I wrote before about Charlie Sherman, the failed TV sportscaster who now fancies himself a talk-show host. In order to accomodate Sherm, the local radio show dumped an excellent guy named Mike Ball and let Sherm in to stink up the place.

Sherm knows he stinks. That's probably why they don't take phone calls from listeners. When a talk show doesn't take callers, they're either too egotistical to think that anyone else could contribute anything of value or too frightened that the callers will show them for the chumps they are. In Sherm's case, it's probably both.

This morning, I flipped on his station to get a traffic/weather report, and found out that Sherm was on two weeks' vacation. I couldn't help but wonder if an incident last week in which I called in to complain might have prompted his absence.

Manchester is home to a minor-league baseball team, the Fisher Cats. The ownership of that team recently changed, and the new owner is a real estate developer named Arthur Solomon.

Sherm thought that topic had great potential for fun, so he "invited" Solomon in to talk about it. Then, in a heavily Jewish accent, Sherm (calling himself "King Solomon," allowed himself to be interviewed by his staff.

It was worse than a car wreck. I desperately wanted to change the station and prayed for it to end, but Sherman just kept going and going. And in between carefully-dropped Yiddishisms ("verkakte," "meshuganah," and several "oy veys" stuck out), he espoused King Solomon's philosophy: he likes cheap stuff. He likes free stuff even more. He's a real baseball fan, but only so long as the team makes him lots of money. And if he can make more money by selling the team or moving them, all the better.

I think he hit at least 80% of the anti-Semitic stereotypes over the course of the morning. I'm crediting his minimal common sense and self-preservation for skipping 10% of the others, and ignorance for the other 10%.

If you read this, Charlie (and I hope this scores highly on Google, because I know you're vain enough to look yourself up frequently), enjoy your vacation. In fact, please do New Hampshire a service and make it permanent. We have enough air pollution here (with ozone and acid rain) that we don't need you adding even more to it.