Saturday, November 06, 2010

How Cold Is The Metal You Love

Fellow lovers of our future robot overlords, let me beseech you, in this cold, cold times, press the coldest metal to your face, grip it tightly in frostbitten hands, lay with it, learn to prefer it to warm, imperfect flesh. Because in the process of our obsolescence, we will find our only consolation with the cold alloys of our robot paramours.

& the music they shall sing to us will be the music you can hear on Dickenbock Electronics, my (usually) every three week or so electronica showcase, a new episode of which is available for your listening pleasure at self help radio dot net.

Produced as a public service for the Committee to Replace Organics on Planet Earth, or CROPE. CROPE is pleased to announce that it now has a human on its Board Of Directors.

Go! Listen now! While you still have a choice!

Friday, November 05, 2010

The Face In The Furor

Aw, did the season start too soon for you? Here are handy tips for making sure you don't catch cold & miss out on the wonders of winter:

1) Keep it in your pants. Whatever it is, if it's not in your pants, it's colder than when it is in your pants, & when whatever it is is cold, it can lower your immune defenses, to let a dreadful cold sneak in & lay you low.

2) Eat plenty of healthy. Yes, healthy often suffers at the hands & feet of unhealthy, which is available in most stores, but surely you can find healthy wherever it is sold & consume more of it. Studies show eating a lot of healthy often keeps you well.

3) If you must exercise, make sure it's your brain. Too many famous people who once were alive & fit are now dead but did they think the right things? I'm not so sure. Reading is good, but also just pondering is worth your while.

4) Perhaps you should also be in love. While nine out of fourteen doctors find love to be distracting unless the sex is good, researchers are fixing the data to show a connection between love in your life & physical well-being. Look it up!

5) Your pets need to go for a walk. This applies mainly to dogs, who carry loads of diseases, but who, when you walk them, spread those germs outdoors & not in the confines of your lovely home.

6) I find alcohol to be delicious. Not so much if it's in medications, like that awful one that you take just so the alcohol in it will make you sleepy. But if that's all you can get - sometimes in the middle of the night, it is - salut!

7) Friends don't let friends get sick. If your friend is sick, you have not been a good friend & it means you probably don't respect him or her very much. Plus, that friend being sick may make you sick. Goodbye, friend!

8) Snow is more cold than soft. It does not make a nice pillow for cold winter sleepytime. Even if, in this tough economy, all you can afford to live under is a bridge. People have been known to make this mistake, or maybe it's just me.

Well! The staff & homemakers at Self Help Radio hope you enjoy this winter in the same way you didn't last year, & we hope these nine simple rules will force you to stay well all through the season & only get the flu perhaps in early spring when you least expect it.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

But Did You Vote?

Sure, sure, this week's episode of Self Help Radio, which is about hunger, or being hungry, is now available for your listening pleasure at self help radio dot net, but that seems so unimportant. Don't you think? Because there's this crazy election going on! You should have voted. Did you vote?

Some people think it's foolish. Some don't care. Some think it's buying into a corrupt system. All I can say is, there's probably some truth to the negative comments. But it sure feels nice to vote. Even if it's voting against someone.

& who knows? Maybe one day we'll not get to vote anymore. You might at least want to say you did something so quaint - & desirable - once in your life.

Or maybe you'd rather listen to Self Help Radio?

Monday, November 01, 2010

Oh, You Already Know What's Important About Tomorrow

Yes! & it's not my stupid radio show. It's that you vote! Even if it seems ridiculous or hopeless, even if you haven't really cared in months, even if the media have already told you who's won - VOTE!

The choices aren't so great, I'll grant you. But at least you have something like a choice, right? One time, on KOOP, there was this inane show - it's probably still on - where the host, a simple but amiable fellow, was interviewing some high muckety-muck from Cuba during one of their "elections," & he asked him, "What's voter turnout in Cuba?" The man said proudly, "Ninety-nine percent of the population votes!" The host gosh-wowed about that & then tsk-tsked the low turnout in the United States, all the while never asking the most important question, which is: but aren't they voting for a single party? If that's the case, could there be another reason they go to the polls - perhaps because they might be punished if they don't?

Perhaps we should punish Americans if they don't vote. But then again, there is a punishment - have you seen the people who run our country? I don't think a one of us could stand to be in a room with a random sampling of any of them.

Vote! Vote! Vote! I say. It feels nice.

& if you're up early enough, listen to me tell you to vote on 88.1 WRFL fm! Don't wait to listen to it later when I archive it on self help radio dot net. It won't make any sense. But actually, you can listen to my shows any time. That'd be great.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Whither Hungry?

That sounds like something a pretentious waiter might say instead of "What can I get you?"

Billions of people in our world live in a state called hunger. Batman might have told members of the Justice League, "Hunger is good for the soul," but that just means he thinks starving children are more soulful than well-fed ones. Which is terrible logic, for both me & him. But it sucks for the Batman since he has a better reputation than I do.

Self Help Radio explores hunger this week because it realized that, about halfway through most of its shows, it could really use a snack. & not something junk food-y, like chips or nuts or whatever. A substantial amount of food, like a sandwich perhaps, or maybe one of those things that other cultures make which aren't really sandwiches but emulate sandwiches in a delicious manner, like a burrito, or a samosa, or even pizza, folded over like they do in New York. Mmmm.

Of course, Self Help Radio is also proud to explore issues of lasting import, like hunger, which has become more prevalent in this country during our Great Recession, & will probably continue to increase, since Self Help Radio expects the worst. & boy, does the worst deliver.

Self Help Radio will be full of depressing facts this week, like this one:

36.3 million people - including 13 million children - live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one in ten households in the United States (11.2 percent). This is an increase of 1.4 million, from 34.9, million in 2002.

Luckily, Self Help Radio will accompany these facts with awesome music to offset this gloomy information.