Two Hours of Live Radio (Better than Rumble and Bumble, Balder and Dash)
Tomorrow night, being Sunday, May 4, I’ll be a guest on the radio show “Amplify,” with host Father Ron Lengwin of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, for a two-hour live interview, from 9 to 11 p.m. [Update: the show’s format has been shortened to an hour and a half, from 9 to 10:30.]
(Hit that link, and then hit the blue “Listen Live” button at upper right.)
Man! A two-hour [that’s ninety-minute] live interview? This will be a first for me. Our topic: The Go-Giver.
Speaking of firsts, the station, Pittsburgh’s KDKA-AM 1020, has a fascinating claim to fame: with its Nov. 2, 1920 broadcast of election returns in the Harding-Cox presidential race, it became the very first radio station to broadcast anything. Ever.
(Interestingly, Warren Harding went on to serve as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, giving rise to what Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, terms “the Warren Harding Error,” named for the fact that he simply looked so “presidential” that everyone seemed to assume he’d make a great president. Harding insisted on writing his own speeches, which are generally considered to have been some of the awfullest ever heard. For example: “I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.” But I digress.)
The show (ours this Sunday, not Harding’s 88 years ago) will be heard in 38 states and half of Canada — but with the miracle of the Internet, you can hear it no matter where you are.
Writing of Warren Harding, the legendary critic H. L. Mencken said: “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
Tune in to see if I do better than Harding.