I like the thinking you laid out, even if I don’t buy the particular business model. You might, however, make some use of the technology that would need to be developed for related purposes. How about, say, a chip that could be installed in a radio that has the following characteristics:

1. You can flag a song as reprehensible by pushing a button on the radio (okay, we need a chip and a human interface, but one button should do it).

2. The next time a flagged song is broadcast, the radio automatically jumnps to the next one of your preset stations and/or invokes its seek function to go to the next available strong signal.

3. Support for an opt-in feature whereby the act of flagging a song is counted as a vote, uploaded to a database in the cloud, accessible by station programmers. This could, over time, rid the airwaves of Whitney Houston.

As for the animatronic mice, though, I got nothing, although if I’d change my attitude on one hot-button issue here in the US, I’m sure my Second Amendment rights could suggest something.

No, wait. Maybe v 2.0 of TV-B-Gone could be made to work on the rodent robots?

And by the way, the rumours that this post was in fact inspired by hearing Meat Loaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light are … completely true and entirely based in fact.

I wonder how this one-radio-one-vote idea would change the type of music that radio stations play. I can’t help thinking that the reason we got Whitney in the first place was from a significant proportion of people who genuinely like her music. I’m worried by what might be called the American Idol effect, where the lowest-common-denominator rules.

On an almost related note, I had immense fun at the Spicks & Speck-tacular show last week. Highly recommended if you’re at all interested in music and/or a fan of the TV show. Anyway at the start of the show the presenter Adam Hills asked the crowd to sing the next line to a song. The twist was that it’s a line that isn’t technically part of the song because it was (AFIAK anyway) never actually sung by the band. Australians should instantly recognise it: “Am I ever gonna see your face again?”. The entire theatre to a person erupted with the next line: “No way, get fucked, fuck off”. (Yes, I didn’t say it made much sense did I?) I find it amazing and amusing that this line was known so widely, way outside of the band’s base of fans.

On the voting idea: you might be right about this not getting Whitney ouston off the airwaves — no one ever went broke underestimating the bad taste of the American people, and I presume the same goes for your countrymen and women. On the other hand, it does seem to me that a lot of people who listen to stations that still have “and iiiiiii will always luv uuuuuuuuuuu” on heavy rotation tend to be passive listeners. That is, they like the radio for background, and don’t care specifically what’s on, as long as it’s not unfamiliar. Thus, a concerted effort by a concerned minority could have a real effect on particularly objectionable songs.

That’s a hilarious story about the S & S show. I’d love to have seen that.