Well I'm a self taught trader. I can rebuild a carbaretor but not name the parts. Sorry.
FYI I hear about Head and Shoulders. Could that be what is appearing on todays chart? The top of the head 7.75 the top of the shoulder at 7.66? I have no idea what it means if its true. and no idea if it is the H&S they are actually talking about when they talk about such stuff.
The "king" will soon be free Howard Stern is excited and anxious as he prepares for his satellite launch
BY STEPHEN WILLIAMS, STAFF WRITER Newsday.com, December 11, 2005
The line has been drawn. Howard Stern is about to cross it.
In 29 days, Stern - shock jock, egomaniac, king of all media, celebrity extraordinaire and a half-billionaire - takes flight, almost literally. His show moves off the FM dial, from its long-time home on WXRK/92.3 (K-ROCK) to the Sirius satellite network, where Stern stuff will occupy not one, but two, channels.
Will angels sing? Will millions of listeners cheer and - more to the point - pay up? Will the world's heart skip a beat? Or will it come down to ... so what?
And how long - in nanoseconds - will it take Stern, freed from the bondage of government censors and arbiters of taste and his own good sense of self- protection, to get real close to the Sirius studio mike and say "--" and "--"?
"It's not just about -- and --," Stern said the other day. "Although -- and -- can be funny."
The history Stern brings to Sirius is enormous: decades of fame and an iconic status in modern pop culture. The risks are equally huge: a reported $500-million five-year contract for the star, the fact that Stern will leave in the lurch a massive, mostly male listener base - a "big, crazy, mixed-up family," as a Howard regular once put it - for a fraction of that number in what is essentially the new (novel, some say) medium of pay radio.
Stern is nervous. And terrifically excited. "I got books full of notes, like a mental patient," he said. "I wish I could plug a wire into my head and play it for everyone. I'm committed for the next five years. I'm upbeat, and that's rare for me. And don't chalk it up to the holidays."
On an afternoon earlier this month, two weeks before his Friday finale on K-ROCK, Stern sat on the uncomfortable purple couch in front of his studio control board on the 14th floor of what the star calls the "The Howard Stern Building" at 40 W. 57th St. in Manhattan. He wore shoulder-length hair, jeans and boots, glasses just barely tinted gray and a black leather jacket, and gestured with his long fingers as he spoke. He betrayed no signs of shpilkes - the Yiddish word for a condition analogous to ants in the pants - but didn't seem overly joyous. Maybe it was the lighting in the studio: the few lights glowing actually made the room, with its clutter of broadcast gear and low ceilings, seem dark.
"If it fails ... who knows?" Stern sat up straighter on the ugly couch. "It would be a terrible disappointment to me. But I see it as a really solid development. Think of Sirius not as satellite, not as radio, not as hardware, but as content.
"We're not used to paying for radio. But the people who said, 'I'll never pay for radio,' said, 'I'll never pay for television' or bottled water, or a Long Island newspaper, because 'I got the ones in the city.'
Vision of change
Stern is not talking about a total overhaul of his shtick as of Jan. 9 at 6 a.m., but he sees the new gig as "revolution, a think tank with phone sex.
"I can create a news department, try out sitcoms ... as long as I can get on the mike and do free form, open up, the show changes every day.
"What makes me nervous is all this anticipation about the first day," he said. "It's not about the first day; it's about the 101st day."
The anticipation has been building for months, much of it because of Stern constantly flogging the move while still with Infinity Broadcasting. (In November, the station ordered Stern to take a "day off" because of his antics.) Historically, hubris rarely intrudes in Stern's public persona, and his drawn-out exit from WXRK's morning slot has become the four seasons of his discontent.
Looking back, he says, is pain- ful ... a little. "I'm sort of in de- nial ... I mean, this" - he waved his hand around the room - "has been my home for 20 years." But looking forward is fun too.
"Originally we planned a roast for the first day on Sirius, because the language didn't have to be censored. I wanted to invite Kathie Lee Gifford, Rosie O'Donnell, [former FCC chief] Michael Powell; I'm talking about all the people who really hate me. They all said, '-- you, no way.'"
Losing proposition?
Whether or not Rosie ponies up the 50 bucks (and up) to buy a Sirius receiver and signs up for the $12.95 monthly Sirius subscription fee is her call. Some observers believe a chunk of Stern's fans won't.
"I think he will drop out of sight for a lot of people," said Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, a trade newsletter. "Howard is an amazing publicity machine, a brilliant entertainer. But it's like he's leaving Broadway to go to a small boutique stage."
Taylor cites the numbers. "Look, the average house has five radios, and one in every car ... that's 800 million radios in America. You go from radio to radio to radio. Now you'll have to reach out for satellite and actually do something."
Such a segue seems totally right for fan Gerry Reilly.
"Howard helped me years ago get through my delivery route every day from the city to the Hamptons," said Reilly, who now works for a major New York bank. It was the only thing that kept me sane. The bottom line is, he's real. He is a performer, and he can be redundant, and I sometimes have enough and turn him off. But his take on his relationships and himself ... he's real."
Reilly, who is 44 and lives in Hempstead, not only bought a Sirius radio ("to listen to stuff beyond Howard") but also stock in Sirius and its competitor, XM. He's determined to attend the public goodbye party for Stern on Friday - Howard's final day with Infinity - on 57th Street.
"The strippers are coming in from Philly; it'll be history," Reilly said. "People say I'm a grown man; it's nutty, but it's history."
The road up
Whether one agrees with Stern's self-assessment that he is "king of all media" - sort of like Tom Cruise saying he is "king of all acting" - documentation exists to show that he has ascended from nowheresville to radio superstardom in three decades.
Raised in Roosevelt and Rockville Centre, Stern, 51, took the mike professionally in the mid-'70s, broadcasting from WRNW-AM in Briarcliff Manor. Along the way to New York - via Hartford, Detroit and Washington - Stern's on-air style - always rough-cut, occasionally indecent, rarely hesitant - collected an audience that, thanks to syndication, now numbers about 10 million listeners.
And he became, as advertised, a multimedia man. His successful 1993 autobiography "Private Parts," became a successful movie. Early on, he found an outlet on television and his taped radio shows were broadcast regularly on the E! cable channel. (In November, he launched Howard Stern on Demand, a video-on-demand pay cable channel that offers racier, uncensored episodes of Stern's E! show.)
But throughout his incumbency at Infinity, the censorship issue has been a constant annoyance to Stern, one that escalated to outright furor last year. In response to the Janet Jackson fiasco at the Super Bowl in February 2004, the FCC became more vigilant in its perceived mission and went after Stern. That June, radio giant Clear Channel Communications, which syndicated the Stern show to six outlets, agreed to pony up $1.75 million for the jock's violations.
But before Jackson ever displayed her right breast on national television, he had decided to bolt.
Stern, who claims with some merit that he invented reality entertainment, was approached by both the XM and Sirius camps before he signed with Sirius late last year. His decision, he says, was bittersweet, based as much on politic as on money.
He told Infinity management that "you guys are good guys, but you didn't fight the FCC; you paid the fines, you've been taking away radio stations, you've been nickel-and-diming me. You guys have blown it."
Stern pointed a finger. "If I tell you I get nauseous every time they hit the button on me, I'm not exaggerating," he said, leaning forward. "Seventy percent of my arsenal, of things that I think are funny, have been taken away. I haven't done the show I want to do for 10 years. I'm a nervous wreck over the fact that I can't do bits as simple as me talking about putting my hand up the back of Shari Lewis' puppet. I can't talk about these subjects, and it makes me mental.
Mel Karmazin, Stern's former boss at Infinity, jumped to Sirius after Stern signed and after Karmazin was dumped from his job at Viacom, Infinity's parent company. He has been relentlessly upbeat for the past year about Sirius' prospects against XM, which holds a 2-1 advantage in subscribers. Recently, in a TV interview, Karmazin said he thought Stern might be worth to the franchise "more" than $500 million; Stern claims he's helped to attract more than 2 million subscribers since his move was announced.
Not much of that impresses Eric Logan, executive vice president of programming at XM. "Stern raised the profile of the satellite industry, but I happen to believe there are more people that don't like Howard Stern and don't want to be a part of a network he is involved in."
Yet some see Stern's pariah image as unjustified. "Stern's a mild old man compared to what's on HBO, Showtime, the Internet," said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade magazine about talk radio. Harrison sees Stern as a "pioneer in bringing the langauge of the street to the radio. I don't mean just the words, but the tone. I don't see this as a risk for him - if it doesn't work, he comes back to terrestrial."
In fact, Stern, for all his dominance in the talk arena, says he's ready to share on the 120-channel Sirius net. "OK, so let's say I suck. Fair enough, and I hope people tune in, say, 'I'm bored with Howard.' There's the Martha Stewart channel, the gay channel, the NFL.... I'll recommend what channels to go to. I'm the Yahoo of that."
And when it comes to content on the Howard channels - Nos. 100 and 101 - the line will definitely be crossed.
One segment under development by the Stern crew is called "Crack Whore Views," snippets of interviews with ... well, whores who use crack. Another involves High-Pitch Eric, "who eats a tremendous amount of food. We want to weigh his bowel movements and bet on the result."
The bit was a no-no at K-ROCK, and Stern has already run into some resistance from Sirius. "They said there's a board of health consideration. They won't allow us to weigh the stuff in the studio, but they said, 'If you do it at his house, we have no problem.'"
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