Or not.

I am a "member" of Sam's club.  I am a member because my current employer pays for the membership, and I can't seem to stay away from 8 pound jars of peanut butter.

I went to the east Wichita location this evening because I needed to purchase a mattress for Abe's bed.

On the way there, my wife called and told me to see if they had mattress pads available.  We needed one for Abe's bed (twin size) and a replacement one for our bed (king size).

So, I walk to the side aisle where the mattresses are, easy enough.  My wife and I had already made a trip to this particular Sam's so she could pick out which mattress she wanted to buy for the kid's bed.

One of the aisles directly perpendicular to the mattresses contains the mattress pads.  I think perhaps they plan this type of product placement INTO the store layout!

I looked for a twin size mattress pad.  No luck.  I figure that Sam's may not carry twin size mattress pads even though they carry three different types of twin MATTRESSES.  Next, I looked for king sized mattress pads.  I found three empty boxes.  I figured that Sam's may, if the bulk gods are appeased, have more king sized mattress pads in some location 30 feet above my head.  However, my eyesight is poor from years of eating government cheese (aisle 7).

So, I made a very poor bulk retail choice.  I went in search of a "membership associate" to help me find a mattress pad.  Did I mention this was a poor choice?

Amazingly, I find someone wearing a snazzy blue vest in the VERY NEXT AISLE!  I politely query the fellow regarding his ability to help me procure the elusive mattress pad.  His response (and I wish I would've used my phone to record the audio), "I'm not ALLOWED to go past this aisle.  Try Customer Care."  Not ALLOWED?  Like one of Sam's bastard offspring is roaming the store just looking for an excuse to knock out your last 4 teeth with a ball peen hammer (set of six, aisle 14)?

Not wanting to tax my new friend's mental facilities with further questions, I slogged my way through empty boxes, fishstick samples, and polo shirts made in Belarus toward the member assistance counter.

There was one other poor searching soul there when I arrived, and three people behind the counter.  After waiting for several minutes to be assisted in my search, I finally asked one of the random people milling around behind the counter if they could do a stock check for me on mattress pads. 

One of the customer care associates grabbed a walkie talkie and bellowed into it for "Kevin".  I believe her exact words were, "KEVIN!  WE GOT ANY KING SIZED MATTRESS PADS??".  Kevin, sounding exactly like one of the adults in a televised Peanuts cartoon, apparently advised her that they were in an endcap display at the end of the aisle I had so recently visited.

When I tried to tell the nice lady that I had already looked at the endcap displays on both sides of the aisle with the rest of the mattress pads as well as the adjoining two aisles, she dismissed me with a scowl and a grunt.  She was bigger than me so I walked back to the mattresses, bought the one my wife had picked out, and drove home.

I sincerely wish we had a Costco in Wichita.

Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don't give you any choice
'cause they think that it's treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.

-Elvis Costello "Radio, Radio"

 I was on the air a lot in college .   It was something I really enjoyed and an activity I sincerely miss. 

The landscape of radio has really changed in the past ten years.  The FCC has relaxed media ownership constraints numerous times in the past few years.  This has resulted in an even greater homogenization of commercial, non-subscription radio.  Syndicated talk programing constitutes the large majority of content on most non-music stations with a rapidly increasing dearth of local content.

The major driving force in the industry is the economy of scale.  Talk is cheap.  Syndicated talk is even cheaper.  Major media enterprises can realize significant profits by cutting news staff and resources at multiple stations and replacing them with a single talking head (complete with sycophantic support staff – not much assembly required).  Ad revenues suffer few ill affects from this strategy allowing the handful of companies owning the large majority of stations to dramatically increase their margins.

Local content and locally produced programming has almost entirely disappeared in all but the largest media markets.  The syndicated replacements for this content are packaged and presented within a limited ideological scope for mass consumption.

I think what I'm really driving at here are the extents to which the value of the content decreases as the "mass" aspect of the communication increases. I think that it is possible for messages distributed to large publics to have great inherent value.  In commercial practice, the demands for profit can have great affect on value.

I have not done "as I am told".  I rarely listen to the commercial stations in my area.  I get my local news content from the Wichita NPR affiliate KMUW . Kudos to them for actually producing quality local and regional content.

This post is most definitely going into the Rant category. 

This post is dedicated to my lack of an attention span…

Billy Packer is a moron. His color commentary during the Florida / Villanova game made me want to drive to the Metrodome and shove a hammer down his throat.

A perfect case in point was his derision of Noah’s free-throw form. Noah converted 13 out of 15 attempts (86.6%). Packer said something to the effect that Noah’s free throw shooting form would catch up to him in the long run. Noah shot almost 72% from the stripe during the regular season (a statistic provided by CBS during Packer’s comments on Noah’s form). Who cares what his form looks like?

There is a seriously funny video on Classic Arts Channel right now. Ugly German babes in wheat fields. It is really cracking me up. The dudes are wearing some boss looking spectacles though.

I’m thinking of changing this site to a straight-up WordPress blog. The Joomla stuff is sort of interesting, but I don’t really have enough interest in it to use it to the full potential. Most of what I’m doing is just bloggy-stupid anyway…

Claymation Rigoletto is kind of creepy.

Joey Cheek is my favorite Olympian.

Joey Cheek won an Olympic gold medal yesterday in the men’s 500m speed skating event. His win is a remarkable achievement. His comments after the race were even more valuable.

Cheek used his moment in the media spotlight well. Calling attention to the genocide and despair in the Darfur region of Sudan, Cheek pledged to donate his medal bonus to relief efforts in the area.

Specifically, Cheek’s $25,000 will go to www.righttoplay.com, an organization started by Johann Olav Koss. Koss, a former Olympic and World champion speed skater, founded Right to Play to use “sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world.”

Thank you Joey Cheek. You are a gentlemen and a fine human.

For more information on this story, please see Michael Rosenburg’s article at The Detroit Free Press.