Author: Dick

It is downright amazing to where a wandering mind may lead. If you are on the Internets, your mind can take to just about anywhere or anything. For instance: I thought about novelty songs. This led to a list of the top 10 novelty songs. I didn’t necessarily agree with the list in that these songs were worthy of the top 10. So I found another list of the 100 greatest novelty songs.

Now it is very difficult to think about this list of the 100 greatest novelty songs without thinking about the songs themselves. “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haa,” by Napoleon XIV is at the top of that list and I also disagree that it should top the list. But it definitely is a novelty song. I remember once when I lived in Longview, Texas, a radio station in that area played this song over and over for something like 24 hours straight. I suppose that qualifies as a bonafide radio stunt but it didn’t particularly inspire me to listen to the station for more than half of the song.

Next my mind veered off course like a drunken ship’s captain onto the subject of radio stunts in general. About.com has a decent list of radio stunts. I read awhile ago about one of the jokes on that list. It involved the co-host of a Spanish-language morning show in Miami calling Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, pretending to be Cuban President, Fidel Castro. That’s definitely funnier than the old “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” prank. Okay, if you don’t get the reference, it has to do with Prince Albert tobacco that was packaged in a tin. It may still be, I have no idea nor do I care to look it up on the Web because I have wasted way too much time today. Back to the Prince Albert prank, a kid would call up a grocery store and ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. If the store employee answered in the affirmative, the prankster would say: “Well you better let him out.” A lot of wasted words there for little effect. And I almost forgot the point to all of this.

Thoughts about radio stunts next plunged my wandering mind down a mountainside to my final tangent. That tangent was the best radio stunt ever which was not real. I refer to the classic “Thanksgiving Turkey Drop” on “WKRP in Cincinnati.” I found a clip of it on You Tube and for some reason I am not able to post it to my blog, but if you click this you should be able to watch the snippet.

My mind is tuckered out from all that wandering so I shall call it a blog day. I wonder where the expression “tuckered out” came from …

Somehow, I initially posted the wrong story on the item about the wayward bra. But since I have tried to, at least tangentially, keep track of the Vivi the missing show dog story I figured that this story might provide some hope for Vivi’s well-being.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. A 17-year-old girl took off her bra while riding in a car with a friend. Then she decides to fly the undie item like Old Glory on the car antenna — with disastrous results.

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) light rail has a message board on each car that continuously flashes news, announcements, weather and so forth. This morning while taking the Ledbetter train to the VA Hospital, I noticed a few messages referred to several events taking place on Labor Day. I had to stop and think for a few seconds. Labor Day? I thought that was last month. Of course, it was last month.

Now I figured that some kind of programming error was made and thought nothing about it. A little while later, I glanced up at the message board and just caught the tail end of ” … Governor Jeb Bush has ordered an evacuation for the Florida Keys.” Wow, I thought, a hurricane is finally going to hit the mainland after a eerily quiet storm season.

For a minute or so after seeing that message, I wondered whether we were going to start having one storm right after another once one headed for the mainland. While waiting for my laboratory appointment at the hospital, I watched CNN for news about the hurricane. But the only news about Florida on the TV was about the horrific find of four bodies along a highway. Nowhere was news to be found concerning the hurricane.

When I got home I finally checked the National Weather Service’s Tropical Prediction Center Web site to find some information about the hurricane. I found out there is not even a tropical storm in the Atlantic, much less a hurricane.

All I could figure out about the message board was that somehow it was programmed for the wrong month and the wrong year. It was either that or I was stuck in a time warp. I suppose the sign miscue could be much worse, like a message aboard a Canadian train saying the prime minister eats babies. If I had seen that message I would still be confused this time next week.

Perhaps I should have entered a career on a different end of the communication industry spectrum, specifically marketing. Why if you are a marketing type, you get to play around and change the name of vast regions. That has happened in the area in which I grew up, the Pineywoods of East Texas. The Pineywoods has been renamed the “Texas Forest Country.”

“We think of the (Texas) Hill Country, it comes with this aura,” explained Jane Ainsworth, whose Ainsworth/Alvis marketing company developed the moniker as part of a strategy to sell East Texas …”

So they ripped off the name from the Hill Country. Is that the best they could do? Why not borrow from the Big Country and call it “The Big Forest” or from the Permian Basin and refer to it as “The Forest Basin?” I think the group that commissioned the marketing company to develop a new brand name should get their money back. By the way, that group — the Pineywoods Economic Partnership — is not changing their name.

Maybe the Pineywoods is a homey, old-timey, sounding name. But pine trees have been the hallmark of that portion of East Texas for many, many years not to mention the crop of choice for the dominant timber industry.

I have no reason to believe that the people behind the name change don’t have their heart in the right place by trying to promote tourism in East Texas. Portions of East Texas are among the poorest places in the country. Also, the beauty of East Texas is a secret to much of the world and folks who may have only known about it from the lynching-by-dragging of Jasper resident James Byrd Jr.

Thankfully, few people in East Texas are redneck racist murderers like the three morons who were convicted in Byrd’s death. And there is much charm to be found in different locales in the Pineywoods.

Personally, I see an uphill battle ahead to change the Pineywoods into the Texas Forest Country. Sure, billboards and tourism brochures may use the name. But I suspect many of the natives visitors will encounter will never use the phrase “Forest Country” when referring to the region. The only way such change will take place is to keep the branding effort alive for many, many years until the older folks who have used the Pineywoods handle for ages die off.

If someone in the future asks me something about the Texas Forest Country, I will tell them that it’s a fantasy land, something kind of like Oz. Then I will point them toward the Pineywoods.