Last weeks Voyager was pretty good. Another Seven of Nine/Doctor episode, though this time with Jeri Ryan getting most of the screen time out of the regulars. Ensign Kim, Seven, and the Doctor are in the Flyer when they run across a race involved in a war with photonics. They want the Doctor, who hides in Seven's Borg implants. The side effect is that the Doctor is in control of Seven's body, with Seven's consciousness dormant and only coming out when the Doctor returns to his portable holo-emitter. I like episodes where characters play each other or new characters. You can see that these people *can* actually act when they're not playing their regular character. Jeri Ryan does a good job acting like the Doctor, and if nothing else it's an opportunity for gender-changed jokes...

KIOI FM in San Francisco changed its format this past week. The "80's Weekend" that they ran when I was going to the Palo Alto Convention is now the format du jour. I tried to find information on the Web about this: their web site is now "under construction" and blank and I don't know any radio news sites. But I did find one article by someone written a few months ago. He said that KIOI was in serious trouble. It has one of the largest, most powerful transmitters in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, it also has one of the lowest ratings for an AC station (I assume that means Adult Contemporary). Its style of Hot-AC is not doing well throughout the US right now. Top-40 AC and Alternative-AC (like Alice) is doing better and the prediction was that there would be a format change soon. So that has come to pass.

My sister is all for 80's music so she's happy to have a nice clear 80's radio station that she can listen to at work, where her office is in the middle of the building. For me though, this is a radio I've been listening to for a over a decade, since I got to Berkeley. I first heard the Corr's "Runaway" and Alannah Myles' "Black Velvet" on KIOI. True, lately it's dropped to number three on the depth chart since I'm more into country music now. But there are a lot of good memories. Hated the Don Blue show (don't know if they kept him or not since I don't get up that early) -- although he was very popular and I think had a million dollar salary, highest in the country.

All the 80's music on the station though, it reminds me that growing up, I didn't like a lot of this music. Like anything else, categorizing a whole decade into one category means that you're really compressing many different styles of music into one monolithic "80's" label. Sure, the most popular songs are really good and recognizable, and when you have a decade to draw upon you could just stick with top 5 songs and be quite well. But there are still quite a few songs that when they're played I get this primal "I hate this song" feeling in my being. If I didn't like it when I was younger I'm not going to like it now, and now the feelings are stronger. The songs now have memories and feelings attached to them, and rather than fading into some distant attic of my mind those feelings are still fresh when I hear the song on the radio. Strange that...

Watching the Dixie Chicks and Faith Hill tv specials, I look at these concerts and I think "man, the venues are huge!" Like they're done in NFL stadiums, which I think they are. How can people go to a concert (or a football game for that matter) and sit so far away that the performers are these little little figures. And for a concert they're not really moving that much even. I'm glad I saw Faith Hill in a small venue in San Jose, less than 10 000 people. For Britney Spears we were sitting on the lawn and you could barely see her. Sure there are big screens but the cameras focus only the main performer so you lose some of the whole effect of the show. Might as well just buy the concert video...