Beware The Ides of March

This has been one heck of a week; change to Daylight Saving Time, a full moon, Friday the 13th, COVID-19 and now today is the day that Julius Caesar got the point, the Ides of March! Holy Cow!

And as if to pile it on, the University of South Carolina has closed their campus to enable social distancing and that means that WUSC-FM has switched off all live radio shows and gone to a completely automated schedule. So instead of preparing for tomorrow’s Backbeat Show today I guess I’ll watch some March Madness on TV this afternoon. Wait, What! Oh Never Mind.

It’s been said often that when God closes a door, he opens a widow. And my window is that I’ll be filling in on the 10AM – 1PM (Pacific Time) on Cruisin’ KLYC 1260 in McMinnville, Oregon and KLYC.us on the internet! KLYC is an oldies station so all is right in the world.

Well, that is not completely true. All is right if you don’t consider toilet paper or as my Brit friends call it “bog roll.” During our regular Saturday afternoon grocery run we found absolutely no TP in our regular grocery store. They normally have hundreds of packages but the cupboard was bare yesterday. I wasn’t too concerned because there was several days supply in the house but some more would have to be found before next week’s shopping trip. We got a tip from a worker at the local Target that they expected a shipment overnight last night and a quick trip there this morning resulted in a score. We’re good for the next week and a half at least.

What’s up with the TP shortage anyway? There is absolutely no reason for the current run on TP. COVID-19 doesn’t create an increase in the demand. But some idiot on the Internet can! Some socially distanced dude (or dude-ette) thought it would be funny to post something about a TP shortage and got a viral response. Many more knock off posts followed and sure enough, it wasn’t funny any-more. Hopefully we’ll all regain our sanity and start working through our hoards before the cat shreds the family fortune while everyone is out looking for more.

Of course I have absolutely no proof of all this but I do have one sobering thought about this mess. In addition to the TP post, I see a lot of posts questioning the veracity of the COVID-19 crisis, calling it a hoax and denigrating the entire social distancing reaction to the spread of the virus. I’ll just say this, if I were an enemy of the free world and wanted to disrupt western culture, creating an artificial shortage and sewing doubt in medical science would be sure fire attack vectors.

But I digress.

Tomorrow will be one of a handful of Mondays where I’ll not be spinning oldies on local Columbia radio in over ten years. I missed one that fell on a Christmas day a few years ago, one when I was sick, one when the Russell House staff forgot to leave my access on during a time when the Student Union was closed and three in 2018 when I was in Scotland. That gives me a grand total of six shows missed out of 530 weeks on the air since January 4, 2010! I’ll take that 1.1%, but it still feels strange.

I saw a meme on one of the group pages for radio broadcasters on Facebook yesterday that stated that radio personalities were the original practitioners of social distancing. We do it every day. It’s true, it may sound like we are out there in a crowd having a party all day long but in reality we sit isolated in our control rooms with only electronic connections with our listeners; radio and telephones and these days the Internet. As a result we love “remote” broadcasts like the old “Nightbeat Show” sitting in a booth right there next to the first row of tele-trays at a drive in restaurant. Old school DJs also love taking requests and dedications over the phone for the same reason; that two way human contact.

So, my earworm for today is The Ides of March’s 1970 hit “Vehicle.” Did you know that the band began in Berwyn, Illinois (a near western suburb of Chicago) on October 16, 1964, as a four-piece band called "The Shon-Dels." They changed their name in 1966, to The Ides of March, a name suggested by bass player Bob Bergland after he read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in high school. And now we are back to Caesar getting the point! Oh MY!