For a while now, I've suspected that the story NPR's Morning Edition runs at 4:45 every morning is specifically designed to sour my mood right before I go to work each day. In the past it has covered such topics as "Dedicating 5 minutes of national air time to letting white baby boomers complain that they aren't pandered enough to in this country because grocery stores aren't all carpeted and sometimes play hip-hop music" and "Dedicating 5 minutes of national air time talking on the phone to some housewives in Ohio who are spending all day watching the royal wedding." The reason I get my news from NPR is because it is dedicated to actual journalism, but at quarter to five that always seems to go out the window, and today's story was one of the worst examples of that yet.

This morning, Tovia Smith reported on a new airport screening technique the TSA is implementing in Boston and plans to have in place nationwide eventually. TSA agents will ask a series of questions for which they don't really care about answers. What they are looking for is subtle clues that someone might be a terrorist revealed by sweating, body language, or any other number of things someone who watched half an episode of "Lie to Me" claimed would matter.

Tovia Smith interviews George Nacarra, the federal security director for the TSA at Logan airport, giving him all the intense scrutiny the mass media of River City gave Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Listen to the story and you will hear a government official pull a turn-of-the-century flim-flam on a reporter from our nation's last bastion of true journalism.

He offers to demonstrate, even over the phone. "Pick a two-digit number, between 50 and 100, both digits even," he says. He explains that he can't guarantee 100 percent success, since he won't be able to read all of the clues he usually gets from face and body language. On the phone, his only clues are things like voice quality, hesitation, pacing and breathing.

"Say nothing aloud," he says. "I'm just going to work off of breath. Hold your mouth next to the phone," and he begins to count as fast as he can from 50 — until he stops dead at 68.

"[It's] 68!" he announces. He says he heard a faint tongue click right when he said the number.

As soon as he qualified "both digits even," I shouted at my radio, "Fuck! He's going to 68 her?" This is a standard warm-up trick for mind-readers and psychics going back to the pre-Houdini days. In the present, it's a trick Mystery of VH1's "The Pick-Up Arist" suggests for meeting girls in bars--and given Smith's reaction as a well-educated woman, it's hard to insult Mystery as tempting as that may be.

There are certain "forces" in mentalism that are based simply on our brain's tendency to select from a small field while thinking it's selecting from a large one. The key is making you decide quickly. "Think of a vegetable," will get the response "carrot" 90 or more percent of the time as long as you don't let the subject really think about it. "Go with the first thing that pops into your head. Think of a wild animal in the jungle," will get you "lion."

"Think of an odd number between 1-50 with both digits odd and different" will almost always yield "37." Why? Because while you think you're selecting from 50 numbers, you're not. You're limited to odds, so already you're eliminating half the field. A two-digit number eliminates five more (1, 3, 5, 7, 9). Both digits odd eliminates another 10 (21, 23, 25... 49). Two different digits gets rid of 11 and 33. That leaves only eight choices (13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, 39), so already the mentalist has a 12.5% chance of guessing correctly as opposed to the perceived 2% chance. But for some reason, the human mind jumps on 37 more often than the other seven combined and anyone who knows this appears to have impossibly guessed your number. In the case of 68, the field is limited to 60, 62, 64, 68, 80, 82, 84, and 86, and again, 68 is chosen disproportionately more than all the rest.

Another favorite is "Think of two simple geometric shapes, one inside the other. Make them different though, don't do a square inside a square or a rectangle. Now draw it." The mentalist then reads your mind and draws:Why? Because while he'll then say, "You could have picked any of hundreds of designs," you really couldn't. Simple shapes pretty much limits you to triangle, circle, and square/rectangle--a dodecahedron inside a parallelogram isn't "simple." When he suggests that a square inside a rectangle would be a bad idea, it limits you to a triangle and a circle. At that point, we fall back on the fact that we circle things (ads in the classifieds, answers to Is He Into You? tests in Cosmo, word searches) and don't triangle them. However, if the subject does draw a circle inside a triangle, the mentalist still can salvage it by saying, "Wow, pretty close, huh? I got the vibe of the two shapes, but I couldn't pick up which was on the outside," and look pretty impressive.

Banachek's Psychological Subtleties gives an intensive list of such "forces" and explains routines he uses in his shows based on them. He and Larry Becker get away with such blatant forces as "think of a flower... a beautiful, long-stemmed flower... is it a rose?" on a regular basis because while it seems obvious while reading it on a blog sitting at your desk, the illusion is much different when you're on the spot in a nightclub or--apparently--interviewing a TSA official over the phone.

Tovia Smith should be embarrassed. I only hope she will scrutinize her subject a little harder in the future before declaring Secretary Tim Geithner is going to solve the debt crisis by pulling coins out of her ears.

Over the weekend, I received a letter made to look like a bill for the registration of this domain with the exception of some fine print stating that it is not a bill.

This letter should be at the forefront of any and all discussion of economic reform.

President Obama is insisting we reform Wall Street and vows he'll veto any legislation that "doesn't bring the derivatives market under control." What constitutes "control" is debatable. In fact, we really don't know how either side of the aisle wants our economy to run. The one thing we can count on in the weeks and months to come is talking points and key terms that will be repeated and regurgitated regardless of their truth. And the one phrase we'll hear more than any other will be "free market."

But what is the free market? To what extent should we support the free market? If child labor can be hired for less than adult labor, the free market would dictate that a good factory owner should hire kids. For that matter, the free market would tend toward slavery. Now, clearly we have legislation that outlaws slavery, but one could argue that such legislation unfairly regulates the free market.

However, I'm going to assume most congressmen don't support the return of slavery--okay, maybe Jim DeMint--but we still need to know what we should expect of our economy moving forward. And this letter sets the stage for that debate perfectly.

This letter notes that the domain registration on jakehateseverything.com is running out "soon." It reminds me that if I want to keep the domain, I'll need to pay to re-register. It never claims to be from my domain registrar. It even uses the phrase "switch" to indicate that I'd be changing companies. And it promises an opportunity to save money by taking advantage of deals on multiyear registrations.

All of these things are factually true, but still the presentation of the letter is a clear attempt at deceit. The company behind it is hoping to take advantage of people who've registered a domain or had a domain registered for them by a relative or friend. By presenting a bill-looking advertisement, the goal is to have some suckers sign off and send in a check for quadruple the amount it should cost to register their domain without even thinking. I will be renewing jakehateseverything.com for nine dollars through my current registrar, while this letter offers me the "deal" of two-years for $50. The "deal" being that one year with this company is $30, so I'd save ten bucks by going for two.

The question is whether this is a business that should or should not continue to operate in our economy henceforth.

Some will argue that the person who first took the time to craft this letter, to search for soon-to-expire domains, and to mail out these "non-bills" should be rewarded for his ingenuity. He's not lying about anything, and it isn't his fault if people don't bother to thoroughly read a document before signing it. And unlike Nigerian princes and bank presidents who are simply out to steal the money of their targets, this company is serving its customers, albeit at a grossly inflated rate.

And that is a cornerstone of marketing, isn't it? The comic store where I used to work prided itself on not giving discounts, instead relying on being the cool attitude of the store and the customer service to win over customers from other stores. The comics aren't any different and the "customer service" consists mostly of upselling customers the way Amazon's "People who bought items in your cart also purchased" feature does.

If legislation were introduced to outlaw such practices, it would be a perfect representation of the "nanny state" Fox News commentators love to warn us about.

The same could be said for predatory lenders, the banks that set out to give loans to people they knew couldn't pay them back because they knew there was money to be made on credit default swaps when the houses foreclosed. Why should the government protect someone who is too stupid to understand that he can't afford a $500,000 home on a salary of $40,000 a year?

A recent episode of This American Life examined the actions of a Wall Street hedge fund that made billions of dollars by creating bonds it knew were likely to collapse, then buying insurance against the collapse. Days later, the Justice Department announced it was filing fraud charges against Goldman-Sachs for a similar practice.

The company in the story linked about was doing the equivalent of building a $100,000 house with frayed wiring and using oily rags for insulation, then buying a $10 million fire insurance policy on it. The company lost millions on the failed bonds, but made billions on the insurance. In fact, much of the housing credit boom--which fueled the predatory lenders mentioned previously--was a direct result of this company demanding riskier credit pools to include in its bonds.

Should such behavior be punished or rewarded?

NPR's Michel Martin and Cokie Roberts have taken a stupid, sexist comment by two right-wing douchebags and are treating it as if it has any bearing on society as a whole.

To recap, Fox News's Chris Wallace was on Don Imus's show--in related news, Don Imus is still not only alive, but on the air somewhere, AND people listen to him--when Imus make a joke about Wallace interviewing Sarah Palin while she sat on his lap. Wallace jokingly replied, "One can only hope."

Roberts--and in turn Martin--made the point that Imus and Wallace wouldn't talk about a male colleague that way and turned the subject to the way that women are not taken as seriously as men and that sexualized treatment of women is more accepted by mainstream society than is the sexualized treatment of men. Unfortunately, they have missed the point of Imus and Wallace's exchange entirely.

It is correct that Imus and Wallace would not speak of a male colleague in that way. After all, they aren't attracted to their male colleague's because they are strong, red state, American males without a drop of the gay in their blood! But it should also be noted they aren't talking about Cokie Roberts or Michel Martin they way they talk about Sarah Palin either.

This is because Roberts and Martin are serious journalists with professional chops that cannot be dismissed by their looks. Imus and Wallace have enough respect for Roberts and Martin to disagree with them on a matter of principle instead of reducing everything they say to a matter of how hot they are. They would consider Roberts and Martin to truly be "colleagues" and wouldn't disrespect either by reducing her merely to a piece of ass.

You can extrapolate from that what Imus and Wallace--and for that matter the Republican Party, Fox News, and Tea Partiers--really think of Sarah Palin, and that is the real story about their "sit on my lap" comments.

Recently, Talk of the Nation did a segment about the dying newspaper industry during which the guest suggested that the industry's greatest weakness is its inability to understand that the internet is more than just a change in technology, but rather a change in philosophy. People who get their news online do not want to read a paper cover to cover, and anyone planning to produce the same product in a digital form is likely to fail.

NBC is facing a similar problem with its Olympic coverage. Years ago, ABC aired "Wide World of Sports" on Saturday afternoons. The show featured prerecorded sporting events, often days or weeks old. It didn't matter, though, because viewers often didn't know the results. For years, the Olympics have been covered the same way. When primetime rolled around, the network aired a series of edited segments recorded during the afternoon's play. People could stay blissfully unaware of the results because the newspaper wouldn't come out until the next morning and radio and TV stations often agreed not to reveal outcomes until after they aired.

Today, however, you can watch live streaming events on sites from other countries. Instead of being at the mercy of NBC, viewers who want to see the Swedish curling team take on Team Finland--which wouldn't get even a mention from Bob Costas, much less a clip--can watch every minute of play in either nation's native tongue. Because news doesn't wait until the morning paper is published, TV and radio can't pretend things didn't happen. Your drive home in the evening will be peppered with spoiler warnings from deejays and news readers, telling you to turn down the radio if you don't want to know who won gold in the Super-G.

Like the above examples, it's easy to think of Facebook like a big party with all of your friends. And all your friends invited all their friends. And all the friends' friends invited their friends and so on and so on.

In such a social setting, you might be engaged in a conversation with a friend, when one of their other friends jumped in to participate as well. In some cases, that friend might even be someone you know! For example, the only time I ever talk to Rhonda, one of my closest friends in 12th grade, is when I see her at the birthday parties of Ryno's kids.

In such a case, it would be perfectly acceptable to interrupt the flow of the conversation to interject a "long time no see" or "hey, what's up?!"

However, Facebook is not a party! It's a website. If you see someone who is a friend of a friend, you can send them a friend request. You can send them a message. You can poke them. You can do all of this out of sight of the rest of your Facebook friends without hijacking a stream of conversation.

The new technology represents more than just a faster way to do the same thing, so pull your head out of your ass.

For the past week, I've had to take my kids to school every morning. Considering I stay up until 3AM or so most nights writing, you can imagine that A) I didn't get much writing done this week, B) I didn't get much sleep this week, and C) I'm not very happy about either A or B.

Making matters worse is the reason I had to drop the kids off all five days last week instead of my customary one. Their mother, who teaches fourth grade at another school, needed to go in 45 minutes earlier than usual to help run Santa's Secret Store.

For those who don't remember Santa's Secret Store from your elementary school days, let me summarize. A company carts in a bunch of cheap crap that ranges in price from a quarter to fifteen dollars, touting it all as affordable gifts. Teachers run the cash register and at the end of the week, the company comes back, counts up the sales, and gives the school a percentage of the sales to use for field trips or special projects or paying teachers salaries so layoffs can be delayed for another month. Whatever.What's worst about this whole fiasco is the false hope it gives the children. I had to fight it in my own children every day as they begged to "go to Mommy's Santa Store" after school. They pulled change from their piggy banks, eagerly anticipating buying presents for me and their mother and their grandparents.

Economist Joel Waldfogel has a new book out called Scroogenomics. I haven't read it yet, but I have heard several interviews with him and am intrigued by the ideas behind it. An expansion on a paper Waldfogel wrote 15 years ago, the book makes the case that gift giving is almost always an economic loser.

To quantify the value lost in gift giving, Waldfogel compared the price someone paid for something to the price the recipient would have been willing to pay themselves. For example, a couple of my friends are getting customized NFL jerseys of their favorite teams with their own names and numbers. These cost $100 each (the website had a sale on Black Friday so I got them for a bit less, but we'll use $100 as the price for this example). My friend Rob is a Packers fan, so I got him a Packers jersey with his last name and the number 99 on the back. If Rob is asked, "How much would you pay to buy that jersey for yourself?" and he answers, "$75," then I have wasted $25 from an economic standpoint.

My goal isn't to dissect Waldfogel's argument too much--I will delete the three paragraphs I've written here and expand on them in a separate post--but rather to use it to make the case that Santa's Secret Shops are among the worst offenders. After all, how much would you pay for one of these?The sane among you answered, "Nothing. What the hell am I going to do with that?" If you found out that someone paid $3 to buy it for you, not only would that be a loss of $3 per Waldfogel's calculations, there would be the added loss of other unquantified values like how much respect you lose for the person who paid $3 for a little rubber piece of crap, the disappointment you feel for the gift you received versus the anticipation you had for it prior to unwrapping it, and the disappointment the gift giver feels when it becomes clear you didn't like the fun, google-eyed rubber sunburst he bought you.

Santa's Secret Shop's greatest crime is selling itself to children as a place to buy great gifts for grown ups. With this in mind, kids scrape together some cash, whether by asking mom and dad or by busting open their piggy banks, and go to the shop, expecting to find gifts that mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa are going to love.

I remember in fifth grade, we had a Santa's Secret Shop set up at my school, so I took a couple dollars hoping to find something for my parents. I don't remember what I got my dad, but I settled on a big pencil for my mom. It was blue and about a foot long and almost an inch in diameter (too big to fit in a pencil sharpener, you'll note). At the time, I recall thinking, "What the hell is my mom going to do with this?" but I felt pressured to get something there because I wanted to be able to say I took care of everything by myself. I didn't need Dad to take me out to the mall to get Mom's present and vice versa.

On the plus side, I didn't get anything like this.This is the worst of the worst that Santa's Secret Shop has to offer. At $8.50, this adjustable-to-fit-the-head-of-any-dad cap is out of the price range of most shoppers. The one afternoon I dropped in with the kids, about 60-70 kids came through the shop and I don't think anyone had more than $5. And therein lies the tragedy. $8.50 is a lot of money just to disappoint your dad. Hell, kids are doing it for free every day!

But the lost value far exceeds the $8.50, which, it should be noted, is a huge amount of money for a fourth grader to spend on anything, much less something that is only going to cause family strife. There is also the frustration his father is going to feel, knowing that his child spent the equivalent of a decent Friday's entrée on an ugly, stupid hat that will never get worn.

At least, that's what he hopes. But that's not the case at all. Unlike the yellow rubber thing that can be tossed in a drawer or a "#1 Grandma" ornament that can be hung on the back of the Christmas tree for a few weeks every year or the foam rubber keychain that can be used to hold the key to the garage, back gate, or utility room, the hat serves only one purpose.

And dad only has one head.

Receipt of this hat on Christmas morning gives dad two "value-losing" options. Either he's going to have to wear it out in public, upsetting himself as he is silently (if he's lucky) ridiculed by everyone who sees him, or he has to explain to his child, his own flesh and blood that he loves in ways he never imagined he would love anyone prior to having this new life born into his own, that he has terrible taste in gifts and would have been better off buying Dad a Wendy's value meal and pocketing the rest of the cash because no, no, I'm not going to wear this gaudy thing, not even long enough for your mother, who hasn't stopped laughing since you handed me the package, to snap a picture just so she can mock us both twenty years from now in front of your wife and my grandchildren.

You can imagine how well this will sit for Christmases in perpetuity. Speaking as someone who refuses to decorate the Christmas tree every year because my mom and grandmother got mad at me for putting too much tinsel on our tree in 1980, I can tell you those memories stick with you.

On top of all the tensions that Santa's Secret Shops bring to families every year and the economic losses it perpetuates, the school only raised $190 (which, sadly, was more than double what it raised last year). That means that if every teacher who worked it had paid $8 a day not to have to come into work 45 minutes early and stay 45 minutes late every day, they would have made more money.

Yesterday morning, NPR covered a story about the state-run health care plan in Oregon. The reporter covered the rationing of health care and the efficiency approach taken by Oregon. To over simplify, a board creates standards for what will and won't be covered weighing cost and effectiveness. So, if something costs $10,000 but is 100% effective in curing what's wrong with you, it's more than likely covered. If something costs $1 and is 5% effective in treating you, it might be covered, too. But if something costs $10,000 and is only 5% effective, it's not covered.

This policy came under fire in the media--I know, I know, the media never jumps on a non-story and blows it out of proportion without considering all sources--when a woman dying of cancer was denied coverage for an expensive, long-shot treatment.

She received a letter from the Oregon Health Plan denying her cancer treatment because it had less than a 5 percent chance of success. The same letter offered payment for the state's physician-assisted suicide program.

The radio story includes a quote from the woman asking, "Who do you think you are?" to the officials who've offered to pay for her death, but not for her chance to keep living. Unfortunately, the next line is delivered in a passing, inconsequential tone when it is the most important point of the piece.

The drugmaker eventually gave Wagner the medication for free, but she died a few months later.

So the state health care board--or DEATH PANEL!!!! if you prefer--was right! Fortunately, the drug company took the financial hit instead of the health care plan, though this bitch makes me feel sorry even for the big corporation that would probably crush a puppy's skull in front of toddlers if there was a dollar to be made in it.

What's not discussed is what would have been sacrificed if Oregon had opted to sink thousands of dollars into the chance that this woman might overcome her cancer--a chance that was only slightly greater than if they'd dropped those same thousands on any given number on a roulette wheel. How many children wouldn't get vaccinated? How many prenatal screenings would have been foregone? How many regular yearly checkups wouldn't be done?

Health care plans, public or private, government or corporate run, have finite resources. Every dollar spent on one treatment comes at the expense of another (or several others). The main benefit of a government run option is transparency in how the decisions about which treatment will win out will be made.

Unlike Aetna, Blue Cross, and others, a government run option would be accountable to the people it covers instead of to its shareholders. The money being shifted from craps-table-odd cancer treatments won't be paying investors dividends or redecorating CEO bathrooms or buying corporate jets. It will be paying for treatments that are more effective and will save more lives in the long run.

The most depressing part of the holidays is driving from my house to my parents' and back. People sitting at bus stops always strike me as particularly sad. They seem like lone survivors of some kind of apocalypse.

Further depressing--though it's my one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving--is the final half hour or so of "Talk of the Nation." Unlike other hosts who force someone lower on the totem pole to take the reins for the holiday or recycle old interviews (Terry Gross, I'm looking in your direction) to fill the time so they can spend Thanksgiving with family, honorary X-Man Neal Conan comes in and hosts his show himself.

The grand finale is always a segment officially titled, "Who's Not At Your Dinner Table?" I prefer to call it "Neal Conan takes horribly depressing phone calls from lonely people who all try to one-up each other for whose tale of woe is most wrist-slashingly tragic."

You have to stop and think about who is going to call in when Neal puts out the request for anyone who is "missing someone this holiday" to share their stories. First, this person has to be sitting alone listening to NPR on Thanksgiving afternoon. Second, he or she has to have lost someone and have the impact of that loss still strong enough to prompt calling a national radio show. Third, the caller has to have no one else with whom he or she can share this anguish, either because there simply is no one else around or--perhaps worse--everyone around has grown so tired of hearing this sad sack's never-ending laments about his great aunt who died in 1977 that he's desperate for a new audience.

What starts as sad become hilariously outrageous, not only as callers try to outdo one another--"That guy who called and said his mom got blown up in a boiler explosion on Easter morning? Well, my mom and dad were burned alive in their beds on Christmas!"--but also as Neal tightropes the line between congenial, upbeat host and grief counselor. The offer to "think of your father" when Neal raises his annual toast to friends who have been lost seems little relief for either the caller or Neal himself.

A few people slip through trying to be reasonably mournful about "my husband's grandma" who died in the past year, but was 93 years old and wasn't expected to have made it as long as she did, but they are quickly forgotten as they're overshadowed by stories of "my dad died on Thanksgiving 1968 in a fighter plane crash in Vietnam... a month and a half after my brother died."

If Neal does it without alcohol, it's doubly impressive.

"On the Media" had a great interview with Michael Hastings this weekend, the best soundbite from which was his comparison of following the presidential campaign and watching porn.

"You see two people perform, you're kind of envious of them, you kind of like when one gets humiliated, and the best clips get sent around the internet... [and if you do it for too long], you feel bad about yourself and you're like 'Man, I should get married or get a life or go exercise more.'"

He also made some good points about what to do as a writer when you look at your body of work and come to the realization that you're nothing but a hack. Mostly I enjoyed it because it hit home for me as his explanations for why he left the campaign beat to go to Afghanistan reminded me of a lot of the reasons I got out of the reporting business all together.

Global warming is a reality. Even the Bush administration admits as much, a prospect that was unthinkable just a few years ago. All of the world's top scientists agree that the human race has permanently changed the way the planet functions. In fact, we changed the Earth so drastically, it will show up in the fossil record, leading geologists to recognize the present as the dawn of a new geological period.

Al Gore made the quintessential case for acknowledging global warming and won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Yet NPR feels the need to waste our time with a story like this?

Unfortunately, because what was once radical propaganda is now mainstream belief, the propagandists have to shift even further if they intend to continue to outrage anyone. And lest you assume I'm painting liberals and leftists with this broad stroke, the same goes for right-wingers who can't seem to settle on what punishment will be sufficiently cruel for Mexicans who dare to cross the border illegally so they bring you fresh hotel linens.

Who are these idiots who claim roads could lead to an increase in malaria if the economic boost generated attracts workers from outside the region who might have malaria? You might as well say combing your hair could kill your dog because there's a chance--regardless of how small--that you might get distracted while combing your hair and accidentally pour weed killer into your dog's food dish instead of Kibbles 'n' Bits.

Meanwhile, one of the highly-degreed scholars acknowledges that the roads will mean more trade, better lives for the villagers, economic growth, better education, and everything short of Jesus himself flying in on a zipline to carry everyone in the Amazon to Heaven in a giant backpack, but sighs that it will come at the expense of losing "uniqueness" and "quiet." True, but 150 years ago, you could have made the case that the cotton gin would come at the expense of the Negro slaves' culture of cotton picking.

Tell the farmers who will be able to sell their crops to a wider market, tell the kids who will be the first generation to have opportunities outside their insular villages, tell everyone whose life will be improved by having any one of the hundreds of electrical appliances you take for granted every day that they'll be living in a less unique place and none of them will care.

That's because when you boil it down, the reason a remote village in a chigger-and-snake-infested jungle with no electricity is "unique" is because no one would ever try to duplicate those conditions. It's a veritable hell on Earth that even the scientists in the story are eager to escape, calling for a boat after two days of hiking, yet while they use their cell phones to call for help and wait to be bailed out, they heap liberal guilt on everyone who isn't outraged by those who try to steal this hellish life from the same people who discuss how much they are looking forward to the roads.

The story seems to be trying to convince us that deforestation of the Amazon is a bad thing, which everyone already knows. Since just telling us that global warming is bad isn't enough though, the story goes further, telling us that in addition to the climate changes inherent in the activity, the roads are also bad because they rob people of the bass-ackwards lifestyle they are begging to escape and reduce the number of places in the world where you can go to be eaten by soldier ants and bot flies.

Joanne Silberner, I understand that you spent a week or more with these narrow minded pseudo-intellectuals and wanted to subject us to the same stupidity you had to endure, but when I'm fighting rush hour traffic with two kids who for some reason cannot understand the words "stop hitting each other" in the backseat, I hardly need you to pipe eight minutes of your frustration through my radio.