The History of Dangerous Talk
My fellow atheist blogger over at Atheist Revolution recently posted a blog entry on why he chose the name he did for his blog. So today I thought I would do the same with mine. Why is my blog called Dangerous Talk?
In 1995, my friend Jeff brought me on the air during his disco radio show on the campus radio station that literally no one but those at the station could hear. I hate disco, but I enjoyed talking in between songs. In fact, the general manager was there and he liked what I had to say. He offered me a show… that no one could hear. The Great Staks’s Radio Show was born.
My friend Jeff got tired of doing a show that no one could hear, so he put together the equipment to broadcast out of his dorm room. He called the station “pirate” to get more people to listen to him, but his stations was under the power limit so it was actually perfectly legal. In any case, we worked out a system where I recorded my show at the campus station and then gave him the tape to play at the same time every week. As a result, my show got popular.
I started putting up signs for the show. Each week, I put up a new sign with the topic we were discussing so that people could call in and discuss it despite not actually being able to hear the show for a few days. The topics were generally edgy and not always about religion or atheism. But as an open atheist who regularly went to religious groups and made a general nuance of myself to the religious leaders on campus, the topics often touched on religion. In any case, one of the tag lines for the show that I put on the posters was, “The Great Staks’s Talk Show: It’s Dangerous Talk.”
Later, when the station switch to the FM frequency so that people could actually listen live, I changed the name of the show to just “Dangerous Talk.”
Years later when I started the show back up at a small local station and also started podcasting I kept the name Dangerous Talk. Then when I transitioned it to the blog it just seemed natural.
Related articles
- Atheist Advice (dangeroustalk.net)
- Atheists as a Political Force (dangeroustalk.net)
- Vote Atheist! (dangeroustalk.net)
