Some kind of busy day. It started last night.
I got in at about 10 p.m. last night, just in time for frozen pizza and then bed. Woke up a half hour earlier than usual this morning. I grabbed a bit of breakfast on the way into the office and, when I got there, I loaded up a cart worth of stuff to send to the surplus store.
If you need a handful of old standard definition television cameras or other outdated gear, I know where you can get it.
After that, the morning show:
The two ladies on the right are national champion cheerleaders. They told me it gets harder every year. They’d know. One has two championships, the other has three. Their team has won five of the last six titles. Harder every year. But, for one, her cheer career is almost over. She wants to work in that business, perhaps as a coach. The other is planning to go to medical school.
So this was the second episode of the new morning show. It looks promising and you’ll see it here when they upload it.
I pretty much lived in the studio today. After the morning show there was anchor training and then some other folks came in and used the room for some interviews. We did critiques of the news shows and then I went back to the studio for more of those interviews and a series of pesky emails and so on.
When the day was over I headed to the grocery store. On the way I found a local country station, a 3,800 watt shop with a liner that says “Fox News is coming up next, after this country classic!”
And then Elvis played. “Devil in Disguise.” Even in 1963, with his powers not yet fading, saw that song go top ten on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B charts. That was no country song. Neither was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” but it showed up a few songs later. There was also Linda Ronstadt and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and there was nothing wrong with any of that. But Elvis? Or, that Elvis?
He had 54 hits on the country charts, including 11 number ones. Altogether, he stayed on the country chart for almost 12 years. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of contradiction on the individual song data online, but this was Elvis’ most successful country song:
Thirty-nine weeks on the country charts. It was written by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers wrote it, two more Mississippi boys. It was covered by everyone so it is basically a standard. Should have heard that on the radio.
Oh, which reminds me, I met Elvis once:
Barbecue restaurant, out in the pine tree woods of Georgia, like you do.
