Ozmon Media – Radio Programming Consultation Air Personality Development

FIND QUIRKY TOURIST ATTRACTIONS NEAR YOU

Perhaps you’re going on vacation somewhere and want to find offbeat and unusual attractions to visit, or maybe you’re just looking for something new and different to do close to home. Well, RoadsideAmerica.com has just what you need. Their Map-a-City function at http://www.roadsideamerica.com/map/about helps you find oddball and over-the-top tourist attractions in your home town, or next road trip destination. When you select a city, map pushpins provide information on attractions and link to stories, trip reports, and visitor sightings within 75 miles of that city.

For example, when you click on Los Angeles, CA, over 100 offbeat attractions appear on the map and there’s not one with the name Disney among them. The Porn Star Walk of Fame, in front of Larry Flynt’s Hustler’s of Hollywood, a coffee and porn shop in the heart of the Sunset Strip, has the hand prints (yes just hand prints) of Ron Jeremy and Marilyn Chambers among others.

If you are in the mood for a little shopping try the L.A. Coroner’s Office’s gift shop called Skeletons in the Closet where you can buy t-shirts, golf balls, and door mats emblazoned with a chalk outlined corpse. If you’re planning a trip to the fourth dimension, stock up on everything you’ll need at the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. There you can load up on humorous time travel relics from the past, present, and future.

Should you have the kids with you on your trip to L.A., there’s also a 20 foot-tall statue of the cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was originally erected in front of the cartoon’s producer’s offices to honor their most successful cartoon. Their offices have long been closed but the stature remains in front of the location’s current occupant’s dog care business.

It could be fun to make a list of all of the oddball attractions in you market and then put together a station-sponsored day-tour of them. Rent a bus and call it the Oddball Express and take a busload of listeners on a tour of the best of the best oddball attractions near you.

YOU CAN BET IT WILL RAIN IN WAYNESBURG TODAY

If you want to make a sure bet on the weather, bet that it will rain in Waynesburg today. There is a town in southwestern Pennsylvania called Waynesburg and legend has it that rain always falls on the town on July 29th. According to local records in the community, it has rained almost every year in the last century on July 29th.

POSSIBLE BACK-TO-SCHOOL PARODY SONG

If you have the heart of a poet or songwriter, here’s an idea for a potentially fun parody song. Re-write the lyrics to Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools using the lyric line “pain of school”. How good your parody song will or will not turn out is now all up to you.

THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE SINGING TELEGRAM

On July 28, 1933, the first singing telegram was said to have been delivered to singer Rudy Valee on his 32nd birthday. Early singing telegrams were often delivered in person by uniformed messengers on bicycle. Later they were usually sung over the telephone.

Of course today the singing telegram has been replaced by “talking” greeting cards and things like JibJab. So, it might make some fun radio to mark this day by challenging the listeners to come up with clever sung greetings for all kinds of occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, etc. Award a prize to the most creative singing greeting of the morning.

TURNING GRANDMA’S ASHES INTO A WORK OF ART

When a loved one passes away, some people scatter the ashes while others store them in urns. Now there a new option for those cremains – turning them into a work of art. Several companies now specialize in mixing the deceased’s ashes in paint, and then using the mixture to create portraits of the deceased. But if canvas doesn’t feel like the right canvas, there’s an alternative. You can also have your loved one’s remains mixed with ink, and then use that to get a tattoo of grandma on your body.

If you’re looking to turn the carbon in your dead relative’s remains into something more practical, there’s a company for that too. Nadine Jarvis, an artist based in London, makes memorial pencils called Carbon Copies. According to Jarvis, the average body yields enough carbon to make 240 pencils, “a lifetime supply for those left behind.” Jarvis stores the pencils in a special box with a sharpener on one side. “Over time,” she says, “the pencil box fills with sharpenings, a new ash, transforming it into an urn.”

RESIST THE URGE TO RESEARCH APPLICANTS ON FACEBOOK

With everyone on Facebook, it’s tempting for employers to research potential hires online. But according to recent findings, information found on social networks may just be distracting employers from making the right decision. In unpublished research conducted by Paige Deckert at the University of Illinois, subjects saw resumes for three fake job applicants, one of whom was objectively the most qualified for the job. Some subjects also saw the applicants’ Facebook pages. Then they decided whom they’d hire.

Two-thirds of participants who saw only the resumes made the correct call, but those who saw the online profiles got it right only half the time. Deckert credits poor performance to the dilution effect: Having irrelevant data on hand – even if they don’t include drunken party pictures – distracts us from the essential facts. Unfortunately, we tend to think more information is always better, and we’re more confident in our decisions when we have it. Maybe that’s why 45% of employers research candidates on social networks, according to a 2009 survey by CarreerBuilder.com.

THAT FAST FOOD SALAD YOU’RE EATING HAS MORE CALORIES THAN KFC’s DOUBLE DOWN

The Kentucky Fried Chicken Double Down – a bacon and cheese sandwich that uses fried chicken as “bread” – has been getting a lot of bad press. But is it really that bad? The Consumerist, one of Consumer Reports’ websites, took a look at the calorie count at various fast food restaurants and found that it actually has fewer calories than some salads. The Original Recipe Double Down has 540 calories, 32 grams of fat, and 1,380 milligrams of sodium. By comparison, Wendy’s BLT salad with Homestyle Chicken Fillet with Honey Dijon Dressing weighs in at 720 calories, 51 grams of fat, and 1,540 mg of sodium. McDonald’s, Chili’s, and Burger King also sell salads with more calories than the Double Down. So, rather than order the salad, just go ahead and get that Double Down, but split it with a friend.

SPECIALIZED SUMMER CAMPS

If your kids found their summer camp to be uninspiring this summer, next year consider some of these alternative specialized summer camps:

1. Hollywood Stunt Camp – California’s Pali Overnight Adventures offers a number of camps for showbiz hopefuls including their Hollywood Stunt Camp. Campers spend either one or two weeks working with real Hollywood stuntmen on topics like taking a high fall, simulating hand-to-hand combat, and sword fighting. The two-week program even culminates with campers taking a 32-foot fall and directing and choreographing their own stunt spectacular. If heights and fights aren’t your thing, Pali also offers a Movie Makeup Academy where campers work with Hollywood makeup artists to replicate favorite movie characters and even turn themselves into gory ghouls.

2. Nudist Camp – Since the early 1990’s, the American Association for Nude Recreation has offered summer Youth Leadership Camps at various resorts around the country in order to let young people ages 11 to 18 enjoy some nude summer camp fun. While the notion of a camp full of naked teenagers may strike non-nudists as a bit strange (or completely appalling), a 2003 New York Times profile detailed how the camps are perfectly legal because the nudity wasn’t of a lewd nature. The camps go to great lengths to desexualize the nudity in an effort to combat the teens’ surging hormones. The result is camps where teens go to enjoy mundane activities like sports and arts and crafts, all while in the buff. The clothes-free policy must make packing for camp much easier.

3. Wizards and Warriors Camp – Finally, there’s a solution for kids who don’t want to leave their role-playing games for a week at camp: a camp that’s one big role-playing game. At Charlton, Massachusetts’ Wizards and Warriors Camp, campers create their own characters and then spend their days fighting together against villains and searching for a treasure. The camp sounds like it integrates educational elements into the fun – a potions-making class provides real-world lessons in chemistry – all while giving children a valuable opportunity to mingle with trolls.

4. Spy Camp – Camp Lohikan in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, offers aspiring James Bonds the chance to learn how to be a spy. Campers learn evasive driving manuevers for an ATV, martial arts, undercover tactics, and code breaking skills. At the end of the term, campers test their spying acumen by participating in a recon and rescue mission.

5. Magic Camp – Wizard’s Workshop bills itself as the best magic camp in Maine. Professional magicians use the day camp to teach kids showmanship, misdirection, and other tricks of the trade. During the camp campers build their own props and use them in a final show at the end of camp.

HOW MANY SWEAR WORDS DO WE SAY PER DAY?

The average English speaker uses 85 swear words per day. (Including mild expletives such as “Jesus Christ.:)

LAS VEGAS LAUNCHES THE SCARIEST NEW THRILL RIDE IN AMERICA

If you’ve ever entertained the idea of sky diving or base jumping but just haven’t been able to take that first step towards doing it, you might want to take a trip to Las Vegas. The new ride at the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas combines elements of both skydiving and base jumping. The SkyJump is a controlled free-fall where riders plummet 855 feet at up to 40 miles an hour. Beforehand, riders get a short safety lesson and are geared up in custom jumpsuits. Connected to a high-speed “descender” machine, they are then led to the edge of a small platform to leap out and descend 100-plus stories. Guide wires keep riders from straying off-course, and the machine slows down near the bottom, bringing riders to a controlled and safe landing. My guess is it won’t be too long before we see this “ride” employed as a challenge on a future season of CBS’s Amazing Race.

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