Disappointed in Sirius Radio:

About nine months ago, I rented a car that had a few Sirius radio channels. I listened to it for about ten hours, ignoring all my favorite podcasts, before it began to pall. There were three humor channels: raunchy, classic, and current. I really like standup, and I discovered a lot of good material. But you can't spend your life just listening to standup.

Last week I got another car with Sirius radio. One hundred Sirius channels, this time. A few of those carry music I really like, but once again, I checked out the humor. I guess that there's an awful lot more good music than good humor, because the focus of the Sirius humor channels has changed, and they are strip mining, I would say, pretty shallow veins this month. There's a raunchy channel that utilizes very little material from the great comedians of the '90's. The high point here was a very, very long and clever rendition of the 'Aristocrats' joke by Gilbert Gottfired. Then there was a blue collar humor channel, and, I'll call it, an esoteric humor channel. The guys working the esoteric channel spoke both very loud and very soft. There was no way I could set the volume to catch any humorist's every word, a great disappointment.

But the main thing I can say about the three humor channels is that they are constantly interrupted by ads and station breaks, and these are so much louder that I had to keep adjusting the volume. A pain! It's really outrageous for a radio station to turn up the volume for ads and breaks, especially a pay station. Sirius: I think you're losing it.