Ugly news to start the day, the Palestinian group called 'Hamas' is being accused of launching a missile attack on Israel. The news channel Al Jazeera has been doing a splendid continuous job of covering the event live entirely in English language and is pre-empting the regular Saturday schedule here on KDX. So far no one has said so, but knowing how much Israel wants to eliminate the Palestinian people, I am suspicious that this could be a setup. However, thus far none of the reports have cast doubt on the unfolding story. Either way it is not a good sign to have another war by militant people who have nuclear weapons.
I first got the news of these occurrences from this post!
I have to admit, I was having second thoughts about canning the news on Artisan Radio. Particularly since it leaves a 5 minute hole each hour in the programming.
But after reading about these events, and then seeing Putin, duly reported by the news media, denying that Russia started the war with Ukraine, I've come to the conclusion that I made the right choice.
But how to fill those 5 minutes. I've decided that Poetry is the right option. In the not too distant future, the top of each hour - or around that - (except for those hours playing Old Time Radio shows), will be filled with Poetry readings from Librivox.org.
So, instead of stupidity, hypocrisy and ignorance, you'll hear culture. Thought. And mindfulness. Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, Dickenson, Whitman et al - all are worth spending a few minutes listening to.
This is not to knock others that play the news, however much. It's just not what I want Artisan Radio to be. And it's not what I want to listen to.
The word 'weltschmerz' comes from German and means 'world weary'. This condition is easily reached at a time when the world edges toward mortal conflict as we're again witnessing, and little hobbies like our part 15 radio stations offer no true defense against it nor can we be of real service in restoring peace. But our hobby does provide an escape where we can indulge our egos by scheduling the best playlists in the universe mostly for our own gratification. It doesn't matter whether we reach four city blocks with 100-milliWatts or the entire globe through streaming because hundreds of thousands of small stations also stream on the internet and we become insignificant against such duplication.
Like Artisan Radio I give serious thought to backing away from a news format and consider other programming to block out the never-ending bad news that doesn't improve as a result of listening to it. For me it would be ambient and experimental music, very plentiful from sources like archive.org, and I've already begun downloading loads of it in anticipation of divorcing from news.
In fact it might happen sooner than expected because Thom Hartmann just said something I strongly disagree with and I don't want to put up with it, so I'm this close to firing him.
Ambient metal music .....
KDX will definitely give ambient metal music a try.
And today, after kicking Thom Hartman off the air, the ambient music I picked at random happened to be terrible junk from a school-dropout with no musical knowledge, so I had Thom Hartmann finish out his shift, and by chance one of his callers gave some Gaza history I did not previously know, so I've given the Hartmann Program a new lease with the rule that if he annoys me I will cut him off again, but bring him back once I cool down. I get to be an unstable radio boss and that's the new way of enjoying the radio hobby.
War news is still being carried on KDX but I am grabbing a lot of ambient music to be prepared for switching to less news. It is amazing how much stuff comes up by searching 'ambient metal music' at archive.org. I'll start running some of it this afternoon at 5 or 5:30 PM CDT.
Speaking of time, Daylight Time ends on the first weekend in November.