Zombie Cassettes!

     Just when you though it was safe to get rid of your old cassette player, they're coming back. Kinda. That's a link to a Washington Post article, but last month there was an earlier story on an audiophile web site.

     I have a box filled with cassettes, mostly air-checks from all those years in radio. I spent some time two years ago going through them and creating a general kind of index. I also remember standing in Rockefeller Plaza as a teenager "interviewing" passersby for a school radio project....on a cassette, of course. Lots of us bought our first "albums" in cassette format, mostly I guess in the 70's and 80's. It was Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band for me, which came out in 1967.



     I've commented on the end of the cassette several times on this blog. Here ...and Here too.

    Looks like the obits were premature. Again.

MMMM # 135 -- S*x Education

     The "sex-education" episode of Glee last week reminded me of a mini-documentary series I produced on WERC in Birmingham in the late 1970's called "Peoples' Journal".

     Each week we'd focus on a single subject, with one part airing each day. We covered topics varying from Blue Laws to the then-extreme sport of parachuting.    

     And one week we focused on the subject of sex education.

     The reaction was, well, amazing. More letters (remember those? You actually had to take pen and ink and paper and use the mail?) There were lots of phone calls too, more than anything we'd done before...much of it negative. So after day one we pulled the series and solicited comments from people. Should we resume it? Or not?

     We never aired the rest of the four parts. But there was a sex education of sorts for me in the experience. You are in the Deep South, son, and we don't talk about sex here. Not on the radio, anyway. No openly, Not in a serious way.

     And I'm not sure much has changed.



[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog]