The PopCulteer
November 10, 2017

Thing are a bit introspective this week, as we devote the PopCulteer to happenings on The AIR, our own radio station, and talk about stuff coming up in this very blog in the near future.

The Third Shift Hits 50

Friday on The AIR it’s a very special evening as The Third Shift, our “man’s man” show hosted by Jay and Jarod, marks their fiftieth episode with a one-hour extravaganza.  You can listen to The Third Shift Friday at 9 PM with a special replay this Sunday at 7 PM at The AIR website, or on this particularly swell embedded radio player…

The boys have something very special planned this week, so make sure you tune in to find out what it is. Fifty episodes is a pretty huge milestone, and I imagine the occasion will require a rather intensive, double-length, bender.

Every Friday at 9 PM you can tune in to The AIR and catch up on booze, sports, babes, gadgets and general weekend tomfoolery with our resident “regular guys.”

Swing All Day On Veteran’s Day

Normally we replay The Third Shift Saturday evenings at 8:30 PM, but this week that timeslot is taken over by a very special marathon.

Regular readers of PopCult may be aware that I host a weekly program on The AIR devoted to Swing Music, called The Swing Shift. It can normally be heard Tuesday at 3 PM, with overnight marathons on Sundays and Thursdays. The marathons are very popular in Europe (reaching a worldwide audience is one of the more fun perks of internet broadcasting).

However, I was recently contacted through The AIR’s Facebook page and discovered that I have two loyal listeners here in the States who happen to be veterans of World War II. Their caregiver wrote to tell me that they really enjoy the way I mix new Swing revival music with the songs that they remember from their youth by the likes of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman and other greats of the Big Band era. She takes her laptop with her and lets them listen to the show during her shift.

The caregiver went on to tell me that neither gentleman was well enough to attend any Veteran’s Day activities this year and wondered if I could possibly run an extra episode of The Swing Shift this Saturday so that they could have something to listen to and enjoy. She’s working most of the day and would make sure they wouldn’t miss it.

It doesn’t take a lot to get me to run a marathon of The Swing Shift. The show is one of my favorite to produce for The AIR. I decided to thank these men for their service by scheduling a 24-hour marathon of the very best episodes of The Swing Shift that will begin Friday at Midnight. It’ll run all day long Saturday, so if you tune in, you can get hep to the jive along with a couple of American heroes.

That’s Swing All Day on Veteran’s Day on The AIR. You can listen at the embedded player above or at the website.

PopCult Gift Guide

Monday we begin The 2017 PopCult Gift Guide. The plan is to run three gift ideas every day for nearly three weeks, and then we’ll do one or two last-minute gift ideas a day the week after that. We will tell you about toys, music, books, DVDs, gadgets, and other cool things that you probably won’t see mentioned in other gift guides. Check PopCult Monday for our first three entries.

More PopCult Notes

During most of the time we run The 2017 PopCult Gift Guide the PopCulteer will be taking a hiatus. Our weekly Friday essay can be quite labor-intensive to write while I’m also juggling Gift Guide entires, a radio station and all our other regular PopCult features. I’ve only missed one or two weeks of The PopCulteer since I started it as part of this blog in April, 2009, but something had to give. The PopCulteer will return on December 8 with the Master List for The 2017 PopCult Gift Guide, and it’ll be back to normal the week after that.

But we will bring you our other regularly-scheduled posts, Monday Morning Art, Sunday Evening Video and The RFC Flashback, along with three posts on most days of the PopCult Gift Guide. You’ll have plenty of stuff to read. Check back here to see.