Observations Upon Listening to the Radio For the First Time in Years

The Foxmobile has a CD player and an auxiliary outlet for plugging in MP3 players, so I never listen to the radio in the car. The moving truck, though, has no such extravagances, so today I listened to the radio for about five and a half hours. I observed the following:

• The rotation on Sacramento's top twenty station starts over after about an hour and a half. Which, if you think about it, makes sense--that's about how long it takes to play twenty songs. Maybe a little longer with commercials.
• Every third song on that station has Kanye West either rapping or singing on it. Now, Kanye West has made some music I enjoy (but of course I liked him before he was cool, because I'm way too cool to like things average people like), but he hasn't made much that I like in a couple albums. I'm especially not a fan of his singing--much as I give him props for experimenting with different musical styles. But still, he just can't sing. The autotune or whatever he uses to warp his voice doesn't make it any better (or maybe it does, but in that case his natural voice must be pretty horrible).
• I was able to get Sacramento stations almost all the way to Reno. This surprised me, as I'd imagined I wouldn't get anything in the mountains.
  
• After Reno, the selection slowly dies down. I listened to NPR for a while and wondered why I don't more often. When NPR went to a jazz show, which was nice sounding but not loud enough to keep me awake while driving, the best thing was a seventies rock station, which wasn't all that bad.
• By the time I got to Winnemucca, the only available station was country. I considered just turning the radio off, but decided to bear with it. Country is actually kind of entertaining, in small doses. I particularly enjoyed a song about a widow who was accused by the Hartford Junior High School PTA of being a bad mother because she wears short skirts and drinks too much. She then tells the PTA off by pointing out that they're all hipocrites, and then the shocking twist at the end (spoiler warning) is that the woman is... the singer's mother. Shocking!

Stay tuned to find out what entertaining observations I have to make about the second half of my trip tomorrow!*



*DISCLAIMER: I probably won't make observations about the second half of my trip, unless I hear something really incredible on the radio. I'm stretching the limits of reader generosity to expect you all to read just this one post.