{"id":3504,"date":"2006-01-26T09:06:12","date_gmt":"2006-01-26T15:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2006\/01\/26\/me-on-a-webcast-be-very-afraid\/"},"modified":"2024-09-19T15:46:02","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T20:46:02","slug":"me-on-a-webcast-be-very-afraid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/01\/26\/me-on-a-webcast-be-very-afraid\/","title":{"rendered":"Me? On a webcast? Be very afraid&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Want to know the true extent of the fall in the fortunes of the <acronym title=\"Main Stream Media\">MSM<\/acronym>?<\/p>\n<p>Consider this: I&#8217;ve been asked to appear on the weekly webcast produced by our local newspaper, the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mywesttexas.com\/\">Midland Reporter-Telegram<\/a><\/em>. Jimmy Patterson, webcast host, man-about-town, and a fellow blogger, will presumably be trying to expose the seamier side of the Gazette and the peculiar delusions and neuroses afflicting its creator, the existence of which is proven by his agreement to submit to such scrutiny.<\/p>\n<p>The program, barring last minute intervention by the <acronym title=\"Federal Communications Commission\">FCC<\/acronym> or <acronym title=\"Food and Drug Administration\">FDA<\/acronym> or any of the dozen or so agencies who might rightly claim jurisdiction over this scary thing, is scheduled to &#8220;air&#8221; around 10:00 a.m. (CST or GMT-6) next Tuesday, January 31.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how many paradigms we&#8217;re busting here, with two bloggers, one of which is also an MSM lackey, appearing via New Media which is owned by Old Media. It&#8217;s unnatural and it makes my head vibrate a bit, thinking about it.<\/p>\n<p>Now, here&#8217;s the real deal. If I understand this thing correctly, the viewing audience will be able to submit questions and\/or comments during the &#8216;cast. I urge you to participate because, frankly, Jimmy and I have absolutely no chemistry together and without some external stimuli, the program will likely start out as a staring contest and devolve from there to my doodling on that icky green wall with a Magic Marker\u00ae. But we need to impose some kind of structure on your participation because I know you and the mischief you&#8217;re capable of, left unsupervised. So, here are the acceptable topics for your input:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Abbye&#8217;s health, as long as you preface any questions with an acknowledgement of her overwhelming cuteness (that&#8217;s her requirement, by the way, not mine)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">the Geico Gecko<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">Ballroom dancing<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">the philosophical underpinnings of <em>Galaxy Quest<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Stick with those subjects and we&#8217;ll all be better off.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, in the time-honored tradition of making fun of one&#8217;s host, thereby ensuring lively interaction possibly involving folding chairs, I present to you a personal invitation from the webcast page to join us in a hitherto unknown dimension. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man&#8217;s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call&#8230;the TalkBackLive Zone.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/talkbacklive.gif\" alt=\"Screenshot\" width=\"281\" height=\"163\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another sign of the impending apocalypse: a live webcast interview of yours truly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-plain-silly","category-navel-gazing","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3504"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14264,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3504\/revisions\/14264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}