Unusual things I sometimes think about at night when I can't sleep.
I don't always sleep too well waking up many times during the night and I have a portable radio on the bedside with a under the pillow speaker and a little switch that I can turn it on and off. If you by any chance have a little bit of insomnia and choose to listen to the radio. You will quickly find out that the choices of subject matter are rather limited. Some people enjoy music and that helps them go back to sleep, I'm not one of those people. So, I search for talk radio and that to is rather limited. There are only so many stations that you can listen to to where they have infomercials which explain to you the great value of whatever snake oil and/or elixir. They are currently selling. What I have been relegated to is various forms of talk radio. Although I do have an Internet radio and can listen to stations far and wide. There seems to be two main products.
There is the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levine, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Laura Ingram, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage. All of these are news of the day, politics, and of course all of these are conservative as I am. I don't hunt for or listen to the very small group of liberal talk show radio host. I've had my fill of socialism discussion.
The second group, which I find myself listening to. Probably more often than I really want to consist of what is sometimes called the late-night paranormal programming. Coast-to-coast a.m. was one of the most popular and was created by Art Bell after he bought a small radio station in Pahrump, NV and searched for a format for late-night listening. The program over time morphed into a rather wide subject matter format that went all the way from listener call-in open format. Art Bell conducted the program from a small studio he had in his house and he had no call screener and everything was live. Sometimes it got interesting. His primary format was interviewing personalities, which also had a very wide range of expertise and subject matter. Among what I would consider kooks that talked about all kinds of aliens, mystic time travelers, alien abduction, Sasquatch, chupacabra, which is supposed to be some kind of weird four-legged type will dog that is seen on the highways normally reported in the far West deserts. And of course, the incident at Roswell, New Mexico back in the 40s were supposedly a space craft crashed and bodies were recovered of little gray beings which were supposedly autopsied and whisked away to disappear somewhere at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and the cover-up conspiracy that was associated with. Conspiracy theories abound.
Sometimes it makes you wonder where some of these guest that he interviews make a living. Art Bell died in 2019 and the program was taken over by George Norry who does not have quite the talent. Art Bell had to at least make some of this stuff interesting. Surprisingly, I have found rebroadcast of the art Bell version of coast-to-coast a.m. on the Internet radio. When all else fails, I can tolerate some of that long enough to go back sleep.
Interspersed with all of this caca talk occasionally includes some very reputable interviews. Dr. Michio Kaku, a very reputable physicist intelligently discusses black holes, time travel, hyperspace, string theory, antimatter, dark matter, and other subjects which I think are well above the mental level of the average listener to this particular program. However, he thinks outside of the box and intellectually considers concepts that I have not thought of.
Occasionally one of the guest host will be the son of Kelly Johnson who created and operated the skunk works for Lockheed Martin aircraft company. You may recall that that was where the U-2 spy plane was invented along with the SR 71 and its predecessor. I believe it was called the YF 12 which was a fighter version of the same airplane. It did not last long, but the SR 71 is a classic. The skunk works is still active. Having produced a number of the stealth airplanes which we saw in the Gulf War. Those interviews are usually interesting to listen to.
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