Radio

Fencing tonight was overrun by epéeists, so I'm back home early.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, we've said goodbye to XM, and are learning our way around the dial. Blu still dominiates most of our time, but it can be a bit much and its future is far from assured, so we've expanded a bit.

KUNM is still our go-to for NPR (though still avoiding Morning Edition during the week), and every so often, in the evenings for their selection of music.

Other evenings, sometimes it's KSFR and whatever's going on there. It's a much more local, eclectic selection there, and I'm becoming quite attached to the homegrown flavor of it all. For my brief time in the car in the morning, I've taken to catching the (usually local) interview on Santa Fe Radio Cafe. I'd prefer not to start my Saturdays without the self-styled rants, Daily Show clips, and UFO conspiracy theories of Camp Lovewave. And their Sunday morning blues show sends me back to the days of Bad Dogs Blues on WITR.

Driving to fencing one night, I came upon The New Mega 104.1 out of Albuquerque. It's a lot of fun, good music for driving around and DJs who use "a'ight" and "shout-out" unironically. Luckily, soon thereafter, there was an article that explained just what it was we were listenting to. The weakness there is the play list — it is a Clear Channel station after all, and songs will start repeating after about two hours.

Working at the print shop, I liked listening to eD-FM, mostly 'cause they were good about playing some Duran Duran in the morning. It's a good mix of the stuff from the '80s that is just this side of embarrassing (and sometimes just over), with a bit of the same from the '70s and '90s. You really never know where it's going to go, but sometimes it's an unpleasant surprise. It just hit me a couple days ago that they have no DJs — just the deadpan announcer talking about "playing stuff we like," and making wry comments about needing to play ads to pay the bills. It got me wondering if this all just coming from some sort of eD Central. And then, emailing with Deb (about WRNR finally streaming), she mentioned WQSR out of Baltimore, which seems kinda familar . . .

Of course, the other night, we just needed to hook the laptop into the stereo and stream The Computer Guys on Kojo.