During my bi-weekly trip to the local 99¢ Store, I came across the following iPod-styled FM radio and, quite frankly, had the buy one. Take a look for yourself and tell me you could resist.

Cracking the plastic casing open took a little bit of slice and dice, but once I had the radio freed I was pretty stoked to find out that the photo of the dude blowing the sax is permanently stuck to the radio and not just some teasing insert! Bonus Points!

The functionality is predictably limited. You can change stations only by clicking on the “Scan” side of the disc. Clicking “Reset” takes you all the way back to the beginning, and there’s absolutely no indicator of what station you’re currently tuned to. That said, the reception is impressively strong and within seconds of plugging the earbuds into the jack, I was listening to the dulcet tones of the Tom Tom Club.

For a buck, I wasn’t expecting anything much, so I’m pleasantly surprised to be writing this post with the earbuds comfortably pumping music into in my head-holes. Just think - without GoRadio, I may never have known Mariah Carey wrote a song telling her man they can have sex but he better not have the video pop up on YouTube! Oh, silly Mariah…

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Apparently an Air America radio host is claiming that Stephen Colbert stole a Klingon joke from him on a recent show. I’m not buying it - either this is another of Colbert’s publicity stunts or Colbert and his writing staff are nerdy enough to develop his own Klingon joke. Judging by the man’s obsession with Lord of the Rings, I’m opting for the latter as my pick in this fight.

Cenk Uygur of Air America’s morning show “The Young Turks” insisted on his program Wednesday that Colbert used his joke on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” Uygur posted a video on YouTube comparing his joke — which he claims he first told on his September 7 radio program — with a segment that aired on “The Colbert Report” four days later.

In both jokes, Uygur and Colbert suggest that the Republican presidential candidates sounded like Klingons from “Star Trek” while speaking about the value of honor.

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The US Government is truly an example of the old adage that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. Case in point, the FCC has become the big moral compass/watchdog concerning what goes over the “free” airwaves by handing out fines left and right for “infractions” that they deem outside the bounds of normal decency. This kind of hyper-aggressiveness has turned what was a vastly entertaining and sometimes organically funny method of delivering music, talk, traffic, and weather together to whoever had a working radio into a timid, demo-geared and rotation-based corporate machine.

Now, pair that with the latest list of call letters that were released this past week by said FCC. Hidden in this document was the very subversive KUNT call sign for an inactive station based out of Maui. As the article states in the link provided above, the owner of this station (KM Communications, Inc.) also owns the call sign KWTF, another soon-to-be classic.

I’m sure that this grievous omission will be rectified by the all-mighty FCC. However, me thinks that someone at KM has a sense of humor. Thank god, at least someone in radio still does.

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