Last day of non-standard Bleatage. A throwback to the old Fridays, when radio actualities filled up the Bleat.

Here's something that's pretty damned meta-meta. One of the most popular radio shows - for a while - was The Adventures of Sam Spade. It was more witty than gritty. In this excerpt, a large round antique dealer who chases around the globe looking for precious items comes to talk to Sam, and because everyone saw The Maltese Falcon, he has to remind you of Sidney Greenstreet, and have some verbal tic. All such characters post-Falcon spoke like this.

		By gad sir you are a card

Okay. So that box is ticked. We're told to be on the lookout for a confederate who's tricky - and that's where it gets meta.

		So Sam saw the movie, too.

Now something from the days when I first started listening to the radio. Oh, how we loved this show. It holds up, and it doesn't. The former because the performances are all deadpan perfect, and Dick Orkin was a legend; the latter because it's "personal smile funny" rather than ha-ha. Or so my revisits seem to suggest. I'd still tune in if it came on every day.

		WELLLLLLLLLllllll.

But there's something else in there . . . something borrowed, shall we say.

		I've always wondered if I could locate the precise cue.

I can't. Yet. The problem is that it's, well, everywhere in the soundtracks.

You can hear it, right? You know where that's from, right?

By the way, checking up on some Orkin deets revealed this:

Ah, Henry's. Remember 23 years ago when we searched in the jungle for the Lost Sign?

Now some classic AM radio sounders. How I love these. It's the sound of being 10 and going to the A & W.

		We'll start with another from the Mitch-Miller era of massed stentorian choruses.
		Another news sounder, with that classic - or cliche - beat to indicate wires, or telegraphs, or  teletypes.
		Back when the term wasn't used with heavy dark irony.

Now we've moved from the middlebrow familiar AM jingles to the new, with-it sound.

		And now the funky sound. You can almost feel the Taxi-Driver era beginning.
		You just keep me hanging on with your off-turned mind
		Better than the previous instrumentation? Matter of taste, I suppose. (Also, no.)

Let's end with something special. At least to me.

Someone tweeted this out, and it brought back many memories.

Perhaps it will do the same for you.

Did we notice at the time that this was a pastiche, edited with a blunt butter knife?

		Now two ways to chip in!

That'll do! See you Monday. Return to normalcy? Well, no. Return to something else entirely.