It has been over a year since I listened to the radio while driving. My car's antenna cable was just long enough to reach the left side of the back of the radio, but doesn't reach if the jack is on the right. For a while I had my last radio installed upside down to make it reach, but that was more annoying than not having radio. When I installed a CD player I left the cable disconnected and gave up on radio once and for all.

From time to time I would crawl up under the dash and try to yank things around to get some more slack or figure out how to disconnect the cable and install a longer one. Finally I got fed up and cut the cable and spliced in a few more inches of coax and got it working again.

It didn't take long to see why I didn't miss radio much. Drive time music programming is a one-in-ten chance of finding something you can enjoy, as often as not something you already own. Commercials are as crass as ever. That leaves the mental wasteland of news and talk radio. Here are a few earaches I've collected recently:

• Some moron solving the recession by calling on the rich to "pay back" the kindness done to them by the economy by spending their wealth away.
• A guy going on about race relations, repeatedly describing recent cases of intolerance as the "last gapses" of something. He turned out to be the much-published Cornell West, so I'll cut him some slack and suppose that metathesis is a feature of his speech. (Elsewhere he was sicced for the phrase "truth lies prostate.")
• Noam Chomsky explaining that some banana republic in South America is actually oh-so democratic.
• The "morning zoo" idiots making the most of a report on germs in public, asking each other what surface they would least want to lick.
• The dreaded DJ spot, wherein the host, instead of semi-apologetically calling for a commercial break, turns and stabs you in the back with an ad of his own! One was going on about his new Pontiac G8, saying how a gas station manager came out of the office to ask about the car, then a construction worker stopped him to talk about it, even the Burger King drive-through workers were impressed by his new ride!