necturus

I've been absent from here recently, dealing with work and helping a couple of sick friends. With each passing year, more people I know get sick or die. This year the chairman of the board of the nonprofit that runs my old college radio station was diagnosed with ALS, and another colleague of mine died of melanoma.

As much as people like to pretend otherwise, 50 is not the new 30 and 60 is not the new 40. Nor will the healthiest lifestyle necessarily postpone illness; my colleague who died was a regular runner who had run several Boston Marathons.

The broadcasting company my brother and I own is treading water at best; it's on track to lose a little bit of money this year because two the radio stations we bought were essentially basket cases, and we've had to put a lot of money into building them up. We were helped a little bit by political ads, mostly from Republicans, most of whom lost. Except for the governor, NH is now a blue state.

One of our accomplishments has been to get all six stations streaming on the Internet:

WCFR Springfield, Vermont (80's/90's)

WCNL Newport, New Hampshire (Country)

WCVR Randolph, Vermont (Country)

WNTK New London, New Hampshire (Talk)

WSCS New London, New Hampshire (Classical)

WUVR Lebanon, New Hampshire (Talk)

The talk stations are running programming that was chosen by the previous owner, which we have to keep running for the time being, alas.

Because I can't yet afford to pay myself, I am still working for all of my outside clients. This week has been a zoo; I've had to shuffle my schedule around to deal with two technical crises at one client's stations.

But I still love radio, and plan to do it until the day I drop dead.

Don't listen to anyone who tells you liberals are the left.

Liberals are not the left; they are the center. When Limbaugh, Hannity et al. thunder against "the left", they are attacking the political center and fundamental values of democracy that both major parties once shared.

The left -- well, that would be a few isolated individuals such as I who believe liberalism is bankrupt, capitalism is ultimately incompatible with democracy, and socialism is the way forward.

I also believe our Constitution is fundamentally flawed and that we need to transition to a parliamentary system like that of Canada, where the head of state is not head of government and obsolete language cannot be used by a corrupt Supreme Court to create an inalienable right to buy political influence or to possess and use deadly weapons.

Perhaps the greatest flaw in the United States Constitution is the failure of its drafters to anticipate the rise of political parties based on ideology. The first success of one such, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, led directly to civil war. A fixed-term executive Presidency allows no removal of a government that has become intolerable; in other western democracies, the government falls if it loses a vote of no-confidence in parliament, leading to new elections. The need to secure a majority leads parties of different ideologies to form coalitions and therefore to compromise; the situation does not arise where a minority of voters can elect a President with a blank check to pursue for four years a political program that is generally obnoxious, as has happened in this country twice in as many decades.

I see the election of Donald Trump as a sign that the American political system is broken and that decades of subtle corruption have wrought a degree of dysfunction in our institutions that make change inevitable. We are at a turning point in our history.

This country is not "one nation under God, indivisible"; it is myriad communities, each with its own interests and aspirations, much like the pre-1918 Austro-Hungarian empire. For the country to hold together, each community must acknowledge the legitimate claims of the others and agree to pursue mutually acceptable goals.

For example, the gun problem admits of no one-size-fits-all solution in a country that includes cities and neighborhoods torn by gun violence, on the one hand, and communities where guns are a means of feeding one's family and an essential part of a traditional way of life, on the other. What works in Newport, New Hampshire does not work in Boston, and vice-versa.

Patriotism, the love of one's country, is laudable; but nationalism, the love of one's in-group, is evil. Nationalism destroyed the Habsburg empire, two of its successor states (Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia), and the Soviet Union, and it may well destroy our country too.

Nothing good has ever come from conservatism. The ancien-regime notion that nature or God has decreed a particular order to human society that must never be questioned, and that each of its members, from the king to the merest peasant, has his or her proper place and role, has done nothing but promote suffering, oppression, ignorance, and injustice. And yet it persists despite the best efforts of successive generations of progressives.

Essentially, I've been immersed in the challenges of our radio station group, Sugar River Media.

We have finally got our Vermont country station, WCVR AM 1320 on FM 100.1 and streaming online (http://northcountry1320.com or http://natrix.sugarrivermedia.com:8000/wcvr). It has taken a great deal of work and we waited three months for Comcast to get its act together before taking matters into our own hands and setting up a temporary audio feed using Verizon mobile broadband. We are even starting to get advertisers interested; a local Ford dealership for which my brother and our GM produced a singing commercial last year is back, with the same spot. The FM coverage is comparable to the AM, but of course the sound quality is better.

This is not a run-of-the-mill country station; we have a 3,000-song library that includes local artists, and we are actively inviting independent country artists to send us songs, which we will consider for airplay.

We've also done a lot of work on our classical music station, WSCS 90.9 FM, which serves the Lake Sunapee area of New Hampshire (beautiful countryside, if you've never been there). WSCS is also soliciting recordings from classical artists seeking airplay.

Our other stations... are still works in progress.

See this list? Those are all the radio stations I am dealing with in one form or another. Some of them are listed multiple times, because each listing represents a particular machine and some stations have more than one.

I bring this up as a way to explain why I haven't been around much lately. Some of my recent challenges include:

1) A set of boxes that my predecessor installed to feed an FM radio station through the Internet have stopped working reliably. The FM station is so stuttery and broken up that it's not listenable, and my only recourse is to replace these boxes with a pair of Comrex BRIClinks, which are better able to handle Internet congestion.

2) The satellite that most national radio networks, including the ones we use at our New Hampshire and Vermont stations, died at the end of June. The networks moved to a new satellite in a different position in the sky. We had to install a new dish at our central Vermont station because the old one couldn't get a signal from the new satellite. We pointed our New Hampshire dish at the new satellite, but it only receives Rush Limbaugh reliably. We keep getting dropouts during Boston Red Sox broadcasts, among others.

3) The microwave system that delivers programming to one of our transmitter sites from the local studio is working, but just barely; trees have grown up to the point where they're starting to block the signal.

4) An asshole performance rights organization wants us to pay a lot of money for the rights to stream music from three of our stations. These stations are not making money; they're being supported by our talk stations, and I'm sorely tempted not to stream them at all.

5) We had to spend the weekend before last disassembling the studio of our classical station and reassembling it in a new space. But it works and is reliable.

6) One of the most powerful AM stations in New Hampshire was running at 20% power when we took it over. We have it up to about 95% power now, but one of the other tenants at the site says it's intermodulating with their transmissions.

7) We have an AM station in Vermont and a construction permit for a translator that will allow it to broadcast also on FM. We have been trying to get our prospective landlord to agree to let us put in a telephone pole with an FM antenna and a small box at the base for the transmitter, but after agreeing in principle to the project and agreeing to the proposed rent amount, the landlord is nitpicking over the language of the proposed lease.

8) We don't have enough sales talent, especially in Vermont. One of the Vermont stations needs a General Manager.

9) McDonald's is changing ad agencies and refocusing on national rather than local advertising. They'll be dropping our stations, and we'll have to replace the lost business somehow.

I'm driving myself batty dealing with all these radio stations, ours and other people's.

Springfield, Vermont, is not doing well. Once a prosperous industrial town whose factories produced machine tools, it is now depressed and decaying. The guy who formerly ran our radio station there was selling commercials for 17 cents apiece. Even if we sold out at that rate, we'd still be losing money. The guy running one of our other stations in a somewhat larger but still depressed town in New Hampshire said he can make a modest living at $3 per spot.

The Boston and Maine Railroad used to offer service between Boston and Montreal on three different routes; all three are abandoned today, with portions of each converted to bike paths. The Cheshire Branch, which ran from Fitchburg, a city in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, to Bellows Falls, Vermont, ran parallel to the roads I often use to drive to Springfield, Vermont or Newport, NH. It last saw a passenger train in 1958, and was abandoned in the late 1980's. I keep thinking how much more pleasant my trips up there would be if the trains still ran. Bellows Falls, Claremont, White River Junction, and Randolph still have passenger service, but only from New York not Boston. The Randolph, Vermont station is about half an hour's walk from our radio station in that town. In the old days, I could have taken a train directly there from Boston's North Station via Manchester NH, Concord, Lebanon, and White River Junction. That train seems to have stopped running in 1965, and the rails were pulled up between Concord and White River Junction shortly after the infamous Guilford Transportation Industries acquired the B&M in 1982. Guilford changed its name to Pan Am Railways several years ago, and now uses the former airline's logo, which you can see on boxcars and locomotives, where it looks singularly out of place.

Meanwhile, every minute I spend behind the wheel of a car is a minute of my life wasted. And The Man in the Tin Foil Hat wants to defund Amtrak. Asshole.

We just got a $10,000 bill from the Boston Red Sox Radio Network.

I wonder if we get anything like that in ad revenue from the broadcasts, especially after commission.

Rush Limbaugh only charges $900 a quarter.

It was chilly and drizzling in Dover, NH, where I spent most of the day, but 66 (F) and sunny back home in Greater Boston.

I am angry at myself because once again I made a mistake running the payroll for our radio stations after I got home. The damn payroll service won't let me fix it, so I'll have to add $115 to the guy's paycheck next time.

Since I started doing these things in February, I have not been able to do a single payroll run without making at least one mistake. I hate looking like an idiot in the eyes of our employees.

There are so many loose ends when it comes to buying radio stations. Idiot utilities we don't know we're supposed to be paying will send invoices into a black hole every month and then cut us off for non-payment.

Today I was confronted with a long list of mostly useless domain names I have to transfer from the seller, and some blogs which appear to have expired because we haven't been paying the invoices they didn't send us.

In the immortal words of the great Joss Whedon: grrr, arrgh.

I think this is the first evening in a very long time that I haven't had some sort of commitment. I'm still working full time at my consulting business while the radio stations we bought start to generate income.

We didn't buy the seller's accounts receivable, and radio clients often take 2 - 3 months to pay, so after almost three months of ownership, we're just starting to see money coming in. That means both of us have to hold on to our day jobs for now, making for some pretty long hours. Getting up at 3 AM yesterday to rescue a station 80 miles away didn't help.

There's very little room for anything else in my life right now. That's not good.

I've been spending way too much time behind the wheel of my car during the last couple weeks. There have been a number of scary situations: giant piles of snow making it impossible to see oncoming traffic; driving straight into the sun during afternoon rush hour; idiots appearing suddenly in my blind spot; and on one occasion, the car in front of me *stopping* at the end of a highway onramp, afraid to merge into traffic.

It occurs to me that autonomous vehicles, when they start to appear on the roads, are not likely to play well with Massachusetts drivers. The robot cars are surely going to get stuck in situations where they have to play chicken with human-driven cars in order to make certain turns or merge into crowded highways. When they fail, they'll back up everyone behind them, and the result will be a huge clusterfsck.

They're going to have to legislate manually driven cars off the road.

The manager running our two Vermont stations sent us an email an hour after we closed on Friday, saying he doesn't want to work in broadcast media any more and, therefore, he was resigning immediately. We knew his stations had been underperforming for a couple years, and had intended to have a talk with him once the dust had settled. But I guess he had plans of his own. Good luck to him.