Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 05/23/18> I about lost it with KLBJ 590 AM on Tuesday…

I have to believe the people running the radio station in Austin do things with their programming just to piss me off. This has been going on now for a few years but Tuesday I think set a new mark for the most uniformed remark a talk show host could have made.

To give you a little background on KLBJ 590 AM it is the local AM station in Austin that has the best traffic reports, and quite honestly, that is how I judge the radio stations. So over the last ten years when I am in the Austin area that is the station I listen too. While traffic was the main reason I couldn’t help but get drawn in to the programming and the different hosts of those programs as well. Some of you might remember last fall when I told you about the host of the one hour program that came on right after the Rush Limbaugh show, Dale Dudley was his name.

The guy was pretty much a liberal and he got on my nerves pretty well as he would bash Rush left and right. I had been a listener of Rush for quite a number of years, all my fingers and toes wouldn’t be enough to count all the years. Rather than switch stations for that one hour, and lose the traffic reports, I endured his bashing and all of his many personal issues he was battling; and he had plenty of those. I have to say though that old Dale taught this old man a lesson and while I was a big fan of Rush, I didn’t realize just how much of what Rush was saying was just flat wrong. I learned a whole bunch from Dale on confirmation bias and that was just the beginning of my appreciation for him.

Well, KLBJ590 AM fired him a few months back from the one hour AM program, he still does a morning FM show on the KLBJ FM station, and he’s been doing that gig for 30 years. I was actually really disappointed they canned him, he brought some balance to the station in his own sort of way. So in the interim they had some other folks working that one hour segment. Usually there would be two people co-hosting and one of the more regular of the twosome was the girl who does the traffic.

The station manager also decided he wanted a piece of the “on the action” so just recently they made it official that the team and the show was the “Mark and Melinda Show”. Not only do they have the 2 to 3 time slot but they also have the 10 to 11 AM slot as well. Mark seems to be pretty in tune to things, kind of a drab voice, but he seems pretty knowledgeable as far as current events and the pulse of the area. Melinda, on the other hand, is best for looking at a traffic map and telling you where the accidents and tie ups are, the girl is lost otherwise in my opinion.

Tuesday Melinda made a comment that just about caused me to wreck my truck; I couldn’t believe just how clueless she was on the subject she was talking about. With the recent school shooting here in Texas the airwaves have been full of debate about guns, metal detectors, new laws and whatever else can be done to help prevent another school shooting incident.

Somehow Melinda tried to make a correlation of the school shootings and guns to the Branch Davidians siege near Waco, Texas in 1993. I don’t know how she was trying to make that correlation, and neither did her co-host Mark. That wasn’t even the thing that made me almost lose control of the steering wheel as she was trying to explain herself. I think what she was trying to get at was that these school shooters ever since Columbine are almost like being a part of a cult, like the Branch Davidians were who followed David Koresh their leader. That’s a pretty big stretch to come up with that but that isn’t even the good part.

Melinda said that these kids doing the shootings should realize that it didn’t work out well for the Branch Davidians, since they all drank the Kool Aide and died. Excuse me, what did you say? Even Mark said to her, that the Davidians died in the fire that consumed their compound, and he was correct. Well, Miss Melinda evidently knows some things that we don’t because she responded, that “Yes, they did die in the fire, but that was after they drank the poison Kool Aid” and at which point I had to swerve back onto the road.

From what I can gather from listening, I am not sure this Melinda was even alive in 1993 when the Waco siege happened. I would also be willing to bet all I have that she wasn’t alive in 1978 when the 900 or so members of Jim Jones congregation drank the poison Kool Aid in Jonestown, Guyana. I don’t know how she managed to screw the pooch with those two events by combining them, but she did.

Well luckily it just happened to be time for a commercial break, and it was a pretty lengthy one at that, when they did come back from the break the whole topic had changed to a guy up in New York whose parents took him to court to have him evicted from their home. No other mention was made of school shootings, Branch Davidians or Kool Aid.

I would have liked to been a fly on the wall during the meeting after the show, I am pretty sure that there had to be one, since Mark is the program manager for the station. I can see her home work assignment for this evening, research and write a paper on the Waco siege and for Wednesday night it will be Jim Jones and Guyana Punch. Mark made the decision to make her a radio personality and if he were smart he would unmake her just as fast and have her just reading the traffic reports.

Hey Mark, I think Dale still has his afternoons open; you might want to give him a call.

Until next time,
@sultnpapper

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