All the Best Ones Have Been Semites

We have Sirius satellite radio in the car because we couldn't get the color and the side airbags without taking the radio so we took the radio. I did not subscribe to the service for over a year because we have two NPR stations here in the Bay Area, and those two were keeping me quite happy during my commute -- which is only three days a week, four tops -- so why pay for what seemed to be 80 channels of music I dislike?

(I wish I liked at least some contemporary music. But if it wasn't written by dead people, particularly dead black Americans or dead white Europeans, I really have very little interest, very little.)

But my sister and her husband were coming to town and more or less to show off I subscribed and discovered it is worth $13 a month. A good jazz station. A couple good classical stations. Four NPR stations, plus 24 hours of BBC news. I judge it cost effective.

I did not subscribe because Howard Stern was on his way. Yesterday he arrived. I was in the car in the middle of the afternoon, and -- as a student of the culture might -- tuned to Howard 100. A group of what I guessed were acolytes were doing a roundtable on Howard's first show, rehashing it, spreading the kudos, taking phone calls from fans who found it all rather and pretty generally awesome.

And I thought. If it's a few hours of Howard and many more hours of studying the sacred texts, though in general simply regurgitating the sacred texts for they resist both paraphrase and exegesis, I think what we are experiencing here is an L. Ron Hubbard moment.

At some point down the road will they hide the body or will there be a resurrection, which should be quite possible as we move into a future of virtual everything.

In the beginning were the words, and the words were Howard and Howard was the words. And I was there.

Almost. If not at the beginning at least at the roundtable.