them journalists when they do real journalism.

Then again, maybe if they call me an artist, I'll change my mind.

SF Chronicle education stenographer is pretty rank

Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle education "reporter" who completely botched the CCSF accreditation story just posted a blog about the Times Higher Education rankings of the world's universities.

First, the important news:

Cal ranks No. 8 and is the world's top public university. Go Bears!

Meanwhile, after noting she had to look up the term "knowledge transfer" -- she's an education reporter? -- she also notes that Caltech is No. 1, Harvard and Oxford are tied for No. 2, and "#3 is oddly missing."

As my students sometimes say, "Derp."

(It's because there are three schools there. The next school is No. 4, which this year happens to be the junior university down in Palo Alto).

'Course, the point is this: You ask a question, you answer the question. It's not like the answer isn't out there.

-------

Update! Update! (10 a.m., March 8, 2014):
This is the stenographer's "defense" in the comments section of the blog:

"you could be right if rankings are restricted to a certain number of schools. But there's no inherent reason why a school that is slightly less good than two tied for second place can't be labeled 'third.'"

I find this troubling because she is unable to admit a mistake, and also because there are many other commenters who pointed out the same thing. Lack of knowledge transfer, indeed.