Save Special X!

Today is a special, and sad, day at XM Bootcamp. XM announced changes to their channel lineup at CES; those changes take effect on February 1. Four channels got the axe — three which were sourced from Univision and played Latin music, and one XM original: Special X.

Special X plays anything and everything, starting with the weird and getting stranger from there. Of course they play traditional odd stuff, like Weird Al Yankovic, Tiny Tim, and Mrs. Miller, and they play the Dr. Demento show frequently — but you can hear that on the regular radio dial if you look carefully. Special X goes farther: they have a six-hour surf music extravaganza (“Wax My Woody”); there’s the weekly Polka Party; I just listened to “Sci Fi Hi Fi”, which is just what you’re afraid it is; they feature cartoon music on “Wabbit Tracks”, and they can get even stranger — I survived an episode of “The Fabulous World of Parrot Training Records” earlier this morning.

No, it’s not a channel which appeals to everyone; it’s not even a channel which appeals to me all of the time — and I don’t think it would make good background music at work. But it’s a channel which makes XM special, and I will be very sorry to see it go dark next weekend.

But the badges WERE stinkin'!

We’re just back from the first BADGES (Bay Area Dining and Geocaching Enthusiasts Society) dinner, where I picked up Cassie, my first travel bug. Now I have not only to get her to France (that’s easy), but I have to find a cache big enough in which to leave her (and that may be tricky).

Cassie the Travel Bug: On her way to France...maybe. It was good being able to put faces to names (or aliases), but there was one small problem with the event — if you used the marker the hosts provided for the name tags, you wound up with, very literally, a stinking badge.

Bootcamp Day 16 — America

When I was growing up, I claimed to like almost all kinds of music — the only kind I was sure I didn’t like was country.

Of course, when I was growing up, there weren’t as many different sources of music as there are today — the idea of 60 channels of music, each playing a somewhat different variety, was as wild an impossibility as being able to choose between more than three TV shows would have been.

So the only country music I was ever exposed to was whatever was being broadcast on WXGI/950 — and I definitely didn’t like it. As far as I could tell, it was all the same song, twangy and irritating.

Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are many more kinds of music than I heard as a kid, and I’ve learned that I like many of them — not all, by any means, as the “F”s on my Bootcamp Scorecard show. But I have rarely gone back to a variety that I decided I disliked.

So I thought I was being generous when I predicted a “C” for today’s Bootcamp channel, America. And when I first tuned in this morning, my initial reaction wasn’t very favorable — the music was twangy and irritating.

But then Larry Gatlin’s “She Used to Be Somebody’s Baby” came on, and I realized that there was more to country music than I had known. I would have thought I was listening to gospel music, except that there was a bit of a twang in the voices.

I kept listening for a while and enjoyed most of what I heard; then I turned it off and went to work. I set the XMPCR back up, and tuned in, and again, I liked most of what I heard. There were even some songs which I knew and liked, such as Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” — I just hadn’t thought of those songs as being “country”.

Hey, there’s another familiar song on right now — Alison Krause’s “Man of Constant Sorrow” — I know the song (if not this performance) from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?“, a movie I really liked (especially for its music).

Today’s Bootcamp experience was a pleasant surprise, and I’ll be back for more (though I can’t decide between giving it a “B+” or an “A-“). Definitely a solid end to the week, and a huge improvement over the last couple of days.

Shabbat Shalom!

Bootcamp Day 15 — SquiZZ

After yesterday’s experience with The Rhyme, I was confident that SquiZZ would be a significant improvement in my XM diet. But I didn’t have high hopes (as you can tell from my expected rating of “C”).

I was pleasantly surprised when I tuned in — the music was a bit harder-edged than most of what I like to listen to, but not so hard-edged as to irritate me. And when I listened this afternoon, I enjoyed Grant, the announcer. But I wasn’t crazy about the lyrics of a lot of the songs — it wasn’t as bad as on The Rhyme (and I dread the day Bootcamp visits Raw), but there were still more Strong Words than I like to hear in my music.

I can see coming back to listen again from time to time, but I don’t think SquiZZ will earn a preset from me.

I guess it was random!

I flew home from Tucson today; unlike Monday, I didn’t have to go through secondary security screening. *whew*

The flight (on Horizon) was very nice — in other words, I had an empty seat next to me and no one in front of me reclining the seat. It was too early in the day to have a beer (Bert Grant’s Deep Powder Winter Ale, from the Yakima Brewing and Malting Company), but I did give it careful consideration, because it had been quite tasty on Monday afternoon.

Perhaps the best part of the flight, though, was the time. My meeting wrapped up last night, so I changed my reservations and took an 11:10am flight out of Tucson (we actually were “wheels up” at 11:07!) and was home well before 2pm. And so I’ll be having dinner at home with my family instead of at an airport — much nicer!