You know how animals seem to sense disaster through mechanisms we can't see? There are stories of various types of wildlife literally heading for the hills as the 2004 tsunami approached, etc., etc. Well, One Idiot can sense changes in the FCC's bandwidth allocation, apparently.
As I set out for work this morning, my radio was tuned to 91.5, WBJC. I listened to the end of Brahms' third. They followed that with the Brandenburg concerto #5, which I'm not a big fan of. So I pressed my station selector button #2 for 103.5, WGMS, the other remaining classical station in the area. I listened to a couple of short things, until they started playing "Sheep May Safely Graze", which I also don't care for much. I flipped back to 91.5, and the Brandenburg was still going on. In frustration, I tuned to 104.1, my favorite rock-and/or-roll station, where they were playing something rather heavy-metalish. I decided to stick with that for what little remained of my trip to work.
Lunchtime comes. For me, this is about 2 p.m., but never you mind that. (Whoops, looks like I have just switched to present tense again! I suspect there is sometimes a good reason for this, but I haven't had time to think about it.) I get in the car. Classical music, nothing unusual. I can't remember what was playing. I arrive at my food place, grab my food, and start driving back. At this point, I'm hearing something which I now know to be "Moses Fantasie" by Paganini, but, spoiled as I am by having two classical stations in the area, I decide that maybe I can get something more interesting than this. It is at this point that I look down at my radio and see that it reads 104.1, the frequency for my rock station. This makes sense in one way; that was the last frequency I had it tuned to. However, it seems very wrong for me to be hearing, of all things, classical music. I mean, the usual pattern of radio format changes is for classical to be replaced by news, and for rock-and-roll to be replaced by Spanish-language radio, something that seems to be an hourly occurrence around here. For a few moments I am convinced that my radio is broken; that it is showing the last station I had tuned in, but that it is actually tuning in one of the two frequencies I use most. To check this theory, I tune away from 104.1. Yep, the tuner works. I tune down to 103.5, and I hear them talking about "the new home of WTOP". I'm unsure what to make of this at first, as WTOP sometimes has the characteristics of a meta-station, and many stations carry WTOP news alerts as an add-on to their regular programming. But by-and-by, I figure out that this really is just a news station, and that what I had been listening to at 104.1 was, hopefully the new home for WGMS. If you've followed the WGMS link, you know by now that that is the case.
It's still pretty bizarre that I happened to be tuned to a completely unrelated station that turned into one of my everyday stations in the few hours I was at work. I'd like to thank WGMS for giving me no warning whatsoever about the frequency change, without which this blog entry would not have been possible.