Too Funny, But True

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This almost sounds like something you'd find on the satirical site The Onion or a Monty Python or SNL skit. I found it almost too funny to be true. Last night as I was driving home from Nashville, I was listening to an all-news station out of Chicago (WBBM). Amid news about Barcelona, who was told "You're fired!" on this week's episode of The Presidential Apprentice, and Cubs and White Sox scores, they had news about the upcoming solar eclipse. Then the news anchor on WBBM said they would be covering it live on Monday. Let's pause, not for station identification, but to let that sink in. How is a radio station going to cover a visual event like a solar eclipse? Will they have a Herbert Morrison impersonator on the air, shouting, "Oh, the humanity!!!" at the peak of the eclipse? (If you don't know, Herbert Morrison was the announcer who broadcast the destruction of the Hindenburg over the radio in 1937.) Are they going to turn into a "classic rock" station and play things like "Dark Side of the Moon," "Total Eclipse of the Heart," "Blinded By the Light," and "Invisible Sun"? You may wonder why they still have AM radio (to answer your question, it's because of people like me who like to listen to distant stations at night or baseball games), and I completely understand that "talk radio" is about all that keeps AM radio even remotely "relevant" today. But trying to cover a solar eclipse on the radio is a bit of a stretch. Maybe Les Nesman can come out of retirement from WKRP and cover it. Here's a country song about the eclipse: