Looking Ahead

...to the weekend, as we really need it to be Friday soon. Some new stuff and some old stuff revisited:

OUT OF THE BUILDING: We weren't listening to radio in morning drive today, so we missed what we're told is the second "out of the building" on-air evacuation at the Clear Channel World Domination HQ on Oak Tree in beautiful Independence, Ohio.

We hear that a fire alarm forced Clear Channel outlets to abandon studio for at least part of morning drive. OMW hears WTAM/1100 morning co-host Bill Wills hosted "Wills and Coleman" in the morning via a cell phone from the station's parking lot, and that other CC stations played music out of Prophet. (We wouldn't be surprised, though, if some of the other morning teams tried to get on the air at some point.)

We don't know how long it lasted, but all was back to normal by the time we heard WTAM's Bob Frantz during his 9 AM hour.

We said "second" up above, because we remember a similar situation some months ago which forced WTAM afternoon eating machine Mike Trivisonno out onto the lawn in front of World Domination HQ, to do his show outside while some emergency situation unrelated to the station was being handled inside the building.

Triv should do it more often. For one, being outside the building makes it easy for the various restaurants which regularly deliver food to the show...

ROGER ON TV?: A spotter at the Browns fan website "The Orange and Brown Report" tells us about a message purporting to be from soon-to-be-former Cleveland Plain Dealer sports/media columnist Roger Brown.

In it, the online version of Roger scoffs at the suggestion that he'd go to work for Scene, which came up after the weekly newspaper published a parody of Roger's column the online Roger calls a "very poor attempt at humor from a worthless rag of a 'magazine'."

In his own attempt at humor, the OBR user calling himself RogerBrown jokes:

I'm exhausting all of my future career possibilities from the top down, and the Editor of the Wooster Daily Record and the guy in charge of hiring people to clean up the massage parlor rooms in Warren already have rejected my resume.

But here's the more interesting part of the message allegedly from The Artful Roger:

And rest assured, I am in the process of finalizing the details with my soon to be new employer. Cleveland will be able to see my smiling face on television each day as opposed to in print.

Assuming that this online version of Roger is indeed the PD sportswriter - which is tough to do, considering the whole "Scene" parody thing - our only thought is:

Wow, we didn't know "19 Action News" had room for yet another sports personality.

OK, so we don't have any information on this aside from the post allegedly from Roger Brown, but it makes sense to us as a potential TV destination for The Artful Roger...it sounds like something Reserve Square would do. Not that we're ruling out other places...

ESPN-NOT-U: OMW has heard all sorts of rumors about the TV distribution of Saturday's Ohio State-Indiana football clash, which will definitely air on little-distributed cable/satellite network ESPNU.

For one, Time Warner Cable - the dominant cable operator in most Ohio cities, including both Cleveland and Columbus - does not carry ESPNU. TWC also pulled the little "U" brother to the big ESPN network from the lineup of the systems it picked up from Adelphia. And DirectTV offers ESPNU, but only does so on its highest tier of service with other specialty sports networks.

For now, we point you to this AP article, which tells us that the game will also air, delayed, on the Ohio News Network cable channel, at 11 PM on Saturday night.

It also mentions a plan for TWC's Columbus-based Mid-Ohio system to re-air the game later Saturday on an analog channel. The Columbus Dispatch reports that it'll be on analog channel 24, and it sounds like TWC Mid-Ohio will clear the ONN replay of the game on that channel.

There's no word yet if Time Warner will do the same in markets like Akron and Canton, where ONN is only on digital cable (119). On the Cleveland-based Time Warner system formerly owned by Adelphia, ONN sits on analog cable channel 70.

We can NOT, however, confirm that Cleveland MyNetworkTV outlet WUAB/43 will pick up the game - right now, another Big 10 contest (Michigan State/Northwestern) is listed on their official schedule in the same time slot.

That possibility seems unlikely, though, since ESPN is clearly interested in driving interest in its puny "U" brother network using a game involving America's top-ranked college football team.

We also can't confirm rumors that DirecTV will offer ESPNU to all customers for this game, even those who don't pick up the "Premium" package that you normally need to get the network.

We CAN confirm that there are a lot of ticked off Buckeyes fans in Columbus and beyond...