It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

No, I’m not about to do a Musikalischer Mittwoch about “American Pie”  (I can more or less promise that won’t ever happen–I don’t hate the song, but it’s been eye-rollingly over-done in my corner of the Universe).

I’m talking about how my favorite radio station totally killed music.

The country station I listen to (the one that plays old shit and does not mock my less-than-secret love of Hee-Haw) decided to become the 24/7 Christmas station for the area starting the day after Thanksgiving.  I would applaud this but for two things:

1) They said this will run through 26 December.  Um.  Yeah.  No.  Twelve days of Christmas, yo (and more than that if you’re smart and milk both Roman Catholic/Protestant AND Orthodox)

and (this is the important one)

2) I haven’t heard a Christmas song yet.  Or any other song.

This station was always a bit heavy on the advertisements in the mornings.  That’s to be expected for any station, so I’m annoyed, but forigiving. But since the alleged Christmas rotation started, I have heard about nothing but collision repair, vinyl siding and the price of brisket for a grocery chain whose nearest store is 30 minutes from me.

I knew the Christmas music thing was going to be a bad gimmick, but I didn’t think it would be this awful.  How can I mock the craptastic renditions of “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer” if I never get to HEAR them?!?!

I have a List.  You do not want to be on this list.  Trust me.

But “SyFy” is there.   They’ve been there for quite a while.  Their sins are numerous.  I’ll spare you the run down and get to the most recent failing.

They no longer have up any Seeing Ear Theater.

I realize it’s probably been down for a couple of years now.  The last time I ventured over there was probably late 2006, but it was nice to know it was there, waiting for me with science-fiction audio goodness.   It was a poorly-advertised, but incredibly cool project that SciFi Channel started back in they days when they were still awesome (you know–the days of Farscape, The Invisible Man, and a name and logo that didn’t look like anyone flunked 4th grade spelling).  A series of science fiction/fantasy/horror related audio plays, in the tradition of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s.  The project actually attracted some very familiar names to lend their vocal talents:  Tim Curry, Rene Auberjonois, Claudia Black, Tony Danza (???)….And the actual stories?  Wow.  From adaptations of well known works by H.G. Wells and Neil Gaiman to completely new material from the likes of J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the quality of the stories was absolutely incredible.  It’s bordering on shameful that it was not promoted any better than it was.  In most cases, those who knew about the project were either fans of one of the individuals involved in an episode, or they were the full-blown nerds who spent way too much time on the SciFi Channel website for their own good.

In particular I had a soft spot for an episode called “Night Calls”–a part of a series of works by JMS known as the City of Dreams.  In fact, on my last successful visit to the Seeing Ear Theater, it was specifically to hear this episode.  It is the most completely surreal combination of creepy and hilarious I’ve ever encountered.  Tim Curry as the voice of both God and a fellow named Ben Joseph who received the dubious task of building an ark for the crap no one mentions in Noah (“Plague bacilli?  What’s plague bacilli?”).  Intermixed with Ben Joseph and God we get a much darker tale that made me afraid of clicking hyperlinks for a good week afterward.

With all the rain my part of the world has had lately, I was in the mood for some good Ark building humor, but alas, the Seeing Ear Theater is no more.  So far I’m not finding any legal method of getting my fix of Ben Joseph.  Used cassettes that were released early in the lifetime of the Seeing Ear Theater project are available, but I don’t have a cassette player and none that I’ve found include the episode I’m looking for.  Amazon came up nil for both meat-space and Mp3 copies.  It looks like this is just one more good thing lost to the ether.

The removal is not a shock seeing as how SciFi-turned-SyFy has been on a steady quality decline since about the time they axed Farscape and is clearly run by people who don’t actually watch, read or understand good genre material in any medium.

It would take a minor miracle to get them off my List.