Bill Ryan's Other Blog

Apparently Google has recently indexed some of my Phil Hendrie Show posts and I”m getting a lot of traffic on them.  Phil has a lot of content available on  his website, and I don’t want to do anything that would stop you from buying a Backstage pass. In fact, the best way to convince me to let you access my archive is to send me copy of your backstage pass receipt (with any information you consider private redacted).  With that said, a lot of the stuff I’ve gotten isn’t available for sale anywhere so I’m not cutting into his sales by making it available.

If you have a backstage pass, you’ll notice that several years are only available in streaming format.  That sucks.  So, I wrote a program to go out, grab the streams and make a big mp3 out of them.   For each year that there’s only streaming content in the Phil Hendrie Show archive – I can help you one of two ways.

Way 1 is to give you access to an archive I have.  However there’s years of content here.  Each show is roughly 50 MB although some are larger.  There’s 3 years worth of content here so as you can imagine, Way 1 might not be of tremendous help to you (and yes, my generosity only goes so far – i’m not really willing to dump a few terabytes of content up on a site to give away for free while paying megabucks in bandwidth charges).  I’m also willing to burn some DVD’s for you.  But since I”m not in the DVD business – I can only do so many. If you have any vintage stuff of his that I don’t have, I’d definitely be glad to trade. And I’m willing to hand out freebies up until the point it gets too expensive or takes up too much time. I’m good like that.

Way 2 is to give you the program I wrote. You’ll need a current backstage pass to use it.  But it’ll go out and crawl his site.  From there it’ll take the streams and make shows out of them.  I made this for myself so I don’t have a lot of documentation on it – but it’s extremely easy to use (Select a Date, Select a clip or “Entire Show”, select an output file location, hit “Create”)

In addition, I’ve been getting more and more stuff from the Miami days.  If you’ve never heard him back then, you really want to hear this stuff. The show was much more Raw back then and much more funny/rude.  This was way before Janet’s wardrobe malfunction brought hellfire from the FCC so yah, it was a much different show.  Most of the stuff i have is 94-96 although I have bits of pieces of earlier stuff.  And I’ve got several vintage bits like:

• Bobby Dooley – Cat Sex, Merry Gone With the Wind Kwanzaa, Bobby Visits Dachau
• Mavis Leonard – All you can eat Negro
• Pastor William Rennick – Christmas Pageant, You Islam, Werewolves
• Chris Norton – Chandra Levy, Teach your man to dance, Banging the boss’ wife, Purple Vein Productions
• Dave Oliva/Brass Vulenueva – Credit cards, clean your plate, I’m gonna be LAPD, Mamba #5, Blue El Camino

Make sure you’re following Phil on twitter if you aren’t already.  And you may want to follow me too as I frequently tweet about stuff I’m giving away.

[tags]Bobby Dooley, Phil Hendrie, Phil Hendrie Show, Mavis Leonard, Pastor William Rennick, Chris Norton, Dave Oliva, Neil Rogers, All you can eat Negro, You Islam, Merry Gone with the Wind Kwanzaa[/tags]

In my The Kids are Alright post, I used the example of Jackie Seal to illustrate a perfect example of how smart today’s kids are (and you gotta love her choice of wall paper which I’m sure she did herself), all the while getting  a really unfair rap.  In fact, for every clueless apathetic teenager I run into, I usually run into several more that are sharp, savvy and motivated.  Even looking at my 10 year old daughter… I love to goof on her about how terrible the cartoons she watches are compared to my day, I love to goof on Hannah Montana and I love to goof on her about Webkins… but I bet she reads more in any given week than me and my friends read in 3 months (and yes, I was a book worm at 10.  I didn’t become a partying degenerate until I was 14).  At that age, I was pestering my mom to take me to Dadeland Mall so I could get some new video games (at 10, I had just graduated from using an Atari 2600 to playing grown up games on my Atari 800 – with a bitchin tape drive).  She has strong political opinions, has a good command of current events and is always interested in learning about what’s ever on the news.  She’s a very smart and motivated girl and so are her friends. 

But everyone thinks their own kids are smart and motivated (mine really is though   ). There are times, particularly when I’m being cynical, that I look at the comments on YouTube (especially ones revolving Hip-Hop Beefs) and think the end of the world is around the corner.  I think back to when I read the Bell Curve and ignoring the racial aspects, think, Yikes, the whole Cognitive Elite scenario is coming true.  But the truth is, I know quite a few very well educated people (with post-graduate degrees in real subject matters) who would be hard pressed to hop on a computer, let alone register for YouTube and start casting snarky insults. 

My /b/eloved 4Chan is often cited as a horrific place where young gremlins and malcontented idiots hang out.  The average /b/tard is typically portrayed to be little more than Beavis or Butthead, but with a computer.  Every loudmouth that get schooled on the net loves to throw out the whole “fat loser who lives in his mom’s basement and plays video games all day” cliche’ – which is often resulting from a bad case of projection)  Yet these same young ‘morons’ have pulled off countless internet hoaxes, have pulled off some impressive hacks, are the creators of tons of famous web sites and are responsible for just about every well-known meme on the net. [If you want to talk about idiotic douchebags on the Internet – I present Exhibit E).  Most people have no idea who M00t is, but he’s ostensibly one of the most accomplished internet entrepreneurs the internet has known.  Ask Sarah Palin if she thinks the average /b/ tard is stupid. I’m sure some phony like O’Reilly has a lot to say about them too (when he’s not out trying to score some a55 while his pregnant wife sits at home alone, insists he’s innocent and then settles with a demand that nothing is discussed).  Ask the victims of owners of db.singles.org (and don’t dismiss them just b/c only losers resort to online dating sites) how stupid OldFags, NewFags and every other form of /b/tard behind Operation Jesus was (Ooops, i forgot, 4chan was definitely not /b/hind Operation Jesus, it was Ebaum’s world).  And honestly, could stupid people have spawned something as utterly awesome as this:

I’m sure some that fancy themselves mature and moral will take issue with my accolades for /b/ denizens or M00t and I’m sure English language Pedants (few things are lamer than trying to defend an idiotic argument by nitpicking typos on a web forum.  A Ph.D dissertation – ok, I’m with you.  An affidavit?  Sure.  But a freaking newsgroup or web forum? Pulleeeezzz) will take issue with my characterization of YouTube beef comments as a sign of intelligence.  If 4Chan was full of idiots, no one would care about it.  If 4Chan was full of morons, the same people wouldn’t be able to take issue with the morality of people all about the LULZ.  And I bet most of the kids who post comments on YouTube are headed for college and can write and spell properly if need be.  At the same time, I doubt many of their critics didn’t even know what Lolspeak was until they heard about it on the news.  And the same folks couldn’t write in Lolspeak even with a freaking Urban Dictionary Translation bot  helping them out.

Far from dumb, far from clueless, today’s kids are quite cool in my opinion.  They’re sharp, talented and ambitious too.  People my age and older will trash their taste in music (Yes, I myself am guilty at times, but at least I admit that I’m wrong for it). But their elders did the same thing about that ‘awful’ Rock-N-Roll.  Pretentious Phony Douchebags Some people got offended by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction (according to Dave Oliva – aspiring L.A.P.D. officer and frequent guest on the Phil Hendrie Show, Janet Jackson is actually a man. And we know that Steve Bosell of Corona, California was definitely hurt by it) and went on and on about how society has lost all sense of morality.  But the same stuff was being said 50 years ago.   Many in my age group love to criticize how bad cartoons of today are (yep, I’m guilty there too) and talk about how much better they were 30 years ago.  But I remember hearing the same exact complaints all the time when I was a kid watching cartoons.  Same thing with TV (admittedly TV hasn’t been around long enough to have several generations comment on it). When I was a kid, I always heard how MASH was truly funny and intelligent (except that it pretty much blew)  Shows of today just aren’t as funny – in fact many need laugh tracks.  There were plenty of laugh tracks back when I was a kid.  Sanford and Son, WKRP,  Soap, The Jeffersons etc were very funny.  But Seinfeld, The Office, Friends etc are equally funny in their own right.  And I’d love to hear some GenXer or older try to say that we didn’t have as sucky, if not worse sucky shows back in our day.

To sum things up, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the kids of today aren’t just alright. They are darned cool.  Each generation, kids tend to get cooler and cooler and parents get dorkier and dorkier (I mean, making kids wear freaking helmets for bicycles with training wheels only rivaled in lameness by the fetish most parents have with child seats).  Each generation bitches about laments the same stuff – music sucks, kids are lazy, have no morals, don’t appreciate anything, don’t respect their elders etc.  If that was true, then the unbiased, objective consummate professional Norah O’Donnell would have schooled Jackie Seal instead of Jackie Seal schooling her.  If kids were 1/2 as rude as they are made out to be –Jackie would have told current a**hole of the week Ms. O’Donnell to blow it out her ass to go pound sand.  Instead, she politely responded to the ambush (what does it say about your argument when you have to ambush a kid to try to make your point… and then star in EPIC FAIL Part 1 in the process). I can tell you this much – even though I think it’s a sign of good manners to respect one’s elders, I wouldn’t have looked down on Jackie a bit if she would have told Norah O’Donnell off – even if that included getting all sorts of gangsta on her.  If she pointed out what a freaking dork this a-hole is – I wouldn’t fault her for it either (Let’s attack a kid and pretend to be setting the Record straight b/c of Glenn Beck’s distortions)  The fact she handled O’Donnell with such composure and grace is testimony to her upbringing and class.

Who really cares if you like the kid’s politics or not?  I mean, when a kid gets a lot of press, one side of partisans talks about how great the kid is while the other side trashes them. If parents put the kids out there as a poster-child, then go after the parents, but attacking the kids is just whack.  Both sides do it (although from my POV, seems the left is a little quicker to get ugly and always gets nastier) and both sides acted shocked and amazed when the other side does it.  Then again, hypocrisy has never been, and will never be, in short supply in Washington D.C. Roubaxl  Bill Ryan is the worst piece of garbage in the world, next to my ex-wife Kim Ryan, formerly Kim  Finleyson. Those two pieces of garbage are made for each other

The point here though is that it’s great to see a high schooler at a political gathering of her own free will (and it’s true, I don’t know for a fact that she’s there on her own will, but it looks like she was and I’ve seen nothing to make me believe otherwise – if such evidence presents itself, I’ll certainly correct myself).  We constantly talk about how apathetic the electorate is.  Pejorative references to Joe Sixpack abound.  Both sides criticize the other side’s voters as stupid and uneducated.  But when we see shining examples of behavior both sides claim they want to see, the opposing side rips the person to shreds (and let’s be honest – both sides constantly blabber about ‘it doesn’t matter which side you vote for, just make sure you get involved and vote’.  And as long as you agree with them, they practice what they preach).  I for one am quite glad to see younger folks getting involved in the electoral process (not just b/c the trend seems to be that younger folks tend to be more Libertarian these days – as opposed to Socialist in my days and previous generations – come to think of it, what more proof is there that today’s kids are SMARTER than previous generations?) Andrexa Roubaxl

[tags]Jackie Seal, Norah O’Donnell, Bill O’Reilly, 4Chan, Pedobear, Lulz, Operation Jesus, db.singles.org, singles.org, Phil Hendrie, Dave Oliva, Steve Bosell of Corona California, Bill Ryan, William Ryan,  Janet Jackson, Wardrobe Malfunction, WKRP, Seinfeld, Sanford and Son, moot, m00t, FAIL, The Bell Curve, Cognitive Elite[/tags]

If you use Twitter, you can now follow Phil Hendrie.  And if you are an old fan and weren’t aware he’s back on the air (albeit slightly different than the classic version), here’s the new show site.

Of course, if you use Twitter and want to follow me, here’s the link

[tags]Phil Hendrie, Phil Hendrie Show, Twitter, Bill Ryan, WGRyan, The New Phil Hendrie Show[/tags]

Phil Hendrie has a subscription service called a Backstage Pass (yes, the inspiration for it is exactly what you think) that used to allow you to get his show’s Podcast. Little by little he started to make vintage clips available on the site. And after his show went off the air, he started to put more and more content up there. So there is a chronological listing of archived shows from 2000-2006, a Character Clips section, a Radio Clips section, Philcasts, his current Podcasts, TV Appearances, Radio Interviews and much more. Pulling down the files is very time consuming. Additionally, although everything is available as either a Real Audio or Windows Media stream, a lot of the content isn’t available as mp3. For years 2000-2006, there are typically shows available for each day that he was on, brokewn down by Year, Month, Day and then segment (three segments per show).  Because there are hundreds of downloads and the length of them is rather large,  manually downloading each individually is impractical.

The Show Archives contain virtually all of his shows from 2000-2006.  Some are just streams but the majority are mp3. The tricky part is that the links on the page aren’t absolute and have redirects in place.  The show clips are redirected in a consistent format but the streams aren’t (at least not that I can tell). This means that I was able to scrape the screen and pull down all the mp3 clips available with a little tweaking (not all of the redirects are consistent but most are). The streams are still being worked on.

Additionally, over the years I’ve pulled down several from Napster and iTunes.  I’ve found several  Torrent streams and pulled those down too. However the latter groups are sporadic. To find them I have a spider I wrote when I was learning C#. This allows me to change the search algorithm (and with the Windows Live API opened up, I’ve been able to do quite a bit more). However the sporadic stuff is so inconsistent I have to let my spider run, eyeball the results and have it try to grab files from those.  I’ve probably spent as much time writing code to grab these files as it would have taken to manually download one years worth of them so it’s been very value added.  Suffice to say, this is one situation that really makes me glad I’m a programmer – without having the computer do it for me, I can’t imagine how long this would have taken).  I’m providing a quick overview of what I have (you can click on the links to see what is available on the Character clips for instance or the Show Archive).  Later this week I’ll have all the content that I’ve been able to find pulled down (the show ran three hours a night for about 15 years, so the sheer volume of content I’m dealing with is very large). As I upload it to my site, I’ll also have a page with hyperlinks available. There’s no way I’m going to do that by hand so I’ve got to get it into a database – then use the tables to write out a Links page.  I’ve been making major progress learning PHP so I think i’ll be able to get it done this week although the actual uploading of those files is going to take forever).

In the meantime, if you’re interested in any of the following (again, for each year and month, you can cross reference the listing on Phil’s site under Show Archive or Character Clips for a specific listing) please contact me.  MP3:

1999 – October, November and December

2000 – All months but December

2005 – All months available

2006 – Jan, Feb, March, April, May and June

Streams:

2002 – All months, both Real Audio and Windows Media

2003 – All months, both Real Audio and Windows Media

2004- All months, both Real Audio and Windows Media

Additionall, I’ve pulled down several individual Character Clips:  (Many of the available clips are just a few minutes long so I’ve not pulled them down, I’ve concentrated on clips 15 minutes or longer). I have clips available from all of the following:

Brass Villenhueva, Chris Norton, Dave Oliva, Doug Dangger, Herb Sewell, Jay Santos, Justin McElroy, Lloyd Bonafide, Mavis Leonard, William Rennick, R.C. Collins, Raj Feneen, Rudy Canoza, Steve Bosell, Ted Bell, Vernon Dozier and Bobby Dooley, several characters that just appeared once or twice including Pre-KFI bits.

 ——————————————————-

Before I make all of this public, I need to make sure Phil is ok with it. Some of it was freely available on his site or the web. But some was from Napster or Torrent feeds and the majority was from his site which I got by using a Backstage pass – so before I stick it all up for free, I need to make sure I’m not violating any copyrights (or even Phil’s wishes for that matter.  The last thing I’d want to do is screw over a guy I love as much as Phil).  I can hand out a few of these without worrying about it but once it’s up on the site with a searchable index, it’ll be accessible by the whole world. Anyway, I’ll get it all figured out and post the updates as they come in.[tags]Phil Hendrie, Phil Hendrie Show, Jason Rantz, Brass Villenhueva, Chris Norton, Dave Oliva, Doug Dangger, Herb Sewell, Jay Santos, Justin McElroy, Lloyd Bonafide, Mavis Leonard, William Rennick, R.C. Collins, Raj Feneen, Rudy Canoza, Steve Bosell, Ted Bell, Vernon Dozier, KFI[/tags]

I am a huge XM Radio fan and have the radio on all day (and nights when Kim let’s me).  The Phil Hendrie Show used to be on XM until Phil got fed up quit radio. Actually, he was on KFI but his show was carried on XM. I listened to Phil for several years. Having lived in Miami, I got to listen to Phil on WIOD way before he made it big. Phil kept me laughing for years until he cancelled his radio show in 2006. He was such a big part of my life, I dedicated two of my books to Walter Bellhaven and Herb Sewell, two of my favorite Phil Hendrie Characters. I’ve kept up with the new show and have went through great lenghts to pull down as much of his show content as I can. I’ve got about 40GB of content currently and am actively pulling down more (My next post will discuss this and tell you how you can get some of it if you’re interested). Anyway, it’s something I wanted to blog about more and plan to now that I have a non-tech venue.

Phil’s show was the most original and funny show I ever heard. He had hopped around from station to station, city to city for years and sort of settled in Miami.  While in Miami, he really started to attract a big following and went to the major leages in the mid 90′s, landing a gig on KFI.  After that, he just blew up.  Unlike most other talk radio shows, Phil’s show wasn’t about Politics.  It wasn’t about computers, health, cars or most other things that non-political talk radio is about.  Phil would just come on the air and talk about whatever he wanted to talk about, then he’d usually feature some guests.

One of things that inspired him was clearly his family, friends and things he enountered in life.  If he was annoyed that day b/c of someone driving slowly in the lefthand lane and not letting him pass, sure enough one of his characters would be on advocating the greatness of left lane driving.   Phil was a huge fan of Satire and few did it better than him.

Many people though Phil’s guests were cranks or put ons and on a fairly regular basis they’d make that accusation at some point in the call.  While having someone pretend to be something they are not, something which would rile the audience is neither new nor clever, Phil’s show was often described as just that. Nothing could be more incorrect. His guests were certainly a put on in the sense they weren’t real, but they weren’t plants.  They were Phil.  You see, Phil would do the voices and he’d interview his guests, which were him. In many cases he’d have a conversation going between him and several of his characters and his execution was flawless. Being able to do one voice or a few is one thing, but being able to do several voices, where he was both the host and the guest, and have heated conversations with himself was something no one else has been able to do and no one else did. Glen Beck realized how incredible this was and stole Phil’s routines but Beck couldn’t hold  a candle to Phil. 

His cast of characters was truly amazing. One man Raj Faneen was an Egyption man (occasionally he was an Iraqi or from another middle eastern country). Another, Pastor William Rennick was a Black Fundamentalist preacher (famous for the Islamic RoundTable bit ‘You Islam’. Clara Bingham was a middle aged Black woman.  Margaret Grey was a Syndicated Columnist (a snobby elitist White woman). RC Collins and Justin McElroy were both obnoxious teenagers.  Dave Oliva and Brass Villaneuvha were both younger Latin Males. Lloyd Bonafide was a Korean War Veteran and an angry retiree.  Doug Dangger was a “Gay man and a gay journalist”.  “Skippy and Frank” were two really annoying DJ’s who hosted a show mocking any of the hundreds of wannabe Morning Zoo type radio programs (there’s only one real Morning Show and that’s Howard Stern, the rest are lame copycats).  He had several other regular characters and many that he ad libbed. Each of his voices was absolutely convincing and you wouldn’t know it wasn’t real unless Phil wanted you to.

You see, unitl Phil decided it was time to let people on to the ruse, it was hard to tell it wasn’t serious. So the guest would start out sounding reasonable and frequently took a position that was something most people would agree with. Then, they’d start explaining their reasons for holding the position which would slowly start turning people off. He’d keep on getting more and more ridiculous to the point it was a dead giveway and ultimately, he’d make it so that only a brain dead idiot wouldn’t realize the game.  If people didn’t think the guests were real, they wouldn’t call in and fight with them. And if they didn’t call in, then Phil’s show would never have gotten as big as it was. More amazingly though, is that Phil’s show lasted for years and he cancelled it at a high point.  He was featured in several magazines and news shows and was on in every major market I know of, and yet night after night people would call in to fight with his ‘guests’. On sevral occassions, Phil would have 3 or more of his guests all on the phone at once and they’d be fighting with each other and Phil. The speed at which the conversation would happen is what’s so amazing. It’s hard enough to remember what you’re going to say next in a heated argument, but Phil could not only do that, but change voice and keep the personalities completely consistent. Every now and then he’d slip up and start laughing or make some other mistake, but those were few and far between.

 Phil didn’t count on profanity to be funny but mild profanity certainly enhanced the show because it made the guests seem more authentic in many cases.  It was fairly common for callers to get so mad at the guests that they’d use profanity but Phil seldom slipped up and did something to violate FCC rules. But after the Janet Jackson Malfunction, the regulatory environment got more ridiculous and Phil really had to watch what he said.  I don’t think I ever heard him drop a F bomb and think that in most cases, it would have diminished the effect, but “God D*mn” “Blow it out your A**” and several other mild phrases were used.  However as Howard Stern noted, Oprah can get on TV and talk about Penises and Vaginas all day, but if he talked about them he’d get fined. This clearly didn’t sit well with Phil and you could tell b/c he’d start doing more and more monologues about it. And his character David G Hall, who was the station manager or program director depending on the day, would call in to yell at Phil more and more frequently for innocuous words.  Phil was brutal in his mockery of how silly this stuff had gotten and he was dead on.

So in June of 2006, he quit. He had been doing voices for King of the Hill for years and had just started on his TV show, Teachers. He was hoping to make it big in TV or movies and sadly it didn’t work out for him. I say Sadly b/c Phil seemed to really want that to work out. But personally, I wasn’t sad b/c it was the fact his acting career never took off that allowed him to make a radio comeback.  Today, his show is available on the Talk Radio Network at 10:00 PM to 1:00 AM Pacific Time. More details are available here.

Additionally, Phil and most of his characters are available on . There are several Phil Hendrie Fan Sites which have content and information on them, most of which are really good. Sweet Feathery Jesus is probably my favorite of the bunch although since Phil’s show isn’t the same format as it used to be, Sweet Feathery Jesus is less active then it used to be. There’s also a Pedia dedicated to Phil known as the Hendriepedia

[tags] Phil Hendrie, Phil Hendrie Show, Sweet Feathery Jesus, Howard Stern, David G. Hall, Hendripedia [/tags]