Give in, monkeyboy, and surrender yourself to the apostasy that is the Hampster Dance! Go ahead, check it out. They're cute as hell, aren't they?

You may remember a few weeks ago I said that the local "alternative" radio station was playing a funny little April Fool's joke by switching to oldies for a day. Remember that? Well, it wasn't a joke. They really became an oldies station.

This did not upset me overmuch. The station in question - 96X, it was called - had become very nearly unlistenable, constantly spewing the same twenty or so songs. I hadn't listened to it in quite some time when the change was made.

This did, however, leave Memphis without a "hip" station for all the young people to listen to. Again, I didn't worry to much. I have a big enough collection of tapes and CDs to move to the desert and foreswear radio altogether.

Happily, Flinn Communications (a local radio company) has stepped in and offered "The Phantom," a station whose concept is a couple of slackers have set up a pirate radio station from which they mock other area radio stations incessantly and play music out of their collection. The music is primarily late '80s and early '90s alterna-stuff, with a good mix of older (lots of Depeche Mode, some Grateful Dead, the Clash, Joe Jackson, Peter Gabriel and Squeeze) and newer (the obligatory Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews). Earlier they followed Just Like Heaven with Cornflake Girl, which pleased me to no end.

It's a good format, and I hope they can keep it up without selling the station's soul and becoming another Top 40 outlet. Flinn has a couple of good stations now (including the city's premiere hip-hop station and only pure pop station) and once upon a time they had WDRE, part of a network of New York radio stations that was always a good bit ahead of the music curve around here.

They had this one DJ, David the Worm, who was a huge Cheap Trick fan. This was nominally an alternative station, now, but one time when Cheap Trick came to town David turned his entire lunchtime show into a Cheap Trick request show. I loved it.

He left the station shortly afterwards.

Oh yeah, the answer to yesterday's question about what to DMX, winter coats and shoes have in common: all these things are in the closet. I'm disappointed, folks. Nobody got that one right. Though technically no one got it wrong, either, since no one even attempted to answer. Jesus, people, the internet's all about being interactive, right? Interact already!

I went running again tonight for the first time since...oh, the end of February, I guess. I did very poorly. I had to walk most of it, wheezing and coughing the whole way from my initial burst of speed. New goal: train like hell in May and attempt to run a 5K in June. That sounds pretty realistic, right? All you runners out there, let me know if this is something you think I can accomplish.

So Sonya and I were driving to the video store the other night, and we're discussing what the blood type of our children would be. Sonya's is O positive, and mine is A positive.

"Well, like," I said, "some blood types are dominant, and some are recessive. So which is which?"

"It's like this," Sonya explained, "what was your father's blood type?"

I shrugged. "I dunno."

"And your mom's?" she asked.

"No idea."

"There you go," the Wife concluded.

I laughed. "What? We have no information whatsoever and voila, that proves your point?"

She nodded. "Yup. That's how it works."

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