"All kindsa shit for sale"

I have mentioned more than once that Johnson's Shut-Ins tends to be a bit of a dead zone, a black hole for cell service, the Internet, over-the-air reception of almost anything with two exceptions: two local FM radio stations, Froggy 96 and the 98 the Boot. I'm not sure just how local they are, as in where their studios are, but one of them proclaims it's proudly serving Ironton, Farmington, and Fredericktown. That's about as local as it's possible to get. Both play country, although one tends to play more old stuff -- Tom T. Hall, the Statler Brothers -- while the other does contemporary -- Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert. We kind of alternate between the two when we want some background noise.

Both stations are also typical of small town, rural radio. Every morning the Boot wishes people happy birthday and does birth announcements. Naturally, then in the evening we're treated to the Boot telling us who all has a funeral coming up in the next day or two: they do death notices and funeral announcements, if not full-blown obituaries. Both stations carry farm reports: announcements from sales barns, how much beef cattle are selling for, how the market looks for dairy products and other commodities. We figured out one is better at local news than the other -- one kept mentioning a local high school being sanctioned (their basketball team had to forfeit the last half of the season so lost their district title) but never said why; the other station tossed in the fact that sanctions resulted from alcohol violations by a couple players. And both radio stations have a Trading Post, which air at different times in the day.

People call in with really odd combinations of items they're trying to unload: a box full of VHS tapes, a dozen 2-week old bronze turkey poults, and a 2015 Mercury boat motor valued at about $3,000. Each caller is limited to 3 items and they're allowed only 3 calls a week. Which means the callers to the Boot show up on Froggy's tradio and vice versa -- after you've listened a few times you start to recognize the same ads repeating themselves: the antique dining room set and cabinets, the shotgun that's a really good deal (it tempted me and I don't even have a use for it), the VHS tapes that no one's ever going to want. And now that it's definitely gardening season, some time before we leave the park I expect to hear a call similar to the one in the clip below:

Secret to staying cool in Hotlanta

Web radio. WTIP from Lake Superior's North Shore. The weather forecast for Grand Marais, Minnesota (current temp -- 48; predicted high -- 70), is definitely easier on the mind than Atlanta's smog alerts (today it's red for ozone, yellow for other pollutants).

Add in the fact it's community radio with real live humans sitting in the studio talking about what they see walking down the main street in Grand Marais, the music mix is not top 40 dreck, and the accents sound like home. . . I listened to this station while living in the white dorm (aka the clean dorm; the slobs always seemed to end up in the green dorm next door) at Apostle Islands NL back in 2002 -- it came in clear because the signal could come straight across The Lake to Little Sand Bay while stations that were physically closer, like in Washburn, were on the wrong side of the Bayfield Peninsula. Rediscovered it while in the U.P. (sitting close to the highest point in Michigan no doubt helped) and, although they never mentioned streaming, it occurred to me that if WOJB out of Hayward, Wisconsin (operated by the Lac Court Oreilles Ojibwa community; it is the station to listen to if a person wants to stay current with what's happening in Indian country) was available on teh intertubes, WTIP probably was, too. (And, yes, I know Atlanta has Radio Free Georgia, a great progressive station, but their weather reports won't allow me to live in a fantasy world.)