WNJN: Worthless Radio
Due to all the driving necessary to pick up and drop off Sam, to get to practice, and to get to gigs, i drive a lot more than i’d like to. because so many of these trips are long distance, I’ve acquired a strong taste for traffic and weather reports: I wish every state and highway would post the best stations for these resources at rest areas throughout the country.
Anyway, some stations do a better job at getting the information across effectively, while others do not. For example, KYW 106-0 in Philadelphia and WCBS 880 in New York City are reliable, easy-to-use stations. Philly broadcasts traffic “on the twos”: 1:02, 1:12, 1:22, and so on. WCBS reports road conditions “on the eights”. This schedule makes it possible to tune in for the news you want and need, and filling the spaces in between with music or programming of your own choice. I listen to KYW religiously in Philadelphia for this reason, and always tune into 880 when I’m driving into or around New York City.
New Jersey has its own traffic and weather station too: 101.5 WNJN. By all measures, the station is exactly what you’d expect of New Jersey: awful. First of all, the programming that’s not weather and traffic is piss-poor: the music selection is “classic rock”, which means buckets of “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog”, “Stayin’ Alive”, and “hits” by Springsteen and Bon Jovi, while the talk show programs boil down to “deliberately stupid and offensive right wing garbage by Casey Bartholomew” (recent topic: “have you, as a white person, ever experienced racism from black people?”) and “let’s wreck a marriage” by Michelle Jerson, who won’t be satisfied until the divorce rate in NJ is 100%.
And all of this would be fine, except the traffic reports are not tied to any particular time you can remember. They air every 15 minutes, so you would figure “traffic on the quarter hour at 1:00, 1:15, 1:30, etc.” But no. It’s more like “traffic at 1:03, 1:18, 1:33…” The end result is that it’s difficult to predict when the traffic report’s coming on, and so you end up sitting through Juice Newton sing “Morning Angel” followed by Batholomew hating on teachers while you wait impatiently to find out if you should take I-295 or the Jersey Turnpike.
It’s maddening and almost certainly a deliberate policy to force more people to listen to their shitty station. It’s the only one that covers the entire state, and by god, you’re gonna sit there and listen to casey bartholomew insist that white Americans are being victimized by black people when all you want is to know whether the 42 freeway’s backed up.
August 23rd, 2010 at 9:27 pm
I thought you were going to tell us that there was a tornado on your ass and all the radio stations would play was Pink Floyd and Joey Lawrence. Whew!