Sometimes, though, I have to question the wisdom of the powers that be at Sirius XM of allowing him to take the vacation breaks. The case that I have in my mind is from the winter months (might have been December) when XM subscribers were given a free preview of the Howard Stern channels for a week. I thought that was a great promotion, except that the Stern crew was on vacation that week! Good grief!

Anyway, since I’ve been getting a lot of traffic on the blog in the last few days from people Googling what the deal is, I thought I’d add this entry. Howard Stern is on vacation, again, and I believe that he’ll be back on the radio live next Monday morning.

Because it was so damn funny, I had to listen to the first show twice. Mr. Sulu (George Takei) is by far the best addition to the show. And as they said on their third or fourth show, unleashing Artie on uncensored radio heightens his part of the show to no end.

Robin has taken an increased role in the show, commenting more than I’ve heard her do in the last few years. The entire staff and all of the on-air talent just sound so much happier and better than they have in years – it’s a nice change for his show. And maybe it’s just me, but the political talk on his show has been drastically reduced – and for obvious reasons.

I think that Howard is going to lead Sirius radio to new heightens (and he already has done that, but he can only go higher). Think about this SIRIUS Satellite Radio company…Howard Stern, the NBA, Martha Stewart, Eminem, the NFL, Cousin Brucie, Bubba the Love Sponge, and hundreds of stations of commercial-free music. How great of a diverse line-up is that?!?

SIRIUS Satellite Radio is going to give XM a run for their money. The last numbers that I saw had XM with something like 6 million subscribers and Sirius with around 3.3 million. Those numbers are incredible for Sirius, considering that 1 year ago at this time, they only had 600,000. Amazing.

So I’m going to research this satellite radio a bit and I might actually take the plunge and get it. Hey, my birthday is coming up – that might be a hot present, right?