I may be a Buffyholic, but I know for a fact that I am not the worst case in the world. We will not be mentioning any names here today.

Ok, it has become clear that if I am to type any real content at this time, these juicy (if occassionally overplayed on your local ClearChannel affiliate) Linkin Park tunes must cease.

Speaking of radio, I made an unusally happy discovery a few minutes ago while I was driving home. Sick of hearing crap and commercials on every one of my presets, but wanting anything but a silent car ("why are you so petrified of silence?"), I set it to autoscan. Lo and behold, a new station had appeared where there had been nothing before (either that, or something so inconsequential that I didn't remember its existence).

Rewind for a moment. Last month, in the vicinity of San Antinio, I scanned the tuner for local stations, where, among other things, I found a station with nothing but pure dance tunes (mostly the pop variety, but also some light techno thrown in). Basicly nonstop hyper-energy music, 150 bpm minimum. As far as I could tell, they might have even dispensed of human announcers entirely, opting instead for brief (if overly crass) station ids between songs. But the music was fresh and good (at least to ears that hadn't heard it recycled ten zillion times every day all over the radio for months on end). I thought, "Man, Denver could use a station like this. There's really no stations that that play real dance music, and certainly not exclusively."

Well, until today. Today, my autoscan hit 102.1, and there it was. I don't think there was even a station at all at that frequency. But today, dance tunes, non-stop. I think I just found something to put in that preset where The Peak used to be. (Up till now, I had put it on KBCO as a temporary measure; they play the occassional good song, but are usually kind of weak and mushy.)

Now, I don't know which conglomorate owns this new station, but I like it, at least for now, mostly because it is actually something resembling a departure from the current tired crop of Denver radio. It wouldn't surprise me to find that it is an invention of the ClearChannel monstrosity, not least because of the apparently automated nature of the operation. But at least they were playing songs I hadn't heard a million times.

Though it sounds good now, how much I like this station next month will depend largely on how much variety goes into the playlist. If it turns out that the two songs I heard on the way home today end up being the same two songs I hear tomorrow, the day after that, and the week after that, then it will quickly become just as tiresome as every other station in town. We shall see. I ain't holdin my breath, but it's nice and unexpected that something new has appeared for the moment, regardless of whether it stays that way.

Moving on.

Yes, I know my content updates lately have been sparse. Sometimes, you get the vibe to type stuff, and sometimes you don't. As it is, rampant Buffyholism aside, a whole lot of things have happened lately that haven't been documented here.

(Not that Bitscape feels any compulsion to document every last bit of his life here. No, none at all.)

The semi-recent trend would be to write a series of hasty summaries about things that happened over the past $n days, but I don't really feel like doing that either. So I guess all you non-existent people will just have to be in the dark. Boo hoo.

Aren't I cruel?

Alright, alright. To avoid being arrested on charges of readership abuse, I'll throw in a few tiny snippets. Not summaries. Just random pieces from here and there.

...

Last Saturday night at the club. (If you don't know what "the club" refers to, try to guess based on ramblings from the past month. It ain't a trick question.) The DJ(s) were going utterly crazy. I recall the crowd dancing wildly to something resembling 40s jitterbug music, except it was being played with electronic instruments. Synth style. Absolutely insane.

Here is this place full of people, many of them dressed like they've come out for the goth revival -- black leather, collars, chains, etc -- dancing feverishly to jitterbug music?!? But it was hella fun. What else can be said? It got worse.

I don't know what those DJs were on. Maybe they were trying to see how far they could push it. Or maybe they were just... good. A few songs later (after having gotten back to the normal fare of Depeche Mode, along with some other standard bands)...

A familiar burst of sound came over the speakers. I started to dance to it, and then did a double take when I became fully conscious of what was being played. In this club?

I wasn't sure whether to dance or laugh. I think most of the people were just a bit bewildered. A few were apparently put off enough that they left the floor. I never though I'd see the day when Club Onyx would play Britney. But it happened.

Briefly. Midway through the first verse, they faded out the Britney, and brought in another song I wasn't familiar with, but whose rhythm and harmony patterns matched perfectly with Oops I did it Again. The genre was more in line with the club's usual fare, but throughout the song, you couldn't help but notice the similarity of notes on the backing instrumentation. A masterstroke, if I've ever seen one. lol.

But later in the evening, they cranked the Ministry. Hard. Oh yeah. Methinks I should spend more Saturday nights there.

...

Alright, I'm tired of typing now. Time to go feed the Buffyholism. More snippets later. Maybe.