Speed Gibson

The Next Big Thing continues, though I've heard a couple of hints that either a second round or an appointment is coming soon, more likely the latter. But meanwhile, we start the sixth month of this experiment.

This week we heard Lawrence Ellis with Mike Jordan in a supporting role. Hour one was largely spent on celebrity vs importance vs intelligence. He saw the Bill Gates family at Chicago's O'Hare airport, not drawing any attention. Brittany Spears would be mobbed, but Gates' contribution to the world is several orders of magnitude larger and more important. All true, in fact rather obvious. As Dennis Prager says, being famous doesn't make you important and vice versa.

The second hour opened up a little more but the show remained on a very calm, ordered basis. It wasn't NPR-boring, but it was definitely "FM" in nature. But KSTP-AM is just that - AM. They don't want or need "shock jocks" like Hugh Hewitt as he was once called, but the show needs a little punch to be successful.

It wasn't a bad effort within these lines. Everything worked pretty smoothly, so I'll give this week's duo a "C".