GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

posted by James Reel

    This morning I forgot to play Arizona Almanac, a 90-second feature produced by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum about plants and critters of the desert, after the 7:01 news. I have no excuses; I just overlooked it on the log, and dropped it in after the 8:01 news instead. Nobody, absolutely no one, called to complain or to find out what was going on. Listeners howl immediately over the slightest glitch with A Prairie Home Companion, but nobody seemed to notice the absence of Arizona Almanac, or at least they didn’t care enoug to complain. It’s a difficult feature for listeners to keep track of, because it airs only once a week and it’s so brief that if you flush a toilet—which many people are doing at that hour—you’ll miss it. It would be good for it to develop more of a following; it’s a painlessly informative little feature.
    When I worked at the Arizona Daily Star, editors would sometimes intentionally drop the horoscope or some other feature for a couple of days to see how many complaints would come in. If few people griped, the feature would be gone for good. Loss of the horoscope was one of two things that always drew a flood of complaints; the other, remarkably, was the absence of the comic strip “Mary Worth.”