Speaking Of Broadcasting

      I have long preferred to listen to radio news in the morning while I catch up on dishes,* make breakfast and rearrange the kitchen clutter.  These days, there's not a lot of news on the radio in Indianapolis, so it's the local NPR station† or nothing, unless I dig out a shortwave receiver and go hunting.

     This morning, closing a long story about an Olympic field hockey player who had part of a broken finger amputated rather than repaired so he could make it to the Paris Olympics, NPR played nearly all of what sounded like the John Williams arrangement of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the inspiring fanfare used for most U. S. network TV coverage of the Olympics since 1964, across two different networks.  The TV networks are protective of it; NBC was a few years getting the rights to the music after they wrestled Olympic coverage away from ABC and if you decide it'd be a great accompaniment to your "Olympics tire sale" commercial, better lawyer up and buckle in for a bumpy ride that will end in a crash.  Public radio sometimes gets a pass, on a "You wouldn't hit a skinny kid with glasses, would you?" basis and a tenuous extension of Fair Use: even big corporations don't like to get caught looking like a bully.  Or they may have worked something out with NBC, which is effectively out of the radio network business these days.

     One thing for sure: every time I hear those big kettledrums lead into that uplifting theme from the brasses, it chokes me up.  And I'm not even much of a sports fan. (Here's an interesting piece on music for the Olympics, with plenty of examples.)
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* Judge me if you must, but several dropped ceramic mugs, drinking glasses and nice plates back, I decided that if I was sleepy, I wasn't going to do the dishes after dinner, just scrape them, rinse them and let them soak until morning.  It was the trying to sort out razor-sharp shards from slippery, soapy silverware while sleepy that convinced me.
 
† They've got a local news department as least as good as the best county-seat AMs had forty years ago, which counts as pretty darned good these days. Without a subscription to the crumbling, tattered remains of the local newspaper, how else would I find out about scandals involving city government officials?