Harmon:
Who's the person on your last nerve on the show and in the world?
The
Morning Stiffy:
Stu –
the guy just barely lived through the sixties and most of his brain
cells didn’t make it to the other side. We can agree on a game plan
(regarding what we’re gonna tease, what prod. elements we’ll use,
and so forth), and 30 seconds later he’ll do it backwards, leave us
all scrambling, and then say “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear ya, I thought
you said something else, etc.” In the world: Rosie O’Donnell.
We target men, and there’s nobody they care less about, particularly
in the context of The View.
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Harmon:
How do you keep it together on days when the show seems to be going
nowhere?
The
Morning Stiffy :
We’ll
often cop to it on the air. It doesn’t happen often because we’re
usually prepared, and when we’re not, we’ve gotten pretty good at
winging it on chemistry and prep material that we always have
stockpiled. If someone’s tired or being lame, we call ‘em out and it
becomes part of the day’s theme.
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Harmon:
What's the worst job you've ever had outside of radio that reminded
you what spoiled moneymakers we can be?
The
Morning Stiffy :
Stu:
Telemarketing… He sold tickets for firefighting organization benefits.
He sold 12 pairs of tickets in three years.
Tiffany: Temp worker at a bank for 2 weeks. She never learned the
phone system, so when someone called to talk to the Vice President,
she’d ask them to hold, and then hang up on them.
Jimbo: Cutting pipe at a fence company for ten hours a day in the
hundred degree heat. The only upside was he got to listen to Stu on
the radio, and now he gets to make lots more money making fun of the
guy.
Sack: Dishwasher at a golf course
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Harmon:
At ten o'clock, how do you know it was a good show?
The
Morning Stiffy :
One of us will say (in
old-school terms) “Now THAT’s an un-scoped demo tape!” It’s generally
a show that had a wide variety of things – at least one good written
bit, one good stunt, funny listener calls on a topic, a good
interview, and a lot of sharp, witty stuff from us in between. And
the high of accomplishment comes to a crash because we’re exhausted.
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Harmon:
Do you try to work in items from the morning paper?
The
Morning Stiffy :
Yeah –
Tiff reads three papers (two local and USA Today) and we get stuff
from there. The best thing about keeping up with the papers is that it
keeps us from missing if someone local is doing something national,
like American Idol , so that we can get ‘em on. It also gives us the
heads up if someone national is going to be in the area. The local
papers are important to us because, even though we’re market 25, we
don’t have any local tv stations … the joy of being a shadow market to
Los Angeles.
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Harmon:
What’s your biggest challenge day to day?
The
Morning Stiffy :
Not
having enough people or time to get everything done that we want to do
(and still have a life). It used to be you just did a show; Now, you
want to blog it, have a great, constantly updated web presence,
podcast it, videotape it, post pictures…We don’t have the budget to
hire more people, and it’s hard to get great interns, educate them on
how to do things, bring them up to speed … and then have them graduate
and go backpacking in Thailand for a year.
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Harmon:
Give an example of a day you “owned the market.
The
Morning Stiffy :
For
the past seven years, we’ve done a weeklong bit called Morning The
Morning Stiffy Boobcamp. Since a lot of women will do anything for a
boobjob, we get a ton of contestants, and we eliminate them down to 10
the first day, then get rid of two a day until Friday’s show, which
gets us down to two final contestants. Then we have a huge party in
our parking lot that afternoon, “A KCAL Kegger,” where the girls are
up on stage and they each get a melon that’s been halved, and then put
back together wrapped in plastic. One of the melons has a big bra in
it, and that’s the winner. The massive amount of people that come out
just floors us – over two thousand people. Granted, we have beer and a
cover band, but a lot of people want to see which girl gets her “dream
come true”… it’s like American Idol. It’s fun to watch our competition
drive their station van past our jam-packed station parking lot,
knowing it’s killing ‘em. We make a ton of money for charity from beer
sales, too
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Harmon:
The Internet - how much time do you spend on internet features from
podcasting, pix, diaries, blogs?
The Morning Stiffy :
Not enough… probably about an hour a day – much of it done by interns.
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Harmon:
What else can Bitboard do for you?
The Morning Stiffy :
Have BFD twice a year! We were blown away by how intensely helpful
that was. We came back here, and made a ton of changes and
improvements, got off our asses from a technical standpoint, and were
just generally reinvigorated about our jobs.
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Harmon:
Best idea you used from Bitboard?
The Morning Stiffy :
That’s a really tough one… We got Mr. Skin from Dwyer and Michaels,
and he’s always really good. Date, Marry or Bang – we let listeners
give us three names and we have to say who we’d Date, Marry or Bang
and say why. We did the car horn thing today that Dwyer and Michaels
mentioned and it was TERRIFIC. We had our producer, who’s a car guy,
claim that he could tell the make, model and year of a vehicle by it’s
horn … the screeners brought the listeners in on the joke and said
that Sack was punking us, and got the car info, and he played it like
it was off the top of his head, while the rest of us acted shocked and
amazed. Even the listeners’ acting surprised was outstanding -
something about mixing cars with a practical joke really was a hit
with guys.
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