I awaken to National Public Radio as the least possible evil.  It beats buzz, buzz, buzz, and every other radio station I can get where I live would be pretty much intolerable.  Caveat: I rant at public radio from time to time, but it still provides a service I value-every time A Prairie Home Companion is broadcast I forgive the past week's offenses, mostly.  

To the point: when the alarm went off at six o'clock this morning I awoke to Barack Obama's voice from Cairo-live.  The Takeaway was broadcasting the speech as it happened.  I was delighted-for about ten to fifteen minutes.  Then John Hockenberry's voice broke in over the radio to announce a brief break for station identification.  The Dumb dumdee dumb dumb, dumb dumbdee dumb dumb, dumb dumbdee dumb dumb dumb, bang bang! theme broke in followed by the local announcer telling me what everyone listening already knew, followed by announcing it was partly cloudy with sunshine due later and a cool high in the low sixties expected.  Back to the speech.  Ten minutes later, repeat the whole thing.  Back to the speech, repeat the whole thing.  By the third time, besides being steamed by the interruptions, I was awake enough to peer out the window into rain.  Do announcers ever look out the window? Aaargh!

Things got even worse at 7:00 when Morning Edition replaced The Takeaway.  Obama is still speaking live.  What does the Morning Edition Host do?  Announce that Obama is still speaking live, and then start interviewing talking heads so we listeners all can know what we're supposed to think about a speech that hasn't concluded yet!  Poor us, too dumb to understand what Obama is saying without help from people who haven't yet heard what he's saying.  Oh, I know they probably had scripts to parse, but still, I can only say double aaargh!  Make that a triple please.

O.K.  End of rant.  I'm going to read the speech and read it as carefully as Obama prepared it.  I'm not going to let the village elders tell me what he said, what that meant, what the subtleties in it were, how John Q. Muslim is going to react to it in Indonesia, or anything else.  When I've read it, and digested it, if I have anything worth saying about it, I might pop back in here to say it.  In the meantime, I'm glad I have two more days until A Prairie Home Companion comes on, so I can retain my mad at NPR a little while longer.