The show was prepped. Guest David Jacobs was about to do his second round on MIDNIGHT IN THE DESERT.. At 8:58 PM left coast time, everything stopped working. Just as ‘The Chase’ got ready to play and the thunder before bumper music was set to sound. Something strange continues to plague the growing program for Art Bell.
Even Bell seemed a bit miffed when he went to Facebook last night, posting three consecutive messages and clearly showing frustration with the incident–at least the second time now that a last minute internet outage has led to the show being preempted and replaced with a repeat.
From Bell:
Can you hear me now? The Internet in Phoenix has failed taking this out of my heartbroken hands. Damn I wanted to do this show but a single point of failure failed. Check back here for details.
The first message showcased the hope that the program but, it certainly wasn’t due to the lack of effort.
He went on to write,
Ok, here is the story and it is pretty much what I already told you the main Internet in Phoenix failed, XDS is playing a back up show and Keith is now using back up Internet and feeding another show. We are toast for Tonight, BUT Tomorrow I will Interview Dr Jacobs come hell or high water. PS the Internet failed at 8:58pm! So, we will increase the back up so this never happens again, the current back up in Phoenix is not strong enough to handle all the feeds, that will be corrected right away. I feel sick about this as I was sooo ready to go. If I have failure here, yes we miss a show but if we have failure in Phoenix we can not even do a replay, that can’t ever happen again and won’t.
Art
And one more message added to the mystery and the potential inner-workings of Bell’s mind as to what is really happening:
This is a post I just picked up below:
I love the organic feel of your show Art. It’s life happening in real time. I will take the real you, glitches and all, any day over scripted, corporate radio. Your MITD is very much a grassroots high tech effort. I am enjoying the ride.
She is right about the organic part, something is not right about what went down tonight. I can’t talk about it now but just saying…..
Organic indeed.
Strange and reassuring perhaps.
But there seems to be more back story to the front loaded programming problems. The outage at 8:58 seems very interesting. Timing is key. There are no “coninshidenches,” some would say.
In this circumstance, you can conclude: Outage me once, shame on you. Outage me twice, shame on me.
Outage a third time?
A conspiracy.