You've been wanting to do this for a while.

Best of luck on this new endeavor!

[Oh, and the sling shot on the sidebar... Too funny!]

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hope you've been practicing using a stentorian tone, so you sound like you know what you're talking about. And just what will you be talking about on this festive opening night?

Good afternoon, trog.

My efforts to project a stentorian voice have almost never turned out very well: I usually end up sounding like some bad-attitude poltergeist, which scares the kids.

This is a family-rated broadcast, so I can't afford to scare the kids.

Okay, maybe I'll scare them a little when I start going off about neo-conservatives, investment gurus, globalist economists, Republicans, Democrats, Zionists, fundamentalist Christians, Chicago thugs, communist Chinese mercantilists, Right-wing pundits, mush-minded Leftists, pop-culture academic airheads, authoritarian followers, and...

Ah, yes. I think I just answered your question about show content.

Actually, this is a call-in show, at least some of it is. I'll have my say, but callers are invited to have theirs, too. The real problem is predicting whether I'll get no calls, a few calls, or lots of calls.

No calls means dead air. I've got that covered: I'll just keep talking.

A few calls is great. I'll have time with each caller to talk for more than a minute or so.

Lots of callers is problematic. It means heavy traffic (and maybe even a few dollars eventually to help defray the costs), but it also means doing the usual cut-off of a conversation just when someone calling in wants to get to the substance of his or her point.

Several weeks ago, I was on the phone with CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry. I got no more than 30 seconds of voice time to cover the entirety of macroeconomics and the impact of $787 billion in economic stimulus that has to be borrowed from foreign investors or printed by the Federal Reserve.

I didn't have enough time, and I was frustrated to the point of wanting to call Ed that night and chew him out. I didn't, of course: he's not all that bright, and he might have thought I was calling from one of those kinky call-boy services. (Talk about kinky: some guy calling you in the middle of the night, faking a stentorian voice, ranting about macroeconomics!)

Where was I?

Oh, yes: Dark Voices Radio. I'm asking for trouble doing this. My audio equipment is lousy, my computer is overwhelmed by all the programs and services I run on it day and night, and I haven't done live media in decades.

On the other hand, it might all work out just right.

That, of course, is what the neo-cons were hoping for in their Project for the New American Century. As events subsequently proved, their hopes were folly.

Maybe they'll make me an honorary neo-con; that way, I can go to some of their secret meetings and find out once and for all if their really do eat Cheetos and play Doom together in a basement while their moms cook a nutritious dinner for them.

I'll let you all know what I find out.

The Dark Wraith has obviously planned for the long-term success of this talk radio adventure.

Well, great good luck in your new venture, and we'll try mightily to keep the cracks about any non-scripted pratfalls during the broadcast to a minimum-5 paragraphs, or 30 seconds on air.

Tap, tap, tap...

Is this thing on?

It is a beautiful song, in tribute to a beautiful man, Wraith.

Well, that was a bit rough at the start, but it smoothed out considerably as the broadcast went on.

Only one caller, and that was Moody Blue.

Thank Heavens someone called in. That would have been rather troubling if I'd had no callers at all.

Anyway, it happened, and it didn't entirely suck, although I have no idea how the sound quality was on the listeners' end.

As I said on the air, I'll do this again next week and see how the audience builds. I shan't make guarantee of a regular show, yet, but it's worth another shot.

The Dark Wraith will now go make himself a snack.

I have no idea how it sounded, either! Next time I'll get to hear the show over my computer?

;o)

Well done, Dark Wraith! I want to call in next time -- when is your next program -- next week?

Good evening, Lisa Ranger.

Yes, I'm setting up the schedule for another live show at 11:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday of next week. If I can get a more amenable time slot, I'll take it and make the show weekly, and I"ll go to 45 minutes.

One way or the other, I'll let everyone know when the next show runs, and I'll keep the logo in the right sidebar, too, so readers can click on it and see the upcoming schedule.

Now that I've gotten some positive feedback, I'm not quite as certain that the first episode was a complete disaster, although that first four minutes of dead air was a fiasco. I thought it was my fault that I didn't connect to the broadcast station when I thought I had, but it was apparently a network glitch. Fortunately, in my desperation to find a solution to the dead air, I tried to connect again, even though I thought I was already connected. The second time was a charm.

One really good thing about this is that I suspect my old audio equipment isn't rendering sound too well, and that means I have an excuse to prowl eBay for something better. If I have a clear mission in mind, I can take out those eBay trolls any day of the week, and right now, I have a mission.

Let the eBay lurkers who like to beat me on bidding at the last second beware.

The Dark Wraith has been waiting a long time for a good excuse to pound a few eBay turkeys into hash in a bidding war.

And by the way, now that I've gone back and reviewed the broadcast, I can see why no one would listen to one of my shows ever again: the static was terrible. It's almost like the way AM radio stations sounded on cheap radios late at night back in the old days. That retro noise is almost creepy.

Good grief, that couldn't have been just my lousy equipment, I hope.

No doubt about it: I'm going to have to do some test broadcasts this weekend to figure out why all that static was there.

What a fiasco.

The Dark Wraith does, indeed, need to be shot.

I must not have been paying attention, 'cause it sounded fine to me, though, as you can see, I missed the live show.

Yeah, 30 minutes is way too short. MB, you let him off the hook! I was waiting for you to get all hot and heavy with the prof, so we could hear him stutter. Oh well, next week for sure.

Oh, and a really great tune for Blackie.

Wraith,

I listened the replay of Episode 1. I did not know that the above player would work after the broadcast, too! (Whoa. It's really weird to hear one's own voice.)

The only time I really noticed any static was during the switch over to and from the Welsh Piano and Vocals music.

Another thing I just noticed is that there is a different player display when using Firefox than there is when using IE. Interesting!

Thank you, again, for the opportunity to be your first guest caller!

Trog,

LOL! "This is a family-rated broadcast, so..." no hot and heavy in front of the kids.

I always get the news a day late.

Thought you might enjoy this fr. today's WaPo (Nassim Nicholas Taleb):

"Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right. I wanted to find out the reason. They would say their models are not perfect. But data show that you do much worse using their models than you would without them. It's a bull [expletive] science. "

So now Mr. Taleb, having made his fortune as a specialist in financial derivatives while being critical of the industry (according to Wikipedia) can safely extricate himself from his field as Wall Street crashes and burns by dismissing it as so much BS- did he bother to say which economic theorists he had issues with, or is he just joining the lynch mob to roast his former colleagues before they implicate him too?

Good evening, LindiBee.

Yes, Taleb was a real player, one of the vile breed of derivatives jockeys, those uglies who took the models and equations and theoretical results of 1980s academia and transformed them into blunt weapons of war using money that wasn't theirs to craft blades that carved liquidity from the illiquid and material wealth for the few from the hard-earned money of the many.

He is, however, but one small man in a swirling ocean of players who are now turning themselves inside out thrusting their pointing fingers at anyone and everyone but themselves. He is not alone: Jim Cramer found God on Jon Stewart's show; Ben Bernanke sits with his sappy smile before the councils of legislators as all in the room bray their dedication to ferreting out the wrong-doers and moving forward. Preening, self-righteous judges wallowing in their own wealth send doddering old men like Madoff to prison for life, yet have nothing to say about the grandest of all Ponzi schemes which has been our fiscal house for years, now.

Economists like Paul Krugman get Nobel Prizes for writing, teaching, and gathering speaking fees advocating the utter destruction of our jobs and industrial base through currency manipulation by the Chinese and other countries. His cohort, Brad Delong, sucks up to him in bizarre, house-of-mirrors conversations that turn the relationships among debt, trade, and interest rates completely on their heads.

Men like Barack Obama hand the office of the United States Treasury to the likes of the failed Federal Reserve bagman, Tim Geithner, this being the same Barack Obama who hands the office of education to a brute thug like Arne Duncan. The correlation is palpable: the very assets that might save us handed to the very men who would destroy those assets while all of respectability step back and bow.

If nothing else, I am a patient man. I can wait for the smoke to clear. I'll let these people all reduce each other with their lies, their re-writes of their own lives, and their contortions of disgraceful populism.

I can wait a little while longer; then I'll have my say.

What I don't have is a fistful of dollars from punditry, from high academia, from fancy publishing houses, from speaking fees, and from all the other benefits that accrue to the reputable men and women who lied to us — and even more, to themselves — about the machinery of wreckage that was loosed upon this economy over the past eight years. That goes for the apologists and the loyal opposition equally; and when I have my say, rest assured my say, albeit from the valley, will sound to the highest hills.

I have Websites, I have podcasts, I have my talk radio show.

And I have an audience, albeit small.

I am not Joshua, but I can blow a mean horn.

Especially when I'm in a bad mood.

And this whole economic mess has put me in a really bad mood.

The Dark Wraith sharpens his pen, his voice, and his rhetoric for the day of reckoning at The Dark Wraith Forums.

Funny, every time I sharpen a pen, all I get is ink all over the place. No wonder you're the teacher.

Good morning, trog.

Life was easier in the old days. Trying to sharpen a word processor is an exercise in futility.

The Dark Wraith longs for the days of the chisel and stone tablet.