Happy Channukah to all -- and fry up a storm! (Including my latest morning-radio rant, complete with the traditional dumping on Air America)

by Ken

I suppose I should really check it out before going into a public whine, but I'm wondering if the powers that be have really thought through the scheduling of The Takeaway, the alternative public radio morning show produced by PRI and WNYC in association with the BBC World Service, the New York Times, and WGBH Boston.

Here's the thing: As I've mentioned countless times here (well, I'm not about to try counting them), I've been adrift for media support for my morning get-out-of-the-house routine since Air America Radio cut us New Yorkers adrift. (It appears that AAR hasn't been able to figure out any way of muscling its way into the cutthroat New York radio market except by finding the 90-pound weaklings among local stations and strong-arming them -- with the gift of a few bronze coins, I assume -- into giving up their airways.

The last time they did one of these mind melds, it was with a station so puny that many of us in the metropolitan area can't even get it, and in the morning there was no reason to try, since they seem to have been unable (or uninclined?) to shove the station's old programming off the air, leaving us stuck with right-wing scumbucket Armstrong "Army" Williams. Yes, in the country's No. 1 media market, morning drive time on the progressive radio network was held down by a wingnut sleazebag who got caught taking money from the Bush regime to flog its wackadoodle No Child Left Behind racket in his newspaper columns.

Up till then, however, the morning drive had been the glory of AAR -- although it was probably no thanks to the succession of boneheads who ran the network. After they somehow allowed the creation of the gloriously irreverent, high-voltage Morning Sedition, a show that started building a fanatically loyal fan base, instead of nurturing and promoting the shit out of it as the potential franchise-builder it was, they sabotaged and finally pulled the plug on it. And even then, probably again by sheer dumb luck, they turned a couple of those hours to a host who had been exiled to the 5am time slot, where to her credit she had continued toiling, developing her on-air format and skills for the time when she would get a real chance.

You may have heard of her. Her name was Rachel Maddow. It was totally different from Morning Sedition, a smart and outrageous progressive comedy show, with genuinely talented comedy writers and performers, including a fellow named Kent Jones who landed a spot on Rachel's show. Rachel's morning show did an amazing job of informing and entertaining and, as I've said here before, providing a barely awake progressive with the basic briefing he/she needed to face the world on near-even terms, or at least get through the day.

Rachel deserved her promotion to the evening slot, but that didn't do me any good. It was a morning radio show I needed. (In fact, I wasn't able to listen to Rachel in the evening.) Even before that switch took place, we in New York lost her -- and Air America mornings -- to the station shuffle. I was barely able to get the new station, but after a week or two of Army Williams (see? I really tried to give the show a chance!), I fled in horror. Since then I think I've made one attempt to tune the new frequency in. As I recall, it failed.

I won't bore you with the litany of media alternatives I've tried to plug into this hole in my mornings. For a while USA's JAG reruns worked,but then we got back to the point where I'd come in.

Without a lot of enthusiasm I sort of settled in with NPR's Morning Edition. It's not a terrible show, and occasionally there's some really alert reporting or commentary. But so much of it is well-meant time-filling -- the sort of tedious, mealy-mouthed stuff you're always afraid of being choked with on NPR.

But now, at least in theory, we have a public radio alternative in The Takeaway, with personable hosts John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji. For a while I was setting my alarm for 6 or 6:30, and I got to hear a little of the show, and it wasn't bad. But then I pushed the alarm back to 7, when WNYC-FM switches to, yes, Morning Edition! No more Takeaway for me, unless I'm up before 7 and ambitious enough to turn the radio on manually.

I just checked the scheduling online, to make sure I wasn't making it up. Sure enough, I'm not crazy. This is the way the show is really scheduled:

New York
New York, NY 820 AM WNYC-AM 8 a.m.–10 a.m. Mon–Fri
New York, NY 93.9 FM WNYC-FM 6 a.m.–7 a.m. Mon–Fri

Do you notice anything odd about here?

Let's look at it another way. Wouldn't it be fair to say that many if not most people have to be at work at 9am? And that all of those people consequently spend some if not all of the preceding hour traveling to work? (Actually, since my company moved all the way downtown in Manhattan, it now takes me about an hour and a quarter, maybe an hour and a half. But who's counting?) So for those of us who fall into this demographic, what would you say would be the most crucial hour of the morning schedule?

(a) 6am - 7am
(b) 7am - 8am
(c) 8am - 9am

Am I crazy, or is the answer not (b)? And if you look again at that schedule for The Takeaway in New York, when between 6am and 10am is the show not on the air? It's like it was carefully planned. Has WNYC been hiring some of the AAR program scheduling talent?

I'LL BET YOU THOUGHT I FORGOT ABOUT
THE CHANNUKAH PART -- WELL, HA!

As it happens, this morning I did flip the radio on early, and they were doing a sort of Channukah show. John and Adaora's guest, I figured out gradually, was New York Times food writer Melissa Clark, and she had a take on the holiday I've never heard, or at least never heard put quite this way.

After running through the historical event being celebrated, the miracle by which the insignificant amount of oil remaining in the Temple, needed to light the Eternal Light, lasted eight days, Melissa explained that that's why we fry stuff at Channukah, like potato latkes (and she provided two crucial latke-making tips: grate the potatoes coarse, not fine, and above all be sure to squeeze the moisture out of the grated potatoes before making your pancake mixture and frying), and that in fact frying anything counts as Channukah celebration, as long as there's lots of oil and grease.

That's why they do doughnuts for Channukah in Israel, Melissa explained. (Jelly or jam doughnuts, apparently. Not my favorites, but okay.) And why in Italy they fry chicken, and in Morocco something else. Anyway, you get the idea. For these eight days, frying stuff is practically a religious obligation.

This isn't the sort of thing you would want to carry through 365 days a year. But for eight days, knowing that you can fry any damned thing you can think of and get into appropriate oil and you're commemorating a religious observance, well, isn't this the sort of thing that gets people involved with organized religion in the first place?

Melissa had some other decidedly unfamiliar takes on Channukah celebration. Like she had apparently brought in "golden gelt cookies" she'd baked (not fried, eh?), for presumptive use in that fast-paced, high-stakes dreidel play common during Channukah. Normally we would use those golden-foil-wrapped chocolate coins, the way it says in the Bible. But Melissa explained that she's always looking for alternatives to the old chocolate coins, and the way she kept talking about those golden cookies of hers, the more I thought it would be churlish not to at least try them.

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