[ Very sorry to be late; unavoidably delayed; details to follow; you might have already guessed some of them. ]
My favorite old-time-radio channel, which I seem to have on the mind a lot lately, made a pretty big change in its schedule. It had been years ago, when I was working in Singapore, on no particular schedule I could figure out except that if I heard a particular Fibber McGee and Molly or Jack Benny Program I'd probably hear it again a few days later. Based on how they have subsequently organized their schedule, I think some of this may have been that they'd rerun shows from the weekday on the US weekends, and Sunday night, United States time, was Singapore midday Monday.
Anyway, by 2007 they'd adapted a pretty regular four-hour schedule, repeating six times a day, and even posted a weekly schedule developed by somebody who apparently had just learned of the HTML `table' element four minutes ago and had never seen it deployed by anyone else. At this rate while they wouldn't have much depth in their programming I could get to know the shorter-run shows that cropped up a lot very well, especially when I was working five days a week.
In early 2009 they went to an eight-hour schedule with three repetitions, opening up programming space for Edgar Bergen or not quite as much Dimension X/X Minus One (generally rather good adaptations of 1950s magazine science fiction, although what they did to Pebble In The Sky you have to hear to believe) as I'd like. But the past month they've really changed things, and gone to a twelve-hour schedule. The variety is much more satisfyingly sprawling, but ...
They'd put Jack Benny and Friends on in the third programming hour, which on the four- and eight-hour program blocks meant it'd air at 11 am Eastern, a fine little warmup ahead of lunch. On the twelve-hour block, I don't get it at all until 3 pm, and the 11 am block may be anything from The Adventures of Sam Spade to Burns and Allen. I guess I'll adjust, but it's going to take time.
Trivia: Some regions around the Cortina d'Ampezzo, where Italy hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics, had communities as much as 70 percent German-speaking still; the area had been taken from Austria at the close of the First World War. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: Specters Of The Dawn, S Andrew Swann.