PAST ANNOUNCEMENTS

Covering the year 2006 Part 3 of 3

Season Finale for the DT20 Dec 15-17

This weekend is the season finale for the Dementia Top 20 Countdown show. Which songs will be among the top 12 of the year and be featured in an upcoming episode of the DFSX Time Machine? Which song will be #1? Keep voting here each week and you decide what the final Top 100 standings will look like:

Official Top 20 Of The Week Voting Page: http://dt20.dfsxradio.com/

Vintage Dementia and Best of Mad Music Taking a Break...

Captain Wayne's Best of the Mad Music Show takes a break for the holidays and will return Jan 2 with show #zzn006, which was originally scheduled for December 12. In its place are special holiday episodes of the ISGD show.

Vintage Dementia takes a break for the holidays and will return Jan 7.

Kahnman Comedy Corner Holiday Schedule...

The Dec 13 and 20 episodes of the Kahnman Comedy Corner will be the special holiday shows that originally aired in 2003 and 2004. A new Kahnman Comedy Corner show will air on Jan 3, originally intended to air Dec 6, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we were unable to prepare the show for use in time.

Halloween Marathons on DFSX

Through early November 1st, DFSX is airing continuous demented and comedy Halloween music. The marathon began the weekend of October 28, after the second airing of the DT20 show.

Mini-marathons of Halloween had been running since October 9th.

Also note the the Vintage Dementia and the ISGD shows will not be heard this week but will return in their regular times next week.

Best of the Mad Music Show Coming Nov 7

Beginning November 7th, Captain Wayne is the host of the Best of the Mad Music Show that will run as a three-hour block, with the first two being a full show, and the third hour with his selections until the block ends.

Best of Manic Mondays Returns Nov 1

Tom Rockwell's "The Best of Manic Mondays" returns to dfsx, but this time, it will be on Wednesday nights instead of Mondays. If NBC can run Friday Night Lights on Tuesday, then we can run a show on a day that doesn't match the day in the title. His show airs just once a week, Wednesdays at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, and 7pm Pacific.

Other specials will fill in such as the Parody Factory and the DFSX Time Machine as part of the Humpday Special wheel whenever there's Manic takes a break as each show takes a month to create (his podcasts run about 15-20 minutes apiece.)

Kahnman Returns Nov 1

Mark your calendars! The Kahman's Comedy Corner will return with new shows on November 8, but on November 1, we're resuming the reruns with episode #17. On November 8, we'll present episode #31, followed by #32 on November 15, and #33 on November 22.

Episode #31 will debut a new feature called "Freakin Funny Music" whose host Jake just quit producing last month so that he can join Wayne on the only demented podcast show called Mad Music Show, available by going to madmusicarchive.com. All of the FFM shows are available at freakinfunnymusic.com.

The first new Kahnman show will highlight Dan Castellaneta, Power Salad, Throwing Toasters, Dino-Mike, The Four Postmen, Jonathan Coulton, Avenue Q, and Marc Gunn among others.

The FFM segment will highlight Heywood Banks, Odgen Edsl, Moosebutter, and Axel the Sot.

Episode 32 of the KMC will feature episode 2.01 of the Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, first aired back in November of 2004 on another demented cast "Fill in the Blank", plus episode two of FFM.

Got a Podcast?

It's getting hard for me to keep track of these things, but you can see more podcasts by going to http://www.davesfunstuff.com/0470.htm. I'm working on a more direct subdomain that will take you directly to that page and it will be called http://podcast.davesfunstuff.com.

If you have a demented music podcast that should be there, please let me know.

Past Kahnman Airings

The Kahnman's Comedy Corner originally began as a five-minute monthly segment on dfsx in October of 2002 which was called The Kahnman Comedy Spotlight, and in January of 2003, a half-hour mini-show called "The Kahnman's Comedy Corner" began airing on the then-new "ISGD" show on a once-a-month basis. The Kahnman, who is Tyrone Kahn, also hosted a then-four-hour "ISGD" show in September 2003, as well as a two-hour Holiday special in December 2003.

In 2004, the Kahnman's Comedy Corner began airing as a separate two-hour show on dfsx. Here are the shows that aired in order:

1/14/04: Episode 1
1/21/04: Episode 2
1/28/04: Episode 3
2/11/04: Episode 4 (cat songs)
2/18/04: Episode 5
3/03/04: Episode 6
3/10/04: Episode 7
3/17/04: Episode 8
4/14/04: Episode 3 revision 1
4/21/04: Episode 9
5/05/04: Episode 10 (Episode Dedicated To Nick And Mary Yankovic)
5/12/04: Episode 11
5/19/04: Episode 12
6/02/04: Episode 13 (The Dr. Demento Basement Tapes #12)
6/16/04: Episode 14
6/23/04: Episode 15
7/14/04: Best of the Kahnman's Comedy Corner Jan-Apr 2003
7/21/04: Best of the Kahnman's Comedy Corner Apr-Jun 2003
8/18/04: Tyrone guest hosts ISGD part one from Sep 2003
8/25/04: Tyrone guest hosts ISGD part two from Sep 2003
9/29/04: Episode 16
10/6/04: Episode 17 (all parodies)
10/13/04: Episode 18 (Past and present B.O.R.E.D. Tour Performers)
10/20/04: Episode 19 ("Weird Al" Yankovic's Birthday, cover Versions and Al Tributes And Three By Al Himself)
11/3/04: Episode 20
11/24/04: Episode 21
12/7/04: Episode 22 (Christmas Special part duex)
5/04/05: Episode 23
5/18/05: Episode 24 (Baseball)
6/08/05: Episode 25 (Star Wars)
9/07/05: Episode 26 (BORED Tour 2005)
9/07/05: The Parody Factory #1 pilot
10/5/05: Episode 28 (Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes #13)
1/11/06: Episode 29 (Grant Baciocco of Throwing Toasters interview)
2/07/06: Episode 30 (Laughter is a Powerful Weapon Volume 2, the Season 2 Finale)
11/8/06: Episode 31 (The Premiere of Freakin Funny Music)
11/15/06: Episode 32 (no subject)
TBA: Episode 27 (we'll tell you about it later)

Proposed Legislation Could Affect DFSX

No updates last week, but Betty from live365 will keep me posted on this issue.

Upcoming legislation that will impact Live365 (the streaming provider for dfsxradio.com) and other internet radio providers is in the House and the Senate as I type this.

Another piece of legislation could outlaw mp3 and other kinds of audio streaming that does not conform to certain digital rights management standards.

Read it all here:

http://www.davesfunstuff.com/041ar073.htm

What is D.T.'s X-Pod?

Simply put, it's the times when you don't hear any specialty shows and all of the songs are randomized. You never know what's coming up next, in fact, we change most of the songs every three weeks to keep the playlist fresh. The X-Pod has introductions to some of the songs that were submitted by the musicians, else there's no other talking between songs. You can listen to the X-Pod most times between 2am and 8pm Eastern Time and all Saturday nights when we don't do specialty shows! Listen all you want. We'll upload more!

Steve Jarrott on Hiatus

Due to technical problems beyond our control, the Steve Jarrott Show will not be heard on dfsxradio until further notice. His last airing was early September 18, 2006.

Update: Ch-Ch-Changes

The Best of Dave's Gone By: Now airs Thursdays and Saturday nights at 11pm ET, 10pm CT, and 8pm CT. Each episode airs just once per night.

The I Still Get Demented radio show no longer airs on Thursday nights. ISGD airs Monday and Tuesday nights at 8pm and 11pm ET, 7pm and 10pm CT, and 5pm and 8pm PT. ISGD will air on Tuesdays through October, or go off sooner.

The Kahnman's Comedy Corner will return to DFSX beginning November 1st with a rerun. It will be followed by a show for the Wednesday Night Wheel TBD.

New episodes of the Kahnman's show will premiere on dfsx on November 8th at the usual time, at 8pm and 11pm ET, 7pm and 10pm CT, & 5pm and 8pm PT.

New shows for Tuesday night will be announced whenever we're in the mood.

FAQ: Syndicating the ISGD Show

I've gotten a few e-mails from three stations wanting to air my ISGD show on their station, but at this time, I can't do so because of the legalities involved with radio shows with copyrighted music embedded within. The songs that are on ISGD are non-transferrable to third parties. If I could find a way to make my past shows on a pay-per-listen on-demand basis, I could do so with the listener helping to pay for the copyright fees involved in streaming a given episode.

D.T. Goes Off: Talonian Plays Talonianban

With the now-dependable kozt no longer streaming the Dr. Demento show on the Internet, and WQMA apparently unable to at least carry the show on their station, it seems that Talonian Productions' is proving to be no friend of the Dr. Demento Show, its fans, or the musicans represented on the radio show.

By forcing radio stations to either pay an exhorborant high streaming fee to carry the show on the Internet or carry the show (with a fee) on their terrestrial sticks only, Talonianban has turned back the clock in progress and is on its way to making the Dr. Demento Show available only on the show's website on demand (for a fee) and making the show disappear from the free streaming Internet for the first time since WMVP first bitcast the Dr. Demento show way back in 1996.

With Dr. Demento soon to be no longer available for free on the Internet, the time has come to embrace new technologies for fans to be able to sample some of the funny music available on many funny music act websites as well as to create more free online radio stations specializing in streaming funny music, getting around the bottleneck that the Talonianban has created by removing Dr. Demento from the free Internet.

We know of dementiaradio.org, a longtime streamer of funny music (who needs to be told to forget about streaming the Dr. Demento Show), with many specialty radio shows hosted by different people such as funny music artists and other people who live the lifestyle of dementia music. We mentioned our own dfsxradio.com enough times already, but are there any other funny music fans planning to get into programming a demented music radio station to give the Talonianban more competetion?

What the Talonianban doesn't realize that when they succeed in getting their affilliates to stop streaming the Dr. Demento Show, they will still be competeting against a few dedicated free radio stations that stream the same kind of music and comedy Dr. Demento plays, in fact, you can buy most of them on CD.

If you want to put together your very own Internet radio station, all you gotta do is to buy a bunch of comedy music CDs and rip them into mp3 files, and make sure that they are tagged correctly so that they meet the DMCA regulations (all songs must have a title, name of act, and the source of the song such as an album name or a SINGLE). Then, find a streaming provider that's right for you, whether you can do it live 24/7 or have a shell account manage the song playlists for you while you're away or even when your computer is turned off.

When you do, let us know about it. Post it in rec.music.demeita, create a Myspace account dedicated to the station intended for networking with the funny music acts and their fans, and create your own website. You can get a good website for about $2.99 a month by going to 1and1.com for a basic hosting plan. If you're not good at HTML, I can offer to create a one-page starter page to get your website running for no charge complete with logos and links to the LISTEN LIVE stream that you supply.

The Talonianban needs to understand that by putting one funny music show on a pay-per-listen basis, they'll be at a serious disadvantage when compared with what their competetion can offer such as cheap pay downloads of funny songs on other websites, free streaming of hundreds of comedy stations from live365 dot com alone, free streaming and donwloads of songs from many funny music artists on myspace.com, and others. A demented music fan doesn't have to pay $2 for an undependable Dr. Demento Show that streams at a low fidelity and is subject to terminal interruption of something goes wrong on the server or client side. They can go to many hundreds of other sources.

A good networked list of funny musicians can be found at this myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/dtaudio/. If you're a funny musician on myspace and not networked from there yet, go there and join the dfsxradio myspace network for free. What I like about myspace is that when a band takes down their myspace page, their links automatically disappearrs, so I don't have to waste my time checking the links for bad pages. You can also link funny music radio stations from there too. This is better than the paid links program at davesfunstuff.com or dfsxradio.com because there's no work involved other than accepting the band on myspace as a friend, so even some of my websites are competeting against themselves for links. More people prefer to link to myspace than to purchase a sponsor link at a website.

While the loss of Dr. Demento on the Internet will mean that their competetors will be gaining many of the listeners looking for a free fix on funny music, it's a shame that the Talonianban has chosen a wrong path to take (the one to 1992), the path that will hasten to demise of the Dr. Demento Show.

Also to blame for the disappearrance of the Dr. Demento Show on Los Angeles radio, his homebase, are both the radio station suits who refuse to give him another chance on the radio, as well as the people involved in producing the show who are not dedicated enough to keep the show on Los Angeles radio. Since September of 1996, the Dr. Demento Show has been on Los Angeles radio for the following months: Five from Sep-Feb '97, and Ten from Mar '98-Feb '99. That's 15 months out of 120. Going over seven years without a Los Angeles station is a travesty for fans of funny music, whose exposure into the second biggest radio market in the United States would greatly help their sales of their CDs and lead more visitors to their websites to sample their music.

Is the Talonianban even bothering to convince KLOS, Jack-FM, KLSX, KROQ, Indie 103.1, and other stations to carry Dr. Demento? I don't think they're even trying to get his show on the airwaves there. Are the stations interested? If not, then what would it take to get these stations interested in his radio show?

If the problem of national sponsors kept KLOS from carrying Dr. Demento, then that part has been solved since as of 2006, no more national sponsors are appearring on the Dr. Demento show. It is understandable that Talonianban has to charge the radio stations to carry his show, but the upside is that radio stations can keep all of the adtime and sell insurance, cars, cellphones, and other stuff to their listeners. Why isn't KLOS interested in Dr. Demento now? Does Disney, their parent company, suck too much? They're the ones responsible for dumping the Tom Leykis show from 710 and replacing it with a women's talk station in 1996 that bombed big time.

So, what we have here is a heritage radio show that has a lousy syndicator, no national sponsor interests, an overpriced and undependable streaming-only fee, no Los Angeles-based radio station, and an outdated philosophy of restricting their affilliates from streaming the show. Does this spell the end of the Dr. Demento Show?

Not Looking For New Shows

I'm not currently looking for any new shows to put on dfsx, though two people offered me some shows, but unfortunately, my listeners prefer a music-intensive programming block with less talk and more comedy. I'll let you know when the situation changes in a future newsletter.

Linking Sponsorship Changes

Due to lack of advertising revenue (as in cash) for links to artists' websites, the terms to advertise have been changed. Musicians that wish for a paid link back to their website from dfsxradio or davesfunstuff are now required to send in a cash payment and are allowed to send one comedy CD for an extra two months after the paid term. Details at dfsxradio.com and davesfunstuff.com, both getting makeovers and adding more sponsored link blocks over more pages so chances are increased that the links will be seen. Links will expire automatically after the term ends (and hopefully before their domain is abandoned and turned into a dead-end website).

Steve Jarrott Returns to DFSX! (Aug 8, 2006)

Sorry about the late notice. Steve Jarrott is back on dfsx, but he will be part of the DT20 three-hour block.

Listen to the Steve Jarrott Show Friday nights (Saturday mornings) at 12:30am ET, Saturday days at 12:30pm ET, and Sunday nights (Monday mornings) at 2:30am ET.

D.T.'s Weird Al Section Redesigned!

Check out http://weirdal.davesfunstuff.com/ for a new look as the 2006 redesign of the website cluster continues. Also included are a big Weird Al games section.

One Project Almost Finalized

On the road to Windows XP (I still have Win 98, which is so obsolete that those wimps at Cox High Speed Cable won't support it), I have converted my 21-year-old creation to work with the new PowerBasic compiler so that it doesn't need the QBASIC interpreter to run it anymore. My Celebrity Birthday database, which has birthdays of anybody famous, was created in 1985 to work in the Atari 800XL computer. This is one of several dozen programs that have to be converted to PowerBasic's BASIC programming language in order for them to run under Windows XP, which does a job running DOS applications so poorly that it probably won't run anything made for QBASIC, or QBASIC itself, anymore. Rather than to be stuck with Windows 98 forever and a wimpy non-supporting cable internet provider, the time has come for me to convert my programs to the 32-bit environment.

Also in the works are other QBASIC progams I have written that helps me create webpages full of playlists from funny music radio shows and pages full of celebrity birthdays, today in history events, funny songs a-z, and demented subjects a-z. The first program was the hardest as I had to learn a lot of new commands, which ones were obsolete and not supported by PowerBasic, which ones had to be changed, which routines I had to lose or change, and all that other spaghetti programming code that I had to deal with.

One big advantage PowerBasic has over QBASIC: the ability to sort very large arrays. No more using a text editor to sort the files before the program can run right.

Hopefully, I can learn how to program the executables to automatically upload each of the pages to the proper destinations with some kind of FTP program I can incorporate into them.

If you're a QBASIC or QuickBASIC programmer and wish to get PowerBASIC, and you're still using DOS-based programs you created to work in a DOS window under Windows, I recommend that you get the Power Basic Console Compiler so that you can convert your QBASIC apps to PB/CC with minimal code conversion. They have one for DOS if you still want to use DOS 6.2 or whatever. If you want the challenge to convert them to the Windows environment to work like a Windows program, get PowerBASIC 8.0 for Windows.

For more information, just go to powerbasic.com

Busy Busy Busy

Due to ongoing projects, requests for songs that I do not have in my mp3 collection as well as new episodes of my flagship show "I Still Get Demented" are being put on hold except when I have enough good new songs to showcase in the program. I am in the process of converting all of my QBASIC-based programs to PowerBasic 4.01 so that I can run them much more efficiently, and to prepare the big move to Windows XP. Believe it or not, I'm still using Windows 98 and it's obsolete. QBASIC hasn't been supported by Microsoft since 1999. QBASIC runs in some version of DOS kernel which has limited support in XP, and I heard that QBASIC won't run in the latest revision of the XP OS. I've been using a program I called the birthday program I created for the Demented Today in History Datebooks since 1985 for the old Atari 800XL computer using BASIC XE, and modified for the Windows 3.1/DOS 5.0 compatable computer using QBASIC for DOS. The time has come for me to convert my programs to PowerBasic, and that will take a lot of debugging and converting to the new syntax for the new PowerBasic program creator, and once finished, I can move on to XP or Vista depending on when that project finally gets finished. No word on when I'm getting a new computer.

So if my response time is long, I apologize in advance, but my priorities outside of my paying job and required hygeine stuff are the daily SDN news blogs, recording the DT20, programming DFSX, and the big fat BASIC conversion project. Yikes!

And whenever I get an order, I will ship one of my Stupid Audio CDs as a top priority. Please see http://www.davidtanny.com/ for my three CD collection.

Navigate To Another Page!