All Fired Up

The devastating wild fires raging across much of southern California brings me back to when I was a writer and producer at CNN television. Over the years, there were always certain stories that you could count on repeating over and over - and most had to do with weather. There was the "first big snowstorm of the year" story. There was the "flooding in the Mid-West" story. There was the "hurricane watch in the summer" story. And, of course, there were the "wildfires followed by terrible mudslides" in California story. There's only so many ways you could write about these stories over and over again - not only year to year, but also hour to hour (remember, CNN has 24 hours of airtime to fill). So to make things interesting, a friend of mine and I (he will remain nameless since he's still in the business) would challenge one another to see how many song lyrics and/or titles we could weave into our writing. The trick was doing so in such a way so that it was subtle enough to make it past the editors and anchors (who sometimes improvised when they didn't like how a particular story was written for them). My personal favorite was from one of my favorites bands - Steely Dan - from their song Babylon Sisters on the album, Gaucho. The lyric was just too perfect not to use for a story on widlfires, which are caused when the dry hot Santa Ana winds come sweeping across the canyons. So, I got great pleasure when we opened the whole show with.... you guessed it.... "Here Come those Santa Ana winds again." You have to be a pretty serious music fan to pick up on that one, especially when it is spoken and not sung. But here's one that pretty much anyone would catch and I can't believe it not only made it past the editors, but that the anchor actually read it... I wrote it almost as a joke, but it made it though a became the gold standard (however cheesy it was) for putting lyrics into news copy. I was a fall evening - it was actually quite late in the evening - I just couldn't write another lede about the terrible string of natural disasters in California. This particular year - around 1993, they had been hit by a considerable earthquake, followed weeks later by terrible wildfires and then suffered through horrible mudslides to top it all off. So that, of course, lent itself to the following lede (my apologies to the artists involved and with no disrespect to those who suffered through these disasters).... "First it was shake rattle and roll, then great balls of fire and now... slip sliding away......"