If getting up at 6 isn't depressing enough this morning, I get greeted with a nauseatingly cheery e-mail from Sirius announcing their merger with XM. (I'd heard rumors about this last year but I was praying they were just rumors and would not come to fruition.) I left Sirius almost a year ago to get away from their suck-ass service and now it looks like I'll be stuck with them again unless they really mean what they say and actually DO intend to give us the best of both services.

So what will we get from SiriuX (Xirius?)?

Will we still get a single traffic report for our city with XM's mostly competent reporters and reports, or will we get stuck with Sirius' abominable two-city share and bumbling reporting (like telling us a collision is in the left lane eastbound rather than in the right lane westbound—big difference when you're stuck in the westbound mess!—or completely ignoring an accident although it's so bad that traffic has been totally stopped for a helicopter landing so that someone can be medevac'd to the nearest hospital, or just recently, listening to the traffic "reporter" spend the entire report musing about how the cold weather tomorrow will affect traffic then rather than giving us the skinny on the traffic issues taking place now)?

Will we still get good channels like Escape (beautiful music) and Sonic Theatre (book readings and radio plays) and Cinemagic (movie music) (none of which Sirius has) and separate channels for 1950s and 1960s music and for Standards and for 1940s music like XM has or will we get none of the first three and Sirius' mixed 50s/60s (which includes only rock music) and mixed Standards/40s channel (Sirius apparently being under the belief that Standards and 1940s music are the same thing)?

And if we do luck out and get a separate 1940s channel, will we get Sirius' hideously restrictive playlist that just plays the most well-known 1940s music rather than all 1940s music like XM does—you know, "Take the 'A' Train" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and "Sentimental Journey" are not the only 1940s songs that exist—not to mention the cool retro news XM gives us at 12 p.m./ 4 p.m. and the top ten music list for a certain 1940s year we get at 2 p.m.)?

Will we keep Take 5 (a rather entertaining women's channel) or will it be dumped in favor of the Oprah channel (yawn—what's next, the Dr. Phil channel)? Will we get to keep the two Canadian comedy channels, which have some hysterically funny British and Canadian comedians?

Will we get XM's New Age channel, which actually plays some Windham Hill and Narada frequently or do we get stuck with the lugibrious strains of the funereal New Age Music that's on Sirius?

Will we get four good, separate channel Christmas stations at Christmastime (not to mention Radio Hanukkah?) like XM has or will we get Sirius' Christmas abortions which take over regular channels and play mostly modern Christmas stuff like NSync and Barenaked Ladies—and the same playlist over and over and over every six hours (how many times can you play Josh Grogan singing "Believe" anyway; isn't every two hours a bit much)? I really enjoyed XM's Holiday Traditions in December! They had a playlist, too, but you usually didn't hear a repeat song for a couple of days, not every six hours. And you got good singers like Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Andy Williams, Amy Grant, Johnny Mathis, etc., not inspid boy bands and anorexic girl singers. And XM's Classical Christmas station was fabulous—lots of standard carols, not just "church music," by the Cincinnati and Boston Pops and the Philadelphia Symphony.

(Sirius' playlists suck out the nose. When we go out on weekends James is either playing Classic Vinyl or the 60s channel and it's the same damn songs, over and over. If I hear Janis Joplin croak out "Me and Bobby McGee" one more time, I'm going to hurl. It's almost as bad as "The Christmas Shoes.")

Will we get Sirius' ridiculous specialty channels like the Rolling Stone channel and Elvis channel and two (count 'em) Howard Stern channels? (I know that just because I don't care for Stern that there aren't people who like him, but two channels? What can Howard Stern possibly say that would be worth two channels? I wouldn't have even listened to Don Adams talk for 24 hours on two different channels. Might we at least get "The Jerry Doyle Show" back, f' god's sake? In a sea of rabid liberals and rabid conservatives, Jerry most of the time seemed like the voice of sanity.

I have a Roady XT with 30 channel preset capability. All but two of those channels are programmed. With Sirius I only had an 18 channel preset capability and I was hard pressed to fill all of those! The only thing I missed when I left Sirius was the Discovery Channel station, and then all they seemed to play when I was driving home from work was the stupid Wedding Story program. Who wants to listen to a bunch of women buying overpriced dresses?

Sigh...when you find something good, it always goes away.

Labels: news, radio

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:00:00 AM

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