EPISODE 147 - Chase's Folly

It's long overdue... but finally happens on this week's show. Radio personality extraordinaire, Barry Funkhouser, aka Funk, sits in with us this week. If you've been a longtime listener you've heard us mention him from time to time. He's one of the head-honchos over at Internet radio station, ErrorFM. As you know we've been providing our show to them for a couple of years now and recently we went live giving us the chance to interact with all of you in realtime through the ErrorFM chat room. It also gives ErrorFM a tent pole show on Sunday nights... yeah, we're conceited. We think of ourselves as the ratings mecca for that evening. Is it true? We don't know. But we tell people it is.Anywho, it was super fun FINALLY having Funk sit in with us. He got the ultimate Who Asked-experience, which is being overwhelmed with 4 obnoxious guys. And in Funk's case, surrounded too. We should really rethink seating arrangements in our studio so guests aren't so intimidated. The Ikea couch offers little comfort with us around.Mr. Funkhouser, a radio professional, picked the perfect show to guest host on too. Our first story of the day involves a radio personality complaining about how a new deal with Sirius Satellite Radio would have him taking a "Sirius" pay cut. The proposal dropped his pay from $1-million to just $200,000. Yep, you read that correctly. This fairly well-known talent named Bubba The Love Sponge is bitching because he'd ONLY be making $200-grand a year? To make jokes into a microphone all day? Really? Why don't you come on over to the podcasting world pal where 6-months of Google ads will reign in a staggering $3.11! Then you'll be aloud to complain. His point about having to take a pay cut while others — primarily Hollywood celebrities — are getting multi-million dollar deals with the satellite radio service is well taken. But the Love Sponge seems to be forgetting the nature of the very business he works in. The bigger the audience, the more you can demand and the more you make. Bottom line... you're getting paid a really nice salary to do what you love. Be thankful.From $200,000 a year paychecks, to a $200-million blockbuster we go as Rolland Emmerich's disaster "disaster," 2012 gets voted the most inaccurate sci-fi film ever, by a panel of really smart scientists. NASA says the movie misinterpreters the Mayan calendar and is riddled with factual inaccuracies that have caused quite a panic amongst those who have seen it. So much so there's an entire website, in our Show Links by the way, put up by the space agency that tries to set the record straight.A record not getting set straight, but rather trampled on and changed is that of Mark Twain's literary classic, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. By now you've probably heard that the N-word, used over 200 times in the book, is being systematically removed and replaced with "slave". Worst of all, it's a Twain scholar who is doing it! You'd think this guy and the publishers of the book would respect Mr. Clemen's work. But soccer mom school boards win out on this one and a story taking an honest, blunt look at 19th-century racism will be dulled down to a G-Rated, censored travesty to shield our kids from a truth they DESERVE to read and learn about for themselves and who, in most cases I think, are mature enough to handle it. As you can imagine this is a biggy on today's program.As we leave 2010 behind, and apparently every written instance of the N-word, we can look back at some of that year's various records and top events. One of which is the 10 most downloaded TV shows via BitTorrent. Shows like FAMILY GUY, GLEE and HEROES make the list. But interestingly enough there are a few programs from premium movie channels that reaffirm the cold hard fact to the industry that people don't want to pay for an entire channel just to watch one show, so they'll just get it from the web. In fact, 2 of the shows on this list had more downloads than TV viewers!And lastly, we'll look at the "words of the year" for 2010 according to the American Dialect Society. Who would know better than them right? From verbage made up by Sarah Palin, to phrases made up by our government in an attempt to fix what's left of our economy or that oil spewing atrocity in the Gulf of Mexico, the list covers several words made popular by people, places and events in '10. If this list had been compiled just a few weeks later, one of those words might have started with a 'N'.