Deryk said,

>... his notion that the only thing attempting to redress this
>hostility is Classic FM strikes me as, well, misguided.  Classic FM
>*makes* me feel hostile.

I sat in my car cursing when Barber's "Adagio for Strings" was played
by our station a few months ago.  I felt a bit violent, I admit. Not
because it gave me images from Platoon, but because it had been played
the previous day!  And the previous week.  ETC!  When I got home I wrote
a quick note to one of the CM guys at the station, a nice chap who doesn't
deserve my invective, but he wants to know how his listeners feel, so I
told him.  I didn't get (and didn't rate) a reply. But a few days later
they played it again.  I cursed and seethed.  When the song was over,
he gave the credits, "That was Adagio for Strings by ...." I thought,
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know, we know!" He continued, "That was requested
by a listener at the Feist-Weiller Cancer Center..."

Oy veh!  How do you turn down a request like that?  The image of the
poor dying patients wanting to hear the Adagio one last time!  Yeah,
right - it was probably somebody in an office who requested it, anyway.
Or maybe a nice nurse thought it would soothe a patient in pain.  No
doubt it did, probably killing them if the were tuned to that station
every day!

I'm sorry, it's a lovely piece. Or at least I once thought so.  It is
now CM's "Stairway to Heaven".

Rick Mabry