Newsgroups: alt.fan.howard-stern,news.answers Path: bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nic.hookup.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!scifi!scifi!njs From: njs@scifi.uucp (Nick Simicich) Subject: [alt.fan.howard-stern] FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about Howard Stern, Monthly Posting Message-ID: <1994.Mar.1.howard-stern.faq@scifi.uucp> Followup-To: alt.fan.howard-stern Sender: njs@scifi.uucp (Nicholas J. Simicich) Supersedes: <1994.Feb.1.howard-stern.faq@scifi.uucp> Organization: N.J. Simicich, Peekskill, NY Date: Tue, 1 Feb 1994 10:10:31 GMT Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: 28 Mar 1994 Lines: 440 Xref: bloom-beacon.mit.edu alt.fan.howard-stern:7070 news.answers:14705 Archive-name: howard-stern/faq The following is a major revision of the Howard Stern FAQ. Last revisions on 1-1-94. I'd like to find a keeper for the station list. This newsgroup was formed so that fans of Howard Stern can discuss the happenings on the show, the comings and goings, and other activities of Howard Stern. Some folks don't like Howard Stern. We know that. You don't have to take time out of your busy schedule to tell us that. The answer here is the same as Howard's answer: If you don't like it, turn the dial, switch bands, change the station, find another newsgroup. In particular, we recognize that there are many tastes and many other radio personalities. If you have a personality you really like, do what I did with Howard: Start a fan group for them. Leave us out of it. Frequently asked questions about Howard Stern: 1. Who is Howard Stern? (Frequently heard from NONUS folks.) 1a. Howard Stern is a radio personality. He came to national attention in the USA while working in New York, and currently resides there. He also had a syndicated TV show, and an interview show on the E Network (a US Based cable channel). He is frequently labeled a 'shock jock'. Your immediate thought might be, "Oh, like xxxxxx (insert name of local shock jock in wherever you are)." No, xxxxxx is like Howard Stern. He has been around for years, he is well known, and chances are that this week xxxxxx is doing whatever Howard was doing last week. If xxxxxx has the balls. And more and more people, throughout the country, are finding this out. 2. What station does Howard Stern's TV show play on in my area? Or, I heard that Howard's show was cancelled. Is it true? 2a. Howard's original TV show is in reruns, or off of the air. Depending on who you listen to, it was cancelled, or Howard quit. I personally believe (and heard this version, once, on-the-air) that WWOR Channel 9 wanted Howard to do it for the same money he got the prior year, and Howard wanted a bigger budget and more money. Channel 9 folks decided that they couldn't give Howard more money *and* make any money on the show, they wanted to cut the budget. So Channel 9 executives wanted to put themselves in a good light by claiming that they fired Howard and made such an announcement. If you get the E Network on cable or satellite, you should now be able to get Howard's new talk show. Unfortunately, I don't. Howard's contract with E is up, and there may be no new shows. 3. No, I can't take it. I have to have Howard on my TV. Is there any way? 3a. No, other than the E show. But Howard has announced a PPV for New Year's Eve. He is currently interviewing women for a $50,000 top prize beauty and 'talent' contest. (This is now over. But there will be either bootleg or official video tapes.) 4. Where can Howard be received on the Radio? 4a. Currently, he broadcasts, daily, from WXRK, K-Rock, 92.3 FM from New York City. This signal is good enough to cover most of New York City and the surrounding areas. This signal is simulcast in Philadelphia (WYSP-FM, 94.1), Baltimore (on WJFK-AM 1300), and Washington, DC (WJFK-FM, 106.7 FM), and is simulcast in LA and then rebroadcast on tape delay when morning drive starts. The LA times and frequency are: 97.1 FM KLSX from 3 to 6am live, and then tape delayed from 6 to 11am. The LA rebroadcast is extra long because they insert (yech) traffic reports and local stuff. Howard's show is still spreading. He is in Las Vegas, Cleveland (WNCX 98.5), Dallas (KEGL, 97.1), and Chicago (but no longer). There is also 103.9 FM (Q104) in Albany, and Rochester, NY. Howard claims that many more stations would carry him but for the FCC's vendetta against him. WWKB from Buffalo, NY (1520 AM) carries Howard starting at 6 AM Eastern Time. This is a 50,000 Watt clear channel station, and reception reports seem good. In the winter, look for him there. Howard is on in New Orleans, on station WRNO-FM at 99.5. In Boston, Howard is on 104.1 WCBN from 7 PM to 11 PM (do they cut the show off after four hours?) The latest addition is El Paso. Howard is not on shortwave unless someone is pirating his stuff. AM is Medium Wave (MW) for you nonus folks. I'm not very good at keeping this list up to date, and if someone else wanted to post a radio list, I'd appreciate it. Finally, you may be able to get Howard on cable. Several of these stations have satellite uplinks (including WXRK) and your cable company may rebroadcast them on the FM band, perhaps at a different frequency. I understand, for example, that in San Diego, Daniel's Cablevision reboradcasts the LA station that carries Howard at 98.5. Consult your cable company for information about hooking your FM receiver to your cable. 5. I'm not in any of those places. Is there a satellite feed for WXRK? 5a. No, WXRK used to be broadcast by SCPC on Hughes Galaxy 2 channel 03, at about 57.5, according to Mark Geyman. I'm told, on GEnie, that WXRK's uplink is now in digital form, and can't be received as SCPC anymore. Can anyone confirm this?...This has been confirmed. If someone can tell me how this digital feed might be decodable, I'd be greatly indebted. 6. How can one be expected to figure out who is who among the regulars on the show? 6a. Listen for a while. Want to take a shortcut? Here is an effort to explain: Howard Stern - The head of the asylum. The ruler of the roost, the King on NY Radio, and All Media, and other points. Robin Quivers - Howard's sidekick. Officially his news reporter, she is also the confidant and instigator in many cases, and also (occasionally) feeds him lines from the privacy of her news studio. Her news reports normally consist of reading the paper, and a few things that are put together by her interns. None the less, the news reports are frequently the most entertaining part of the show, as Howard comments on everything. Fred Norris, King of Mars - Fred handles sound effects (paints) and also keeps the show on schedule. When Howard started broadcasting in NY, frequently he would just push off the commercials for an hour. Now that they are syndicated, he has to take breaks at regular intervals. Fred cracks the whip. He is on the writing team. Fred also does voices for the occasional (these days) radio 'movie' and as the Nazi in the 'Guess who's the Jew' bits. Fred also does song parodies, and is a reasonably talented musician. Jackie (The Jokeman, Penthouse Jokepage) Martling - Jackie is a comic who never quite made it big, notably because his standup isn't very good IMHO. He writes full time for the Howard Stern show, and makes a fair bit of money doing local appearances as well, pushed by plugs from the show. One wonders when he sleeps. Maybe during the show. +1 516 922 WINE gets you a schedule of his upcoming appearances, and it is a normal toll call (no 900 style surcharge) but has a few ads, and a few jokes. There is more than 30 minutes of material on the new all-digital line. He is also on the writing team, as the head writer. Jackie gets two plugs a day, by contract. Gary (Baba Booey) Dell'Abate - The show's producer. He arranges guests, insures that the office part of the show gets done, and so forth. For those of you who've read Gulliver, he is also Howard's chief flapper - he is generally the one who makes the judgment as to whether or not someone speaks to Howard when they call up with a beef. He is called Baba Booey after his mispronunciation of Baba Looey, Quick Draw McGraw's sidekick on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show. He was buying animation cels, and didn't know how to pronounce the name of the character, despite professing fandom. Gary does occasional personal appearances, for which he gets plugs. Gary has recently married. Despite predictions, some of them mine, he is still Baba Booey. He was making noise about registering Bababooey as a trademark recently. He is famous for the 'repeat after me' bit. These days, he is also 'Fa-fa'fooey, sa-sa-smelley, and so forth. John (Stuttering John) Melandez - Hero of the stupid. He was a paid performer on Channel 9, officially on WXRK he is just an intern. He is paid in notoriety [supposedly he is now getting a salary] (he gets to plug his band appearances and occasional personal appearances, and has gotten a record contract because of his connections. John has been signed by Atlantic Records). and is typically sent out to interview celebrities. The questions are all prepared, but sometimes he gets to adlib. Scott the Engineer - mixes tapes, inserts the bleeps so that you can still hear the cursing in the background, and is hapless when it comes to fixing the console. He is employed by WXRK as Chief Engineer, and he is in the Union. He is making additional money because he gets a daily plug, which he has used to build up a DJ business. He has a number of DJ's who work for him and provide canned music for parties, weddings (Gary was married and used Scott's service, Rocket Entertainment) and so forth. This is good, because Scott smokes like a chimney and I wouldn't want him at one of my parties. Gorilla (Gorillo, but they call him Gorilla on the show) is an intern who wants to be a radio personality someday, but who first needs to learn how to talk in English. We almost never hear about Robin's news interns. Billy West, the voice of Ren and Stimpy, occasionally performs on Howard's show, doing various voices. I believe, for example, that he did Marge Shott (see the sound archive) and does 'Red'. 7. How can you listen to someone who is as racist/homophobic/anti woman/etc. as Howard Stern? 7a. You just don't get it, do you? Howard is none of those things, in spades: He is an equal opportunity denigrator. Sooner or later he will kick one of your sacred cows in the balls, to mix metaphors in an udderly improbable manner. But he is still very funny. Someone on this newsgroup once said that a lot of Howard's humor comes from the sort of attitude that says, "Look at all of this crap in the world around us! Isn't it wierd? Isn't it funny? Sit in our circle and we'll let you in on the joke." Well, some of us think that we get the joke. 8. Is Howard Stern half Jewish? 8a. Definitely. The question is, what is the other half? We have to differentiate between the persona that Howard plays on the radio, and the real Howard. According to Howard's radio persona, it is not Jewish, perhaps WASP. The half-Jewish identity may be something that Howard puts on so that he can insult both Christians and Jews with impunity. However, he is equally free with insults of Muslims, Hindus, etc. It may also be something that he does to avoid anti-semitism. Some folks on the net believe that the other half is Italian, based on something that Howard said a while back. Others point out that you can be a Jewish Italian, so this may have been another joke. The Jewish half and the Italian half may well be the same half. It is pretty clear based on statements that Howard's sister made on the radio that Howard, in Real Life(tm), is Jewish. Also, Howard has recently admitted, on the air, that he is all Jewish, and claimed that he was half Jewish to avoid anti-Semitism. 9. I want to write to Howard and tell him (what a dickhead | how wonderful) he is. What is the address? 9a. His address is: The Howard Stern Show 600 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Particularly vehement and stupid hate letters are likely to get read on the air. Clueless ones well may earn a phone call. If you really can't wait, fax him at (212) 759-KFAX. 10. How do I get a copy of "Crucified by the FCC"? I called 1-800-52-STERN, and they didn't have a clue. 10a.They never had a clue, but at one time they could take orders for the album. The album hasn't been for sale for quite a while, and is now a "collector's item". This just goes to prove that you should always buy every Howard Stern premium offered, immediately. The 1-800-52-STERN was in use for Butt Bongo Fiesta, and is now out of service, but expect it to be revived soon for New Year's Rotten Eve or whatever. 11. I don't get enough bababooey in the morning. I want my computer to say 'bababooie' instead of beeping at me. I have a Mac/Amiga/Soundblaster/NeXT box that can talk, and I want it to talk. 11a.This (alt.fan.howard-stern) is not in the binaries hierarchy. Of course, you can post anything you want. If various sysops notice that this group has become a binaries group, they will treat it like one, and those connected by phone line or concerned about disk space may not carry it. As a hint: If your sysop does not carry the alt.binaries tree, they are unlikely to carry this group if it begins carrying binaries. Jeremy A. Moskowitz has been doing some digitizing, not only of soundbytes, but of whole songs. These are digitized into Amiga .iff format at 11047 samples/sec. If you are on one of these other systems, you will need to figure out how to convert the sounds to, say, .wav format if you want to play it with the Microsoft Windows multi-media program. If you are interested in same, I'd like to refer you to the alt.binaries.sounds.misc FAQ, (may also be available in news.answers) which seems to cover this stuff fairly well. Briefly, they recommend sox, which you can get on wuarchive.wustl.edu. Or use your nearby archie server. (I was able to convert the sounds to .wav format by entering the command find . -name *.iff -exec sox -r 11047 {} {}.wav \; and I got oddly named .wav files that would play on my Linux box.) Jeremy puts the sounds onto the wuarchive.wustl.edu system in directory /systems/amiga/boing/audio/samples/howardstern, which seems like a heck of a good place. The howard.list file describes the samples. If you do want to post digitized soundbytes, please post them to alt.binaries.sounds.misc, or alt.sex.sounds, as appropriate, and post here saying that you've done so, and other things about the sounds, like maybe what the message ids are or when you posted them, or how many parts. Anything seems to go there. I've seen whole songs posted there in 41 parts. Also, Harry has made Stern fans a generous offer. His words: In honor of Howard, I'm willing to offer up my machine as a central ftp site for Howard-related items. I'll put the stuff in: krishna.cs.umd.edu:pub/stern This should provide a more permanent repository than uunet's /tmp. I've copied these images here to start things off. I encourage all the Stern fans out there to add stuff to this collection. In particular, I would like to collect sound bites (like "fafafoohee", or Jackie's "tragic news item" laugh, for instance) and I'd like to see some gifs scanned in from his book, or maybe frames grabbed from Butt Bongo (though the quality on these images tends to suck). If you have something to download to ftp, send me email and I'll tell you how to do this. You won't be able to drop things off directly, I'll have to tell you where to put them (to keep the world at random from dumping on me). This will last as long as it doesn't become a problem. I'd appreciate it if you waited until the evening or early morning (East Coast time) to get stuff, but unless this becomes a problem I'm not going to worry about it too much. -harry --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spoken: Harry Mantakos Domain: harry@cs.umd.edu UUCP: uunet!mimsy!harry Phone: 301-405-2750 USPS: U of Maryland, CS Dept., College Park, MD 20742 Harry already has the soundbytes above and a couple of .gifs, and a copy of sox to convert sounds to different formats. 12. I can't believe it. Do people really strip naked in Howard's studio, or is it a put on? Is it theatre of the mind, or is it really happening? 12a.According to Mark Levy, yes they do. And I have it on good authority that Howard drinks Poland Spring water (Take that, Georgia!). Additionally, if you can get a copy of the New Year's Eve Pageant, there was a fair amount of 'getting naked in the studio' footage there. I believe that some percentage of the folks who call in are bogus, but they are putting Howard on at the same time they are putting us on. 13. Why is is when Howard says mini-system in that ad, that everyone responds (exaggerating mini-). 13a.A number of years ago, there was a comedian who regularly appeared on the Howard Stern radio show called Crazy Jerry, who used to do 'impersonations' in a flat voice, the most famous of which is, "This is Mother Theresa speaking from the bed. God don't want me yet, man, I got more feet to taste." Crazy Jerry brought in a 'mentally challenged' girl who had a speech impediment who used to do the 'gina dance' (figure it out) and, when she quit appearing, brought in a guy who did the 'peepee dance'. I suspect, from things alluded to by Howard, that he has agreed not to replay any of those shows, since he was convinced that the girl, especially, didn't really want to do this stuff, but was convinced by Jerry although she wasn't competent to make the decision. The mini-skirt, gina dance, peepee dance, and "I love you, Jerry," all came from this response stuff that was done between Crazy Jerry and his sidekicks. (Note that this is my memory talking. There is another version of this story in another faq which the author claims to have tape backup for, so they are likely right. I still like my version better. Here is the other version, verbatim:) Q. What do you know about Gina (rhymes with Carolina) Girl? A. In late 1988 this woman called up Howard saying she loves him and she does the 'Gina dance. Howard sensed quickly that this woman was a little "off" and he asked her if so- she said she's not retarded, just "slow". She came down to the studio with Crazy Jerry, who was not her boyfriend but more of a companion. Well she did the Gina dance, laying down naked on the floor, but almost no one really saw it - Howard and even Jackie averted their eyes because she was too heavy to be appealing. About that time Rain Man had been a hit movie, so Howard called up Gina Girl again and got her to say some lines for his new radio movie "China Girl," starring out of the closet Stern. It was in this movie that she uttered the words made famous, "mini-dress" (usually at the same time as saying "naked dance") Howard was trying to fix up Steve Rossi and Gina Gina Girl but I don't think it ever happened. I have this all on tape and that's why I can give you this detail. All the attribution I have on this is: testnet!pr@pegasus.att.com 14. What about Howard's book? Is it any good? Can I get mine signed? 14a.Yes, Howard Stern has a book out, called "Howard Stern's Private Parts". IMHO, and in the opinion of a number of reviewers, it is actually a worthwhile piece of literature. As I write this, it completes its second week as #1 on the New York Times best seller list, entering the list at #1. Howard says that he wrote it, but he freely gives credit to a collaborator (an essay about this appears in the book) and to his editor (who moved into his house). There is no doubt that this is a collective effort and I believe that, unlike some celebrity books, Howard did a significant amount of work on the book personally, using the professionals to help him plan and polish. I believe that it was a successful effort as well. There were a number of book signings. It looks like there will be no more. Howard attracted a record number of people to his Wall Street, NY signing (where I got mine signed, and was on FOX 5 news that night having it signed), and signed a record number of books, the previous record being held by Mohammed Ali, the boxer. The problem was that the crowd was too hard to manage (according to the police), and the police wouldn't let him sign for as long as he needed to. It sounds like a new record was set in LA. 8000 books. Personally, if I hadn't had mine signed, I'd mail it to the show, with a pleading letter, and a check for $25 (since that was what he offered a signature to the paraplegic from Cleveland for) as well as a self-addressed, postage paid mailer. At best, they will sign it and send it back, and at worst they will keep it (which is what they threatened to do when they still thought that they could have managable book signings) and you'll have to buy another copy. Do not confuse this with the paperback book titled Howard Stern, Big Mouth, by Jeff Menell. Make up your own mind, but IMHO, this isn't worth wasting your money on. 15. I'm looking for a BBS related to Howard Stern. 15a.Dimnah BBS (703) 276-8060 has the Washington area's "only Howard Stern conference. Also includes a Howard Stern fanclub. .gifs and .bmps are available through the users." Also, Off Our Rockers BBS (201) 727-6917. Please download some gifs, according to one poster. 16. What about all these other FAQs I see here? 16a.I think they are a great idea. More power to them. Between all of the FAQs, we'll get the Stern info to the masses. :-) If any other FAQ owners want to cross post to the answers group, I'll restructure this one so that it goes in a subdir and there is room for everyone. -- Nick Simicich - uunet!bywater!scifi!njs - njs@watson.ibm.com SSI #AOWI 3958, HSA 318, NAUI #14065, PSI #3286