I'm in junior high jazz band playing the tenor saxophone. The band practices before school on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so to get there on time my Dad drops me off just after seven. He habitually listens to the morning news on public radio during his commute to work, so twice a week all winter I listen to Carl Kasell re-cap the previous day's market activity while riding through Palmer. I probably know more about the Dow, S&P, NYSE, and even more notably, oil prices, than any other 13 year old. On just about any given day I can spout off, oh yeah, West Texas Intermediate is currently trading for $8.77 per barrel and Alaska North Slope Crude is at $6.93 per barrel. Analysts predict that oil futures are bottoming out right now and will start surging upwards this summer.

Now it's the summer after my sophomore year of college and I commute to Anchorage to work at the state Department of Transportation building by the airport. On my lunch break, desperate to get out of cubeland, I sit in my car eating lunch while listening to Talk of the Nation with Neil Conan. How did Neil Conan get this job? He's pathetic! He stutters, can't deal with callers, and even ends conversations by saying “bye-bye”! Who even says “bye-bye”? I suppose his incompetence is quaint and endearing, in a cutely pathetic sort of way. Oh, thank God today is Friday and it's Ira Flatow instead; he's much less of a loser. I guess I shouldn't be so hard on Neil. After all, he shows up every day and is clearly trying as hard as he can, fostering debate and involving listeners in the conversations, even if he stammers through most of it.

Four and a half more hours in cubeland is more than I can take and I'm jubilant at 5 o'clock rolling around. My loud voice makes me terribly suited to the prairie dog shit-talking of my coworkers. Everybody in our quadrant of the building hears everything I say in my uncontrollably booming voice so I usually say nothing at all—just keep to myself and slug through another boring day. When I go out to my car at the end of the day the radio dial is still set on public radio and, depending on when I leave, it's either All Things Considered or Fresh Air. I like the names of those shows better than the shows themselves. You know? It's like, All Things Considered: we considered all things, or Fresh Air, this show is a breath of Fresh Air. As nice as the names are, the rock stations actually play music at this time of the day, not the crude and annoying morning shock jocks. Time to rock out on the commute home.

It's Saturday evening and I'm probably about eight years old. My parents are lounging around in the living room drinking cocktails and bullshitting about their respective weeks. The radio is blasting a most agreeable mix of Bob Marley and UB40. This is Prince Albert's (pronounced Albairt) reggae hour and perhaps the only public radio programming that at any point in my life I will miss. Many years later I'm at a party talking about UB40 and some random person tells me that the guy from UB40 is white. I fiercely denounce that notion as utterly ridiculous and emphatically denounce the party-goer making this accusation as a moron. Later, I find out that I was the real moron because the guy from UB40 is in fact white, a fact I still have trouble forcing myself to accept. I mean, c'mon! It's UB40! UB40 can't be white!

Feel free to quote me on that last part.

“UB40 can't be white!” -Furious M