Pop Culture Potpourri: And People Wonder Why Radio is Dying

Merton Sussex, King of the Damned

First, a disclaimer: I know full well that looking to morning radio for substance is like looking for an honest cop in Tijuana. Yes, the law of averages would seem to indicate that such a thing more than likely exists, but actually finding it is a fools' errand that's most assuredly not worth the effort. The sad fact is, with rare exceptions, the sort of programming most mainstream radio puts on in the mornings is so sack-of-gravel stupid that it actually gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as you fear for the continued future of the human species.

That said, some folks are just plain overachievers of under-delivery.

The dopey grins and dead eyes to the right belong to the Twin Cities' pre-eminent Drum Majors in the great 'tard parade, KS-95's "Greg and Melissa." Or, as they're most often referred to on the air, "GreggenM'lissuh," which, when you think about it, almost looks and sounds like some sort of two-headed, baby-eating monster from a Welsh folk tale. Apropos, that.

But, not to worry. This isn't the case. I say this largely because my exposure to them has left me with serious doubts as to whether either of them possesses the mental capacity to feed themselves at ALL, much less consume fresh infants that need to be dressed and de-boned before you can even think about roasting them.

Morning after morning, GreggenM'lissuh serve up exactly the sort of dumbed-down, lukewarm tapioca-brained pap that the General Public who made Jay Leno the #1 host in late night apparently demands. The gulf in intelligence 'twixt their show and, say, NPR's "Morning Edition" is so vast that Columbus would've died TWICE trying to sail the expanse of it.

For the blissfully uninitiated: their repertoire consists largely of toothless gags, empty and obvious pop-culture "observations," and stuff ripped off wholesale from much-funnier humor-based news-aggregator websites like Fark.com. And yeah, in this, they're far from unique. Every major media market in America has a similar "wacky" morning team whose only real purpose is to shovel enough waste product to fill drive-time (Don't even get me started on those hyena-cackling syndicated penises "Bob & Tom"). Such a situation is pretty much par for the course on airwaves from Portland to Miami, so it's not like anything up to now has been news, per se. What bears remarking upon is the amazing consistency, the bland, reliable, cream-of-wheat evenness of their banality. They succeed only at being deeply vapid, all the time. Their greatest achievement is the unwavering smoothness they achieve in the colorless rhetoric they dribble while busily and enthusiastically soaring to new depths.

To begin with, in addition to being incredibly vacuous (which, admittedly, most AM hosts are), they're also a pair of right-leaning conservative puritans. So besides being culturally and intellectually shallower than a Frisbee™, their show is also riddled with barely-concealed contempt for any person or idea any further left than Dennis Motherfucking Miller. Granted, they're not journalists...SHIT, no. Perish the thought. So it's hardly as though they're held to any standard of neutrality. They're not required to leave their personal bias at the door when they punch in, I suppose. It's just a jarring thing to pause just long enough when flicking through my presets to hear the female specimen smugging it up as she pulls the same sort of thinly-veiled, "don't get me wrong, I TOTALLY respect their right to exist, and stuff" diatribes of passive-aggressive homosexual-bashing hate speech that not even far prettier blondie-bots with expensive, pageant-funded Tupper-tits are allowed to get away with.

"No offense to anyone out there, but I personally think that I believe that U.S. Americans'
marriage should be between a man and a woman and like The Iraq and such as."

And it's not just gays. As it is with the bulk of moralist religion-humping Republican types, it's anyone who thinks or acts differently. F'rinstance: the other day, I stopped for a sufficient span of seconds to have the privilege of hearing the two of them go to town on "The Bachelorette" (which is just further reinforcement of the usual academic level of the proceedings). Evidently, there's some dude currently on the show who has a full-on foot fetish, and footage of him talking to the camera about how much he wants to suck on the desperate bimbo du jour's instep is constantly inter-cut with unbroken takes of his longing stares at her pump-enhanced toe-cleavage. Fair enough. I'll allow that's likely as not at least as interesting to watch as moisture evaporating out of freshly-applied "Sandy Beige" flat wall latex.

But these two mooks were having a god-damned field day...especially Golden Years Barbie. She just couldn't shut her tooth-lined dick-receptacle about how EWW WEIRD it was that this guy thought the chick on the show had pretty feet, and how he liked to kiss and massage them. They even invited any of their brain-dead listenership who might have had any experience with some shameful C.H.U.D. who dug feet to call in and share their stories of said "weirdo" encounters. And she wrapped the whole disgusting proceedings up with the typical breathless shock you might expect of your average dishwater-dull meat-and-potatoes puritan aghast at anything more salacious than the grudgingly joyless, pitch-dark room/hole-in-sheet procreation-based medical-grade intercourse she reluctantly permits her husband on the occasion of his birthday. "GOSH, I'm glad I'm 'normal'! What's next...cross-dressing?!?"

I'm honestly not into dudes, but FUCK is he pretty.

Y'know what, you squared-off, Palin-worshiping skin-puppet? Maybe! And at the end of the day, if some dude in his wife's pantyhose is happy, fulfilled, and not hurting anyone, then so fucking what? Who are you to judge or denigrate them, much less invite others to call in and jeer them as well? How DARE you?!?

Look, I'm NOT a foot fetishist. But if I was, I'd admit it. Y'know why? Because there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. A lot of people with quirky trigger-trips feel needlessly ashamed, isolated, and alone enough about their perfectly-normal desires even WITHOUT insignificant vagina-hosts like Sister Mary Dumbshit openly mocking them on the airwaves. People with completely harmless erotic preferences should feel good about their needs, to give themselves the permission to explore them in ways that are healthy, consensual, and beneficial to their psyches. So it does NOBODY any good when June Cleaver (and her un-ironic pearl necklace) pulls the incredulous act out of her puckered dirt-star in a public forum like that. Christ. As if folks don't have enough to deal with without being made to feel like deviant freaks by a couple of square, clueless prudes on the radio calling out their secret yen.

And besides, if they think something as comparatively vanilla as having a foot fetish is that outlandish, it's probably for the best that they've just advertised out loud just how sheltered their wetly-trembling li'l sensibilities are. Because then people might refrain from calling to their attention any of the myriad of even more unusual, but still totally-reasonable kinks some others have. Hell, I'm not even someone who necessarily seeks out the alternative-lifestyle crowd (for the most part), but if something so "Sex 101" as a fucking foot fetish gets their blood pressure up, hearing even the surface details of some of my TAMER evenings would curl their hair, knot their underpants and induce fatal cardiac arrest.

Go ahead...use your imagination. We sure as hell did.

Uptight judgment of others aside, that's not to say their little motorcade of morning mediocrity is TOTALLY devoid of any entertainment value. A lot of days, I play a little game with myself. I turn on their show when I leave home for Diary HQ, but I do so with the understanding that my finger will reflexively stab a different pre-set the MILLISECOND that I can sense my intelligence has been, or is about to be insulted. Sometimes, I make it a block or two. If there's a song or a commercial on, I might even make it as far as the highway on-ramp. Today? The garage door wasn't even closed yet by the time the stimulus/response conditioning kicked in, and I was jabbing at my radio like a smack-addled chimp in a Skinner box. I wish I was joking.

Once in awhile, I also dial up their dung-fest when they're running one of their regularly-scheduled call-in contests. This is largely because most of their aforementioned stone-skulled audience members (as you might expect) are such cripplingly-hilarious mongoloids that it's a good dose of schadenfreude to hear them fumble around and fuck up tests of mental prowess easier than your sister at a Shriners' convention.

To wit: they have this derivative rip-off called "The $25 Pyramid" that's similar to the $64,000 version, wherein they feed you clues trying to get you to figure out the shared category they belong in within a specific time limit. And it's always a crap-shoot (emphasis on "crap") as far as who is going to be more hilariously inept: the low-watt bulbs calling in, or the meat-headed seat-warmers mouth-breathing into the microphones.

Pictured: Greg, Melissa.
Not shown: EEG-measurable beta-wave activity.

As with most things during their programming block, Tweedle-Dumb is marginally better at this than Tweedle-Dumber. He's usually at least in the ballpark, if not outright running the bases. But her? If the category is "Peanut-Butter Brands," you can be sure she'll stammer for at least five seconds trying to wrack her shriveled raisin of a brain adequately enough to drop turds like, "Jiffy-Pop," "Skipper" and "Peter Paul." At which point the clueless dolt on the phone will no doubt blurt out, "TYPES OF SHOES!!!"

Or if it's "Ice cream flavors," she'll no doubt come up with "Pork," "Grape" and "Guilt," prompting the response of, "Places my dad touched me!" Maybe one in twenty will actually be lucky enough to penetrate the dense knot of their clumsy incompetence and win miniature portraits of Andrew Jackson and Abe Lincoln, plus some other perfunctorily worthless "prize" like tickets to a concert nobody in their right mind would ever want to go to (that they're giving away because there are still so many still left unsold). So, that particular few minutes usually turns out to be the only thing they do that's actually funny, albeit unintentionally.

In fact, the imbeciles who typically play this little game are so laughably thick that I got it into my head that I had to make it through on the phone banks someday, play Ken Jennings to their collective Zippy the Pinhead, and run the board by barking out a single correct guess per category before the flesh-pod that was giving the clues even got done reading the second one. This would be a challenge, but mostly due to how much they suck at coming up with examples to convey each item or idea on the list.

This really doesn't need a caption. I'm just gonna go ahead and
file it under, "Part of the Problem."

Even so, I managed to do exactly this, to the letter, the morning after I decided I ought to try. The dude half of their brain trust (thankfully) fed me the clues, they were as plainly simple as always, and I got every one on the first guess. It was kind of a letdown, actually. Kind of like everything else they do. I mean, it's one thing to set realistic goals for yourself. It's quite another to achieve them with such minimal effort that you literally used a larger percentage of your cerebral cortex tying your shoes before you left the house. I mean, sure. Based on having heard this wee game played previous to this, I knew it would be easy. I wasn't prepared for effortless. Leave it to those "shoot for the bottom" anus-wrinkles to rob me of even the SLIGHTEST sense of anything resembling accomplishment.

So, apparently, I won 25 bucks and two tickets to a Bridal Expo. The tickets, I was supposed to go to their studios to collect. Which you can bet I did with all of the speed and urgency of a 90-year old's bowel movement. As you can well imagine, I have about as much use for (and interest in) a Bridal Expo as I do in exfoliating the head of my penis with a cheese grater. In front of my mother. While she's naked.

Warning: prolonged exposure to this photo has been shown to be a leading cause of pancreatic cancer.

As for the 25 bones, they mailed it to me. Or, at least, they said they did. I "won" their little Special Olympics in early March, but it's currently mid-June, and I've still never seen the check. This, despite three consecutive weekly phone calls to the bubble-headed dingbat in their promotions office who I'll refer to as "Kelsey," mostly because that's her name. So, I guess KS-95 is an operation that doesn't confine the idea of abject incompetence just to the broadcast booth.

Y'know...I'm an optimist at heart. I want to believe that most people are basically good, and capable. It's been said that every cynic is a frustrated idealist, and I guess that's me in a nutshell. It's just that the longer I live, and the more I find myself exposed to sharp-as-a-bowling-ball, "we got to fail UPWARD" schmucks like the Dread Beastie GreggenM'lissuh, the more its becoming apparent that "Idiocracy" wasn't a spoof cautionary tale. It was a pre-emptive documentary.


Except, of course, for the part where we'd ever be progressive enough to elect a black president.