Beck the Halls

[Xmas] Time to face it: I'm not going to win tickets to the Glenn Beck Christmas show on Saturday night at the E Center, no matter how many times I entered via 570 KNRS. But at least now I'll have the unending joy of e-mail spam from "Family Values Talk Radio."

Good City Weekly liberals may or may not be aware of Glenn Beck, whose radio talk show airs weekdays 4-7 p.m. (and 9-10 a.m.) on KNRS, running right into his TV show on CNN Headline News at 7 p.m. He also has a new book (called An Inconvenient Book) and now a Christmas tour. He's a busy guy, as detailed in an exhaustive (and exhausting) story in Sunday's Deseret Morning News. Why the D-News? Beck's also a converted Mormon who only a few years ago gave up booze and drugs and became a conservative talk-radio guy.

Despite all this, Beck runs an entertaining, unpredictable radio show--unlike, say, Utah's "most-trusted newsman." Because, unlike most of the assclowns drafted into talk radio during the post-Rush Limbaugh boom of the '90s (consider yourself lucky if you never heard The Oliver North Show), Beck was a radio guy long before he cleaned up and turned to talk, and it shows. If NPR could come up with something even half as freewheeling and fun, they'd finally be onto something.

Don't know what his live Christmas show is like, but I doubt it's a typically maudlin yuletide snoozefest. Feel free to send me a review, you lucky-bastard winners. (Bill Frost)