Original site back up

The original, pre-Inauguration Day site is back up.

Fake John Hogan Blog.

So, this site is unnecessary and is now officially laid off.

Pay Cuts

So, I'm sitting in my office. Well, my cube, and I see Randall in the mirror I had attached to my computer monitor so nobody could sneak up on me and catch me doing my fantasy football "work." It's not one of those plastic mirrors, either. It's an actual rear-view off a 1971 El Camino. I immediately knew something was up, because he was actually "knocking" on the virtual door I have taped off.

Uh-oh. He NEVER does that. Usually, he just waltzes in (although sometimes it's a foxtrot in, Saturday Night Fever in, or occasionally a robot in, when he's had too many Red Bulls after lunch) and sits down, immediately picking up and playing with my Hulk Hogan action figure.

Well, this time, he knocked and when I spun around in my chair, he asked if I had a minute or two to talk. I knew it. We were breaking up.

Randall sat down and started right in on what he wanted to talk about. "Johnny," he said, "Mark and I are biting the bullet and taking a pay cut. We'd like you to do the same." While he was talking, he wasn't looking at me, but eyeing Hulk Hogan. GOD, I wish he'd keep his hands off my Hogan.

"Wow. That's difficult," I said. "I've got expenses. I just leased a new car," nodding out the window at my new Honda Element. "Plus, the feed bill on those cows is ridiculous." Every month I get the bill for feeding my livestock options, and I'm wondering if they're feeding those damn bovines Prime Rib or something.

"I know," Randall replied, "Mark and I are feeling it. I'm having to think about cutting my first name down to one 'L.' The gold engraving for new stuff I buy is just outrageous. Thank God when great-great-grandpa came here from the old country, he shortend his name to 'Mays.' Otherwise, everytime I bought something, the engraver would have to inscribe 'Randall Mayscenphiouzwicz. That would so totally suck."

I nodded. See, another lesson. Everyone's got problems. I can be so self-centered sometimes.

"Sure, Randal," I said, making sure I pronounced only one of the Ls. "I'm in."

"Excellent, Johnny. You're a team player. You know, all great CEOs do this, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Fahrid..." Well, not Fahrid, but those other guys definitely do it." He clapped me on the back, took one more covetous look at my Hogan action figure and started out. Then, he stopped short and turned around again.

"OK, so I'll have Accounting reduce your salary to $1 per year. That's before taxes, of course. You'll have withholding from that. You know, it'll be a lot more effective to do it retroactive too. Let's say to...last November. Way to go! High five!" He put his hand up in the high-five position, but before I could get mine up and do the HF (which I've NEVER gotten to do with Randall...Er, sorry, RandaL), he dropped his hand, spun around, pretended to open the virtual door to my cube and walked out.

Leaving the damn door open. At least I still have Hulk.

Hogan out.

We're in the newspaper

I know, you're thinking "there are still NEWSPAPERS out there?"

Well, at least in New York there is, and the New York Post has earned a big fat bitch-slap from the Hoganator with this piece of crap I came across while downloading Friday's Garfield.

Clear Channel Plans Revamp.

I guess the cat's out of the oven. Tuesday is the day...AFTER MONDAY!

LOL! Snap!

There are numerous errors in the story.

A precise headcount for the layoffs could not be obtained. Clear Channel has about 30,000 employees worldwide.

Right. 30,000 employees. Come on! I've never counted everyone. I mean, I tried one time, but they all kept moving around, so I'd count some of them twice and would have to start over. Then, Mark kept screwing with me by saying things like "four hundred eighteen, two thousand eight hundred and seven, twenty-nine..." Annoying. I hope he's one of the ones who gets fired.

Sources said an initial round of layoffs is expected to commence next Tuesday - not coincidentally the same day President-elect Barack Obama is to be sworn into office. Clear Channel managers are hoping they can slip in the layoffs while the press is preoccupied with Inauguration Day festivities, sources said.

LOL! Barack Obama?! That Hawaiian guy? Get a grip. We're doing it all on Tuesday because American Idol is on that night, and everybody will be too busy watching those idiots who can't sing, but think they're going to be the next American Idol to care about some DJs getting the boot and having to go back to selling drugs for a living.

To be sure, Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners took a hard look at Clear Channel's expense base in the due diligence phase of their $17.9 billion acquisition, and identified hundreds of millions of dollars of costs that could be taken out of the company. While they always planned to restructure the company, sources said that the soured economy forced them to expedite the timeframe for the cuts.

Well, I can't refute this part. Mainly because I'm not sure exactly what "refute" means, but we are cutting some expense. Like free toilet paper. I think what this means is, if you're an advertiser, and one of our salesmen come into your business, whatever you do, do NOT shake hands with him.

No charge for that advice.

I can't lie (well, I can, I suppose, but this blog is my truth-out, so I won't). We are firing some people, but it won't be as many people as you might think. In fact, after much consideration, many meetings and a session with a really, really good phrenologist, I've decided on the final criteria for termination in this difficult time:

If you drive a Pontiac Trans-Am (any year) or are a male named "Carl," you are fired as of Tuesday.

If your name is "Carl" AND you drive a Trans-Am, you will be beaten with a pool cue on your way out, and will receive no severance pay at all. The local HR Director will do the beating, so if your HR person is small, or kind of squeamish about beating people up, consider yourself one lucky bastard, Carl.

Now, many of you are probably asking yourself "why should the Carls among us bear the brunt of this economic downturn? I LIKE Carl. He helped me change my tire once, always pays a little more than his share at Chilis when we go there for someone's birthday, and after all, drives a Trans-Am! Why him?"

I'll tell you.

Because we've been in this industry for a long time, we know what we're doing, and Carl is a douche-bag.

Hogan out.

A Holocaust?

Reading one of my pain-in-the-butt whiners today, he compared what's going on in our business with the Meryl Streep-introducing movie "Holocaust." Man, if only Tovah Feldshuh worked here. THAT would be cool. I'd give 4 of our 5 Ryan Seacrests for that!

What? You thought there was only one Ryan Seacrest? LOL!

Listen up, Kings of Comedy, there are FIVE Ryans. Did you really think one guy could do all that stuff? Host American Idle, be the next Dick Clark (who, Ryan gives weekly blood transfusions to, keeping the Dickster alive, by the way), do AT40, a radio show on KIIS-FM and syndicate a show to little towns like East Christ-It's-Cold-Here, North Dakota?

There are 5, Clive. 5 smiling, messy hair, boyish grin robo-talent scoop of goodness Ryans. We call them Ryan 1, Ryan 2, Ryan 3, Ryan 4 and (for some odd reason) Ryan Q. The one on American Idle is Ryan 3, who is actually the tallest, but also the gassiest, and that's one of the reason he and Simon don't get along. Paula was dating Ryans 2 and Q for awhile, but that kind of petered out.

Anyway, back to the "Holocaust" thing. Look, I'm not sure why Jerry picked THAT particular Meryl Streep vehicle to describe radio. I think a more appropriate comparison would be "The French Lieutenants Woman," "Kramer vs. Kramer" or better yet, "Falling in Love," because I really like Bob De Niro, especially when he's in one of his meatier roles, like Boris Badinoff in "Rocky and Bullwinkle."

But "Holocaust?" Nah. We're a funny company, and that's not a funny movie. It's all about men wearing hats, lots of boots, and talking with a funny accent that isn't at all like Texas.

"Falling in Love." That's what we're all about. Yep.

Really Ticked This Morning

I've been filling up my Twitter page with more tweets than Gordon Gecko (that guy in the movie Wall Street who went to prison and came out the spokesman for Geico Car Insurance) working on his takeover of Blue Star Airlines.

But, I'm not wearing suspenders. Not on the outside, anyway.

There are a couple guys who write blogs that are super-hyper-pain-in-the-ass-ful critical of my work, and I've about had it. I won't mention names, so let's call them "Tom and Jerry" because...Well, those are their names. Screw coming up with fake pseudonyms for these guys, I save all my creativity for the air-chair.

And BTW, yea, to the guy who posted on one of those "I can do radio better than anyone - even Arthur Godfrey sucked" fools on one of those message boards, you were trying to be funny, but as a matter of fact, I DO do mornings on 17 of our stations. Snap that, Abe.

Tom and Jerry are pissing me off because they're not playing by the rules. We're a great country built on one all-abiding principle, that sets the stage for the free market, the foundation of our democracy. And it's this:

If someone's in your way, you can buy them, fire them and get them out of your way. Neither of these guys stay bought. I don't get it. I'm looking into getting their citizenship yanked, hopefully before President Bush leaves office. Try publishing your little rants and muck-raking from somewhere outside the good ol' US, where they don't HAVE the internet.

Chumps.

Borat gets fired

You may have read in the trades that my buddy John Gehron, who I fired in Chicago and went to work for Oprah making new Marx Brothers movies (didn't the dumbass know those guys were dead?) got canned by Her Highness and is sending out tapes and resumes? I heard he may do some weekends for that Jack station in Chicago while he looks.

Anyway, a lot of people don't know it, but Gehron's also an actor, and is doing pretty well. What? You didn't know that, Sir Isaac Newton? Have you heard of a little movie called "Borat?"



You were probably one of those morons who thought that movie was a real documentary, like A Mighty Wind or something.

God, having a big brain is hard sometimes, when you have to explain everything to everyone.

New Programming Orders

Okay, my lovelies, it's time for a reshaping of the Programming Operations of our newly private Band of Brothers...Well, and Sisters, too. Our Band of...Siblings, I guess.

Damn. Just doesn't have the same ring to it.

As you know, we own the company that provides the product that plays all of our songs, commercials, promos and adlets, blinks, winks, breathers and...What's that little commercial that's 0 seconds long, where no audio comes out, it's just the DJ thinking about the sponsor?

Oh yea, the thought. Boy, have those been successful, by the way. Can you believe it? We've got sponsors who are playing like a hundred dollars a spot for just having the friggin' DJ think about their product for like 10 seconds during a commercial break.

What idiots. Like having a DJ think about your product for 10 seconds is going to make listeners buy something. They'd have to think about it for at least a :60 to really have a chance for the brainwaves to travel out enough to be noticed.

Advertisers are such suckers.

Anyway, so we own this Profit company, which is really misnamed, because they ain't bringin' home the bacon, if you know what I mean. So, they're out. We're rebuilding that system.

I was reading an interesting article recently about the internets, which (and I didn't know this), is really just a complicated set of tubes, like the old department store thing where they put your money in a cylinder, which goes into a tube and it gets sucked all the way to the office. Well, we're determined to stay on the cutting edge of technology, so we're adopting that system. All of our stations will be connected to this series of tubes, and when a song is supposed to play, it'll be put in a tube in San Antonio, sucked to the station, say in Los Angeles, it comes out the other end, right into the player, and Ryan Seacrest pushes the button. PRESTO! The song plays. Well, in reality, the guy who pushes the button for Ryan will push the button, because that's his job, and Ryan doesn't know a button from his left elbow.

Now, you're probably thinking "how the hell are you going to send an mp3 down a sucking tube?"

Good question.

No, it's not, you moron. That's a TERRIBLE question. Where have you been the past year? Mp3s are so 2008 (and, well, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, and most of 2002 for that matter). We're going to play everything from here on off a new technology that involves magnetic tape that is put in loops inside a cartridge that looks like an 8-track (which it isn't, by the way - that'd be so 1968, 1969,1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978 and part of 1979). The new technology is called a CART, which is short for...Well, CART. Because if you have a lot of them, you have to haul them around on a CART.

So, some guy in San Antonio (probably Mark) will pick the song a station's going to play, put the CART into the TUBE and close the door. The cart travels through the tube to the station, and goes right into the CART MACHINE so dumbass Ryan doesn't even have to do that. His button-boy presses the button after he's done his "blah blah blah oh, you're so hot Paris Hilton," and "oh, Simon Cowell, you have the worst teeth in the world, blah blah blah."

The song plays, we get the ratings and life is good.

I know this is all new to you guys who don't spend your lives eating, breathing and burping technical stuff like Popular Electronics, but it's the future. Get with it, or get gone.

Hogan out.