Well…you can’t do both. Every year, about this time, I get a few letters from students asking for advice on how to pursue a career in radio production. Well, I’ve never been one to be shy about giving my penny’s worth of advice, even though I know you can’t make change. Today’s letter came from a 17-year-old high school student who is debating whether to go to college for a communications degree (bad idea), or to jump in, feet first (which is probably worse.) What follows is a slightly modified version of my response. Just starting, eh? Well, there’s a ton of advice I could give you, but let me emphasize this: Go to school. Even if you only get an associates degree (2 years), this could b
It’s Thanksgiving week and even though many are not in the least religious I’ve long thought that, being a national holiday, it’s just a good point in the year to sit down and think about everything we have to be grateful for. I’m not one to prattle on about my personal belief system, I make a conscious effort to keep my opinions as regards religion and politics to myself. It’s been my experience that there is little, if anything I can say that will persuade someone who does not share my beliefs to change his or her mind. That’s OK with me. When I see others do it, I just smile and shrug. They usually don’t see that they almost always come off looking petty or mean-spirited. Like Dirty Harry
I recently cruised the Internet to satisfy my curiosity about how the “experts” define branding and don’tcha know that of the 25 or so articles I looked up, every one had a different definition? They all were in the same general ballpark but some of them were so vague, I wasn’t even sure I could say they defined it at all. So let’s be crystal clear. Branding means the same thing today as it did 150 years ago when cattlemen branded their livestock. If you spotted a steer with a big double X scar on its butt, you knew it belonged to my great-great grandfather Cyrus Josephus Foxx. Branding is a mark of ownership. To the average camp kid, it is nothing more than your name scribbled on the inner
Close your eyes for a moment and listen. (I’ll wait.) OK. What did you hear? Your CPU fan…some hiss from the monitor system…your own breathing…a page out in the hall for someone to please pick up their pizza at the front desk…maybe you heard your chair squeaking. (Hello, engineering? I need some WD-40 STAT!) Whatever you heard, you heard it in context. Your brain automatically isolated the various sounds for identification, but you heard them all mixed together. Now I’m going to travel a road you might not know for a moment, but stick with me…the signpost ahead promises all will become clear. Here’s a word you may not know. It’s confabulate (intransitive verb. L. confabulatus, past parti
