Mayberry Challenge: You’ll feel like you’re 300 lbs tyring to run a 4-minute mile

The Challenge:

Give up traditional media for a week and listen only to WPAQ, The Voice of the Blue Ridge in Mount Airy, NC[1]➚. Listen to every bit - the preaching, the blue grass, the obituaries, the high school sports scores, the church pot luck announcements - everything. You can still get weather and news and whatnot from the web, just stay away from traditional media. (This assumes you spend most of your working day at a desk where you can do this, or have a Wi-Fi radio available.)

Then:
Turn on your local news or favorite cable outlet.

Prediction:
Your ears will get exhausted just listening and you’ll feel like you’re 300 lbs trying to run a 4-minute mile. But very soon you’ll develop this niggling appetite for more, and you’ll consume more, until you’re fat and lazy with empty facts and dull satisfying noise, and you’ll feed yourself again tomorrow, and the next day, until you again ask yourself why the hell you’re on someone else’s treadmill.

I’ve tried to give up traditional TV. I spend some time watching TV shows from my youth, like Kojak, Quincy, Bob Newhart, and I listen to books now rather than read them[2], and take in at least one OTR episode at night, maybe two if they’re short, and depend on PBS, NPR and WPRR➚ for most of my news and science. But I’m still drawn to CNN and MSNBC for news and opinion, especially as we ramp up to an election.

[1]
Mount Airy was Andy Griffith’s home town. Some of The Andy Griffith Show is based on his boyhood memories. I’ve never been there, but plan to. My Dad visited, got his hair cut at Floyd’s Barber Shop. Judging by WPAQ, the town has retained its values, despite TV Land’s attempt to turn it into a shrine.

[2]
Rework➚ by Jason Fried and starting The Exorcist➚ by William Peter Blatty (n beautiful stylist).

Started: 2012-01-18