Warning: Venting ahead.

"Home was a condo on the fifteenth floor of a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The walls were solid concrete. A foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets their hearing aid go and have to watch game-shows at full volume. Or when a volcanic blast of debris that used to be your furniture and personal effects blows out of your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails flaming into the night. I suppose these things happen." -- Not Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Unfortunately, it seems no amount of concrete will help you in the event of an electrical failure. Nothing as dramatic as a concussive act of anti-consumerist rebellion, but it was inconvenient. This morning at 7:30 something startled me awake. My alarm clock was blinking 12:00... 12:000... etc., so obviously something had happened to the power. Trying the lights, I found that they came on weakly, and the high-power appliances like the computer and TV were AWOL. Looking out the peephole I discovered only inky blackness in the corridor outside. Some kind of ticking or buzzing coming from the utility room on my floor told me that something nasty had happened inside it, which I can only suppose was the source of whatever noise woke me up. So my next concern is, "Fire...?" But it seemed to be okay. Still, I was left with a dark apartment where nothing worked, so I put on some clothes and headed out to give the building management some time to deal with the situation. And of course this had to happen on a holiday weekend...

All of which leads me to the observation that Rivershore Towers is not my favourite building. It's not horrible, or I would have moved out instead of just switching apartments like I did a few months ago, but bad impressions pile up. The power failure is just the top of a deepening pile that, to date, includes: the wonky elevators which, despite repeated repair visits, keep failing to line up on their floors and even trapping people; the vandalism to lights and windows around the place until the idiots responsible finally got caught and thrown out; the rather unsavoury character of some of the neighbours, including the house just under my window that underwent a home invasion last year, complete with shots fired; the foiled robbery attempt at the Mac's Milk on the corner a couple of weeks ago (although convenience stores and robberies go together like, well, robberies and convenience stores); the gas station at the other corner that was caught stealing customers' debit-card PINs last year; the complete lack of grocery stores or any other useful services closer than the corner of Walker and Ottawa; et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Okay, venting finished. Thanks for sticking with me.

An odd feeling came over me this afternoon as, sitting in one of the less-unhealthy fast-food joints around, I began to focus on the piped-in music. Inexplicably, they were playing an endless series of clips, each from 15 to 30 seconds long, of one song after another: What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding , So Far Away , How Long , Let's Dance (the album version), et cetera. At first I thought it must be a call-in contest to win money by identifying and calling in the correct song titles, but as one clip followed another it became obvious that couldn't be it. So obviously it was an attention-getting stunt of some kind, and it worked: I started listening in more closely to the DJ's occasional patter to find out what was going on, and guess what?

The River is back! Triple-A radio returns to the Detroit (slash-Windsor) market! What prompted this? I have to conclude it's a consequence of WDET abandoning its daytime music programming. Some marketing drone somewhere has identified an opportunity in the 30-to-50, former-English-or-Communications-major demographic. They'll be doing the clip thing all weekend and going to full-length tunes Monday morning. Plus, since it's at the same old spot on the dial, 93.9 FM, there's CanCon to boot! What's not to like?